Description

This is a local history with national and international dimensions. It has always been known that Queen Mary was imprisoned in Staffordshire, and other Midlands counties, but the crucial role of this county in the many plots launched around the captive Queen has been underestimated. The times when the Queen was put in Staffordshire always meant that the plots and plotting which followed her had reached crisis proportions. Staffordshire was

a highly secure backwater, but her jailers could not isolate herf – until the very end, and then with unexpected consequences.

At first the government of Elizabeth, her cousin, knew she was plotting but not how. In the first year of her captivity she sought a court intrigue to marry a Duke – and was caught up in the Earls revolt. In the final eighteen months in the county the spymaster Francis Walsingham organised a ground-breaking

counter plot to find out what was going on. But was his counter plot a trap? This was an illegal captivity – but was Mary making political choices which triggered her downfall? Staffordshire was the crucial stage for the key developments in her English captivity, explored here for the first time in unique detail.