THE THREAT POSED by Protestantism to the hierarchical social order of sixteenth-century Europe was not only an anxiety for the King of Spain. One of the many objections to Elizabeth from Rome was that she had dismissed a number of noblemen from her council and replaced them with “obscure” nobodies, an objection also felt by some of her most powerful subjects. To the Nevilles and the Percys, the great families of the Northern March who had patrolled the Scots border for centuries, enjoying what was, in effect, princely privilege within their own fiefdoms, government policy in London had for some years appeared both confusing and insulting. The Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Percy, and the Earl of Westmorland, Charles Neville, felt marginalized by Cecil’s regime and threatened by the religious settlement and apparent lack of resolution over the status of Mary Stuart. Their disaffection, however, may not have taken radical form were it not for the incendiary provocations of a group of anti-Cecil activists: Richard Norton (who had been involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the uprising against Henry VIII three decades earlier), Thomas Hussey, and Robert Tempest. Norton, Hussey, and Tempest claimed that they had the support of the Duke of Alba, who ;would land troops at Hartlepool to aid them in rebellion. They played upon the wounded pride of the great northern families by vociferously deriding the “new men” who were in power under Cecil in London, berating them as parvenus who were misadvising the queen. Details of these men’s mood of insurrection were sufficiently alarming for Elizabeth’s lieutenant in the north, the Earl of Sussex, to summon the two earls to court in late October 1569 to explain the persistent rumors of sedition. The earls refused, instead responding by calling out their troops in one of the moments of fission that characterized Elizabeth’s reign—the summoning of what was to all intents and purposes a feudal host to confront the new order. Sussex had the earls declared traitors on 13 November, his reaction serving to coalesce what had been an incoherent reaction to general discontent into a specifically focused conflict.
Grumbling became rebellion. The earls had a cause—the release of Mary from Tutbury—though they did not announce an intention to push her to the throne. While they hoped to effect change, their cause was not specifically Mary’s. They were conservatives who wanted to slow what they saw as the alarmingly radical absorption of Church by state while remaining theoretically loyal to the crown. Yet once the earls’ affinities were mobilized, they were effectively in open rebellion and there could be no turning back. By the 24th, ten thousand men had reached Bramham Moor, about fifty miles from Tutbury, having celebrated Mass and burned English Bibles in Durham Cathedral en route. Emergency musters were held to provide an army of fifteen thousand men to protect Elizabeth, should the rebels succeed in attaining the capital, but even as the queen’s troops moved north and Mary was removed to Coventry for greater security, the rising, which had never enjoyed much support beyond that of the immediate Neville and Percy affinities, began to peter out. After a last stand at Barnard’s Castle, which they took but quickly realized they could not hold, the rebels scattered and by 15 December, they were in flight to Scotland.
In January 1570, Leonard Dacre, a member of another significant northern family who was engaged in a wardship dispute over inheritance with the Duke of Norfolk, gathered about three thousand men at his seat at Naworth. He had been received by Elizabeth at Windsor as the rebellion was fomenting, and had returned to the north apparently as a loyal subject, but he had been in correspondence with Mary Stuart since 1566 and now attempted to attract her Scots supporters to his side. Elizabeth dispatched her first cousin, Henry Carey, from Berwick to confront Dacre, and in the Battle of Gelt Bridge on 20 February, Dacre was defeated and about three hundred of his men killed. Dacre himself escaped, fleeing first to Scotland and then to the Continent, where he died in Brussels, a pensioner of Philip of Spain, in 1573. Other rebels were less fortunate. Both Westmorland and Northumberland were attainted for their treason; Westmorland and his wife eventually escaped to the Netherlands, but Northumberland was executed in 1572. Tudor propaganda was not only a celebration of dynastic magnificence; it could also serve in creating gruesome folk memories. The north could not be allowed to forget that royal justice held sway throughout the realm, so every bell tower which had sounded in favor of the rising was stripped of its carillon, leaving just one bell to remind the people of their disobedience. Many rebels were publicly hanged and their rotting bodies displayed “for terror.” In Cecil’s view, “The Queen’s Majesty hath had a notable trial of her whole realm and subjects in this time,” and Elizabeth was as keen as her Secretary that the country should be horrified into remembrance.1
It is hardly surprising that the government in London believed that a storm was coming. In February 1570, the prediction Cecil had made in his “Device” eventually came true. Pope Pius V promulgated the bull Regnans in excelsis, the most literally damning Catholic challenge Elizabeth had yet faced. “The number of the ungodly,” the pope declared, “has so much grown in power that there is no place left in the world which they have not tried to corrupt with their most wicked doctrines; and among others Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England, and the servant of crime, has assisted in this.” The bull listed the offences of Elizabeth and her ministers, which included the oppression of followers of the Catholic faith, the institution of false preachers, the abolition of the sacrifice of the Mass, the promotion of heretical books, the ejection of bishops and priests, the forbidding of the acknowledgement of canonical sanction, and the forced abjuration of the authority of Rome. Consequently, Pius declared Elizabeth a heretic, excommunicated her, and deprived her of her “pretended title to the aforesaid crown and of all lordship, privilege and dignity whatsoever.” Her subjects, the bull went on, were formally absolved of their oaths of loyalty to the queen.
Since Elizabeth’s accession, English Catholics had endured an uneasy truce with the religious settlement, but the bull rendered this untenable. “The harsh reality was that the Pope had made it impossible to be a good Catholic and a good Englishman.”2 As the Catholic priest John Hart, interrogated in 1580, was subsequently to express it, “If they obey her [Elizabeth] they be in the Pope’s curse, and if they disobey her, they are in the Queen’s danger.”3
Knowledge of the bull was well current at court by the end of the month, but attempts were made to suppress it as far as possible, until on 25 May, a young man named John Felton nailed a copy of it to the Bishop of London’s garden gate. Writing later from the Catholic college at Rome, the English writer and spy Anthony Munday claimed the existence of a special book of martyrs from which inspiring stories were read to the students in the evenings. Felton, who was executed for his action and had refused to give the traditional speech of submission to royal authority from the scaffold, was according to Munday celebrated in the book. Regnans in excelsis had articulated what had previously been incoherent; it had given men such as Felton a clearly defined cause and the glorious prospect of dying for their faith to which they could aspire.
Elizabeth was now an official, legitimate target for prospective Catholic revolutionaries. Cecil had feared this since the beginning of her reign, and in the late 1560s, he began to work closely with Francis Walsingham, who was to become his strongest ally in matters of security. Walsingham was familiar with Cecil’s circle as a member of the Italian group of exiles under Mary Tudor, and on his return to England had been elected as a Member of Parliament in 1559. An active supporter of French reformists, known as Huguenots, in 1570, Walsingham became ambassador to Paris. He joined the Privy Council on his return three years later, eventually becoming Secretary in 1587. His involvement in what became known as the Ridolfi conspiracy is the first significant example of the close partnership he created with Cecil with the aim of protecting the queen from what both men perceived as the principal threat to her person and to the Protestant regime to which they were passionately committed.
The Ridolfi conspiracy was finally exposed in 1571, but it formed the background of Anglo-Scots relations from 1569. There are two ways to read the plot as it was ultimately revealed. One is that Elizabeth and Cecil had made a potentially calamitous misjudgment and permitted a dangerous conspirator to go free. The other is that Elizabeth herself was involved almost from its genesis in a scheme which would have efficiently compromised the Scots queen without Elizabeth apparently getting her own hands dirty.
Since the late 1560s, Elizabeth’s intelligence network had been keeping an eye on Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine businessman who was also a suspected papal agent. In December 1568, Francis Walsingham wrote to Cecil to report on a disturbing communication he had received from Paris, which claimed that the French and Spanish governments were considering an alliance for the overthrow of Cecil, “the great heretic,” and the imposition of a total trade embargo on Elizabeth if she resisted a return to the Catholic fold. Within days of Walsingham’s letter, the Spanish ambassador de Spes met with his French counterpart, Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, to discuss the scheme. De Spes was in touch with Ridolfi, and in September 1569, as the first stirrings of the Northern Rising were heard in London, it was discovered that Ridolfi had made bills of exchange for the vast sum of £3,000 available to the Bishop of Ross, Mary Stuart’s envoy. This was sufficiently alarming for Ridolfi to be detained on the advice of Cecil and the Earl of Leicester for questioning at Walsingham’s London home in Seething Lane, near the Aldgate, a former medieval hospital known as the Papey. Ridolfi remained there from November until late January 1570 (that is, for the duration of the rising), during which time he admitted his acquaintance with Ross and his knowledge of the plan to marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk. His revelations were prompted by intervention from the queen, who suggested that some of his responses were “far otherwise than the truth is” and added threateningly that “a harsher examination would reveal more.” So, was Ridolfi “turned” during his residence at Walsingham’s home, possibly under threat of torture? Elizabeth certainly seems to have displayed a curious degree of friendliness towards such a dangerous character.
After Ridolfi’s release, on a promise to meddle no more in affairs which were beyond him, Elizabeth actually received him for an audience, in her garden at Greenwich Palace on 25 March. Ridolfi swore loyalty to her: “He did in like sort make profession of great affection to serve Her Majesty and this crown.”4 Shortly afterwards, he was on his way to Rome, with a passport signed by Elizabeth herself. His journey also encompassed the Spanish Netherlands and Philip of Spain’s court, apparently with a view of promoting an invasion by the Duke of Alba to set Mary on the throne, supported by an internal coup led by English Catholics. Alba himself termed Ridolfi un gran parlaquina—a chatterbox—and dismissed his capacity to organize any sort of insurrection, yet the view that
Ridolfi . . . was a man with an Italian love of intrigue, but . . . with little of the Italian Renaissance skill at diplomacy; he understood little of the workings of the English mind, or indeed the workings of England itself must be disputed. It is almost inconceivable that this supposed political lightweight should have successfully deceived Walsingham, Cecil and Elizabeth at such a delicate moment, while it is a fact that Ridolfi eventually died a respected senator in Florence, neatly avoiding the consequences of his revolutionary plotting. So there is another way to look at Ridolfi’s career . . . that Ridolfi was a plant; that the whole conspiracy was a set-up from the start, a plot manufactured by [Cecil] to expose Mary Stuart and the danger he knew her to be and to reveal those in England and abroad with whom she had been plotting.5
Walsingham assured Cecil that Ridolfi “would deal both discreetly and uprightly, as one both wise and who standeth on terms of honesty and reputation,” an assessment which hardly fits with the clumsy blabbermouth of Alba’s opinion. Unless, of course, Ridolfi’s indiscretion and incompetence were part of his cover. That Elizabeth should have chosen this moment to promote Walsingham to the French embassy implies that she trusted his views. Moreover, Elizabeth’s resistance to French pressure to make a definitive statement about Mary can be read in this light as a tactic to postpone action until the plot had worked itself out. Ridolfi was a man whose “manoeuvring was so deft that we still cannot be sure whose side he was on.”6 Was he indeed working for Elizabeth, or fooling her into thinking he was a double agent, while in fact remaining loyal to the Catholic cause? Recent historians have strongly inclined to the former view, but whatever Ridolfi believed himself to be doing, his activities indeed confirmed Cecil’s worst fears for the security of Elizabeth and her state.
On 12 April 1571, a man named Charles Bailly, newly arrived from the Netherlands, was arrested at Dover and sent to Lord Cobham in London. Bailly’s luggage had excited the suspicions of the port authorities when it was found to contain copies of A Treatise Concerning the Defence of the Honour of . . . Mary Queen of Scotland, as well as coded letters to the Bishop of Ross. Lord Cobham immediately sent Bailly to the Marshalsea Prison, obviously having alerted Cecil, for Bailly’s cellmate proved to be William Herle, a skilled informant who worked for the Secretary. Bailly discovered that his cell also possessed a convenient hole in the wall, through which he was able to communicate with an Irish priest, a secretary of the Spanish ambassador, and two servants of the bishop. Herle wrote daily letters to Cecil, who appeared to interrogate Bailly himself, and after several weeks of threats and a dose of the rack (the use of which Ross protested, though Cecil and Leicester denied it), Bailly confessed to knowledge of Ridolfi’s discussions with Alba in the Netherlands and claimed that Ridolfi had requested Bailly write two letters to be passed to Ross for delivery. Bailly knew only that the letters were intended for English noblemen, marked as “30” and “40.” On 13 May, Cecil, accompanied by Sir Ralph Sadler, the Earl of Sussex, and Sir Walter Mildmay, visited Ross at his lodgings, and after lengthy questioning obtained the information that Ridolfi had in his possession letters from Mary to Alba, Philip of Spain, and the pope, and letters from Ross to Alba, all concerning plans for funds and troops to come to Mary’s assistance.
After spending the summer on progress with the queen, Cecil wrote an extraordinary letter on Elizabeth’s behalf to the Earl of Shrewsbury, adding directions to the courier that it should go direct to Sheffield Castle, “haste post haste, haste, haste, for life for life for life for life.” It is a rare and evocative little piece of poetry; one can hear the urgent gallop of the post horse’s hooves in the repeated injunction. Shrewsbury was instructed to press Mary to further revelations and to prevent her from sending or receiving any communication, for if Cecil had set a trap, he was very close to springing it. On 29 August, one Thomas Browne of Shrewsbury had been given a purse of silver by two of the Duke of Norfolk’s clerks for delivery to another Norfolk servant, Laurence Bannister. Browne took the precaution of looking into the purse and discovered £600 in gold and two notes written in code. Within days, Norfolk’s men were being interrogated in the Tower, and Elizabeth claimed she was “very inquisitive” to hear the news. The Duke of Norfolk was taken into custody at Howard House on 4 September, but not before he had had time to dispose of the key to the code. Norfolk refused to sign a statement put together by Sir Ralph Sadler, whom Cecil had employed to question him, and Elizabeth then instructed that Norfolk be sent to the Tower for further examination. Elizabeth sat next to Cecil at his desk as together they combed through the report. The queen proposed that William Barker, one of the two Norfolk servants who had been given charge of the gold, should be questioned again, and she authorized the use of “some extremity” against him. She was no longer prepared to listen to Norfolk’s pleas for clemency, though he pleaded that “when I considered with myself how far I have transgressed in my duty to your most excellent Majesty I dare not now presume to look up or hope for your grace’s favor.” By mid-September, with the warrant for the torture of Norfolk’s servants arrived at the Tower, Cecil was insisting on answers. A month later, he was sufficiently convinced of Norfolk’s guilt to release a tract, Salutem in Christo, detailing the conspiracy to the public. In a method familiar to modern-day manipulators of the press, this was a “private” letter from one “RG” which “accidentally” found its way into the public domain. Although the plot it detailed has become known by Ridolfi’s name, his identity was concealed, referred to only as “the messenger” (which again lends support to the notion that Ridolfi had been working for the English government all along).
The charges were as follows: that Mary was responsible for the Northern Rising, that she had conspired to marry Norfolk and with him orchestrate a plan to take London and receive troops from the Netherlands, a scheme enabled by Ross, that “instrument of all the duke’s calamity.”7 Mary was to be proclaimed Queen of England and Scotland, and her son James kidnapped. It was an incendiary piece of propaganda, “a sensational revelation from the heart of Elizabeth’s government.”8
A week later, Ross was questioned again, in an investigation which stretched over days. Over and over again the bishop was asked about Ridolfi—and when he cracked it was clear that Norfolk was a dead man. Yes, Norfolk had “discoursed” with Alba; yes, he had conspired with Philip and Mary, even proposing Harwich as the ideal port at which to land troops; yes, he had been in communication with the pope; yes, the duke was “40” and his ally, Lord Lumley, “30.” Further evidence of Ridolfi’s agency came from the cipher he had prepared from Italian for Norfolk’s use after his release from Walsingham’s custody and kept in Norfolk’s Bible. With only one code, it would be pathetically easy for Cecil to crack, and, as Cecil’s biographer notes, “Who but an English agent would have made such an obvious mistake?”9 In November, Norfolk wrote a long letter to Cecil asking him to intercede with Elizabeth, but some days later the queen herself charged her kinsman with six counts of treason drawn from his own confessions.
THE RIDOLFI PLOT reveals much about Elizabeth as a political strategist. From its inauguration, we see her working closely with Cecil, meeting with Ridolfi himself, her communications half protective, half threatening. We see her agreeing to the threat (and possibly the use) of torture on Bailly and Norfolk’s servants. We see her going about her public business, meeting ambassadors, progressing through her realm, all the time patiently waiting for the threads of a conspiracy against her life to weave together. Yet in the days preceding Ross’s interrogation, the strain was beginning to tell—Elizabeth suffered from painful bilious attacks which could only be relieved by emetics, the “purging” cure the queen usually despised. The effort required to maintain the mask of majesty under such circumstances demanded tremendous self-discipline, particularly as Elizabeth had been as duplicitous as her Secretary in engaging in a plot whose consequences could have been disastrous. Whether Ridolfi was indeed a stooge or just a chancer who loved intrigue can never fully be known, but Elizabeth was prepared to gamble with her own safety in order to bring down her enemies.
THE CHURNINGS OF the Ridolfi conspiracy illuminate Elizabeth’s attitude towards Scotland the previous year, when the assassination of the regent, Moray, on 23 January 1570, provoked a crisis. With the Protestant regime north of the border thrown into further disarray, Elizabeth was also under pressure from France to declare her intentions as to what she planned to do with Mary. At a meeting with the French ambassador on 6 February, Elizabeth asserted that she had “used the Queen of Scots with more honor and favor than any prince having like cause would have done, and though she was not bound to make account to any prince of her doings, yet she would impart to the King, her good brother, some reasonable consideration of her doing.”10 No such “reasonable consideration,” however, was forthcoming until April, when Sir Henry Norris was instructed to take a firm line in his statement to Catherine de Medici and her son. After detailing the incidents of the Norfolk marriage plot, the failure to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, and the rebellion in the north, Elizabeth’s envoy declared,
If the requests that are made to us to aid her to our power to restore her forthwith to her realm shall be applied to the former things preceding, no indifferent person of any judgment will or can think it in conscience reasonable to move us to commit such a dangerous folly, as to be the author ourself to hazard our own person, our quietness of our realm and people.11
Personally, Elizabeth was still uncertain as to how she ought to proceed, and, despite the resolve of her Privy Councilors, who firmly opposed Mary’s restoration, the queen held a meeting at Hampton Court that same month to discuss the matter once again. Elizabeth’s indecisiveness at this point has been read as typical of her character, as evidence of the “feminine” nature of her governance, or, more realistically, as an inability to contemplate the enormity of striking at another of God’s anointed. Yet given Elizabeth’s personal engagement in the early stages of the notorious plot, it is possible to consider that her diplomatic stalling was based upon the assurance that Mary might soon be trapped by her own schemes.
THE EVENTS OF 1571 produced two further pieces of legislation, prompted in part by Regnans in excelsis and in part by the Ridolfi conspiracy, which further compromised the loyalty of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects and delineated the opposing sides in what was now an overt confessional conflict within the realm. The Treasons Act made it illegal to deny Elizabeth’s right to the throne: to call her a heretic, a tyrant, an infidel, or a usurper was treason. The Act Against Fugitives over the Sea posed a more practical problem. Catholics who chose exile rather than conformity (expressed as leaving England without license and failing to return within six months) were termed “fugitives, rebels and traitors.” All English Catholics were now suspected of the treason which Catholic militants promoted, which is not to say that there were many among them who attempted to find a way out of the theological labyrinth the pope and the Queen had created between them. Many Catholic gentry were content to become “Church papists,” outwardly conforming to the requirements of the Act of Supremacy while holding to a certain freedom of conscience; others actively sought a place for loyal Catholics within the structure of the English state; still others maintained Catholicism as a system of social and cultural rather than strictly religious practice: scholars working on the distinctions and interactions between these groups have ascertained considerable degrees of variation. Nor is it correct to assume that Elizabeth was staunchly opposing a monolith of Catholic conformity, however mighty the ultra-loyalist Hapsburg Empire at times appeared. For example, the French had never accepted the ruling of the 1563 Council of Trent which endorsed the pope as the bishop of the universal Church, hence “Gallicanism,” as it became known, was increasingly influential in continental politics as the century drew on. Gallicanism argued for the ecclesiastical independence of Catholic kingdoms, especially, but not exclusively, in France, thus the English government was not unique in proposing that subjects should obey a monarch of a different confession than their own.12 Many English Catholics saw “ultramontanism,” the assertion of the power of Rome over all other authorities, as a perversion of their faith, giving the temporal precedent over the spiritual. Anthony Copley, a Catholic polemicist writing at the end of the Elizabethan period, exhorted, “All English Catholics as well for that we are Catholics as English, explode and prosecute this doctrine . . . as impostural and disloyal.” As France descended into spiritual civil war, Gallican tracts became increasingly popular among English Protestants, with 130 such works having been translated and published by 1595. Dogmatic militancy no more universally obtained among European Catholics than insurrection among their English counterparts: the challenge Elizabeth faced was from an extremist minority.
Elizabeth’s fine, supple intellect was in many ways brilliantly suited to the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of rainbow loyalties which formed Renaissance politics, but increasingly she was obliged to concede that her government could not afford to recognize subtleties, as the moral landscape was ineluctably reduced to black or white. Post-Regnans legislation denied to English Catholics a position which both Elizabeth and Cecil had assumed during Mary’s reign. Each in their own way had claimed that loyalty and conscience were not incompatible. Dying for one’s beliefs had begun to look rather old-fashioned to these skillful proponents of a new political ideology, yet as the positions of both sides hardened, there were increasing numbers of Catholic idealists prepared to rush in where pragmatists feared to tread.
For Norfolk, then, there could be no quarter. According to Cecil, Elizabeth was mindful of the duke’s nearness of blood and superiority of honor, and the death warrant was signed and rescinded four times before Elizabeth could bear to allow the execution to proceed. If Elizabeth had been engaged in the planting of Ridolfi, this would suggest that she was as eager as her ministers to learn the scope of the plots against her, but this did not mean she could easily reconcile herself with the consequences of that information. Yet she was even more reluctant to move against Mary Stuart than against Norfolk, and her parliament would not permit her to spare them both. In late 1570, Dr. Thomas Wilson, a Cambridge lawyer, had been commissioned by Cecil to “translate” a work by George Buchanan, the tutor to James of Scotland. A Detection of the Doings of Mary Queen of Scots, a brutal summary of Mary’s activities, had been sent to London by Elizabeth’s ambassador in Scotland, Thomas Randolph, in 1568. Now Wilson doctored the text to make it appear that it had been written in “handsome Scottish,” after which it was sent to the French court with the aim of destroying what was left of Mary’s reputation there. The text sums up the views of the Commons, who were determined on Mary’s blood:
When rude Scotland has vomited up a poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative? Oh vile indignity. . . . Oh ambition fed with prosperity, strengthened with indulgence, irritated with adversity, not to be neglected, trusted, nor pardoned.13
Installed as ambassador in France, Walsingham added his opinion that “so long as that devilish woman lives, neither Her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.”
In the May Parliament of 1572, member after member stood up to denounce this “horrible adulteress” and “subverter of the state.” It is notable that Mary’s marital transgressions were conflated with her political treason, invoking the ancient association between sexual sin and perverted government, an association which anti-Elizabeth propaganda was also to adopt. Elizabeth pressed hard for a moderation of the House’s wishes, pressing for a bill which would exclude Mary from the succession rather than the bill of attainder which would cost the Scots queen her life, a mercy which was very grudgingly accepted. In return, Elizabeth finally agreed that Norfolk should go to the block. Mary heard the news in tears, and spent much time in private prayer for her lost suitor, but one does wonder whether she was truly grateful.
Norfolk was executed on Tower Hill on 2 June. The following evening, Cecil approached Elizabeth with a report from Walsingham containing research on the opinions of significant French Protestants on the Queen of Scots, but Elizabeth waved him away after a few moments, confessing that she was too distracted by her sadness over Norfolk’s death to talk business. On 25 June, the moderated bill which Elizabeth had requested was read for the third time in the House of Commons. It stated that Mary Stuart had no right to the dignity, title, or interest of Elizabeth’s crown, and that if she should claim it, or seek to provoke any kind of war or invasion, that she would be a traitor and could be tried as such by the peers of England. If condemned, she would be executed. But Elizabeth did not give her assent, without which the bill was useless. She requested that it be deferred until the next parliamentary sitting in November. All that she permitted was a delegation to Sheffield Castle to read the brazenly unrepentant Mary yet another severe lecture on her treacherous ingratitude, a visit which had much the same effect as all its predecessors.