The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Dalgleish, who had ‘shown’ the investigators the casket under the bed, had been executed in early 1568 and could not be questioned – when surely the lords should have kept him alive as a witness, if he had truly been the possessor of the casket. French Paris or Nicholas Hubert, the servant of Bothwell who had then gone to work for the queen and carried her letters, had fled to Denmark after his mistress had been taken to Lochleven but the lords were chasing him down. When he was finally brought back and interrogated in the summer of 1569, he stoutly said that he did not carry Letters I and II to Bothwell at Mary’s instigation. He was promptly tortured and confessed. But the confession was so weak that when Cecil read it, he wrote instantly to say that any execution should be delayed and the man sent for interview in England. Elizabeth wished him interrogated about the role of other lords in the conspiracy and how much Moray had known. But Paris was hanged without trial almost immediately after the confession had been wrung out of him. On the scaffold, he shouted that he had never delivered the letters.

  What Mary’s accusers needed was a letter from her directing Bothwell to kill Darnley. But instead, there was a very vague unsigned love poem that could have been to anyone, and undated copies of letters that were inconclusive. As we have seen, the dates were entirely wrong on Letter I, and Letter II has incorrect timing as well – as well as no mention of anybody else being involved.

  Mary had been investigated on perhaps the flimsiest evidence conceivable. But the judges believed they had done their job.

  Then Elizabeth had another change of heart. The whole pantomime of judges looking at letters when Mary was denied them, and which her commissioners could not defend, smacked of unfairness, and the English queen had come to suspect that the casket letters were unreliable. She was not only concerned with upholding the rule of law, but she also worried that if a trumped-up court and accusations based on false letters took place under her watch then she would be damned in the eyes of the world. Elizabeth suspended the tribunal, added further dignitaries to the group of judges to balance out the bias and decreed she would supervise proceedings herself. Cecil took the minutes and noted that when the casket letters were compared to those written by Mary to Elizabeth, ‘no difference was found’.10

  This was a lie. Not only were they looking at copies, but Mary, when writing to Elizabeth, as the archives show, would write in her most perfect script – as people tended to do when writing on official business. She no doubt copied the letter out more than once to ensure a good impression. Letter II declared that it was ‘scribbled’ and that the writing was ‘evil’. Moreover, Mary’s handwriting, when examined in the archives, was not particularly distinctive. It was actually rather round and almost schoolgirlish, unlike Elizabeth’s charismatic hand. As she herself had said before, it was easy to forge. Not all the nobles were convinced. The Spanish ambassador heard that some had dissented and found Cecil too aggressive in his attitudes towards the Scots queen.

  Mary’s commissioners were despairing when they heard that the inquiry had proceeded without them. Elizabeth agreed to meet them and said that Mary could send someone to answer on her behalf or that a deputation would be sent to question her (but they would probably not bring copies of the letters). Herries and Leslie advised Mary to compromise. But she was infuriated and she wrote to Elizabeth that she would not answer accusations based on evidence she had not been shown. She requested again that her commissioners should receive copies of all the documents that were ranged against her and should also be allowed to see the originals. Mary made her points clear: Moray and the others had blamed her for the murder when ‘they themselves are authors, inventors, doers and executors’, and any writings that might exist were ‘false and feigned’. She made a proud declaration that she was not ‘equal to her rebels’ and ‘neither will I submit myself to be weighted in equal balance with them’.11 Finally, she had openly accused her half-brother of Darnley’s murder.

  Before Elizabeth could receive the letter, she wrote again to Mary that she had been ‘very sorry of long time for your mishaps’ and was even sorrier now ‘in beholding such things as are produced to prove yourself cause of all the same’. But, she said, she would wait for Mary to provide her defence – ‘we are moved to stay our judgement before we may hear of your direct answer thereunto’. Elizabeth told her that she should reply quickly, ‘as earnestly as we may, require and charge you not to forbear answering’.12 The inquiry could hardly find Mary guilty of the charges if she had not given her response. To reach a conclusion and a verdict, it was necessary that Mary should speak – and she refused to do so unless she saw the letters.

  Herries and Leslie also tried to offer a compromise to Moray but he would only consider that Mary might assent to her abdication and live in England. They then told Elizabeth that they were acting on Mary’s behalf and were now accusing Moray and the other lords of Darnley’s murder. They asked again to see the letters that had been given as proof of Mary’s guilt. Elizabeth received their requests but still the copies were not forthcoming. Then in mid-January, Herries and Leslie were told that Elizabeth would allow Mary to see the letters, but only if she agreed to submit to a trial, after which she would be pronounced innocent or guilty.13 It was the most enormous travesty of justice – but to whom could Mary complain? The French ambassador attempted to get the letters for her.14 Elizabeth told him that she would show them to him but then promptly did not.

  Elizabeth was reluctant to openly pass judgement on a queen. And finding Mary innocent was anathema to Cecil, who continued to believe she aimed to seize the English throne. Elizabeth adjourned the inquiry, swearing all the judges to secrecy over the letters. She agreed to recognise Moray as regent, although she did not trust him. It was a hopeless stalemate.

  Mary was begging again to see her, declaring Elizabeth her ‘nearest kinswoman and perfect friend’, expressed her bitter disappointment that her cousin was not the ‘queen restorer’ she had hoped and blamed Cecil for everything. Although Elizabeth had suspended the inquiry, the stench of suspicion still hung around Mary, and if Elizabeth would not meet her, it was a signal to the rest of the world. Mary saw that no hope lay with her cousin and instead turned to Philip of Spain, begging him to take pity on her because she was ‘deprived of my liberty and closely guarded’.15 She wished that he would push for her release. The new Spanish ambassador went swiftly to his French counter-part and declared Cecil the greatest enemy to Catholicism possible and that they should work together to ‘make him lose his office’.

  On 12 January 1569, Moray was formally allowed to return to Scotland, even though Mary had accused him of murder. He set off with a large loan from England and the crown. As both Elizabeth and Cecil knew, Moray was entirely under their control.16 If he rebelled, threatened or attempted a foreign alliance, they could remind him of the accusation of regicide to bring him back into line and even expose the letters as full forgeries.

  On 20 January, Elizabeth wrote to Mary without the usual expressions of emotion, sympathy or desire to see her cleared. She told her: ‘Your case is not so clear but that much remains to be explained.’ This state of ambiguity and confusion was exactly what Elizabeth wished to continue. Mary was to remain, as it were, in suspended animation.

  At the end of January, Mary was moved to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, ensconced in the landlocked Midlands, far from Scotland and the sea. She had begged not to be moved from Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, declaring she would have to be ‘bound hand and foot’17 to be shifted. But she had no choice. After an arduous journey, she arrived on 3 February to a solemn and miserable place. It was derelict, admitted every draught, was damp and situated on a marsh that was very unhealthy. Although her furniture followed her there, no money had been provided to make her home habitable. Mary finally realised she was a prisoner. As she wrote in her Book of Hours, pitifully, ‘Qui jamais davantage eust contraire le sort, Si la vie m’est moins utile que la mort’ (‘Who has ever been dealt with by a more hostile fate, i
f my life is less useful to me than death’).18

  Then she was handed over to her new captor, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who had recently become the fourth husband to the formidable Bess of Hardwick. Between them, they had a dazzling array of properties including Sheffield Castle and Chatsworth House, and Tutbury was the least appealing. Elizabeth had sent beds and furniture to make it more comfortable, but it was hardly fit for a queen, and Mary, exhausted after a damp and cold nine-day journey, collapsed into bed with rheumatism and fever. Talbot was sympathetic to Mary and her position, and, like many nobles, was resentful of Cecil and his power. He had no desire for a sickly queen on his hands and Tutbury was not suitable for Mary’s ever-growing entourage, so he wrote to Elizabeth requesting permission to move her to another of his homes.

  Notwithstanding her illness and imprisonment, the insults to Mary didn’t stop. She was visited by Nicholas White, one of Cecil’s men, who, despite a pleasant conversation about art, informed her that she had been responsible for the death of Francis Knollys’ wife, Catherine – favourite and chief Lady of the Bedchamber to Elizabeth, daughter of Mary Boleyn – who had died in mid-January, just before Mary was moved, her suffering increased because her husband was away. It was of course unfair – Cecil could have relieved Knollys of the job of jailer so he could have been with his wife. For White, Mary was still a serpent. Despite being reduced, heartbroken, ignored by her relations overseas, deprived of money and associates, imprisoned and watched on all sides, she was to him a terrible threat, a seductive beauty who could send men to their doom. As he warned, she had an ‘alluring grace, a pretty Scots accent, and a searching wit, clouded with mildness. Fame might move some to relieve her, and glory joined with gain might stir others to adventure much for her sake.’19

  Elizabeth wrote a letter to Sir Ralph Sadler, one of the three ­grandees who had headed the inquiry, that she intended to be read by Mary. Elizabeth employed the romantic language that Mary had used – against her. She wrote that she had vowed not ‘to write to her with my own hand until I have received better satisfaction from her to create my contentment than I have received so far’. As she told Sadler, ‘you may let her understand that I wish she had been as careful in the past to have avoided the cause and ground by her given of the just jealousy that I have conceived, since she now appears to dislike the effects that the same has bred towards her’.9 It must have been painful for Mary to read, for Elizabeth does not spare her words. The Queen of Scots knew ‘how great contentment and liking we had for a period of her friendship, which I then esteemed as a singular and extraordinary blessing of God to have one so nearly tied to us with blood and kin’. The ‘just jealousy’ was not so much Mary’s claim to the English throne but the whole avalanche of activities around Darnley’s death. Elizabeth claimed she was sad to see the break in the amity, but, as she put it, it was not her fault. ‘So I am now much grieved to behold the alteration and interruption in the matter, taking no pleasure to look back on the causes that have bred such unpleasant acts which I wish that either they never had been or at the least we could never remember, and that she were as innocent of them as she works so hard to convince both me and the world that she is.’20

  Elizabeth was refusing even to write to Mary unless she submitted to the English judges. And to Mary, Elizabeth’s sentiments in this letter were barely distinct from those of the lords. They had changed from saying they would rescue her to declaring she was unfit for the throne because she had been part of the murder plot. Now Elizabeth was declaring that Mary was at fault for what had occurred, and consequently she could not treat her as kindly as she wished. When Elizabeth wrote that she wished Mary ‘were as innocent of them as she works so hard to convince both me and the world she is’, she questioned Mary’s innocence. This was something of a new turn. Did Elizabeth truly believe Mary had played a part in the conspiracy? Was she simply trying to attack and reduce her? Or did she dread foreign criticism and was therefore trying to make herself seem less to blame by throwing guilt on Mary?

  Typical of Elizabeth, the letter did not choose either way. It cast doubt on Mary’s innocence and yet suggested how much Elizabeth wished her to be innocent. But the import was clear to Mary – her situation could not be worse.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘Unnatural Sister’

  Keeping Mary in the state of royal grace that a queen required was dazzlingly expensive and Elizabeth was reluctant to pay the bills. Talbot was begging Elizabeth for money. His allowance for the Scottish queen was £52 a week – a pitiful sum when her servants often numbered fifty, she had ten horses in her stable along with grooms in livery, and the household consumed an eye-popping amount of food. Poor Talbot complained that the queen’s gentlemen ate eight courses at every meal and he could barely afford it. But Mary sailed on regardless, expecting money to appear, and Elizabeth ignored Talbot’s begging letters. As with so many government payments in the sixteenth century, the sums Talbot was promised took months to turn up. He paid for Mary out of his own pocket. He possessed the most marvellous exotic captive in the whole of England, a woman who thousands were desperate to see and he tended to promise overexcited Midlands visitors that they might glimpse her or even meet her if they came to his home. The great local families came to visit for musical entertainments and dinners and Mary was allowed to attend.

  Elizabeth agreed to have Mary moved, first to Wingfield House, then to Chatsworth, and finally to Sheffield Castle, where she lived in great state, her apartments hung with tapestries and lit with chandeliers, thick carpets on the floor and the chairs upholstered in gold and crimson. Mary Seton dressed her hair to dazzling effect and Mary’s cosmetics bill would have sunk a lesser host. She sent to Paris for the latest designs and ‘cloth of gold and silver, and of silks, the handsomest and the rarest that are worn at court’ and ‘crowns of gold and silver, such as were formerly made for me’.1 Such orders of splendour were hardly calculated to win over Elizabeth. Moreover, Mary sometimes used these consignments as ways of sending letters back and forth to Paris, secretly tucked into the folds of dresses or in between the boxes.

  For Mary, maintaining a royal lifestyle was the way in which she helped persuade the world that she was a queen who deserved to keep her throne. She dined off silver dishes and expected two courses at meals, both with a selection of sixteen dishes from which she would choose, washed down with crystal glasses of wine, along with plentiful bread, salad and fruit. A typical menu might be soup, with meats such as veal, chicken, beef, mutton, duck and rabbit, followed by substantial dishes of pheasant, lamb, quails and a baked tart. Her ladies were allowed nine dishes per course, the secretaries six or seven, so there was a lot of wasted food. Mary lived in such grandeur that her court was second only to Elizabeth’s. Bess of Hardwick and Mary struck up a friendship in the early days and sat and worked on their embroidery together, accompanied by Mary Seton. The captive queen had companions, riches and grandeur.

  And yet she was still not at liberty, watched by armed guards who marched under her windows and followed her closely when she rode out or went hunting. Talbot promised Cecil that Mary was very restricted, telling her he refused her and her company any exercise out of the gates, ‘for fear of many dangers needless to be remembered to you. I do suffer her to walk upon the leads [i.e. the roof] here in open air, in my large dining chamber and also in this courtyard, as long as both I myself or my wife be always in her company, for avoiding all others talk either to herself or any of hers. And sure watch is kept within and without the walls, both night and day.’2 Mary was not even allowed to talk to people whom Talbot had not approved. As Talbot’s son gleefully put it, ‘good numbers of men, continually armed, watched her day and night, and both under her windows, over her chamber, and of every side of her, so that unless she could transform herself to a flea or a mouse, it was impossible that she should escape’.3 The trapped flea was forbidden to write to her son and she was heartbroken to think he was being brought up by those
who hated her and who she feared were turning him against her. She kept his miniature always beside her. She still held tight to her much-loved Book of Hours, from her days in France, and began to write in it sad little poems.

  Apart from the unhappy letters and demands for money from Talbot, Elizabeth could just about pretend that Mary didn’t exist. And as the months went by and Moray and Scotland were quiet and caused Elizabeth no problems, the queen felt less enthusiasm for restoring Mary to her throne. Though Elizabeth met Leslie, Mary’s commissioner, and told him she ‘fully intended to bring this about, without any mention of the murder of her husband’4 – she was just fobbing Leslie off. As Cecil himself had written in a private memo, the best thing for England was if the Scots queen lost her throne and the state continued as it was. At about this time, the brilliant Sir Francis Walsingham gained the position of spymaster, working with Cecil to head off threats to Elizabeth. Walsingham’s arrival meant the end of cack-handed, easily unmasked plots like Rokesby’s. Under him, spying and surveillance became a labyrinthine, sophisticated business, a weaving of webs with Mary as the chief fly.

  Mary was still hopeful of being rescued. Nothing had been proven against her, so why should she not be freed? But Philip of Spain did nothing for her and Catherine de’ Medici was equally reluctant and did not answer Mary’s letters. Mary wrote to everyone she could think of, scribbling missives to the Cardinal of Lorraine, her aunt, the Duchess of Nemours and her cousins.5 Although the duchess offered kind words, there was little she could do, and the cardinal rarely answered. When so many of Mary’s problems had come from the fact that the Guises had pushed her to stake her claim to the English throne, it was even more pitiful that they appeared to care little for her now she was no longer of use. Their ascendancy was waning too, and if Catherine de’ Medici had any favour to give, they wished it for themselves, not for far-away Mary in her sumptuous isolation. To her annoyance, there was no movement on the dissolution of her marriage with Bothwell. Although she had promised her heart to Norfolk, she was still married to the man she hated.