Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [112]
Days later, Elizabeth was formally examined by the Council. Questioned as to her contact with Sir James Croft and her proposed move to Donnington, Elizabeth stalled, saying “she did not well remember any such house,” but then declared, “Indeed, I do now remember that I have such a place, but I never lay in it in all my life. And as for any that hath moved me thereunto, I do not remember.” When Croft was brought before her, Elizabeth recovered her memory: “And as concerning my going unto Donnington Castle, I do remember that Mr Hoby and mine officers and you Sir James Croft, had such talk,” but, she added defiantly, “what is that to the purpose my lords, but that I may go to mine houses at all times?”18
On April 3, Renard relayed to the emperor the queen’s assurances that “fresh proof is coming up against her [Elizabeth] every day, and there are several witnesses to assert that she had gathered together stores and weapons in order to rise with the rest and fortify a house in the country [Donnington] whither she had been sending her supplies.”19 In her first Parliament, Mary had restored the ancient constitutional law by which overt or spoken acts of treason had to be proved before any English person could be convicted as a traitor. Mary could not convict Elizabeth on the evidence of intercepted letters because they were written in cipher and could be forgeries. She told Renard that she and her Council were laboring to discern the truth but insisted that the law must be maintained.
WYATT WENT TO the block on Tower Hill on April 11. Upon the scaffold, he addressed the crowd: “Whereas it is said and whistled abroad, that I should accuse my lady Elizabeth’s grace and my lord Courteney; it is not so, good people … as I have declared no less to the Queens Council.”20 Having made his confession, he knelt down upon the straw and laid his head on the block. He then sat up again to tie the handkerchief around his eyes, raised his hands, and then returned to the block. At one stroke the hangman beheaded him. His corpse was taken to Newgate to be parboiled, after which it was cut into four pieces and each quarter displayed in a different part of the city.21 His head, placed on top of the gibbet at St. James’s, was stolen within a week.
The day after his execution, a group of councillors visited Elizabeth in the Tower.22 Despite Wyatt’s exoneration of her, pressure remained on the princess to admit her guilt. Mary still refused to proceed against her sister with insufficient evidence. Finally with Elizabeth maintaining her innocence, the decision was made to move her to Woodstock, a remote country house in Oxfordshire, “until such time as certain matters touching her case which be not yet cleared may be thoroughly tried and examined.” Here she would be placed in the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield, a Catholic gentleman of proven loyalty whose father had been steward to Katherine of Aragon during her last days at Kimbolton.23 On May 19, Elizabeth left the Tower for Woodstock. As Mary stated in her instructions to Bedingfield, she was to be “safely looked unto for the safeguard of her person, having nevertheless regard to her. In such good and honourable sort as may be agreeable to our honour and her estate and degree.”24 It was an important caveat, one that Mary had not been afforded during her confinement in the infant Elizabeth’s household at Hatfield.
Elizabeth would spend the next eleven months under house arrest. As Don Juan Hurtado de Mendoza,