The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 17
In this renewed atmosphere of hope, Fenelon took the opportunity to revive the proposal of a match with Charles IX’s younger brother, Henri, Duke of Anjou, which had been first mooted two years before. The French King was still keen to use a marriage alliance with Elizabeth to conciliate the French Huguenots, draw Anjou away from the influence of the Cardinal of Lorraine, the senior member of the Guise family, and form the first stage of a defensive alliance against Spain. Anjou was, as Fenelon enthused, ‘the only prince in the world worthy of her’.3 But it was hardly an ideal pairing. Anjou was eighteen years younger than Elizabeth, ‘obstinately papistical’ according to the English ambassador, and a blatant transvestite who regularly appeared at court balls in elaborate female dress and was rumoured to be bisexual. As a Venetian envoy described, ‘He is completely dominated by voluptuousness, covered with perfumes and essences. He wears a double row of rings and pendants in his ears.’4 Marriage to Anjou also risked a further decline in relations with Spain, where a ‘coldness of amity’ had already developed mainly as a result of Spanish action in the Netherlands.
Elizabeth had immediately expressed her doubts about the Anjou match, as had the duke himself, who, encouraged by the Guise faction at the French court, considered Elizabeth a ‘heretical bastard’.5 As Catherine de Medici admitted in her letters to Fenelon, ‘so much has he heard against her honour, and seen in the letters of all the ambassadors who have ever been there, that he considers he should be utterly dishonoured and lose all the reputation he has acquired if he was to marry Elizabeth’.6 Catherine had tried to convince her son by explaining that, ‘the greatest harm which evil men can do to noble and royal women, is to spread abroad lies and dishonourable tales of us’, and that ‘we princes who be women, of all persons, are subject to be slandered wrongfully of them that be our adversaries: other hurt they cannot do us’.7 Nevertheless, the queen mother was forced to concede that, ‘he will never marry her, and in this I cannot win him over, although he is an obedient son.’8
Besides her own reservations about taking a teenage boy to bed as a husband, Elizabeth had also received warning from her agents in France that some people were encouraging Anjou for malicious ends. They believed that he would do well to marry ‘an old creature who had had for the last year the evil in her leg, which was not yet healed and never could be cured’ – a reference to a leg ulcer – ‘and that under pretext of a remedy, they could send her a potion from France of such a nature, that he would find himself a widower in the course of five or six months; and then he might please himself by marrying the Queen of Scotland, and remain the undisputed sovereign of the united realms.’9 Elizabeth was naturally alarmed at the suggestion of murderous plotting against her in France but was also affronted by the reference to her age, apparent infirmity, and the unfavourable comparisons to her Scottish cousin. Especially vain, Elizabeth pointedly informed Fenelon that, ‘notwithstanding the evil report that had been made of her leg, she had not neglected to dance on the preceding Sunday at the Marquess of Northampton’s wedding; so she hoped that Monsieur would not find himself cheated into marrying a cripple instead of a lady of proper paces’.10
Negotiations for a French marriage were revived and by March, Catherine wrote to Fenelon that her son had changed his mind and now ‘infinitely desires the match’. King Charles sent his envoy de Foix to England and talks continued through the spring and summer of 1571. However, though Elizabeth was, according to her closest councillors, ‘more bent to marry than heretofore she hath been’, religion remained the sticking point. Whilst the Queen made it clear that Anjou would have to conform to the laws of the realm, the French were equally uncompromising in their demands that Anjou and his servants should have ‘free exercise’ of their religion.11 But as Walsingham wrote, such was the necessity of a marriage that all reservations could be reasoned away: ‘When I particularly consider her Majesty’s state, both at home and abroad … and how she is beset with Foreign peril, the execution whereof stayeth only upon the event of this match, I do not see how she can stand if this matter break off.’12
On 9 July the French ambassador was pleased to inform Catherine de Medici that the Queen had told one of her ladies, when they were alone, that she ‘had of her own accord commenced talking of Monsieur’ and had made clear that, despite her concerns about the age gap and his religion she was ‘resolved on the match’. Elizabeth had naturally turned to her Bedchamber women for counsel and reassurance; she feared especially that Anjou might grow to despise her if she was unable to have children. The Queen asked Elizabeth Fiennes de Clinton, the Countess of Lincoln, and Lady Frances Cobham – ‘two of the most faithful of her ladies’ in whom she placed ‘more confidence’ than the others – to tell her ‘freely their opinions’ on the match. Lady Cobham spoke of how ‘those marriages were always the happiest when the parties were of the same age, or near about it, but that here there was a great inequality’; she hoped in this case that ‘since it had pleased God that she was the oldest’ that the duke would be ‘contented with her other advantages’. Lady Clinton, who had known Elizabeth since childhood and sensed the need to reassure the Queen, spoke favourably of Anjou, ‘whose youth’, she said, ‘ought not to inspire her with fear, for he was virtuous, and her Majesty was better calculated to please him than any other princess in the world’.13 Elizabeth said ‘she would place all her affection on the prince, and love and honour him as her lord and husband’ and hoped that this would be enough for him.
Yet her doubts lingered, and on receiving a portrait of Anjou, Elizabeth again expressed concerns as to the ‘disparity of age between herself and the prince’; considering her ‘time of life’ she should be ‘ashamed’ to marry one so young.14 Once more Fenelon sought to assure her of her suitability and persuade Anjou, ‘God had so well preserved her Majesty, that time had diminished none of her charms and perfections, and that monsieur looked older than her by years; that the prince had shown an unchangeable desire for their union.’ She would find in the duke, ‘Everything she could wish for her honour, grandeur, the security and repose of her realm, with the perfect happiness for herself.’15
Elizabeth suggested that Anjou might cross the Channel incognito to meet with her, but he refused, and she remained adamant that she would not marry a prince that she had not seen. For all Fenelon’s assurances of the duke’s enthusiasm for the marriage, by October, Anjou was refusing to marry Elizabeth under any circumstances and was now so ‘assottied’ in religion that he was hearing mass two or three times a day.16 After months of talks and false promises, all hope for a match with the flamboyant young Frenchman had vanished.
23
Compass Her Death
In a letter to Henry Bullinger in the summer of 1571, Robert Horne, the Bishop of Winchester, wrote of the ‘dangerous and dreadful state of agitation’ that had plagued the English government ‘for almost the last three years’. Not only had Elizabeth and her councillors been ‘shaken abroad by the perfidious attacks of our enemies’, but they had been threatened at home by ‘internal commotions’ which Horne described as the ‘brood and offspring of popery’. Pope Pius V was sponsoring ‘desperate men’ who sought to ‘besiege the tender frame of the most noble virgin Elizabeth with almost endless attacks and most studiously endeavour to compass her death both by poison and violence and witchcraft and treason and all other means of that kind which could ever be imagined and which it is horrible even to relate’.1
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’.2 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.3 Ano
ther 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’.4 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’.5 The battle lines had been drawn; Catholics could now be treated as traitors by reason of their faith alone.
* * *
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.6 Cecil immediately ordered that Bailly be sent to the Marshalsea prison in London and kept under close watch.7
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.8 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.9
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’.10 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 1568.11 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’.12 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.13 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.14
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.15
* * *
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’.16
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’.17 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.
* * *
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’.18 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.’19
24
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.1
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’.2
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’.3 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.’4