by Susan Kay
She turned away, grinding her fist into the palm of her hand. The first numb daze at the extent of the treachery around her had worn off in a savage reaction. She wanted them to suffer. She wanted to rend and tear all those who had lightly tossed aside her three decades of ceaseless labour, thirty years which had changed her from a handsome, high-spirited girl to a bitter, lonely old woman who had never known a moment’s peace.
And so, on the 20th of September 1586, the first batch of conspirators were drawn on hurdles to St. Giles-in-the-Fields to meet their tormented ends in a skilful execution which was prolonged for three hours. First hung, but cut down quickly while still alive, they were thrown to the ground and ripped open from neck to groin. The crowds pressed forward as the first animal screams of anguish tore through the air and the street became littered with burning entrails. Castration followed the removal of lesser organs. Babington was heard to cry “Jesus!” three times as his heart lay in the executioner’s hands and abruptly the mood of the crowd changed. Women vomited and turned away, while the men moved forward with a low menacing growl and the executioner quailed for a moment, bloody-handed and shamefaced. The full penalty for treason was seldom exacted in this manner and no one present was prepared to believe that their beloved Queen had ordered this.
When the hideous, screaming deaths were reported in detail to Elizabeth, she was sickened by her own cruelty and gave orders that the second batch of traitors, scheduled to die the following day, were to hang until dead before the mutilation of their bodies took place. Supper was served with all its attendant ceremony, but she remained alone in her chamber and no one dared to approach her.
Her behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic and Burghley was privately disturbed. He knew that she had written a desperate letter to Mary, begging for a confession: “…if you will do this in your own hand as Queen to Queen, woman to woman, then you will not be tried in open court and I will find some means of leniency towards you…”
The answer had come in the form of a flat refusal, couched in the terms of coldly incredulous outrage, and said in effect that Mary could not confess to a crime she had not committed. Elizabeth stared at the letter in despair, frantically trying to reconcile its dignified, martyred air with the evidence Walsingham had presented. For the first time she began to doubt the Secretary’s integrity. What had he done behind her back and how could she ever dare to expose forgery at this stage? Would anyone in their right minds, knowing their guilt, choose death when they had been offered life? Was Mary innocent of the main charge, after all?
Elizabeth was thrown into an agony of doubt and panic, for Mary’s letter was the death blow to her hope of reasonable compromise. Events were now drawing her relentlessly towards the very act she had spent eighteen years eluding; her advisers and her people were clamouring for Mary’s punishment with a violence that she knew she could no longer contain or deflect. To bring Mary to trial would be the first step towards that irrevocable act of madness, the execution of a sovereign, the one crime which she knew she could never bring herself to accept. But Burghley and Walsingham had her in a vice. Twist and turn as she might, there was no escape from the path she must now tread, and with her back to the wall Elizabeth felt the first strand snap in the threadbare fabric of sanity which she had miraculously preserved through more than fifty years of constant uncertainty and danger. Her mind veered like a rudderless ship, desperately seeking some loophole in the net which had tightened around her, so that she seemed quite incapable of holding to the smallest decision for any length of time.
She flatly refused to bring Mary to the Tower, but could not seem to make up her mind where she should go to be tried instead—Hertford was too near, Fotheringay too far. The men who worked with her were astonished by the treacherous, shifting bog of confused emotion which threatened to blot her calm rationality out of existence.
It was October before Elizabeth even agreed to bring her cousin to trial, but when Burghley, Walsingham, and the rest of the commissioners arrived at Fotheringay, the Queen of Scots refused to acknowledge their authority to try her. She was not a subject and she was not answerable to any English court! It was three days before Hatton convinced her that it was in her own interests to appear, since if she refused to attend, her case would go by default. And so at last the miserable farce began. Mary conducted her own defence before a jury of thirty-six men who had reached their verdict weeks before. In the Great Hall of Fotheringay, she passed the empty, throne-like chair, symbolic of Elizabeth’s presence, on her way to the prisoner’s stool, set significantly lower.
“I am a Queen by right of birth,” she said quietly, gazing up at Elizabeth’s empty throne. “My place should be there.”
A rustle of indignation ran through the assembled men. She had condemned herself out of her own mouth. But she was not dead yet and she had many uncomfortable moments to give them before this trial was ended. The evidence against her was all produced in copies of the original documents and, as she listened to the forged postscript of her reply to Babington, she understood why.
“How can I reply to this accusation without access to the original papers?” she demanded acidly. “I do not deny that I have earnestly wished for liberty and done my utmost to procure it for myself. In this I acted from a very natural wish; but can I be held responsible for the criminal actions of a few desperate men which they planned without my knowledge? I demand to see the original letters, my lords. It is quite possible that my ciphers have been tampered with by my enemies.” She swung round and pointed a finger at Walsingham, whose eyes were fixed on a point on the far wall. “He may well have composed your documents.” For I know how he hates me and all I stand for.
There was an uneasy stir. Walsingham got to his feet with pious indignation and looked around the court with an unblinking stare.
“My mind is free of all malice,” he lied smoothly. “I call God to witness that as a private person I have done nothing unworthy of an honest man, nor as a public person have I done anything unworthy of my place.”
The hours dragged away, the second day set in, and still she fought.
“What becomes of the majesty of princes if the oaths and attestations of their secretaries are to be taken against their solemn protestations?—I am held in chains. I have no counsel. You have deprived me of my papers and all means of preparing my defence…”
This had begun to go rather well. Several of the commissioners began to look shaken and ill at ease, but Burghley and Walsingham held the trial with a firm rein and swamped sympathy with raucous argument. It became a personal duel between Mary and the cold, white-bearded gentleman who had stood behind her rival for thirty years—the formidable little figure of William Cecil.
“Ah, you,” sobbed Mary at last, “you are my adversary!”
“That is true,” said Burghley with superb calm. “I am the adversary of all Queen Elizabeth’s adversaries—”
Fearful of the verdict that would be taken at Fotheringay, Elizabeth ordered the Commission back to London to finish their business in the Star Chamber. At the end of October, unable to influence the outcome, she received her sombre foremost councillors in silence.
“And the verdict?”
“Guilty, Your Majesty.”
Her eyes flickered a moment over their faces.
“Was the decision unanimous, gentlemen?”
“Unanimous save for one voice—Lord Zouche declared himself still unsatisfied as to the guilt of the Scottish Queen.”
Lord Zouche was a brave young man. She wished she had the courage to say she shared his doubts, but she dared not test their loyalty so far. She turned away and slowly they filed out, until only Burghley remained, hovering at her side like a bird of prey.
“Forgive me, madam—but we are all agreed that her sentencing should be handled now by Parliament.”
So they were bringing in their ultimate weapon, secure in the knowled
ge that she could not hold out against the demands of the Commons.
“Parliament!” she echoed dully.
Burghley lifted his hunched shoulders.
“The burden will be better shared, madam—and the world’s opinion better satisfied. I strongly advise that the writs go out at once for assembly next month.”
“Hold your damned Parliament then if you must,” she spat, and walked out of the room. In the doorway she threw over her shoulder bitterly, “But don’t expect me to open it, will you?”
And she did not.
* * *
Along the mud-sloughed roads Leicester rode on the last stage of his journey to court, his mind full of the disasters from which his urgent recall to England had snatched him in temporary respite. A hopeless catalogue of military skirmishings designed to threaten the Duke of Parma’s minor garrisons had culminated in the mad charge he had led at Zutphen. He had fought like a madman on that field and his dreams still dripped blood and the bitter memory of his brave nephew, Philip Sidney, dying of the savage wounds received that day. He wondered how he was going to face the Queen, what he was going to say to explain away the dreary cycle of failure which had hounded his every move. It had been hard to keep his mind on military action once he knew from Walsingham what was afoot in England. He had begged to be recalled immediately, but the Queen had insisted he remained at his post until the conduct of his affairs was satisfactorily arranged.
Now as he turned into the courtyard and swung down from his horse, he wondered what kind of reception he could expect. Abuse? Recriminations? Demands for an accurate account of his expenses? It was more than a year since he had seen her and there were many young men at court only too eager to step into his shoes during his absence—that virile toad Raleigh, for one, would have wasted no time, he was certain of that. And Hatton, too, would have been making hay while the sun shone. It was this uncertainty of his reception which had prompted him to bring his step-son, the young Earl of Essex, back to court with him. If she must smile on another man let it be Essex rather than Raleigh. He could control Essex for as long as the boy remained his financial dependant, but since his sojourn in the Netherlands, his fear of Raleigh had become obsessive—
By the time he had stripped and washed his muddy face and dressed again, the formal summons to the Queen’s presence had arrived. He went nervously along the corridors, limping a little under the burden of increasing obesity, and the combination of speed and anxiety caused him to mop his red face with a handkerchief. He was bitterly aware that the strains of the last year had not improved his physique. What would she think when she saw him at last, a bloated old man with receding white hair, who had failed her miserably?
He had expected a formal audience, but to his surprise he was shown into her withdrawing chamber and her women, evidently on her instructions, immediately curtsied and withdrew, leaving them alone. For a brief moment, before he bowed, he looked into her ravaged face and was shocked at the change in her; like him she appeared to have aged ten years in the last twelve months.
All his carefully rehearsed excuses went out of his head, and he held out his arms to her like a schoolboy.
“Will you kiss the conquered hero?” he demanded jauntily. “Or make him live on bread and water to pay for his miserable failures first?”
She walked up to him, keeping a tight hold of herself, and poked him ungently in the stomach.
“Bread and water wouldn’t come amiss, would they—what on earth have you done to yourself out there, you bloated toad?”
He kissed her thin hand impudently. “I’ve been eating for two, madam, since it’s damned obvious you haven’t been—you promised to eat while I was gone.”
She smiled suddenly. “And you promised not to.”
He shrugged. “Well—a lot of promises have gone under the bridge since then.” He took both her hands and put them around his neck and saw the happy tears brimming in her eyes at last.
“Oh, Robin,” she whispered against his doublet. “Thank God you’ve come home safely.”
“You should have let me come before,” he said gruffly, holding her close. “How do you think I felt all those miles away from you, knowing the danger you were in—I should have been here—”
“You’re here now,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”
He grimaced slightly. “Here to face my critics—I imagine there are quite a few of them waiting to tear my campaign to pieces.”
She looked up into his lined face and said angrily, “If they’ve got anything to say they can say it to me—I’d like to see the man among them who could have done any better. Anyway, you won’t be here to face them—I’m sending you straight to Buxton to take the waters.”
“Then—you don’t need me at court?” There was an anxious note in his voice suddenly and she touched his face.
“It’s precisely because I need you with me that I’m sending you away. It frightens me to see you looking so ill. When you come back, I shall need all the support you can give me, Robin. They found her guilty—you know that by now, I suppose—they’re going to try to force my hand at last.”
He said nothing. He had come back to England for the precise purpose of joining his voice to those of his colleagues who were urging her to sign Mary’s death warrant; but somehow it did not seem the appropriate moment to tell her that. She appeared to be under the impression that he was going to help her to make a stand against them all and there would be time enough for her to learn over the next few weeks that she was wrong.
* * *
Stone walls shut out the outside world, enclosing Mary in a strange serenity. The pealing bells and heartfelt psalm-singing, which had greeted the news of her trial and sentence all over London, could not penetrate Fotheringay’s grim silence.
She had watched indifferently from a doorway while Paulet ripped down her cloth of estate, because in law she was a dead woman and unworthy of such trappings. Her calm smiles and idle speeches infuriated the humourless Puritan; he could sting her neither to fear nor anger, and his futility mocked him. In the bare stone patch where the cloth of estate had stood, she hung a cross and pictures of the Passion. She would not be troubled much longer by Paulet’s spite; she had only a few weeks left to live and she did not wish to mar them with futile outrage.
Approaching death with the peaceful resignation of one who has knowingly taken a fatal gamble and lost, she had no regrets at her rejection of Elizabeth’s promise of leniency. A proud and noble martyrdom, for the sake of her faith, was better than a shameful life lived out in prison as the object of Europe’s contempt. She would leave this world with spirit and courage and hope, glad of the merciful release for, “In my end is my beginning.”
It was her motto.
She wrote a restrained and dignified letter to Elizabeth, requesting burial in France, thanking her for the priest who had been sent to comfort her last days, and inquiring ironically whether Elizabeth wished her to return a diamond, which had been the pledge of friendship between them, now or later. But she finished on a note of quiet threat:
“Do not accuse me of presumption if I remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge, and for all those whom you doom…I desire that my blood and my country may be remembered in that time.”
The letter was her last barb against her cousin but, in order to be permitted to send it at all, Paulet made her wipe her face with the sheets of parchment to prove that they had not been lanced with poison.
If there was peace in the winter-bound world of Fotheringay, it was not mirrored at Greenwich where revelry had ground to a halt and the corridors were hung with whispers. The Queen made few appearances in public. She was harried day and night by advisers, clamouring for her signature on the death warrant, and had taken refuge in her private apartments.
The heavy velvet curtains of her withdrawing chamber were drawn against the
icy winter winds which buffeted the casements and she sat close to the fire, laced into a heavy cloth of silver gown, chewing the scarlet paint off her long nails and staring moodily at the carved and gilded ceiling.
Her supper, untouched on a silver tray beside her, caught her attention at last and made her clap her hands irritably.
“Take it away,” she said curtly.
As Elizabeth Throckmorton curtsied nervously and removed the offending tray from the room, the Countess of Warwick laid her embroidery aside with a frown and left her seat by the hearth to kneel at the Queen’s feet.
“Madam—” Her voice was a stern reproach and Elizabeth looked away guiltily.
“Tomorrow,” she muttered.
The Countess sighed and gripped her hand.
“You said that yesterday, madam—and not so much as a manchet of bread has passed your lips all day. It can’t go on! Another week like this and the only death warrant you will have signed is your own.”
Elizabeth freed her hand and stood up wearily.
“Burghley is waiting in the ante-room, Anne. Send him in, if you please.”
“I know where I’d like to send him,” said the Countess, getting with difficulty to her feet. “It’s a disgrace the way they’re hounding you, madam—Robert knows my mind on the matter, Lord knows I’ve made it plain enough.”
The Queen smiled faintly. Leicester was Lady Warwick’s brother-in-law and the Countess seldom gave him any quarter.
“Anne! You know he couldn’t stand against the entire Council in this.”
The Countess sniffed.
“When did he ever stand against anyone, begging your pardon, madam?”
“I won’t have him maligned in my presence,” said the Queen sharply. “He is not well.”
Lady Warwick curtsied with unruffled calm. She was a trusted friend who knew her mistress well and was not afraid to speak her mind on any subject.
She said with asperity, “I shall tell Goodrowse to prepare you a sleeping draught,” and went to admit the old Lord Treasurer.