Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  In the meantime the revelations which Walsingham was able to make to Elizabeth concerning the abominable perfidy of her good friend and sister Mary were eminently satisfactory from his own point of view. Elizabeth was plunged into a panic of acute physical fear, unaware how much of the assassination plot had in fact been elaborated by Walsingham’s own agents. The English queen’s letter to Paulet on the subject of the discovery of the Babington plot was ecstatic with relief: ‘Amyas, my most faithful and careful servant,’ she wrote, ‘God reward thee treble fold in three double for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.’ Mary was now ‘your wicked murderess’ and any future fate, however rigorous, no more than ‘her vile deserts’.39 It was understandable that Elizabeth should feel a mixture of keen fear at the danger to her personal safety and righteous horror at Mary’s ingratitude: the confessions of the Babington conspirators, arrested and examined in turn, did nothing to reassure her. In mid-September they were tried and condemned, having pleaded guilty to the indictment of wanting to kill the queen; Mary Stuart’s name was not introduced at any point into the trial, however, lest the assassination of Elizabeth would be further encouraged. The conspirators were then executed in two batches.

  The manner of their ending was extremely savage, according to the general principle of the Elizabethan government that fierce penalties performed in public encouraged the people to believe the natural corollary that fierce crimes had been committed in private. As Camden put it: ‘They were all cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered.’ Babington murmured ‘Parce mihi, domine Jesu’; Chidiock Tichborne, whose poem written in the Tower is one of the most moving of all Elizabethan apologia, made a noble final speech, which aroused the pity of the spectators. Savage actually broke the rope and fell before being disembowelled. Those privy councillors present felt impelled to point out to the queen that such blood-thirsty vengeance would do more harm than good. The next day Salisbury, Dunn, Jones, Charnock, Travers, Gate and Bellamy were dragged to the scaffold on hurdles as before, but were only cut down when they were actually dead. This act of mercy was attributed officially to Queen Elizabeth – although she was not at this point in a particularly merciful mood.

  The next desiderata to be secured by Walsingham and Cecil, to complete their case against the queen of Scots, were the revelations of her secretaries, Nau and Curle. The all-important point was that they should testify to the authenticity of Mary’s ‘gallows’ letter to Babington. At first the unhappy secretaries denied everything: Nau said afterwards that Walsingham shook his fist in his face, and had to be calmed down by Cecil. But the situation was a critical one, and neither of them was a man of steel. They were alone, helpless, and terrified out of their wits; they were quite cut off from any possible consultation with their mistress, and to Nau England was a dangerous foreign country. Not only that, but their antagonists were apparently able to produce in front of them the texts of all the secret letters they had written, in a way which must have seemed like some terrible witchcraft. As Curie himself said in his subsequent apologia:40 ‘They did show me the Majesty’s letters to my lord Paget, Mr Charles Paget, Sir Frances Englefield and the Spanish Ambassador, all penned in my own hand which I could not deny. … Moreover they showed me the two very letters written by me in cipher and received by Babington. … Upon which so manifest and unrefusable evidence I could not deny’. In fact the documents which Nau and Curle were shown, which they finally attested, were not ‘the two very letters’ as Curle believed, since Babington had destroyed these. They were copies, in which the master-forger Phelippes probably had a hand, but in view of the exact reconstruction of the text, and the fact that Babington himself had by now vouched for the letters, it is easy to understand how the wretched secretaries fell victim to the deception. As for Mary’s long detailed letter to Babington on 17th July, in which she ran through his plans at length, Nau and Curle were only asked to attest to the body of the letter itself; the forged postscript, added by Walsingham, in which he asked for the names of the six men destined to act as assassins, was deliberately left off the reconstructed letters. Babington specifically mentioned this postscript in his first confession; but when he was shown the reconstructed letter, he carelessly or compliantly passed it, without pointing out its absence. Had he insisted on its introduction, Nau and Curle would certainly have noticed such an obvious interpolation. Nor was the critical passage at the end of Babington’s first confession, alluding to the postscript, ever read out later in court – so that the forgery should not be uncovered.41

  Mary afterwards both believed and said publicly that she had been betrayed by Nau. Cecil also took a cynical view of the secretaries’ moral stamina, when he wrote to Hatton on 4th September: ‘Nau and Curle will yield somewhat to confirm their Mistress’ crimes. But if they were persuaded that they themselves might escape, and the blow fall upon their Mistress betwixt her head and shoulders, surely we should have the whole from them.’42 But in retrospect, it is difficult to blame the secretaries too harshly for attesting a text whose validity they believed they could hardly in honesty refute. In the critical and terrifying atmosphere of the interrogation, under circumstances of fear and hopelessness, the impossibility of saving their mistress in face of such evidence jostled with their very human fears for their own safety. Nau’s betrayal of his mistress at the end does not necessarily mean that he was engaged in a long-term policy of villainy. It was true that Nau had fallen out with Mary over his use of the secret pipeline to forward his matrimonial plans with Bess Pierrepoint. According to his enemies, Nau was bribed with £7000 to betray Mary; he was certainly housed with Walsingham in London, and later sent back to his native France in a boat of his own after a few months, whereas the unfortunate Curle remained in close imprisonment for a year.43 Such signs of English favour, while they may point to the fact that Nau exposed the truth about Mary’s intrigues to save his own skin, does not prove any further degree of treachery. Paulet always hated Nau in the old days at Tutbury and Chartley, and wished that he could get rid of him, and Paulet’s dislike was an excellent indication of Nau’s loyalty towards Mary. Nau also managed to straighten out Mary’s finances to an admirable extent during the period in which he served her. Nau’s surrender should be equated with the outburst of Leslie in the Tower over the Norfolk conspiracy; they were both the unfortunate but explicable lapses of servants who were enmeshed in webs which were altogether too strong for men of their calibre. In the event, the betrayal of Nau and Curle can hardly be said to have much historical significance; if they had persisted in their denials, it is not likely that Walsingham would have allowed such petty obstacles to stand in his way. He would have found other ways of getting the letters vouched for.*

  By now, with the Babington conspirators dead or dying, Nau and Curle under lock and key and the Act of Association, by which she was already guilty, hanging over her head, there was little left for Mary to hope for. But there was one terrible thing left for her to dread: the secret death, the slow drip of poison, the assassin’s knife, all the fates by which she would be deprived of the public martyrdom by which she now hoped to proclaim the Catholic faith at her death. During her fortnight at Tixall she seems to have thought coolly and courageously towards this end: from now on, she deliberately played every scene with this climax in view. Her hope was to triumph at the moment of her death; her fear was to be extinguished meaninglessly without an opportunity of bearing witness to the truths in which she believed. In September, while describing how wretchedly she was treated, she managed to write to this effect to her cousin the duke of Guise: ‘For myself, I am resolute to die for my religion.… With God’s help, I shall die in the Catholic faith and to maintain it constantly … without doing dishonour to the race of Lorraine, who are accustomed to die for the sustenance of the faith.’44 Mary was by now so convinced that death was at hand that she begged him to look after her poor servants, and gave the most detailed instructions for the disposal of her b
ody, which she wished to have buried at Rheims, with that of her mother. Her hand was now so stricken with pain that she could hardly hold the pen to write the letter, the terror of the unknown death haunted her, and yet Mary ended proudly: ‘My heart does not fail me. … Adieu, mon bon cousin.’ It was in this heroic frame of mind that Queen Mary allowed herself to be taken without protest out of Chartley on 21st September and set on her last journey towards Fotheringhay. It was Mary’s triumph that by her deliberate behaviour in the last months of her existence, she managed to convert a life story which had hitherto shown all the elements of a Greek tragedy – disaster leading ineluctably to disaster – into something which ended instead in the classic Christian manner of martyrdom and triumph through death. This transfiguration in the last months of her life, which has the effect of altering the whole balance of her story, was no fortunate accident. The design was hers.

  * 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 million 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 time 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.

  † 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.

  * 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.

  * 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.

  * 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.

  * Paulet professed himself to be scandalized by the procedure, but it was well within the regulations of the Catholic Church.

  * 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Trial

  ‘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.’

  Mary Queen of Scots to Sir Amyas Paulet, October 1586

  On 21st 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!*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, 21st Septembris, 1586 usque Burton Fortheringhay.* 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 25th 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 Domesday 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 Maud de Senlis, 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 tower 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 1st 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 grownup 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 8th 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 meaningfully to Shrewsbury: ‘I would advise you not to be absent.’