Yet it is clear that despite these affectionate demonstrations, in the Norfolk negotiations Mary was very much following the line of conduct presented to her by her advisers, rather than leading them forward; this was in part due to her captivity, and the conditions which made her dependent on the reports of others to estimate any other situation. It was also due to her natural suspicion of the whole state of marriage which had brought her into such a parlous condition at the time of her marriage to Bothwell. She had believed Bothwell to be the choice of her nobles and he had turned out to be their bane; she had believed Darnley to be the choice of Elizabeth, but she had been rewarded for marrying him by the virulent fury of the English queen. It was hardly surprising that she greeted the first approaches over the Norfolk match with considerable doubts. When she finally gave her consent, it was on the strict understanding that Elizabeth’s approval would be secured: ‘she wished them first and foremost to get the Queen’s assent, lest the matter might turn to her hurt and the Duke’s whereof she had had experience before in her marriage with Lord Darnley contracted without her (Elizabeth’s) assent.’18
But Mary managed to convince herself in her prison, or was persuaded by John Leslie, bishop of Ross, that Elizabeth did approve these negotiations, or would approve them when she was informed. As late as January 1570 (when she had had considerable evidence to the contrary), she wrote confidently to Norfolk that their marriage would be generally approved: ‘Our fault were not shameful: you have promised to be mine, and I yours; I believe the Queen of England and country should like of it.’19 In the following August Leslie told the Spanish ambassador that Mary had been much importuned over the marriage, but had been driven to it by necessity, since she believed Elizabeth wanted her to marry an Englishman. Therefore, despite Mary’s formalized sentimental attitude to Norfolk, her wearing of the diamond which he sent to her, for which Mary sent in exchange a miniature of herself set in gold, it is evident that Mary was seeking an honourable exit from her cage approved by Elizabeth rather than involvement in a life-and-death conspiracy.
In the summer of 1569 Elizabeth showed further encouraging signs of favour to Mary by testing out a series of restoration proposals with the Scots. There were three possibilities: that Mary might ratify her abdication, and live in England; that Mary and James should rule jointly; and, thirdly, that Mary should be restored with certain religious guarantees, and a promise for the security of Moray. The English nobles and Leslie also secretly imagined that the Norfolk marriage would fit neatly into this third solution, the only one, as Leslie proclaimed, which would be tolerable to his mistress. Already in the previous October Mary had expressed herself willing to be divorced from Bothwell, and messengers had been sent to him in Denmark to sign the necessary documents. Now, with a view to proving that there had been no marriage, emissaries were sent to Rome to institute a suit of nullity on two grounds: firstly, it was said that Bothwell had never been properly divorced from Jean Gordon, so that Bothwell could not have rightly married Mary; secondly, it was suggested that Bothwell had used force to effect his marriage to Mary, which was in itself a cause of nullity. In June 1569 Lord Boyd was given authority by Mary to treat with Moray on the subject, and a written mandate to apply for the divorce.20 Such negotiations made it clear not only that passion for Bothwell had well and truly waned – if indeed it had ever existed – but also that Mary was prepared to suit her marital situation to anything which she imagined might lead to her restoration in Scotland.
These restoration proposals, to which Elizabeth herself seems to have been genuinely well-disposed, were turned down by the Scots themselves, led by Moray, at the Perth convention at the end of July, when the idea of Mary’s return was rejected by forty votes to nine; among the nine who voted for Mary’s return on certain conditions were Atholl, Huntly, Balfour and Maitland. Six weeks later Moray’s position was made still more secure when Queen Elizabeth discovered the Norfolk marriage plot. Her rage was extreme. Mary found herself moved back to the hated Tutbury, and given an additional jailer in the shape of Huntingdon, the man whom she particularly disliked and even feared because she always believed his own pretensions to the English throne (he had Plantagenet blood) might lead him to do away with her. Her suite was cut down, and Elizabeth angrily ordered that Mary should neither give nor receive messages to the outside world; Mary complained to Elizabeth that her rooms had been roughly searched by men armed with pistols. Norfolk was imprisoned in the Tower. Elizabeth even turned, through his servant John Wood, on Moray, amazed to discover that he too had apparently been favourable to the notion; but Moray quickly informed Elizabeth’s Governor Hunsdon at Kelso that he had never done more than tell Norfolk that if Bothwell were dead or Mary divorced, and if Elizabeth agreed to the match, then he would approve.*
The northern rising in November, under the Catholic earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, did nothing to improve Queen Mary’s lot. This rising, ill-prepared and ill-organized, was more in the nature of a separatist movement on the part of northern Catholics than a revolt on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots. Queen Mary herself disapproved of it, not only on the grounds that she hated violence and wished to avoid the risk of the slaughter of innocent people, but also on the very sensible grounds that she did not believe it would do her cause any good, since the moment was hardly ripe for such a demonstration. Leslie later testified that she had asked him to try and get Northumberland to stop or stay the rising. Yet whatever her own wishes, a Catholic queen was the inevitable rallying-point for such an enterprise. Mary was hastily taken to Coventry for the time being in order to be geographically still further away from the rebels; here she had to be temporarily lodged in an inn, since Coventry Castle had been uninhabited since the Wars of the Roses and was therefore destitute of furniture – the government in London being as usual in ignorance of conditions in the Midlands. The idea of the inn infuriated Elizabeth when she learned of it, since she thought it implied too much dangerous social life for the queen of Scots. Mary was then removed to a house in the centre of the town;† here she in turn was annoyed to hear that Huntingdon, her jailer, had been listening to some sermons containing ‘lewd preachings’ against her, which she herself understandably refused to attend. Yet the see-saw nature of English noble attitudes and alliances at this time may be judged by the fact that Huntingdon now took the opportunity to press the suit of his own brother-in- law, Leicester – Mary’s former suitor Robert Dudley under a new name – on the grounds that Queen Elizabeth was now considering the duke of Anjou as a husband, which left Leicester free for Mary; Mary, reporting this back indignantly to Norfolk, said that Huntingdon’s next proposal was that his own claims to the throne of England should be recognized in return as being next to those of Mary and James.23
In the meantime events in troubled Scotland were about to take another dramatic turn: on 11th January, 1570, the regent Moray fell dead, struck down by the bullets of an assassin in the main street at Linlithgow; the story that he fell a victim to the vengeance of a poor man whose wife he had driven out into the snow, to meet her death, has long since been exploded. In fact his assassin was a Hamilton, and the Hamilton archbishop of St Andrews had at least foreknowledge of the plot. The death of Moray drew to an end the career of one who had aimed high: it will never be known exactly how high, or whether the pretensions by which his enemies accused him of aiming at the throne itself had any substance.* Mary certainly came to believe that he had aimed at the throne, and paid his assassin a pension. At all events, under Moray’s brief regency Scotland had not more, but much less stability than in the early years of Mary’s rule, and there was nothing in his conduct of affairs to justify his ejection of his sister from the throne on administrative grounds. It was no coincidence that he was struck down by a Hamilton, a member of a rival family: Scotland was by now, and continued to be throughout the minority of James, a hotbed of warring factions; Scots with long memories might have looked back to the minority of James’s mother Mary and seen that li
ttle outward progress had been made.
The death of Moray meant the search for a new regent, to whom most parties would agree. It was not until the summer that the choice finally fell upon James’s grandfather, Lennon, largely as a result of the favour of Elizabeth, who supported him as being a likely tool for English policy. In the meantime Mary herself made frantic efforts to maintain some sort of maternal contact with her little boy, now three and a half. Just before Moray’s death she sent him a little pony of his own, and a saddle, with a pathetic little note to accompany them: ‘Dear Son, I send three bearers to see you and bring me word how ye do, and to remember you that ye have in me a loving mother that wishes you to learn in time to love know and fear God.’ Mary wrote in vain, for neither her letter nor her presents were allowed by Elizabeth to pass to Scotland, to the son who could not remember Mary; and James himself, far from being taught to remember his duty ‘anent her that has born you in her sides’ as his mother hopefully put it, was being instructed by George Buchanan and others that his mother had cold-bloodedly murdered his father to marry her lover. These teachings did not augur well for Mary’s future relationship with James.
In the summer of 1570 there was some scheme promoted by Elizabeth for bringing James to England (that old desire of the English to acquire a Scottish princeling); the Scots never agreed to it, but Mary was enthusiastic at the opportunity of bringing her child a little nearer. She swallowed her pride and even contacted her former mother-in-law and established enemy, Lady Lennox, on the subject, seeking her grandmotherly advice about James. ‘I have born him and God Knoweth with what danger to him and to me both, and of you he is descended, so I mean not to forget my duty to you,’ she wrote. But this scheme came to nothing. In the autumn of 1571 Mary was still pleading with Elizabeth to let her correspond with her son, or at least find out how he was faring, in her own words, from the point of view of a ‘desolate mother whose solitary child has been torn from her arms’.25
In May 1570 Mary was once more taken back to Chatsworth, and here a fantastic plot was hatched on the part of some romantic local squires to rescue her. At the time of the northern rising, Mary had been offered a possible chance of escape by Leonard Dacres, Northumberland’s cousin, and had refused the bait, because she felt herself committed to Norfolk and her plans in that direction; Norfolk had pointed out that an escape would ruin everything, and leave no chance of Elizabeth’s approval. By May the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which had been promulgated by Pope Pius V in Rome in February, had reached England, and had been posted up on the door of the bishop of London by a Catholic hand. This bull was to have an enormous effect on Mary’s future, since it formally excommunicated Elizabeth and declared that her Catholic subjects were released from their loyalty to her. But at Chatsworth this summer Mary still remained damping towards the ardour of her supporters who wished to compass her escape.
The fabric of the plot was revealed in the examinations of those involved after they had been arrested; it seemed the protagonists were Sir Thomas Gerard, a local Catholic squire (father of the future Jesuit missionary John Gerard), two brothers, Francis and George Rolleston, one John Hall and two Lancashire magnates, the brothers Sir Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Stanley. But the most searching cross-examinations could never make the actual practical details of the plot amount to very much, and Sir Edward Stanley strongly denied that he had had any effective part in it, giving the ingenious excuse that he had been away in the north at the time courting a Mrs Strickland. Gerard’s idea was that the queen of Scots having escaped from Chatsworth should be shipped away to the Isle of Man by the good offices of Thomas Stanley; but he put his finger on the main trouble with any private rescue plot to do with Mary Stuart during all her years of captivity when he said that he had ‘feared to make any man privy thereof for danger of discovery, and unless many were made privy, the thing could not be done’.26
Finally Hall and Rolleston did manage to have a cloak-and-dagger meeting with the master of Mary’s household, John Beaton, on the high moor above Chatsworth at the conspiratorial if chilly hour of 5 a.m. Beaton told them he would have to consult the queen herself, but he could give them in advance her general answer to such proposals: ‘So would she wish that no man should go about that matter, unless they were assured to put her in surety.’ The plot was finally betrayed by George Rolleston, and Thomas Gerard was arrested and spent two years in the Tower. Francis Rolleston in his examination showed how frail the structure of conspiracy had been when he said that Chatsworth had been chosen as a good escaping ground because the queen could be carried off as she took the air on the moors, but it was never decided what to do with her next ‘because the matter never grew to any determination or likelihood’ since everyone had been in doubt of everyone else.27 Hall’s examination was especially significant on the subject of Mary’s attitude to the whole project: Beaton had thought that the escape should take place at night, despite the fact that the queen’s servants were then locked into rooms, but he admitted that Mary herself remained distinctly unenthusiastic since ‘she nothing doubted but that the Queen’s Majesty [Elizabeth] at the request of the Kings of Spain and France would restore her to her former dignity hereafter, the which she rather minded to expect, than to adventure upon a mere uncertainty, by such means to work her own delivery which might if the matter miscarried turn her to confusion and all her partakers’.28
This was a commendably prudent reaction. Beaton was never able to be arraigned for his part in the conspiracy since by the time it was uncovered he was dead, and buried (a sad expatriate Scot but a loyal servant) in the parish church at Edensor, close by Chatsworth. Mary’s words showed that her eyes were sternly fixed on where the power lay, on the help of monarchs, not a handful of local lords, whose number of horsemen varied from 100 to 200 to ‘a few’, and at times apparently intended to ship her beyond the seas and at other times imagined ‘they might keep her in some secret place undiscovered, if she could not have ready passage’. She showed no more interest when there was an attempt to revive the plot the next year. Mary was by now a woman of nearly thirty, on the verge of middle-age by the standards of the time; the old impetuosity of her youth was gone. She was chronically sick, alone in a country she did not know; it was a different matter to elude the bars of her own palace of Holyrood and ride to Dunbar through her own kingdom of Scotland, than to travel in disguise through unknown England, a foreign queen among foreigners. Under the circumstances Mary preferred to pin her hopes to more substantial targets.
In August 1570 Norfolk was released from the Tower. His release proved the signal for a further and much wider conspiracy, in which he was once more involved, under the inspiration of an Italian banker based in London, named Roberto Ridolfi. The Ridolfi plot, as opposed to the earlier plan, which merely proposed marrying Norfolk to Mary, had distinctly dangerous objectives if its widest aspects were taken seriously. Ridolfi himself was a man with an Italian love of intrigue but unfortunately with little of the Italian Renaissance skill at diplomacy; he understood little of the workings of the English mind, or indeed the workings of England itself. His aim was apparently to secure an invasion of England from the Netherlands by Philip II’s general there, the duke of Alva, which invasion was to be supplemented by a rising of native Catholics within England. This combination of invaders and internal rebels would free Mary and, having seized Elizabeth, place Mary on the throne of England, side by side with her consort Norfolk. These were rash and treasonable schemes indeed. There were many difficulties in the way of their being carried out – the principal one being, as Philip II was quick to notice, that there was no proof that there would be another Catholic rising within England. Yet Philip stipulated that there should be no Spanish invasion until the English themselves had risen. In the meantime Alva formed the lowest opinion of Ridolfi, whom he termed a gran parlaquina or chatterbox, and a lightweight; as late as September 1571 he wrote to Philip from the Netherlands with a sarcastic lack of respect for Ridolfi’s ab
ility to carry out any sort of practical scheme, that even if Philip and Elizabeth jointly agreed to the invasions it still would not be sure that Ridolfi would be able to carry it through! Alva also analysed with terrible correctness the danger, to both Norfolk and the queen of Scots, if such a scheme was discovered or miscarried: either or both might lose their lives.29
Mary’s attitude to, and personal involvement in, Ridolfi’s schemes is open to question. She had not lost interest in Elizabeth’s projects for her restoration to Scotland, which still dragged on. In October 1570, Cecil and Mildmay paid Mary a personal visit at Sheffield Castle, possibly spurred on by the king of France’s representations to Elizabeth on the subject of Mary. They put before Mary a long list of articles proposing an alliance between herself and Elizabeth. Many of these articles reiterated the familiar English position since the abortive Treaty of Edinburgh: Mary was to give up her unlawful claims to the English throne. In addition Mary was to give up bargaining over her remarriage without Elizabeth’s consent, and the question of James coming to England as a hostage if Mary was restored to Scotland was officially incorporated. In the course of their discussion, Cecil showed himself not immune to the famous charm of the queen of Scots: in a memoir of 1569 he had already referred to ‘her cunning and sugared entertainment of all men’, whereby she won many to her cause; now a personal experience of this sweetness led him to agree with Maitland: ‘The Queen of Scots was of a clement and gentle nature, and was disposed to be governed by counsel of them in whom she reposed her trust.’ Leslie, who reported this favourable verdict, even thought that Cecil had promised to bring Mary at last into Elizabeth’s presence. Yet nothing concrete ever actually happened as a result of these articles, and by the spring of 1571 Mary was writing wearily to Sussex that she seemed to have been looking for a happy resolution to her affairs for so long ‘which has been so many times delayed for every light matter that did occur, that we are for our own part in doubt if finally there shall be any good succeed unto us therein’.30