Roaring Boys Read Free

was the ready-made figurehead with a claim to the English throne around which malcontents and Catholic plotters could gather. Indeed, within a year of her arrival the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland were planning rebellion, while the Catholic Earl of Norfolk, Thomas Percy, was making overtures of marriage to her, which she was encouraging for all she was worth. Popular romance has Mary as a martyred heroine, taking little or no part in the activities undertaken in her name, but she was soon sending messages to the Spanish Duke of Alva asking for help for the Earls. ‘Tell your master’, she wrote to him, ‘that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months.’ No doubt about that then.
    The Privy Council got wind of what was afoot and Norfolk was sent for and shrewdly advised to be honest with the Queen. Later, as he faced execution, he wished he had been. Instead, what followed was the abortive Northern Rebellion which was put down with great savagery, some eight hundred of the Earl’s followers being hanged. Northumberland fled to Scotland but was later returned to England and executed. Elizabeth refused to act against Mary on the grounds that there was no certain proof that she had been party to the plot, but so major an insurrection thoroughly unnerved both the Queen and her government, and matters were soon to deteriorate further. In February 1570 Pope Pius V issued his notorious Bull of Excommunication against the Queen, the result of which was to make it almost impossible for her government to separate faith from politics as had hitherto been the case. The Pope had put English Catholics in an impossible position: if they remained loyal to the Queen they were disobedient to the commands of the Holy Father in Rome, yet if they obeyed his edict it followed that they were traitors to the Queen. The Bull made the position quite clear: all the subjects of the English realm were freed from their oaths of allegiance ‘and all manner of duty, fidelity and obedience’. But even that was not enough. The Pope ‘commanded and enjoined all and every subject and people whatsoever that they shall not once dare to obey her or her laws, directions or commands, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary’. In other words those remaining loyal to the Crown faced automatic excommunication. More than that, it was now open season for assassins.
    In 1572 the Ridolfi Plot led finally to the execution of the Earl of Norfolk, a deed accompanied by a demand from Parliament for Mary’s head. Again Elizabeth refused. Then in August, while she was staying at Warwick Castle, the news was brought to her of the horrific massacre of Huguenots which had taken place on St Bartholomew’s Eve, first in Paris then spreading out to other towns and cities, bringing with it an influx of asylum seekers into England. By the 1580s storm clouds were gathering from every direction. In 1583 there were two more plots, those of Somerville and Throgmorton, both designed to pave the way for a Spanish invasion. That both failed was due in no small part to the intelligence-gathering skills of Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents. Then, in 1586, intelligence reached the Queen’s spymaster of yet another, the initiator being a naive country gentleman by the name of Antony Babington. The government had had enough and were absolutely determined that Mary should go. To ensure this she had to be implicated beyond any shadow of doubt; Walsingham therefore infiltrated into the circle of the conspirators his own best secret agent, Robert Poley. The result, as everyone knows, was not only the downfall and unpleasant deaths of the plotters but the eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
    But no sooner had one hazard been put behind her than the Queen was beset by others. Although ‘the Spanish Armada’ of 1588 is usually referred to as the single attempt by Philip II to conquer the English, Spain had actually