The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Read online

  Weeks later, as Mendoza prepared to depart England, he reported that ‘a soldier returned from Terceira [a Portuguese-owned island in the Azores] had come to the court to give a letter to the Earl of Bedford and to see the Queen’. Mendoza described how the soldier ‘proceeded with such boldness’ that he entered the palace and found his way to ‘the place where the Queen was with two other ladies’. Elizabeth ‘cried out angrily for him to be seized’, and he was taken to Dudley’s chamber where he was asked whether Mendoza had sent him to ‘kill the Queen’. Later the soldier said his entrance was to irritate the people against the Spanish ambassador and make them think that it was by his intervention that the mariner wanted to kill the Queen.11 Dudley believed that any Catholic had become a danger to the Queen’s own safety. ‘There is no right papist in England that wisheth Queen Elizabeth to live long,’ he wrote, ‘and to suffer any such in her court cannot be but dangerous.’12

  35

  In Defence of the Queen’s Body

  On 10 July 1584, William of Orange, the Protestant leader in the Netherlands, was shot dead by a fanatical Spanish Catholic – a murder many believed was sponsored by Philip II of Spain. At once Elizabeth’s own demise seemed to draw far closer. As Edward Stafford, son of Lady Dorothy, reported, similar atrocities were being planned, including an attack on the Queen: ‘There is no doubt that she is a chief mark they shoot at and seeing there were many who would kill William of Orange anything could be done.’1

  The assassination threat was now at its highest since the start of Elizabeth’s reign. Throughout the year evidence of foiled plots and conspiracies filled diplomatic bags and personal correspondence. One intelligence report detailed how ‘the life of our glorious sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth hath been most traitorously and devilishly sought’, and might even have been taken ‘if almighty God, her perpetual defender, of his mercy had not revealed and withstood the same’.2 In March, Giordano Bruno, in a letter addressed from Paris and sent personally to Elizabeth, described how he had been visited by a Spaniard called Zubiaur, an agent for Mendoza, who had confessed ‘the most ignoble things’. Zubiaur claimed that he had been charged by the Spanish ambassador, to procure Elizabeth’s death, ‘very shortly by arms, by poisons, bouquets, underclothes, smells, waters or by any other means; that it will be the greatest St Bartholomew’s Day there has ever been; and that neither God nor Devil will stand in the way of their doing it’.3

  Later in the year, an undated and unsigned sheet of paper was given to Walsingham entitled, ‘The Speeches of a Friar in Dunkirk’, and outlined another conspiracy against Elizabeth. If, said the friar, that wicked woman were ‘dispatched and gone’, all Christendom would be in ‘peace and quietness’. The friar had shown Walsingham’s informant a picture depicting the murder of William of Orange. ‘Behold and see well this picture,’ the friar told him. ‘Look how this Burgundian did kill this prince. In such manner and sort, there will not want such another Burgundian to kill that wicked woman and that before it be long, for the common wealth of all Christendom.’4

  The Privy Council believed Elizabeth and Protestant England to be in real and imminent danger. Dramatic and unprecedented measures were now taken as Cecil and Walsingham drew up, ‘The Instrument of an Association for the Preservation of Her Majesty’s Royal Person’ (or ‘the Bond of Association’), which bound signatories to defend the Queen’s life and avenge any assassination attempt against her. It obligated all signatories ‘to the uttermost of their power, at all times, to withstand, pursue and suppress all manner of persons that shall by any means intend and attempt any thing dangerous or harmful to the honours, estates or persons of their sovereign’. All those who signed the bond pledged ‘never to accept, avow, or favour any such pretended successor, by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be committed or attempted’. Members of the association were ‘to prosecute such person or persons to the death … and to take the uttermost revenge on them … by any possible means … for their utter overthrow and extirpation’.5 The intention was clear. Should an attempt be made on Elizabeth’s life, Mary Queen of Scots would be killed, whether she was a direct party to the plot or not. A sacred oath sealed the bond.6

  From October to November 1584, while elections were held for a new Parliament, copies of the bond were circulated throughout the realm, acquiring thousands of signatures and seals.7 Whilst the government claimed that this demonstrated a spontaneous outpouring of loyalty for Elizabeth, it took significant steps to ensure certain individuals swore the oath and signed the bond. In a letter drafted by Cecil for circulation to the lord lieutenants in the counties, Walsingham added the words:

  Your lordship shall not need to take knowledge that you received the copy from me, but rather from some other friend of yours in these parts; for that her Majesty would have the matter carried in such sort as this course held for her [safety] may seem to [come more] from the particular cause of her well affected subjects than to grow from any public direction.8

  The Privy Council’s correspondence over the next few months included reports from all parts of England on the progress of the Bond of Association, with local officials devising signing ceremonies fit for the solemnity and significance of the undertaking.9

  * * *

  When the new Parliament met on 23 November, Elizabeth expressed her gratitude for the displays of popular loyalty:

  I am not unmindful of your Oath made in the Association manifesting your great goodwills and affections … done (I protest to God) before I heard of it or ever thought that such a matter, until a great number of hands were showed me at Hampton Court, signed and subscribed with the names and seals of the greatest of this land. Which I do acknowledge as a perfect argument of your true hearts and great zeal for my safety, so shall my bond be stronger tied to greater care for your good.10

  In a long and impassioned opening speech, Sir Walter Mildmay identified the Pope as their ‘most mortal and capital enemy’, who had sponsored sedition in the realm.11 He described the ‘malicious and secret practices’ which were dependent on the Pope and emphasised that Edmund Campion and other Jesuits had met their deaths not simply for the ‘superstitious ceremonies of Rome, but for most high and capital offences and conspiracies’, including ‘the deposing of our most gracious Queen, advancing of another in her place,’ and the ‘alteration and subversion of this whole state and government’. He called on members to consider if these ‘priests, rebels, fugitives and papists’ were set at ‘the helm of the Church and Commonwealth’, and painted a terrifying picture of the ‘ruin, subversion and conquest of this noble realm’. Strong laws were needed to provide for the queen’s safety ‘against all such malicious enemies’ and, as Mildmay deliberately added, ‘straight laws also against troublers of this state under pretence of titles, either present or future, thereby to cut off their expectation if they or any of them dare to lift up their hands or hearts to endanger the person or state of our gracious Queen’.12 After a day of strong words and rallying rhetoric, Mildmay set out their task: to provide the highest penalty to avert three types of danger: invasion, rebellion and violence to the Queen. The stage was now set for what would become the principal measure of the Parliament, the ‘Act for the Queen’s Safety’.

  This sweeping new law ‘for Provision to be Made for the Surety of the Queen’s Majesty’s most Royal Person and the Continuance of the Realm in Peace’ was justified as a direct response to the ‘sundry wicked plots of late devised and laid, as well in foreign parts beyond the seas as also within the realm’.13 Inspired by the Bond of Association, it gave the Queen’s subjects the right to pursue to death anyone involved in an invasion, rebellion, attempt on Elizabeth’s life or anything at all that ‘compassed or imagined, tending to the hurt of her Majesty’s royal person’. With Mary Queen of Scots again clearly in mind, the act decreed that any pretender to the English throne could also be pursued to death for any conspiracy organised in their name.

  In fierce debates, MPs questioned how,
if the Queen was killed and all royal authority lapsed, effective action could be taken against the culprits of her murder. Fears were raised of a kind of vigilante justice and an orgy of ‘mutual slaughter’ between rival claimants. To counter this danger the call was made for statutory provision during an interregnum. Royal authority would reside with a ‘Great Council’ formed of the ‘great officers of the realm’, and the privy councillors would execute royal justice, take action against those responsible for the Queen’s death and choose a successor who appeared ‘to have best right … in blood by the royal laws of the Realm’, at which point the interregnum would end.14 During this period, the union of the natural body of the monarch with the body politic of the realm would be broken until it was reunited in the appointed heir on their accession.15 Ultimately this proposal was rejected and never presented to the Queen as her councillors knew she would oppose it.

  On 18 December, Sir Christopher Hatton informed members that the Queen thankfully accepted their care for her, which, ‘her Majesty said (but he might not say), was more than her merit’. She expressed approval for the bill but added that her confidence ‘was in God only for her safety’. She also said she ‘would not consent that anyone should be punished for the fault of another’. In other words if Mary Stuart was implicated in a treasonous conspiracy, she did not wish the penalties to extend ‘to the issue of the offender’, James VI, except if ‘the issue was also found faulty’. The bill was then put aside for the Christmas recess.

  The second bill of the session also addressed the issue of the Queen’s safety by seeking ‘to bar the coming in of Jesuits and seminary priests, the only disturbers of the peace of the realm and the very instruments to work her Majesty’s destruction’.16 All Jesuits and priests that remained within the kingdom forty days after the passing of the law were to be regarded as traitors to the realm.17 It also became treason for any person to ‘willingly and wittingly receive, relieve, comfort or maintain’ any Jesuits or other priests. This was the harshest legislation of the period and was testament to the growing numbers of missionary priests now in England and their perceived threat as agents of sedition.

  The bill was brought to the Commons for a first reading on 12 December and then three days later was given its second reading along with the bill for the Queen’s safety. It seemed that all in the house was in agreement. After one final reading, they would be ready to pass to the Lords and then receive royal assent.

  With Parliament apparently united behind the bills for the Queen’s safety and against the Jesuits and seminary priests, an entirely unexpected voice of opposition was raised. Dr William Parry, a member who was sitting in his first Parliament as MP for the tiny borough of Queenborough in Kent, rose to his feet and affirmed that he ‘favoured not the Jesuits or seminaries but was to speak for English subjects’. He ‘spoke directly against the whole bill’, he said, which sought to banish the Jesuit and seminary priests. He denounced it as savouring treasons, ‘full of blood, danger, despair and terror to the English subjects of this realm’; full also ‘of confiscations – but into whom?’ Parry asked. ‘Not, said he to her Majesty (which he wished they were),’ but to others. Whilst he was sure that bill would be carried by both houses, ‘he hoped when it should come into her Highness’s most merciful hands, that it would stay and rest there, until which time,’ he said, ‘he would reserve his reasons of his negative voice against the bill, then to be discovered by him only unto her Majesty’.

  The MPs listened in stunned silence, clearly grieved by Parry’s questioning of the house’s motives and his suggestion that they were acting ‘not so much for the Queen’s safety … as for the satisfying of their own greedy desires’. They were also angered that he would not give an explanation for his words, ‘a thing contrary to the orders of the house’. Parry was immediately removed from the Commons into the Sergeant’s custody, brought before the Privy Council and the Speaker of the Commons before returning to the house the following day to apologise for his hasty actions. He said he meant no offence to the Queen or the house, but repeated that he would reserve his reasons for the Queen herself.18 The question in many minds was: what had caused a member of the Commons to behave so rashly?

  36

  Agent Provocateur?

  Seven years earlier, Dr Parry had left England for the continent with mounting debts and disaffected with a lack of favour and patronage from Elizabeth. In 1582 he was received into the Catholic Church in Paris and became involved in the politics of Catholic exiles in France. In May the following year he wrote to Cecil, from whom he continued to seek patronage, ‘If I were well warranted and allowed, I would either prevent and discover all Roman and Spanish practices against our state, or lose my life in testimony of my loyalty to the Queen’s majesty,’ while at the same time pledging to others ‘to employ all my strength and industry in the service of the Catholic Church’.1 It is difficult to determine whether he was a traitor or, as he later claimed, a freelance English spy.

  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.2 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’.3 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.4 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.’5

  Parry w
as 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’.6 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’.7 He also wrote to Elizabeth that he hoped ‘most graciously (beyond all common expectation) to be pardoned’,8 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.’9

  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.10