The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (23 page)

Swift action had to be taken to meet the mounting threats against the Queen. When Parliament met in April, Thomas Norton, the Lord Keeper, was quickly to his feet to remind the house that ‘her Majesty was and is the only pillar and stay of all our safety’. He continued, ‘the care, prayer and chief endeavour’ of Parliament must therefore be for the preservation of her life and estate’.
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Further measures were enacted to ‘regulate’ Catholics. One Act forbade anyone to obtain, circulate or make use of papal bulls and prohibited any subject to reconcile others to Rome or to be reconciled.
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Another Act made it high treason and punishable by death to ‘compass, imagine or practise the death or bodily harm of the Queen, to practise against the Crown or to write or signify that Elizabeth was not lawful Queen, or to publish, speak, write, etc. that she was an heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper or to entice a foreign country to invade’.
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Moreover, anyone who named in print any person as heir to the throne except her own ‘natural issue’, faced a year’s imprisonment. It was also now a capital offence to speculate on how long the Queen might live, ‘by setting or erecting of any figure or figures, or by casting of nativities, or by calculation, or by any prophesying, witchcraft, conjurations’.
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The battle lines had been drawn; Catholics could now be treated as traitors by reason of their faith alone.

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On 12 April 1571, Charles Bailly, a young Scotsman working as a courier and servant for John Leslie, the Bishop of Ross, Mary Stuart’s agent in London, was seized as he arrived at Dover on a ship from the Low Countries. He was searched and found to be carrying a number of seditious books and incriminating letters addressed to the Bishop of Ross, which pointed to a plot to assassinate the Queen and invade England.
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Cecil immediately ordered that Bailly be sent to the Marshalsea prison in London and kept under close watch.
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Under interrogation and the threat of torture, Bailly confessed the details of a conspiracy masterminded by Roberto di Ridolfi, a Florentine merchant and banker then living in London. Ridolfi had been put under surveillance two years earlier when it was discovered that he was bringing bills of foreign exchange into the country for the Bishop of Ross and for the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, at the time of the rising of the northern earls. After little more than a month’s house arrest at the London home of Sir Francis Walsingham in Aldgate, Ridolfi was released with a warning not to meddle again in affairs of state.
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Yet it seemed, unbeknown to the English authorities, that Ridolfi had become a secret envoy of the Pope and a key contact between the Spanish government and English Catholics sympathetic to Mary’s cause.
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In the summer of 1571, as details of Norfolk’s involvement in the Ridolfi plot emerged, Elizabeth, then on her summer progress in the Home Counties, visited the Duke of Norfolk at Audley End near Saffron Walden in Essex. Her councillors disapproved of her journey and were anxious about her absence from London, ‘upon doubt of some great trouble both inward and beyond the seas’. But the Queen ‘would not forbear her Progress’.
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During her five-night stay at Audley End, Norfolk assured Elizabeth of his innocence and swore his allegiance to her. Given her kinship ties with him – they were cousins through Anne Boleyn’s family – and his senior position among the nobility, Elizabeth ‘seemed to give favourable ear’ to his petitions.

Yet four days after Elizabeth’s departure, Norfolk was arrested and sent once more to the Tower. Walsingham had uncovered evidence that the duke had sent money to Mary’s supporters and had been acting in treasonous complicity with her since 1568.
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In the weeks that followed, the repeated examinations of Norfolk and his servants confirmed his disloyalty to Elizabeth and his complicity in the Ridolfi conspiracy.

On 16 January 1572, Norfolk was brought to trial in Westminster Hall in London. Three charges of treason were read out to him, the principal of which focussed on his designs to marry Mary Queen of Scots, through which he had conspired to deprive Elizabeth of her crown and life and thereby ‘to alter the whole state of government of this realm’.
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He was found guilty, condemned to death and returned to the Tower to await execution.

Within weeks a plot emerged involving two minor Norfolk gentlemen, Edmund Mather and Kenelm Berney, fostered by the Spanish ambassador, which sought to liberate the Duke of Norfolk by means of ‘a bridge of canvas’, a rope bridge, and to assassinate the Queen and Cecil and place Mary Stuart on the English throne. Mather had talked about his plans to William Herle, one of Cecil’s agents. Berney and Mather were promptly arrested and questioned, and subsequently confessed to their conspiracy and to the involvement of the Spanish ambassador.
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De Spes was now ordered to depart the realm for ‘his practices to disturb our state, to corrupt out subjects, to stir up rebellion’, and Mather and Berney were executed on 13 February.
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Elizabeth finally signed Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s death warrant on Saturday 9 February and the execution was set for the following Monday morning; but late on Sunday night she sent for Cecil and ordered that the warrant be revoked. The Queen had, Cecil reported, ‘entered into a great misliking that the duke should die the next day’. She wrote to Cecil that the ‘hinder part’ of her brain would not trust ‘the forwards side of the same’; her emotions, she said, had got the better of her, and so the duke remained in the Tower.
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Whether Ridolfi was indeed a genuine conspirator who had masterminded a plot to deprive Elizabeth of her throne, or a double agent used by Cecil to expose the danger of Mary Stuart and the Catholic threat from abroad, remains unclear. The leniency of his treatment after he was shown to have been supporting Mary Queen of Scots, the Duke of Norfolk and the northern earls in 1569 suggests perhaps that during his weeks of house arrest, Ridolfi was ‘turned’ by Walsingham and thereafter began working in the service of the Elizabethan government’s spy network. Whatever or whoever Ridolfi was, the plot that had taken his name exposed a vast conspiracy against the Queen and her crown, and one which had gained the support of the Pope and Spanish King, implicated the Duke of Norfolk and demonstrated the continuing threat posed by Mary Stuart. As Cecil outlined in a long memorandum, when ‘the great part of the people of the realm’ saw Elizabeth without a husband or any successor, they could be ‘easily induced’ to give their support to a Scottish Queen who had a son and who, if she sat on the English throne, could unite England with Scotland, ‘a thing these many hundred years wished for’.
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Danger was everywhere, at home and abroad. Ports were watched, the guard around the Queen increased and the militia put on a state of alert. Further precautions were introduced into the privy lodgings after Cecil received new warnings that the Queen ‘should be careful of her meats and drinks, for some say she shall not reign long’.
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No one was immune from the gaze of suspicion. The climate of fear even led to action being taken against one of the Queen’s most trusted Ladies of the Bedchamber.

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In 1572, Lady Frances Cobham, Mistress of the Robes and a woman upon whom Elizabeth increasingly relied for counsel, had lost her place in the Queen’s service following her husband’s temporary disgrace over the Ridolfi plot. As Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle, William Cobham was responsible for gathering intelligence, scrutinising arrivals and searching suspicious diplomatic bags from the continent. However, in April 1571, when he seized letters from Ridolfi, Cobham alleged that ‘his ungracious brother Thomas’ begged him to keep them from the Privy Council, ‘for he said they would otherwise be the undoing of the Duke of Norfolk and of himself’.
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Cobham was placed under house arrest for his apparent disloyalty and his wife lost her place in the Privy Chamber.

That Lord Cobham was only imprisoned for seven months and later restored to favour suggests perhaps that he had been acting with the approval of his friend Cecil, who had wanted the continental correspondence to reach its intended recipient in order for the Ridolfi plot to be exposed. Certainly Lady Cobham’s loss of the Queen’s favour was short-lived and by the summer of 1574, she had been restored to her position in the bedchamber with her backpay credited. As Dudley reported on 9 June, ‘My La[dy] Cobham I thank God is grown into very good favour and liking again & I think very shortly shall be in her old place as her Majesty hath of late fully promised.’
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Beside Her Bed

At the end of March 1572, Elizabeth, then at Richmond, succumbed to a short but violent stomach-ache. Some believed worry over the Duke of Norfolk’s execution warrant had made the Queen ill, but it was most likely the result of food-poisoning, or a failed attempt to poison her. Fenelon described in his dispatch to Paris the ‘great twisting (
torcion
)’ of the Queen’s stomach, ‘on account, they say, of her eating some fish’ and ‘the heavy and vehement pain (
douleur
) that she had suffered’. For three anxious days and nights, Dudley, Cecil and Elizabeth’s women had kept a vigil at her bedside.
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When her sickness subsided, the Queen emerged from her Bedchamber and in an audience with the French ambassador described the ‘extreme pain’ which for five days had so ‘shortened her breath and so clutched her heart’ that she thought she was going to die. She dismissed the idea that the cause was the fish she had eaten, saying that she often ate it without ill effects. Elizabeth believed that her sickness had been brought on by complacency; for the last three or four years she had found herself ‘so well’ that she had ‘disregarded all the strict discipline which her physicians formerly had been accustomed to impose upon her by purging her and drawing a bit of her blood from time to time’.
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For Elizabeth’s councillors, her ill health raised the spectre of assassination attempts, the unresolved succession and the fragility of the Queen’s body. Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s envoy in France, who had received regular updates from the English court on the Queen’s health, now thanked Cecil for ‘calling to our remembrance and laying before our eyes the trouble, the uncertainty, the disorder, the peril and danger which had been like to follow if at that time God had taken from us that stay of the Commonwealth and hope of our repose’.
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The English agent John Lee wrote to Cecil from Antwerp on 2 April: ‘It has been rumoured by the Italians that the Queen is very sick and in great danger, which causes Papists in the Low Countries to triumph not a little, and to substitute the Queen of Scots, without contradiction, in the place.’
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On 8 May 1572, less than a year after its previous sessions, Parliament assembled again. It was late in the season for a Parliament as summer sessions were generally avoided given the heat and spread of disease, however, as the Lord Keeper Bacon explained in his opening address, ‘the cause was so necessary and so weighty as it could not otherwise be’.
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He then described the ‘great treasons and notable conspiracies very perilous to her Majesty’s person and to the whole state of the realm’. Two main issues had to be addressed: the fate of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and what to do with Mary Queen of Scots.

Within weeks both houses had resolved to act against the Queen of Scots, ‘for the better safety and preservation of the Queen’s Majesty’s Person’. The proposed bill would declare Mary a traitor and so deprive her of her ‘pretended claim’ to the throne.
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Predictably, Elizabeth procrastinated. She thanked the house for ‘their carefulness’ of her safety and preservation, but ruled out ‘by any implication or drawing of words’ to have Mary Stuart, ‘either enabled or disabled to or from any manner of title to the crown of this realm or any other title’.
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Cecil’s sense of weariness and despair were palpable:

I cannot write patiently: all that we laboured for … I mean a law to make the Scottish Queen unable and unworthy of succession of the crown, was by Her Majesty neither assented to nor rejected, but deferred until the feast of All Saints; but what all other wise and good men may think thereof you may guess.
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Elizabeth had pledged only to move Mary to a harsher state of imprisonment; yet the life of one cousin was bought at the cost of that of another. Finally Elizabeth agreed to sign the Duke of Norfolk’s death warrant and a little after seven o’clock on the morning of Monday 2 June, Thomas Howard was beheaded on Tower Hill.
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Increasingly, Elizabeth’s stance on the succession was met with frustration and disbelief. ‘Jesus!’ Catherine de Medici told Sir Thomas Smith, ‘And doth not your mistress, Queen Elizabeth, see plainly that she will always be in such danger till she marry? If she marry into some good house, who shall dare attempt aught against her?’

‘Madame,’ replied Smith, ‘I think if she were once married, all in England that had traitorous hearts would be discouraged, for one tree alone may soon be cut down, but when there be two or three together, it is longer doing; for if she had a child, all these bold and troublesome titles of the Scottish Queen, or of the others who make such gapings for her death would be clean choked up.’

‘I see that your queen might very well have five or six children.’

‘I would to God we had one!’ Smith replied.
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Catherine nonetheless remained determined to construct a defensive alliance against the threatening Spanish presence in the Netherlands (and the threat of the Guise in France) and so after Henri Duke of Anjou’s refusal to marry Elizabeth, she had immediately offered her youngest son François Duke of Alençon, believing he ‘would make no scruple’ in accepting only the right to a private mass.
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