Mary Queen of Scots (90 page)

Throughout the letter Mary took care to emphasize the terrible consequences to her personally should the plot explode prematurely and fail: the best that could happen to her would be that she would be buried in a dark prison for ever and ever. In this context Mary herself saw foreign help as being not so much desirable as absolutely essential. Not only did she reiterate to Babington that she would only be drawn forth from Chartley by ‘a good army, or in some very good strength’, but it was a point which
she also tried to hammer home to Sir Francis Englefield in a letter written on 17 July, the same day as her fatal communication to Babington:
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‘Before that they have sufficient promise and assurance, I have wished them plainly not to stir in any wise on this side, for fear they may ruin themselves in vain.’ As she had told Beaton on 18 May, the action of the Spanish king must be regarded as crucial to any actions the English Catholics might take.
²³

There was no wonder that Phelippes drew a gallows mark on the outside of this letter when he passed it on to Walsingham. Mary had fallen plumb into the trap which had been laid for her. When Walsingham wrote to Leicester in the Netherlands on 9 July – a whole week incidentally, before Mary actually penned her reply – a highly confidential communication saying that the Scottish queen would shortly be caught out in practices which would condemn her, this was exactly the sort of letter which he had in mind.
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The schemes of Gifford, combined with the restrictions of Paulet, had worked their effect in Mary’s mind. Even so, Walsingham was not totally satisfied with Mary’s reply: he added a forged postscript to the end of the letter also in cipher in which she was made to ask for the names of the six gentlemen who would perform the deed. It would, he felt, represent the climax of her guilt, as well as providing the English government with some additional useful information. This forged postscript provides the final ironic touch to the setting up of the Babington plot by Walsingham and his agents:
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‘I would be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment; for that it may be I shall be able, upon knowledge of the parties, to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein…. As also from time to time, particularly how you proceed: and as soon as you may, for the same purpose, who be already, and how far every one, privy hereunto.’

It is important to judge Mary’s acceptance in principle of the Babington conspiracy against the background of her own mood in the course of the late summer of 1586 and how it developed up till July. Her mental state was by now very different from what it had once been; the old notion of establishing her on the throne of England, however much it appealed to her youthful champions, was not uppermost in the mind of the middle-aged woman, by now quite out of touch with Europe, let alone with England. Mary herself was beginning to feel weary of the prolonged battle for some sort of decent existence, in which she had now been involved for eighteen years, and the constant strain of being ever on her guard, ever plotting, ever hoping, ever planning. The period in which she was perforce cut off from her secret post contributed much to this feeling of melancholy
and lassitude. She began to speak of liberty in terms of retirement rather than government. After James’s betrayal of the association, Mary told Elizabeth that her own desire had been to ‘retire out of this island in some solitary and reposeful place, as much for her soul as for her body’. She described herself poignantly at the end of May 1586 as knowing not ‘what line to sail, nor how to lift anchor’. This feeling of isolation and not understanding foreign matters any longer resounds through all her letters to Morgan, once the post was resumed: ‘My dear friend,’ she wrote to him on 20 May, ‘I can found no certain judgement nor know what course in the world to take in my affairs I shall hear amply and more recently from every part.’ On the same date, as if to prove her lack of contact with reality Mary also wrote to Mendoza in Paris confiding her rights to the crown of England conditionally to his master Philip
II
, if James had not become a Catholic by the date of her death. At the end of June, Nau told how little Mary now felt she understood concerning the mind and intentions of other princes, thanks to her long solitude.
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In July this abandoned and exhausted frame of mind received a terrible fillip from the news that James and Elizabeth had actually signed a treaty of alliance. The maternal heart-break Mary had suffered in the spring of 1585 was now spiked with fearful bitterness. It was one thing to repudiate the idea of the Association but at Berwick on 6 July, only eleven days before Mary’s vital answer to Babington, a proper treaty was signed between the English and Scottish sovereigns, a treaty from which Mary and her interest were totally excluded. James was now to receive an actual agreed subsidy from Elizabeth. Mary’s letter of 12 July to Beaton in Paris on the subject of James was written in a tone of the utmost despair.
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There is no doubt that the publication of the treaty sent her temporarily off her balance, and robbed her of the sustained powers of calm reason which might have led her to act far more cautiously over the Babington plot. Even the fact that her health – for so long enfeebled – was now somewhat restored by the better conditions of Chartley contributed towards her downfall. On 3 June Paulet reported that the queen was now well enough to be carried down in her chair to the ponds near the house to watch the duck-hunting.
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With renewed health came greater energy to escape, a prospect impossible to contemplate for an invalid endlessly confined to her chamber and her bed.

If to understand all is to forgive all, then it is certainly possible against this background to forgive Mary for tacitly acceding to – for her letter came to no more than that – a conspiracy involving the assassination of Elizabeth. Her own agreement was entirely in the context of a captive seeking to escape her guards, and may be compared to the actions of a
prisoner who is prepared to escape by a certain route, even if it may involve the slaying of a jailer by another hand. If her own life in captivity could be considered to be in danger, then there was much theological doubt as to whether agreement to the slaying of Elizabeth was sinful at all. The immense theoretical problems which political assassination presented to the men of the sixteenth century caused Babington and his friends prolonged disquiet and heart-searching, but for Mary, illegally detained against her will, and not in any case concerned with the actual execution of the deed, or its instigation, the problem was considerably simpler: after so many years it was her rescue which mattered to her, not the safety of her jailer Elizabeth.
^b
Even these same scruples of the Babington plotters do them credit in an age when many of the philosophers worked out good ethical reasons for the just death of a tyrant.

Yet in the sixteenth century the theory of resistance to one who had abused a ruler’s sacred duties was given much prominence in the writings of both Jesuits, such as de Mariana, Suarez and Mola, and Calvinists, such as Hotman who wrote
Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.
The view of de Mariana in particular in
De Rege et Regis Institutione
, writing as he did in Catholic Spain, where there was religious unity, caused scandal in France and Germany where there was both religious and civil disorder: de Mariana’s view that an individual might be justified in slaying a manifestly evil ruler, in accordance with the wishes of the people, were furiously condemned in countries where this imprudent advice might only too easily be put into effect.
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Although many Jesuits rejected de Mariana openly, and later editions of his book contained modifications, the attitude of both Pius
V
and Gregory
XIII
to Elizabeth – first in the bull in 1570 and then in the ban of 1580 – was still susceptible of the interpretation by their Catholic flock that it would be a holy deed to rid England of this heretic ruler – even if they were certainly not specifically exhorted to do so. From the other side of the fence, John Knox had proclaimed without further ado that it was not only lawful but positively necessary to kill a king who had betrayed his people.

It says much for the innate goodness of ordinary people at the time that, although political actions like the papal bull or the bond of Association, had truly wreaked havoc with the concept of public morality, nevertheless Babington and his friends were still bewildered about their moral position if they carried through Elizabeth’s assassination. Babington wrote to Mary apropos ‘the despatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free’, but revealed in his subsequent confession that he had been uncertain and worried as to whether this excommunication was still in force. Châteauneuf’s memoir also revealed the genuine doubts which all concerned felt on the subject.
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In an apparently violent age, when justification for the death of tyrants was openly discussed, and princes – like William of Orange – did meet their ends at the hands of the assassin, such scruples showed that it was easier for decent people to listen to the arguments in favour of such a deed than actually stifle their consciences to perform it. But such arguments, vivid as they might be throughout the sixteenth century, growing more intense after 1580, never really concerned Mary Stuart; she was never indeed at liberty in the society in which they were exploited; she continued to view the subject from the more personal standpoint of her own liberty.

The gallows letter was in Walsingham’s hands by Tuesday 19 July. On 20 July Gilbert Gifford fled to the Continent; his work as an
agent provocateur
completed, he was unwilling to be involved in the holocaust of arrests and cross-examination which he was aware was about to break in England.
^c
On 29 July Babington himself received the gallows letter and deciphered it the next day with the help of Tichborne. On 3 August he wrote back to the Scottish queen acknowledging the fatal letter.
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By this date, however, as Mary’s hopes of release began to rise, one of Walsingham’s agents, William Wade, had already secretly visited Chartley to work out with Paulet the best manner of securing her arrest. The gossamer plot began to fall apart. On 4 August Ballard was arrested and at the news Babington fled north through London to the leafy lanes of St John’sWood; here he lay in safety for some time, until on 14 August he too was seized, and brought in hideous triumph to the Tower. William Weston, the Jesuit, lying in his own dark captivity, heard the unusual and ominous sound of the bells pealing at midnight: his guard told him that the city was celebrating the capture of certain papists – ‘traitors who had made a dastardly plot to assassinate the sovereign and declare the Queen of Scots her rightful heir’.
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Finally on 18 August Babington made the first of his confessions, in the course of which every detail of the conspiracy was placed in the hands of Walsingham: the queen of Scots, as well as all his fellow-conspirators, was fatally incriminated. Although Babington had destroyed Mary’s letters to him, he now compliantly reconstructed their text for Walsingham during his interrogations; and should his memory fail, Walsingham could always call on Phelippes, his decipherer, to help with the official reconstruction document – after all, Phelippes and Walsingham, through the medium of the secret pipeline, had read these letters long before they ever reached Babington himself.
³³

In the meantime Mary herself, cut off at Chartley, had absolutely no inkling of the dramatic turn which events had taken. Her commitment to the plot had been limited to letters; because of the time lag between the writing and delivery of messages by the secret post she knew very little of the various meetings which the conspirators had held up and down the country. Her spirits were high at the beginning of August: she felt she might even hope again. On 11 August, when the dour Paulet suggested that she might like to ride out of Chartley in the direction of Tixall in order to enjoy a buck hunt, this seemed yet another favourable omen of future happiness, since such manifestations of goodwill from her jailer were rare indeed. Mary took particular trouble with her costume under the impression that she might be meeting some of the local gentry at the hunt. The ebullient Nau was also smartly arrayed as usual. Also in the party were Curle, the queen’s other secretary, and Bourgoing, her personal physician (on whose journal we depend for so many of the details of the last months of Mary’s life). It was a fine August day. The queen’s mood was so gay and so gentle that when she noticed Paulet lagging behind, she remembered that he had recently been ill, and stopped her horse to let him catch her up.
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As the little procession wound its way across the moors, the queen suddenly spied some horsemen coming fast towards her. They were strangers. For one wild moment her heart leapt up and she actually believed that these apocalyptic horsemen were the Babington plotters, their plans more advanced than she supposed, coming to rescue her. The first words of their leader speedily undeceived her: this was none other than Sir Thomas Gorges, Queen Elizabeth’s emissary, dressed for this momentous occasion in green serge, luxuriously embroidered. As Paulet introduced him Gorges dismounted from his horse and strode over towards Mary. ‘Madame,’ said Gorges in a ringing voice, ‘the Queen my mistress, finds it very strange that you, contrary to the pact and engagement
made between you, should have conspired against her and her State, a thing which she could not have believed had she not seen proofs of it with her own eyes and known it for certain.’ As Mary, taken off her guard and flustered, protested, turned this way and that, explained that she had always shown herself a good sister and friend to Elizabeth, Gorges told her that her own servants were immediately to be taken away from her, since it was known that they too were guilty.