The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Talbot sent his son, post-haste, to London with the death certificate. The news had a cataclysmic effect. Cecil was sent to Elizabeth and she fell into shock and ‘cursed Burghley [i.e. Cecil], heaped obloquy on Davison and cried out that Marie had been executed against her will’.1 She immediately retired to her bed, wept in ‘an abundance of tears’, said she would wear mourning and told Davison he had acted wrongly, that the execution decree had never meant to be enacted and she sent him to the Tower in fury. She declared she had only signed it as a back-up measure and she had given it to Davison for safekeeping only. She threatened her council that she would put them all in the Tower.

  She wrote to James:

  My dear Brother, I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen . . . I beseech you that as God and many more know, how innocent I am in this case . . . I am not so base-minded that fear of any living creature or prince should make me afraid to do that were just; or done, or deny the same. I am not of so base a lineage, nor carry so vile a mind.2

  An envoy was sent to tell James to reiterate her points of ‘how innocent I am’.

  Cecil told Elizabeth to mute her protests – for if there were any suggestion that Mary had been killed illegally and against the will of the queen, there could be serious consequences. France and Spain might attack. Elizabeth might have shown her sorrow by allowing Mary’s body to be sent to France or even simply providing for her servants to be freed. She did not. Still, she demanded Davison pay the impossible fine of £10,000 and banished Cecil from her presence and called him ‘false dissembler and wicked wretch’.3 Cecil had to beg for mercy, offering to lie at her feet, and was not admitted back into favour until March.

  In Scotland, James was publicly grieving but privately calm – he had never known his mother, after all. There were some rumours that he even happily rejoiced in being ‘sole king’. But there were furious raids across the border by noblemen half mad with grief, and Elizabeth was insulted as a Jezebel, a witch and a whore on the streets of Edinburgh.

  The ports were closed for nearly three weeks. The King of France received the news in early March. He was enraged, refused to see the English ambassador, arrested Elizabeth’s couriers and impounded English vessels at port. A requiem Mass for the royal family was held at Notre-Dame in March and the preacher looked up at the black-draped walls and spoke with emotion. He talked of ‘the axe of a low executioner spoiling the body of she who was two times a queen, the form that had graced the nuptial bed of a sovereign of France, falling dis­-honoured on a scaffold’. Even a year later, Walsingham said he was editing reports from France to remove the worst of the protest as he feared they would increase Elizabeth’s fury with her Privy Council. Among the emotive pamphlets was one that claimed that Dudley had rushed to her in his nightgown and begged her not to execute Mary without a proper trial or ‘show of justice’.

  After all the claims that killing Mary was the way to make England safe, the death seemed to have done the exact opposite.

  And Philip was only emboldened. He gathered his fighting men and his high-powered galleons and his stores of cannon for the blow that would destroy Protestant England for good. In late 1568, Philip’s wife, Elisabeth of Valois, the old playmate of Mary in the French nursery, who had long expressed sympathy for the captive queen, died of a miscarriage. As Philip’s confessor told him, he must ‘avenge the wrongs done to God and to the world by that woman, above all in the execution of the Queen of Scotland’.

  After death, Mary’s body was put into a lead coffin and kept until the end of July, when Elizabeth ordered a burial in Peter­borough Cathedral, in the same church which held Catherine of Aragon, another woman who had fallen foul of the graces of the monarch. The dreaded Dr Fletcher presided and had his revenge for Mary’s refusal to listen to him on the scaffold, reminding the congregation of the adultery and murder charges and portraying the execution as having been committed by the hand of God, in order to pay Mary for killing her husband. He even declared that good weather on the execution day reflected God’s approval. ‘The day being fair did, as it were, show favour from Heaven and commended the justice, the eighth day of February, that judgement was repaid home to her, which . . . she measured to her husband.’ Her servants were permitted out of captivity to attend the burial. The Bishop of Lincoln quoted Martin Luther, ‘Many one liveth a Papist and dieth a Protestant.’ It was a weak attempt at suggesting Mary converted at the last minute – which would have been the most brilliant propaganda coup for the English. Unfortunately for them, the news of Mary’s grace under pressure, royal dignity and presentation of herself as a Catholic martyr was beginning to reach Europe – to cataclysmic effect. The Catholic League was emboldened and France began to look more kindly on the belligerent ambitions of Scotland.

  Elizabeth had signed Mary’s execution warrant and now she was free from the threat of Mary claiming her throne. But the execution hardened Philip’s resolve to invade Britain with the Spanish Armada – the invasion that Mary had so long awaited, hoped for. Elizabeth was determined to teach Philip a lesson after what she saw as his consistent support of Mary’s claim. She had backed the Dutch revolt against Spain, in which the Protestant territories of the Low Countries rebelled against Spanish rule. She had needled him by sending her privateers to chase Spanish ships as they crossed the world. She had sent Francis Drake to sack New World ports Philip claimed as his, and English ships were always disrupting Spanish trade. In the year after the death of Mary, the relationship between Philip and Elizabeth, once mooted as marriage partners, descended into bitter war. Philip intensified his desires to invade England, supported by the Pope, who decided it was a Catholic crusade. Elizabeth sent Francis Drake again to lead a pre-emptive strike and he attacked Cadiz in April 1587 and destroyed supplies and thirty ships. But Philip was determined, and on 28 May 1588, the Spanish Armada of 130 ships, 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers sailed out from Lisbon. The rescuers that Mary had so long hoped for were coming, but more than a year too late. The engagement began in July, and on 8 August, Elizabeth travelled to Tilbury to speak to her forces, delivering the famed speech that declared ‘I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’. Scholars rage over its authenticity, chiefly because it seems almost too good to be true. But current scholarship vouches for its truth.4 In it, Elizabeth drew the brilliant comparison between the body of the queen and the body of the realm. Both were impregnable and pure.

  The English forces were victorious and the Gloriana vision became all-powerful. But the brave sailors were struck down by a terrible bout of typhoid that swept the fleet after the victory, and Elizabeth, chary of spending, never actually paid those who survived and many ended up begging on the streets of port towns. However, the victory had been won and Protestant England could declare that God shone down upon her. And yet, although the Spanish could not regain control of the Channel or frighten Elizabeth off meddling in the Netherlands, they still reigned supreme on the trade routes across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, and even Elizabeth’s most intrepid pirates could gain no toehold in their Spanish Empire. Elizabeth and Philip would continue to fight, sapping resources and lives, until the queen’s death.

  By 1603, Elizabeth was sixty-nine and very ill, cast down by infirm­ity and sadness at the deaths of so many friends. When her advisor, Robert Cecil, son of William, told her she should go to bed, she replied sharply that ‘Must is not a word to use for princes, little man.’ But princes had to die. She took to her bed. Her coronation ring had to be cut off her badly swollen finger, which to her ministers was a gloomy omen, as if her marriage with the state was about to end. By March, she was struggling to eat or sleep, in constant pain, sitting motionless on a cushion for days. But still she would not name a successor, resistant to giving anyone the assent she had so long withheld. In the middle of the month, she refused to eat, bathe or be put to bed
– for she thought if she went to bed, she would never rise again. She lay, dressed, on cushions on the floor, refusing to move. But her courtiers forced her to undress and go to her bed – even at the end, kings could not die as they wished. Robert Cecil had been negotiating secretly with James about taking the throne and he was ready to come. On 23 March, Elizabeth could no longer speak. The Privy Council came to see her and asked her outright if she agreed to James succeeding her. She lifted up her hand, which was taken as assent. They departed and left her to her ladies and ministers. In the early morning of 24 March, she breathed her last.

  James VI was now king of Scotland, England and Wales. He was welcomed to London with enthusiasm. He was the beginning of a new dynasty, the Stuarts, and his son, Charles I, would lose his head to the English state, as James’s mother had done before him. James, buffeted by the battles for power, pushed about as a child, even kidnapped by his nobles when he came to his majority, was now a great believer in the divine right of kings. As he said, ‘Kings are justly called Gods’ for they had the same power as God, of ‘raising and casting down, of life and death, judge over all their subjects and in all causes and yet accountable to none but God only’.5 Mary had believed the same, but instead of being like God, able to ‘judge all and to be judged not accountable to none’, she had been deprived of the royal role of dispenser of justice, instead judged by all on proofs she was not even allowed to see. It was hardly surprising, after how she had been treated, that her son clung to the dream of divine right, passing it down to subsequent Stuart kings, but the work of Elizabeth’s reign had been done: in the end, with the death of Charles I, Parliament was greater than the monarch. Elizabeth had wished not to die in her bed, but was forced to do so. Although the men of state tried to deprive Mary of everything she had wished for, surprised her into execution, she still managed, with her dress and final words, to be remembered as the martyr Elizabeth’s men had dreaded, and to direct her own death, which is usually forbidden to all of us, even kings.

  Fotheringhay Castle was left to crumble and was sold off. Nothing remains of it now but a mound under the grass and a few pieces of stone.

  ‘The English love queens,’ said the mother of the future Queen Victoria, on Victoria’s birth. But they did not love Mary, Queen of Scots. Her life was a series of failures and bloody, breathtaking betrayals. Some of them she contributed to in part, thanks to folly, passion or a fatal willingness to trust those around her too much. Everything that her cousin Elizabeth had, Mary lacked – she had ministers who might turn on her at any time, a host of lords who had been too long used to following their desires. Her nation was familiar with the vicissitudes of power and she had been brought up in France, far from Scotland. The court she knew was refined, punctilious and always deferential to royalty – unlike those around her in Edinburgh. Mary also had the bad luck to attract the two worst consorts in royal history.

  In Britain, the greatest periods of progression of the state or, as we now say, constitutional monarchy, have been often under queens: Victoria, Elizabeth II. The few times that Victoria exercised a small amount of will – complaining about the change in her ladies-in-waiting after the fall of Lord Melbourne’s government, for example – were met with opprobrium, despite being much less significant than William IV’s meddling in the passage of the Reform Act. Victoria refused to change her attendants from supporters of Melbourne to supporters of Robert Peel, the leader of the opposition, and Peel promptly declined to form a new government. Peel was arguably looking for a reason not to rule with a wafer-thin majority and Victoria’s ladies were simply an excuse. Victoria was of course the first post-Reform Act queen, but there is little doubt that male monarchs have been allowed to behave with wider licence and run over the will of the ministers. When Elizabeth II came to the throne, Winston Churchill complained she was a ‘child’ and she had to win his respect – which her father had never had to do. Even though a queen is a monarch, she is still a woman and it seems as if greater deference to her ministers is expected. Elizabeth I talked more of her body than any other monarch, and her body has been much discussed in scholarship. The weakness of the female sex, so often used against Mary, was something Elizabeth turned to her strength in words. But her ministers never forgot what she was.

  Elizabeth herself said in the letter to Mary after Darnley’s murder, ‘I am sure you have no friend more true than I, and my affection may stand you in as good stead as the subtle wits of others.’ Mary was betrayed by so many for their own gain – and they did benefit from her. Moray achieved power and glory, James I maintained a relationship with the Queen of England and secured his position, the various Scottish lords kept their property and despoiled Mary’s belongings. Over and over, she was betrayed and exploited for power. Only Elizabeth protected her – and finally could not continue to do so. Elizabeth, by agreeing to behead a monarch, according to the point initially raised by the lords that Mary was ‘unworthy’ to rule, agreed to the greatest possible incursion into royal rule. If Parliament disliked a king’s actions, it could now depose him and behead him. Yet although Mary met her death with little time to prepare and only the dignity she herself brought, she kept her majesty until the end.

  Parliament saw Mary as a threat but she was also symbolic in the struggle between Elizabeth and the ruling class over where power was lodged, whether in the relationship between parliament and monarch or in the monarch’s own person. Despite the fact that Elizabeth’s body was the most discussed of any monarch in history, it was the one which suffered the greatest blows against royal power. After Elizabeth, the body of the monarch was no longer the source of government. The actions of Parliament and the signed warrant ushered in the possibility of the execution of future monarchs – Charles I and even others across Europe, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In executing Mary, Elizabeth – as she knew – had executed a tiny part of herself. For if a king could be killed by his subjects, then what was special about a king?

  We admire our great queens and recall their iconic imagery. We treasure the stories of their relationships with their ministers. We congratu­late them on their dignified bearing and the excellence of their personal sacrifice and creation of a virtuous monarchy, whether as Virgin Queen, perfect wife or working mother. We see their reigns as more stable, less bloody, calmer than those who came before or after. But what if we look more closely at the relationships with their ministers? It has been separately argued about Elizabeth, Victoria and Elizabeth II that the state, parliament and ministers gained power in their reigns – the progress of what we now call constitutional monarchy. We may put this down to their intelligence, their sense of duty. Or we could argue that female monarchs are permitted less leeway for imposing their personality. Elizabeth II was schooled in constitutional monarchy by the provost of Eton as a young girl and her reign has exemplified political neutrality par excellence. The queen asks and comments but does not interfere. The famous instructions of what a monarch may or may not do were written by Walter Bagehot in the reign of Victoria in his book The English Constitution – the monarch had the right to ‘be consulted, to encourage and to warn’. This was much less than her predecessors had done.

  Elizabeth I’s time on the throne is seen as one of brilliance, thanks to the superbly effective propaganda of Gloriana. But the queen herself was constantly battling her ministers for supremacy. Henry VIII had begun the Reformation, in seemingly the most explicit revelation of pure monarchical power possible: that he could command the religion of the country as he pleased. And yet he relied so much on Parliament both for the ensuing reforms and the dealings with Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth meant to jealously protect her prerogative and agency, to retain the rule of monarch as the ultimate source of power and all that can be decreed. But little by little, her position was depredated, and power was gained by Parliament. We see the first example of this process in her ministers’ and advisors’ attempts to demand she should marry (and moot that she should be told to marry an Englishman at th
at). Elizabeth fought hard to preserve her state but she was also fortunate that her advisors and nobles could not agree on one person – and so although they were often telling her to marry they could not decide unequivocally on a groom.

  Yet throughout Elizabeth’s reign, her advisors and Parliament attempted to fashion her as more figurehead than absolute monarch; signing the decrees rather than actually making them. Elizabeth herself talked a brilliant game of absolute monarchy, pronouncing that ‘absolute princes ought not to be accountable for their actions to any other than God alone’. She promoted herself as a strong monarch so famously and our modern popular visions of her are of absolute power. But Henry VIII had used his advisors for his own ends, and when they failed him – as in the case of Thomas Cromwell and his counsel to marry Anne of Cleves – he had them executed. Cecil was devoted to the queen and her safety, but, whether due to his own desire for power or a belief that she did not know what was good for her, he went behind her back and acted without her decree.

  The greatest battle for power was over Mary, Queen of Scots. Ultimately, Elizabeth’s desire to assist Mary, to send troops to support her, to put her back on the throne and not to execute her, were thwarted. Some of what happened to undermine Mary was without Elizabeth’s knowledge – such as Walsingham and Cecil using Gilbert Gifford to trap her into revealing her assent to a plot. But much was overt – Elizabeth raged but did not, could not, find her way to give the queen back her Scots crown by force, for the appetite for warmongering was not there and Parliament saw Mary as a great threat to the realm. Although Elizabeth is often seen as our most powerful queen, it was in her reign that the greatest incursion was made into royal privilege. In executing Mary, Elizabeth had cut away a part of herself. ‘Je ne suis plus que je fus’, ‘I am no longer who I was,’ Mary wrote in her beloved Book of Hours, before her death. Mary was the queen who became a subject.