The chief concern of domestic policy through the 1580s (apart, of course, from the military and financial preparations for war) was the ‘enemy within’, the Roman Catholics, and above all Mary Queen of Scots, who might so easily become a focus for their discontent. The sometimes hysterical fear of Catholic plots peaked in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the reign, the making of the ‘Bond of Association’ in 1584, an episode which paradoxically revealed both the deep devotion of the English people to their queen and their increasing preparedness to act collectively without her lead. Inspired by the assassination of William of Orange on 10 July 1584, but conditioned by the series of plots against Elizabeth’s life which were continually being uncovered, the Bond of Association was, as its title suggests, a contract or agreement of a group of people to pursue common objectives. The objectives were the protection of the queen’s life and, in the event of her suspicious or sudden death, vengeance to the death against the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the deed. Modelled to some extent on the kind of political bonds and covenants which commonly figured in Scottish politics, it is a public document unique in English history for binding its signatories to commit murder under specified circumstances:
We do not only vow and bind ourselves... never to allow, accept or favour any such pretended successors, by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted... but do also further vow and protest, as we are most bound, and that in the presence of the eternal and everliving God, to persecute such person or persons to the death with our joint and particular forces, and to take the uttermost revenge on them that by any possible means we or any of us can devise...
The subtext of the bond was the importance of keeping Mary Queen of Scots off the throne at all costs in order to defend the Protestant establishment. What is most significant about the bond is its popularity. Drafted in October by the Privy Council, and circulated by them on a county by county basis for signature by the nation’s political elite, it rapidly succeeded in attracting signatures not only from most of the gentry and civic patriarchs of England, but also from vast numbers of enthusiastic men of the ‘middling’ and ‘lower’ sorts. It became a nationwide expression of loyalty. Better than anything else it symbolises the change in the religious temper of the nation since 1559. Although under peer pressure it was even signed by some Catholic gentlemen here and there, and although equally some Puritan gentlemen with acute consciences held back from promising to commit murder, this explicit contract to destroy Mary Stuart simply could not have been conceived in the 1560s, when so much of the English elite remained Catholic at heart, nor promulgated in the 1570s, when hatred of ‘popery’ was not yet the common coin of English culture. The Bond of Association was the index not simply of a Protestant country, but of a country which would do almost anything to prevent a Catholic from taking the throne. The tone of the document was mitigated in the Parliament which met over the winter
Roman Catholic plots against Elizabeth, as seen in part of an engraving by Cornelius Danckwerts, entitled A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercie, which was issued to accompany the 1625 edition of George Carleton’s book of the same title. At the top: Dr Lopez, Elizabeth’s physician, who was executed in 1590 having been convicted on scanty evidence of attempting to poison the queen. In the central panel: Pope Pius V, who excommunicated Elizabeth on 25 February 1570, releasing her subjects from all oaths of allegiance to her; Don John of Austria, to whom the crown of Ireland was offered in 1577 by James Fitzgerald;
Sir Thomas Stukeley, who secured papal and Spanish support for a campaign in Ireland; and the Earl of Desmond, whose tenants and clansmen forced him into revolt in 1579. At the bottom: the Babington Plot, which aimed at the assassination of Elizabeth and her replacement by Mary Queen of Scots.
The Babington Plot, from George Carleton’s Thankfull Remembrance, p. ioo. In 1586, the Derbyshire gentleman Anthony Babington was the central figure in a plot to liberate Mary Queen of Scots and assassinate Elizabeth. The confidence in success which led him to commission a group portrait of the conspirators was misplaced. Sir Francis Walsingham’s spies had penetrated the conspiracy and all the correspondence between the plotters and the captive queen passed across his desk. In due course Babington and the rest were rounded up. They were executed on 20 September 1586. The real significance of this plot was that it enabled the Privy Council to overcome Elizabeth’s reluctance to sanction a definitive solution to the problem posed by Mary.
Of 1584-85. Elizabeth herself was far from entirely happy with the gung-ho rough justice proposed in the original bond, and the subsequent statutory version provided for a semblance of legal process, in the form of a commission of enquiry to precede any vengeance.
In the event, lynch law was not needed. Pressure for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which had been building up since 1570, became irresistible in the context of all-out war with Catholic Spain, especially as Philip II was now cultivating links with Mary’s French relatives, the ultra-Catholic Guise dynasty. Mary sealed
Her own fate when she became entangled in the Babington plot to secure her liberation and Elizabeth’s assassination. Francis Walsingham, who controlled Mary’s communications with the outside world, allowed her to believe that she had a secure link to a group of youthful Catholic adventurers led by the Derbyshire gentleman Anthony Babington. The whole conspiracy was so deeply penetrated by Walsingham’s men, and his access to its communications so total, that apologetic claims that Mary in fact had no knowledge of the plot to kill Elizabeth are not untenable. That she was, at the least, cruelly entrapped is undeniable. Moreover, if her consent to the plot was full and informed, she might be allowed some plea of self-defence, in that the Bond of Association had put beyond any doubt the determination of the English establishment to take her life. Once the plot was exposed, Mary was tried in a special court of English nobles. Elizabeth knew perfectly well how posterity would view any decision to execute Mary, and convened Parliament in October 1586, either to consider alternatives or, more realistically, to spread the burden of guilt. Parliament added to the pressure which the Privy Council was exerting behind the scenes, and Elizabeth was impelled reluctantly, hesitantly, but inexorably, towards signing the death warrant. Even then she hesitated about executing it, and it was her Privy Council, on its own initiative, which finally despatched it. Mary was beheaded on 8 February 1587. Even Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, was in disgrace for weeks afterwards, but most of her wrath fell upon her unfortunate Secretary, William Davison, whose career was destroyed by his role in this affair.
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