Free The Watchers by Stephen Alford Page B

December of that year, he was held under house arrest by the Elizabethan authorities. They discovered that Ridolfi’s bills of foreign exchange were for the Bishop of Ross, Mary’s ambassador at Elizabeth’s court, and for Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. This was clearly suspicious, but nothing certain was proved either way. Only in 1571 did all the elements of Ridolfi’s plot come properly to light. Because of the arrest at Dover of a courier working for the Bishop of Ross, Elizabeth’s government discovered that Ridolfi had been working as a contact between the Spanish government and English Catholic noblemen sympathetic to the cause of the Queen of Scots. Chief among them was the Duke of Norfolk, who had plotted to free and then marry Mary and to encourage a Spanish invasion of England. In unmasking Norfolk as a traitor to Elizabeth, the Ridolfi Plot struck a blow to the heart of the Elizabethan state. The duke’s beheading in 1572 was the price Elizabeth had to pay for resisting pressure from her Privy Council and a very angry parliament to execute the Queen of Scots herself.
    One of the profoundest problems facing Elizabeth’s advisers was that of Mary’s asylum in England. For nearly nineteen years, between 1568 and her execution in 1587, she was Elizabeth’s guest both uninvited and unwanted. She was believed by the English government to be complicit in the murder of her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, in 1567. She was obviously hostile to Elizabeth and wanted her kinswoman’s crown; she plotted with foreign powers in Europe on behalf of her own royal claim to England. Elizabeth, nervous of killing a fellow monarch even by justice, refused to put Mary on trial for her life. Equally, it would have been madness for Elizabeth to send her back to Scotland: the consequences for England’s security, and fora friendly Protestant government in Scotland, were unthinkable. To return her to France was much too dangerous a prospect. At least in England she could be held at Elizabeth’s pleasure. So Mary was isolated, moved between houses and castles in the midland counties of Warwickshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, her movements and household controlled as much as possible by the English government. But Elizabeth’s ministers could not cut her off from Europe completely, much as they tried – from Spain and King Philip’s ambassadors in London, from her Guise kinsmen in France or from Rome. It was known that secret letters passed between Mary, her secretaries and her friends at home and abroad. Eager English Catholic gentlemen volunteered to act as her couriers.
    To English eyes it was clear as daylight (though of course concealed in shadow and secrecy) that the Queen of Scots was determined by hook or by crook to get for herself the Tudor crown. They believed that she sat at the centre of a web of European Catholic conspiracy. This toxic fear of Mary provoked in 1585 the Act for the Queen’s Surety, one of the most extraordinary and menacing laws ever passed by an English parliament. This statute set out how any action against Elizabeth ‘by or for’ a pretender to the English crown would be tried by a special commission of privy councillors and lords of parliament. Anyone found guilty of such a conspiracy against the queen – and also the pretender with whose knowledge or assent the conspiracy was planned – could on being found guilty by the commission be hunted down and ‘pursued to death’. The statute, in other words, sanctioned vengeance against Mary by private subjects authorized to do so by an act of parliament. True, her name did not appear in the act, but nevertheless the statute was clearly and obviously aimed squarely at the Queen of Scots. Indeed it was the very law that took her to the executioner’s block at Fotheringhay Castle two years later.
    The Act for the Queen’s Surety spoke of ‘sundry wicked