Devices and Desires Read online

  Far from abiding by the Queen’s order, Shrewsbury continued to make trouble, carrying on his suits against Bess’s servants and sons, and stirring up her Derbyshire tenants. Both he and Bess came to court during the spring and summer of 1585, anxious to further their cases. Bess lodged in Chancery Lane, and, as Henry Talbot reported to Shrewsbury, she, together with William, Charles and Mary Talbot, attended ‘very diligently at Court’, where they commanded ‘little respect’ (this may well have been a case of telling the Earl what he wanted to hear).5 By October, Bess was back at Wingfield, where, according to the order, she was based (she had the use of Wingfield for her lifetime, under her marriage settlement). From here she told Burghley that her husband made ‘a sport of this broken reconcilement’, that she had hardly seen him, and, despite his promise to the Queen to ‘send often’ for her, he refused to let her come to any of his other houses. She had now endured ‘these extreme wrongs’ for three years.6

  Bess needed Burghley’s support. She assured him that she counted him as one of her few true friends, though she must have been aware that Burghley’s loyalties were divided between the Shrewsburys. Marital breakdown tests friendship, and Bess felt let down by many – a certain ‘noble man’, for example, whom she had ‘found at the time of my need much less than he professed’; others who offered nothing but ‘general words, referring my comfort to hope’.7 There was sympathy for Bess – the Earl’s behaviour was, after all, highly unreasonable at best – but she did not command the kind of power and connections that Shrewsbury relied on. Living at Wingfield, a house she had little love for, was isolating, both geographically and emotionally. When she signed herself off to Burghley ‘your Lordship’s poor friend greatly oppressed’, it was probably no more than the truth.

  A few days later, she wrote to her husband, repeating her desire to return to him: ‘I see your love is withdrawn from me, but my constant duty and affection continues so to you, that if my time were long, as it is sure to be short, I shall never cease to seek and sue by all good means, that I may live with you as I ought.’8 These of course were the stock expressions of the dutiful wife. Lady Willoughby, when pleading with Sir Francis to be allowed to return to him in 1586, wrote in similar vein, vowing ‘to perform all good duties that do become a loving and obedient wife towards her husband’.9 Lady Willoughby’s case was rather different to that of Bess – she had left her husband and thus suffered from the loss of the ‘good opinion’ of her peers, as well as of financial security. The Queen had ordered Sir Francis to pay his wife £200 a year in maintenance, but the Willoughby finances were so rocky, with Sir Francis renegotiating her jointure four times, to raise money, that she was probably lucky if she received anything at all.

  Bess enjoyed significant financial independence and she had been careful to preserve her reputation. She was certainly not prepared to abjectly prostrate herself before her husband. She reminded Shrewsbury that just two months before he sent her away from Sheffield, back in 1583, he had expressed a desire to put their differences behind them, promised to ‘become a new man’, and vowed that he loved her ‘so well’ that he ‘also loved the steps’ she trod on. And she claimed that she couldn’t be blamed for defending herself when she had barely £300 a year to live on and when her children would be forced ‘to sell all they have for my maintenance and to pay my debts’.10

  The Earl dismissed Bess’s ‘fair words’ – ‘though they appear beautiful yet they are mixed with a hidden poison’ – and replied with an outpouring of invective: ‘there cannot be any wife more forgetful of her duty and less careful to please her husband than you have been . . . I have seen thoroughly into your devices and desires, your insatiable greedy appetite did betray you, you own living at my hands could not content you, nor yet a great part of mine, which for my quietness I could have been contented to give you.’ She would always ‘favour’ her children over him, and it would therefore be ‘dangerous . . . to be compassed about with you and them when after me you shall leap into my seat’. But, as often, in amongst the wild hyperbole are small nuggets of truth. Bess claimed to have been ‘in misery’, yet she was ‘sufficiently furnished to buy lands’ for her children.11

  ‘You loved me so well that you also loved the steps I trod on.’ The extremity of Shrewsbury’s loathing for Bess was directly proportionate to the love he’d borne her: she only became a devil because she had once been an angel. But was she the devil Shrewsbury believed her to be? Bess could justly be accused of many things – she was rapacious, self-seeking, ruthless. But for all her capacity for feuding, she had an equal capacity for love, whether for husbands (some), children (similar) or grandchildren. And malice – too impractical an impulse, its effects too uncertain – was not part of her make-up. Her schemes were framed by the long view, which did not allow for small-minded vengefulness. That she left to Shrewsbury.

  As Christmas approached, Bess consulted Elizabeth Wingfield about her New Year’s gift for the Queen (with her affairs in such disarray, it was more important than ever to get this right). Elizabeth, after talking to Lady Cobham, advised that a ‘fine, rare thing’ would definitely be preferred over money, and added that Lady Cheke had talked to the Queen ‘of my lord’s hard dealing’ and she had given ‘many good words what she would do for your honour’.12 The Queen, who was not insensible to Shrewsbury’s loyalty and the service he’d performed for her, and who besides disliked warring couples, was indeed doing her best to bring the Shrewsburys together. She told the Earl how she ‘had long desired for your own good and quiet, that all matters of difference between the Countess your wife, your sons and you, might be brought to some good composition’, and she asked him to drop legal proceedings against Bess’s servants and sons.13 But even Her Majesty’s pleas had little effect.

  Since the first commission had clearly brought no kind of reconciliation between the Shrewsburys, it was decided to hold another. At Ashford, in January 1586, Sir Francis Willoughby (a supporter of Bess) and John Manners (Shrewsbury’s brother-in-law) heard allegations from both sides. Much the same ground was covered, with much the same outcome – a second order from the Queen, in May, reiterating the first, with the added stipulation that Shrewsbury was to be allowed to sue William Cavendish for the plate and hangings that he’d taken during his raids on Chatsworth. The Queen followed this up with a letter to the Earl – it was not right for ‘two persons of your degree and quality to live in such a kind of discord. As also for the special care we have of yourself, knowing that these variances have disquieted you, whose years require repose, especially of the mind.’14

  Many around Shrewsbury felt that his obsessive vendetta against his ‘wife and her imps’ was undermining his mental and physical health and that he should simply swallow his pride and take Bess back. Many shared the view of William Overton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who wrote urging reconciliation and offering some marriage guidance: ‘if shrewdness and sharpness may be just cause for separation I think that few men in England would keep their wives long, for it is common jest yet true that there is but one shrew in the world and every man hath her’.15

  The new order brought some result. Shrewsbury, as Bess wrote, paid William and Charles £850 of the £2,000, though otherwise he was still displacing ‘sundry tenants’ and continuing his legal suits.16 The order was reinforced in August, when the Queen saw the Shrewsburys together at Richmond Palace: the Earl was bound by the colossal sum of £40,000 to end all conflict with Bess; he was to accompany her to Wingfield, where he would supply provisions and bear all expenses, as he would in any of his other homes occupied by her; he was to content himself with his £500 a year while Bess was ‘to hold to herself all the rest of her living’; William and Charles Cavendish were to be sure not to give any cause for offence; the items removed from Chatsworth were to be returned. The official version had it that the Shrewsburys ‘both showed themselves very well contented with Her Majesty’s speeches and in good sort departed together, very comfortable to the sight o
f all their friends’.17 Privately observers took a rather different view – ‘in common opinion’, wrote one, it was ‘more likely’ that the wars in the Low Countries would come to an end ‘than these civil discords between him and her’.18 Roger Manners told his father, the Earl of Rutland, that Shrewsbury intended to ‘rule my lady, but she says little and yet plainly thinks to govern him’.19

  Shrewsbury was certainly not having much success in ruling Bess, though he seized on the question of the Chatsworth goods and furnishings as a chance to gain the upper hand and promptly submitted a lengthy list of items he claimed as his: plate, New Year’s gifts, linen, jewels, sheets, hangings, household utensils, and feather beds. In her ‘Answer to the Demand of Plate’, Bess went through his list, adding her own crisp comments in the margin. Various items of plate had been at Chatsworth at the time of the deed of gift and had thus gone to William and Charles Cavendish. ‘One great bason and ewer, fashioned like a ship’, was dismissed with ‘bought by the Earl of purpose for the Countess to give away, which she did, as he well knoweth’.* Various items of plate – ‘six candlesticks fashioned like boats, two cups of alabaster bound about with silver’, etc. – given by Bess to the Earl as New Year’s gifts had been returned to her, ‘he misliking of them’. ‘Rich hangings’ (including the Virtues hangings) had been made at Chatsworth and the Earl hadn’t contributed a penny towards their making. Sheets and pillow cases were ‘worn out, made 17 years ago’. At the bottom of the page she wrote: ‘these parcels above demanded by the Earl are things of small value and mere trifles for so great and rich a nobleman to bestow on his wife in 19 years’. Besides, if the Earl wished to stoop to such pettiness, she could match him – what about the ‘pots, flagons, chafing dishes, chamber-pots, porringers, warming pans, boiling pots, and many other things’, not to mention over £1,000 worth of linen, that she had provided for his various houses over the years?20

  It was no surprise to anyone that the Queen’s second order was scarcely more successful than the first. Shrewsbury continued to be irascible and unpredictable, allowing Bess a brief audience in London, when he made ‘favourable and loving speeches’ before reverting to his ‘former wrath and heavy displeasure’.21 He told Burghley that while he was prepared to bear Bess’s living expenses, he would ‘neither bed nor board with her’.22 Drawing up a list of ‘causes . . . why he should not cohabit with the Countess’, he claimed that Bess ‘doth deadly hate him and hath called him knave, fool and beast to his face and hath mocked and mowed at him’.23

  In the autumn of 1586, the Shrewsburys’ ‘civil wars’ came to a temporary halt, and the Earl’s attentions were diverted, as the last act in the unhappy life of the Queen of Scots played itself out. Walsingham had devised a system by which nothing written by Mary went unread: her letters, which were smuggled out of Chartley Manor, where she had been moved from Tutbury, in waterproof containers slipped into beer barrels, came straight into his hands and were decoded before being sent on to the recipient. It was simply a question of waiting for Mary to condemn herself, and with the discovery of the Babington Plot, the moment came. Burghley, who had always believed that only Mary’s death could secure the English throne and the Protestant succession, finally had his chance.

  Anthony Babington came from a family of Derbyshire Catholics. The Babingtons were known to Bess – she had negotiated for land with Henry Babington, Anthony’s father, back in 1565 – and Anthony himself had served Shrewsbury as a page, at Sheffield. He was young, charming and entirely out of his depth – the plot to which he gave his name, but of which he was not the chief architect, involved a revolt by English Catholics, a Spanish invasion, the assassination of Elizabeth and the liberation of Mary. It differed little from previous plots, and it never posed a serious threat, but crucially, it was known about and condoned by Mary, who was desperate enough to seize at the slenderest of straws. On the letter, a reply to Babington, in which Mary fatally incriminated herself, Walsingham’s decipherer drew a small gallows. She was trapped.

  According to the Bond of Association, drawn up in October 1584, anyone who threatened the life of the Queen was to be put to death. This was modified, the following March, by the Act for the Queen’s Safety, which insisted on a legal process: a claimant to the throne who was involved in a plot or rebellion against the reigning monarch was to be tried by a commission, and if found guilty, would face death. Nevertheless, it still smoothed the way for Mary’s destruction. At Fotheringhay Castle, she was put on trial by thirty-six commissioners, including Shrewsbury, who lodged nearby, at Orton Longeville, with his son Henry Talbot. Mary, claiming that she was ‘a Queen and not a subject’, at first refused to appear before the commission; when she did, she defended herself with dignity and denied any intention to kill Elizabeth. The commissioners returned to London to consider their verdict, though Shrewsbury, who was too unwell to travel, remained at Orton Longeville, where he received a letter from Burghley informing him that the Queen deplored his absence, ‘less there may be some malicious sinister interpretation’ (a reference to the old rumours about the Earl and Mary). Burghley advised the Earl to write a letter reiterating his belief that Mary was guilty.24 Whether or not Shrewsbury truly believed so, or whether he simply had to be seen to believe, his fellow commissioners were of the same opinion – in the Star Chamber, on 25 October, the Queen of Scots was pronounced guilty.

  But when it came to signing the warrant for Mary’s execution, Elizabeth, true to form, prevaricated. Accepting her guilt was one thing; regicide quite another. She was no longer willing to ‘cherish a sword to cut my own throat’, but her feelings for Mary were as ambivalent as ever. She wanted Mary dead. Yet how could she take on the responsibility for executing an anointed queen? The warrant was signed, but still Elizabeth held back. Hoping to pass the buck, she let it be known that she would count it as a service if Sir Amyas Paulet quietly did away with Mary, a service that Paulet declined. In the end, Burghley and the councillors made the Queen’s decision for her and sent the warrant to Fotheringhay.

  Shrewsbury and the Earl of Kent, who had been chosen to supervise the execution, arrived at Fotheringhay in early February. On the 7th, the two earls, together with Robert Beale, told Mary that she was to die the next day. On the morning of the 8th, in Fotheringhay’s Great Hall, it was Shrewsbury, as Earl Marshal, who had to give the signal to the executioner, whereupon he looked away and wept. He may not have seen the first fall of the axe into the back of Mary’s head, the second that failed to cut through her neck, the sawing it took to finally sever her head, but during those long minutes he would have heard the grunts of the executioner, the dull thud of the axe, Mary’s cry of pain, the weeping of her ladies. It was a scene to which even the most hard-hearted of men could not have been indifferent, and the emotional Earl was certainly not that. That Mary had been Shrewsbury’s mistress can surely be discounted. Nevertheless, for fifteen years he had shared a roof with her, her gaoler but also her protector; there had scarcely been a day when he hadn’t been in her company and many times when her company must have been a pleasure, even a balm. However exasperating Mary could be, however much trouble she had caused, however much the Earl had longed to be rid of her, the overseeing of her execution must have been not just a duty too far, but an agony.

  Mary was dead, but as far as the Queen and her councillors were concerned, the Catholic menace remained very much alive, not just in Europe but at home. Despite the fact that English Catholics faced increasing penalties under Elizabeth, a small but resolute band remained, sustained by the seminary priests who had been arriving from Europe since the 1570s, and boosted by converts.* The Midlands in particular was something of a Catholic heartland – ‘more dangerously infected’ than anywhere else in England according to Richard Topcliffe, the tireless persecutor of Catholics, a place where ‘bad weeds will seek to shroud themselves under great oaks’.25 Derbyshire had a considerable number of Catholic gentry families, such as the Babingtons. It was one of Shrewsbury’s less envi
able duties, as Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, to ‘root out’ Jesuit priests and their hosts, a task he performed with dogged determination. In 1582, he had been outraged to discover that a barrel stuffed with ‘mass books’ had been smuggled onto one of his ships at Hull.26 ‘Papist recusants’ (those who refused to attend a Protestant service on Sunday) were gaoled and fined, though the fate of priests was much worse. In 1588, the Earl arrested Sir Thomas Fitzherbert and his family, together with two Catholic priests. All were sent to gaol in Derby, where Sir Thomas spent the last thirty years of his life; the priests were hanged, drawn and quartered.

  When it came to hunting down recusants, the Earl employed a band of local men – John Harpur, Francis Leake, William and Thomas Kniveton among them – who entered suspect households, bearing warrants from the Earl, conducted searches and made any necessary arrests. John Harpur reported how he’d arrived at the house of a Mr Danyell early one morning, to find him still in bed and insisting that he was no recusant, whereupon Harpur bundled him and his wife off to church.27 The Danyells were lucky. The Knivetons reported that a Constance Sherwin had offered to go to church and ‘become a new woman’, but they’d arrested her anyway, on the Earl’s orders. However, they hadn’t dared take her ninety-two-year-old bed-bound, blind and impotent husband, who, it was thought, would not survive without his wife; the Knivetons begged for mercy for the pair of them. There was no mercy for Lady Constance Foljambe, who was taken into custody on behalf of the Earl by her own grandson, Sir Godfrey.28