The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Mary again requested that she be able to speak in front of Parliament and be allowed a private conversation with Elizabeth. She told the lords that she gave them her pardon and turned to give a few words to Walsingham, which did not please him. She faced the assembled lords once more and said that ‘I place my cause in the hands of God.’ She then departed the room, offering the table of lawyers her pardon as she passed.

  Elizabeth had requested that the court did not pronounce before she had reviewed the evidence and Cecil suspended the commission and planned to reconvene more privately, without Mary – the fewer lords present, the less likely anyone would be to be won over by her. Mary, although sick and lame, was still a queen and an orator to rival her cousin. As Paulet complained, Mary had conjured ‘long and artificial speeches’11 in an attempt to throw blame onto the queen and council. She had succeeded in raising doubt in the minds of those around her.

  Mary’s speeches and conduct at the trial had been incisive and skilled and she was justly proud of herself. She had done all she could – and she was hopeful she would be invited to speak to Parliament. As Bourgoing recalled, ‘I had not seen her so joyous, nor so constantly at her ease for the last seven years.’12

  The commissioners attended the Star Chamber in Westminster on 25 October. Much of the legitimacy now depended on the secretaries, Nau and Curle, who had written the offending letter, and they were brought out in person and questioned at length. All of the nobles, save one, found Mary guilty of ‘compassing and imagining since June 1st matters tending to the death and destruction of the Queen of England’.13 Only Lord Zouche was brave enough to raise objections. Mary had not been allowed to examine the evidence against her or give a full defence against it or use her counsellors to cross-examine those who accused her or implicated her. Even Anne Boleyn, accused of adultery, had been allowed to defend herself. Ultimately, Cecil, the council and Elizabeth had been cowardly; trying Mary and examining her witnesses when she could not be there. It was a poor reflection on the English courts. And yet, unlike the previous show trial of the casket letters, Mary was guilty.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘We Princes Are Set upon Stages’

  Parliament on 29 October was passionate in its accusations against Mary. All the anti-Catholic propaganda was hauled out, along with accusations of the murder of Bothwell and scandalous adultery. But the biggest fight was between Elizabeth and Cecil. Cecil wanted Mary publicly executed, to display Elizabeth’s power, discourage any further Babington-type plotters and to prevent a Spanish invasion, once and for all. Elizabeth pushed back. For her, to execute Mary as an action of Parliament was to fatally undermine the value of monarchy. It would implicitly make it possible, due to precedent, for Parliament to kill another monarch. A monarch should be above Parliament, above their sentences, and Parliament should never be allowed to commit regicide. If a king or queen had a divine right to rule – which Elizabeth strongly believed – then they could be brought to death only by God. Moreover, she was worried that if Mary were officially executed under the queen’s name, then James might invade, with the help of Spain, to take revenge. The Catholic nobility in England were even more restive, after the violent deaths of young men so many of them had known, and Philip of Spain was watching England closely.1

  There was also the problem that Mary had denied every word with strength and courage. Ideally, the court would have extracted a full confession that could be used as fit evidence against her. The Elizabethan court was enthusiastic in threatening torture to those accused, but although Mary had suffered every other possible threat and privation in England, to suggest torturing a queen was simply impossible. But Mary had not broken under the sustained attacks at Fotheringhay and there was little else they could do. The one person Mary might have been induced to give a confession to was Elizabeth herself – but the queen was adamant that she would not meet her ‘dear cousin’. Still, on the order of Walsingham, Paulet did his best to make Mary’s life a misery, interrupting her prayers, criticising her and refusing supplies. When Mary asked about a few lords in whom she had detected sympathy, Paulet refused to give details. ‘Not one of them was favourable to your cause’, he snapped and continued by declaring how ‘everyone’ (not that he had any idea) was surprised at how calm she was: ‘No living person has ever been accused of crimes as frightful and odious as yours.’ Paulet was hoping for hysteria, from which he might be able to extract an admission of guilt, but Mary was too strong to bend under his verbal assaults. ‘I see no change in her, from her former quietness and serenity’, he complained. He begged Walsingham to release him from his miserable task of attacking Mary for ‘I do not see that any good can come of it.’2

  In Scotland, the people were shocked to see Elizabeth and Cecil putting their queen on trial and were horrified that the English queen might execute Mary. James was reluctant to intervene and knew that Elizabeth expected his support. But his advisors warned him that he faced insurrection if he did not attempt to defend his mother. James complained to Elizabeth that he would be in danger if ‘this disaster being perfected since before God I already scarce dare go abroad, for crying out of the whole people’.3 A confession might have stayed the people’s passion but Mary was refusing to relent. James issued threats and expressed panic to England but he did not perform the one act he had in his power to save his mother: threaten to break the alliance with Elizabeth. If he had switched and made a union with France, which had protested the proposed execution, it would have been deeply worrying to Elizabeth. But James did little, complained and rumbled, nothing more.

  Parliament was baying for Mary’s blood. Elizabeth had two refuges in times of great political import: ambiguity and refusal to decide. She deployed these cleverly in a superb speech in Parliament in which she reminded her troublesome nobles that they might demand the execution of the queen, but it was Elizabeth who would have to enact the death – and then be held responsible for it by the world. As she put it so brilliantly, ‘we princes are sent as it were upon stages, in the sight and view of all the world’. Parliament had won in its desire to put Mary on trial, but the queen was fighting back. She later asked if there could not be a way in which Mary was left to live.

  But Parliament was moving without Elizabeth’s knowledge. Lord Buckhurst and Beale, the clerk of the council, came to Mary on 19 November and told her that she and Elizabeth could not live in the same country. They proposed she repent, and suggested the Dean of Peterborough might receive her words. If they had hoped for a confession, they would have been better offering her a Catholic clergyman clandestinely. Mary refused to speak to the Dean and presented herself as a martyr, ‘the necessary instrument for the re-establishment of religion in this island’. Paulet spitefully demanded her servants tear down her cloth of state, which she was still bravely keeping up, with awful words: ‘You are now only a dead woman, without the dignity or honours of a queen.’4 Her servants stood back and Paulet’s men removed it, also demanding the billiard table, for Mary surely had no time for amusing herself. Even he felt he had gone too far and offered next morning to ask the council if the cloth might be put back. Mary shook her head. She had put her crucifix in its place.

  Elizabeth had given up hoping that Mary might die of natural causes and she had come to accept that Mary must be put to death. But her desire was that it would be done by one of the individuals who had signed the Bond for the Queen’s Safety. She wanted Mary killed privately so it could not rebound on her and so that regicide did not become part of parliamentary precedent. Cecil said there wasn’t time to add an indication of the importance of a private act of killing to the Act for the Queen’s Safety (there was).5 And it was not easy to find an individual who would agree to slaughtering Mary. English nobles were happy to sit in kangaroo courts and engage in plots and subterfuge. But all-out murder, whether they twisted the knife or hired an assassin, was shocking and it had something in it of the death of Darnley. Wisely, they refused – for if they were to kill Mary,
then the responsibility would be theirs and Philip of Spain might hunt them down or Elizabeth herself might turn against them. Murder, for an English aristocrat, was simply too much. The state had put the court into motion and the state must enact its findings.

  Mary, meanwhile, was still at Fotheringhay and she was better than she had been in some time. She was pleased by her spirited defence at the court and discussed it over and over again. It seemed to her as if she had won. Elizabeth would not dare execute her on such privately reviewed, shaky evidence. Paulet reported that she was contented, ‘taking pleasure in trifling toys and in the whole course of her speech free from grief of mind’.6 Her rooms at Fotheringhay were not uncomfortable and – she thought – she had escaped condemnation. Always, she invested great hope in the notion that her sister would rescue her, tempted by feminine sympathy, two women in a man’s world. She must have believed that if she behaved herself from now on, she would be safe. She occupied herself with embroidery, prayer and hoping for escape. But Fotheringhay was now fortified by seventy soldiers and fifty bowmen, just in case a gallant supporter considered raising an army for her.

  Finally, on 4 December, Mary was publicly declared guilty of treason against Elizabeth. But still, there was no execution. Elizabeth remained resistant and worried about inviting foreign invasion. Cecil and Walsingham began to stir up talk of an attack by Philip of Spain, declaring that another assassination plot had been discovered and that Spanish forces were nearing Wales. The ‘Stafford Plot’ was revealed, a conspiracy of a young gentleman, William Stafford, whose mother was Mistress of the Robes to Elizabeth. He planned to put barrels of gunpowder in his mother’s room, which was under Elizabeth’s, so that ‘the queen could be blown up’. Stafford was put in the tower for a year and half but never tried and executed – for most likely he had been in the pay of Walsingham and the wild claims had all been set up in order to encourage Elizabeth to finally sign for Mary’s death. The English queen was mired in emotion and indecision. She confessed to the French ambassador that she had never wept so much, not even for the deaths of her father, brother or sister.

  In mid-December, Mary asked her jailers to give a letter to Elizabeth. In 1561, Mary had written to Elizabeth about not having safe passage, declaring if she ‘be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me’. She had travelled regardless and Elizabeth had relented and given her a passport. All her life, Mary had talked about death and threatened to die as a strategy. Here, she did it when the stakes were highest. She raised the possibility of the practical measures for her death – in the hope that Elizabeth would be so horrified that she would take steps to help her.

  Mary begged, if she were killed, for Elizabeth to allow her servants to transport her body to France, not Scotland, for she wished for a proper Catholic burial. She expressed her fear of a secret killing by those around her and pleaded to be allowed to send a final letter to James, with a jewel as a present. She wiped the sheets of paper on her face to show they were not poisoned and sealed the whole thing up with white silk. Although she had never met Elizabeth, her final sentence was perfectly judged to affect the queen. ‘Do not accuse me of presumption if, on the eve of leaving this world and preparing myself for a better one, I remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge.’ She signed off, ‘your sister and cousin, wrongfully accused’.7

  How could Elizabeth’s heart not be swayed? Paulet was so afraid that the letter would push the queen to mercy that he delayed sending it. He suggested to the secretary of the council that Mary was executed forthwith and so the letter would arrive when it was too late for Elizabeth to relent. It was sent, but if Elizabeth received it, she did not reply. Mary wrote again after a miserable Christmas asking for Elizabeth to give her clarity and talked of confiding her secrets. It was a clever stroke, the best possible attempt at encouraging Elizabeth to come to visit her – the promise of a possible confession or secrets that would be most useful to know. But this time Paulet did refuse to send the letter, on the basis that he had no orders to do so. He was desperate for Mary to be executed and to be set free of his role as jailer. In late January 1587, he informed Mary that she must lose the attendance of her chaplain and Melville as her steward – she would be allowed only Bourgoing, as her doctor, from her senior attendants. There was no direction from Cecil, and Paulet had given up attempting to extract a confession. He simply hated Mary, resented her as his ball and chain and wanted her to suffer.

  Elizabeth continued to fret about the horror of executing her cousin and the vengeance that might be wreaked by Catholic Europe. In late December, she had asked for the execution warrant to be drawn up for her to sign. But she did not touch it.

  Further rumours spread of invasion and uprising in January, and the reports were coloured in by Walsingham and Cecil before they gave them to Elizabeth. As Walsingham put it, ‘False bruits were spread abroad that the Queen of Scots was broken out of prison, that the City of London was fired, that many thousand Spaniards were landed in Wales . . . The stir and confusion was great; such as I think happened not in England these hundred years past.’8

  It was almost beyond belief that Mary could escape her dank, heavily guarded castle. But still they feared her. Out of the two major plots in which she was involved, the Babington plot was definitely engineered by Walsingham and it was very likely that the Ridolfi one bore the marks of his hand too. She was, as Talbot’s son had said, as trapped and powerless as a flea. But it was all too easy for ministers to blame the violence and unrest on Mary and believe that the only way to free the country of threat was to execute her. With the full weight of her council, ministers and many of her people ranged in support of the execution, it is astonishing that Elizabeth held out for so long.

  The queen called for the execution warrant. William Davison, secretary of the council, gave it to her on 1 February along with a pile of other papers that required signature, to soften the blow. Elizabeth signed it at Greenwich, asking Davison if he was relieved to finally see her signature. She said that the execution must not be public. To see it now, in the Lambeth Palace archives where a copy is kept, is astonishing. The document so long discussed, weighed over, agonised over, is little more than a few paragraphs. The first word is ‘Elizabeth’, making it clear that no matter what Parliament decreed, only she could order the execution.

  The warrant was written in the form of a letter to the earls of Shrewsbury, Derby, Cumberland, Kent and Pembroke. Mary was to be executed because she was a ‘continuall danger’ – to the realm, the church and Elizabeth. As the warrant put it:

  All the Estates in the last Parliament assembled did not onlie deliberatlie with greate advice allowe and approve the same sentences as just and honourable, but did also with all humbleness and trustiness possible at sundrie times require, sollicite and press us to proceed to the publishing of the same and thereupon to direct such further execution against her person as they did adjudge her to have dulie deserved adding thereto that the forbearing thereof was and would be dailie a certaine and undoubted danger not onlie to our own life but to themselves, their posterities and the public state of this realme, as well for the cause of the gospel and the true religion of Christ, as for the peace of the whole realme.9

  The warrant noted that there was ‘some delaye of time’ until the sentence was published and that ‘we have hitherto forborne to give direction for the further satisfaction of the foresaid most earnest requeste made by the said Estates of our Parliament’. Elizabeth was only doing so now due to the begging of her people,

  all sortes of our lovinge subjects both of our nobilitie and Counsel and also of the wisest gravest and best devoted of all other our subjects of inferior degrees, how greatlie and deeplie from the bottoms of their hartes they are grieved, afflicted with dailie and hourlie fear of our life and thereby consequentlie with a dreadful doubt and expectation of the ruine of this present godlie and happy estate of this realme if we shall forbeare the furt
her final execution as it is desired and neglect their general and continuall requestes prayers counsels and advice. And thereupon contrarie to our natural disposition in such a Case being overcome with the evident weight of their counsels and the dailie continuance of their intercessions.10

  Elizabeth repeated herself. She did not wish to do it. Her ‘natural disposition’ was to refrain. But her Parliament and all her people were constantly begging her to carry out the act. It was a letter both to her people – those who, like Cecil, believed that killing the Queen of Scots would put an end to England’s problems and insecurities – and also to the world: her excuse was she could not help what she did.

  Yet still, she did not wish her country to execute a queen. She begged for Mary to be quietly assassinated behind closed doors and a request was sent to Paulet. He replied swiftly from Fotheringhay on 2 February that he would never do such a thing and he even went so far as to chide Elizabeth for even asking. As he wrote:

  I am so unhappy to have lived to see this unhappy day, in the which I am required, by direction from my most gracious Sovereign, to do an act which God and the law forbiddeth . . . God forbid that I should make so fowle a shipwracke of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my posteritie, or shed blood without law or warrant . . . thus I commit you to the mercy of the Almightie.11

  Paulet, although cruel to Mary without end, had too many scruples to commit the ultimate act. He was quite right on his own accord, for it was very possible that France and Spain could protest and Elizabeth would have him arrested and put on trial for killing Mary.

  The warrant was taken to be sealed by the Lord Chancellor and then to Walsingham. He had already ordered his servant to find an executioner and Mr Bull was quickly escorted to Fotheringhay, his axe in a trunk, dressed as an ordinary servant. Sir Walter Mildmay refused to have him stay at his house and so Mr Bull and his axe were given rooms at a Fotheringhay inn.