MARY FELT she had been torn in pieces when her son, James VI, rejected her to clear the way for his own glittering dynastic prospects. Sir Amyas Paulet, her jailer at Tutbury and Chartley, coolly predicted her reaction. As he cautioned Walsingham, it was “when she was at the lowest [that] her heart was at the greatest, and being prepared for extremity, she would provoke her enemies to do the worst.” Despite her sorely inflamed legs and physical weakness, this was still the same Mary who had ridden in her steel cap at the head of her army during the Chase-about Raid and dealt so ingeniously and courageously with Darnley after the Rizzio plot.
She guessed instantly the reason for Paulet’s severing of her links to the outside world. Walsingham realized that his success in checkmating Castelnau had been all too complete. If he wanted to entrap Mary, then far from sealing off her correspondence, he would have to find her a new postman whom she trusted and believed to be safe. Castelnau could no longer fulfill this role, since he was discredited in both England and France for his collusion in the Throckmorton plot and his aid to Mary over and above his instructions. He was replaced as the French ambassador in September 1585 by Guillaume de l’Aubepine, Baron de Châteauneuf.
Walsingham’s genius as a spymaster lay in his ability to penetrate the networks of his Catholic opponents and turn them to his advantage. He recruited a defecting Catholic refugee, Gilbert Gifford, to establish a monitored channel of communication between Mary and the French embassy. Gifford was a friend of one of Mary’s agents in Paris, who vouched for his credentials. The operation was in place by the end of January 1586, and Walsingham was soon accumulating a fresh pile of intelligence papers, larger and more informative than before. Mary trusted Châteauneuf, whom she believed to be a zealous Catholic of the sort who might help gain her freedom and take seriously the papal decree of 1570 that had declared Elizabeth to be excommunicated and deposed. She wrote candidly to him, blithely unaware that Gifford was working for Walsingham and forwarding her letters to his office for inspection before they were delivered to the embassy.
Mary urged Châteauneuf to look out for “spies” and “moles” among his secretaries. She had also learned her lesson about using alum as a secret ink. It was too easily discovered, she said, “and therefore do not make use of it except in an emergency.” If there was no alternative, she suggested hiding secret messages “in such new books” as she was sent, “writing always on the fourth, eighth, twelfth and sixteenth leaf, and so continuing from four to four . . . and cause green ribbons to be attached to all the books that you’ve had written in this way.”
Mary asked that letters meant for her should be packed, tightly wrapped, in the soles or heels of the fashionable new shoes she still wore and of which she received regular consignments, or else placed between the wooden panels of the trunks and boxes that were used to transport her silks or other goods from London and Paris. At the height of Walsingham’s plan of entrapment, Gifford found himself using a small watertight box that he inserted through the bunghole of a beer cask, where it floated on top of the beer. Paulet was sent by Walsingham to intercept the casks, which were delivered weekly by the brewer. Then, at the crucial moment, Walsingham’s chief decipherer rode to Chartley and slipped incognito into Paulet’s household to read and copy the intercepted documents, after which they were carefully sealed again and returned to their box in the barrel.
Walsingham’s early breakthrough was in March 1586. Mary sent Châteauneuf the key to a new cipher, perhaps her own creation, that she insisted he use for their correspondence, as the old ciphers supplied by Ridolfi and Castelnau were compromised. Once again Walsingham’s chief decipherer did not have to crack the code, which was inadvertently supplied to him, this time by Mary herself. It was just the first of a series of misjudgments that led to her downfall. As Châteauneuf laconically explained in his final report on the debacle to Henry III, “The Queen of Scots and her principal servants placed great confidence in the said Gifford . . . and thence came the ruin of the said queen.” Instead of looking for spies at the French embassy, Mary should have been less trusting when Gifford appeared out of nowhere to offer his services as a postman.
Shortly afterward, a madcap plot took shape. Anthony Babington was a rich young Catholic gentleman who had time on his hands and had served the Earl of Shrewsbury at Sheffield as a page. Now twenty-five, he was married with a young daughter. He became embroiled on the fringes of Catholic conspiracy when he visited France in 1580 to further his education. On his return to England, he ran errands for a number of Catholic priests and missionaries as a favor. Above all, he forwarded five packets of confidential letters to Mary before she was transferred from Shrewsbury’s custody to Sadler’s.
Babington’s role as a conspirator might have stopped there, but his connections to Mary’s agents in Paris drew him steadily into an underground cabal after Mendoza was expelled as the Spanish ambassador in London. Mendoza went to live in Paris, and it was from there that he hatched the idea of a coup d’état. Mendoza’s plan aimed to combine a revolt of the English Catholics, a Spanish invasion, Elizabeth’s assassination, and the final liberation and triumph of Mary.
In May and June 1586, Babington first conspired with John Ballard, a soldier-priest and fanatic, Gifford and others. At a meeting at his rooms in London on June 7, it was agreed that Elizabeth should be seized and Mary freed with foreign aid. After some thirteen conspirators had been recruited, many of them more committed to the plot than he was, Babington reluctantly proposed Elizabeth’s assassination by a group of “six gentlemen,” although the names of the six were never settled.
But would Mary approve of the plot? Babington wrote to ask her on July 6. Thanks to Gifford’s role as her postman, the letter was intercepted and Walsingham’s men were alerted. Walsingham knew this was the opportunity he had been waiting for to entrap Mary. The plot was not in itself a “projection”* to frame her; it really existed, but rather than nipping it in the bud, Cecil’s spymaster allowed it to gather momentum so that he could collect the written evidence to put her on trial for her life. Walsingham was involved from start to finish, interviewing Babington no fewer than three times after the plot had developed, but before arresting him, to see if he would be willing to defect and implicate Mary. The plot was highly disorganized—almost entirely a product of fantasy. Babington himself was wracked with doubt, and Walsingham even had to send Gifford to buoy him up when he suddenly panicked and wanted to back out.
Walsingham sent Thomas Phelippes, his clerk and chief decipherer, to the vicinity of Chartley on July 7. He waited until the 10th, when he received Babington’s letter. After Phelippes had successfully decoded it, the letter was returned to the secret box hidden inside the beer cask and smuggled back into Chartley. In readiness for Mary’s reply, the decipherer sat and waited.
Mary ruminated for a week before sending it. Her anguish and despair led to recklessness. She weighed her options, which by now were very limited, and decided to take a gamble. Foremost in her mind was the fear that she was likely to be quietly murdered. “She could see plainly,” wrote Paulet to Walsingham, “that her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness.”
Her mind made up, Mary was excited. Her new animation was observed by Phelippes, who noted her change of mood with grim satisfaction. Her health improved, and she was allowed out in her coach to enjoy the summer sunshine. As she was driven out of the gates, Mary passed the decipherer, who acknowledged her. “I had,” he cynically informed Walsingham, “a smiling countenance, but I thought of the verse:
When someone gives you a greeting,
Take care that it isn’t an enemy.”
Mary first worked out her ideas for the fatal reply in her head. She then sketched some headings on paper and sat at the table in her study with her two secretaries to discuss them. The senior of the pair was Claude Nau, the brother of the surgeon who had so expertly saved her life after her gastric ulcer burst at Jedburgh. He took notes, then drafted a letter to Babington in French for her approval. Afterward, he translated it into English. The “authentic” final version of the reply was in English, not French, on this occasion. The reason was that the code Babington used was based on English. Nau’s original French draft has not survived,* and even if it had, it would not have been the document Walsingham wanted most, because he needed the text as it was actually sent to Babington. Still, this was in cipher, and not written in Mary’s own hand.
Mary’s letter was finished late in the evening of July 17. It was posted early the next day, when it was quickly retrieved from the beer cask and brought to Walsingham’s agent to decode. His deciphered text in English—the momentous evidence that would be produced against Mary at her trial—was sent to Walsingham on the 19th. To indicate its urgency and as a token of the decipherer’s black humor, a gallows was drawn on the outside.
As soon as Walsingham read Mary’s letter, he knew it to be far more incriminating than her earlier appeal to her foreign supporters before the Northern Rising. There she had spoken generally and allusively. Here she was almost explicit:
The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both without and within the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design, I may be suddenly transported out of this place, and that all your forces in the same time be on the field to meet me in tarrying for the arrival of the foreign aid, which then must be hastened with all diligence.
Mary’s meaning is quite clear. She had consented to Elizabeth’s assassination and a foreign invasion. She had not strictly specified what the “work” of the six gentlemen was to be, but the letter from Babington to which she was replying included the graphic passage “For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by the excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and Your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.”
When the two letters are read together, Mary’s complicity in the plot is undeniable. She protested at her trial that the evidence against her was purely circumstantial. She demanded to be judged only by her own words and writing, saying that in her own words there would be found no consent or incitement to assassination. She refused to accept that the two letters should be taken together.
This became the crux of her defense, and not the later allegation of forgery. There has been much confusion over a postscript that Walsingham’s chief decipherer added to the “authentic” final version of her letter before he returned it to its box in the beer cask for onward delivery to Babington. A whole conspiracy theory has been built on this brief postscript, one in which the decipherer is accused of “doctoring” the main body of the letter to incriminate Mary in the murder plot. But there is no evidence to support the claim that the main text of the letter was altered, and the postscript—a blatant and audacious forgery of which Phelippes cheekily left his draft in the archives—was not used against Mary. It was a clumsy tactical move, an attempt to entice Babington to disclose the “names and qualities” of the “six gentlemen” and their accomplices so that Cecil and Walsingham could arrest them all. It did not work, because Babington’s suspicions were aroused and he fled. Ten days later, he was caught in a barn with his hair cropped short and his face grimed to make him look like a farm hand.
Walsingham took his time to put the conspirators on trial. His main quarry was Mary, who was brought to Sir Walter Aston’s house at Tixall, about three miles from Chartley. A subterfuge was devised to separate her from her secretaries and seize all her papers and ciphers before she learned that Babington and his accomplices were to be executed. She was in unusually high spirits. When Paulet invited her to ride out and join a deer hunt in Sir Walter’s neighboring park, she jumped at the chance. Her legs were so much better, she was able to mount her horse for the very last time in her life.
On August 11, she set out with Paulet and his company for the hunt, attended by her secretaries, her loyal valet Bastian Pages and her physician, Dominique Bourgoing, to whom we owe a vivid account of the final seven months of her life.
After riding a short distance, Paulet and some of his men dropped back. On the horizon, a troop of horsemen had appeared. Mary’s heart must have leapt. Her vision was almost apocalyptic, because it was just such a group that she had imagined Babington would be dispatching to free her. The captain of the troop conferred earnestly with Paulet, then rode forward. He dismounted and told Mary that a plot to kill Elizabeth had been uncovered and his instructions were to arrest her secretaries and conduct her securely under guard to Tixall.
Mary tried to lie her way out of trouble. She angrily expostulated that Elizabeth had been misled. “I have always shown myself her good sister and friend,” she insisted. She ordered her servants to draw their swords to defend her, but they were heavily outnumbered by men with loaded pistols. After all were disarmed, Mary dismounted and sat on the ground. She refused to move, saying she preferred to die where she was. Paulet threatened to send for her coach and forcibly remove her. Mary demanded to know where she was to be taken. She sat firmly glued to the spot until Bourgoing came to her side to comfort and assist her. At length she agreed to move, but first she knelt against a tree and prayed loudly. Paulet and his men were obliged to wait until she had finished.
Mary was kept at Tixall for a fortnight. While she was there, her rooms at Chartley were searched and her papers packed into three large coffers. Her secretaries were escorted first to a nearby village and then to London for interrogation. Her papers followed. Everything that was found was removed: letters, drafts, notebooks, minutes, memos, and the keys and tables of sixty or so ciphers. All were brought to Walsingham, who presided over a committee of privy councilors assigned to scour the entire archive looking for evidence that could be used to convict her.
On August 25, Mary was brought back to Chartley. As she passed through the gates at Tixall, a small crowd of onlookers was gathered. Seizing her opportunity, she cried out to the beggars, “I have nothing for you. I am a beggar as well as you. All is taken from me.” And to the rest she said, weeping, “I am not witting or privy to anything intended against the queen.”
But Mary’s humiliation had scarcely begun. When she reached Chartley, she was incensed to discover her ransacked drawers and cabinets. Fighting back the tears, she screamed, “Some of you will be sorry for it!” Then she declared that there were two things that could not be taken from her, her royal blood and her religion, “which both I will keep until my death.”
On September 5, Paulet was told to confiscate Mary’s money and isolate her as much as possible from her servants. Even Walsingham was alarmed at these measures, in case they should “cast her into some sickness.” If Mary died unexpectedly, she would become a martyr to the Catholic cause, the center of a glare of publicity. He wished to avoid this at all costs. But Elizabeth was adamant. For the first time since she had quarreled with her cousin over the ratification of the treaty of Edinburgh, she had hardened her heart. At last she took Cecil’s dire warnings about her safety seriously. She feared she would fall victim to poison or an assassin’s bullet, and had already gone into hiding at Windsor Castle, then a fortress rather than a pleasure palace and one she hardly ever visited except when she felt her life was in danger. She knew that sooner or later Mary would have to be put on trial. The Privy Council was lobbying for Parliament to be summoned, and it was obvious what Cecil’s inner caucus would be demanding after their strident calls for Mary’s execution in 1572.
Unlike Cecil and Walsingham, Elizabeth preferred Mary to die of natural causes. Her idea was that by seizing her money and keeping her as much as possible in solitary confinement, she would become so seriously demoralized, her existing illnesses and afflictions would fatally worsen.
Elizabeth could afford to turn against Mary, who was shunted aside after James VI signed a separate treaty with England. Yet she was loath to put her cousin and “sister queen” officially on trial. She was not squeamish, but did not want the responsibility of executing an anointed queen, with all the implications that would have for undermining the ideal of monarchy. If Mary did not die naturally, Elizabeth’s preference was barely masked. She wanted her hunted down and killed under the terms of the Bond of Association.
Elizabeth had a clear grasp of the issues. She knew that regicide authorized by a statute made in Parliament would alter the future of the monarchy in the British Isles. It would tend to make the ruler accountable to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.” This was of slender concern to Cecil, whose aim for nearly twenty years had been Mary’s execution and a guaranteed Protestant succession.
Mary, by this time, was ill in bed. When Paulet came to impound her hoard of cash, she railed against him and his political masters. In a harrowing scene, she refused to hand over the key of her closet, but Paulet ordered his servants to break down the door. Mary then yielded and asked her gentlewomen to hand over the key. As Paulet’s men took away the money, Mary rose pathetically from her bed and “without slipper or shoe followed them, dragging herself as well as she could to her cabinet.” She pleaded with them for some time, but Paulet ignored her.
The Privy Council, meanwhile, met daily in closed session at Windsor. Elizabeth called for retribution against Mary, but objected to everything that was proposed. Cecil wrote to Walsingham, who was ill at his house in London: “We are still in long arguments, but no conclusions do last, being as variable as the weather . . . and so things are far from execution for the bringing of the Scottish queen to some apt place where her cause and herself might be heard.” Elizabeth had rejected the Tower as being too close to London. Hertford Castle had been agreed on for a day, then Elizabeth changed her mind.
Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire was at last chosen. Since Henry VIII’s death, it had been used mainly as a prison but was still in a reasonable state of repair. It was accessible from London, but not too close. And it was not far from Staffordshire, reducing the risk of Mary’s escaping en route.
Mary left Chartley for Fotheringhay on September 21. She was prematurely aged at forty-three. Her rheumatism and swollen legs were getting worse, and the pace was slow. She took four days to reach her final destination, a physically broken woman, but one who still insisted on as much “grandeur” as could be preserved. Even in her presently reduced state, lacking money to pay for necessities as well as luxuries, some twenty mules and carts were required for her baggage train.
Cecil’s preparations for the trial were meticulous. Every detail was carefully planned: measurements of the rooms were taken, furniture was requisitioned and a seating plan made. Sufficient food and fuel were brought in, and the sleeping and dining arrangements settled. According to the Act for the Queen’s Safety, Mary was to be tried by a commission of no fewer than twenty-four nobles and privy councilors, who would be advised and assisted by common-law judges. In the event, more than forty commissioners were appointed, but seven or eight did not turn up. To Elizabeth’s great displeasure, a number evaded the summons on the excuse of illness. They too wanted no part in a regicide.
The place chosen for the courtroom was the second-floor presence chamber of the old state apartments, a space sixty-nine feet long and twenty-one feet wide, which was divided into two unequal halves by a rail at waist height. The larger area in front of the rail was to be the courtroom. At the upper end sat a chair on a dais beneath a cloth of state emblazoned with the royal arms of England. This symbolized Elizabeth’s throne and was left empty throughout the proceedings. Benches were arranged on the other three sides of the space for the nobles and privy councilors, with more benches and a table in the center for the judges, lawyers and notaries. A high-backed chair with a red velvet cushion was positioned for Mary at the side, behind the senior judges and in front of the nobles seated to the right of the throne if viewed from the center of the space. The other, smaller area behind the rail was used as standing room for the knights and gentlemen of the county, who were allowed to watch the events.
Most of the commissioners gathered at Fotheringhay on Tuesday, October 11, leaving Cecil to arrive early the next morning. He took charge from the outset, sending a small delegation to Mary in her privy chamber. They handed her a letter from Elizabeth, informing her that she was to be put on trial. After reading the letter, she flatly refused to appear before the commission. “I am an absolute queen,” she said, “and will do nothing which may prejudice either mine own royal majesty, or other princes in my place and rank, or my son.” She was calm and composed during the interview, speaking slowly but confidently. “My mind is not yet dejected,” she said, “neither will I sink under my calamity.”
The delegation withdrew, leaving Cecil to reconsider his tactics. He spent most of Thursday, the next day, trying to induce her to change her mind. He led a larger committee that made several trips to and from her privy chamber. In the morning, she repeated her objections. “I am a queen,” she said, “and not a subject . . . If I appeared, I should betray the dignity and majesty of kings, and it would be tantamount to a confession that I am bound to submit to the laws of England, even in matters touching religion. I am willing to answer all questions, provided I am interrogated before a free Parliament, and not before these commissioners, who doubtless have been carefully chosen, and who have probably already condemned me unheard.”
Mary warned the commissioners to think about what they were doing. “Look to your consciences,” she said, “and remember that the theater of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England.”
On hearing this, Cecil (whom Bourgoing in his narrative describes as “homme plus véhement”) brusquely interrupted her. He reminded her of Elizabeth’s kindnesses to her, then told her that he had legal advice that the commissioners could proceed to judgment in her absence. “Will you therefore,” he said, “answer us or not? If you refuse, the commissioners will continue to act according to their authority.”
Mary hit back instantly. “I am a queen,” she said. To which Cecil retorted, “The queen, my mistress, knows no other queen in her realm but herself.” Cecil carried on for several minutes in this vein, but Mary ignored him.
The committee returned in the afternoon, when Sir Christopher Hatton tried a more conciliatory approach. He told her that royal majesty in the case of such a crime as she was charged with would not exempt her from answering, adding artfully, “If you be innocent, you wrong your reputation in avoiding a trial.”
Mary replied that she did not refuse to answer. She would not appear before the commissioners, but would plead before a full Parliament, as long as her protest against the legitimacy of the proceedings was admitted and her rights were acknowledged as Elizabeth’s nearest kinswoman and the heir apparent to the English throne.
Cecil decided this was enough. The commissioners, he said, “will proceed tomorrow in the cause, even if you are absent and continue in your contumacy.”
“Search your consciences,” Mary said. “Look to your honor! May God reward you and yours for your judgment against me.”
But when she slept on it, she was torn between two conflicting positions. She dreaded appearing as a defendant in a public trial, yet she realized that the commissioners would convict her in her absence of conspiring to murder Elizabeth.
Early on Friday morning, she demanded to see a new and expanded committee. Among them was Walsingham, whom she met for the first time. After some give and take on both sides, Cecil asked her whether she would appear if her formal protest was received and put in writing by the commissioners. Mary reluctantly agreed. She was, she said, so anxious to purge herself of the accusations against her that she was willing to accept his terms.
Soon after nine o’clock, the commissioners took their places in the courtroom, and Mary arrived wearing a gown of black velvet with her distinctive white cambric cap on her head to which was attached a long white gauze veil. As she entered slowly and purposefully through the door, the commissioners removed their hats as a mark of respect. She graciously acknowledged them and took her seat, her eyes darting around eagerly to see who was there and which of them might be on her side.
When the court was brought to order, Mary registered her protest, after which the prosecuting counsel opened the case against her. He delivered what the official transcript of the trial describes as “an historical discourse” of the Babington plot. He argued point by point that she knew of the plot, approved of it, assented to it, promised her assistance and “showed the ways and means.”
One of Mary’s objections to the court’s legitimacy was that its procedure was that of a treason trial. She was not allowed a lawyer, she was not able to call witnesses, and she was not allowed to use notes or examine documents in the course of conducting her own defense. Despite these unbending restrictions, which swung the balance heavily against her, she was ready to enter her plea.
She offered a robust denial. The court reporter was favorably impressed, remarking on her “stout courage.” “I knew not Babington,” said Mary. “I never received any letters from him, nor wrote any to him. I never plotted the destruction of the queen. If you want to prove it, then produce my letters signed with my own hand.”
“But,” replied the prosecutor, “we have evidence of letters between you and Babington.”
“If so,” countered Mary, “why do you not produce them? I have the right to demand to see the originals and the copies side by side. It is quite possible that my ciphers have been tampered with by my enemies. I cannot reply to this accusation without full knowledge. Until then, I must content myself with affirming solemnly that I am not guilty of the crimes imputed to me.”
What Mary could not yet have known was the full extent of Babington’s confession and the evidence collected by Walsingham. Babington had pleaded guilty at his own trial, but that was kept from her. All she knew was that her reply to him had been sent in code by one of her secretaries and was not written in her own hand. She did not know that the letter had been intercepted en route. She assumed (correctly) that Babington had burned the document after reading it, as she had ordered him to do. As the “final” and most incriminating text was the one he had destroyed, she may have thought the case against her was weak, especially regarding Elizabeth’s assassination, as she well knew that she had not specified in her own letter what the “work” of the six gentlemen was to be.
Mary was sadly deluded. She had seriously underestimated Cecil’s spymaster. He had the deciphered transcript in English of her fatal reply to Babington. He had a copy of this English text as authenticated by Babington himself under interrogation (happily without the need for torture), and without the forged postscript, so the evidence could be produced in court. Most important, he had a craftily “reciphered” copy of Mary’s original letter, to replicate the missing document she had actually sent. That was Walsingham’s pièce de résistance. A facsimile of the lost original had been reconstructed by Phelippes to stand in for the evidence Babington had burned. The facsimile was so brilliantly done, it looked exactly like the “final” version of the original letter and could easily be taken for it. When it was shown to Mary’s secretaries during the last stages of their interrogation, they broke down and confessed everything. Their confessions were at once taken down. Thereafter, their statements were the crucial “corroboration” that the reconstituted cipher was the true text of Mary’s original letter—the one she had actually sent to Babington! And of course the contents of the facsimile exactly matched the English transcript on which the chief decipherer had earlier drawn a gallows. By this sleight of hand was Walsingham able to persuade the commissioners that the case against Mary was invincible.
Mary must have been stunned when the prosecuting counsel went on to produce what now seemed to be watertight evidence against her. Piece by piece, the evidence was read out. As these damning documents were placed before the court, she could no longer contain her emotions. She burst into tears of despair. But despite her distress, she kept her wits about her. She turned to Walsingham, taxing him for the uncanny perfection of these proofs. “It was an easy matter,” she said, “to counterfeit the ciphers and characters of others.” She knew there had been trickery. She was not sure just what it was or how it had been done, but all a forger had to do, she said, was to consult her lately purloined “alphabet of ciphers” to discover the codes, assuming he did not already know them.
It was Walsingham’s turn to be stung; he rose to defend himself. “I call God to record,” he said, “that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, nor as I bear the place of a public person have I done anything unworthy of my place.” It was a Delphic explanation of the arcane rules of politics, worthy of a Machiavelli. Only Cecil and his spymaster could know where the boundaries had been drawn in this instance between private and public duties. Did the ends justify the means? Walsingham hinted at the correct answer when he admitted that he had always been “very careful for the safety of the queen and the realm.”
Mary accepted Walsingham’s reply with extraordinary good grace. Perhaps its subtler meaning had escaped her under the pressure of this courtroom drama. She asked him not to be angry with her, and to give no more credit to those who slandered her than she did to those who accused him. She then wept again. Drying her eyes, she cried out, “I would never make shipwreck of my soul by conspiring the destruction of my dearest sister.”
After this electrifying exchange, the court adjourned at about one o’clock for dinner. When everyone returned, the rest of the evidence was read out, notably the confessions of Mary’s secretaries. She was deeply shocked. She saw how damaging their statements were, and tried to counter them by suggesting that passages might have been added to her letters after she had approved the final drafts. She drew herself up to her full height and with all the remaining dignity she could muster said, “The majesty and safety of all princes falleth to the ground if they depend upon the writings and testimony of their secretaries.” She paused for a moment, then locked horns with the prosecution. “I am not,” she said, “to be convicted except by mine own word or writing.” She pointed out that her secretaries had not been called as witnesses and so could not be cross-examined. And she observed in a gently mocking tone that her initial memo of rough headings for the letters she had discussed with her secretaries on the crucial day had disappeared. She sensed a weakness in the prosecution’s case, because she knew these notes should have been retained in the archives seized by Walsingham’s men from her rooms at Chartley. (Walsingham had, in fact, searched in vain for the notes and also for Nau’s initial draft in French of the reply to Babington.)
Although forced to defend herself without being allowed to subject any of the documents exhibited against her to legal or forensic scrutiny, Mary stood up remarkably well to her ordeal. The afternoon debates continued until late in the evening, and resumed on Saturday morning. The case turned on whether she had consented to Elizabeth’s assassination: the crux was the court’s insistence that her reply to Babington be read in conjunction with his letter proposing that “the usurper” be “dispatched” in a “tragical execution.” This way, the “work” of the six gentlemen was shown to be the plot to kill Elizabeth.
Mary contended that the circumstances of her guilt might be proved, but never the fact. She does seem genuinely to have convinced herself of it, because even after the trial she made a clear distinction in her letters between “intending to assassinate” and “leaving to God and the Catholics under God’s Providence.” She had not, she said, at any point specified the work that the six gentlemen were to undertake.
But she was grasping at straws, since in the coded letter to Babington she had appealed for foreign (i.e., Spanish) aid to assist her on the field of battle after her liberation. Her rationale was that she was an independent queen wrongfully held in captivity. From her point of view, even an act of war was legitimate if it allowed her to recover her freedom. If she was not an independent queen, she was guilty. If she was, and Elizabeth’s death was no more than a providential incident in her legitimate struggle to regain her rights, she was innocent. This was how she saw it, but the commissioners could hardly be expected to agree with her.
No one who attended Mary’s trial could ever have forgotten it. Perhaps the most memorable clash was on the last day with Cecil himself. Becoming more and more impatient with what he saw as her futile semantics over her right to make a bid for freedom, Elizabeth’s chief minister finally put in the knife. With scant respect for the majesty and dignity of a queen, he told Mary that all her failed efforts to liberate herself were the result of her own actions and those of the Scots, not those of Elizabeth. Hearing this, Mary turned to him. “Ah, I see you are my adversary.”
“Yea,” he replied. “I am adversary to Queen Elizabeth’s adversaries.” In that brief but fiery exchange was captured all the ardor of a contest that had lasted for almost thirty years.
From then on, the trial, in Mary’s opinion, was over. While she continued to participate, her hopes had faded. “I will hear the proofs,” she said, “in another place and defend myself,” by which she clearly meant she awaited judgment in heaven. Bourgoing, whose account is slightly different, says she exclaimed, “My lords and gentlemen, my cause is in the hands of God.”
She kept her seat until the proceedings drew to a close, but when she was asked if she had anything more to say, she ended as she had begun. “I again demand to be heard,” she said, “in a full Parliament, or else to speak personally to the queen, who would, I think, show more regard of another queen.” She then stood up (as the official reporter noted) “with great confidence of countenance,” spoke disparagingly to Cecil, Walsingham and Hatton about the conduct of her two secretaries, then swept out of the room.
After she had departed, Cecil adjourned the commission for ten days. He had received a letter from Elizabeth ordering him to delay sentence if Mary was found guilty. Elizabeth wanted nothing to be done in haste. The commissioners were told to reconvene on October 25 in the Star Chamber at Westminster. There the evidence was reviewed in full, and Mary’s secretaries had to swear under oath that their written statements were true. They were then examined viva voce by the commissioners to check their stories. Mary was found guilty in her absence.
Now Cecil called for the verdict to be publicly proclaimed according to the Act for the Queen’s Safety so that Mary’s execution warrant could be issued. But Elizabeth stayed his hand. Cecil and Walsingham drew up a memo, yet nothing happened. When Parliament reassembled on the 29th, a stormy session was guaranteed. The debates turned immediately to Mary’s sentence, and she was denounced in a series of prepared speeches. All the old charges of adultery with Bothwell and Darnley’s murder were resurrected alongside the new. Mary was demonized in a frenzy of invective couched in the language of biblical fundamentalism.
Parliament, steered by Cecil and Walsingham, openly petitioned Elizabeth to execute Mary. Behind the scenes, however, a battle royal was in progress. Elizabeth was amenable to a petition, but insisted on the Bond of Association as the basis of action against her cousin. She preferred her to be quietly smothered by a private citizen, someone who had subscribed to the bond, whereas Cecil wanted Elizabeth to sign a warrant to justify a public execution as a means to validate regicide. At stake was the future of divine-right monarchy in the British Isles. If Mary was to be executed by a private citizen who had signed the bond, he would act in a private capacity, whereas an official execution sanctioned by Elizabeth under the terms of the Act for the Queen’s Safety would justify regicide as a legal precedent and permanently cede to Parliament some measure of the ruler’s prerogative.
Elizabeth asked Cecil to make sure that the parliamentary petition referred to the Bond of Association. Cecil gave a dishonest answer. He said such a change of wording could not be made for lack of time. In reality, the wording that Elizabeth expected had been included in the first draft of the petition, but Cecil had personally deleted it.
The result was deadlock. When Elizabeth gave her answer to the petition for execution, she cloaked her meaning in mist. “If I should say I would not do what you request, it might peradventure be more than I thought; and to say I would do it might perhaps breed peril of that you labor to preserve.” She herself called this an “answer answerless.”
Cecil, determined to get his way, struck out on his own. On December 4, the guilty sentence against Mary was publicly proclaimed. Elizabeth agreed to this, but for her own reasons. When overruling Cecil the previous year, she had insisted on putting her own wording into the Act for the Queen’s Safety. According to this, when the verdict against a conspirator was proclaimed, then the guilty person, “by virtue of this act and Her Majesty’s direction in that behalf,” was to be hunted down and killed. By the final wording as Elizabeth had approved it, an execution warrant was unnecessary. Those who had signed the Bond of Association were already empowered to take the responsibility once she signaled her desire to them.
And this is how Elizabeth planned Mary’s end. The deadlock lasted for six weeks. It was broken by Cecil and Walsingham, who visited Châteauneuf at the French embassy in London. Again France refused to intervene in Mary’s defense: Catherine de Medici and her son Henry III by now regarded her as a dangerous embarrassment. She simply had to go.
Châteauneuf connived with Cecil in a shabby little conspiracy. They pretended that another plot to kill Elizabeth had been discovered. It was actually an old plot, known to Châteauneuf for over a year, that had never amounted to anything, but it served its purpose now. Cecil helped to foster a rumor that Spanish troops had landed in Wales, and ordered justices of the peace to instigate the hue and cry.
When Elizabeth was told to double her bodyguards, she momentarily caved in. On February 1, she sent for her secretary and asked him to bring the warrant for Mary’s execution. She called for pen and ink, then signed. She even made a joke. Walsingham was ill again at home. “Communicate the matter with him,” she said, “because the ‘grief’ therefore would grow near to kill him outright!”
The idea that Walsingham would die of grief at Mary’s death was darkly amusing. Except that Elizabeth did not jest in vain. She never intended the warrant to be used. Instead, she told her secretary to order Walsingham to write a letter in his own name to Paulet, asking him to do away with Mary without a warrant. Paulet was to act on his own initiative, just because he had been told it was a good idea. Elizabeth wanted Mary dead, but without taking any of the responsibility. Paulet had been among the first to sign the Bond of Association, and this letter from Walsingham was to serve as the “direction” referred to by the Act for the Queen’s Safety. And yet if Paulet acted on it, he would kill Mary as a private citizen, with all the risks that entailed.
Paulet was shocked. He had once proudly boasted that he would rather forgo the joys of heaven than disappoint Elizabeth in his duty.
When forced to live up to his claim, he ate his words. Robert Beale, who was later responsible for delivering the execution warrant to Fotheringhay on Cecil’s orders and without Elizabeth’s knowledge, tells the story:
When I was come to Fotheringhay, I understood from Sir A my as Paulet and Sir Drue Drury that they had been dealt with by a letter if they could have been induced to suffer her [Mary] to have been violently murdered by some that should have been appointed for that purpose. But they disliked that course as dishonorable and dangerous, and so did Robert Beale. And therefore [they] thought it convenient to have it done according to law, in such sort as they might justify their doings by law. One Wingfield (as it was thought) should have been appointed for this deed . . . Her Majesty would fain have had it so, alleging the Association . . . [Italics added.]
When Paulet had protested, “God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience,” Elizabeth had stormed at his “daintiness.” Cecil, meanwhile, pressed ahead on his own. When Elizabeth had signed the warrant even though it was not really to be used, he took over, arranging for it to be quickly sealed. He then convened a secret meeting of ten privy councilors in his private rooms, and within two days they had ordered the warrant to be dispatched to Fotheringhay. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent were chosen to direct Mary’s execution, their letters of appointment drafted by Cecil on his own initiative and signed on the authority of his fellow councilors. Lastly, the councilors agreed among themselves that they would not tell Elizabeth about the execution “until it were done.” A covering letter to the earls, to which Walsingham added his signature from his sickbed, justified this as “for [the queen’s] special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole realm.”
Such a rationale was needed, because Elizabeth had sent for her secretary again, telling him that she had dreamed of Mary’s death. She spoke elliptically, but made it clear that what she wanted was for Mary to be assassinated. That was her main aim, but by now she had skillfully contrived things so that she would win whatever happened. If Mary was killed under the Bond of Association, Elizabeth could disclaim responsibility. If Cecil covertly sealed the warrant and sent it to Fotheringhay behind her back, she could claim she had been the victim of a court conspiracy.
Her secretary kept quiet. He knew that the warrant was already on its way to Fotheringhay. Beale had been sent posthaste to find the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent at their houses, to show it to them and hand them their letters of appointment. Also riding north was the executioner, disguised as a “servingman,” his ax concealed in a trunk. Walsingham had personally selected him and promised to pay his fee and a bonus.
Cecil was utterly implacable; he had acted clandestinely. It was a truly historic moment. He was prepared to take no chances and chose to go ahead regardless. He had waited so long for this day. In this respect, he was far more than just the adversary of the ill-fated Queen of Scots. He really was her nemesis. And now that the time had arrived, not even the queen of England was going to stop him.