Motley has conjectured that at that time the population of Spain and Portugal numbered at least twelve millions. Spain possessed the most powerful fleet in the world, an immense army, with all the wealth of the Netherlands and the Indies wherewith to maintain them; consequently, when difficulties arose between France and England, Philip trusted that to save herself England would become a firm ally of Spain. But the Spanish monarch had left out of his reckoning the magnificent courage of England’s Queen, and the indomitable pluck, and bull-dog determination of her subjects to hold their own. All this should be remembered when the stern repression of all and every kind of conspiracy is brought against Elizabeth and her principal advisers, of whom Walsingham and Burleigh were the foremost. It was a desperate position, only possible of being defended and upheld by desperate means. The horrors perpetrated by the Romish bishops in the name of religion whilst Mary Tudor reigned, had given the English but too vivid a suggestion of the fate that would befall their country if the King of Spain were again to become its ruler, either as conqueror or as King-consort. This terror was the principal cause of the passionate tide of patriotism that under Elizabeth stirred our glorious little island to its very foundations, and had it not been for the detestation of foreign rule there would not have been that universal rallying round the Queen and country in the hour of danger, which was the marked feature of our people during that courageous woman’s reign.
A suspicion of conspiracy was sufficient in those days, electrical with perils for the Queen and the country, and on the 11th of October 1569 Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, the son of the ill-fated Surrey, and the grandson of the old Flodden duke, was brought a prisoner to the Tower on the charge of high treason, his intended marriage with Mary of Scots constituting the charge against him. In the following month the Queen thus directed Sir Henry Neville to attend to Norfolk’s safekeeping in the Tower. “The Lieutenant is permitted to remove the Duke to any lodging in the Tower near joining to the Long Gallery, so as it be none of the Queen’s own lodgings; and to suffer the Duke to have the commodity to walk in the gallery, having always of course the said Knollys in his company” (Hatfield Calendar of State Papers). Owing to the plague which raged in London in the following year, Norfolk was allowed to leave the Tower for his own home at the Charter House, still a prisoner; but he was soon back again in the fortress, a correspondence which he had carried on with Mary Stuart’s adherents having been discovered. Others implicated in the undoubted conspiracy to set Mary on the throne, were the Earls of Arundel and Southampton, Lord Lumley, Lord Cobham, his brother Thomas Cobham, and Henry Percy; these were all arrested. On his return to the Tower, Norfolk was confined in the Bloody Tower. About this time a batch of letters, written by a Florentine banker named Ridolfi to the Pope and to the Duke of Alva, on the perpetually recurring subject of Mary’s succession to the English throne after Elizabeth’s dethronement, were intercepted by Elizabeth’s government, with the result that a fresh batch of prisoners, with the Bishop of Ross, Sir Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Gerrard amongst them, entered the fortress. These letters disclosed a conspiracy which was known under the name of the Italian Ridolfi, its prime instigator. Ridolfi, who was a resident in London, had crossed over to the Netherlands, where he had seen the Duke of Alva, informing that Spanish general that he had been commissioned by a large number of English Roman Catholic noblemen to send over a Spanish army to drive Elizabeth from the throne, and place Mary Stuart in the sovereignty in her stead. The Duke of Norfolk would then marry Mary, and by these means the English would return to the benign sway of the Holy Father, and become the faithful subjects of the gentle Philip. Alva had suggested that Elizabeth should be got rid of before he himself came to London with his army, Philip entirely agreeing with his general as to the necessity for her removal.
Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, from the Curfew Tower to the Beauchamp Tower
The mere chance of a packet of letters being intercepted not only saved Elizabeth’s life, but probably England as well from a terrible disaster.
The Ridolfi Plot conspirators were distributed in the various prisons of the fortress, in the Beauchamp and the Salt Towers, and in the Cold Harbour, much of the information regarding the conspiracy having been obtained from a young man called Charles Bailly, who was seized at Dover on his way to the Netherlands with a packet of treasonable letters. He was brought back to London, placed in the Tower and tortured, whereupon he confessed the names of several other persons implicated. Bailly left several inscriptions on the walls of the Beauchamp Tower where he was imprisoned.
On the 16th of January 1572 the Duke of Norfolk was taken from the Tower to Westminster to undergo his trial. He was charged with having entered into a treasonable conspiracy to depose the Queen and to take her life; of having invoked the aid of the Pope to liberate the Queen of Scots, of having intended to marry her, and for having attempted to restore Papacy in the realm.
The Duke, who was not allowed counsel, pleaded in his own behalf, attempting to prove that his intended marriage with Queen Mary of Scots would not have affected the life or throne of Elizabeth. “But,” replied the Queen’s Sergeant, Barham, “it is well known that you entered into a design for seizing the Tower, which is certainly the greatest strength of the Kingdom of England, and hence it follows, you then attempted the destruction of the Queen.” By his own letters to the Pope the Duke stood condemned, as well as by those written by him to the Duke of Alva, and to Ridolfi, in addition to others written from the Tower to Queen Mary by the Bishop of Ross. Norfolk was accordingly condemned, but Elizabeth appears to have wavered regarding the signing of his death warrant, for the Duke was her cousin. At length, however, the House of Commons insisted that the Duke must die for the safety of the State, and Elizabeth signed the warrant, and the 2nd of June was fixed for his execution.
The Duke wrote very appealingly to the Queen for pardon, beseeching her to forgive him for his “manifold offences” and “trusts that he may leave a lighter heart and a quieter conscience.” He desired Burghley to act as guardian to his orphaned children, and concluded his letter thus: “written by the woeful hand of a dead man, your Majesty’s most unworthy subject, and yet your Majesty’s, in my humble prayer, until the last breath, Thomas Howard.”
Fourteen years had passed since anyone had been executed on Tower Hill. The old wooden scaffold had fallen into decay, and it was found necessary to build a new one. Compared with former reigns the fact of no execution having taken place amongst the State prisoners for such a length of time does credit to Elizabeth’s clemency, Norfolk being the first to die for a crime against the State during her long reign. The Duke has found apologists among historians, and has been regarded as a hardly-used victim of Elizabeth and her Ministers. But his treason to the Queen he had sworn to obey and defend was proved beyond all manner of doubt, and his particular form of treason was the worst, having no possible extenuation, since he plotted for the admission of a foreign army into the realm, composed of the most bloodthirsty wretches that ever desecrated a country, and led by a general whose cruelty resembled that of a devil, and has left him infamous for all time.