So High a Blood by Morgan Ring

Author:Morgan Ring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

15

Secret Charge

An agitated parliament met at Westminster in January 1563. Elizabeth’s bout of smallpox had been a powerful reminder that there was no obvious heir to the throne. On the opening day the dean of St Paul’s preached a sermon urging Elizabeth to marry and settle the succession.1 Two weeks later both houses pleaded with the queen to come to a decision, warning of the ‘evident and present danger and peril to all states and sorts of men of this realm’ that would arise ‘through want of understanding to whom they should hold their allegiance and duties, whereby much innocent blood is like to be shed’.2 But Elizabeth was unmoved and unimpressed with the parliamentary meddling.3

Captive, impoverished and cut off from her network of friends and retainers, Margaret was now the least troubling of Elizabeth’s relatives. The prospective marriage of Mary Stewart and Don Carlos of Spain, once rejected by Philip II as not worth the English and French displeasure it would provoke, was once again a possibility. In England, Jane Grey’s eldest surviving sister, Katherine, had two years earlier married the Earl of Hertford in secret and without Elizabeth’s leave. When the queen learned of the wedding and of Katherine’s pregnancy, she sent both Katherine and Hertford to the Tower, were they had been ever since, their son declared the illegitimate child of an invalid marriage. When parliament met, Katherine was in double disgrace: she was eight months pregnant and her optimistic supporters were trying to get her named Elizabeth’s heir. The Lennox-Stewarts, by comparison, seemed a minor problem.

But Margaret still believed that she could match her son to the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth’s sudden show of magnanimity to the Lennox-Stewarts gave Margaret hope that she might get the support of both the English queen and Mary for her plans, but she was ready to act without Elizabeth. Before long, she was playing an even higher-stakes game than she had been before her imprisonment: she was still in close and secret contact with Spain and Scotland, but rather than plotting from Yorkshire, she was acting from within the paranoid world of Elizabeth’s court.

She had to bide her time. Cecil sent one of Margaret’s messengers back to Sheen with a curt reply warning her not to ask for too much, and she hurried to conciliate him: ‘I am sorry that you impute me to be so unthankful as to blame you for the slow proceedings of my suit, considering that always I have rested and hath had my full confidence in all my suits only on you, not attempting any other but by your advice. And to say the truth, I have from time to time understood you to have taken such pains in soliciting my causes that I have rather just occasion to give you thanks and to requite your gentleness if it may lie in my power.’4 For Margaret, it was easier to be patient now that she had Lennox back and that it seemed they would eventually get their freedom.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.