After Elizabeth Read online

  On 17 November 1600 thirty-three secular priests signed a second appeal to Rome and published a flurry of pamphlets in England. William Watson wrote one warning that if the Pope’s decision on the Archpriest was allowed to stand, “all Catholics must hereafter depend upon Blackwell, and he upon Garnet and Garnet upon Persons, and Persons upon the Devil, who is the author of all rebellions, treasons, murders, disobedience and all such designments as this wicked Jesuit had hitherto contrived.”6 Cecil was astonished and delighted by the hatred Watson had expressed for the Jesuits. Here at last was a way to stanch the increase in the number of Catholic converts. He would use the Appellants to expose the treachery of the Jesuits, discredit all of them and thereby sow further divisions.

  In March 1601 the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, summoned the Appellant priest Thomas Bluet from his cell to meet with him at his palace in Fulham. Bluet was shown letters and books allegedly written by Jesuits inviting the King of Spain to invade England and urging individuals to assassinate Elizabeth. Bluet willingly agreed to help the government and in return the Appellant priests were encouraged to prepare a supplication for toleration to the Queen. Elizabeth responded in July 1601 with an icy reminder that she had been excommunicated—a judgment that still stood: “if I grant this liberty to Catholics,” she told them, “by this very fact I lay at their feet my honour, my crown and my life.”7 But the priests were encouraged to continue to strive to prove their loyalty and in November 1601 the Privy Council sent Bluet and four or five of his companions to Rome for a new appeal on the matter of the Archpriest. Meanwhile Bancroft, the licensing authority for printing, encouraged the Appellants to publish more literature,8 and he soon informed Cecil that William Watson was proving to be particularly “tractable to whet his pen against the Jesuits.”9

  Another of these sixteenth-century “useful idiots” was a gentleman poet and friend of Watson called Anthony Copley. His writings claimed that the courtly Jesuit Robert Persons was the bastard son of a plowman, “a common ale house squire, and the drunkest sponge in all the parish where he lived,” and that he had “two bastards, male and female, upon the body of his own sister” before “he ran away . . . and so became a Jesuit.”10 Eighteen such books attacking Persons and his designs upon the English throne appeared between 1601 and 1603, and eventually Persons responded.

  In his “Manifestation of the Great Folly and Bad Spirit of Certain in England calling themselves secular priests,” published in 1602, Persons sank to the same level as Copley. He sneered that the cross-eyed William Watson “looks nine ways at once” and was so short-sighted “he can discern nothing that touches not his eye.” Watson, he wrote, was remembered at his seminary in Rheims for being as clumsy as he was stupid and for arriving so poor that he licked “the dishes which other men had emptied.” Other priests received similar treatment while Copley was dismissed as “a little, wanton idle headed boy.” 11 Bancroft was so pleased when he saw the pamphlet that he told the man who brought it to him “that if he had brought him a £100 he could not have done him a greater pleasure, and, scratching his elbow, said that this was that he looked for all this while, viz, that one should write against another.”12 The propaganda war was, however, only part of a very dirty business. Some members of the Appellant faction were persuaded that the best way to prove their loyalty to the state was to betray their Jesuit enemies directly to the government. Here again Watson stood out.

  In April 1602 three priests were hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on the same day and all, according to Garnet, “like our Saviour were betrayed by false brethren.” Watson, in contrast, was “permitted to live where he will” and “though he be known generally, yet he goeth in his chain of gold, white satin doublet and hose and velvet jerkin” 13—quite an outfit for a man who had once been obliged to feed himself by licking others men’s plates. The appeal to Rome by the secular priests finally came to a conclusion on 5 October when Clement VIII issued a new brief. It attempted to end the friction by forbidding the Archpriest from communicating with either the Head of the English Jesuits (Garnet) or their Principal (Persons). It cleared the Appellants of schism and insisted that three of the Appellant priests should be appointed as Blackwell’s assistants in succession. It did not, however, establish episcopal government, as the Appellants had hoped. The post of Archpriest was to remain. Nor did it restrain priests from interfering in political affairs, or bind them to release any information of plots against the monarch. On the contrary, Pope Clement then issued his secret brief that no Catholic should consent to any Protestant successor to the Queen.

  Elizabeth had by now grown anxious to put an end to calls for religious toleration, and in November 1602 the Privy Council published its Proclamation Against Jesuits and Others. It repeated what Elizabeth had already told the Appellants in 1601—namely, that she would never permit two religions to exist in her realm. The proclamation ordered the Jesuits to leave the country within thirty days; the Appellants had until the end of January 1603. Behind the scenes, Cecil and Bancroft maintained contact with the Appellants, but James was infuriated that the November proclamation was not being carried out, and the letter he sent to Cecil from Scotland left the Secretary with no option but to confront this inaction. The Appellants’ search for common ground concluded on 31 January 1603, the day Elizabeth made her last journey to Richmond, when they presented a Protestation of Allegiance to Bancroft. It affirmed that the thirteen priests who signed it would maintain their allegiance to the Queen despite her excommunication, but they also reasserted their adherence to the Catholic faith and submission to the Pope in spiritual matters.

  Bluet and the three other priests who delivered the Protestation were taken straight to the Clink prison in Southwark (at least one and possibly two signatories of the Protestation would become martyrs). The rest of the secular clergy were given a further forty days’ grace before banishment. Watson had refused to sign the Protestation, telling Bancroft he was “much moved with this [the priests’] presumption in taking upon them to prescribe in effect their own conditions” for staying in England.14 But he took advantage of the forty days’ grace to set off for Scotland, looking for assurances of toleration from James and hoping to achieve the breakthrough the other priests had failed to make. He had returned when Elizabeth was dying, claiming that James “was neither heretic, as Persons and other Jesuits had blazed him to be; neither would he afflict [Catholics] as they had been: and therefore [he] wished them by me not to be afraid.” 15 Since Catholics remained in prison, as afflicted as they had been when Elizabeth was alive, Watson was now looking very foolish. Fellow Catholics bitterly referred to James as “Watson’s King” and he was seething with resentment.

  The first person Watson shared his disappointment with was his good friend Sir Griffin Markham, Sir John Harington’s Catholic first cousin. Once an excellent soldier, he had served as Essex’s Colonel of the Horse in Ireland until a gunshot wound to the arm almost killed him. Sir Griffin had financed Watson’s trip to Scotland and Watson had arranged to meet him in Doncaster, where Sir Griffin hoped to be given an audience with James. The Markham family history had been one of total loyalty to Elizabeth: they had remained true to her even in the aftermath of Wyatt’s revolt against Mary I. Elizabeth had duly rewarded them with the lease of Beskwood Park, nine square miles in the Forest of Nottingham. These woodland stewardships had become the basis of Sir Griffin’s high standing in the county and he was anxious to prove his loyalty to James in the hope of continuing royal favor—not least because the Markhams had urgent need of his help. They had recently found themselves in severe financial difficulty. This had been not through extravagance but the consequence of misplaced family loyalty. Sir Griffin’s brother-in-law, John Skinner, the Deputy Governor of Berwick, had persuaded Sir Griffin’s father to guarantee his debts. He had then defaulted, leaving the Markhams facing ruin. Sir Griffin had written to Cecil in December asking for his help in resolving the crisis. They were kinsmen and he hoped Cecil wo
uld pressure Skinner into selling his house in Berwick to pay his debts. Cecil was no friend of Skinner, but he did nothing to help the Markhams. Only the King could now save the family from disaster. Sir Griffin hoped that Watson would express his family’s loyalty to James and he intended to match those words with deeds. While the priest had traveled through the north in March, “longing much to drive all doubtful conceits and dangerous attempts, tending to disloyalty, out of all English but especially all Catholic hearts,” Sir Griffin kept his ear to the ground for Jesuit plots.16

  Sir Griffin was friendly with a priest called William Clark, who had just published an answer to Persons’s tract on the secular priests. 17 Clark wrote to Sir Griffin early in April warning that the Jesuit John Gerard was seeking the means to depose James. Watson later elaborated on this, claiming that Gerard had been telling Catholics that they would be excommunicated if they did not resist the crowning of a heretic. 18 Sir Griffin hoped his information would please James, and as Cecil was still traveling with the King, he was in a position to create an occasion on which Sir Griffin could present his suit.

  On 19 April James stayed at the Sun and Bear Inn at Doncaster. 30 The Council had originally intended that James spend the night at the eight-towered Pontefract Castle, but it had proved to be in too poor a condition to accommodate the royal party. Such decay was a direct result of a deliberate policy of Tudor neglect, an attempt to prevent such castles from being used as strongholds by rebellious subjects. Only those in the north and west, which were needed as bulwarks against the Scots and the Spanish, were still maintained. England’s inns, by contrast, were famously comfortable. Fynes Moryson boasted, “There is no place in the world where passengers may so freely command as in the English Inns; they are attended for themselves and their horses as well as if they were at home, and perhaps better, each servant being ready to call, in hope of a small reward in the morning.” 19 James’s bedchamber and dining place at Doncaster had been dressed especially for his stay, but even an ordinary traveler could expect rooms to be well furnished and to be offered a wide selection of fresh meat and fish.

  Sir Griffin must have cut a distinctive figure among the press of people around the inn, with his dark complexion, broad face and badly disfigured hand. We do not know whether he saw Cecil, but he was refused an audience with James. Watson wasted no time in expressing his own sense of betrayal to the former soldier, as Cecil must surely have guessed he would. He also knew that if Watson was caught and condemned for involvement in any future plot his fellow secular priests would be damaged by association. Sir Griffin, who was well connected at court and a neighbor of Arbella Stuart, might in turn involve other malcontents. He was friendly with both Grey of Wilton, who had demanded James be invited to accept the crown with conditions, and Cobham’s brother, George Brooke. Once compromised, he would either hang with the rest or act as a spy—but Sir Griffin’s hopes in James were not yet entirely spent.

  From Doncaster James traveled to Worksop Manor in Nottinghamshire, the first of the great Elizabethan palaces the King was to see. Worksop was one of nine houses the Earl of Shrewsbury owned in the area and the nobleman was grateful the King had chosen to visit it. The actions of Arbella Stuart at Christmas had made her more of a liability than an asset to the family and Shrewsbury knew he would have to work hard to charm the King.

  The builder of Worksop, Robert Smythson, had honed his trade as a mason on Longleat and he knew how to impress. The façade was 180 feet long, reaching six stories at its wings, with lantern turrets above. For much of this length it was only one room wide, which must have made it a cold house, but it was light and Cecil judged the gallery to be “the fairest in England.”20 James was greeted in Worksop Park by a band of huntsmen dressed in green, the chief of whom delivered a speech of welcome and asked if he would like to see some game—an offer, of course, James accepted.21 After his kill James retired to the house. Shrewsbury had invited all his local friends to meet the King, adding by way of postscript to his letters: “I will not refuse any fat capons and hens, partridges and the like.” His neighbors had responded generously and there was a feast for rich and poor. The Shrewsburys had also added a special touch, the “most excellent soul-ravishing music, wherewith his Highness was not a little delighted.”22 James had been an enthusiastic patron of music in Scotland and it is likely the musicians included Thomas Greaves, a lutanist to the Countess of Shrewsbury’s brother-in-law at nearby Holme Pierrepont. 31

  When James was suitably relaxed the Shrewsburys seized the opportunity to assure him that Arbella’s attempts to escape Hardwick and marry Edward Seymour had sprung entirely from unhappiness at the severity of her grandmother. James asked with whom she would be happier. Shrewsbury suggested the Earl of Kent, whose nephew had recently married his daughter. James immediately drafted Kent a letter ordering him to take his cousin in.

  Forasmuch as we are desirous to free our cousin the Lady Arbella Stuart from that unpleasant life which she hath led in the house of her grandmother with whose severity and age she, being a young lady, could hardly agree, we have thought fit for the present to require you, as a nobleman of whose wisdom and fidelity we have heard so good report, to be contented for some short space to receive her into your house, and there to use her in that manner which is fit for her calling.

  A copy was sent to the Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury at Hardwick. Arbella must have been delighted at her grandmother’s discomfiture, but when James asked her to act as chief mourner at Elizabeth’s funeral she refused with ill grace, saying that since she had been denied access to the Queen during her lifetime she would not be brought onto the stage for a public spectacle after her death. It was poor repayment for the effort James had made on her behalf and a source of further embarrassment for the Shrewsburys, though before James left he knighted the Shrewsburys’ son-in-law, Henry Grey.

  The events of that day cast a long shadow over James’s future reputation. He stopped at the Nottinghamshire town of Newark, which according to one visitor boasted a “fair church . . . richly adorned with monuments,” a “neat market place . . . in a manner four-square,” and streets full of “handsome creatures, well furnished.”23 It was, however, to be the scene of an ugly incident.

  A young cutpurse who had followed the royal train disguised as a gentleman had been caught with a large amount of coin on him. The sentence for any thief caught and convicted of stealing more than 12 pence was death. 32 The end for this cutpurse was thus never in doubt and by tradition the house at number 63 London Road, Newark, bearing the name “Gallows Field,” was the place where the execution took place. What was unusual—and disturbing—was that James simply directed a warrant to the Recorder of Newark to have the young man executed.24 “I hear our new King has hanged a man before he was tried,” Sir John Harington wrote soon afterward; “ ’tis strangely done: now if the wind blows thus, why may not a man be tried before he has offended?”25 Harington’s comments would be quoted down the centuries, with James’s action described as the first example of Stuart despotism in England. It was not, however, quite as shocking as writers would later make out.

  Scottish law did not require cutpurses to be tried before execution. The same applied to some areas of England—Fynes Moryson records, for instance, that the town of Halifax still had the privilege to behead “anyone found in open theft . . . without delay.”26 James never repeated his offense, presumably having had the English legal norms explained to him, but it is significant that Harington, hitherto such an advocate of James’s cause, was so quick to pass judgment. Harington was clearly disappointed that James was not going to offer toleration of religion, as he had hoped, but he was also close to Sir Griffin Markham, under whom he had served in Ireland—so close, in fact, that he had secured his debts. If Sir Griffin defaulted on his creditors, they would pursue Harington. It seems possible that Sir Griffin had been in contact with Harington, expressing his irritation that he was unable to get an audience with James at Doncaster as well as
describing the death of the cutpurse in Newark. 33

  James stayed at Newark Castle that night, one of two key fortresses guarding the crossings of the Trent and so in a reasonable state of repair. The second, at Nottingham, was well known to Harington. It was famous for having held David II of Scotland a prisoner between 1346 and 1357. Tourists were often shown the cell where “the said king with his own hands (without any instrument than the nails of his fingers) did engrave and claw out the form of our Saviour’s life, death and passion.”27 The scratches could still be seen on the walls and Harington had shrewdly had one of these scenes copied onto the lantern he had sent James as a New Year’s gift. The king had sent Harington his thanks for the gift shortly before he left Scotland, but the words of the good thief crucified alongside Christ inscribed on it—“Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom”—would soon have a desperate ring. Harington was already beginning to understand what he had lost in his royal godmother and as he considered what he had learned of the new king he moaned to his friends: “I have lost the best and fairest love that ever shepherd knew, even my gracious Queen.”28