Behind the Palace Doors (9 page)

But far from arresting the chief suspect in Darnley’s murder—James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell—the Queen of
Scots married him. The blustery Lord Bothwell, who had served as a close advisor to the queen, was, according to one contemporary description, “high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition.” Just six weeks after Darnley’s death, Bothwell staged an abduction of Queen Mary and allegedly raped her. Then, after securing a quick divorce from his wife, he and the queen were wed.

Elizabeth was utterly revolted by her cousin’s actions. Randolph reported that she had “great misliking of that Queen’s doing, which now she doth so much detest that she is ashamed of her.” For a woman who believed as fervently as Elizabeth did in the divinely ordained nature of majesty, who sacrificed so much personal happiness for the welfare of her own kingdom, Mary’s base behavior was inexcusable—a monstrous betrayal of monarchy. Nevertheless, she would never countenance the dethroning of an anointed queen, as the rebellious Protestant lords in Scotland planned to do with Mary, replacing her with her infant son, James. It was, Elizabeth declared, “a matter hardly to be digested … by us or any other monarch.”

“Elizabeth was outraged by the notion that a queen could be divested of her regal dignity as if it were no more than a tattered old cloak,” wrote her biographer Anne Somerset, “and felt that by accepting so profane a concept, she herself would be eroding the very foundations of Kingship.”

On June 15, 1567, the Queen of Scots was taken prisoner by her own subjects after a standoff between her forces and those of the dissident Scottish lords.
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Instead of celebrating the downfall of a rival who had threatened her since her accession,
Elizabeth was horrified by the fate of a fellow sovereign. Majesty was at stake, and that made the English queen impervious to the advantages of a defanged Scottish queen—at least for a time. She was determined to defend not so much Mary the woman, whose behavior put her almost beyond redemption, but Mary the anointed monarch.

“Now for your comfort in such adversity as we have heard you should be in … we assure you, that whatsoever we can imagine meet to be for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same,” Elizabeth wrote to Mary; “that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, a faithful friend; and so shall you undoubtedly always find us and prove us to be indeed towards you.”

To ensure Mary’s safety and the preservation of her rights, Elizabeth sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Scotland with a stern warning to the rebel lords that if they deposed their queen, “we will make ourselves a plain party against them, to the revenge of their Sovereign, for example to all posterity.”

Yet despite Elizabeth’s threats, the Scottish lords forced their queen’s abdication on July 24, 1567, and continued to keep her captive. Mary was twenty-five at the time and had just miscarried the twins she had conceived with Bothwell. Five days later, her thirteen-month old son was crowned King James VI.

The English queen was incensed when she received the news and, according to her chief advisor, William Cecil, “increased in such offence towards these Lords that in good earnest she began to devise to revenge it by war.” Angry though she may have been, Elizabeth was still a practical politician who soon recognized the need to deal with the new regime in Scotland—a Protestant government that was, after all, far friendlier to her than Mary had been. So, while the queen maintained outward demonstrations of outrage over her cousin’s treatment, she quietly allowed her representatives to
deal with the Scottish lords behind the scenes. James Stuart, Earl of Moray, the illegitimate half brother of the deposed Queen of Scots who now served as regent for her son, James VI, perceptively noted that “although the Queen’s Majesty seems not altogether to allow the present state here,” he was certain “but she likes it in heart well enough.”

Such was the situation when, on May 2, 1568, Mary Stuart managed to escape her castle prison with the assistance of Moray’s younger half brother George Douglas, who, it was said, “was in a fantasy of love with her.” The fallen queen then gathered an army of supporters and confronted her half brother Moray’s forces outside of Glasgow. The ensuing Battle of Langside was a bitter defeat for Mary, who was forced to flee the field and spend the next three days as a hunted fugitive before finally crossing into England, where she found herself a most unwelcome guest.

Mary came to England fully expecting her cousin’s assistance in regaining her throne. “I am now forced out of my kingdom and driven to such straits that, next to God, I have no hope but in your goodness,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “I beseech you, therefore my dearest sister, that I may be conducted to your presence, that I may acquaint you with all my affairs.”

To receive Mary was highly problematic, however. That would signal tacit approval of the refugee queen’s behavior and thus obligate Elizabeth to help restore her to her throne. The English queen was inclined at first to help her cousin, but her counselors convinced her that aiding Mary would not only alienate the friendly Protestant regime in Scotland but open the way for an enemy to regain power. And even in her diminished state, Mary remained a dangerous adversary who had
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not renounced her claim to Elizabeth’s crown.

Almost as dangerous as Mary Stuart’s restoration was her continued presence in England, where, besides enticing disaffected Catholics to her cause, she could invite foreign
intervention as well. Indeed, she seemed to be plotting almost from the time of her arrival. In a note smuggled to the Spanish ambassador, she wrote, “Tell your master [Philip II] that if he will help me, I shall be queen of England in three months, and mass shall be said throughout the land.”

The former Queen of Scots was proving to be a most vexing problem for Elizabeth. She could not keep her cousin too closely confined for fear of retaliation from the Catholic powers in Europe, nor could she allow her to roam free and cause untold havoc within the realm. It was Mary’s half brother, the regent Moray, who offered a solution of sorts when he produced the so-called Casket Letters—a series of missives purportedly written by Mary to Bothwell in which she implicated herself in Darnley’s murder.

The Duke of Norfolk advised Queen Elizabeth that the letters described “such inordinate love between Mary and Bothwell, her loathsomeness and abhorring of her husband that was murdered, in such sort as every good and godly man cannot but detest and abhor the same.”

Mary, on the other hand, insisted that the letters were forgeries (as have some historians), but she refused to defend herself before a commission that had been gathered by Elizabeth to examine her case. It was beneath her dignity as a queen, she maintained, to answer to men with no authority over her. Thus, without her cooperation, the commission closed with the verdict that nothing had been proven.

It was a victory for Elizabeth. Mary was publicly disgraced by the Casket Letters, freeing the English queen from any obligation to help her. At the same time, the inconclusive verdict allowed her to avoid actually condemning her cousin while giving her an excuse to hold Mary under more restraint as the cloud of suspicion lingered. Still, as Cecil warned Elizabeth, “the Queen of Scots is and always shall be a dangerous person to your estate.”

Mary Stuart justified Cecil’s alarm time and time again, involving herself in any number of plots to depose Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne. “The poor foolish woman will not desist until she loses her head,” declared Mary’s former brother-in-law, Charles IX of France, when she was found complicit in one of the more serious conspiracies against the English queen.
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“She will certainly bring about her own execution. If she does so, it will be her own fault.”

Prescient as Charles’s remark would later prove, the last thing Elizabeth wanted was to execute her cousin. Mary had flown to her realm “as a bird that had flown to her for succor from the hawk,” as the queen put it, and no matter how pernicious her cousin’s plotting, she could not consider the judicial killing of another queen. It was her continued adherence to this principle that would cause Elizabeth so much agony years later when she was confronted with the most diabolical of all Mary’s schemes against her.

Averse as she was to killing her cousin, Elizabeth showed no such reluctance in keeping Mary under increasingly close confinement until, in 1585, she was sealed off from the world entirely at a fortified manor house called Chartley, under the vigilant eye of Sir Amias Paulet. The austere jailor took great pride in the security measures he devised to keep the former
Queen of Scots utterly isolated, ensuring that no secret correspondence could ever be smuggled in. “I cannot imagine how it may be possible for them to convey a piece of paper as big as my finger,” Paulet boasted.

But despite all Paulet’s precautions, Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state and so-called spymaster, still feared that Mary would find a way to communicate with her allies and foment trouble. Therefore, he wanted her to be able to send and receive correspondence in a controlled way so that he could better monitor her schemes. To that end he used a shady character by the name of Gilbert Gifford, described by one acquaintance as “the most notable double and treble villain that ever lived.” Gifford had been in Paris, where he agreed to be a courier for Mary’s agent there, but upon his return to England he was apprehended and used by Walsingham to serve the secretary’s own purposes.

Gifford was sent to the French embassy, where most correspondence intended for Mary was sent in the hopes that the ambassador could find the means to deliver it. There he announced that he had found a way to surreptitiously slip correspondence into Chartley and offered to act as courier. The ambassador agreed to test Gifford’s system, and soon enough Mary was thrilled to receive a letter from him. In a return post, also smuggled out by Gifford, she urged the ambassador to trust the courier and rely on his system.

What Mary did not know was that each letter sent to her was first delivered to Walsingham’s office, where it was opened, decoded, and examined for content, then meticulously resealed and sent north by messenger to a cooperative local brewer, who would hide it within the bunghole of a beer barrel he delivered to Chartley. There Mary’s steward would retrieve it and then send out Mary’s letters in the empty barrel, which started the whole process again in reverse. It was a lethally efficient system that would soon ensnare the Queen of Scots.

As it turned out, a Catholic priest named John Ballard had received assurances from the Spanish ambassador to France that Philip II would send troops to England if Queen Elizabeth was assassinated first. Armed with this encouragement, Ballard sought out Anthony Babington, a wealthy Catholic Englishman known to be sympathetic to Mary. Babington, in turn, gathered a group of trusted associates who would work together to kill Queen Elizabeth, then free Mary in anticipation of the Spanish invasion.

Inspired by this holy quest, Babington wrote to Mary, addressing her as “My dread sovereign and Queen,” and informed her of the plan. One key element, he made clear, was the murder of Elizabeth: “For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free,
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there be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.”

Mary’s initial response to Babington was simply to let him know that she was considering his proposal and would reply as soon as possible. Walsingham’s code breaker, Thomas Phelippes, was delighted upon deciphering the message, writing, “We attend her very heart at the next.” Sure enough, within a week, Mary implicated herself entirely when she agreed to Babington’s plan—including the killing of her cousin: “The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both within and without the realm, then it shall be time to set the six gentlemen to work, taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design I may be suddenly transported out of this place.”

A roundup of the conspirators ensued, followed by their
brutal executions. While traitors were normally hanged until unconscious, then disemboweled and cut into quarters, some of the Babington plotters were still very much alert when they were castrated and gutted. The queen’s wrath was dreadful indeed, except when it came to Mary. Killing her was still too horrible to contemplate. Nevertheless, there would have to be a trial.

Mary was taken to Fotheringhay Castle on September 25, 1586. At first she refused to appear before the gathered commissioners, insisting that “she was no subject [of Elizabeth’s] and rather would die a thousand deaths than acknowledge herself a subject.” The commission then carried a letter to Mary from Elizabeth. It was short and concise: