On a clear, calm evening in April 1580, south-eastern England, as well as the Low Countries and parts of northern France and Germany, were struck by a violent earthquake. In London, as the ground moved, church bells rang uncontrollably, water courses ‘shook and frothed wonderfully’ and many chimney stacks collapsed. At a church near Newgate Market, falling masonry killed an apprentice named Thomas Gray and fatally injured his servant, Mabel Everitt. At Sandwich, in east Kent, a sound like the discharge of several cannons was heard before the ground shook, the sea swelled and the gable end of St Peter’s church collapsed. Down the coast at Dover part of the cliffs fell, while Saltwood Castle, overlooking Hythe, suffered damage. The quake was followed by as many as four aftershocks, the last of which occurred on 1 or 2 May. Tremors were evidently felt as far afield as Edinburgh; in October the Master of Gray reported that his house ‘did shake and rock in the night as with an earthquake’.

These sudden bursts of violent seismic activity struck terror into the populace. Two days after the main quake, the court jester Richard Tarlton recorded that many in the Royal Exchange ‘wept with fear’. At the same time the writer Thomas Churchyard reported that in one London theatre those in the balcony were so frightened that the gallery would collapse that they leapt ‘from the lowest standings’. In Kent, according to a contemporary chronicler, many of those woken by the last of the aftershocks during the night of 1 May ran to the local church to pray.

Although the main earthquake lasted for little more than a minute, it was of an unusually high magnitude for the British Isles, where seismic activity is rare. Dr Roger Musson, the author of the historical earthquake catalogue for the UK (maintained by the British Geological Survey), includes the 1580 event among the four greatest earthquakes ever to have struck England. Originating 33km below the seabed in the Straits of Dover, the quake was almost certainly associated with movement of a major structural feature in the eastern English Channel known as the Variscan Thrust Front. This area has a long history of seismic activity. As early as 1382 a synod in London held to examine the writings of the Lollard John Wycliffe was interrupted by an earthquake in the Dover Straits which caused widespread damage in south-eastern England and the Low Countries. In November 1776 another earthquake, of lesser magnitude, originated in the same location. It is because the Straits of Dover are seismically active that the Channel Tunnel was designed to be earthquake-proof.

In early modern England, understanding of earthquakes was limited. One theory held that they were caused by the earth’s expulsion of trapped wind, a view first advanced by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey agreed that it might have been caused by ‘some forcible and violent eruption of wind, or the like’, occasioned by excessive rainfall the previous autumn. This, Harvey argued, had ‘stopped and filled’ up ‘the pores and vents and crannies’ of the earth with moisture, so that ‘the windy exhalation and vapours pent up as it were in the bowels thereof could not otherwise get out’. However, many contemporaries were sceptical whether the Aristotelian argument was relevant in this case. They included the Essex gentleman Arthur Golding, who argued in print that the 1580 earthquake cannot have had a natural cause since among the places affected were areas ‘which by reason of their substantial soundness and massy firmness, are not to be pierced by any winds from without’. Moreover, quakes that had natural causes were preceded by signs such as tempestuous seas, whereas in this case the weather was ‘fair, temperate and unwindy’.

For many Elizabethan Englishmen – perhaps the vast majority of them – the 1580 earthquake, like most natural disasters, was an obvious expression of God’s displeasure at the nation’s sinfulness. To argue otherwise was, as Arthur Golding saw it, a mere evasion, an attempt ‘to keep themselves and others from the due looking back into the time erst misspent … lest they should see their own wretchedness’. Among the many sins Golding imputed to the English were widespread corruption, hatred, malice, disdain, pride, flattery, dissimulation and the desire for revenge. He also complained that servants behaved like masters; that men adopted ‘the garish attire and nice behaviour of women’; and that women ‘have gotten up the apparel and stomach of men’. To Golding, the 1580 earthquake was just one in a recent series of warnings to the English to mend their ways. Other signs of God’s wrath included unseasonal heavy rainfall and snow, and sharp and long-lasting frosts. Golding could not have known that a temporary dip in solar sunspot activity meant that England, like the rest of the globe, was experiencing what many historians have dubbed the mini ice age.

In fact Golding, who had worked at the London house of the Queen’s chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, during the mid-1560s, was expressing views commonly held in official circles. Immediately after the quake, both John Aylmer, bishop of London, and Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, drew up prayers for circulation in their respective dioceses calling for repentance. The Privy Council approved of these initiatives. It also declared, like Golding, that England had had a lucky escape. Whereas other countries had suffered far greater disasters in recent years, such as civil wars, massacres and the earthquake which had destroyed a large part of the city of Ferrara, in northern Italy, ten years earlier, England had escaped relatively lightly. As the Council put it, God had dealt ‘more favourably with us … than he hath dealt with other nations in the like case’, having sustained little damage and few casualties (just two fatalities in fact).

By comparison, other countries had suffered the loss of whole cities and thousands of people. At the Council’s urging, Grindal’s prayer service was circulated throughout the realm, along with Golding’s short treatise. Urging repentance, it described the quake as ‘the strange and terrible token’ of God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. As if to set an example to her subjects, the Queen shortly after the earthquake urged the principal gentry of every shire to contribute generously to a collection on behalf of the plague-afflicted Huguenots of Montpellier. She cited ‘God’s merciful warning by the late earthquake’ as an ‘extraordinary admonition’ to England to act with Christian compassion.

The 1580 earthquake is unlikely to have been quickly forgotten; a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act One, Scene 3), written sometime in the early 1590s, seems to allude to it (‘’Tis since the earthquake now 11 years’). For a short while it may even have shaken the English in their confident belief that God was an Englishman, an idea which can be traced back to at least the early stages of the Reformation and was still current: in 1559 John Aylmer urged his fellow countryman to fear neither French nor Scots ‘as God is English’, and in 1573 Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, pressed Burghley to advance the cause of true religion because God was ‘so much English’. However, if the 1580 earthquake did give the English pause for thought about their favoured status, these doubts were dispelled eight years later with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when ‘God blew and they were scattered’.

AT

Further reading:

Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Parker Society, 1847) ed. W.K. Clay

Historic British Earthquakes

Pamphlets on the Earthquake of 1580 – Darin Hayton

Biographies of the 1st Lord Burghley, John Aylmer, bishop of London, and archbishops Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal will in due course feature in our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords.

In July 1599 the mayor and aldermen of Hull complained to the Privy Council that five ships from their town had been seized by Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, while fishing near ‘Wardhouse’ (Vardøhus), a fortress off Vardo, on the north Norwegian coast. Their crews had been placed in irons, and some of the seamen were allegedly tortured. Four of the ships were detained as prizes, while the fifth was sent back to England with a message that no-one was to fish in Danish-Norwegian waters without licence. Hull’s governors were incensed. Even though Hull’s ships had long fished off the Norwegian coast, many of the town’s merchants now faced financial ruin. Moreover Christian’s aggressive actions, if left unchecked, threatened the English trade route to Muscovy. The harsh treatment meted out to the Hull fishermen was undoubtedly due to the fact that Christian IV was then trying to assert his authority over northern Norway. He was engaged in a territorial dispute with Muscovy, which claimed that Vardo and the surrounding Lapp country belonged to the Tsar.

Naturally both the queen, Elizabeth I, and the Privy Council sympathized with Hull’s complaint and agreed to intervene. However, as neither England nor Denmark employed a resident ambassador in the other’s capital, it took several months and the dispatch of a special ambassador to Copenhagen to arrange a meeting to discuss the dispute. Eventually, over the winter of 1599/1600, it was agreed that commissioners from both countries would meet on neutral ground the following Easter. The place chosen was Emden, a quasi-autonomous city in north-western Germany which enjoyed the protection of the neighbouring Dutch Republic. In March 1600, with the conference now imminent, Elizabeth selected three delegates to attend this conference. Unsurprisingly, two were civil lawyers experienced in maritime law, Dr Christopher Parkins and Richard Swale. However, the third figure chosen, and the nominal head of the mission, was a leading churchman, Richard Bancroft, the 45-year old bishop of London.

Perhaps no one was more astonished by Bancroft’s selection for this mission than Bancroft himself. Quite apart from the fact that he had never been abroad and lacked both diplomatic experience and expertise in the civil law, he was the first bishop chosen to serve on a diplomatic mission since Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Ely, had been included on the delegation which negotiated the 1559 treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. Since her accession in 1558, Elizabeth had broken with the practice of the past and largely restricted prelates to their ecclesiastical duties. The only exceptions to this rule were her appointment of Thomas Young, archbishop of York as lord president of the council in the North in 1564 and the addition of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, to the Privy Council in 1586.

Elizabeth’s reasons for choosing Bancroft remain unknown. She may have thought that, as a Protestant bishop with well-known anti-Calvinist leanings, he would be acceptable to the Lutheran Danes. However, why choose a bishop at all? Would not a nobleman have been preferable? The answer to this question is probably ‘yes’. But by the late 1590s the queen was having difficulty in finding noblemen capable of performing diplomatic missions, as many peers were either not up to the task or simply lacked the means to subsidise the cost of an official embassy. Bancroft, by contrast, was shrewd and capable, the bane of radical puritans. Moreover, he had neither wife nor children to support and an annual income of more than £1,100 at his disposal. Elizabeth’s only concern was not the depth of Bancroft’s pockets but his notorious thriftiness. For that reason, she reminded him that, as leader of the Emden mission, he would be expected to ‘keep a bountiful house’.

Bancroft was not in the least bit pleased to have been selected for this mission and initially pleaded inexperience and a ‘tertian ague’ (malaria) to avoid having to go. However, once it became clear the queen would not budge, he threw himself into the task with his customary vigour. Determined to make a good impression, he decided to take with him a 40-strong entourage and a large amount of plate, which he borrowed, with the queen’s permission, from the Jewel House. He also got himself admitted to membership of Doctors’ Commons, the professional body to which all leading civil lawyers belonged, presumably in order to improve his credentials in the eyes of the Danes.

Bancroft and his two fellow commissioners sailed from Gravesend on 18 April 1600. However, a persistent easterly wind meant that as late as the 29th they were still at Queenborough, in north Kent. By the time they reached Emden on 10 May the Danish commissioners were on the point of departure, their commission being about to expire, having awaited the English delegation for more than a month. Thoroughly angry, the Danes refused to confer with the newly arrived delegates unless the English rowed out to their ship, an offer which Bancroft and his colleagues rejected as humiliating. Eventually the English were forced to relent, whereupon one of their number, perhaps Bancroft himself, took to the water. On seeing this the Danes immediately spread sail and departed.

In the immediate aftermath of this fiasco, the English delegates were obliged to return home empty-handed. As a result, the governors of Hull had no choice but to renew their suit for redress later that same year. The queen did not blame Bancroft for the ignominious failure of his mission, though, but rather thanked him for undertaking the journey.

In the aftermath of this, his first and only diplomatic mission, Bancroft managed to retrieve something from the wreckage. During his short time at Emden, he had succeeded in cultivating some useful contacts in the town, where he was evidently wined and dined. Consequently, over the next few years, he was able to keep the queen’s chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, informed of events in north-west Germany, a not unimportant service in an era when reliable news was often in short supply. Bancroft may have derived a further benefit from his trip to Emden. According to the newsletter-writer John Chamberlain, a well-informed observer, he did not return to England with his two colleagues but instead travelled alone and incognito through the United Provinces. This raises the intriguing but hitherto unconsidered possibility that Bancroft, who liked to study his religious enemies up close, used the opportunity of this unplanned adventure to witness Dutch Calvinist practices at first hand. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bancroft’s trip to Emden is notable as being the last occasion on which a bishop headed a diplomatic mission until 1712-13, when John Robinson, bishop of Bristol, represented Great Britain at the Congress of Utrecht.

ADT

Further reading:

P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013)

S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962)

Although neither of these studies discusses it, Bancroft’s trip to Emden will feature in the biography now in preparation for our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords. For the bishop’s later career, see also his entry in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (Cambridge, 2021).

It has previously gone unnoticed that, during the first Elizabethan Parliament, one of the lay members of the House of Lords took his seat even though he was a prisoner of war, an occurrence which appears to be unique in the annals of English parliamentary history. The peer in question was William Grey, 13th Lord Grey of Wilton, widely regarded at the time as England’s finest soldier. Grey was the former commander of the English garrison at Guînes, in the Pas de Calais. In January 1558 the French captured Calais and laid siege to Guînes. Despite putting up a stout defence, Grey was unable to prevent the town’s capture. Following the surrender of Guînes, Grey was held prisoner in the Chateau de Sainte-Suzanne, south-east of Evron, in the Loire valley. His ransom, set at 25,000 crowns (equivalent to about £8,000 in this period or about £1.9m in today’s values), was not paid until the late summer of 1559, by which time Parliament had been dissolved. Nevertheless, Grey attended the House of Lords on at least three occasions that year, on 1, 4 and 10 February, shortly after the session began. The printed Journal (published in the early nineteenth century) also shows Grey as having been present twice more, on 13 and 17 April. However, the first of these attendances is certainly erroneous as it does not appear in the manuscript Journal. The second also seems to be a mistake, based upon a misreading by the editors of the printed Journal of the manuscript, in which the attendances are carelessly recorded for that day.

Why was Grey able to sit in the Lords, albeit briefly, while still a prisoner of the French? The answer to this intriguing question lies in the relations between England and France at the time. Following the accession of Elizabeth I in November 1558, England’s new queen was anxious to bring about an end to the war with France which she had inherited from her predecessor, her half-sister Mary I. The French king, Henri II, was no less desirous of peace. However, whereas Elizabeth expected Calais and its associated territories to be returned to England as part of any peace settlement, Henri was determined to hang on to his recent conquests. In order to put pressure on Elizabeth to agree to his terms, Henri decided to draw attention to the fact that his daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland and wife of the dauphin, had a claim to the English throne which many considered to be better than Elizabeth’s. Unless Elizabeth agreed to drop her claim to Calais, he threatened to promote Mary’s right. Rather than select a Frenchman to carry this unwelcome message, however, Henri offered the task to Lord Grey who, in late December, returned to England, ostensibly in order to attend Elizabeth’s forthcoming coronation.

The terms of Grey’s parole remain frustratingly unclear. However, according to the Venetian ambassador in Paris, Grey was required to guarantee that he would pay a ransom of 40,000 crowns if he failed to return or was prevented by the queen from doing so. From this same ambassador we also learn that Grey’s parole was limited to just two months: on 6 February 1559 he reported that a messenger from Grey had arrived in Paris confirming that the baron intended to return to France shortly.

Thanks to the Mantuan agent at the English court, we know that Grey arrived at Whitehall on the evening of 30 December 1558. Moreover, from a document drafted at the time by the queen’s chief minister, Sir William Cecil, we also know that, after some difficulty, Grey was subsequently granted two interviews by the queen. These meetings, and the discussions which surrounded them, may explain why Grey attended the 1559 Parliament only infrequently. At the first interview, Grey presented Elizabeth with a letter from the duc de Guise, the commander of the French forces which had captured Calais, in which the queen was assured that France now wanted peace. It may also have been at this meeting that Grey delivered the message from Henri II threatening to support Mary queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne if Elizabeth made difficulties over Calais. In the second interview, Grey was told to thank Guise for his letter and to say that Elizabeth, too, desired peace. However, he was to add that Elizabeth wanted to turn the clock back to 1553, when Edward VI had ascended the throne. In other words, she was not prepared to make peace unless Calais was first restored. Grey was told to send this reply in writing ‘by some gentleman well instructed’. At around the same time, Elizabeth sent two members of her Council to the Spanish ambassador to discover whether her ally, Philip II of Spain, would allow Grey to be exchanged for one of the French noble prisoners in Spanish hands. In the event, nothing came of this approach, even though Philip had by now decided, albeit reluctantly, to seek Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.

It seems likely that Grey returned to France in mid-February 1559. As we have seen, his supposed attendance in the Lords on 17 April 1559 can be discounted; he was certainly not on the jury which, three days later, tried the 2nd Lord Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth) for surrendering Calais after barely a fight. Grey remained a prisoner until his ransom was paid later that year. Interestingly, the money was provided by Elizabeth, who accepted Grey’s argument that even if he sold all the lands he owned he could never hope to raise the 25,000 crowns demanded by his captors. However, the queen, in true form, put her own financial needs first by canvassing voluntary contributions from other members of the nobility – crowdfunding before the fact. She also required Grey to pay her back and to put up part of his estate as collateral. In so doing, she condemned the baron, who died in December 1562, to serious financial hardship for the remainder of his life.

ADT

Further reading:

A commentary of the services and charges of William, Lord Grey of Wilton, K.G. by his son Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, K.G. ed. P. de Malpas Grey Egerton (Camden Society, vol. 40; 1847)

One of the most striking features of Queen Elizabeth I’s funeral, held on 28 April 1603, is that the place of Chief Mourner in the procession was taken by Helena, dowager marchioness of Northampton, a member of the privy chamber. Despite having served Elizabeth for the past thirty-six years, Helena was not English-born but a native of Sweden.

Born in about 1549, Helena (or ‘Elin’ as she signed herself before she settled in England) was the daughter of Ulf Henrikson Snakenborg, member of an old Swedish baronial family, and Agneta Knutson, also of aristocratic stock. Helena’s parents enjoyed considerable standing in Sweden. In fact, their marriage five years earlier had been held at Stockholm Castle, in the presence of the king and queen. Not surprisingly, by the mid-1560s their daughter Helena was a maid of honour to Princess Cecilia, sister to the then king of Sweden, Eric XIV.

In September 1565 Helena, aged about 16, accompanied the princess on a fruitless mission to England to persuade Queen Elizabeth to marry King Eric. Cecilia and her entourage were lodged at Bedford House, on the Strand, where they were visited by leading members of the English court. Among the more regular callers was the 53-year old William Parr, marquess of Northampton, the childless brother of Elizabeth I’s late stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr. In all likelihood, Northampton was a keen exponent of a Swedish match, just like his second wife, Elizabeth Brooke (daughter of William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham), who had died of breast cancer five months earlier. However, concern for the queen’s marriage was not the only reason Northampton was drawn to Bedford House. The marquess soon began to take an interest in Helena’s welfare, beginning with arranging for her medical treatment, as she was ill by the time she arrived in England. Despite the age difference Northampton fell in love with Helena, who was reportedly ‘very beautiful’. Before the year was out Helena accepted Northampton’s offer of marriage. However, as a letter to her mother makes clear, Helena’s feelings were affectionate rather than amorous: ‘the marquess has been both father and mother to me’, she explained, and ‘most kind in every detail’.

Following Princess Cecilia’s departure for the Continent in May 1566, Helena remained in England, cared for by eight or ten of Northampton’s servants. However, the planned marriage was placed on hold because of the queen’s disapproval. Though Northampton was now a widower following the death of his second wife Elizabeth Brooke, his adulterous first wife, Anne Bourchier, was still alive. In 1548 a royal commission, headed by Archbishop Cranmer, had concluded that Anne’s unfaithfulness had ended their union. However, the queen disagreed, oddly, as she never challenged the legitimacy of Northampton’s marriage to Elizabeth Brooke, with whom she was great friends. For the queen, there could be no question of Northampton marrying Helena until Anne was dead. When, in November 1566, Northampton joined the chorus of voices demanding that she take a husband, Elizabeth retorted that the marquess would be better advised thinking of arguments to persuade her to let him remarry ‘instead of mincing words with her’.

Helena and Northampton finally reached the altar on 6 May 1571, four months after Anne’s death. The ceremony was held in the Chapel Royal, and the queen danced at the wedding feast, which was followed by two days of jousting. However, the marriage proved to be short-lived, as Northampton died just five months later. Northampton’s demise threatened to spell disaster for Helena, as the marquess had neglected to provide his new wife with a jointure, and his entire estate, worth about £1,200 per annum, escheated to the crown. Fortunately for Helena, Queen Elizabeth took pity on the marquess’ young widow. She not only paid for Northampton’s funeral but also assigned Helena lands worth £400 a year. Additionally, at some point Helena was admitted to the privy chamber. Perhaps because of this Helena met the man who was soon to become her second husband, Thomas Gorges. Thirteen years her senior, Gorges was a Wiltshire landowner and one of the grooms of the privy chamber.

The social gulf between Gorges and Helena, who continued to be known as the marchioness of Northampton, was considerable. It was not unknown for women of a high social rank to marry beneath them. In fact, before Elizabeth’s accession Katherine Brandon, dowager duchess of Suffolk had taken Richard Bertie, a Lincolnshire gentleman, as her second husband. However, the queen looked askance at such matches. Realizing that Elizabeth would never agree to their marriage, the couple took matters into their own hands and sometime in 1576 they were secretly wed. When the queen discovered this she was naturally furious. Helena was banished to Gorges’ house in the Whitefriars, while Gorges himself was jailed. However, Elizabeth’s anger eventually subsided and within a year or so she had become reconciled to the match. In January 1578 she and Gorges exchanged New Year gifts; six months later, Elizabeth stood as godmother at the baptism of the couple’s first child, prudently christened Elizabeth.

Helena retained Queen Elizabeth’s favour for the rest of the reign. Formally, at least, her duties were limited, partly because she was an unwaged member of the privy chamber but also because of her gender. Behind the scenes, though, she may have been more active than has previously been supposed. In 1582 her husband was dispatched to Sweden on a mission to recover certain debts owed by the Swedish king, John III. There is no evidence that Helena remained in England. Her presence in Sweden may have been considered essential, as Gorges would not have been selected for this delicate mission had it not been for his wife’s intimate knowledge of the Swedish court. Helena can certainly be glimpsed alongside her husband in September 1586, when Gorges was entrusted with the task of conveying Mary, Queen of Scots from Chartley to Tixall, both in Staffordshire. Mary, fearing that her plotting against Elizabeth had been discovered, reportedly ‘raged and stormed, and showered invectives on Gorges and his mistress’. That same year, Gorges became responsible for the queen’s robes. It seems unlikely that Helena did not share in her husband’s official duties.

Following Elizabeth’s death, Helena lost her position at court. This cannot have been entirely unexpected, especially as Anne, the new queen consort, was Danish, and Denmark and Sweden were longstanding enemies. Nevertheless, in 1605 Helena and her husband were granted the keepership of Richmond Park for life. On the death of Gorges in 1610, Helena largely retired from public view. She lived on until April 1635, dying at Redlynch, in Somerset, the home of her youngest son Sir Robert Gorges, who sat in three parliaments during the late 1620s. At her request, Helena was buried alongside ‘my dear and late husband Sir Thomas Gorges’ in Salisbury Cathedral.

A.T

Further reading:

Charles Angell Bradford, Helena, Marchioness of Northampton (London, 1936)

Raymond Gorges, The Story of a family through eleven centuries illustrated by portraits and pedigrees, being a history of the family of Gorges (Boston, 1944)

The last of the Fitzalans, Earl Henry was a member of one of the oldest aristocratic dynasties in England. Indeed, his family had held the earldom of Arundel since the early thirteenth century. He was also extremely wealthy, having a large estate in Sussex, with other lands scattered throughout southern England. Born in 1512, three years after the accession of Henry VIII, Arundel first achieved high office in 1546, when he was appointed lord chamberlain. However, it was under Mary I that he attained a position of great prominence, as Mary, thankful for his support against Lady Jane Grey, promoted him to lord steward and also made him lord president of the Privy Council.

Seniority of rank was no guide to ability, of course. Contemporary observers regarded Arundel as a light-weight. The Imperial ambassador, for example, thought him ‘silly’, while Spanish diplomats considered him ‘flighty’ and ‘weak’. He was certainly unable to control his temper and did not like to be contradicted. On one occasion early in Elizabeth I’s reign he and the lord admiral, Lord Clinton, quarrelled so vehemently that they ‘fell to fisticuffs and grabbing each other’s beards’, to the considerable embarrassment of the queen, who witnessed this childish behaviour. However, it would be a mistake to write off Arundel as inconsequential.

Despite his character flaws, Arundel was an important figure at the Elizabethan court because he was regarded as potentially dangerous. His wealth and landed estate made him powerful. So too did his connections: until recently he had been father-in-law to the queen’s cousin, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer. There was also the fact that, like many members of the ancient nobility, Arundel clung to the Catholic faith. Unless handled carefully, he might easily become a rallying point for disaffected members of the nobility and gentry alike. He was certainly a popular figure. When, in April 1567, he travelled to London through Kent, having spent some time in northern Italy, he was accompanied by six or seven hundred members of the gentry of Kent, Surrey and Sussex. By the time he reached the capital, his entourage had reportedly swollen to more than 2,000, including many of London’s aldermen and several of his fellow nobles.

From the very start of her reign, Elizabeth had the good sense to treat Arundel with kid gloves. When Arundel, then one of the commissioners entrusted with the task of negotiating a peace with France, returned to England without her permission in late 1559, Elizabeth neither upbraided him nor sent him back. On the contrary, she let his presumption go unpunished and instead confirmed him in office as lord steward. She also allowed him to retain his seat on the Privy Council, whereas four other Catholics lost theirs, among them Arundel’s Sussex neighbour, Viscount Montagu. Moreover, she allowed Arundel to play a central role in her coronation, appointing him lord high steward and constable of England for the occasion.

One reason Elizabeth trod so carefully was that she could not afford to alienate such a powerful Catholic peer before she secured parliamentary approval for the restoration of the royal supremacy and the Protestant faith. Arundel might otherwise serve as the focus of Catholic opposition in the Lords. This consideration probably explains why, before Parliament met, Elizabeth encouraged Arundel to believe that she might marry him, despite the more than twenty-year difference in their ages. The earl was completely taken in by this deception, and showered the queen’s ladies-in-waiting with jewels in the hope that they would further his suit. A few weeks after Parliament assembled in January 1559, Arundel made himself scarce, pleading illness, presumably to avoid incurring the queen’s displeasure, as he would have found it difficult to avoid allying himself in Parliament with fellow Catholic peers opposed to the reintroduction of Protestantism. Although he resumed his seat some weeks later, he quickly withdrew again.

Arundel seems to have been slow to discover that he had been deceived. As late as August 1559, in a bold attempt to win the queen’s hand, he lavishly entertained the queen at Nonsuch, the former royal palace he had bought from Queen Mary. However, the following year he learned that Elizabeth was amorously involved with Lord Robert Dudley. Thereafter, he proved to be something of a thorn in the queen’s side, though it soon became clear that he was less dangerous than was at first feared.

Arundel, in fact, was his own worst enemy. In July 1564 he lost his temper with the queen and surrendered his staff of office, for which offence he was placed under house arrest for the next five months. He thereby deprived himself of his key position at court. Sullen and resentful, he spent the next few years trying to avoid matters of state. However, he returned to the fray in 1569, when he and the duke of Norfolk began plotting with the Spanish ambassador to overthrow the queen’s chief minister, William Cecil, whom they blamed for Elizabeth’s hostility to her heir apparent, Mary, Queen of Scots. Arundel saw in Mary, by now Elizabeth’s prisoner, the best chance of restoring England to the Catholic faith. However, neither he nor Norfolk was ever able to deliver the coup they promised as they proved unable to win over Dudley, now earl of Leicester.

The following year Arundel became implicated in a plot to marry Norfolk to Mary, which Elizabeth considered treasonable. Indeed, according to Norfolk, the plan actually originated with Arundel. As a result, Arundel was once again placed under restraint, and only released in April 1570, after the suppression of the rebellion of the Northern Earls, the first serious Catholic conspiracy of the reign. Between September 1571 and December 1572 he was again imprisoned, this time in the Tower of London, after it was discovered that he was closely involved in the Ridolfi Plot, a Spanish-backed scheme which aimed to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. However, his life, unlike Norfolk’s, was spared as it was clearly Norfolk who posed the major threat. Following his release, Arundel was permitted to resume his seat on the Council. This was a surprising decision, perhaps, but as Dr Neil Younger has recently shown, the Elizabethan Privy Council was never the sole preserve of Protestants but included many Catholics and crypto-Catholics, among them the well-known Sir Christopher Hatton. Besides, it may have been expected that Arundel would not live much longer as by then he was in poor health. In fact, he did not die until February 1580, whereupon his lands and titles descended to Philip Howard, the eldest son of his fellow conspirator, the late duke of Norfolk.

ADT

Further reading:

Neil Younger, ‘How Protestant was the Elizabethan Regime?’, English Historical Review, vol. 133 (2018)

Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity (1998)

Wallace MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (1969)

On 10 October 1562 Elizabeth I, England’s 29-year old queen, the last of the Tudors, was suddenly taken ill at Hampton Court Palace. By 16 October it was clear she was suffering from smallpox, which had recently claimed the life of the young countess of Bedford. So severe was her condition that her courtiers supposed that her death was imminent. The queen herself shared this fear, as she urged the Privy Council to appoint as Lord Protector her favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, in the event of her demise. Somehow, though, she pulled through. By 25 October she was on her feet again.

What would have happened had Elizabeth, like Mary II in 1694, succumbed to smallpox? Who would have succeeded her, given that she was unmarried, childless and lacked surviving siblings? And what would have been the implications of her death for the recent restoration of Protestantism? Would England have returned to the Catholic fold, as it had in 1553, following the short reign of the Protestant boy king Edward VI? Or would the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 have endured in some form?

On paper at least, the rightful successor to Elizabeth was her first cousin once removed, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary was the direct descendant of Henry VIII’s eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, and already considered herself the rightful Queen of England, on the grounds that Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate following the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn in 1536. However, Mary was a committed Catholic. As such, she posed an existential threat, both to the Elizabethan religious settlement and to the lives and careers of many on the Privy Council, including the queen’s chief minister, Sir William Cecil, who were not eager to return to the persecution of Protestants that had characterized the reign of Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I. Pointing to the will of Henry VIII, which specifically barred the descendants of Margaret Tudor from the succession, they therefore resolved to set aside the claims of Queen Mary. This had the effect of forcing one of the leading Catholic members of the Council, the Lord Treasurer, William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, to advance instead the candidacy of Margaret, Countess of Lennox, the daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage (to the 6th Earl of Angus). Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, whose accession threatened not only the Protestant religious settlement but also the intrusion of Scots into English affairs, the Countess of Lennox had the advantage of being English-born. However, her Catholicism made her no less unacceptable to English Protestants.

Since a Catholic claimant to the throne was ruled out by a majority on the Privy Council, who else was in the running to succeed Elizabeth? Perhaps the strongest candidate was the 25-year-old Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. Directly descended from George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV and Richard III, Huntingdon was the sole remaining Yorkist claimant to the throne. Huntingdon enjoyed impeccable religious credentials, having been educated alongside Edward VI, which made him acceptable to leading Protestant noblemen like William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford and Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. He was the brother-in-law of the royal favourite, Lord Robert Dudley and the latter’s brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Between them, Huntingdon, Norfolk, Pembroke, Bedford, Warwick and Dudley controlled much of the Midlands, East Anglia, South Wales and South-West England.

Huntingdon was not the only Protestant claimant available, though, as Lady Katherine Grey, the eldest surviving great-granddaughter of Henry VII and sister of the nine days’ queen, Lady Jane Grey, also enjoyed widespread support. Her claim was arguably stronger than Huntingdon’s, as she was the direct descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, whose heirs were favoured by Henry VIII’s will. Lady Katherine was married to the Wiltshire-based Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford. She also enjoyed the backing of the Lord Chamberlain, William Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, who exercised influence in Surrey. Moreover, when Parliament met in 1563, it also became apparent that she enjoyed considerable support in the House of Commons. However, her candidacy was not without its complications. The legitimacy of her marriage to Hertford was questionable, and she herself was then a prisoner in the Tower for having married without royal approval. Moreover, if Lady Katherine were to be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor, what would be the status of her putative husband, Hertford? Would he accept that he was merely the queen’s consort, or would he demand, like Mary I’s husband, Philip II of Spain, to be recognized as king in his own right?

Because there were two non-Catholic claimants to the throne rather than one, there was a risk that Elizabeth’s death in 1562 would have precipitated civil war. However, mutual self-interest suggests that the two sides were unlikely ever to have come to blows for fear that the ultimate beneficiary would be Mary Queen of Scots. Although Mary had been ruled out of contention by the Privy Council, she might still have tried to take the throne by force. Until recently, she had been married to the French king, François II, who had endorsed her claim to the English throne. Although François was now dead, and his successor was preoccupied with a rebellion of the prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny, this did not mean that Mary would not eventually be able to call upon French support. In March 1563 peace returned to France, in time for the start of the new campaigning season.

Faced with the threat of a Franco-Scottish invasion, the two Protestant candidates for the throne, Huntingdon and Lady Katherine Grey, would either have been forced to bury their differences or fight in the hope of eliminating their rival quickly. In this power struggle, Huntingdon would have quickly gained the upper hand, as his backers were arguably stronger than Katherine’s and Katherine would still have been a prisoner in the Tower on Elizabeth’s death. The outcome of the ensuing struggle between Huntingdon and Mary Queen of Scots is perhaps less certain. However, it is probable that Mary would have been defeated. Her cause would have elicited little support among English Catholics, whose spiritual leaders, the Marian bishops, were under lock and key. Moreover, in the north of England, where Catholicism remained strong, anti-Scottish sentiments would probably have trumped hatred of Protestantism. Mary, too, could not have counted on the solid support of her Scottish subjects. During her absence in France, the Scottish Parliament had embraced the Protestant reformation. In all likelihood, therefore, many of Mary’s countrymen would have taken up arms against her. Of course, Mary’s side would probably have been bolstered by forces provided by France. However, in the recent Anglo-Scottish conflict of 1559-60, the Scots had suffered defeat despite French support. All this means that Elizabeth I’s death in 1562 was unlikely to have resulted in a Stuart succession and an early union of the crowns of England and Scotland.

Elizabeth’s most likely successor, then, was not Mary but Huntingdon. As Huntingdon lived on until 1604, there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he would have held the throne for the next forty years. What might then have occurred we cannot easily guess. However, we do know that Huntingdon’s wife never bore him any children. That alone is grounds for supposing that the early years of Huntingdon’s reign would have been characterized by a succession crisis not dissimilar to the one actually experienced by Elizabeth following her narrow brush with death. Sooner or later, ‘Henry IX’, like Henry VIII before him, would have come under pressure to annul his marriage and take another wife. In that event, his chief supporters, the Dudley brothers, might have experienced a fall akin to the one that had destroyed their father, the Duke of Northumberland in 1553.

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Further reading (for those who enjoy counterfactual history):

Conrad Russell, ‘The Catholic Wind’ in Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (London and Ronceverte, 1990)

Geoffrey Parker, ‘If the Armada had landed’, History, vol. 61, no. 203 (1976)

Katherine Willoughby was the only child of Lincolnshire’s leading magnate, William, eleventh Baron Willoughby, and Lady Maria de Salinas, one of the ladies-in-waiting to the queen consort, Katherine of Aragon, after whom their daughter was named. In 1526, aged five or six, she inherited her father’s lands and title, despite the pretensions of her uncle, Sir Christopher Willoughby, the eleventh baron’s next male heir. One reason for this was that inheritance of the Willoughby title was limited to the heirs of the body of each successive Lord Willoughby. Another was that Katherine’s interests were protected by the king’s friend and former brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, who acquired her wardship. Suffolk’s intentions were far from altruistic, and in 1533 he married Katherine, thereby gaining control of her estates himself.

During the 1530s Katherine and her husband Suffolk embraced the new Protestant faith, having fallen under the influence of Hugh Latimer, who became bishop of Worcester in 1535. Latimer remained important to Katherine even after Suffolk’s death in 1545. For instance, in 1552 he stayed for a while at her Lincolnshire residence of Grimsthorpe Castle, where he preached a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer. Katherine was therefore dismayed when, following the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553, England returned to the Catholic fold. A contemptuous Katherine subsequently named one of her dogs after Stephen Gardiner, the Marian bishop of Winchester, and had it carried around dressed in clerical vestments. Not surprisingly, she fled soon thereafter, first to Germany then to Poland, joining her new husband, Richard Bertie, a minor gentleman from Kent who shared her religious convictions. The couple did not return to England until 1559, by which time a new Protestant monarch, Elizabeth I, was on the throne.

Although Katherine was glad that England had returned to the Protestant faith, she quickly became disenchanted with the requirement that all clergy wear ecclesiastical vestments. Like other radical Protestants (known as puritans), she regarded these items as popish. During the 1560s Katherine became a focus for puritan discontent, not only in the diocese of Lincoln, where she enjoyed the right to appoint the minister in no fewer than 14 parishes, but also in London, where she controlled the parish of Holy Trinity Minories. Situated near the Tower of London, Holy Trinity Minories has been described as a seed bed for puritan preachers. During the late 1560s the puritan radical John Field often preached there. So too did Miles Coverdale who, though he had served as a bishop under Edward VI, was not appointed to the episcopate by Elizabeth. Coverdale lodged with Katherine, and until his death in 1569 he served as preacher and tutor to her children.

Katherine clearly helped to foster the growing puritan movement in England thanks to her own religious convictions and her status as an independently wealthy aristocratic woman. However, that is not her only claim to fame. Thanks to her, in 1571 the earldom of Kent, which had been in abeyance for 47 years, was restored to the Grey family.

Katherine’s interest in this matter stemmed from the fact that in 1570 her only daughter, Susan Bertie, married Reynold Grey, who lived at St Giles Cripplegate, just next door to Holy Trinity Minories. Reynold Grey believed with good reason that he was the rightful earl of Kent. The earldom had lapsed in 1524 on the death of Richard Grey, 3rd earl of Kent, who had sold off much of his estate to pay his debts despite having no legal right to do so. By rights the earldom should then have passed to Richard’s next male relative, Sir Henry Grey (Reynold’s grandfather). However, many of the courtiers who benefited from the 3rd earl’s illegal land sales persuaded the king that, as Sir Henry was only the half-brother of the 3rd earl, his title was not good.

By July 1570, Katherine had taken up her new son-in-law’s cause. She lobbied the queen’s chief minister, William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley, who was sympathetic as he was keen to expand the peerage. However, the question of restoring the Kent earldom was inevitably bound up with a far knottier problem, the restoration of the family’s estate. Many of the lands alienated by the 3rd earl had been bought by the crown. It soon became clear that, while the queen was perfectly prepared to acknowledge Reynold as earl of Kent, she was not willing to return his family’s former lands to him. Indeed, she suspected that Grey’s real aim in claiming the title was to lay his hands on the lands. Consequently, towards the end of 1571, Katherine offered on her son-in-law’s behalf to give Elizabeth a full release ‘of all such lands in her hands, only requiring her favour that he might by order of her laws enjoy his right against his equals’. It was this offer by Katherine that finally did the trick. On 30 Dec. 1571 the queen informed Grey that she now acknowledged him as earl of Kent.

Katherine’s central role in restoring the earldom of Kent was quickly forgotten. During the late 1590s, Reynold’s brother Henry, 6th earl of Kent, fell out with Reynold’s widow, Susan Bertie, accusing her of holding onto jewels that were Grey family heirlooms. She in turn accused him of ingratitude, saying that had it not been for the strenuous efforts of her mother, Katherine, who had died in 1580, ‘the defendant had not now been earl of Kent’. Kent, however, was too proud to admit the truth of this. He claimed instead that the earldom of Kent had fallen into abeyance because his grandfather Sir Henry Grey had decided not to use the title, having inherited little from the 3rd earl with which to maintain the dignity. The 6th earl thereby perpetrated a falsehood which has lasted almost to the present day.

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Further reading:

Evelyn Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk: a Portrait (London, 1962)

S. Wabuda, ‘Bertie [née Willoughby; other married name Brandon], Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online

By the early 1590s, Elizabeth I’s long-serving chief minister, William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley, was in his early seventies and plagued with ill health. However, he had had the foresight to train his second son, Robert Cecil, to succeed him. Then in his late twenties, Robert was no less clever and capable than his father. However, he was subject to widespread disdain at court, having inherited from his mother a twisted spine, which shortened his stature and gave him a hunchback, a condition known as scoliosis. Even the queen, who valued his services, referred to him as her ‘pygmy’.

Cecil’s right to assume his father’s mantle might nevertheless have gone unchallenged had it not been for Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex. Slightly more than two years Cecil’s junior, Essex was still a boy when he succeeded to the earldom of Essex in 1576. For the next ten years he was the ward of Lord Burghley. Indeed, for a short time he was educated in Burghley’s household at the latter’s country house, Theobalds in Hertfordshire. However, following his mother’s remarriage in 1578, he also became stepson to the royal favourite, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Burghley’s principal competitor for the ear of the queen at court. Leicester, who commanded the English forces in the Netherlands in 1585-6, trained Essex in the martial arts. Lacking a son of his own, he also groomed him as his successor. In this he proved successful. Following the attainment of his majority in 1586, Essex, now a handsome young man, became a constant companion of the queen, who appointed him Master of the Horse.

Following Leicester’s death in 1588, Essex initially remained on good terms with Burghley, who was naturally eager to encourage his former ward to carve out for himself a martial career rather than remain at court. Thanks to Burghley, he was granted command of the English forces sent in 1591 to Normandy to assist the French king, Henri IV, against Spain and her French allies, the Catholic League. However, the Rouen campaign was a failure, as the queen kept Essex short of men and money and twice recalled him to England.

At this point the relationship between Essex and the Cecils began to sour. On his return to England in January 1592, an angry and disenchanted Essex discovered to his dismay that, during his absence, Robert Cecil had been appointed to the Privy Council. By contrast, all he had to show for his efforts was a pile of debts. He thereupon resolved to direct his efforts at improving his position at court and his standing with the queen. He began by setting up a network of intelligence agents to rival Burghley’s. His efforts did not go unnoticed, for in February 1593 the queen appointed him to the Privy Council. However, this promotion, though it now gave him the same status as Robert Cecil, did not satisfy Essex. As Prof. Paul Hammer has argued, he now aimed to ensure that when Burghley died he, not Cecil, would become the queen’s first minister.

Over the next few years, the rivalry between Essex and the Cecils split the court along factional lines, something that had not been seen in thirty years. As the French diplomat André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse remarked in 1597, ‘a man who was of the Lord Treasurer’s party was sure to be among the enemies of the earl’. Essex’s followers included many of the younger, disaffected members of the nobility, among them Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton and Robert Radcliffe, 5th earl of Sussex, who resented the power of the parvenu Cecils. They also included many army officers. The Cecils, by contrast, enjoyed the support of many of their fellow privy councillors, including the Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, 2nd Lord Howard of Effingham. Perhaps inevitably, some of Essex’s followers remarked on Robert Cecil’s physical disfigurement.

An important aspect of the conflict between the two sides was patronage. When, in 1597 the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports died, Essex and the Cecils competed with one another to secure the office for their respective nominees. There was also continual jockeying for position by the main protagonists. In 1595, for example, Burghley, taking advantage of Essex’s temporary discomfiture at court, urged the queen to appoint Robert Cecil secretary of state. The promotion was prevented by Essex, who understood that were Cecil to be appointed his own chances of succeeding Burghley as chief minister would be greatly lessened.

In this struggle, Essex placed himself at a serious disadvantage. Unlike Robert Cecil, whose physique and temperament were ill-suited to martial affairs, the earl remained committed to winning military glory for himself. This earned him praise among his fellow noblemen as well as popularity in the nation at large but it necessarily required him to be often absent from court. Naturally, these absences were exploited by the Cecils. In 1596, while Essex was helping to lead the English assault on Cadiz, Robert Cecil was finally appointed secretary of state. The following year, while the earl led an expedition to the Azores, the queen advanced the Cecils’ ally, Lord Howard of Effingham, to an earldom. Essex was furious, because the new earl of Nottingham’s patent of creation suggested that Howard alone was responsible for the English victory at Cadiz the previous year. To add insult to injury, Nottingham was appointed Lord Steward, which gave him precedence over Essex. On his return to England in October 1597, Essex was so angry that he withdrew from court and refused to attend Parliament, pleading illness. His pride was only salved after the queen appointed him Earl Marshal and Nottingham resigned as Lord Steward, thus restoring to Essex the pre-eminent position which he craved.

Ironically, Essex’s chance of succeeding Burghley as the queen’s chief minister was ruined not by his absence but by his presence. In late June or early July 1598 Essex clashed with the Cecils over the appointment of a new Irish lord deputy. Unusually, each side was keen that the office should be bestowed on one of the other’s supporters so as to avoid weakening their own positions at court. However, when the queen ridiculed Essex’s suggestion that the post be bestowed on Sir George Carew, Essex angrily turned his back on her, only to be hit over the head by Elizabeth for his rudeness. Essex thereupon reached for his sword, but was restrained by a horrified Nottingham. According to a later account, Essex stalked from the room, declaring that he would not put up with such an affront, and that the queen ‘was as crooked in her disposition as in her carcass’.

His subsequent refusal to apologize to Elizabeth ensured that Essex was ill-placed to benefit greatly from the distribution of offices which necessarily followed Burghley’s death on 4 August 1598. It also enabled Robert Cecil to slip effortlessly into his late father’s shoes, an extraordinary accomplishment; between them the Cecils dominated the English political scene for almost 54 years. For Essex, though, this was not quite the end of the matter. In February 1601 the earl tried to overthrow Cecil by force. However, his rebellion was easily suppressed. Later that month he ended his days on the block, only the third member of the English nobility to be executed by Elizabeth.

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Further reading:

P.E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-1597 (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

De Maisse: A Journal of all that was accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in England from King Henri IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597 ed. G.B. Harrison and R.A. Jones (Nonsuch Press, Bloomsbury, 1931)

At Richmond Palace on 24 November 1586, four hundred and twenty-six years ago to the day, Elizabeth I delivered a speech which profoundly disappointed her listeners. After almost four weeks of intense parliamentary activity, the delegation sent to hear her reply to a petition from both Houses had expected better than to receive an ‘answer answerless’, as Elizabeth herself described it.

The Parliament of 1586-7 – the sixth of Elizabeth’s reign – had been called after the discovery of the Babington Plot, whereby Elizabeth’s prisoner, the deposed Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, had plotted to murder Elizabeth and take the throne for herself. The purpose of the Parliament, summoned at the behest of Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley and his fellow privy councillors, was to decide what to do with Mary, who had been convicted by a jury of English noblemen and sentenced to death shortly before Parliament met. Unlike her Parliament, however, Elizabeth was reluctant to order the execution of a fellow monarch, for reasons both political and personal. Mary was not only a kinswoman but also the heir-apparent. Elizabeth was worried, too, that Mary’s execution would merely fuel the claim, widely expressed in Continental Catholic courts, that England’s Queen was a tyrant and worthy of death herself. And while most of Elizabeth’s Protestant subjects believed that their Queen would only be safe if Mary were to be executed, Elizabeth herself feared that execution of her rival would merely increase the risk to her own safety. Caught between the danger involved in not executing Mary and the peril she faced if she did, Elizabeth did what she did best: she prevaricated. The result was her ‘answer answerless’, in which she declared that she would neither agree to order Mary’s execution nor decline to do so. She thereby wrong-footed Lord Burghley, who had tried to use Parliament to force Elizabeth to order the Scottish Queen’s death and was now compelled to employ underhand means to secure Mary’s execution. As a result, he incurred the wrath of Elizabeth and his own temporary banishment from Court.

The evasive nature of the ‘answer answerless’, and Elizabeth’s thwarting of Burghley, were arguably the two most striking features of the 1586-7 Parliament. However, there were two significant points of difference between this assembly and most other parliaments, both of which also deserve our attention.

The first was that this Parliament was summoned almost immediately after the dissolution of its predecessor. Elizabeth, like her predecessors, usually left an interval of three or four years between meetings of Parliament. By contrast, for the first time in English history, an interval of just one day separated the dissolution of the 1584-5 Parliament on 14 September 1586 and the summons of the 1586-7 Parliament. (Not until 1690, following the Glorious Revolution, did the practice of summoning one Parliament hot on the heels of another become established.) The reason for this departure from customary practice was the urgent need to deal with Mary Queen of Scots, which was considered incompatible with the continued existence of the 1584-5 Parliament. Mary’s involvement in the Babington Plot was exposed in August 1586, but the prorogued 1584-5 Parliament was not due to reconvene until 14 November 1586. As no mechanism for shortening a prorogation existed – not until 1667, following the Dutch Raid on the Medway, was the solution of holding an extra-sessional meeting devised – the Council urged the Queen to dissolve the 1584-5 Parliament and summon a fresh assembly which, it was planned, would meet on 15 October, one full month before the 1584-5 Parliament had been due to reconvene.

The second extraordinary difference between the 1586-7 assembly and all other parliaments was Elizabeth’s decision to distance herself from the meeting. When the new Parliament finally opened on 29 October 1586 it was without the Queen who, though in good health, remained at Richmond. No English monarch before or since has ever failed to attend the State Opening for reasons other than physical or mental infirmity. It seems likely that Elizabeth’s decision, which was reached as early as 4 October, aroused strong opposition in the Council, for on 26 October Burghley reported that Elizabeth would now open Parliament in person after all. In the event, Elizabeth reverted to her original plan, so leaving Parliament to be opened by Burghley and two of his fellow ministers, acting as commissioners for the Queen.

Elizabeth’s refusal to attend the State Opening, and her continued residence thereafter at Richmond, led to widespread speculation that the Queen was afraid that returning to the capital would invite assassination. There were certainly good grounds for the belief that the danger remained: although the 14 conspirators involved in the Babington Plot had already been put to death, another assassination plot was uncovered in January 1587. Elizabeth naturally denied that her absence from Westminster was occasioned by fears for her safety, telling a parliamentary deputation on 12 November that the real reason was grief, as she could not bear to be repeatedly reminded of Mary’s crimes. A less plausible explanation would be hard to imagine.

Aside from considerations of personal safety, probably the main reason Elizabeth chose to distance herself from Parliament was that she wanted to avoid incriminating herself on the European stage. She hoped that someone else would rid her of Mary, so that she might avoid the blame. This was not entirely unreasonable, as many members of the gentry and nobility had previously sworn to hunt down and kill anyone who attempted to assassinate the Queen (the Bond of Association, 1584-5). Elizabeth later expressed disappointment that Mary’s gaoler, Sir Amias Paulet, who had taken the Oath, had not quietly murdered the Scottish Queen. Elizabeth did not want to be seen as complicit in regicide and bitterly resented Parliament’s expectation that she herself would wield the knife. Her desire to keep Mary at arm’s length was evident even before Parliament met. In the wake of the discovery of the Babington Plot, Mary had not been placed in the Tower and tried in Westminster Hall, as would normally have been the case for such a high-profile prisoner. Instead, she was transferred to Fotheringhay Castle, in Northamptonshire, where her trial (and ultimately her execution) took place, well away from Elizabeth, London and Westminster.

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Further reading:

Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots (1969)

Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (1960)

Read more from our First Elizabethan Age blog series here.

On 1 February 1587 Sir Francis Walsingham and his fellow Secretary of State, William Davison, wrote on behalf of Elizabeth I to the privy councillor Sir Amias Paulet, one of the gaolers of the deposed Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, who had fled to England more than twenty years earlier and had recently been judged guilty of plotting to overthrow and murder Elizabeth. In this letter – perhaps the most extraordinary ever to have been written at the behest of an English monarch – Paulet was informed that Elizabeth ‘doth note in you a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looketh for at your hands’. The Queen was astonished that though Paulet had been Mary’s gaoler for more than two years, he had not yet, in all that time, ‘found out some way to shorten the life’ of Mary, whose continued existence posed a very great threat, not only to Elizabeth herself but also to ‘religion and the public good’. Mary, after all, had made no secret of the fact that she considered herself the rightful Queen of England, or that she desired to return Protestant England to the Catholic faith.

For those of us brought up to regard England’s most famous Queen in an heroic light, it is sobering to learn that Elizabeth expressly advocated the murder of her Scottish cousin. However, the murder of royalty was hardly unknown in England, as Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI and the uncrowned Edward V had all been quietly dispatched. Even so, those responsible were normally careful to leave nothing in writing that might incriminate them. In this case, however, Elizabeth felt no such compunction. That is because, in her view, she was not asking Paulet to commit murder. As she observed, Paulet already had ‘good … warrant and ground’ for quietly dispatching Mary, because he had taken the Oath of Association of 1584. Formulated in the aftermath of the assassination of the Dutch Protestant leader William the Silent, and given statutory authority by the Parliament of 1584-5, the Oath required all those who took it to eliminate anyone who tried to kill Elizabeth. As Mary had recently been tried and found guilty of conspiring with Anthony Babington and other English Catholics to overthrow and murder Elizabeth, Paulet was duty-bound to end the life of his prisoner without further ado.

Unsurprisingly, Paulet did not share Elizabeth’s view of his obligations in respect of the Oath. On receiving the Queen’s rebuke, he penned a response that has become justly famous: ‘God forbid that I should make such a shipwreck of conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, [as] to shed blood without law or warrant’. Elizabeth, though, was furious at Paulet’s refusal to take matters into his own hands. She stormed at ‘the niceness of those precise fellows who in words would do great things but in deed perform nothing’. As she saw it, Paulet’s dereliction of duty meant that the responsibility for killing Mary now fell to her.

Elizabeth’s reluctance to execute Mary was partly informed by a horror of taking direct responsibility for killing a fellow queen and a close relative – Mary was her first cousin once removed. It also owed something to a desire not to play into Mary’s hands by turning her into a Catholic martyr. However, the main reason Elizabeth wished to do away with Mary secretly was that she feared how the news of her involvement in Mary’s death would be received in Paris and Edinburgh. Now that England was at war with Spain, Elizabeth was anxious to avoid antagonizing either France (where Mary was a former queen consort) or Scotland (where Mary was a former queen regnant) by executing a fellow monarch. Were Mary to be killed as a result of private enterprise rather than state action, Elizabeth could hope to assuage the wrath of these foreign powers by blaming her death upon the zeal of one of her subjects. A state execution, on the other hand, seemed to offer Elizabeth little prospect of pleading innocence. It would also provide her enemies with the perfect justification for carrying out further attempts on her own life.

Elizabeth’s desire for Mary to be killed secretly was not shared by her chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This was ironic, to say the least, as Burghley was one of the architects of the Bond of Association, which had authorized the killing of anyone who threatened the life of Elizabeth. Like other members of the Council, Burghley considered it important that Mary should die at the hands of the public executioner. When in November 1586 Parliament prepared a petition urging the Queen to execute Mary, Burghley struck out a long reference to the Bond of Association lest it should encourage Elizabeth to cling to the hope that one of her enterprising subjects would make it unnecessary for her to sign Mary’s death warrant. However, in the short term, Burghley was beating his head against a brick wall, as before the beginning of February 1587, Elizabeth declined to append her signature to the warrant. Even after she did sign it, she decided not to issue the warrant until she had first put pressure on Sir Amias Paulet to take Mary’s life.

What happened next is well known: Burghley and his fellow councillors issued the warrant without the Queen’s knowledge and Mary was executed on 8 February. Elizabeth was livid, because Mary’s death would now, inevitably, be laid at her door. Burghley was temporarily banished from the royal presence, and William Davison was deprived of office, tried, imprisoned and fined. However, for Elizabeth the matter had actually worked out rather well. By acting independently, Burghley and his colleagues had given the Queen what she wanted. Not only had they succeeded in ridding her of the threat posed by Mary, they had also ensured that she could deny direct responsibility for Mary’s death.

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Further reading:

Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots (1969)

J. Wormald, Mary, Queen of Scots: a Study in Failure (1988)