28

An Axe or an Act?

Mary had first put out a feeler to Philip II in November 1568, in the earliest months of her captivity when she was still at Bolton Castle. The timing was propitious, because a new Spanish ambassador, Don Guerau de Spes, had arrived in London. He was inexperienced, but a natural conspirator. Within a few months, he had staked out positions that sparked an Anglo-Spanish trade war and threatened a Spanish invasion of England on Mary’s behalf.

A fortnight or so after Moray had exhibited the Casket Letters for inspection, de Spes called at the French embassy in London, where he made two proposals. The first was that ‘he knew of no greater heretic in this world, nor a greater enemy to the Catholic faith than Master Cecil’. He urged France to co-operate with Spain ‘to make him lose his office and the favour and credit that he enjoyed with his mistress the Queen’. The second proposal was that France and Spain should place a joint embargo on all English trade until the Catholic faith was restored.

A month later, a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, who was secretly channelling the funds sent by Pope Pius V to the English Catholics, entered the story. He was a double agent working both for Spain and for Walsingham. In February 1569, he offered to arbitrate between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alba, Philip II’s governor-general in the Netherlands, to end the trade war. The following month, he visited de Spes, bringing an exciting and dangerous message from the Duke of Norfolk and his allies, the Earl of Arundel and Lord Lumley. They had said that they were no longer willing to accept exclusion from their rightful places by the low-born upstarts of Cecil’s inner caucus. They wished to overthrow Cecil and force Elizabeth to realign her policy closer to Philip II and Rome. Later, Ridolfi told the French ambassador that he was commissioned by the Pope to help restore the Catholic faith in England.

Ridolfi contacted Mary through her agent in London, John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, to whom he transferred £3000 from de Spes with Mary’s knowledge. The transaction placed her at the heart of two converging conspiracies. One was designed to improve her conditions in exile and displace Cecil as chief minister. The other linked her dynastic claim to a plan to restore Catholicism in England.

The Duke of Norfolk had conspired to oust Cecil shortly after the first stage of Elizabeth’s tribunal opened at York in October 1568. He had been one of the original English judges and resented the way Cecil had dictated the proceedings; but Cecil had ignored his protests. The tribunal had been revoked to Westminster, and Norfolk was sent off on a futile mission to inspect the northern frontiers until Cecil was ready to reopen the hearings.

But Norfolk was not easily marginalized. He was England’s premier duke, whose family stood at the very heart of the Catholic party in England. His talent for making advantageous alliances was unrivalled. He had married three heiresses, Lady Mary Fitzalan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel, who died at sixteen; Margaret, daughter of Lord Audley, who died after bearing five children in as many years; and Elizabeth Leyburne, the widow of Lord Dacre. When his third wife died in 1567, Norfolk became the guardian of the heiresses to whom he would marry his three sons. His sister, Jane, was the wife of the Earl of Westmorland, one of the two predominant landowning nobles in the north of England. Lastly, a second sister, Margaret, married Lord Scrope of Bolton Castle. Shortly after Elizabeth’s tribunal had ended in a stalemate, Norfolk decided that he would try and marry Mary. He had sneaked up to Bolton Castle to take a look at her, using a visit to his sister as an excuse. In the end, he would conspire to put Mary (and himself) on the English throne.

That, however, is not how the plot began. As it was first imagined by that arch-conspirator among the Scottish Lords, the insinuating Maitland, the aim was very different. His idea was that if Mary could be married off to an English nobleman, she would be neutralized politically. She would have been treated honourably, but her power and authority would be vested in her husband. Under English law, she would be a femme couverte. The idea was ingenious, because it appealed to those hereditary nobles who had always disliked the way Henry VIII had bypassed the strict order of succession in his will. It also resolved the problem of Mary’s dynastic claim in a way that Elizabeth herself had once anticipated: it was analogous to her old scheme to marry her cousin to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Mary jumped at the idea. She asked the Pope to annul her marriage to Bothwell, which was by Protestant rites and thus canonically invalid. Over the next twelve months, she also wrote Norfolk a series of love letters, despite only having seen him once. ‘I will live and die with you,’ she said. ‘Neither prison the one way, nor liberty the other, nor all such accidents, good or bad, shall persuade me to depart from that faith and obedience I have promised to you.’ Norfolk, in turn, sent Mary a diamond that she was to take with her to Fotheringhay, describing it as something ‘I have held very dear, having been given to me … as a pledge of his troth, and I have always worn it as such’. As she told the Duke at the time, ‘You have promised to be mine and I yours … As you please command me; for I will for all the world follow your commandment, so you be not in danger for me … Your own faithful to death, Queen of Scots. My Norfolk.’

We must allow for the conventions of royal marriages in which the custom was to express affection as soon as a betrothal had been arranged in principle. Even so, Mary was once more grasping at straws. If a marriage to Norfolk could enable her to recover her freedom, she would do it without asking any questions. It was a reasonable match, a better dynastic prospect than the old idea of marriage to Leicester. But there was a hopeless catch. No one had dared to tell Elizabeth, without whose consent the plan was worthless.

At first, however, even the perfidious Moray was in favour. In July 1569, he was at the centre of the plan. Then, a month later, he had compelling second thoughts. He saw the snag. Mary would use the marriage to seek her restoration as Queen of Scots, and Norfolk would use it to assert his claim in right of his wife to the throne of England with the aim of restoring Catholicism. With Norfolk at Mary’s side, furthermore, Moray would be ousted as regent and forced to seek exile abroad. He would end up changing places again with his sister. So Moray played a dirty trick, sending Elizabeth, still ignorant of the proposed marriage, a certified copy of Norfolk’s letter announcing his intention to marry Mary even if Moray objected.

Elizabeth had rarely been so angry. She perhaps disliked the marriage plan less than the fact that it had been devised behind her back. Everyone involved was sent for except Mary, and those such as Leicester and Throckmorton who were agile in a crisis made their excuses. Badly caught out in this game of musical chairs were the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. When these Catholic Lords were abandoned by their allies and left to face Elizabeth and possible execution alone, they decided to rebel. Their revolt, the so-called Northern Rising, erupted in November 1569 and was crushed by overwhelming southern forces within six weeks.

The two Earls and the Countess of Northumberland took refuge in Liddesdale, but were denounced by Bothwell’s old adversary, the Laird of Ormiston. Westmorland and the Countess of Northumberland fled to the Netherlands, where they remained in exile. Northumberland was seized by Moray and executed by Elizabeth after the Scots sold him back to England for £2000. The Countess of Westmorland retreated to her brother’s estates in Norfolk, where she lived out her remaining days in obscurity.

Mary was not herself blamed by Elizabeth for causing this, the most serious rebellion of her reign – at least not yet. But there had all along been two separate conspiracies. The plan to marry Mary to Norfolk had failed and the Duke was a prisoner in the Tower. Ridolfi, meanwhile, was still plotting. In May 1569, he had drawn up a plan to depose Elizabeth called the ‘Enterprise of England’ and taken it to the Spanish embassy. Philip II was tentatively listening. These were plans that fitted in with his grand strategy for Europe and the domination of world trade. He wondered if they could possibly succeed.

Ridolfi had then visited Walsingham. As long as he was careful and the two sides did not meet and compare notes, he could hope to get away with his double-dealing and claim rewards from both sides. He had information to sell, because his banking services provided the only link between de Spes, Norfolk, and Mary’s agent in London. He had also supplied the cipher used to encode the communications between de Spes, Mary, and the English Lords. Whoever had a copy of this cipher could read all their intercepted letters.

Ridolfi was arrested on the eve of the Northern Rising yet was released after six weeks. And he was not detained in the Tower, the usual place for political prisoners, but at Walsingham’s house. Ridolfi had been ‘turned’ by Walsingham. It was a stroke of luck for Cecil, because in February 1570 the Pope, spurred on by the prospect of reversing the English Reformation, did what his predecessors had always refused to do. He published a decree, Regnans in excelsis, depriving Elizabeth of her ‘pretended title’ to the English throne and releasing her subjects from their allegiance. This was Mary’s golden opportunity and what she had sought in her youth, when she had first been married to the Dauphin Francis.

Cecil’s reaction was immediate, his logic as inexorable as ever. Protestants were now loyalists and Catholics traitors. By his definition, Catholics agreed with the Pope that Elizabeth should be deposed. When Parliament met in April 1571, he introduced an oath to ensure that all Catholic members were excluded. He then drafted a government bill to disqualify any candidate for the succession – principally Mary – who at any time for the rest of Elizabeth’s life might claim the throne or usurp its insignia. In debating this bill, he would never let Parliament forget that Mary’s heraldic arms in France had been quartered with the royal arms of England and her ushers had cried ‘Make way for the Queen of England’ as she walked to chapel.

During 1571, Cecil and Walsingham closely monitored the ‘Enterprise of England’. In an attempt to put the main conspirators off their guard, Norfolk was released from the Tower on parole. Mary’s correspondence was more rigorously vetted, and by April, Walsingham – on secondment as English ambassador to Paris, where most of the plotting was centred – had acquired with suspicious ease a copy of the cipher supplied by Ridolfi to the conspirators. There was no need to struggle to crack the code: Walsingham was given the solution on a plate.

On 4 August, Philip sent Alba his detailed instructions. The plan was to capture Elizabeth in the final phase of her summer progress to Hertfordshire and Essex. This would unleash a general rising of English Catholics, who would liberate Mary and marry her to Norfolk. A Spanish fleet would then sail with six thousand crack troops from Alba’s forces in the Netherlands to secure the country. Mary and Norfolk would then ascend the throne. To meet the costs of the expedition, Philip II was sending 20,000 ducats to replenish Alba’s treasury.

The plan leaked when one of Philip’s councillors disclosed it to a merchant in the Anglo-Iberian trade who was another of Walsingham’s double agents. The man returned at once to England. He arrived on or about 4 September and was sent directly to Cecil. The very next day, Cecil issued a warrant to put Norfolk back in the Tower. He also wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary’s custodian. The letter was endorsed ‘sent from the court, the 5th of September 1571 at 9 [o’clock] in the night’. No Elizabethan document had a higher priority. It is marked ‘haste, post haste, haste, haste, for life, life, life, life’.

Shrewsbury was warned of the plot and of Elizabeth’s reaction to it. She knew, Cecil said, that Mary was planning to escape and that she wished to go to Spain rather than to France or Scotland. She knew Mary had offered her son, James VI, in marriage to one of Philip II’s daughters by Elizabeth of Valois, Mary’s recently deceased childhood friend and playmate whom she affectionately knew as ‘Isabel’ and greatly mourned. At none of this, said Cecil, had Elizabeth taken umbrage. Mary was a captive Queen. These were no more than ‘those devices tending to her liberty’. What rankled, and what Elizabeth ‘understandeth certainly’, so it was said, were her cousin’s ‘labours and devices to stir up a new rebellion in this realm and to have the King of Spain to assist it’. Of all these facts, concluded Cecil, Elizabeth was ‘certainly assured and of much more’.

He greatly exaggerated. His information about Philip’s invasion plan came from Walsingham’s double agent and was strictly verbal. Later, he claimed to have confessions from Norfolk and the Bishop of Ross, a damaged letter from the Pope to Mary, and a ciphered letter from her to Norfolk found under a mat in the Duke’s house containing ‘great discourses in matters of State, more than woman’s wit doth commonly reach unto’. But there was no proof that Mary had endorsed a plan to depose and kill Elizabeth. The most incriminating letter, intercepted from Mary and written a few months before the Northern Rising, did not say what Cecil needed it to say.

The letter comes to us in the form of a copy of the deciphered original. In it, Mary spoke generally and allusively. She thanked her unnamed supporters for their ‘care how to enlarge our liberty, to restore us to our rightful seat, to cease our daily griefs, to suppress our usurping and undeserved foes, to quench the rage of erroneous tyrants, to the furtherance of God’s word, to the releasement and comfort of Christians’.

What works could be more acceptable to God than to succour the Catholic Church, to defend the rightful title of a prince, to deliver afflicted Christians from bondage, and to restore justice to all men, by cutting of the most faithless antichrist and usurper of titles, the destroyer of justice, the persecutor of God and his Church, the disturber of all quiet states, the only maintainer of all seditious and mischievous rebels of God and all Catholic princes, having a way made by our Holy Father. Wherefore we beseech you to proceed in God’s name and our Blessed Lady’s, with the assistance of the whole company.fn1

Nowhere did the letter mention Spain or Elizabeth by name. The ‘antichrist’ referred to could also have been meant literally. Mary had neither called explicitly for an attempt on her cousin’s life, nor requested aid from Philip II or the Pope. ‘Works … acceptable to God’ were no more than the workings of divine Providence, and what earthly creature could resist them? And to ‘proceed in God’s name’ was not in itself an incitement to assassination or invasion. Mary’s meaning is, of course, perfectly clear. But such evidence would not have stood up in a court of law, even supposing that she, who was neither English nor a subject of Elizabeth, was bound by English law.

Cecil did not have enough evidence to put Mary on trial. To obtain more damaging admissions, Shrewsbury was ordered to confront her and ‘tempt her patience in this sort to provoke her to answer somewhat’. But she could not be caught out in this way. She could be impulsive or naïve, but was rarely stupid. In dealing with Ridolfi, she had followed her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine’s maxim, ‘Discretion sur tout’, to the letter.

If Cecil could not put her on trial, he could isolate her diplomatically. He sent his friend and fellow Privy Councillor, Sir Thomas Smith, to Catherine de Medici, playing up the Spanish threat in Europe and urging her to persist in the dissociation of France from Mary’s cause. This was the start of an Anglo-French entente that lasted for a decade. It survived even the setback of the massacres of St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August 1572), when some three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and ten thousand more killed in provincial France over a period of three weeks. The massacres caused panic in England. The Bishop of London advised Cecil ‘Forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen’s head’. Cecil only wished he could comply. He had met Mary face to face when he had visited her at Chatsworth in October 1570 in an attempt to quieten her demands to return to Scotland. She had burst into tears and their interviews were inconclusive. How he impressed her and how she impressed him are maddeningly not recorded. But Cecil was impervious to women’s tears. He had no more room than Paulet for ‘foolish pity’ and precious little scruple in his dealings with Mary. He had already followed Knox in identifying her as ‘Athalia’ – a biblical precedent for regicide.fn2 And he had been advised by Knox before he left for Chatsworth that if he ‘struck not at the root, the branches that appeared to be broken would bud again with greater force’. To give his warning maximum impact, Knox informed his old ally that he had written his letter ‘with his one foot in the grave’.

When Cecil met Mary, he had piously claimed how Elizabeth had ‘always foreborn to publish such matters as she might have done to have touched the Queen of Scotland for murder of her husband’. If Elizabeth had such reservations, Cecil did not. The judges who had examined the Casket Letters had been sworn to secrecy, but now Cecil broke their silence. He arranged for his friend Thomas Wilson, author of an acclaimed treatise on The Art of Rhetoric, to prepare a vernacular edition of Buchanan’s dossier for the press, telling the Lords’ side of the story and translating it from Latin into imitation Scots in order to create the false impression that it was authorized by the Lords in Scotland and not by anyone in England.fn3

A proof copy was ready by late November or early December 1571, to which Wilson craftily appended a damning but anonymous ‘oration’ against Mary and translations of the Casket Letters. Cecil was delighted. He had the book rushed out by his ‘tame’ printer, John Day, under the tortuous but highly informative title: A Detection of the Doings of Mary Queen of Scots, touching the murder of her husband, and her conspiracy, adultery, and pretended marriage with the Earl of Bothwell. And a defence of the true Lords, maintainers of the King’s grace’sfn4 action and authority.

Cecil had smeared Mary with the old and legally unproven allegations of the Casket Letters. An adulteress who could plot to murder her husband would have no qualms about conspiring to depose and kill Elizabeth. It made her guilt as a co-conspirator in the ‘Enterprise of England’ seem more credible. It also hit out collaterally at Norfolk shortly before his trial for treason began. The innuendo was that anyone prepared to take Mary as his wife was tarred with the brush of Darnley’s murder.

In publishing the Detection in this underhand way, Cecil was playing with fire. It is unlikely Day was allowed to sell the book openly in his shop. Elizabeth would have been enraged at Cecil’s meddling had she been able to link the work directly to him. It was circulated privately to his inner caucus, at least at first. A final exhortation set the tone:

Now judge Englishmen if it be good to change Queens. Oh uniting confounding! When rude Scotland has vomited up a poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative? Oh vile indignity! While your Queen’s enemy liveth, her danger continueth. Desperate necessity will dare the uttermost …

And this was the point. The Detection set the keynote for the Parliament that met in May 1572 to debate Elizabeth’s ‘safety’. When Norfolk was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Elizabeth dithered over his execution, whereas Cecil and his Protestant allies wanted Mary as well as Norfolk dead. They had secured this Parliament to make a bid to execute her as well as the Duke. Their aim was a bill of attainder by which Mary would be ‘convicted’ of treason by an Act of Parliament and without a formal trial, thus avoiding the trouble of providing proof.

In a memo on the eve of the Parliament, Cecil rebuked Elizabeth for her ‘doubtful dealing with the Queen of Scots’. His verdict was chilling. The only ‘good’ Mary was a dead one. Elizabeth’s mistake was her desire to give her cousin the benefit of the doubt. Far from the threat she posed diminishing, it was increasing. All the Catholics supported her dynastic claim, as did anyone who put their emphasis on hereditary right. Mary enjoyed Spanish and potentially Guise support. Her ‘party’ maintained her title to be the legitimate Queen of England. All she needed were the forces and the opportunity to launch a coup d’état.

When Parliament assembled, the members of Cecil’s inner caucus called vociferously for Mary’s execution. It was an unusually hot spring, the temperature in the House of Commons even hotter. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce her, echoing each other often almost word for word. Mary, they argued, had disqualified herself. She was no longer Queen, but ‘the late Queen of Scots’. She was ‘a Queen of late time and yet through her own acts now justly no Queen’. She was Elizabeth’s kinswoman ‘and yet a very unnatural sister’. ‘She hath sought to dispossess the Queen’s Majesty of her crown … [she] hath made so small account of the Queen’s goodness towards her as she deserveth no favour.’ She ‘is but a comet, which doth prognosticate the overthrow of this realm’. ‘She is no Queen of ours, she is none of our anointed. The examples of the Old Testament be not few for the putting of wicked Kings to death.’

Cecil’s circulation of the Detection had done its work. Mary was ‘this Jezebel’, this ‘Athalia’, this ‘idolatress’, this ‘most wicked and filthy woman’. She was ‘the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth’. There was no safety for Elizabeth as long as she lived. ‘She hath been a killer of her husband, an adulteress, a common disturber of the peace of this realm, and for that to be dealt with as an enemy. And therefore my advice is to cut off her head and make no more ado about her.’

Precedents from legal and historical treatises were quoted to justify her trial and execution:

Every person offending is to be tried in the place where he committeth the crime …

A King passing through another’s realm or there resident is but a private person …

A King deposed is not to be taken for a King …

A King though not deposed may commit treason …

Punishments ought to be equal to the offences committed …

Death is the penalty for treason.

One of Cecil’s protégés, Thomas Norton, summed up Parliament’s mood. ‘The execution of the Scottish Queen is of necessity, it may lawfully be done … A general impunity to commit treason was never permitted to any … You will say she is a Queen’s daughter and therefore to be spared; nay then, spare the Queen’s Majesty that is a King’s daughter and our Queen.’ This speaker even quoted from the Detection: ‘desperate necessity dareth the uttermost …’ Who knew what mischief the serpent might do if she was allowed to live?

But could Mary, an anointed Queen of Scots, commit treason in England? Elizabeth did not yet think so. She refused to hand Parliament an axe for Mary’s execution, instead she encouraged members to seek an act excluding her from the succession. When the bill was passed, however, she vetoed it. She claimed it was not technically a veto, but in this she played with words. She could not bring herself to proceed against an anointed Queen, yielding only to Parliament’s pleas to execute the Duke of Norfolk, who went to the block on 2 June, a month before Parliament ended.

Cecil was wholly frustrated. As he wrote to Walsingham, then still in France: ‘All that we have laboured for and had with full consent brought to fashion – I mean a law to make the Scottish Queen unable and unworthy of succession to the crown – was by her Majesty neither assented to nor rejected, but deferred.’ And in a second letter, he made a shrill complaint about how the ‘highest person’ in the realm (meaning Elizabeth) had failed to act, and so brought shame on her councillors.

Cecil was not foolhardy enough to tell Elizabeth this to her face. He did not need to, as she was well aware that she had invoked the royal prerogative to defend her cousin in defiance of Parliament, exonerating herself by promising that the bill of exclusion might be revived at a later date. But the appointed day came and went, and almost four years elapsed before Parliament met again. Mary was left untouched. Cecil had got neither an axe nor an act.

This most intrepid of spiders did not let up for a moment. Lady Catherine Grey, the heir apparent under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, and her sister were both dead. Cecil turned his full attention to achieving Mary’s exclusion from the succession by fair means or foul. He sent his brother-in-law, Henry Killigrew, on a secret mission to Scotland to see whether, if Mary were handed back to them, the Protestant Lords would put her on trial and execute her. To fulfil this delicate task, Killigrew was recalled from France, where his instructions had been to drum up support for Mary’s execution among the enemies of the Guise family.

Another of Cecil’s intermediaries was Robert Beale, Walsingham’s brother-in-law, later the man charged with delivering the warrant for Mary’s execution to Fotheringhay Castle. He set about demonizing Mary and lobbying for an integrated policy linked to English support for the Protestant cause abroad and the ‘extirpation’ of Catholicism at home. Where the Catholics were concerned, Beale advised that ‘their chiefest head must be removed’. ‘I mean’, he said, ‘the Queen of Scots, who as she hath been the principal cause of the ruin of the two realms of France and Scotland, hath prettily played the like part here.’

It was a matter of waiting until Mary was trapped. Patience and surveillance were needed. When Walsingham returned to England, the interception of her letters was stepped up. A huge pile of deciphered transcripts accumulated, much of it concerning pensions granted by Mary to Catholic exiles abroad. She had also generously rewarded those who had fled after the débâcle of the Northern Rising. ‘I pray you’, she wrote in 1577 to her agent in Paris, ‘give the Pope to understand as soon as you can that all I have remaining from my dowry (as you are able to inform him) is not enough for the maintenance of my household affairs and to furnish the necessity of the banished English and Scots whom I am constrained to relieve.’ That same year she appealed to Philip II to ‘take care of those that are banished out of England, and especially the Earl of Westmorland’. Her cousin, the young Duke of Guise, was to be a recipient of similar pleas.

Step by step, Walsingham pieced together a jigsaw linking Mary’s agents to Philip II, the Pope, the Guise family, the Grand Master of Malta, and the Spanish ambassador in Rome. But nothing out of the ordinary was found for him to spin malice from until 1579.

That year, Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny, first cousin of Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley, returned to Scotland from France. His courtly style and handsome looks captivated the impressionable young James, who showered him with gifts and created him Duke of Lennox. Within a month, James was to abandon his schoolroom at Stirling Castle and take up his place at Holyrood. D’Aubigny reformed the court and the royal household on the French model, then turned his attention to his enemies among the remaining Confederate Lords. In December 1580, Morton was arrested on a charge of complicity in Darnley’s murder and executed in the following June. Mary was overjoyed; she believed that events were turning in her favour and that she could soon be restored as Queen of Scots.

She made contact with Castelnau at the French embassy in London. They agreed to work together to achieve the independence of Scotland under the protection of France, and with Mary as Queen. Their project was to revive the ‘auld alliance’. As Castelnau reminded Catherine de Medici and Henry III – at no small cost to himself, since his attachment to Mary would bring about a premature end to his career – ‘It behoves your Majesty to preserve the alliance with Scotland, which has always been the bridle for England.’

All Cecil’s work since the treaty of Edinburgh in 1560 seemed about to be undone. D’Aubigny had the support of the Guises, who were fast making a comeback in the 1580s in their capacity as Philip II’s allies in the French Catholic League. Would their combined influence on James be sufficient to persuade the susceptible teenager to invite his mother back to Scotland as Queen?

In November 1581, Elizabeth sought to recover lost ground. She sent Beale to Sheffield to see if Mary could be used as a distraction against her son. Mary was thrilled to be back in the limelight, but did not intend to play such games. She put an alternative scheme to Beale, one by which she would be restored to her throne as co-ruler with her son. She used every weapon in her arsenal to obtain Beale’s support for her idea, but he was impervious to her powers of persuasion. When Mary’s tactics failed, she tried a more theatrical approach. She exaggerated her illness, exploiting it to dramatic effect by conducting the interviews from her sickbed. She claimed to be dying. She had been vomiting and was partially immobilized because of lack of exercise, but she was secretly elated at the prospect of recovering her freedom.

Beale was not so easily fooled. When he found Mary and her gentlewomen ‘weeping in the dark’, he withdrew, later commenting that ‘the parties are so wily with whom a man deals’. He left Sheffield with Mary’s assurances that she would recognize Elizabeth as the lawful Queen of England and not have dealings with foreign powers or rebels. Within a few months, however, she was writing to Bernardino de Mendoza, de Spes’ successor as Spanish ambassador in London, asking for information about new plots devised by d’Aubigny and the Jesuits. She was determined to keep all her options open.

Her hopes were dashed when a renversement in Scotland led to d’Aubigny’s exile. In August 1582, while out hunting, James was decoyed into Ruthven Castle, where he was imprisoned by the Protestants and d’Aubigny ousted. Mary was distraught at the news. ‘When I heard that my son was taken and surprised by rebels as I was myself certain years ago’, she said, ‘I cannot but pour out my grief out of a just fear that he should fall into the same estate as I am in.’

But all was not lost. James by now was sixteen and finding his feet. In 1583, he escaped from his captors and declared his minority to be at an end. No longer would a regent rule in Scotland. Almost overnight, Henry III of France started a competition with Elizabeth to dazzle him. Henry sent two ambassadors to Scotland, with instructions to renew the ‘auld alliance’. He even recognized James as King, a move that ensured a lavish welcome for his ambassadors. Some progress was made in this diplomacy, and in retaliation Elizabeth talked of granting Mary her freedom under strict conditions. Until French influence on James could be neutralized, the Queen of Scots was still a card worth playing.

Still her imprisonment dragged on. Beale was sent back to Sheffield, where Mary again proposed a deal in which she and James would share the throne. They would recognize Elizabeth as Queen of England for as long as she lived, while reserving their own dynastic claim to the succession. It was hardly a new idea. But Elizabeth was willing to consider it. She even sent Walsingham, very much against his will, on an embassy to Scotland to float the plan.

This was shortly after he had pulled off his most significant intelligence coup by recruiting a mole at the French embassy. He was Laurent Feron, one of Castelnau’s clerks. As he had good reason to visit Walsingham in the normal course of his duties, it was easy to slip him secret documents over and above the papers he was really meant to show him. Walsingham was watching the embassy closely, because a young and headstrong Catholic gentleman, Francis Throckmorton, who had also travelled to Madrid and Paris, was seen to be making regular visits. He was arrested in November 1583, when he confessed under gruesome torture that the Duke of Guise was preparing to invade England and Scotland with Spanish and papal support, and that Mendoza was the impresario of the plot.

In January 1584, Mendoza was summoned before the Privy Council and expelled from England. He left in a rage, shutting the door of the Spanish embassy in London for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. Mary now relied exclusively on Castelnau to get her letters and instructions in cipher delivered to her agents in Paris. This is where Walsingham’s mole came in. Whatever she sent or received through the embassy could be copied and sent to Walsingham. Not much of the evidence against Throckmorton could be used against her, because, if it was, the mole’s cover would be blown and Walsingham could not carry on reading her secret correspondence. A trap was, nevertheless, baited.

Mary was naïve about the danger she faced. After so many long years of imprisonment, she had come to occupy an enclosed mental space in which her sense of reality was ebbing away and intrigue became a substitute for activity. She worried about security measures even as she risked her own security. ‘The best recipe for secret ink’, she informed Castelnau (as if he did not already know) ‘is alum dissolved in a little clear water twenty-four hours before it is required to write with. In order to read it, the paper must be dipped in a basin of water, and then held to the fire; the secret writing then appears white, and may easily be read until the paper dries.’ Naturally, the mole sent a copy of this letter straight to a much amused Walsingham, in whose papers it still remains.

But Mary was soon undeceived. After a mysterious silence lasting six weeks, she wrote, ‘through the discovery of all my agents who have visited your house, many people greatly suspect that one of your servants has been “turned”, which to speak the truth, I rather think myself’. Fortunately for Walsingham, Castelnau did not smell a mole. He carried on business as usual, enabling the spymaster to keep on reading his letters. They showed that Mary had indeed encouraged Throckmorton and promised to reward him. She had urged Castelnau to do all he could to assist him, which was enough to prove that she was dabbling in conspiracy even as she was negotiating with Elizabeth to be restored as co-ruler in Scotland. Elizabeth’s fury at this deception ended all further prospects of a political accord with Mary. From this point onwards, there was no more talk of a rapprochement.

Then, in July 1584, a catastrophe occurred. William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Protestants in their revolt against Philip II, fell victim to a Catholic assassin’s bullet. The shockwaves reverberated across Europe. This, and a series of assassination plots against Elizabeth herself, created a frenzy in which the Catholics and their allies were portrayed as terrorists by the Protestants. In October, Cecil and Walsingham drew up the Bond of Association. It was modelled on Scottish and Huguenot examples, extended to include the whole of the Protestant élite and others who wished to subscribe to it. At its core was the notion of Protestant citizenship. Signatories were to comprise ‘one firm and loyal society … by the majesty of Almighty God’. They were to take a solemn oath by which they entered into a national covenant to defend Elizabeth’s life and the Protestant succession.

The Bond was not just an oath of loyalty. It was a licence to kill. Signatories swore to ‘pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge’ anyone who tried to harm Elizabeth. Retribution was to be exacted on the spot. Moreover, no ‘pretended successor by whom or for whom [my emphasis] any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’ was to be spared. This clause was the most arbitrary. It included the heirs and successors of the intended beneficiary. Thus, if anyone threatened Elizabeth’s life in the interests of the Stuart succession, both Mary and James VI were to be executed, whether privy to the attempt or not.

Parliament met in November to discuss the Bond. What followed was a protracted battle of wills. Elizabeth was fifty-one. Her father, Henry VIII, had died at fifty-five and her sister, Mary Tudor, at forty-two. Quite apart from the threat of assassination and the looming war with Spain, Cecil was keen to settle the vexed question of the succession once and for all. He wanted to create a radical constitutional mechanism that would automatically exclude Mary and enable a Protestant ruler to be selected by Parliament when Elizabeth died. And Elizabeth was determined to prevent him.

Cecil proposed a ‘Great’ or ‘Grand Council’ that would come into effect on the Queen’s death, governing as a council of regency and summoning a Parliament that would choose a Protestant successor, whose authority would be confirmed by a statute. It was a quasi-republican solution to the succession issue, one that guaranteed Mary’s exclusion, since Catholics were ineligible to sit in Parliament after the legislation of 1571. But it was a risky proposition, and in Elizabeth’s view an almost scandalous subversion of the principles of monarchy and hereditary right.

She wielded her power and instructed Cecil to drop his plans for the succession. The ‘Act for the Queen’s Safety’, as it was passed in March 1585, dealt instead with two contingencies, each devised with Mary in mind and paving the way for her trial and execution. The first concerned a claimant to the throne (i.e. Mary) who was involved in an invasion, rebellion, or plot. In such a case, a commission of Privy Councillors and other Lords of Parliament, assisted by the judges, was to hear the evidence and promulgate its verdict by royal proclamation. Those found guilty were to be excluded from the succession, and all subjects ‘by virtue of this Act and her Majesty’s direction in that behalf’ might exact their revenge by killing them. The Act then considered Elizabeth’s assassination. In such a case, the commissioners were to investigate and proclaim their sentence as before, whereupon the intended beneficiary (i.e. Mary) was to be proscribed and she and her accomplices hunted down and killed according to the Bond.

But if the Act confirmed the Bond as it related to Mary, its most draconian sanctions were moderated. Whereas the Bond made no provision for a public trial, the Act insisted that offenders be tried by a commission. And whereas the Bond had referred to heirs and successors (i.e. James VI), Elizabeth exempted him unless he were ‘assenting or privy’ to a plot. This was not mere altruism. She was about to send an expeditionary force under Leicester’s command to aid the Dutch in their revolt. That would mean outright war with Philip II, leading up to the battle with the Spanish Armada. To protect her northern frontier, Elizabeth opened up negotiations with James. And she dangled before him the prospect of what so far she had always withheld. When, after the tribunal at which Moray had exhibited the Casket Letters, she had recognized a regent of Scotland, she had not recognized James VI as King. Now she opened the door to this and also did not rule out the further possibility of the succession to the English throne, thus tempting the nineteen-year-old with the prospect of this glittering prize.

James was male, Protestant, and available. His flirtation with d’Aubigny and his Jesuit friends had been little more than a teenage crush. He was deeply resentful of the constraints to which he had been subjected by the Lords, especially those imposed by Buchanan, his hated tutor. He longed for a throne more powerful than that of Scotland, and with so spectacular a reward as England within his reach he decided it was not in his interests to think of sharing his dynastic claim with a mother he could not even remember.

In the very same month that Elizabeth made her decisive interventions over the ‘Act for the Queen’s Safety’, James informed his mother that he would always honour her with the title of ‘Queen Mother’. But that was as far as he would ever go. There could be no question of joint sovereignty or her return to Scotland as Queen. To Mary, it was the cruellest of blows. She could not believe what she was reading. She fell, in turn, into paroxysms of vomiting, distress, and rage. ‘I pray you to note’, she fulminated as she fought back her tears, ‘I am your true and only Queen. Do not insult me further with this title of Queen Mother … there is neither King nor Queen in Scotland except me.’

Mary wrote at once to Castelnau demanding that, when treating with James, he should not call him King. She threatened to disinherit her son and to curse him if he ignored her and made a separate treaty with England. It touched her most sensitive nerve, destroying everything for which she had fought since returning to Scotland from France. ‘I think’, she said, ‘no punishment, divine or human, can equal such enormous ingratitude, if he is guilty of it, as to choose rather to possess by force and tyrannically that which justly belongs to me, and to which he cannot have any right but through me.’

And yet, a year later, the treaty with England was signed. James, perhaps without ever fully realizing it, made his mother’s execution at Fotheringhay inevitable. With his signature, he made her irrelevant and disposable. To Mary, who had suffered so many setbacks when her enemies and rivals thought she was in their way, it was the ultimate rejection. She became desperate. The prophecy of the Detection was now to become self-fulfilling: ‘Desperate necessity will dare the uttermost …’, it had said.

From this moment onwards, Mary was prepared to listen to any plot that might offer a chance of escape, however implausible it might seem and however obscure its advocates. And Walsingham was waiting for her. No longer did he need his mole at the French embassy, because Castelnau was effectively blackmailed. To spare him public exposure as an accessory to the Throckmorton plot, he was required to show all letters in his possession to or from Mary to Walsingham. Then, when Paulet succeeded Sir Ralph Sadler as Mary’s keeper and she was returned to the greater security of Tutbury, all her contacts with the outside world were sealed. There was no further need for pretence. Her letters were to be sent directly to Walsingham to be forwarded. Mary was indignant at this blatant disruption of her communications, but it was to no avail. No longer were any of her letters remotely confidential, because Cecil’s spymaster was reading them openly.

By the time a genuine – if totally unrealistic – conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth was spawned under the leadership of a gullible young man named Babington, Walsingham’s network was complete. His trap was baited and sprung. As he wrote to Leicester, ‘If the matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices during her Majesty’s reign.’ This time, no mistake would be made. They had entered the end game. The evidence would be obtained by fair means or foul, and Elizabeth compelled to act under the ‘Act for the Queen’s Safety’. Cecil would be victorious, and Mary sent to the block.