Leicester, Cecil and the marital intrigues of the
Queen of Scots
While at times they worked together amicably to achieve a result both men considered to be in
the best interests of Elizabeth and England, Leicester and Cecil were often at
odds. During the early years of Marie
Stuart's personal rule after she returned to Scotland as Dowager Queen of
France, Cecil brokered a plan to marry Dudley to the widowed Scottish queen,
and Elizabeth endorsed the project, even suggesting that the threesome might
live together for part of the year.
Dudley, however, did not buy into the project, and neither
When Marie Stuart first received the proposition
from Elizabeth’s ambassador, she laughed heartily, thinking it was a joke. When she discovered that the idea was advanced
in earnest, she wrote an angry letter to Elisabeth, but finally agreed to consider
it. She was merely buying herself some
time to explore the other candidates.
The
first candidate on Marie Stuart’s list was Don Carlos
Nevertheless, while the Dudley proposal was dying
a lingering death, through a series of machinations not clearly understood,
Elizabeth let her cousin Lady Margaret Douglas’s oldest son Henry Stuart, Lord
Darnley, traipse off to Scotland and into the affections of its husband-hunting
queen.
Darnley did have some attributes to commend him. He was a
There is still an ongoing debate as to whether the
English queen was cognizant of the disaster Darnley’s arrival in Scotland might
cause. The negative side of his
personality cannot have been that easily disguised, since after six months in
Scotland, he was reviled by nearly everyone other than the smitten queen. Indeed, if Elizabeth had foretold the outcome
of that romance, she was as gifted as Nostradamus. Historian John Guy and
others argue that it was the Darnley marriage that sent Marie Stuart on a
course to ruin.
While
the queen's disastrous second marriage to Henry Stuart and her even less
defensible third one to the principal suspect in his bizarre murder may have
removed Marie Stuart from her throne, her serial missteps did not eliminate her
as an item of contention between Dudley and Cecil.
Not surprisingly, William Maitland remained in the
thick of things. Although there is some question as to exactly who hatched the
plot, when Maitland of Lethington went to London while the York hearings were
moved to Westminster by order of Elizabeth, he apparently met with Dudley at a private
dinner party where the dinner table topic was a scheme to wed the captive Queen
of Scots to England’s highest ranking peer, new widower Thomas Howard, Duke of
Norfolk. Maitland sought out Norfolk who was hawking on
his estates on the following day. He,
too, was taking a break in the hearings, at which he was the presiding judge.
Initially the duke was not particularly impressed, but he did not cry ‘Foul!’
in outrage, in spite of the fact that the proposition was against royal
protocol, and presented a clear conflict of interest, considering Norfolk’s
position as an officer at the tribunal. Although he made some remark that by virtue of
the evidence he considered the Scottish queen a dangerous lady, by the time the
hearings adjourned in stalemate in the spring of 1569 and the Scots went home,
Norfolk was seriously considering the idea.
 |
| Norfolk (US PD-art) |
For a
period, Maitland, the man many called Mickel Wiley for Machiavelli, had actually
sold the Scottish queen’s treacherous brother Moray on the idea. But as the group who knew about the plan
expanded, whispers finally reached the English queen. Elizabeth was not amused. She had a long history of vigorously enforcing
the protocol that subjects in line of succession to the English throne not
marry without their sovereign’s permission.
She had locked up both of the Grey sisters and their suitors and had
sent her cousin Lady Margaret Douglas into house arrest for promoting her son
Darnley’s marriage to the Queen of Scots.
Just as in the Darnley matter, the present offender
was not the Queen of Scots, who was not an English subject, but the ambitious Norfolk. Queen Anne Boleyn’s mother was a Howard, and
the duke and the queen were second cousins. To make matters more egregious, the
Howards were suspected of Catholic leanings. The marriage would have achieved that which
Elizabeth feared most, by providing her Northern Catholics with an alternative
to her own illusive dynastic scheme. She
took out her wrath on Norfolk, but after some ranting she excused the Queen of
Scots. Cecil was livid. He preferred giving the Scottish queen to the lairds so
they could kill her off, not marry her to a bona fide English hero with a
pedigree. Moray quickly distanced himself from the proposal when Norfolk joined
the parade of persons who ended up under house arrest for considering a union so
patently offensive to Elizabeth. But the
matter did not end there, at least not for Norfolk.[1]
Norfolk had become mesmerized by the idea of marrying the Queen of
Scots and began corresponding with Marie Stuart and members of the Marian
faction, as well as with Maitland. Dudley
also remained in communication with Moray and Maitland, but cautioned his
Scottish contacts to take care that communications were worded to make it appear
that the idea of a Norfolk marriage had originated with the Scots. When Elizabeth began to cool toward him and
publicly took Cecil’s side in the dispute. Dudley sulked off to one of his estates and
took to his bed. When the queen came to nurse him back to health as was her
habit, he confessed to everything. It
was probably fortuitous that he did so, because it limited his guilt to that of
merely engaging in behind-the-scenes- brokering of an unsanctioned marriage,
when unbeknownst to Dudley, the intrigues went far deeper and were patently treasonous. When
the full scope of the enterprise known as the Ridolfi plot unraveled, it revealed
far more perfidy than a disfavored marriage.
It included an uprising of the Northern Catholics to be led by Norfolk
and his brother-in-law Westmoreland, and the concurrent launching of an invasion
from the Spanish Netherlands by the Duke of Alva. The plot was to culminate in a regicide that
would place Marie Stuart and Norfolk on the throne of a Catholic England. Although Dudley had distanced himself
sufficiently to remain relatively unscathed, Cecil was very much the man of the
hour. Elizabeth made him into a baron, and thereafter he was known as Burghley
to his face and by whatever name those who spoke of him behind his back thought
they could get away with.
‘Go --go to yonder man in the castle
whom you know I have loved so dearly …to warn him to leave that evil
cause…but he shall be disgracefully dragged forth to punishment and hanged
on the gallows in the face of the setting sun, unless he hastily amend his
life and flee to the Mercy of God.’
~JOHN KNOX
|
Across the
Border, Morton tried to expose Maitland as a Marian sympathizer and arranged to
have a straw man accuse him of complicity in Darnley’s murder, which Morton himself
had helped orchestrate. The plan had to have involved silencing Maitland before
he had a chance to speak out from the gibbet. Maitland was being held
temporarily at the Provost’s House in Edinburgh, awaiting transport to a remote
coastal castle controlled by one of the Red Douglases when his old friend
Kirkcaldy staged a rescue using forged documents and hauled him up the hill to
Edinburgh Castle. When he agreed to appear at a public trial in Edinburgh, no
one was interested in giving the silver-tongued Maitland a public forum and the
matter evaporated. Morton’s effort had the opposite effect from what he planned
and drove Maitland openly into the ranks of the Marians.
Soon he was entrenched
at Blair-Atholl operating a school for Marians called the Schoolhouse and he
was henceforth called the Schoolmaster. It was the political core of the Marian
party. At
this point, another principal in the story enters center stage, Maitland’s
rescuer, French military hero and Scottish general Sir William Kirkcaldy of
Grange, one of the most controversial players in the drama of the Queen of
Scots.
Come back tomorrow for the next part of Leicester, Cecil and those pesky Scots.
About the author
Linda
Root lives in Yucca Valley, California with her husband Chris and two
giant Alaskan Malamutes. Root is a former prosecutor with more than 140
trials to her credit, several sufficiently newsworthy to attract the
national media. Two were featured episodes of The Prosecutors and Arrest
and Trial. She has taught research and writing at the law school
level. Since college, Root has pursued an avocation provoked by the
duality of the historical treatment of the Queen of Scots. Following an
early retirement she combines her expertise as a researcher with her
love of Tudor-Stuart history to a quest to rediscover the Queen of
Scots. The result is a series of stand alone but related historical
novels beginning with the epic The First Marie and the Queen of Scots, a
tale of Marie Flemyng, one of the famous Four Maries who had served the
queen since they were five years old. The second segment, The Last
Knight and the Queen of Scots explores Marie Stuart through the
fictional adventures of colorful and controversial William Kirkcaldy of
Grange, Europe's first-ranked soldier who later became her last
champion. The third book , a work soon to be released, is The Midwife's
Secret:Book One The Mystery of La Belle Ecossaise, a look at the
stunning aftermath of the years of Marie's personal rule, imprisonment
and death as it impacted the life of a young woman of mysterious origin,
hidden in France. A fourth book coming in mid to late 2013 is The
Midwife's Secret, Book Two, The Other Daughter, the adventures of the
illegitimate child born posthumously to the knight of Grange, and her
personal quest. Book five, The Reluctant Countess, is in the early
planning stages.and its tragic aftermath from the prospective of a
Scottish expatriate sent to France as a secret agent of her son, James
VI and I. Root is a member of the Marie Stuart Society and a regular
contributor to the Marie Stuart discussion group, an in active member of
the State Bar of California and numerous historical and indie writer
forums. Reach her on her Facebook page or at lindaroot8@gmail.com.
Amazon link UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/FIRST-MARIE-Queen-Scots-ebook/dp/B00BWEU9OA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375003178&sr=1-1
Amazon link UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Midwifes-Secret-Legend-Belle-Ecossaise/dp/1480112534/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375004811&sr=1-5
Amazon link US: http://www.amazon.com/Linda-Root/e/B0053DIGM8/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
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