The Elizabethans (43 page)

With my most loving adieu, and prayers for thy long life, your most assured and loving Sovereign, as thereto by good deserts induced, E.R.
⁵

This missive, so characteristic of its sender, is full of drama. It has no doubt that Mary is ‘treacherous’, and a ‘wicked murderess’. The injunction that she should pray for delivery from the fiend implies that Elizabeth meant Mary to die – but how? As she moved, over the next few months, through agonies of indecision, she wanted Mary’s death, but ‘she wished it could be done in some way that would not throw the blame on her’. Through Walsingham, she let Paulet know that she would be grateful if he would simply murder the Scottish queen. Paulet’s reply was – unlike anything the Queen thought, did or said at this juncture – unambiguous: ‘It was an unhappy day for him when he was required by his Sovereign to do an act which God and the law forbade. His goods and life were at her Majesty’s disposal, but he would not make shipwreck of his conscience, or leave so great a blot to his posterity as shed blood without law or warrant.’
⁶
But that was all a long way in the future, after Mary Stuart had been tried and condemned to death.

The trial took place at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. It was a strong, capacious castle. It was the property of the Crown. It was a compromise. The Council wanted Mary brought to the Tower of London, but Elizabeth, ‘variable as the weather’ as Burghley complained,
⁷
would not hear of it. She needed her left hand to be in ignorance of the activities of her right. She who was an anointed queen could not, with a large part of herself, countenance the trial (let alone the execution) of another so anointed. She who had known the horror of imprisonment in the Tower could not bring herself to inflict such a punishment on her cousin, ‘wicked murderess’ though she was. Though Mary had abdicated when she escaped from Lochleven in 1567, English law had never recognised the abdication. As far as the law of England was concerned, Mary was still the regnant Queen of Scots.

Now, the world waited to see what her fate was to be. Among Mary’s letters and papers at Chartley had been found her will, disinheriting her son James for his heresy. This was forwarded to Scotland. It was now a
fait accompli
that James VI would become Elizabeth’s Protestant heir, and the Council felt it was imperative to assure James that this was the case. M. D’Esneval, the French Ambassador at Holyrood in Edinburgh, had been doing his best to persuade James that, if his mother were executed, he would be dishonoured throughout Europe and would lose the honour of his English inheritance. Philip II, poised now to invade England, was preparing to be King himself and to govern as the successor.

Meanwhile, the papers discovered at Chartley, and used in evidence at the trials of Babington and his friends, had made public the nature of England’s enemies. These young Catholic men revealed how carefully they had been groomed (or radicalised, as we should say) by the priests of their Church. The Jesuits at Reims openly taught the legitimacy, and indeed the merit, of murder. Babington told the court that the murder of Queen Elizabeth had been represented to him as ‘a deed lawful and meritorious’. The King of Spain would have agreed. He had said to Mendoza that to kill his sister-in-law would be an enterprise so saintly (‘
tan santa empresa
’) that it would be of great service to Almighty God.
⁸

A number of the Council members themselves would have been embarrassed to discover, among the papers at Chartley, the now-public knowledge that the Scottish queen, the French Ambassador and the King of Spain regarded them – the Earls of Rutland and Cumberland, Lord Montague, Lord Lumley and St John of Bletsoe – as likely to be Catholic sympathisers who would join forces with them in the event of the counter-revolution. It was all the more necessary for
these
Council members to demonstrate their loyalty to Elizabeth and distance themselves from any seditious murder plots.

So it was that the entire Council made the journey to Fotheringhay in mid-October 1586. The castle was built on the hillside over the River Nen, surrounded by trees in their autumn gold. It was not a large castle and it was already filled to the attics by Paulet’s soldiers and Mary’s entourage. Members of the Council had to find accommodation in village cottages or in the surrounding farms. The peers did not come alone. All these great lords had an entourage, and they were all armed to the teeth; 2,000 horses crowded into the little village.
⁹

As had been expected, Mary refused to acknowledge the authority of the court. The Lord Chancellor and Burghley went and remonstrated with her. Burghley said that if she had been imprisoned without cause, there would be justification in her refusal to appear before the court; but Elizabeth had shown a forbearance to her that was without historical precedent. If she refused to attend, ‘we will proceed tomorrow in the cause, though you be absent and continue contumacious’.
¹⁰
Two clever people confronted one another in their exchange: ‘Search your conscience. Look to your honour,’ she had rejoined; but Burghley was the cleverer. He knew that Mary’s exhibitionism would triumph over caution and that after her years of incarceration in which she had charmed only Lord Shrewsbury and a succession of underlings, she would be unable to resist making an ‘impression’ on the peerage of England. Nor did she disappoint. From now on, until her death, she was magnificent. But shifty and, as always, transparently dishonest.

When examined next day by Gawdy, a judge of the Queen’s Bench, Mary denied knowledge of Babington and his letters. She even denied having written a letter in her own hand to Babington. ‘Do not believe that I have consented to the Queen’s destruction.’ Then she burst into tears. ‘I would never make a shipwreck of my soul by conspiring the destruction of my dearest sister.’ (The same phrase that Paulet was to use when refusing to murder
her
– it had sunk into
his
soul.) On the second day she pulled rank and said that the words of ‘Princes anointed’ were not ‘evidence’ that could be challenged. She also issued a threat: ‘The Princes her kinsmen’ in Europe might prove too strong for the Reformation. Burghley challenged her. He recapitulated the confessions of Babington and the others. He proved that Cardinal Allen and the Jesuit parsons were even at that moment in Rome petitioning the Pope to persuade the King of Spain to go to war against England. She did not reply directly, but when he had finished she demanded to be heard by Parliament or to speak directly to Queen Elizabeth. Paulet noticed that, now that the proceedings had begun, she seemed fearless. She was enjoying the discomfiture of her judges and she probably knew enough of Elizabeth’s character to realise how difficult the Queen of England would find it to decide the fate of the Queen of Scotland.

The commission had no difficulty in finding her guilty, though they prorogued their assembly for ten days and did not pronounce the verdict until they had met in the Star Chamber. What next? Parliament had been summoned for 15 October, but it was prorogued, opening on 29 October (8 November, new style) with Elizabeth not appearing. Her absence was for reasons of decorum. She could not be seen to take part in proceedings against a queen.
¹¹
The Commons had already twice petitioned for the Scottish queen to be beheaded. Now a joint committee of Lords and Commons made a statement. The Queen of Scots regarded the Crown of England as belonging to herself. Ever since coming to England she had been a canker at its heart, corrupting its people. Mercy shown to her would be a cruelty to all loyal subjects. Sir Christopher Hatton made an impassioned speech. He described Mary as ‘the hope of all idolatry’, conceived by ‘a number of subjects terming themselves Catholics . . . to be a present possessor of the crown of England’. Her manner of life had from earliest years been ‘most filthy and detestable’; ‘her ambitious mind, grounded in Papistry’ had ‘thirsted after this crown . . . and our overthrow’. He called for her death. Otherwise ‘the Queen’s Majesty’s most royal person cannot be continued with safety.
Ne pereat Israel, pereat Absalom
– Absalom must perish, lest Israel perish.’
¹²
Parliament unanimously agreed, and formally demanded that Mary Stuart be executed.

Ever since news of the Babington conspiracy had begun to trickle out in August, England had been in suspense. When the sentence of Parliament was agreed – verbally – by Queen Elizabeth, it was received with rapture by the populace. Not only in the capital, but all over the country, bonfires blazed and bells rang. The bells of London rang for a full twenty-four hours in celebration.

Crowds become ghoulish when there is war-fever in the air. They were not whooping with joy and lighting bonfires because a woman had been condemned to have her head chopped off, so much as exultant that a great threat to their collective nation had been checked.

Elizabeth, as a rule, was intuitively in touch with her people, but not on this occasion. Her feelings were complicated, her emotions were tortured. Still, everyone waited for her to do the final, the legally necessary, thing and issue a death-warrant to enable the execution to take place. And still she continued to receive deputations from abroad: M. de Belièvre, the French Finance Minister, to entreat Elizabeth for mercy. If mercy were not offered, he was commissioned to pass on the fact that the King of France was in warlike mood; so was the Papal Nuncio in Paris, so was Mendoza. If the Scottish queen were executed, not only would the King resent it, but he would see it as a special affront to himself.

‘M. Belièvre,’ said the Queen, ‘does the King your Master bid you use these words to me?’

‘Yes, madam. It is his express command.’

But England had spoken – the Council, the Parliament, the people. There could be no doubt what they all wanted. Walsingham had news of other conspiracies hatching, and the longer the Scottish queen lived, the more chance there was of such schemes gathering momentum. Walsingham became ill, an illness exacerbated by the strain; but perhaps there was an element of self-protection here. He was a cunning enough man. He knew Queen Elizabeth well. He knew the danger of being the man who actually put Mary, Queen of Scots’s death-warrant under Elizabeth’s nose and asking her to sign it.

This task fell to Walsingham’s deputy, Mr William Davison. As they entered the month of February (Wednesday, 1 February, old style; 11 February, new style) he went down to Greenwich, that pleasantest of all the Queen’s palaces, where, from the windows of her apartments, she could watch the ships sailing down the Thames and out to sea. Davison decided not to deceive Her Majesty, but to numb the sharpness of what was needed by sandwiching the appalling document in a pile of trivial papers that required her signature. It appeared at first as if she knew his game, and wished to play it this way. She made small talk, and remarked upon the brightness of the morning. She signed the papers, all of them, including the death-warrant, casting them to the floor as she did so. Davison must have thought that he was going to get away without having to discuss the matter any further.

But this was not Elizabeth’s way. Of course she could not allow the significance of what she had done to pass without notice. She told him to take the warrant at once to the Lord Chancellor and to have it sealed. Only when the Royal Seal was attached to it would it become a fully legal document. She specified the hall, rather than the lawn at Fotheringhay, as a more seemly place for the dreadful deed to happen. Then, with a bitter joke, she told Davison to call on Walsingham with the news, adding that the grief would probably kill him outright.

As Davison withdraw, walking backwards, she called him back. It was then that she raised the possibility of an assassination rather than a formal execution. It would disarm the resentment of Scotland and France; it would remove any necessity that James VI or King Henri III might have for quarrelling with her. She asked him to approach Paulet or Walsingham. Davison was brave enough to tell her that he was sure they would refuse. Nevertheless she insisted that he should do so. As soon as Davison had taken the death-warrant to the Chancellor, a seal was attached to it. The Chancellor did not even bother to read it. The next day Davison received a note from the Queen telling him
not
to go to the Chancellor until she had spoken to him again. Davison hurried back to Greenwich and told the Queen that the document was already sealed and dispatched to Fotheringhay. After a spell of impatiently pacing the room, Elizabeth suddenly walked out on him and left him alone.

Secretary Robert Beale, clerk to the Privy Council, was entrusted with the task of taking the death-warrant to Fotheringhay. He rode hard out of London, broke the journey at Wrest in Bedfordshire and reached Fotheringhay Castle on the Sunday evening. He then went in search of the Queen’s erstwhile guardian, Lord Shrewsbury, and on Monday evening Shrewsbury and the Earl of Kent assembled. A message was sent to the Sheriff of Northamptonshire to be in attendance on Wednesday morning.

Shrewsbury had not been in London for some time. He had taken no part in the Parliament that insisted upon Mary Stuart’s death. Nor had he seen her since Amyas Paulet had taken charge of her. It was his task to break to her the awful news. With Kent at his side, on Tuesday, 7 February (17th), he told Mary that she must die in the morning. Perhaps in part because the bearer of these tidings was a man of whom she was fond, and who patently loved her, the emotion of the scene was too much for her. In Paulet’s presence she was able to keep up a cool disdain. At the trial she had maintained a lofty swagger. But now, as Shrewsbury told her that she was to be executed, and so soon, she found it impossible to believe. With much tossing of the head she called for her physician. When Shrewsbury and Kent made their awkward withdrawal from her presence, she had broken down altogether and both men were haunted by the spectre of her committing suicide in the night; or, when morning came, of the painful possibility of her having to be dragged to the block.