The news arrived in London at a bad time. A Portuguese Ambassador had just come (May 1568) to complain—“brawling,” as Cecil calls it—of the Hawkins expeditions to Guinea. He went to the audience with Guzman, and found the Queen in a towering rage about a scurrilous letter referring to her, written by the Cardinal Prince Dom Henrique. Cecil had obtained possession of the letter somehow, and produced it, saying that the presumption of the Portuguese was insufferable and made them hated by all nations. The matter of the letter quite overshadowed the grievance about trade, as it no doubt was intended to do, and the Portuguese got no redress. On the contrary, Cecil called to him some Spanish residents in London who accompanied the Ambassador to Whitehall, and warned them that they might not attend mass at the embassy. What! not foreigners? asked Antonio de Guaras. No, retorted Cecil, and turned his back upon them to rejoin the Queen. The next day when Cecil saw Guzman, he complained of Alba’s severity in Flanders, and of some insulting reference to Elizabeth in the “Pontifical History” of Dr. Illescas, so that when Dr. Man’s letter arrived immediately afterwards announcing his practical expulsion from Spain, everything was prepared for an explosion. The Queen received the news with some alarm as to what it might portend, and was at first inclined to be conciliatory; but when Guzman visited Cecil in the Strand two or three days afterwards, he found the Secretary in a fit of anger unusual with him. Such treatment of an Ambassador, he said, was an unheard-of insult to his mistress, unless it was meant as a provocation to war. After storming for some time, he stopped for want of breath; and it needed all Guzman’s suavity to calm him. “I waited a little for him to recover from his rage, and then went up to him, laughing, and embraced him, saying that I was amused to see him fly into such a passion over what I had told him, because I knew that he understood differently. The affair, I said, might be made good or bad as the Queen liked to make it.”[268] But Cecil was not easily appeased. He told Guzman that the Council regarded him with suspicion, that Englishmen were treated harshly in Spain, and much more to the same effect, all of which was very surprising to the Spaniard, who was unused to such plain speaking from him. But in the ten years that Elizabeth had sat upon the throne, things had radically changed. Cecil could afford to speak boldly to Spain now; for whilst England had grown enormously in wealth, commerce, industry, and shipping, under a prudent, patriotic Government, both the great rivals she formerly feared were rent by the religious schism which the folly or ambition of their rulers had precipitated upon them, and England at any given moment could paralyse either of them for harm by smiling upon their Protestant subjects.
Whilst Mary was in Lochleven Castle, Murray’s enemies, the Hamiltons and the Catholics, were busy. Murray had tried his best by severity to reduce the country to something approaching order, and the turbulent chiefs who profited by anarchy resented it. The compromising papers which implicated the ruling powers in the late deeds of murder and violence were burnt, though not those that implicated the Queen,[269] and the whole of the responsibility was cast upon the Queen and Bothwell. Religious uniformity was passed by Parliament, and the exercise of Catholic worship abolished. All this violent action, too rapid and too partial to be readily assimilated by a country so profoundly divided as Scotland was, naturally caused reaction in favour of Mary, and when after one unsuccessful attempt she escaped from prison (2nd May), there were friends in plenty to flock to her banner. The day before her flight she had written the fervent prayer to Elizabeth, swearing unchanging fidelity to her if she would send her help[270]—help for which she had besought Catharine de Medici in vain; for France wanted the alliance of Scotland, not that of Mary Stuart personally. The day after, when Mary, surrounded by Hamiltons, was free again, the possibilities were all changed. Mary Stuart turned in a few hours from the humble suppliant to the haughty sovereign. Her abdication was revoked, Murray’s regency declared illegal, and all his acts annulled. Beton was sent off post-haste to London and Paris to demand for his mistress a thousand harquebussiers and a sum of money. Beton’s instructions were to tell the English Government that if they would not send the help, he was to demand it from the French. Cecil writes to Norris,[271] 16th May, that under these circumstances the Queen had promised all that Mary demanded; but he was to keep his eye on Beton, and if he asked for French aid, Catharine was to be told the message he brought from Mary to London. Before Beton left London he went to see Guzman with a verbal message from Mary. Now that she was free, she said, she would show the world how innocent she was, and begged for the advice and help of Guzman and his master. She was a firmer Catholic than ever, she averred; nearly all the people and nobles of Scotland were on her side; but she complained that she was in the field without proper garb or adornments, and begged Guzman to send a request to the Duke of Alba to seize her jewels and restore them to her, if Murray sent them to Flanders for sale.[272]
This was on the 11th May. Two days afterwards the result of the battle of Langside once more cast the unhappy Mary Stuart into the chasm of irredeemable misfortune, and on the 16th she fled across the Solway a fugitive to England, to see her country no more in life. Such a step as this was tempting fate. It is true that Elizabeth had constantly professed sympathy for her in her captivity; but whilst the English Queen’s words were fair, the acts of her Government, dictated not by personal motives, such as the friends of Mary have absurdly tried to fix upon Cecil, but by high national policy, had been uniformly in favour of Murray and the Protestants. Mary’s attitude, moreover, had from the first, and not unnaturally, been favourable to the French alliance, upon which for centuries Scotland had depended for the preservation of its independence; and to place herself thus unconditionally at the mercy of the English, whose policy she had opposed and whose interests she sought to subvert, was little short of an act of madness. Mary had no excuse for trusting to a Quixotic generosity, of which Elizabeth had never given her the slightest indication beyond conventional fine words, such as would hardly deceive Mary. It was not so much that she overrated her generosity as she underrated her boldness.
Drury in Berwick had kept Cecil informed almost from hour to hour of the course of events in Scotland;[273] and a few hours only after Mary landed at Workington she wrote her famous and oft-quoted letter to the English Queen. In it she recites her sorrows, and begs Elizabeth to aid her in her just quarrel; but, above all, to send for her as soon as possible, “for I am in a pitiable condition, not only for a Queen but a gentlewoman.”[274] The position was a difficult one for the English Queen and Council. Guzman says they were much perplexed, “as the Queen has always shown good-will to the Queen of Scots, and the majority of the Council has been opposed to her, and favourable to the Regent and his government. If this Queen has her way, they will have to treat Mary as a sovereign, which will offend those who forced her to abdicate; so that although these folks are glad enough to have her in their hands, they have many things to consider … if she remain free, and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will arise. In any case it is certain that the two women will not agree very long together.”[275]
When Mary had arrived at Carlisle a few days afterwards, she sent Lord Herries to London with a letter for Cecil, which may be given in full. Mary’s letters were always clever, unless she lost her temper, as she did sometimes, and here it will be seen that she appeals to positively the only feeling which it was probable would move Cecil to favour her, namely, her kinship to his mistress and her regal status. “Mester Ceciles,” runs the letter, “L’équité, dont vous avvez le nom d’estre amateur, et la fidelle et sincère servitude que portez a la Royne, Madame ma bonne sœur, et par consequent a toutes celles qui sont de son sang, et en pareille dignité, me fayt en ma juste querele, par sur tous autres m’adresser a vous en ce temps de mon trouble pour etre avancée par votre bon conseille, que j’ai commandé Lord Heris, presant porteur vous fayre entandre au long.… De Karlile ce xxviii Mey. Votre bien bonne amye Marie R.”[276] With this letter Herries brought others for the Pope and Guzman. He demanded aid for his mistress on a pledge sent to her by Elizabeth through Throgmorton in the form of a ring, and when some hesitation was shown, he imprudently blurted out that if Elizabeth did not keep her word his mistress would appeal to France, Spain, the Emperor, and the Pope. “The Pope!” exclaimed puritan Bedford, shocked at the idea. “Yes, the Pope,” replied Herries, “or the Grand Turk, or the Sophi, or any one else who will help her.” This sort of talk was sufficient to decide Mary’s removal to Bolton as a measure of precaution.
Before this took place, however, Lord Scrope and Sir Francis Knollys had been deputed by Elizabeth to visit and confer with Mary at Carlisle. Herries on that occasion had said that if the English would not help his Queen, she wished to go to France; “whereupon,” writes Knollys, we “answered that your Highness could in no wise lyke hyr sekyng aide in France, therbie to bring Frenchmen into Skotland;” and, continued the envoys, the Queen of England could not receive her personally until she was satisfied of her innocence in the murder of her husband. Mary was just as imprudent as Herries in her interview with the English envoys; but what frightened Knollys most was the large number of her English sympathisers in the north of England. In his letter to Elizabeth he points out the danger of the situation, and suggests that Mary should have the choice of freely returning to Scotland, if she chose, or of remaining in England; but not of going to France, as she evidently wished to do. “She was so agile and spirited,” says Knollys, that she could only be kept a prisoner so near the Border by very rigorous means, such as “devices of towels and toyes at her chamber window”; whereas to carry her farther inland might cause “serious sedition.”
Elizabeth and her Council decided to run the latter risk rather than that Mary should go to France to be a permanent thorn in the flesh of England, and the Queen of Scots’ long imprisonment commenced.[277] Even in the first few weeks of her stay she was busy endeavouring to subvert English ends; appointing Chatelherault, Argyll, and Huntly to the supreme government of the kingdom against Murray; Chatelherault being strongly in the French interest, and daily clamouring through his brother in Paris for French armed support. All this was known to the Queen and Cecil; and Mary’s intemperate letters of protest against her removal from Carlisle, and her constant threats to appeal to France and Spain if Elizabeth would not help her,[278] made it altogether inconsistent with prudence to allow the misguided woman her liberty. The investigation into Mary’s guilt or innocence seems to have originated with Cecil.[279] Left to herself, Elizabeth, as we have seen, was mainly influenced by the personal feeling of reverence for a sovereign: Cecil could not oppose this, and as usual took an indirect means of reaching his end. When Mary complained to Knollys at Carlisle of the subjects who had dethroned her, he had told her that as it was lawful for subjects to depose mad sovereigns, it was also lawful for them to depose those who had lost their wits to the extent of conniving at murder. Mary wept at this, and Knollys softened the blow; but Knollys had certainly seen Cecil’s report, and took the line suggested by it. If Mary could be shown to have connived at Darnley’s death—and Cecil must have known of the damning proofs against her when he proposed the negotiation—the regal immunity fell from her like a loosened garment, and Elizabeth’s personal desire to consider the sacredness of the monarch before the interests of the country lost its principal resting point.
In the meanwhile the state of civil war in Scotland continued, and news came daily of French armaments preparing to aid Mary’s party. Cecil ceaselessly urged an armistice, and at last (1st September) was successful, though imprudent Herries continued to threaten that if Elizabeth did not restore the Queen of Scots to the throne in two months, she and her friends would appeal only to France for armed aid. Elizabeth clearly could not force Mary upon the Scottish people, and for her interference to be effective she must be recognised as a mediator, not by Mary alone, but also by Murray and his party. This was difficult; for Murray knew that if the final result was to restore Mary with any power at all, he and his party sooner or later were doomed. Thanks mainly to the efforts of Cecil, Murray at last gave way, and the commissions of Scotch and English Councillors were sent to York, ostensibly to mediate between the Queen of Scots and her subjects. But Mary found herself no longer, as she had hoped to be, the accuser of Murray, but practically on her own trial for murder. By a remark in a letter from Cecil to Norris at the time, he seems again with some difficulty to have avoided being appointed a commissioner himself.
Whilst the intricate and obscure proceedings in York[280] were progressing, Cecil’s hands were full in London. Protestant zeal was fairly aflame now at Alba’s proceedings in the Netherlands. All eastern England swarmed with Flemish fugitives, many of whom found their way back home again well armed with weapons bought in England, and even more with messages of indignant sympathy from English Protestants. Guzman protested to Cecil again and again, but could get no more than vague half promises, and once a proclamation, which the Spaniards described as a “compliment rather than a remedy.”