Elizabeth's Spymaster (22 page)

There is a sadness, a sense of dreary inevitability, in his description of Mary’s state of mind. She knew that her beauty had become blurred by the years of boredom and sedentary life: she was now doubled-chinned and stood painfully, with stooped shoulders, her legs swollen and crippled with arthritis. During her imprisonment at various houses in the English North and Midlands she had suffered from a veritable medical lexicon of afflictions – a gastric ulcer, dropsy, headaches, constipation, neuralgia, viral fevers and rheumatism. Some may have had psychosomatic causes; others, such as vomiting, abdominal pain and weakness in the arms and legs, may have been symptoms of the hereditary metabolic disorder porphyria.
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Just as importantly, for almost twenty years, Mary had been completely separated from the real world beyond the walls of her prisons. She had also been denied access to uncensored information from her correspondents between December 1584 and January 1586.
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In her isolation and in her sequestered state of mind, hopes of rescue and her succession to the English throne were undoubtedly unrealistic, sometimes hopelessly optimistic. Perhaps that was the crutch upon which she leant to enable her to endure the loneliness of the stateless, lost world she unwillingly inhabited. Throughout her ordeal she remained a proud, showy cockatoo, caged within the bars of a gilded jail, always conscious of her status, always jealous of her position and the respect it merited from those around her.

For all her ill-health and her own growing perception that she was losing a battle against time for the throne, Mary truly personified the
mounting foreign and internal threats both to the survival of the Protestant state of England and Elizabeth’s own crown – indeed, her very life. In Elizabeth’s view, and that of her supremely loyal ministers, during the 1580s the Catholic forces of Counter-Reformation were marshalling their awesome strength against her realm.

They saw the Spanish sun now firmly in the ascendancy across Western Europe, growing in strength and power, and feared the consequences for England. Across the North Sea in the Netherlands, where a revolt against Spain had been continuing bloodily since the 1560s, the rebel cause now faced disaster after the assassination of William, Prince of Orange, in July 1584. In December 1585, Elizabeth had reluctantly sent 6,000 English troops under the lacklustre command of her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
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to reinforce the Dutch rebels in their campaign for independence against the Imperial forces under Governor General Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. Further south, three years earlier, Philip II of Spain had won control of Portugal and her lucrative empire, together with her mighty naval forces to augment his already powerful fleet.

On the other side of the English Channel, the new French king Henry III had, to all intents, capitulated in June 1585 to the dominant Catholic party within his country, led by Mary’s cousin Henry, Duke of Guise.

In Rome, Walsingham’s spies had earlier reported that Pope Gregory XIII had been encouraging Philip II to invade troubled Ireland. After Gregory’s death on 1 June 1585, the new Pope Sixtus V was a dedicated supporter of the Counter-Reformation; an over-enthusiastic member of the Inquisition in Venice earlier in his career,
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he was a ruthless reformer of papal finances and governance. Under his hand, the papacy was to become both leaner and meaner and wholly dedicated to reclaiming the former Catholic states and provinces that had been lost to Protestantism.

Across the Irish Sea, the four-year-long Desmond Rebellion had finally ended in 1583 after a brutal counter-insurgency operation by English forces that had left around 30,000 Irish non-combatants dead from starvation. Savage subjugation had left that restive nation a bubbling cauldron of dissent and resentment.

All around, therefore, grave doubts and dangers beset Walsingham, Burghley and the other Privy Councillors – not least within Elizabeth’s own realm, where many of her Catholic subjects viewed Mary Queen of Scots as their rightful monarch, if not the sole legitimate heir in the event of Elizabeth’s death. Mary’s pivotal role in any attempt at restoration of the Catholic faith in England was also fully appreciated overseas by the Catholic exiles, and by their paymasters in the Vatican and Madrid.

Some were prepared to back their beliefs with actions, however ill-judged and hopeless. In early June 1586, Henry Radcliffe, Fourth Earl of Sussex, was tipped off about an intended rebellion ‘in the country near Portsmouth’. Within days, he reported that he had quelled it and had arrested some of its leaders, adding on 13 June that ‘some recusants, privy to the insurrection, were going to sea’ and that he would attempt to apprehend them.
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Away from all these alarums, Mary was ostensibly merely quietly biding her time for her succession to the throne, ‘which I will wait for patiently, without getting myself into trouble’, as she wrote to one supporter.
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In truth, she was always deep in trouble; always well over her head in conspiracy.

Walsingham’s efficient spy network had uncovered plot after plot aimed at assassinating Elizabeth, some planning to include foreign troops landing in England to support the
coup d’état.
The fumbling, bumbling Babington debacle of 1586 was the last straw as far as Burghley and Walsingham were concerned. On 2 October that year, Burghley wrote to Stafford, the English ambassador in France:

Here has been of late upon the prosecution for discovery of the great horrible conspiracy very great diligence used, so as in our opinion we have seen the bottom of this later purpose …

I was never more toiled than I have been of late and yet am with services that here do multiply and whosever scapeth I am never spared. God give me his grace.
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It was time to act against Mary – ‘that devilish woman’, as Walsingham called her – and remove the dire threat she posed.

Cohorts of distinguished lawyers were assembled to consider the legality of trying her in England, sparking a legal debate that presaged similar discussions before the trials of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich at Nuremburg from November 1945, or indeed of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2005. Then, as now, page after page of legal argument were scribbled, well spattered with Latin phrases, as learned counsel cast back into antiquity in a quest for precedents.

Objection:
If it be objected in respect of her person that she is an anointed queen and an absolute princess and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of her majesty …

Answer:
It may be doubted whether she is a queen because she stands deposed [in]… Scotland and she has willingly left all her right and interest in the same realm to her son [James VI]. A king deposed is not after to be taken for a king. Therefore Frederick, King of Naples, being deposed by the King of Spain was afterwards judged [as] no king by sentence.

Every prince without his own territory is no more than a private person.

Objection:
If it be objected that the offence wherewith she is charged is not
delictum consummatum
[a complete crime] and therefore not punishable by death in her person … to which law she submits herself?

Answer.
It may be said in respect to her allegiance to the Crown of England, her actions are to be measured according to the positive laws of the said realm than by the law of nations.

By these laws, her actions are treason.

Aliens and strangers are not exempt from the force and penalties of the laws which are enacted and published whereby they remain … A king in all other kings’ territories may commit treason as another private person.
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After days spent sifting through their lawyers’ opinions, Burghley and Walsingham decided that they could convince both Elizabeth and
public opinion that Mary could be tried for treason quite lawfully. The all-important legal gloss had been deposited upon her destruction. She would be tried by a commission of no fewer than twenty-four Privy Councillors and other nobles, under the terms of the Act for the Surety of the Queen’s Person passed the previous year. Elizabeth needed little persuasion of the Scottish queen’s guilt. She urged Mary’s jailor, Sir Amyas Paulet:

Let your wicked murderess know how with hearty sorrow her vile desserts compel these orders and bid her from me [to] ask God forgiveness for her treacherous dealings towards the saver of her life many a year to the intolerable peril of her own.
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Elizabeth declared that Mary’s money should be seized and her servants sacked, possibly in the hope that such pressure would make her seriously ill and even kill her, thus neatly sparing the queen the problem of ordering her execution. Walsingham doubted the wisdom of such a policy. On 5 September, he told Paulet:

Her pleasure being such I do not see why you should now any longer forebear the putting of the same in execution. If afterwards the inconveniences happen … her majesty can blame none [but] herself for it.

He was away from the court because of an inflammation in his right leg, ‘caused by a painful boil’, and therefore ‘I cannot debate the matter with her majesty as I would’.

Despite his affliction, Walsingham was wasting no time in making his arrangements to bring the Scottish queen legally to book, anxious as he was to execute her before Christmas 1586. That afternoon, he told Paulet, he was meeting with Burghley and Hatton to decide whether Mary should be moved to Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, or to the Tower of London for the trial.
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Their sensible recommendation was the Tower, for greater security, but for Elizabeth that would be too close to home and she flatly rejected the idea. Hertford Castle, north-east of London, was also considered but again turned down as a prison.

On the morning of 9 September, Paulet moved to confiscate Mary’s cash. ‘We found [her] in her bed, troubled after the old manner with a defluxion [open sore] which was fallen down into the side of her neck and had bereft her of the use of one of her hands,’ he recounted to Walsingham afterwards.

After many denials, many exclamations and many bitter words against you (I say nothing of her railing against myself) with flat affirmation that her majesty might have her body but her heart she should never have, refusing to deliver the key of her cabinet, I called my servants and sent for [crow]bars to break open the door, whereupon she yielded and caused the door to be opened.
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Inside Paulet found 5,000 French crowns, two bags containing £104 2s (or £14,500 in modern monetary values) and three pounds of silver, the latter left with her as she claimed she had no more money in the house and she owed her servants their wages. More money was found in the chamber of her secretary Claude Nau, amounting to £1,445 18s (£199,500). Further searches found a casket containing all Mary’s seals, and further cash in gold and silver.
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On 25 September, Mary arrived under heavy armed escort at Fotheringay, seventy-five miles from London, after a four-day journey from the unhealthy manor house at Chartley where she had been imprisoned since the previous December.
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Preparations for the trial were already in full swing. Walsingham employed Patrick, Master of Gray,
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one of James VI’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and Master of his Wardrobe, to discover the Scottish king’s attitude towards the trial of his mother. Robert Douglas, Provost of Lincluden and a Scottish Privy Councillor, wrote to Archibald Douglas, the Scottish ambassador in London, of James’s

misliking [of] the wicked intentions of her majesty’s evil disposed subjects and thinks, if the same had taken effect, to have been no less in danger thereby as if it had been meant against his own person … In so far as his mother may be burdened … I find his majesty [in] no ways mind[s] that rigour shall be used against her.
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Gray also reported that James believed that Mary should be ‘put in the Tower or sum [sic] other firm manse and kept from intelligence; her own servants taken from her and such as be culpable punished rigorously’ and that in future, those about her should be in the pay of Elizabeth.
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Burghley, meanwhile, sketched a plan of the Great Chamber on the first floor of Fotheringay,
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with special fittings for the trial. Against one wall was a canopied cloth of state, brightly blazoned with the arms of England, positioned above a throne set on a dais for Elizabeth – although the chances of her attending the hearing were less than slim. ‘A [waist-high] rail, as in the Parliament Chamber’ was stretched across the room, separating the well of the court from ‘the nether part, for all persons not being in [the] commission, nor of the Queen’s learned counsel’. Despite Burghley’s original plans, a high-backed chair upholstered in crimson velvet was placed for Mary not directly facing the throne as he had ordered, but immediately to its right. Before her would be a table for the lawyers and their papers and behind and in front, along the walls, low benches to seat the commissioners. The room was draped with velvet, intended to add to the majesty, if not the appearance of legality, of the occasion.

On 6 October, Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador to Mary’s court in Scotland during the 1560s, announced his intention (with permission) to attend the proceedings ‘because of his knowledge of that woman’s former dealings against her majesty’.
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