Mary Queen of Scots (87 page)

The point was all the more easy for Mary to appreciate since from June 1584 onwards there had been murmurings in Parliament for a new type of Association – not to be confused with Mary’s Association with James – in this case a bond or pledge of allegiance. But this was a pledge with a difference. It was not enough for the signatories of this new bond to swear to bring about the death of all those who might plot against Elizabeth. In addition they also swore – and the inspiration was Walsingham’s – to bring about the death of all those in whose favour such plots might be instigated, whether they had personally connived at them or not. In short, if it could be proved that a particular conspiracy had been aimed at the elimination of Elizabeth and the placing of Mary on the throne, Mary herself was as much eligible for execution as any of the plotters, even if she had been in complete ignorance of what was afoot. This bond was formally enacted into a statute by the English Parliament in the spring of 1585 when the murder of the prince of Orange brought home still further to the English the constant dangers of assassination to their own queen: in the meantime signatures poured in from loyal subjects, and were presented to Elizabeth in an endless series of documents, from the autumn onwards. Mary, ever conscious of the delicate path she was treading, and the need for Elizabeth’s favour, actually offered to sign the bond herself.
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But her pathetic offer could not gloss over the fact that the enactment of the bond into English law amounted to the drawing up of her own death warrant: it was hardly likely that many years would pass before some conspiracy or other in Mary’s favour, to the detriment of Elizabeth, would be brought to book by Walsingham: once such a charge should be proved, it was now legal in England to try and execute the Scottish queen. No one was more conscious of the dangers of the bond to Mary than Elizabeth herself, and the possibility of the trial of a crowned queen was one Elizabeth preferred not to contemplate too closely in advance:
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she therefore chose to regard the bond of Association as a spontaneous act of loyalty on the part of her people in the first place, of
whose genesis she had been quite ignorant. In the parliamentary proceedings which followed, she began by showing considerable reluctance that the statute for her safety should be enacted at all and went on to take care that James
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should be excepted from the clause which debarred even the descendants of the nameless beneficiary of her murder from the succession. Parliament itself, understandably less worried by the problem of regicide, showed no such scruples. To them the bond seemed only too natural, as well as essential. In 1572 when Mary’s life had been in danger, the whys and wherefores of her captivity, her original illegal detention, had seemed already remote: but thirteen years later they appeared positively prehistoric. The ‘monstrous dragon’ was now considered to be part of the English policy – and a singularly unpleasant part.

By the spring of 1585 there was very little that was encouraging to be discerned in the situation of the queen of Scots. Her son had repudiated and betrayed her; her French organization was in administrative chaos, and penetrated by Walsingham’s spies; the English Catholics were quarrelling among themselves abroad and increasingly persecuted at home; Mary herself no longer felt complete trust for her erstwhile allies abroad and at times suspected the good faith of the Guises and Spain; in the meantime her position in England may be compared to that of someone tied down unwillingly over a powder keg, which may at any moment be exploded by a match held by an over-enthusiastic friend. To add to Mary’s distress her prison was changed for the worse. In September 1584 she had been taken out of the custody of Shrewsbury and handed into that of the upright and elderly Sir Ralph Sadler. The real reason for the change was presumably to free Mary from the imbroglio of the Shrewsbury scandals: but according to Camden, in order not to offend Shrewsbury it was explained to him that Catholic plots now made it essential for Mary to be put in charge of the Puritans.
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Sadler was a fair and considerate jailer. But in the autumn of 1584 the edict went forth that Mary was to be taken back to the hated Tutbury for greater security. She was once more incarcerated in this loathsome if impregnable fortress in early January 1585. Not only that but at the same time the care of her person was handed over to a new and infinitely more severe jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, who became in time as odious to her as the masonry of Tutbury itself. Under these doleful circumstances, with very little to cheer her as she surveyed her prospects for the future, Mary Stuart entered on the last and most burdensome phase of her captivity.

24 The Babington Plot

The harsh character of Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary’s new jailer, was apparent from his very first action. This was to take down from above her head and chair that royal cloth of state by which she set such store, since it constituted a proof of her queenship. Paulet’s reasoning was that as the cloth of state had never been officially allowed, it must be removed, however long it had been there. Mary first wept and protested vigorously, then retired to her chamber in a mood of great offence; finally she secured the return of the dais. The incident was typical of the man, who believed profoundly in the letter of the law: ‘There is no other way to do good to this people than to begin roundly with them … whatsoever liberty or anything else is once granted unto them cannot be drawn back again without great exclamation’, he wrote to London.
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Paulet came of a west country family, and his father had been the governor of Jersey. He himself had been English ambassador to the French court for three years, but had otherwise not enjoyed a particularly distinguished career; he was certainly not of the high rank of a Shrewsbury, or a diplomat of great age and experience such as Sir Ralph Sadler, whom he replaced. But he had been specially selected by Walsingham for the task in hand, because, as all his contemporaries agreed, he was not only a prominent Puritan but also a mortal enemy of the queen of Scots and all she stood for. Walsingham understood his man; Paulet was quite immune to the charms of the queen of Scots and, unlike Knollys and even Cecil, found her irritating and even tiresome as a character. Since
honour and loyalty were his gods, and these Mary Stuart seemed to offend with every action, Paulet’s Puritan conscience allowed him to hate her in advance. When they actually met, Paulet was able to transform charms into wiles in his own mind; like Knox so many years before, he disliked his captive all the more for her possible attractions.

Paulet’s instructions from London were clear: Mary’s imprisonment was to be transformed into the strictest possible confinement. She was not even to be allowed to take the air, that terrible deprivation which she dreaded so much, ‘for that heretofore under colour of giving alms and other extraordinary courses used by her, she hath won the hearts of the people that habit about those places where she hath heretofore lain …’.
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In particular her sources of untapped private letters and messages were to be stopped once and for all; the only letters she was to be allowed to receive were those from the French ambassador in London – and these Paulet read in any case and stopped at will, as he thought proper. At no point in her captivity so far had Mary been cut off so completely. Her correspondence with Beaton, her ambassador in Paris, Morgan, Paget and her other foreign agents, had depended on a secret pipeline of letters, without which no foreign plotting could have taken place. During the whole of 1585, under the orders of the Elizabethan government, this pipeline was shut off, and Mary was totally deprived of the news she wanted so much.

Paulet achieved this isolation – which had a calculated position in Walsingham’s scheme for Mary Stuart’s downfall – by the most rigorous supervision of the Scottish queen’s domestic arrangements. There were naturally to be no more pleasant sojourns at Buxton; on her last visit in the summer of 1584, still under the aegis of Shrewsbury, Mary had some premonition of this, for she wrote with a diamond on a window-pane at the springs:

Mary complained furiously to Elizabeth of Paulet’s demeanour: she described him as being more fit to act as the jailer of a common criminal than of a crowned queen. But Elizabeth merely replied smoothly that Mary had often professed herself ready to accept whatever served Elizabeth best; in which case she would surely accept Paulet.
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In the meantime conditions under Paulet were very different from the easy days under Shrewsbury. Not only was Mary herself not allowed to ride abroad but Mary’s coachman Sharp was not allowed to ride out without permission, and then he had to be accompanied. He was also deprived of the privilege of dining with Paulet’s servants, as he had done with Sadler’s. Paulet also went at great lengths into the difficult and, to him, vexatious subject of the royal laundresses. These elusive maidens, under the pretext of carrying out their work, had carried on a merry trade of message-bearing; what was more, two of them turned out to be the coachman Sharp’s sister and sister-in-law. Paulet’s Puritanical brow furrowed over the subject of the laundresses, and at one point, despairing of finding cooperation in their midst, thought of importing some more malleable creatures from Somerset. It was an easier matter to prohibit all Mary’s servants from walking on the thick walls of Tutbury (where they could wave, it was thought, in an enlightening manner, to passers-by). Another domestic change – of significance for the future – was that the brewer of beer and ale for the castle was installed at near-by Burton, with his family.
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Mary’s little private charities in which she had delighted, and by which she endeared herself to the local people, were sternly quelled by Paulet. His crushing comment – more applicable perhaps to the modern welfare state than to the Elizabethan polity – was that the laws of the realm had provided so carefully for the relief of the poor that no one could want for anything except through their own ‘lewdness’ or the negligence of the officers of several parishes. Mary said plaintively that she was ill in body or in mind, that she depended on the prayers of the poor to support her, and that it was barbarous to restrain her, but she did not get her way. Mary had a habit of presenting cloth to the poor on Maundy Thursday – in 1585 forty-two girls received 1¼ yards of woollen cloth and eighteen little boys, specified to be out of respect for her own son, were similarly endowed. Money was also given to the poor at Tutbury town. Paulet was furious to learn of such goings on and demanded that they should cease; he said that such unpleasant practices might not be new to Mary, but they were certainly new to him.