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

  Babington and his men were tried in two groups between 13 and 15 September. John Savage was arraigned before the judges first since he was said to have plotted the assassination of the Queen before becoming involved with Babington. All the conspirators were charged with assenting to a plan to assassinate Elizabeth, attempting to stir up a rising of English forces with the help of foreign powers, and of plotting to release Mary Queen of Scots and put her on the English throne.16 So angered was Elizabeth by their treason that she did not believe that the usual punishment was enough. She wrote to Cecil the day before the trial ordering him to tell the judge to deliver the expected sentence but to add that ‘considering the manner of horrible treason against her Majesty’s own person which had not been heard of in this kingdom, it is reason that the manner of their death, for more terror, be referred to her Majesty and the Council’.17 Cecil responded that the customary punishment – hanging, drawing and quartering – was ‘cruel enough’, although the victim was more often than not dead before the disembowelling and emasculation took place. ‘I told her Majesty,’ he informed Hatton, that the normal way of proceeding but ‘prolonging’ the pain of the traitors in front of the London crowd ‘would be as terrible as any new device could be’. Nevertheless Elizabeth insisted that the judge and the privy councillors understand her royal will. She wanted the conspirators’ bodies to be torn to pieces.18

  Gallows were set up near St Giles in the Fields and the condemned were bound to hurdles at the Tower of London and dragged through the streets of the city to the scaffold. Father John Ballard and Babington were executed first on 20 September with a brutality that shocked even the hundreds of onlookers who were baying for their blood. Ballard died first. He was left to swing briefly by the neck and then, whilst still alive and conscious, was cut down and made to watch as the executioner hacked off his genitals and then cut out his guts and finally his heart. His innards were then cast into a fire as his body was dismembered. Having stood to watch Ballard’s agonising death, not kneeling down to pray as was customary, but standing with his hat on his head ‘as if he were a beholder of the execution’ and displaying a ‘sign of his former pride’, Anthony Babington readied himself for his fate. Having been hung and then pulled down from the gallows to face the executioner’s knife, he cried out again and again Parce mihi Domine Iesu! – ‘Spare me Lord Jesus’. His cries were ignored as his body was hacked apart.19 When Elizabeth heard of the butchery of the executions and the crowd’s disgust she ordered that the next batch of conspirators should be killed by hanging alone.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1586, the Queen did not go on progress at all but stayed in her royal residences in the Thames Valley and in the tense autumn of that year, resided at Windsor. It was from here, on 6 October, that Elizabeth wrote a letter to Mary Stuart. She had been ‘given to understand’ that she had conspired against her in a ‘most horrible and unnatural attempt on her life’.20 Mary would now be tried according to the Act for the Queen’s Surety.

  Five days after Elizabeth’s letter, commissioners were sent to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire to ‘examine all things compassed and imagined tending to the hurt of our royal person’ and then to pass sentence or judgement.21 Mary immediately questioned the legitimacy of the hearing and its jurisdiction over her as a foreign prince and demanded the right to be heard in full Parliament or before the Queen and Privy Council. She denied all knowledge of Babington or any letter from him and rejected the charge that she had written to him. When Elizabeth ordered Cecil not to allow a sentence to be given on Mary’s guilt, the commission was recalled to London and ten days later resumed proceedings in the Star Chamber at Westminster Palace where, in Mary’s absence, all the evidence was reviewed in full. Finally the commissioners passed sentence:

  By their joint assent and consent, they do pronounce and deliver their sentence and judgement … diverse matters have been compassed and imagined within the realm of England, by Anthony Babington and others … with the privity of the said Mary, pretending title to the crown of this realm of England, tending to the hurt, death and destruction of the royal person of our said lady the Queen.22

  When Parliament reassembled on 29 October, the Queen was urgently petitioned to carry out the sentence and have Mary executed.23 Elizabeth was warned that if the Scottish Queen escaped punishment, she would be ‘exposed to many more plots’, and more ‘secret and dangerous conspiracies than before’.24 demanded instead that action should be taken against her cousin according to the Bond of Association and that she be killed by some ‘private means’. Cecil insisted Elizabeth must sign a warrant for a public execution and fostered rumours that Spanish troops had landed in Wales and that another assassination plot to kill Elizabeth had been ‘discovered’. The formal warrant for Mary’s death was drawn up and now only awaited the Queen’s signature.25

  40

  Blow Up the Bed

  In the winter of 1586, as Elizabeth finally decided to act against Mary, William Stafford, the second son of the Queen’s bedfellow Dorothy Stafford – ‘a lewd, young miscontented person’ – became involved in a plot to kill Elizabeth.1 The chief plotter was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford who was being held in Newgate gaol as a recusant debtor, and was soon to be released. Moody planned to gain access to the court, lay a trail of gunpowder to Elizabeth’s Bedchamber and under the Queen’s bed, and blow her to pieces.2

  Having been apparently won over to the plot, William Stafford drew in Chateauneuf, the French ambassador and his secretary Leonard des Trappes. He told the ambassador of his ‘intention of killing the Queen on religious grounds and in order that the Queen of Scotland might ascend the throne’. When the French ambassador pointed out that the plan to kill Elizabeth in her Bedchamber would also involve blowing up Stafford’s own mother, ‘as she and the Queen both slept in one room’, Stafford agreed instead that it would be better to kill the Queen by stabbing.3

  With the revised plan in place, early in the New Year, William Stafford reported the whole affair to Walsingham describing how a ‘graceless’ man has gone to kill the Queen, and ‘her Majesty should take good heed to herself as to who comes near her’.4 William Stafford, Moody and des Trappes were swiftly arrested and confined in the Tower and Chateauneuf placed under house arrest. The guard around the Queen was now doubled. Under examination by a committee of the council, the French ambassador confirmed that William Stafford had come to him with a hare-brained scheme, but Chateauneuf maintained that he had rejected it. He could not, however, avoid the charge of having concealed knowledge of a conspiracy. It is possible that Stafford was one of Walsingham’s agent provocateurs. Two years earlier, in June 1585, he had acknowledged some kind of deep obligation to Walsingham, writing, ‘I am as ever at your command and there is no man living to whom I am so beholden. If I should live to see my blood shed in your cause I should think it but some recompense for the great good I have received at your hands.’5 Moody was also known to Walsingham, the spy master had paid him to carry letters between London and Paris in 1580–84.

  Writing to Philip of Spain from Paris on 7 February 1587, Mendoza described how William Waad had been sent by Elizabeth to inform the French King of the reasons for the arrests.

  A brother [William Stafford] of the English ambassador here [Edward Stafford] and a son of the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes [Dorothy Stafford] (neither of whom however have spoken to him for years owing to his bad contact) pretended to be Catholic and frequented the house of the French ambassador with whom he was on close terms of intimacy.

  He had disclosed his intention to kill Elizabeth by placing ‘barrels of gunpowder in his mother’s apartment, which is underneath the Queen’s bedroom and she could thus be blown up’.6

  Following the investigation, Moody was sent back to gaol for another three years. Chateauneuf was kept under close surveillance and forbidden to communicate with the French court. He knew it was a trap. The plot was intended to put pressure on
Elizabeth and also effectively neutralised the French ambassador at a crucial time. The secretary des Trappes was later quietly released from the Tower and after two months, when the danger was passed, the government declared that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding and sought to smooth Anglo-French relations. The whole episode was, as Walsingham later told the ambassador, merely an attempt by Stafford to exhort money.7

  In January, Elizabeth sent a letter to Sir Edward Stafford through Waad that ‘although she does not doubt his loyalty and innocence in the matter yet, as the delinquent is his brother, she thinks better that the communication respecting it should be undertaken by another envoy, who would give him a full account if it’. The Queen also referred to the effect of the revelations on Dorothy Stafford: ‘Your mother, whose sorrow being so near as she is unto us, cannot but add some affection to ours, as for your own person, occupying the place you hold.’8 Such was Lady Stafford’s own ‘inward grief’ and distress at her son’s ‘odious dealing’ in a plot against her beloved queen that she stopped petitioning the Queen for certain family properties which had fallen into the Queen’s hands by attainder.9 Whilst Lady Dorothy remained selflessly devoted to Elizabeth, clearly her sons exasperated her both as a mother and as a loyal servant to the Queen.

  The ‘Stafford plot’ was more than likely a Walsingham creation, a ruse to convince the Queen of the extreme danger that Mary Queen of Scots posed. However, given the distress caused to Lady Stafford, which one would imagine Elizabeth would want to prevent, it is likely that Elizabeth was not told the origins of the plot until much later. The uncovering of the conspiracy also enabled the government to place Chateauneuf under house arrest and sever his links with France at the time that action was being taken against the deposed Scottish Queen. When Elizabeth received the French ambassador back into her favour in May, she joked with him about the matter, behaving as if there had been no substance to the plot.10 If all this is true, William Stafford emerges not as the traitor that Elizabeth had initially perhaps feared, but as a crucial member of Walsingham’s spy network. Ultimately no charges were brought against William Stafford but, for reasons unknown, he remained in the Tower for at least eighteen months.11

  William’s brother, Edward Stafford, was also accused of dabbling in treasonous activity in support of Mary Queen of Scots. His appointment as ambassador in France in 1583 was not least because of the influence of his mother. Once in post and writing his first dispatch to the English court, Edward requested that Cecil, ‘seal up this in another paper and to deliver it to my mother, sealed, as all copies that hereafter I shall send you’.12 Lady Stafford was therefore privy to significant foreign affairs and although Cecil may not always have complied with Edward Stafford’s request, Dorothy undoubtedly became her son’s most informed and important advocate with the Queen. This was much to the annoyance of Walsingham, who demanded that he be kept at the centre of the diplomatic and intelligence networks. He instructed his ‘searchers’ at the port of Rye to intercept and open all Stafford’s letters.13 Edward Stafford complained to Cecil, ‘I have been served but very evil touches since I came here … I know that by his [Walsingham’s] means the Queen … has been incensed that news of importance should come from others; but some have come from me and he has kept them a day and delivered his first.’14

  Desperate to prove his worth and demonstrate his independence, Sir Edward began to use increasingly rash methods. In November 1583 he proposed to include some deliberately false information in his consular dispatches in case some of them were being intercepted. He warned the Queen that such passages would be indicated by a special mark in his letters so that she would know they were ‘written for a purpose and not for a truth’.15 As Stafford wrote defensively, ‘I never heard of any ambassador being blamed for seeking intelligence any way he could.’16 He undertook more and more risks to gather intelligence. In the spring of 1584, Sir Edward became involved with the Catholic conspirator Charles Arundell and in October, Michael Moody, one of his servants at the English court, was detained at Walsingham’s command on the grounds that he was conveying letters to and from Catholics. The following autumn Walsingham detained William Lilly, another of Stafford’s servants on the grounds that he had read Leicester’s Commonwealth.17

  Walsingham persisted in his attempts to get the ambassador recalled and looked to exploit Sir Edward’s reputation as a notorious gambler. As Stafford fell into greater debt, he became compromised and accepted an advance of 6,000 crowns from the Duke of Guise in return for sharing the contents of his diplomatic bag, thereby betraying his English informants and selling the country’s secrets to the enemy at a time of great national danger.18 Stafford was also accused of acting in the interests of Spain by repeatedly denying the existence of any hostile intention by Philip II, and by passing on English intelligence to Madrid. Writing from Paris in July 1587, Mendoza, the former Spanish ambassador in England who had himself been implicated in more than one plot to assassinate the Queen, told his master that Sir Edward had sent Charles Arundell to see him, ‘to ascertain from your Majesty in what way he might serve you’. Stafford was known to be ‘much pressed for money’, Mendoza added; ‘even if he [Stafford] had not made such an offer as this, his poverty is reason enough to expect from him any service, if he saw it was to be remunerated’. Shortly afterwards, Charles Arundell arrived with news from Sir Edward that an English fleet was about to sail against Portugal:

  The ambassador told Arundell to advise your Majesty of this instantly, which, he said, would serve as a sample and handsel [token] of his goodwill; and within a fortnight or three weeks he would report whether the despatch of the fleet was being persisted in, together with the exact number of ships, men, stores and all other details of the project.19

  In a letter dated 28 February, Mendoza described how he had authorised the payment of 2,000 crowns to his valuable ‘new correspondent’.20 For the next eighteen months, Mendoza’s dispatches were full of detailed information on English policy from his ‘new friend’. The evidence points to this being the English ambassador, though Sir Edward later claimed he was acting as a double agent, deliberately providing false information to the Spanish with the full knowledge of the Elizabethan government. Stafford also began to supply information, in December 1586, on Sir Francis Drake’s preparations for his raid on Cadiz (to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’) and warned the Spanish in advance of the English attack.21 That Walsingham had sought to give Stafford false information about Drake’s plans suggests that he suspected the ambassador of treason. The quality of intelligence Stafford passed back to the English court was low and he exaggerated the hostility of French Catholics in order to make out that they, rather than the Spanish, were Elizabeth’s principal enemy. As the Spanish threat grew, Sir Edward’s activities threatened to fatally undermine national security.

  41

  Nightmares

  The sentence of Mary Queen of Scots’ guilt had been proclaimed on 4 December 1586, but Elizabeth continued to resist signing the warrant for its enforcement.1 She remained deeply ambivalent about the execution of one who had been an anointed monarch. Elizabeth still hoped that Mary could be killed in private, by an assassin, at Fotheringhay, rather than by public execution, but Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary’s gaoler, professed himself shocked at the suggestion. But, as Elizabeth insisted, had the signatories of the Bond of Association not pledged to pursue to their death any that sought her harm? Finally in late December, the Queen authorised Cecil to draw up the warrant for Mary’s execution. It was charged to William Davison, the recently appointed Secretary to the Privy Council, to secure Elizabeth’s signature.

  It was a time of great tension, with fears of disturbances, plots to rescue Mary, and conspiracies against the Queen’s life. At the end of January 1587, great alarm spread across the country, as Walsingham described,

  False bruits were spread abroad that the Queen of Scots was broken out of prison; that the City of London was fired; that many thousand Spaniards w
ere landed in Wales; that certain noblemen were fled; and such like … The stir and confusion was great; such as I think happened not in England these hundred years past, for precepts and hue and cries ran from place to place, even from out of the north into these parts, and over all the west as far as Cornwall.2

  William Davison had kept the warrant in his possession for five or six weeks, hoping that Elizabeth might be ready to sign it. On 1 February, the Queen sent for him. Alarmed by the rumours that were spreading through the country, she declared that she was now fully resolved to proceed with Mary’s execution and signed. Later that day, as Elizabeth had instructed, Davison gave the warrant to the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley to attach the great seal.

  However, the next morning, as the Queen was speaking with Sir Walter Ralegh in the Privy Chamber at Greenwich, Elizabeth called secretary Davison to her and described to him a distressing dream she had had the night before in which her Scottish cousin had been executed without Elizabeth’s consent. She told Davison that the sealing of the warrant must be delayed. It had already passed, he replied. According to Davison, Elizabeth said nothing further.3