by Jane Dunn
Fotheringhay was the theatre for her final act of revenge and salvation. The only way to redeem her reputation and make sense of her life was to control the manner of its ending. She saw her death in these histrionic terms; writing to Mendoza she referred to the scaffold as ‘a stage whereupon I am to play the last act of the tragedy’.13 Now that her death was inevitable, she no longer sought Elizabeth’s approval or pardon. The only world that Mary hoped to impress now was a Catholic one, the redemption she sought was spiritual and the immortality she craved was as a martyr for her faith. If she could manage that then she would not only establish her rightful place in history and the hearts of her supporters, she also would store up posthumous trouble for Elizabeth and her counsellors too.
On the morning of 15 October, Mary was led into the great chamber for the commencement of her trial. Because she had been secluded from London and the centres of power in the country, many of the nobility there assembled had never seen the Scottish queen before. The lurid tales of her past history and her reputed supernatural charm had endowed her with a glamour and fascination. Even though now middle-aged, her height and demeanour meant she was still a compelling presence.
The stage was ready. Burghley had worked carefully on the symbolic detail of the setting. On a raised platform at the head of the room was placed the chair of state under a canopy of state. This was to represent the presence and authority of Elizabeth, Queen of England, and remained empty throughout. A smaller chair, placed further into the heart of the room, was designated for Mary Queen of Scots. The commissioners were seated on benches down either side of the long room. Mary objected to the inferior position of her chair: ‘I am a queen by right of birth and my place should be there under the dais [canopy of state]’14, she is reputed to have said, pointing to the empty throne intended for the absent Queen of England.
The charges were read out against her, ‘that you have conspired the destruction of [the Person of the most Serene Queen Elizabeth] and the Realm of England, and the Subversion of Religion’. Mary defended herself eloquently and emphatically, and admitted not one scintilla of evidence that could prove her guilt. The Babington letters were read out; she absolutely repudiated any suggestion that she had known him, let alone knowingly written him letters or received any from him. She demanded that she be shown the originals with her signature upon them.* Babington’s confession she tossed back at her inquisitors: ‘If Babington or any other affirm it, I say plainly, They lie. Other mens Faults are not to be thrown upon me.’ Her ‘stout Courage’ and forceful denials were punctuated with explosive bouts of weeping, one of which accompanied a statement of loyalty to Elizabeth: ‘I would never make Shipwreck of my Soul by conspiring the Destruction of my dearest Sister,’ she declared with feeling.15
The most damning evidence, however, was that given by her two secretaries Nau and Curle, whose confessions, recorded independently and not under torture, tallied with each other. They confirmed that the letters Walsingham had intercepted, deciphered and copied had been written on Mary’s dictation. She even parried this damning evidence with cool composure: ‘As well the Majesty as the Safety of all Princes must fall to the Ground, if they depend upon the Writings and Testimonies of Secretaries … If they have written anything prejudicial to the Queen my Sister, they have written it altogether without my Knowledge, and let them bear the Punishment of their inconsiderate Boldness.’16
In a letter the following month to the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, who was complicit in the general detail of the Babington Plot and closely sympathetic to her, Mary wrote as if she accepted that her secretaries had spoken the truth: ‘Nau has confessed everything, Curle a great deal, following his example, and all is on my shoulders.’17
In court she maintained her powerful, eloquent presence, insisting that her protestations be registered that she was a sovereign queen who did not recognize the authority of Elizabeth over her but came to the court voluntarily, ‘to vindicate herself from the horrible imputation that had been laid to her charge’.18 She continued to take the floor, undefended by anyone. Quite alone and having to act as her own counsel, she argued her case with passion. She was determined to promote the religious component of her arraignment which her prosecutors were equally adamant in denying: ‘[my religion] has been my sole consolation and hope under all my afflictions, and for its advancement I would cheerfully give my best blood, if so be I might, by my own death, procure relief for the suffering Catholics; but not even for their sakes would I purchase it at the price of the blood of others … It is, in sooth, more in accordance with my nature to pray with Esther than to play the part of Judith.’*19
The trial was adjourned and the commissioners returned to London to meet again in the Star Chamber in Westminster on 25 October. Although they had not been asked to travel to Fotheringhay and give evidence before Mary, her secretaries here appeared in person to confirm their evidence about the letters. The commission, unanimously except for one vote,* pronounced Mary guilty of having ‘compassed and imagined within this Realm of England divers Matters tending to the Hurt, Death and Destruction of the Royal Person of our Sovereign Lady the Queen’.20
When the councillors went to Elizabeth to give her the news the French ambassador reported that she sank to her knees and remained in prayer for at least fifteen minutes. She asked God to ‘inspire her how to act for the greater glory of His name, the greater safety of her kingdom, the greater security of her person’. Elizabeth in this prayer reiterated the fear she had at ‘putting to death a woman, a Sovereign Queen like herself, relation of all the great Princes of the world, and closely allied to herself by blood’. Aware perhaps of her audience, she also shared with her maker how hard she found the decision, given that she herself was a woman, ‘and the most tender hearted on earth’.21
Elizabeth may have been a little disingenuous but she was not being melodramatic. Her fear was real on a personal, spiritual and political level. When the momentous news of the verdict reached the European courts there was talk of retaliation. Spain’s long-planned revenge for England’s heresy, for her own fleet’s piratical depredations on Spanish treasure ships and foreign colonies, for Elizabeth’s intransigence, was prodded into life by the projected execution of Mary. In December 1586 a dispatch from the Venetian ambassador in Spain reported in cipher, ‘the King [Philip II] and his Ministers are extremely anxious to avenge themselves on the Queen of England, but two considerations of great weight present themselves, the questions of how and when’.22 The Guises too were busy stoking French antagonism to Elizabeth for her treatment of their kinswoman. The general feeling abroad was that the English queen would never be so rash as to allow the execution of the Queen of Scots to proceed: ‘there is no reason in the world why England should commit an act which would rouse all Christendom in wrath against her’.23
With such threats from beyond her shores, Elizabeth’s own anxiety and alarm were exacerbated by Mary’s ecstatic embrace of her sentence: ‘so far was she from being dismayed thereat, that with a settled and steadfast Countenance, lifting up her Eyes and Hands towards Heaven, she gave Thanks to God for it’. Even more disconcerting was Mary’s sense of triumph when told by the commissioners that as long as she lived the reformed religion in England would never be secure. She greeted the news ‘with a more than wonted Alacrity, giving God Thanks, and rejoicing in her Heart, that she was taken to be an Instrument for the re-establishing of Religion in this Island’.24
Greatly troubled as to what to do, Elizabeth faced a delegation from her Lords and Commons that November, most of whom were pleading that she execute Mary as soon as possible as the only way to re-establish security in the country. She wished to show her gratitude for their loyalty and her understanding of their fears. She explained that although infinitely grateful to God for every gift and mercy He had shown her, in keeping her safe from constant perils, the greatest miracle to her was her people’s love: ‘as I came to the crown with the willing hearts of my subjects, so do I now
after twenty-eight years’ reign perceive in you no diminution of good-wills, which if haply I should want, well might I breathe but never think I lived [without which I might as well be dead]’.
She then addressed the pressing problem of Mary: ‘it is and has been my grievous thought that one not different in sex, of like estate, and my near kin, should fall into so great a crime … I secretly wrote her a letter upon the discovery of sundry treasons, that if she would confess them and privately acknowledge them by her letter to myself, she never should need be called for them into so public question’. Acutely sensitive to Mary’s charge that the Act under which she had been found guilty was made law expressly to entrap her, Elizabeth specifically denied this was the case. She declared it was more just to try Mary under this statute which allowed for judgement from a commission of the noblest in the land than to subject her to a common court of law and a jury of common men, which Elizabeth speciously claimed as ‘a proper course forsooth, to deal in that manner with one of her estate!’.
Elizabeth was ever mindful of the need to prove herself as resolute as any king. She was aware of how Mary’s transgressions fulfilled every expectation of female fallibility, reinforcing the suspicion that women could not rule. Well into the rhythm of her eloquence, Elizabeth explained how her experiences separated her from her cousin and made her worthy of her crown:
I have had good experience and trial of this world: I know what it is to be a subject, what to be a sovereign; what to have good neighbours, and sometimes meet evil willers. I have found treason in trust, seen great benefits little regarded, and instead of gratefulness, courses of purpose to cross. These former remembrances, present feeling, and future expectation of evils, I say, have made me think an evil is much the better the less while it endureth, and so, them happiest that are soonest hence [in the face of evil the sooner one is dead the better] and taught me to bear with a better mind these treasons than is common to my sex – yea, with a better heart, perhaps, than is in some men.
Having proved her superiority, she ended her rhetorical flourish with the statement that brought the terrible possibility of her own death into the public mind, a mind now having to contemplate the execution of the Queen of Scots: ‘I would be loath to die so bloody a death [as assassination] so doubt I not but God would have given me grace to be prepared for such an event.’25
The juxtaposition of her violent but innocent death with Mary’s emphasized on many levels their interconnectedness. Increasingly it seemed that one had to die for the other to live, but Elizabeth was determined to show too that even in dying, Mary’s queenly courage could be matched by Elizabeth’s nobility of spirit. By talking with equanimity of the greatest terror that her councillors faced, the murder of their sovereign, she assumed the mantle of the monarch she wanted to be. These great speeches of Elizabeth’s were quickly published and distributed and there was a sense that she was addressing a wider public than solely these Members of Parliament who had sought audience with her at Richmond Palace.
After the verdict Mary was divested of her canopy of state that had been symbolic of her status as queen throughout her captivity. In a letter to Beaton, she related how, since she had refused to admit her guilt and ask repentance of Elizabeth, the English queen had ordered this dishonour, ‘to signify that I was a dead woman, deprived of the honours and dignity of a queen’.26 The following day Paulet offered to reinstate her canopy, explaining it was not Elizabeth but one of her council who had demanded its removal, but Mary refused. She had already replaced it with a crucifix. Mary’s enigmatic motto ‘In my end is my beginning’ had been embroidered on her cloth of state. Its removal symbolized the relinquishing of her temporal life as a queen in preparation for the eternal life as martyr and myth.
Mary explained to Mendoza her subsequent conversation with her jailers, who would be executioners, in which she argued for this new focus of her life:
‘It was a fine thing’, they said, ‘for me to make myself out a saint and martyr; but I should be neither, as I was to die for plotting the murder and deposition of their Queen.’ I replied that, ‘I was not so presumptuous as to pretend to honours of saint and martyr; but although they had power over my body, by the divine permission, they had none over my soul, nor could they prevent me from hoping that, by the mercy of God who died for me, my blood and life would be accepted as offerings freely made by me for the maintenance of His church.’27
Mary was determined on securing her spiritual reputation and personal salvation and her apparently serene self-satisfaction did not fail to irritate and disconcert Elizabeth. Just as she made much of her willingness to die for her faith, so Elizabeth was fond of declaring she would sacrifice her life for her people. At this time of danger averted and new perils to come her rhetoric was particularly resonant, bringing tears to the eyes of her loyal audience of parliamentary Lords and Commoners: ‘if by my death, other nations and kingdoms might truly say that this realm had attained an ever prosperous and flourishing estate, I would (I assure you) not desire to live, but gladly give my life to the end my death might procure you a better prince’.28 While Mary aimed for spiritual glory Elizabeth, always pragmatic and parental, sought more material insurance for her people: ‘I look beyond my lifetime to the welfare of my subjects and the security of my kingdom’29 was her vision of a more practical immortality.
To condemn to death a fellow monarch and defenceless neighbouring queen made for all kinds of uneasiness and outrage both within her country and without. The ruling nobility in Scotland preferred their alliance with Elizabeth to any sentimental attachment for Mary. Although most were sanguine about the prospective execution of the Queen of Scots, the people were not. They had once called her a whore and threatened to burn her, but her transgressions had been lost to memory. Her suffering, her unjust treatment, her enforced exile from their land and long captivity in the inhospitable heart of Scotland’s old enemy, was a source of raw emotion. She was born of the proud race descended from Robert the Bruce and had provided them with a good strong male heir to carry on that line. They were incensed at the idea that the English could claim a legal right to destroy her.
James VI, ambitious for himself, pragmatic and clever, was unmoved personally by his mother’s plight. By this time he was twenty-one years old and had known her only through letters and by repute. The discovery of the Babington Plot, he felt, justified keeping her in closer captivity, claiming dismissively ‘it was meet for her to meddle with nothing but prayer and serving of God’.30 Her sentencing to death made him take account, however, of the outrage of his people.
James sent the duplicitous Master of Gray* to Elizabeth to plead for mercy, pointing out all the arguments that already exercised her greatly: the damage to her reputation for justice and clemency; the solidarity of sex, status and blood between the queens, and concern for himself, for ‘what Straits and Hazzard of his Reputation among his own People he should be plunged, if any Violence be offered to his Mother’. The factor which most worried Elizabeth – that of the setting of dangerous precedent – was hammered home rather too heartily in James’s submission: ‘How strange and monstrous a thing it would be, to subject an absolute Prince to the Judgement of Subjects. How prodigious, if an absolute Prince should be made so dangerous a Precedent for the prophaning and vilifying her own and other Princes Diadems.’31 But while this public entreaty was not entirely welcome, Gray reputedly ‘buzzed into the Queen’s ear that Saying, Mortua non mordet, that is, A dead Woman biteth not’.32
Elizabeth was besieged with advice and threats on all sides. She knew she had long ago lost her good relations with Philip II of Spain but this meant her amicable alliances with France and Scotland were crucial for the security of her realm. Her isolation, and the sense of loneliness in making this, the most momentous decision of her life, ran through her speeches and letters of the time. Reliant as she was on her trusty Burghley, and affectionate Leicester, they did not appreciate her profound emotional attachment to the idea o
f the sacredness of kingship, the sense that the relationship with God, his king and their people was a mysterious and hierarchical compact. To violate that divine order was to profane it. Elizabeth was horrified that the responsibility fell to her alone. In turmoil herself, she had to respond to another emotional petition from her Parliament at the end of November. Her answering speech to them was full of the anguish and uncertainties of her position.
‘Neither hath my care been so much bent how to prolong [my life], as how to preserve both, which I am right sorry is made so hard – yea, so impossible. I am not so void of judgement as not to see my own peril; nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut my own throat … But this I do consider: that many a man would put his life in danger for the safeguard of a king. I do not say that so will I, but I pray you think that I have thought upon it.’33 This illustrated perfectly Elizabeth’s powerful sense of the inviolability of monarchy, that she should think it preferable to risk her own life than break that taboo. Trespassing on God’s territory in order to punish an anointed queen who, by definition, was above mere mortal intervention, filled her with dread.
From France, King Henri III sent his ambassador Bellièvre to plead for leniency. Elizabeth, pained, could only reply: ‘It is impossible to save my own life if I preserve that of the Queen of Scots, but if you ambassadors can point out any means whereby I may do it, consistently with my own security, I shall be greatly obliged to you, never having shed so many tears at the death of my father, of my brother King Edward, or my sister Mary, as I have done for this unfortunate affair.’34 Her official letter in January 1587 to Henri III, in response to his forceful arguments for clemency, revealed a more angry and imperious expression of her tension and fear: ‘My God! How could you be so unreasonable as to reproach the injured party, and to compass the death of an innocent one by allowing her to become the prey of a murderess? … that you should be angry at my saving my own life, seems to me the threat of an enemy, which I assure you, will never put me in fear, but is the shortest way to make me dispatch the cause of so much mischief.’35