1568-72: the pivot of the reign

Mary, Queen of Scots in captivity
by Nicholas Hilliard.
Public domain.

The captive Queen

The period 1568-1572 is the pivot of the reign when Elizabeth entered a period of danger. The arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots in England posed an acute dilemma for Elizabeth. Her initial reaction was horror at the violation of the rights of a fellow-sovereign, an anointed queen. But Mary was a discredited figure. She could not send her back to Scotland, where her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, was Regent for the young James VI, neither could she allow her to go to France.

She was a powerful presence in the north of England, where Catholic loyalties were still strong. She managed to persuade many Catholics of her innocence and she represented an alternative to Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement. Under these circumstances, Elizabeth felt she had no alternative but to imprison her; as long as she was in England she represented a threat.

In mid-July 1568, Mary was moved to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. Elizabeth refused to see her, and her enemies produced a series of letters – the ‘Casket Letters’ – that ‘proved’ her complicity in Darnley’s murder. In January 1569 she was moved to the inhospitable Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and was guarded by George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. (There were to be many other changes of places of imprisonment.)

The Duke of Norfolk and the Northern Rising

From the end of 1568, the Queen’s second cousin, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, was planning to marry Mary. He was supported by Leicester, though not by Cecil. In November, after Elizabeth had learned of his plans (and of Leicester's apparent betrayal) he was placed in the Tower, and Mary was kept under stricter surveillance.

Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk,
by Hans Ewerth,
Public domain.

This provided the signal for Norfolk's Catholic allies. Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland were summoned to court. Fearing to comply, they acted in traditional baronial fashion and mustered their forces. From November 1569, much of the far North was in the hands of the rebels. They marched to Durham, and on 14 November restored Mass in the cathedral.

The 1570s: the Catholic mission and the last courtship

The Sieve Portrait by
Quentin Metsys.
Elizabeth as the Vestal Virgin, Tuccia
Pinacoteca Nazionale (Siena)

The years 1568-1572 had been a period of intense crisis in Europe. The four main events (as far as England was concerned) were 

• the arrival of Mary Queen of Scots in England
• the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pius V
• the revolt of the Netherlands
• the St Bartholomew Massacre

All these events pointed to a Europe increasingly divided over religion. They also confirmed England’s dangerous isolation, as it increasingly saw itself as a beleaguered Protestant island surrounded by hostile Catholic powers. Elizabeth herself, however, was usually pragmatic, and tried to resist the demands of her more ideological councillors and members of parliament (a) to help the Dutch rebels, and (b) to execute Mary Queen of Scots. 

Elizabeth’s Councillors

Leicester: The rivalry between Cecil (created Baron Burghley in 1571) and Leicester was one of the factors Elizabeth had to live with. In the late 1560s Leicester had been involved in the plot to marry Norfolk to Mary Queen of Scots, but by the 1570s he had become the chief patron of the Puritan party within the Church. He was a ‘hawk’ in foreign policy, his goal being to lead an expeditionary force against the Dutch.  From being (probably) Elizabeth’s preferred choice of husband, he was now her companion - nicknamed her ‘Eyes’.

In July 1575 Elizabeth visited Leicester's home at Kenilworth Castle, where she was entertained with great magnificence. However, she left in a huff when she learned that he had been having an affair with the Countess of Essex, her cousin once removed, Lettice Knollys. When the Earl of Essex died, Leicester and Lettice married secretly in September 1578. Elizabeth was furious when she learned and for a time wanted to send him to the Tower: he couldn't marry her, but she didn't want him to marry anyone else!

Burghley: Leicester’s influence never matched Cecil’s (a much more trustworthy character). He was raised to the peerage as Baron Burghley in February 1571 and when the Marquis of Winchester died in June 1572 Elizabeth appointed him Lord Treasurer. There was a bond of trust between him and Elizabeth, though she never shared his visceral hatred of Catholicism or his implacable enmity towards Mary. Queen of Scots. She named him her ‘Spirit’.

Sir Francis Walsingham: was the son of a Kentish family. He was ambassador to Paris at the end of 1570 and Secretary of State in 1573 (in effect, Foreign Secretary). A dark-visaged man, Elizabeth named him her ‘Moor’. His politics were dominated by a single-minded, intense anti-Catholicism. In the developing crisis of foreign policy, he was the steady advocate of intervention in France and the Netherlands and he was outspoken in his hostility to Spain.  He was the most single-minded ideologue on the Council. 

Christopher Hatton (1540-91): became captain of the queen’s bodyguards in 1572, and entered the Council in 1577. He had been for some years an established royal favourite, Leicester’s rival.  HAs the queen’s junior by seven years he cast himself, in the Renaissance tradition of courtly love, as the perpetual suitor, paying court to an adored but inaccessible mistress. His letters to her were signed as her ‘(eye)Lids’ or her ‘Sheep’.

New, rising young men included Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester’s nephew and putative heir and Sir Walter Raleigh, the, son of a small Devonshire squire, who, like Hatton, rose through personal magnetism. Neither of these ever reached the inner sanctum. 

Elizabeth's counsellors were ambitious politicians, frequently divided along ideological lines, but they did not pose a threat to the monarchy. England was far more stable than France or Scotland, two countries rent apart by rivalries among the nobility. The failure of the Northern Rising and the execution of Norfolk had confirmed the fundamental strength of the Tudor monarchy. 

Marriage and the succession

Mary, Queen of Scots
by François Clouet
Public domain

The European context and Mary, Queen of Scots

The domestic politics of the 1560s centred on the succession to the throne, Elizabeth’s matrimonial problems, the European political and religious situation, and the Scottish question, all of which were inter-linked. John Guy, Tudor England (1990), p. 268

Mid-sixteenth-century Europe was in the grip of two lethal conflicts: an ideological war between revived Catholicism and radical Protestantism, and the continuing Habsburg (the Holy Roman Empire and Spain) and Valois (France) struggle for supremacy. England was a small, vulnerable country with an uncertain succession.

For Catholics, Mary, Queen of Scots, the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was the rightful Queen. Since 1548, when she was five, she had been living in France and was a pawn of French politics. On 24 April 1558, she and the Dauphin François were married in Notre Dame.  

When Queen Mary Tudor died in 1558, Mary asserted her claim to the throne against Elizabeth by quartering the arms of England on her shield, a gesture the English regarded as extremely provocative. 

On 10 July 1559, Henri II died following a jousting accident and François became king. Mary was now Queen of Scotland and France and at the same time asserting a claim to the English throne. Her prestige and her importance had never been higher. She was a serious rival to Elizabeth.