The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 29

  Now unsure of whether to act on Elizabeth’s signed warrant or not, Davison sought out Hatton and Cecil who called a Privy Council meeting for the following day. It was agreed that they would proceed without further consultation, it being ‘neither fit nor convenient to trouble her Majesty any further’.4 Robert Beale, the clerk of the council, was sent immediately to Fotheringhay, accompanied by two executioners. A covering letter signed by the councillors and by Walsingham, who was ill in bed, to the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, appointed to preside over the execution, justified this subterfuge, as ‘for [the Queen’s] special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole realm’.5

  * * *

  At eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 8 February, Mary, dressed in black and clutching an ivory crucifix in her hand, was led out to the scaffold which had been erected in the great hall at Fotheringhay. She laid her head on the block to await the fall of the axe. The first blow missed her neck and sliced into the side of her skull. As the second blow severed her head, Richard Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, cried out, ‘So let Queen Elizabeth’s Enemies perish!’6

  The following evening it fell to Cecil to break the news to Elizabeth that her cousin, the Scottish Queen, was dead.7 Elizabeth immediately took ‘to bed owing to the great grief she suffered through this untoward event’.8

  By the morning her feelings had turned to incandescent rage. She summoned Sir Christopher Hatton and berated him for his part in what she saw as ‘a thing she never commanded or intended’.9 She threatened to throw all her councillors in the Tower for such blatant defiance of her orders, and in the meantime ‘commanded them out of her sight’.10 Davison bore the brunt of the Queen’s wrath; she believed he had abused her trust by allowing the signed warrant to leave his possession. He was stripped of his office, interrogated by Star Chamber and sent to the Tower. By the end of the month Elizabeth was threatening to have him summarily executed, but in the event he was fined £10,000, a sum far beyond his means, and was to stay in prison for ‘as long as her Majesty decreed’. Though his fine was remitted, he remained in the Tower for twenty months and was never allowed back into the Queen’s service. 11

  Cecil, after years of loyal service, was banished from the Queen’s presence and remained out of favour for several months, during which time Elizabeth referred to him as that ‘traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch’. Normally proud and pragmatic, the sixty-six-year-old Cecil was now reduced to writing despairing epistles in which he pleaded just to even be allowed just to lie at Elizabeth’s feet, in the hope ‘that some drops of your mercy [might] quench my sorrowful panting heart’.12 His friend, Lady Cobham, one of Elizabeth’s most trusted women, assured him, ‘If you will write I will deliver it. I do desire to be commanded by you.’13 She proceeded not only to speak favourably of him to the Queen, but to keep him informed of everything that happened at court during his absence. Finally, in March, Cecil was admitted back into the Queen’s presence.

  In the days after learning of Mary’s execution, Elizabeth neither ate nor slept. A joint letter from her senior councillors of 12 February urged her ‘to give yourself to your natural food and sleep, to maintain your health’.14 On the Sunday after Mary’s death, Richard Fletcher, one of Elizabeth’s most favoured preachers, faced the daunting task of delivering a sermon before the Queen in the small chapel royal at Greenwich.15 As Dean of Peterborough, Fletcher had served as chaplain during Mary’s trial and execution, and now condemned the Scottish Queen for her traitorous Catholicism. Elizabeth sat in an elevated gallery, her courtiers in the chapel stalls below. Fletcher hailed Mary’s execution as an act of God’s deliverance and urged Elizabeth to rise above her grief and pursue her enemies and those who sought her life.16

  Soon after receiving the news from Fotheringhay, Elizabeth wrote to James VI, denying that she had authorised his mother’s execution:

  My dear Brother, I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolor that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen … I beseech you that as God and many more know, how innocent I am in this case … I am not so base-minded that fear of any living creature or Prince should make me afraid to do that were just; or done, to deny the same. I am not of so base a lineage, nor carry so vile a mind … Thus assuring yourself of me, that as I know this was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it on others’ shoulders; no more will I not damnify myself that thought it not … for your part, think you have not in the world a more loving kinswoman, nor a more dear friend than myself; nor any that will watch more carefully to preserve you and your estate … your most assured loving sister and cousin Elizabeth R.17

  Robert Carey, youngest son of Lord Hunsdon and now a trusted courtier, was charged with delivering the letter to James, who took the news of his mother’s death ‘very heavily’. On the streets of Edinburgh, violence erupted against the English Queen. An agent in the Scottish capital reported to Walsingham a libellous epigram that addressed Elizabeth as ‘Jezebel, that English whore’.18

  In Catholic Europe too there was outrage.19 From Paris, Sir Edward Stafford reported, ‘Truly I find all men here in a fury, and all that love not her Majesty in a great hope to build some great harm to her upon it.’ He added that Henri III, the French King and Mary’s former brother-in-law, ‘took it very evil’ when he heard the news and immediately severed diplomatic ties with England.20 For several months the King refused to receive Walsingham as Elizabeth’s envoy, who had requested an audience to explain the execution. The French immediately called for vengeance and such was the strength of feeling that the French King felt obliged to send a message to Stafford imploring him, for sake of his personal safety, not to leave the embassy in Paris.

  Parisian preachers and polemicists denounced the execution. A propaganda war of images broke out: Catholics displayed hideous portraits of Elizabeth, while Huguenots set up pictures of the English Queen in all her magnificence, accompanied by laudatory verses.21 In April 1587, Walsingham wrote to Stafford to say that he was editing his dispatches so that Elizabeth would not know how enraged the French were over the execution; he feared the news would only increase her anger towards members of the Privy Council.22

  English and Scottish Catholic exiles in France denounced Elizabeth in print and made great play of the nightmares and fitful sleep that she was rumoured to have had on the night after she signed Mary’s death warrant.23 Adam Blackwood’s Martyre de la royne d’Escosse, written shortly after Mary’s death, claimed that Sir Walter Mildmay had gone to Dudley while he was in bed at court and warned him of ‘the evident danger and ruin of his Majesty’, if with ‘inexcusable cruelty’, Mary was executed ‘without all pretence of law, right or reason, or any apparent show of justice’. Blackwood then described how Dudley immediately got out of bed and in his nightgown went straight to Elizabeth’s Bedchamber – ‘whether often he was wont to go for less necessary business’ – to warn her of the consequences if the execution went ahead’. Dorothy Stafford ‘being in her bed’ had cried out in a ‘terrible voice’ that awakened the Queen and then began to weep. She told Elizabeth that she had had a nightmare in which the Queen of Scotland was beheaded and immediately after that Elizabeth’s head was also cut off. Elizabeth declared that the ‘same vision had appeared to her in her sleep leaving her greatly terrified’ and as a result she had changed her mind about putting Mary to death.24 Another version of Blackwood’s account describes how, having given orders to go ahead with the execution, Elizabeth – ‘the harpy’ – did not sleep the entire night ‘having another demoness within her soul who tormented her strangely and vengefully about the execution of her cousin, to such an extent that she repented of having ordered it’.25

  Blackwood’s propagandist tract, in which Elizabeth was once more condemned for her innate depravity, was printed in France and distributed throughout Catholic Europe.26 Attacks on Elizabeth could always fall back on the lurid det
ails of her conception – choice material for any opponents of the Elizabethan regime. Blackwood referred to her illegitimate and incestuous birth, alleging that the Queen was ‘not only a bastard’ but also born ‘of triple incest and had no right to the throne of England’.27 She owed her sexually corrupt body to the unrestrained sexual immorality of her mother, Anne Boleyn, the ‘hacquenee [mare] d’Angleterre’.28

  Other attacks used similar imagery. In 1587, De Jezebelis Anglae, a collection of French and Latin poems reviling Elizabeth was printed. The ‘de Jezebelis’ poem was posted at the door of Notre Dame and described how Anne Boleyn had slept both with her own brother and with Henry VIII and that it was unclear who Elizabeth’s father was.29 The Vers Funebres attributed to Cardinal du Perron developed the theme of Elizabeth as a ‘monster, conceived in adultery and incest, her fangs bared for murder, who befouls and despoils the sacred right of sceptres and vomits her choler and gall at heaven’.30 Other poems claimed that Elizabeth had illegitimate children who were the fruit of her promiscuous conduct with members of the Privy Chamber, especially the Earl of Leicester, and that Elizabeth deliberately avoided marriage because she wanted to be free to enjoy these licentious pleasures.31

  While with Mary’s death, English Catholics lost the figurehead and focus for their plots, the threat of Spain came into sharper relief. Mary had made Philip II of Spain a written promise that she would bequeath him her right to the English succession. In the event she never did so, but her death left him the leading Catholic candidate for the succession. As a descendent of John of Gaunt and Edward III, he had English royal blood and had the military might to enforce his claim. The English Jesuits, William Allen and Robert Persons, now back on the continent, pressed Philip to take action against Elizabeth, and Philip was urged by his confessor to attack England, ‘to avenge the wrongs done to God and to the world by that woman, above all in the execution of the Queen of Scotland’.32

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  Secret Son?

  In June 1587 a young Englishman found shipwrecked off the northern coast of Spain was arrested and taken for questioning, suspected of being a spy. He was sent to Madrid, to the house of Sir Francis Englefield, formerly Catholic councillor to Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I, and now Philip II’s English secretary. The details of the interrogation were recorded by Englefield in four letters he subsequently wrote to Philip.1

  The Englishman, who was thought to be about twenty-five, proceeded to reveal an incredible story. His name, he told Englefield, was Arthur Dudley. He had been raised by Robert Southern, whose wife had been a servant to Queen Elizabeth’s most senior Bedchamber woman, ‘the heretic’ Kat Ashley. Her husband, John, a Gentleman of the Chamber and Master of the Jewel House, had given Southern the post of Keeper of one of the Queen’s houses in Enfield; and it was to here, each summer, or if there was any plague or sickness in London, that Arthur from the age of eight would be taken and schooled in Latin, Italian, French, music, arms and dancing.

  When he was about fifteen, Arthur told Ashley and Southern that he wanted to seek adventure and go abroad. When they refused to let him go he stole a purse of coins and fled to the port of Milford Haven in Wales, where he planned to board a ship for Spain. Before he could do so he was arrested by order of the Privy Council and returned to London. He was taken to Pickering Place, the home of Sir Edward Wotton, where, in the presence of Sir Thomas Heneage, he was reunited with John Ashley.

  Finally, four years later, Arthur was granted permission to go abroad as a soldier in the service of the French Colonel de la Noue in the Netherlands, and was accompanied there by a servant of Robert Dudley’s. When de la Noue was subsequently captured, Arthur fled to France but was called back to England by news that Robert Southern was gravely ill. He found Southern in a tavern in Evesham, where he had been working as an innkeeper. On his deathbed, Southern revealed to him the true circumstances of Arthur’s birth. One night in 1561, Southern had been sent for by Kat Ashley who instructed him to go to Hampton Court. There he met ‘Lady Harington’, probably Isabella Harington, one of the Queen’s ladies and the mother of the Queen’s godson, John, who handed him a newborn baby boy. He was told that the child belonged to a lady at court, ‘who had been so careless of her honour’ that if it became known, it would ‘bring great shame on all the company and would highly displease the Queen if she knew of it’. The boy was called Arthur and Southern and his wife were ordered to take him home and bring him up with their own children, in place of their son who had died in infancy.

  The dying man refused to tell Arthur any more, but under pressure, and saying he wished to clear his conscience before his death, Southern then confessed that the true identities of the boy’s parents were Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester. Arthur then travelled to London to confront John Ashley with the information. Ashley told him to repeat what he had been told to no one and to remain near court, but fearing he might be in danger, Arthur left London and headed for France. There, he explained to Englefield, he learned of the Duke of Guise’s plans for a league against England and so warned Ashley and Sir Edward Stafford of the threat. It was soon after this, at Greenwich Palace, that he was first introduced to Robert Dudley, who took him to his chamber and confirmed that he was his father. Dudley showed ‘by tears, words and other demonstrations’ so much affection for him that Arthur recognised Southern’s deathbed confession to be true. Walsingham, who had been notified of Arthur’s arrival, was suspicious of the mysterious youth and began asking questions. Arthur fled the court and joined a ship carrying English soldiers to the Netherlands.

  In Englefield’s report to Philip, he described how the Englishman claimed to be a Catholic and to have become involved in various plots to forward the Catholic cause: he had opened up a dialogue with the Elector of Cologne and the Pope, and had undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia. In early 1587 after hearing of Mary Queen of Scots’s execution he decided to head for Spain. During this voyage he was shipwrecked on the Biscay coast and taken to Madrid for questioning by Englefield. He told Englefield that he believed Robert Dudley had plotted against Mary Stuart and this had led to her being condemned to death. He was now worried, he said, that agents of Queen Elizabeth would seek him out and arrange to have him murdered so that the secret of his birth would never be known. He promised the King’s secretary that if Philip would protect him, he would write an account of his birth and life which the Spanish could use as they wished. 2

  Arthur’s account, written in English, filled three sheets of paper and was translated by Englefield for Philip. Thereafter Arthur was sent to the Castle of La Alameda and spent the next year under interrogation. Hieronimo Lippomano, the Venetian ambassador in Spain, reported to the Doge and Senate that the young man ‘gives himself out as the son of the Queen of England, but is in disgrace with her because he is a Catholic, has been arrested’.3 In another despatch he described Arthur as being ‘spirited’, with ‘the air of a noble’, and able to speak Italian and Spanish, though ‘he is thought to be a spy’.4 Arthur’s claims caught the interest of the Spanish government, his revelations coming at the time when Philip II was preparing to claim the crown of England for himself and for his daughter the Infanta Isabella. ‘It will certainly be safest,’ Philip wrote in the margins of Englefield’s report, ‘to make sure of his person until we know more about the matter.’ Neither he nor Englefield was willing to take any chances.

  A letter to Cecil, dated 28 May 1588, from an English agent known only as ‘BC’ recounted Arthur Dudley’s claim to be have been ‘begotten between our Queen and the Earl of Leicester’. It has been suggested that ‘BC’ was Anthony Standen alias Pompeio Pellegrini, one of Walsingham’s chief intelligence-gatherers in Spain.5 The letter reported that Arthur, identified as being ‘around twenty-seven years old’, was still in Spanish hands ‘very solemnly warded and served’, at a cost to the King of six crowns a day, and ‘taketh upon him’ [behaves] like the man he pretendeth to be’. Anoth
er letter, written in September, mentioned that ‘the varlet that called himself her Majesty’s son is in Madrid, and is allowed two crowns a day for his table, but cannot go anywhere without his keepers, and has a house for a prison’. The spy explained that Arthur bore more than a passing resemblance to the man he claimed was his father, though this was not something that Philip’s secretary, Sir Francis Englefield, who was aged and virtually blind, would have been able to confirm.6

  Two years later, a report sent to England on ‘the State of Spain’ spoke of Alcantara, ‘where an Englishman of good quality and comely personage was imprisoned who avowed himself Leicester’s son by no small personage’.7 Thereafter Arthur Dudley disappears from the record. Perhaps he remained there until his death, or perhaps he escaped and simply discarded his elaborate claim.

  * * *

  Sir Francis Englefield clearly did not know what to make of the tale he had been told by the young Englishman, but he suspected that Elizabeth and her councillors ‘may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends’. Perhaps it was a plot intended to dupe the Spanish into acknowledging Arthur as the Queen’s son so that he could be offered as a possible heir to the throne, thereby cutting James VI of Scotland out of the succession. Or perhaps he was a spy who was being used by the English government to learn of Spain’s preparation for the invasion of England. During the spring of 1587, Walsingham certainly drew up detailed plans of how to gather information on the Queen’s foreign enemies and determined that agents should be sent into Spain to pose as disaffected Englishmen. One of his memos specifically noted the need to get a spy into the very heart of the Spanish court.8

  Ultimately Englefield came to the conclusion that there was a good chance that Arthur was telling the truth and was unaware of how he was being used: