The Watchers (36 page)

And so it was that Anthony Babington and his companions were executed on gallows specially constructed near the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, where Savage had first concocted his murder plot, on 20 and 21 September. The deaths of Ballard, Babington, Savage and Chidiocke Tycheborne were quite as terrible as Queen Elizabeth, demanding the full execution of royal justice, wanted them to be.

Where the queen insisted on savage deaths for the conspirators, she dithered on Mary Stuart. By now there was no way to avoid the examination of the evidence against the Queen of Scots by the commission of privy councillors and lords of parliament. The fearsome mechanism of the Act for the Queen's Surety had been set in
motion. The Queen of Scots would answer for her conspiracies against her royal cousin. In weeks of nervous preparation, councillors and lawyers directed by Lord Burghley felt their way cautiously through the evidence. There was no precedent for what they proposed to do, trying a foreign monarch, even one deposed, by English laws for treason to Elizabeth. Acutely conscious of proper form, they were not even sure what to call Mary in the proceedings of the commission. With the imagination of Elizabethan lawyers, they settled on ‘the Scottish Queen'.

The commission met at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire between 12 and 15 October 1586. In the great hall Mary was brought before ten earls, one viscount and twelve barons, who sat on long benches on either side of the chamber. The queen's privy councillors occupied chairs of their own. At a table in the centre of the hall were the crown's law officers and two public notaries. The proceedings were conducted under the great cloth of state, Elizabeth's coat of arms, the mark of royal justice.

It was a contest between old enemies. Mary, forty-three years old and too long in confinement, had been worn down and prematurely aged by prison. Both Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham had been ill, yet ferociously busy in preparing for the commission. Still, the wits of Mary, Burghley and Walsingham were as sharp as ever.

The Scottish Queen wanted nothing to do with what she thought was a travesty of a hearing. She was, after all, a monarch and accountable only to God. Human justice could not touch her – or so she maintained. She contested the commission's jurisdiction over her as a foreign prince and she mocked the evidence it brought against her. She was not allowed lawyers; nor, significantly, was she permitted to examine the documents used by the crown's law officers and by Lord Burghley (who sat as a kind of presiding officer for the commission) to prove her guilt; this was common practice in treason trials, though in Mary's case it had special significance. The evidence, so carefully and diligently prepared by Thomas Phelippes, was read out loud in the great hall of Fotheringhay.

The commission was confident in the strength of an overwhelming case against the Scottish Queen. It was not, however, sure enough of
the weight of Phelippes's forged postscript of Mary's ‘bloody letter' to Babington. The evidence is complicated and open to a number of readings, but it seems likely that when Babington's first confession was read to the commission his reference to Mary's request to know the identities of his six fellow conspirators was left out. Likewise, the text of the ‘bloody letter' put to Mary's secretaries Nau and Curll and read out at Fotheringhay did not have the postcript appended.

Why was this the case, when Walsingham and Phelippes had taken so profound a risk to forge the postscript in the first place? First, it was because the documentary evidence produced by the commission against Mary was cumulatively strong enough to prove the crown's argument. Mary had corresponded with Elizabeth's enemies; she knew well enough of their plots and conspiracies. Secondly, the weight placed by the commission on the testimonies of Nau and Curll meant that the text of the ‘bloody letter' had to be consistent with what they had seen, and they had not (so far as we can tell) seen the postscript. Thirdly, the commission was nervous of anything that could jeopardize the precision of their case. By October, with the political context now wholly altered, the view of Burghley and Walsingham must have been that the postscript added nothing materially to the evidence presented at Fotheringhay; it would be too much of a risk to use it.

Not allowed to examine the documents for herself, Mary's defence followed predictable lines. She pounced on the weakness of the commission's case. She was sharp, though at times she broke off to weep. She said she did not know Babington, had never seen him or received any letter from him. It was a poor argument, she maintained, to say that because Babington had written to her she had been a party to his conspiracy. True, she desired news and intelligence from her friends. True also, that people sent her letters, though she did not know who they were or where the letters came from. Babington's confession was read out once again. She denied that she had written any such letter to him. And then she asked the question Burghley and other members of the commission must have been expecting. She asked to see her own handwriting. With the patience of an executioner before his victim, Burghley countered by showing to the commission – but probably not to Mary – copies of Babington's letters.

The Scottish Queen knew from the documentary evidence being
used in the prosecution that her secret correspondence had been penetrated. Somehow Lord Burghley had copies of letters that had passed secretly between Anthony Babington, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curll, and her friends and allies in Europe. She suspected underhand practice. Above all, she suspected Sir Francis Walsingham, who, as one of the observers of the commission, was sitting close by in the great hall of Fotheringhay. The Scottish Queen demanded of Walsingham whether he was an honest man. He stood up from his place at the opposite end of the chamber to Mary, walked to the lawyers' and notaries' table in the centre of the hall and spoke:

Madam, I stand charged by you to have practised something against you. I call God and all the world to witness I have not done anything as a private man unworthy of an honest man; nor as a public man unworthy of my calling. I protest before God that as a man careful of my mistress's safety I have been curious [anxious, concerned, solicitous].

At this reply – a masterpiece of subtle wordplay that said everything and nothing at the same time – Mary's response was to weep. She protested that she would not make a shipwreck of her soul in conspiring against her good sister Elizabeth. But she also spoke with venom against Walsingham. Those he had set for spies over her, she said, also spied for her against him. It seems unlikely that he was disconcerted by her claim. He knew both his men and his methods. And he, quite unlike the Scottish Queen, was not on trial for his life.

Soon after this the Scottish Queen made the dramatic gesture of withdrawing herself from the great hall. She wanted nothing more to do with the commission's proceedings; she had heard enough. It made little difference. In Mary's absence the commissioners continued to hear the evidence against her. Elizabeth effectively hamstrung the proceedings by ordering Lord Burghley not to allow the commission to give a sentence on Mary's guilt. But, though at first depressed by an inconclusive end to the hearing at Fotheringhay, the commissioners were not prepared to let slip their best opportunity so far to destroy the pernicious influence of the Scottish Queen.

After an adjournment of ten days, the commission met once again,
in the Star Chamber in Westminster Palace. This time Mary was not present to misdirect or mislead the commissioners in their reading of the evidence against her. Her secretaries, Nau and Curll, once again swore to the accuracy of the documents they had seen, all carefully prepared and set in order by Thomas Phelippes. Even more than this, Curll said that when he had deciphered Anthony Babington's letters and then read them to his mistress he had ‘admonished her of the danger of those actions, and persuaded her not to deal therein, nor to make any answer thereto'. She had of course ignored him. Curll's sworn testimony made Mary's guilt plainer than ever.

At last the commission passed sentence upon the Queen of Scots:

By their joint assent and consent, they do pronounce and deliver their sentence and judgement … divers matters have been compassed and imagined within the realm of England, by Anthony Babington and others … with the privity, of the said Mary, pretending title to the crown of this realm of England, tending to the hurt, death and destruction of the royal person of our said lady the Queen.

After this it was a long and complicated road to Mary's execution, one along which Queen Elizabeth was pushed and prodded very unwillingly by her senior advisers. Elizabeth wanted Mary to be quietly killed at Fotheringhay. She made it plain to Sir Amias Paulet, Mary's keeper, that he had subscribed to the Association for the revenge of any treason against queen and country. Why, Elizabeth asked, could he not pursue her to death as he had sworn to do? Shocked at the suggestion, Paulet refused to stain his conscience.

What Elizabeth resisted for as long as she could was the act of signing her royal cousin's death warrant: she did not want the blood of her royal kinswoman on her hands. When Elizabeth at last signed the document, in February 1587, the Privy Council dispatched it to Fotheringhay so quickly and secretly that Elizabeth had no time to change her mind to any effect. The Scottish Queen was dead long before Lord Burghley happened to tell Elizabeth that the warrant had been sent off to Fotheringhay. In a furious temper, the queen blamed everyone except herself. Her junior secretary, William Davison, who had taken the signed warrant to an inner caucus of privy councillors, went before Star Chamber and then went to prison. He was lucky: Elizabeth
had wanted Davison to be hanged. Lord Burghley, for the first time in his long career, was dismissed from Her Majesty's presence. It was one of the most decisive and extraordinary moments in English history. Thanks to the clandestine and ruthless work of Walsingham and Phelippes, and the resolution of Walsingham's colleagues in the Privy Council and in parliament, the politics of Elizabeth's reign were never quite the same again.

Did the end justify the means? Were queen and country served by the employment of methods that by modern standards of justice are questionable, to say the least? Certainly a forgery, the tangle of the Babington Plot and a show trial at Fotheringhay and in Star Chamber meant that Mary Queen of Scots could be eliminated once and for all. Elizabeth Tudor was at last free of her rival. But in 1587 even the cleverest of the queen's advisers could not properly apprehend what they had done. Mary's death did not take the sting out of a contested Tudor succession. War with Spain and the Pope was now certain. But there were other intangibles, the principal of them being one that would rumble on through the centuries. In defence of queen and country, Elizabeth and her ministers had killed a monarch.

When Bull the executioner cleaved Mary Stuart's head from her shoulders in the hall of Fotheringhay Castle in February 1587 the Elizabethan world was jolted on its axis. Bull's blow helped to sever the notion of monarchy as a sacred thing. Queen Elizabeth knew this and, as she believed that divine sanction was the best defence she had against her enemies, it filled her with revulsion. Her ministers, however, being pragmatic men, argued powerfully that Mary must die. And so it was that Elizabeth, pressed by the unanimous will of Privy Council and the Lords and Commons of parliament, signed her royal cousin's death warrant. She and her kingdom now had to take the consequences.

Sir Francis Walsingham and Thomas Phelippes led Mary Queen of Scots to the headsman's block. By secret means they had uncovered her correspondence with Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators, unearthing with great patience the evidence they needed to prove Mary's complicity in a plot to murder Elizabeth. By today's standards the methods used by Phelippes and Walsingham look unappealing. They dabbled a little in forgery. Even at the time the word entrapment was used by their enemies to describe the way Mary had been caught and held fast. Her trial by commission was unorthodox. The Queen of Scots was refused the help of lawyers (a fixed principle of Tudor treason trials) and she was not permitted to examine the documentary evidence brought against her. But to Elizabeth's government in 1586 all of this hardly mattered. After so many years of effort they had Mary where they wanted her. The evidence was robust enough for privy councillors and lords of parliament to prove what Elizabeth's advisers had known all along: simply, that the Queen
of Scots was guilty of privity in compassing treason against their queen. Of course it was a political trial whose outcome was never in doubt. But at least Mary's case had been tried in a special court of justice. It would have been so simple to have her quietly killed. That, after all, was what her cousin Elizabeth had wanted: a quiet and discreet murder from which she could have distanced herself.

Even before the blow of the axe, Elizabeth's government braced itself for the coming storm. There was outrage in Catholic Europe, though that was hardly surprising. In Paris clergy preached angry sermons of revenge against Elizabeth's murderous regime. King Philip of Spain, however, was a little more ambivalent about Mary's judicial execution, for it left open his own claim to the Tudor crown. This he began to press with great energy, notionally with the Scottish Queen's blessing. Philip believed in the existence of a will made by Mary to the effect that she granted the right of English succession to Philip; he ordered a thorough search of Europe's archives to find it. It was a phantom; no such document existed.

The outrage of Europe's Catholics was for Philip an instrument of political power. They believed that England was a heretic pariah kingdom where for nearly thirty years Elizabeth's government of atheists had engaged in a vicious persecution of English Catholics, raiding their homes, putting them in prison and making martyrs of their priests on trumped-up charges of treason. That was how exiles and émigrés like William Allen saw it: they stood squarely against evil.