Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots (92 page)
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Buxton, whose warm waters have made thy name famous, perchance I shall visit thee no more – Farewell.
†
The obtaining of beer for domestic consumption was an important item in Elizabethan housekeeping. It has been estimated that a population of four millions consumed eighteen million barrels of beer annually, three quarters of it brewed privately.
4
‡
Barbara Mowbray was one of the two daughters of the laird of Barnbogle who served Mary Queen of Scots. She had joined her service by the beginning of 1584. About the item of her marriage, her sister Gillis Mowbray applied to join her in the royal service and was duly given a passport.
§
In the end the arrogant Bess did not marry until she was thirty-five, and then to an Erskine, created Viscount Fenton and earl of Kellie, who had been loyal to James
VI
during the Gowrie conspiracy and had come to England with him.
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The story of ‘Barnaby’ shows how ready Mary’s heart was to be touched at this point. When Gifford needed to go to France, a certain ‘Barnaby’ was introduced to Mary by letter as being her substitute carrier; Barnaby was in fact the pseudonym for Thomas Barnes, a venal Catholic corrupted by Gifford. Mary developed such a fondness for the helpful ‘Barnaby’ that he was preserved as her nominal correspondent even after Gifford had in fact returned to England.
a
Another example of Babington’s extraordinarily foolhardy nature was the fact that he had the whole group of conspirators sit for their portrait, with himself in the centre and the motto painted above them:
Hi mihi sunt comites, quos ipsa pericula dicunt.
b
Mary has been harshly judged for agreeing in principle to the assassination of Elizabeth, and this has been something held to justify Elizabeth’s own execution of Mary. But this is to continue the propaganda of Walsingham successfully beyond the grave since there was, after all, little real danger to Elizabeth from a plot vetted throughout by Walsingham. The action of Elizabeth in suggesting that Mary, who was in her charge, should be secretly assassinated by Paulet was far more morally culpable.
c
Gifford got himself ordained priest in March 1587 in order to continue his informer’s trade; he was awarded an English pension of £100 a year for his services. But the next year
hubris
was his undoing: he was arrested in a brothel, put in the archbishop’s prison at Rheims and died there in 1590. However, all efforts to bring a case against him for his treachery to the Catholic cause in England failed, as Thomas Morgan would not testify against him.
d
Paulet professed himself to be scandalized by the procedure, but it was well within the regulations of the Catholic Church.
e
When Nau reached France, the Guises accepted his story that he had merely bowed to
force majeure.
In 1605 Nau went further and actually applied to James
I
and
VI
to have his good character established.
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MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
to Sir Amyas Paulet, October 1586
On 21 September Mary Queen of Scots was taken out of Chartley Hall and away to an unknown destination. It was a sinister and frightening scene. The men who came to fetch her, Gorges and Stallenge, arrived with pistols at their belts. Her own servants were locked in their rooms and their windows guarded, so that they should not witness her departure or signal their sympathy to her. The most that Paulet had imparted to Mary officially on the subject of her new prison was the mere fact that she was going to be moved. From hints gleaned secretly through the servants, Mary actually believed she was going to a royal castle about thirty miles from London.
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1
Under these doleful conditions Mary was conducted out of Chartley and Staffordshire by a body of Protestant gentlemen of the country, including Walter Aston and Richard Bagot. The first night was spent at Hill Hall, near Abbot’s Bromley, where the queen’s stay was commemorated by her name and the date scratched on a pane of glass by a Paget sympathizer at the end of the century:
Maria regina Scotia quondam transibat istam villam, 21 Septembris, 1586 usque Burton Fortheringhay.
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The next morning Gorges, on instructions from Elizabeth, attacked the queen on the dual subject of her culpability and her ingratitude, although Mary firmly and steadfastly refused to admit either guilt or guilty intentions. The next two nights were spent at Leicester, in the house of the earl of Huntingdon in Lord’s Place: here the ordinary people showed signs of favouring the prisoner rather than her jailer, Paulet, and his coach had to be guarded against demonstrations. Finally, on 25 September, the queen reached the castle of Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, about twenty miles south-west of Peterborough.
Mary Stuart first sighted its ancient towers from a path called since the days of the Doomsday Book, Perryho Lane – which according to tradition enabled her to make a melancholy little play on the name as she exclaimed aloud, ‘Perio! I perish.’ Quite apart from its heavy, brooding appearance, Fotheringhay had a stark history. Ironically Mary might have been able to claim it for her own, since at one point it had been made the dowry of Princess Maud, the English bride of King David of Scotland. It had been built in the time of the Conqueror and rebuilt in the reign of Edward
III
. It subsequently became a Yorkist castle and here in 1452, Richard
III
, that sad and twisted king, had been born. It was now used entirely as a state prison, but was considered of sufficiently bleak reputation for the wretched Catherine of Aragon to refuse to go there unless, as she said, she were to be bound with cart ropes and dragged thither. The front of the castle and the enormous gateway faced north, the mighty keep rose to the north-west; a large courtyard filled the interior of the building, which included a chapel and a great hall; there was a double moat system along three sides, and the River Nene winding along the very edge of the castle made up the fourth side of the defences. Around its grim towers stretched the level Northamptonshire countryside; this had more of the flatness of eastern England, and plains stretching onwards to the Fens themselves, than the mountainous midland landscape which Mary had been accustomed to in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
Despite the size of Fotheringhay, Mary found herself incarcerated in comparatively mean apartments: this brought back all her phobia of a secret killing, the sort of barbarous death that stained the history of English medieval castles. But when her servants reported that many of the state rooms had been left empty, Mary drew the correct conclusion that she was about to be tried, and the rooms were awaiting the arrival of dignitaries from London. At this evidence that she was about to undergo the public martyrdom she sought, as Bourgoing reported: ‘Her heart beat faster and she was more cheerful and she was in better health than ever before.’
2
When Paulet came to inform her on 1 October that her misdeeds were now to be punished by the interrogation of certain lords, and advised her in her own interests to beg pardon and confess her faults, before she would officially be declared culpable by law, Mary was able to meet him in an
extraordinarily calm and even detached mood; she even made a little joke saying Paulet was behaving like a grown-up with a small child, asking her to own up to what she had done. Then she went on more seriously: ‘As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator, and I beg Him to forgive me, but as Queen and Sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below….’ And she concluded loftily: ‘As therefore I could not offend, I do not wish for pardon; I do not seek, nor would I accept it from anyone living.’ Disgruntled, since he laid great emphasis on the fact that this sinner should personally confess her misdeeds, Paulet reported carefully back to London all that had happened.
3
A few days later Mary was cheered by the arrival of her steward Melville and his daughter, and Bastian Pages also with his daughter Mary, who was the Queen’s god-daughter. However, she rightly interpreted the dismissal of her coachmen – Paulet had at last succeeded in effecting this domestic economy – as an ominous sign that her days of driving abroad were over.
In London the commissioners appointed to judge the Scottish queen assembled at Westminster on 8 October. They were read copies of the letters sent by Babington to Mary, her answers and the evidence of Nau and Curle. It was then agreed that Mary should be brought to trial under the Act of Association enacted in 1585: this provided means whereby a commission of twenty-four peers and privy councillors might be appointed to investigate any conspiracy or attempt to hurt Elizabeth ‘by any person or with the privity of any person that shall or may pretend to the title to the Crown of this realm’.
4
The punishments for anyone found guilty under this act were to be two-fold: firstly they were to be deprived of their title to the English crown forever, and secondly they could be lawfully put to death under the provisions of the Act. It had been quite clear at the time that this Act had been especially framed in order to be able to try and execute the queen of Scots: now it was coming into its own. It was under this Act that the commissioners and peers were now summoned to meet in a few days’ time at Fotheringhay – including Mary’s former jailer, Shrewsbury. In vain he tried to duck this unpleasant task on grounds of health. Shrewsbury was smartly reminded by Cecil that his failure to appear might be interpreted by the malicious as confirmation of all those old rumours that he had been too lenient towards his prisoner: the Lord Chancellor Bromley also wrote meaningly to Shrewsbury: ‘I would advise you not to be absent.’
The provisions of the Act of Association were so heavily weighted against Mary that she stood absolutely no chance of acquittal even if it had
not been quite clear to all and sundry that her case had been pre-judged. Indeed Cecil mentioned calmly to Shrewsbury that if his health really did prevent him from attending, he ought to authorize Cecil in advance to deliver his (Shrewsbury’s) opinion of Mary’s guilt.
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It was of no avail for Châteauneuf, the French ambassador, to plead with Elizabeth for Mary at least to have counsel to defend her on what was a capital charge: Elizabeth told him sharply that she did not need advice from strangers on how to manage her own business. At the forthcoming trial, therefore, Mary was to be allowed neither counsel nor witnesses in her defence; she was not even to be allowed a secretary or amanuensis to help her prepare her own case – her own secretaries being of course still in prison in London. She was to be left quite alone, a sick woman and a foreigner, who knew nothing of England, its laws, or customs, and had only begun to learn its language comparatively late in life, to conduct and manage her own defence against the best legal brains in the country. These eminent lawyers on the other hand were not even to be put to the simple task of bringing witnesses for the prosecution for none was to be called.
Yet, curiously enough, by the standards of the sixteenth century the innate injustice of the trial of Mary Queen of Scots lay not so much in its arrangements – the accused was never allowed counsel at an English treason trial at this date, and the barbarity of the Scottish treason trials has been sufficiently commented upon
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– as in the fact that the trial took place at all. How, indeed, could it ever be legal for Mary as sovereign, the queen of a foreign country, to be tried for treason, when she was in no sense one of Elizabeth’s subjects? In 1586 the sovereignty of a ruler was taken extremely seriously with regard to his own subjects – how much more difficult then was it to try and execute one who was actually or had been the sovereign of another country? Elizabeth herself was the first to perceive the dangers for the future of pulling down any monarch to the rank where he or she could be punished like any other subject – let alone the monarch of another country. If Mary had partaken in treasonable activities in England where in any case she was a prisoner, held against her will – the correct remedy (although of course it was never considered) was surely to expel her from the country. The mere judicial proceedings for trying a sovereign presented enormous difficulties by English common law. In England it was the foundation-stone of justice that every man had a right to be tried by his peers; Mary being a queen had no peers in England except Elizabeth herself. Neither privy councillors nor earls nor barons gathered together in no matter what profusion could be said to be the equals of one who was an anointed queen.
As the English lawyers pondered these questions, it was even suggested that the old claims of England to feudal suzerainty over Scotland (last used by Henry
VIII
to justify his depredations) might be brought out again, dusted over and employed to prove that Mary was Elizabeth’s subject and as such capable of both treason against her, and of trial by English law. In the end the line of proceedings taken consisted of a long narration of circumstances ranging down from ancient times – some of them very ancient indeed – when it had been considered suitable for one sovereign to try another for treason done within their state. The most recent case cited was that of Conradin, last of the Hohenstaufen, who, four centuries earlier, had been beheaded by the papal nominee for his father’s thrones, Charles, duke of Anjou, after being captured in battle and subjected to a form of treason trial. But the two cases were hardly comparable, as Mary had certainly not been captured in battle, and in any case was utterly ignorant of the laws of England, a country in which she had never been permitted to live at liberty.
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