The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  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 scr
eamed, “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 s
uch 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.