The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (34 page)

In 1583, Parry made his first traitorous step, writing to Cardinal Campeggio, the Pope’s nuncio in Paris, offering to help the Catholic cause. Later that year, Parry met Thomas Morgan, Mary Queen of Scots’s chief intelligence gatherer, in Paris. Morgan encouraged him to act and Parry agreed to kill ‘the greatest subject in England’, Queen Elizabeth, on condition that it would be sanctioned by the Pope who would absolve him of his sins.

On his return to England, Parry, having acquired a doctorate of law in Paris, played the part of agent provocateur and ‘very privately discovered to her Majesty’ the assassination plot that he himself had engineered. It was a dangerous game, and unfortunately for Parry he was unable to convince Elizabeth of the veracity of the plot (she ‘took it doubtfully’). Parry soon feared he had fatally incriminated himself. He wrote to Thomas Morgan in Paris, renouncing the mission and resolving instead to lie low at court and continue in the Queen’s service. Yet as long as Parry remained in debt, and unsure about his future, he proved susceptible to Catholic persuasion.

Parry received a letter from Cardinal di Como informing him of the Pope’s commendation of him and the granting of a plenary indulgence in his Holiness’s name for the sin and punishment for all his errors. Parry resolved to go ahead with his murderous mission.
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He recruited a fellow conspirator, Edmund Neville, a disaffected gentleman from the north of England, to join him in carrying out the assassination. They discussed the best means to kill Elizabeth. First they planned to target her as she rode in her carriage on progress; they would approach her from each side and lunge their daggers at her. They then considered an even more daring plan. Parry suggested he attack the Queen at Whitehall as she ‘took the air’ in her privy garden. Having committed the deed, he could escape over the palace wall to one of the landing stairs nearby and flee by boat along the Thames. Having committed to carry out the plan, Parry hid in waiting near the gardens, but when Elizabeth appeared he claimed he ‘was so daunted with the majesty of her presence, in which he saw the image of her father, King Henry VIII, that his heart would not suffer his hand to execute that which he had resolved’.
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The conspirators made no further move, though Parry’s feelings of injustice and resentment continued to fester.

*   *   *

After his outburst in Parliament and subsequent rebuff, it seems that Dr Parry revived his treasonous plan. On the evening of Saturday 6 February 1585, he visited Edmund Neville at Whitefriars, ready to act. However Neville had begun to have doubts and told Parry that he had decided ‘to lay open this his most traitorous and abominable intention against her Majesty’.

Two days later Neville surrendered to the authorities and confessed to his involvement in Parry’s plot.
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According to a court observer, ‘the Queen, when she heard about this doctor [Parry], went into the garden, wept aloud, and said she would like to know why so many persons sought her life. She tore open her garment, exposing her breasts, exclaiming that she had no weapon to defend herself, but she was only a weak female.’
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Parry was arrested and taken to the Tower. Walsingham gave him the opportunity to reveal anything he knew of the plots against Elizabeth, and specifically whether he ‘himself had let fall any speech unto any person (though with an intent only to discover his disposition) that might draw him into suspicion, as though he himself had any such wicked intent’.
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If Parry was a self-styled agent provocateur then this was his moment to reveal himself. Instead Parry vacillated and by the time he confessed it was too late. Under torture, Parry named Thomas Morgan and Cardinal di Como as having persuaded him to kill Elizabeth in order to place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne.

On 25 February, Parry was tried in Westminster Hall. He appealed to Cecil and Dudley that his case was quite unique: ‘My case is rare and strange, and, for anything I can remember, singular: a natural subject solemnly to vow the death of his natural Queen … for the relief of the afflicted Catholics and restitution of religion’.
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He also wrote to Elizabeth that he hoped ‘most graciously (beyond all common expectation) to be pardoned’,
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but he was executed in Westminster Palace Yard the following week. On the scaffold he maintained his innocence, denying that he had ever thought of murdering the Queen and claimed his plot had intended to trap others: ‘I die a true servant to Queen Elizabeth; from any evil thought that ever I had to harm her, it never came into my mind; she knoweth it and her conscience can tell her so … I die guiltless and free in mind from ever thinking hurt to her Majesty.’
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Parry’s performance at his trial had been confident and compelling. Cecil realised that the government needed to take steps to control the account of events and ensure accurate reporting of what they called ‘the truth’ of Dr Parry’s treason. The official account was ruthless in its description of Parry’s treachery denouncing him as a ‘vile and traitorous wretch’, testament to the depth and horror of his perceived betrayal.
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Whatever Parry’s real purpose, his plotting fed the already widespread deep Protestant anxiety. Following his execution, a special service of public worship was published, ‘An Order of Prayer and Thanksgiving for the Preservation of the Queen’s Majesty’s Life and Safety’:

Thy divine providence from time to time hath many ways mightily and miraculously preserved and kept her from the crafty cruel and traitorous devices of her bloody adversaries and the deadly enemies of Thy Gospel, which with barbarous cruelty have sought to distinguish the light thereof by shedding her Majesty’s most innocent blood.

But this Thy gracious goodness and mighty providence never so apparently showed itself at any other time as within these few days when a traitorous subject … had of long time retained a wicked and devilish purpose and have often sought occasion and opportunity to lay violent hands upon her royal person and to have murdered her. But still the vigilant eye of Thy blessed providence did either prevent him by sudden interruption of his endeavour or, by the majesty of her person and princely behaviour toward him, didst strike him so abashed that he could not perform his conceived bloody purpose …
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Preachers were also instructed to read from the pulpit Dr Parry’s confession, which declared that the Pope had authorised him to assassinate the Queen and had granted absolution for the murder. The Parry plot, according to official propaganda, showed that the Catholic powers would readily sponsor Elizabeth’s assassination as a means to bring about the return of Catholicism in England.
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Given the fears for her safety, Elizabeth chose to remain close to London that summer, cancelling any long progresses and often staying at her own royal houses or making only isolated visits into nearby counties. In June 1585, Sir Thomas Pullyson, the Lord Mayor of London, was so worried about the level of threat against the Queen that, in a letter to Walsingham, he offered to guard her in person as she travelled to Greenwich. As he noted, ‘considering the present perilous times and continual malice and mischievious purposes of the papistical faction’, he was logical and prudent in his concern for the Queen’s well-being.
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For the next few years, Elizabeth shunned Whitehall, feeling too that her personal security could better be provided in some more compact and less accessible palace. Yet Elizabeth impatiently refused Dudley’s suggestion that courtiers with Catholic leanings should be forbidden access to court, and the proposal of an armed bodyguard. She remained determined to show herself to her people and said she would sooner be dead than ‘in custody.’

37

Unseemly Familiarities

‘My very good Lord,’ Sir Francis Walsingham wrote to Robert Dudley on 29 September 1584. ‘Yesterday I received from the Lord Mayor enclosed with a letter, a printed libel against your Lordship, the most malicious written thing that was ever penned since the beginning of the world.’
1

The book had come from a secret press in Paris or Antwerp; entitled
The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge
, it was known almost immediately as
Leicester’s Commonwealth
. When the work first appeared, written in English, in Paris in August 1584, it proved an overnight sensation and after being smuggled across the Channel it was avidly read at the English court.
2
The book took the form of a conversation between a London gentleman, a Catholic lawyer and a Cambridge academic. The Earl of Leicester was attacked for his power at court and his influence over the Queen, ‘his diligent besieging of the prince’s person’, and his ‘taking up the ways and passages about her’. He was also accused of preventing the Queen from marrying by his ‘preoccupation of her Majesty’s person’ and his impudent behaviour in ‘giving out everywhere that he (forsooth!) was assured to her Majesty and that all other princes must give over their suits to him’.
3

The tract included lurid allegations, centring on Dudley’s relationships with various women and his supposedly voracious sexual appetite. It was said that there were not two single noblewomen who attended upon the Queen ‘whom he hath not solicited’;
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he was even accused of paying £300 for sex with one of them.
Leicester’s Commonwealth
described the extreme lengths to which Dudley had gone to cover up his relationship with Lettice Knollys, hiding her from the Queen, sending her ‘up and down the house, by privy ways, thereby to avoid the sight and knowledge of the Queen’s Majesty’. Lettice was accused of falling pregnant with Dudley’s child before her husband Walter Devereux had died and she and Dudley were held responsible for his ‘murder’. The death of their son, Lord Denbigh, in July, was seen as a sign of God’s vengeance on Dudley: ‘the children of adulterers shall be consumed and the seed of a wicked bed shall be rooted out’.
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He was also accused of having conspired in his wife Amy Robsart’s death and having attempted to assassinate the French envoy Simier.
6

The tract belonged to a swathe of Jesuit propaganda that was being distributed to highlight the threat of the Protestant Earls of Leicester and Huntingdon to Mary Stuart’s succession. For some,
Leicester’s Commonwealth
was seen as preparing the ground for the Catholic-sponsored murder of the Queen, which could then be blamed on Dudley.
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The piece also suggested that Dudley would try to foist one of his many illegitimate children on the throne by pretending that the child was Elizabeth’s. The Earl of Leicester had ‘contracted to her Majesty’ that ‘he might have entitled any one of his own brood (whereof he hath store in many places, as is known) to the lawful succession of the crown … pretending the same to be by her Majesty’ and that he was behind the decision to put ‘words of natural issue’ into the statute of the succession for the crown; ‘against all order and custom of our realm … whereby he might be able after the death of her Majesty to make legitimate to the crown any one bastard of his own by any of so many hackneys he keepeth, affirming it to be the natural issue of her Majesty by himself’.
8

Elizabeth went out of her way to defend Dudley and issued a proclamation ordering that all copies of the publication be surrendered:

[In] their most shameful, infamous and detestable libels they go about to reproach, dishonour and touch with abominable lies … many of her most trusty and faithful councillors … greatly touching thereby her Highness’ self in her regal and kingly office, as making choice of men of want both of justice, care and other sufficiency to serve her Highness and the Commonwealth. And further, in the said books and libels they use all the means, drifts, and false persuasions they can devise or imagine to advance such pretended titles as consequently must be most dangerous and prejudicial to the safety of her Highness’s person and state.
9

An amnesty was offered to anyone who instantly submitted their copies to the authorities; thereafter the penalty for retaining a copy was imprisonment.
10
It made little difference, and in June, Elizabeth was forced to issue another proclamation in a further attempt to suppress the work. She blamed the ‘great negligence and remissness’ of the authorities in London, ‘where it was likely these books would be chiefly cast abroad’, for not doing enough to enact her initial proclamation:

The very same and diverse other such like most slanderous, shameful and devilish books and libels have continually spread abroad and kept by disobedient persons, to the manifest contempt of her Majesty’s regal and sovereign authority, and namely, among the rest, one most infamous containing slanderous and hateful matter against our very good Lord the Earl of Leicester, one of her principal noblemen and Chief Counsellor of State, of which most malicious and wicked imputations, her Majesty in her own clear knowledge doth declare and testify his innocence to all the world.

She added that, before God, she knew in her conscience, ‘in assured certainty, the libels and books against the said Earl, to be most malicious, false and slanderous, and such as none but the devil himself could deem to be true’.
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Dudley quickly came to the view that Mary Queen of Scots was behind the libel and Walsingham suggested Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent in France, as its author.
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However, Charles Arundell, a known Catholic conspirator who was implicated in the Throckmorton plot, had fled to Paris in December 1583 and had always been hostile to Dudley, emerged as the likely writer. He was the cousin of Lady Douglas Howard, who was formerly the lover and, as she maintained, the wife, of Robert Dudley. She was now married to Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in France. When Arundell fled to France, Walsingham had warned the Staffords not to get involved with him, but the couple ignored the request and entertained Arundell on a number of occasions.