“May it please your most excellent Majesty,
“Having then ten years been secluded from your most gracious sight and happy presence, which more grieveth me than any travel or discommodity that I have suffered in this charge that it hath pleased your Majesty to put me in trust withal, I have taken the boldness most humbly to beseech your Majesty that it may please the same to license me for a fortnight’s journey towards your Majesty’s royal person; to the end you may by myself receive a true account of my said charge, and thereby know what my deservings are. Wherein, if I may (as I desire most earnestly) satisfy your Majesty, it shall be unto me a great encouragement to continue the most faithful duty and careful service that I owe unto your Majesty, and shall yield to my life’s end.”
This permission was in a fair way to be granted as far as letters could show, and the good, timid, dogged Earl made all arrangements, settled the stages of his journey, ordered bedding and lodging, and planned his retinue: “I think my company will be twenty gentlemen and twenty yeomen, besides their men and my horsekeepers.” He only waited for his journey till Chesterfield Fair was over and the crowds of suspicious loafers dispersed. But he waited far too long. The plague had seized London and had increased apace; he dreaded the cold journey south in the autumn storms; he dreaded an aggravated attack from “the enemy”—gout.
Simultaneously with this disappointment came sharper sorrow—the death of Francis Talbot. The event presented itself to Lord Leicester as worthy of one of those flowery, humbugging, sententious, idiotic letters of which he wrote so many in his crowded life. This unscrupulous idler, living on the fat of the land and overheaped with gifts and favours, presents a very odd picture as he conjures an afflicted, upright, and overburdened contemporary to count up his blessings: “The Lord hath blessed you many ways in this world, and not least with the blessing of children for your posterity.” This from a fellow who could disown his legitimate son by denying a lawful marriage with the mother! And again: “He that hath sent you many might have given you fewer, and He that took away this might also take away the rest. Be thankful to Him for all His doings, my good Lord, and take all in that good part which you ought; be you wholly His, and seek His kingdom, for it far surpasses all worldly kingdoms.” This from the shrewd sycophant who was waiting day after day to be announced as consort of the Queen of England!
To return on our paces a little. The health of Queen Mary was extremely unsatisfactory. From 1579 right on through the eighties she addressed letter after letter of piteous entreaties for freedom to Elizabeth, and to the ambassador Mauvissière. Sometimes, for weeks at a time, she could not leave her bed owing to the pain in her side. Sometimes the hardly won permission to go to Buxton would revive her spirits. On one occasion she fell backwards from her horse just as she was mounting, and injured herself severely. Sometimes she was kept closely guarded at Buxton, and on others she would be allowed to see something of the country close to it. In 1577 she was so ailing that she made her will. But she would revive to write endless spirited letters, to plead incessantly and indignantly against the way in which her French dowry, the only income she now had, was being dissipated and misappropriated in France, and to make eager preparations for hunting expeditions, to few of which, as she confessed, she expected Lord Shrewsbury would give his consent. At the end of 1581 she was so worn out by secret suspense in regard to her fate, by constraint, and by lack of air and exercise—the simple remedies which in years past had helped her to conquer all bodily ills—that for once her courage left her. She begged for special doctors other than those who ordinarily attended her. She worked herself into an agony over the position of her son, and finally begged that the Queen would send assistance to her “as that she might not be cast away for want of such help of physicians and things as she needed.”
Robert Beale, already mentioned in his connection with the Privy Council, who was really sent down at this juncture to Sheffield to investigate the political relationship between Mary and her son, found the household in a depressing condition. Lord Shrewsbury had a bad attack of gout, and though the Countess was not described as ill, her frame of mind cannot have been very cheerful. Everyone seems to have poured out his woes in Beale’s ears, while he stuck to his purpose, and tried to secure a definite answer as to whether or no Mary would formally yield the Scottish crown to her son. A clear answer from her he never had. She was ill, hysterical, and, to his thinking and that of the Earl, full of trickery. They believed that she asked for a special physician from London because it might give her a chance of carrying out some scheme to her advantage in connection with the Duke of Alençon, who was expected in England. One night when she sent specially for Beale he arrived to find the room in sudden darkness, and Mary in bed, with the dim shadowy figures of her chamberwomen hovering about her. Among those shadowy ladies in the bedchamber was still the devoted Mary Seton, to whom had come some years previously ruth which her mistress also shared. Not only had the loyal prægustator, John Beton, died in the earlier days of the long imprisonment, but his brother and successor in the post, Andrew, had passed away. With Andrew, who courted her passionately, the Seton had at last fallen in love. The only barrier to their union was a most inexplicable vow of celibacy which the girl had taken. With the approval of his brother, Archbishop Beton, and the encouragement of his royal mistress, the gallant Andrew overcame his lady’s dread of the married estate, and undertook to secure papal dispensation from her vow. It was on his journey back from Rome to Sheffield that he died.
Beale, as aforesaid, found himself nonplussed by the gloom of the Queen’s apartments; and as for talking business it was impossible, for she received him with sobs.
Because of “her weeping and her women in the dark I brake off,” he wrote to Walsingham. He went away and reported this uncanny interview to the Earl, who sent his lady to her. Mary was asleep or shamming, and all Lady Shrewsbury could do was to chat vaguely with Mary Seton about “the suddenness of her sickness.” Later on the same careful enquiries were made by the Countess, whose shrewd deduction was, “I have known her worse and recover again.” Her Ladyship was, if not head nurse on these occasions, certainly official inspectress, and Beale reported that whether Mary was dangerously ill or not she was obliged to use medicine and poultices, at which he had himself sniffed inquisitively, and which Lady Shrewsbury had seen applied.
Presently there was a decided improvement in the condition of the invalid, and Elizabeth allowed Mary’s carriage to be sent to her so that she might drive within the limits of the Sheffield manor estate, whose circumference in those days, as Leader assures us, was eight miles, and covered an expanse of 2461 acres. Mary could not yet avail herself of this distraction, so sore and feeble was her weakened body. Yet at all times and seasons she was extraordinarily sensitive to the joys and sorrows of persons in her environment. The birth of Gilbert’s daughter already mentioned was just such an occasion for her goodness and generosity. She stood godmother to the child and sent to France for presents. These family occurrences complicated the Earl’s business considerably, and he took great precautions on this occasion that the event should not come to pass under the same roof as that which held his captive. At the end of the letter, in which he instructs Baldwin to make certain payments to his daughter-in-law’s nurse, he says: “I am removed to the castle, and most quiet when I have the fewest women here, and am best able to discharge the trust reposed in me.”
He had still further occasion for this attitude, for another blow fell upon his family. Young Lady Lennox died. As usual it was the Earl who made the formal announcement of the loss at Court, for his wife was, as on a previous occasion, too distraught to collect her wits.