If Mary Queen of Scots was the hapless Norfolk’s nemesis, so the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolphi was the ominous figure that finally brought him to his doom. Although the duke’s annual income was around £4,500 - more than £1.1 million at 2009 prices - he found that the extravagances of life at court and his public duties cost him dearly.
55
It may have been a temporary need for hard cash that led to a fateful introduction to Ridolphi in 1569.
56
The Italian had come to London eight years earlier and in 1566 had been charged with channelling the secret funds provided by Pope Pius V to the English Catholics to help overthrow Elizabeth. Both the French and Spanish ambassadors were involved in the conspiracy, as were a number of English Catholic nobles and Mary’s representative in London, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross.
Cecil’s agents had Ridolphi under surveillance and monitored his visits to Howard House. On 7 October, the banker was arrested and held at Walsingham’s house for questioning.
57
This was all unknown to Norfolk in the Tower of London. His friends and associates were being interrogated about him, but there was little hard evidence on which charges of treason could be brought against him. One note of Cecil’s about the investigation is significant:
The duke was advertised of the intent of conveying away the Queen of Scots to Arundel Castle by letters of the Scottish queen to the Bishop of Ross.
The Earl of Arundel’s [Philip Howard] cook to be examined of his knowledge.
58
Wary of simmering discontent among the Catholic population, it was too dangerous to free the duke, as far as Elizabeth was concerned - so he continued to suffer in prison. On 16 October he wrote to the Privy Council beseeching them to procure the return of Elizabeth’s favour to him and assuring them that if ‘I knew what to do [which] should be to [her] satisfaction, no good would be found wanting in me’. Norfolk complained that his ‘health doth decay every day and I am falling into the disease I had before going to the baths’.
59
Under close questioning in fluent Italian over many days, Walsingham investigated Ridolphi’s activities, particularly his dealings with Mary Queen of Scots and Norfolk. He admitted dealing with the Bishop of Ross and giving both him and the duke cash from overseas. Suddenly, on 11 November, the banker was ordered to be released as Elizabeth was now ‘disposed to act with clemency’.
60
The reason for his sudden release was that Walsingham had ‘turned’ the Italian into an agent for Cecil. The antiquary and herald William Camden, who probably knew Walsingham well, described him as ‘a most subtle searcher of hidden secrets, who knew excellently well how to win men’s minds unto him and apply them to his own use’. We shall see more of Ridolphi shortly and how he was used to snare the naive and trusting Norfolk.
In November 1569, the Catholic magnates in the north - Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland - armed 7,500 of their tenantry and marched on Durham. On the 14th, they broke into the city’s cathedral and destroyed the English bibles and prayer books within and banned further Protestant services there. They then marched south, planning to free Mary Queen of Scots from her confinement at Tutbury Castle. But their bold advance was stopped in its tracks by approaching royalist forces and the rebellion disappeared in the withering cold of the northern winter. Elizabeth meant to teach her Catholics a harsh lesson. About 750 insurgents were executed to satisfy her strident calls for vengeance.
61
On 25 February 1570, Pope Pius V published the Bull
Regnans in Excelsis
which excommunicated Elizabeth and deprived this ‘pretended’ queen of the English throne - as well as absolving her subjects from any allegiance or loyalty to her. This was a decisive tactical error by the Vatican in its campaign against Protestant England, as the Bull made each and every one of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects potentially an individual threat to her life. The Pope had, in effect, offered up his blessing upon their treason. As far as the queen and her staunchly Protestant government were concerned - particularly after the jolt to the body politic of the northern rebellion - all English Catholics were now latent enemies within their own country.
But with the lessons of the harsh retribution wreaked upon the north still fresh in Catholic minds, they felt safe enough to free Norfolk, after ten months of incarceration, in early August 1570, although the plague that raged in and around the fortress may have been a factor.
62
There remained grave uncertainties about his trustworthiness and he was confined in his London home in Charterhouse Square, under the charge of Sir Henry Neville, and kept under close surveillance.
Norfolk dutifully wrote to the queen acknowledging his offence ‘and by my voluntary offering to make amends for the same with a determined mind, never to offend your majesty either in the same or in any matter . . . And where I did unhappily give ease to certain motions made to me in a cause of marriage to be prosecuted for me with the Queen of Scots . . . I will also willing confess . . . I did err.’
63
In such circumstances - his narrow escape from a treason charge, his grovelling apology and his house arrest - it is simply breathtaking that the duke was so stupid as to become involved again with Mary Queen of Scots and Roberto Ridolphi.
Only days after his release from the Tower, the audacious Florentine was back inside Howard House. One would think that a hardly more unwelcome visitor could be conceived. Nor was his mission more palatable. He asked the apprehensive Norfolk to write to the Duke of Alva, the Spanish Captain General in the Low Countries, and appeal for funds for Mary Queen of Scots. With rare perception, Norfolk shunned him - ‘I began to mislike him,’ he said later and, ‘sought ways to shift me from him.’
Mary’s love of intrigue and her lack of any sense of reality also added to his nervousness. On 31 January 1571, she wrote to him, encouraging his escape from house arrest - ‘as she would do [herself] notwithstanding any danger’ - in order that they could be married.
64
The final chapter in Norfolk’s meteor-like life began with the arrest on or about 12 April that year of Charles Bailly, a young Fleming who had entered Mary’s service in 1564 and latterly worked for the Bishop of Ross. Cecil’s agents had detained him in Dover after finding letters and books from English Catholic exiles in his luggage. Two of the missives, addressed to the Bishop, were from the ubiquitous Ridolphi, now in Brussels.
Brought to London, Bailly was soon strapped to the rack in the Tower of London, and, under torture, admitted tearfully that Ridolphi had departed England on 25 March with appeals from Mary to the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, the Spanish king, Philip II, and the Pope, to fund and organise an invasion of England. The objective was to overthrow Elizabeth, replace her on the throne with Mary and return the realm to Catholicism. Earlier that month, Ridolphi had returned to Howard House and left Norfolk a document that detailed the invasion plans and listed forty nobles and officials who secretly supported Mary’s claims to the English crown. Each name was identified by a number for use in coded correspondence.
65
Meanwhile, Ridolphi had failed to convince the Spanish governor about the chances of success of the invasion plan. He talked confidently that Spain could contribute 6,000 infantry and twenty-five cannon to reinforce a populist army of English Catholics, led by Norfolk, to oust Elizabeth .
66
Hard-nosed Alva was not impressed, and clearly believed the plan was founded on wild flights of military fantasy. He urged the Spanish king to provide military assistance only after the English Catholics had successfully rebelled and Elizabeth ‘was already dead . . . or else a prisoner’. He added: ‘We may tell [Norfolk] that these conditions being fulfilled he shall have what he wants.’
67
The duke was swimming in very dangerous waters indeed. He was now serenely approaching a vortex which would suck him down into oblivion. On 29 August, his two secretaries, William Barker and Robert Higford, handed over a bag purporting to contain £50 in silver coin to a Shrewsbury draper called Thomas Browne. They instructed him to deliver it to Laurence Bannister, the steward of the Dacre estates in the north. Once out of Howard House, the curious Browne opened the bag and found £600 in gold and a number of letters written in cipher. Being a cautious man, and aware of the suspicions still surrounding the duke, he took it immediately to the Privy Council.
Norfolk must have been either an innocent babe in matters of espionage and subversion, or supremely incompetent. Not only could the cash be linked directly to him - worse, it could be traced back to its source, de la Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in London. In reality, it was to be sent to Scotland to be used by the faction supporting Mary Queen of Scots.
Cecil’s agents were soon hotfoot to Charterhouse Square, to search Howard House. Their efforts were quickly rewarded:
The cipher, or key to his [Norfolk’s] correspondence on this subject, [was] found under the tiles of the roof of the Charterhouse and some particular papers deciphered by the duke’s secretary Higford and which he had ordered him to burn, [were] discovered under the mat leading to the duke’s bedchamber.
68
On 4 September, Sir Ralph Sadler checked on new tightened security measures imposed at Howard House, arriving there at eight o’clock in the morning. He found that Neville had ‘discreetly ordered all things’.
The duke is committed to his chamber, all his servants secluded from him out of the house, saving two to attend upon him in his chamber and four or five necessary officers to provide and dress his meat.
Sadler expected to be ‘on the spot all day’ and at night, when he departed to his lodgings in the Savoy, he would leave at least six men to secure the house. He stressed that ‘Neville guards so wisely and well that my presence is not needful’.
69
He was back three days later to warn the duke that ‘for his obstinate dealing and denial of his great faults, her majesty was sore offended with him and had determined to use him more severely’.
Sadler told a ‘submissive’ Norfolk that he was to be ‘removed to another place by her highness’ command’ and took him, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, by ‘footcloth nag’ to the Tower. Their journey across the city was troubled by a ‘number of idle rascal people, women, men, boys and girls, running about him and . . . gazing at him’. The Spanish ambassador, however, reported that ‘the concourse of people was so large and the shouts so general, that a very little more, and he would have been liberated’.
Sadler and his companions left Norfolk in the custody of the Lieutenant of the Tower, with two servants to attend to his needs.
70
The queen instructed his jailer in the ‘strict keeping’ of the duke, and ordered: ‘You shall do well presently to shut up in close prison for a time, all prisoners that are thither committed for obstinacy in religion or such as you may conjecture will deal for intelligence in favour of the duke.’
71
Norfolk’s secretaries were arrested and questioned. Old William Barker was ‘three or four times examined but hitherto showed [himself] an obstinate and a fool’ reported Sadler.
72
Then, threatened with the rack, his resistance crumbled. The secretary said that many English nobles favoured the duke’s marriage with the Scottish queen; he doubted the Earl of Derby’s support ‘for he was but a soft man’. Fatally, he talked of Ridolphi’s invasion plans: Spanish military assistance would land at Dumbarton ‘if from Flanders’, at Leith [and at] Harwich in Essex.
Last Lent he brought Ridolphi to the Duke of Norfolk, who talked with him. Ridolphi found no great good disposition in the duke because he would not write to Alva, which the duke afterwards told him, saying: ‘I do not like it, nor will not write.’
73
The keeper of Howard House, John Sinclair, alias John Gardener, who had served the duke for a decade, was also caught up in the inquiry and found himself in the Tower. He denied everything, but his inquisitors produced a man called Archie Inglis, who recounted a conversation with him that proved damning:
He knew from Sinclair how the Queen of Scots should have got away before it was known in England . . . After several knights and gentlemen had resorted to the duke by one or two together, certain men should have gone and taken her away where she should have been at hunting and companies of men should have been laid to have received her every ten or twelve miles.
The duke should have gone away that same day and met her.
The queen’s [Elizabeth’s] power had been nothing to the duke’s; he would have had so many partakers.
He who is the duke’s keeper is of the duke’s counsel and privy to this enterprise.
The duke might leap on horseback at his back door, ride his way and send the queen word that he was gone and she should not be able to fetch him again.
74
Sinclair acknowledged that ‘there was talk among the yeomen of the house that the duke and the Scottish queen were assured together; that their goodwill remained still and that he would marry if he might’.
75
Elizabeth Massey, wife to the parson of the Tower, was also questioned. She related that during Norfolk’s first imprisonment there, ‘one Jervis, serving there, sent his little daughter of seven years, almost daily unto the duke’s chamber with nosegays’ and she returned ‘sometimes with a golden groat [4d]’. She did not like these visits and had seen Jervis talking to papists.
And now lately on All Hallows night he counselled her husband to put her away with many evil words betwixt them . . .
That same evening, about eight of the clock, Jervis met her, saying: ‘Whither goest thou?’ She answered: ‘To go to the Lieutenant to complain of him.’ Then he struck her upon the arm with his halberd and did overthrow her into the myute [moat].
She suspected also my Lady Eleanor because she spoke diverse times at the window with the duke at his first imprisonment and sent one of her children to him almost every day.
Further, the said Elizabeth says that she . . . was procured by certain signs to deliver and receive letters from the duke secretly by his [
underlined
] laundress. The same said to her that she should serve God and pray for the duke, whereby she should lack nothing for ‘he thinks well of you’.
As for the queen, [she] shall not be long queen, being a bastard.
76