Elizabeth's Women

by Tracy Borman

  Yet however great Elizabeth’s anger, and however much she might rant to her courtiers and ministers about her cousin’s treachery, she still shrank from deciding her fate. Only after intense pressure from Burghley and Walsingham did she agree, with considerable reluctance, to appoint a commission for Mary’s trial. This took place at Fotheringay Castle, Northamptonshire, in October 1586. Although Mary defended herself with skill and dignity, the verdict was never in question. Toward the end of the month, the trial was transferred to the Star Chamber in Westminster, and on October 25 the verdict was pronounced. Mary, Queen of Scots, was found guilty of conspiring toward “the hurt, death and destruction of the royal person of our sovereign lady the Queen.” Parliament was convened to decide upon the sentence, and on December 4 it was proclaimed that Mary should be put to death.

  Yet still it required Elizabeth’s sanction. No execution could go ahead unless she signed the warrant herself. And still she wavered. This was partly because of a justifiable concern that putting Mary to death would threaten England’s international security, for France or Spain might well launch a revenge attack. Mary herself had written to Philip II upon hearing of the commission’s verdict, urging him to avenge her death by invading England and taking the crown for himself. There was also Scotland to consider. Mary’s son had already let it be known that he would “no ways keep friendship if his mother’s life be touched.”24

  But aside from these diplomatic matters, there was another, more pressing concern—one that above all else made Elizabeth flinch from signing the warrant. Mary was no straightforward traitor: she was an anointed queen. She was also of Tudor blood. To put such a woman to death would set a shocking and dangerous precedent, not to mention plaguing Elizabeth’s conscience more than anything else she had done. “What will they now say that for the safety of her life a maiden Queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?” she lamented.25 Katherine and Mary Grey had been punished for their treachery, but they had at least absolved Elizabeth of guilt by dying of natural causes. The same had been true of Margaret Douglas. Mary, Queen of Scots, on the other hand, had been a constant thorn in Elizabeth’s side for almost thirty years, and the threat she posed to her security had increased tenfold after her flight to England. It would be too much to hope that if Elizabeth deferred her execution in favor of continued imprisonment, Mary would die at a convenient moment before causing any further trouble. She had already proved far too great a danger for that.

  There was another reason why Elizabeth found the idea of putting Mary to death so abhorrent. She had apparently finally grasped the point that her cousin had made so often about female solidarity. Although she had scoffed at this in her letter to Paulet, it apparently weighed increasingly upon her mind, especially after Mary referred to it in a letter she wrote in December, stressing “our sex in common.”26 Her councillors were evidently aware of this, for it was one of the main issues they tackled in a paper that set forth the necessity of having Mary executed. “What compassion is to be had of her who has transgressed the bounds of that modesty and meekness that her sex and quality prescribes … shall any difficulty be alleged in executing her that so heinously has gone about to procure the murdering of the Lord’s anointed, a lady, a Queen, a virgin?”27

  This tactic of praising Elizabeth’s virginity in contrast to Mary’s licentiousness showed just how far the two women’s roles had been reversed. Not so long before, Mary had been hailed as a shining example of womanhood; Elizabeth as an abomination. Yet, ultimately, while Mary had confirmed all the stereotypes about women’s incapacity to rule, Elizabeth had confounded them. Mary had proved to be a woman first, a queen second; Elizabeth had proved the opposite and had triumphed because of it. In the end, her virgin state had been widely accepted not as an anomaly but as a virtue, a symbol of the discipline and self-control that had so obviously been lacking in Mary’s character.

  No matter how persuasive her ministers’ arguments, they did little to ease Elizabeth’s dilemma. Perhaps the agony of her decision was intensified still further by the horror she still felt over her own mother’s execution. That she should condemn a kinswoman to such a death must have filled her with dread. This was undoubtedly the greatest crisis of her reign so far, and she almost broke down under the stress. There was no reprieve from her councillors, who plagued her daily—hourly, even—with demands for her cousin’s death. In November, while Elizabeth was seeking refuge at her favorite palace of Richmond, a parliamentary delegation arrived to put yet more pressure on her to conform to their wishes. Her response made it clear how tormented she was by the dilemma she faced. “Though my life hath been dangerously shot at,” she told them, “yet I protest there is nothing hath more grieved me, than that one not differing from me in sex, of like rank and degree, of the same stock, and most nearly allied to me in blood, hath fallen into so great a crime.” Referring to their calls for her to sanction Mary’s execution, she claimed: “I am so far from it that for mine own life I would not touch her,” and went on to utter what have become some of the most famous words in her oft-quoted speeches. “I assure you,” she told the astonished delegation, “if the case stood between her and myself only, if it had pleased God to have made us both milkmaids with pails on our arms, so that the matter should have rested between us two; and that I knew she did and would seek my destruction still, yet could I not consent to her death.” Dismissing her statesmen, she told them: “I must desire you to hold yourselves satisfied with this answer answerless.”28

  Elizabeth had made it clear that if Mary were to repent, then she would spare her life—something she claimed to wish “with all my heart.”29 Her cousin stubbornly refused to oblige and continued to insist upon her innocence. This effectively forced Elizabeth’s hand, for she knew that it was now a choice between Mary’s life and her own. “I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril; nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat.” Yet still she desperately sought a way to save both their lives, and lamented: “I am right sorry [this] is made so hard, yes, so impossible.”30

  Elizabeth’s decision was made yet more “impossible” by a long and impassioned letter that Mary wrote to her in December. Clearly trying to shock her cousin into sparing her life, Mary brought her face to face with the reality of ordering her execution. “When my enemies have slaked their black thirst for my innocent blood, you will permit my poor desolated servants altogether to carry away my corpse, to bury it in holy ground, with the other Queens of France, my predecessors, especially near the late queen, my mother.” She also made reference to Henry VII—“your grandfather and mine”—and begged that she might be permitted to send “a jewel and a last adieu to my son.”31

  The Earl of Leicester noted that the letter “wrought tears” from his royal mistress, who pleaded that the “timerousnes of her [own] sex and nature” made the dilemma she faced all the more agonizing. For all this show of womanly weakness, however, Elizabeth’s favorite rightly predicted that Mary’s letter “shall do no further [damage] herein.”32 Perhaps, after all, the Queen wanted to prove them wrong about women’s inability to rule and make it clear that she really did have the “heart and stomach of a king.” Although Elizabeth kept her councillors—and her cousin—waiting for a further month after receiving this letter, by the end of January she had apparently decided that death was the only option for Mary. Still shrinking from sanctioning her execution, she urged Paulet to “ease her of this burden” by secretly putting Mary to death with poison or some other means. This would absolve Elizabeth of responsibility—and also clear her of blame in the eyes of the world. Paulet was horrified at the suggestion and utterly refused to carry it out.

  With apparently no other option left to her, on February 1 Elizabeth finally signed her cousin’s death warrant. The controversy surrounding this action would tear her council apart and has been the subject of intense debate ever since. The central que
stion is whether Elizabeth, as she later claimed, signed the warrant but ordered her secretary William Davison not to issue it until she gave the order. Melville certainly believed that this was the case and noted in his memoirs that she had given Davison “express command” not to deliver it.33

  However, Davison’s own account, made during his incarceration in the Tower, casts doubt upon this theory. He described the occasion in detail, saying that he had brought the warrant to Elizabeth along with several other papers, and that she had signed it, apparently without a care. She had known full well what it was, however, for she had asked her secretary if he was sorry for it. He had replied that he was, but that it was necessary: “Which answere her highnes approving with a smiling countenance, passed from the matter, to aske me what ells I had to signe and theruppon offering unto her some other warrants & instructions touching her service, yt pleased her with the best disposition and willingnes that might bee to dispatch them all.” According to Davison, the Queen had then specifically ordered him to have the warrant sealed before giving it to the lord chancellor with a special order to “use it as secretly as might bee.” She had also told him to inform Walsingham that she had at last given in to pressure by him and others and ordered Mary’s execution, joking that “the greeife therof would goe neare (as she merrilie sayd) to kill him.”34

  The apparently blasé way in which the Queen had signed the warrant made Davison confident that she was not about to change her mind. Nevertheless, he waited two days before presenting it to her councillors. In the meantime, he received further proof of Elizabeth’s resolve, for the day after signing the warrant, she told him that she had been troubled with a dream that the “Scottish Queene” had been executed. She had apparently “bin soe greatly moved with the newes” that she had railed against Davison in her dream with such “passion shee could have done I wott [know] not what.” However, she told all this to her secretary “in a pleasant and smyling manner,” and when he asked her what it meant and “whither having proceeded thus farre, shee had not a full and resolute meaning to goe through with the sayd execution according to her warrant,” she confirmed, “with a solemne oath in some vehemencye” that she had no regrets.35

  The following day, Davison presented the warrant to a group of councillors. They agreed that it should be implemented straightaway, and it was duly dispatched to Fotheringay. Upon receiving it, Paulet, no doubt relieved at having received no further orders to have Mary secretly assassinated, immediately set about making preparations for the execution. Mary herself took the news of her fate calmly, with “a stable and stedfast countenance,” determined to set herself up as a Catholic martyr by declaring that she was being put to death for her faith, rather than for any treachery. She spent the night before her execution praying devoutly, a crucifix in her hand, and consoled her weeping ladies by telling them “how signal a mercy God was showing her in rescuing her from the power of so bad a woman as the queen of England.”36

  On the morning of February 8, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, mounted the scaffold in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. She was barely recognizable from the beautiful woman who had so beguiled the world. An eyewitness described her as: “round shoulder’d, of face fat and broad, double chinned and hazel eyed; borrowed hair.”37 But still she had that presence and enigma that drew all eyes to her. She was ever one for theatrical gestures: when her ladies took off her outer gown, it revealed an underdress of scarlet, the color of martyrs. She then proclaimed her status as an anointed queen and, one last time, stressed the responsibilities that she shared with her cousin as a fellow sovereign, woman, and “sister.” Turning to her executioner, she pardoned him and told him she was “glad that the end of all her sorrowes was so neare.” She also told her women to cease their “whininge and weepinge,” urging them instead “to thanke God for resolutenes.”

  When Mary lowered her head onto the block and gave the signal that she was ready for death, the executioner “struck at her neck” with his axe, but missed and instead sliced into the side of her face. “Lord Jesus, receive my soul!” Mary exclaimed, at which the executioner again hacked at her neck but still did not sever it. It was only with the third blow that Mary’s head finally fell upon the scaffold. When the executioner stooped to pick it up, it came away in his hands, and he was left holding only her wig. In the increasingly macabre farce, Mary’s little dog then scurried from where he had been hiding under her dress and “laid itself down betwixt her head and body, and being besmeared with her blood, was caused to be washed, as were other things whereon any blood was.”38

  Mary’s desire to set herself up as a martyr had succeeded. As news of her execution spread across Europe, she was portrayed as a brave Catholic princess who had died at the hands of that wicked heretic the Queen of England. One account referred to her as “that sweet saint and martyr,” while another observed: “She finished her happy and blessed martyrdom, to the comfort of all true Catholics, and to the shame and confusion of all heretics.” Meanwhile, a Spanish envoy reported: “Our Lord will have taken [Mary] into heaven, seeing that she died a martyr.”39

  When the news reached the court in London, Lord Burghley ordered that it should be concealed from the Queen until the evening. Accompanied by Sir Christopher Hatton, vice chamberlain of the council, he then went to seek out his royal mistress, no doubt apprehensive about what her reaction would be. Upon being told that her cousin had been executed, Elizabeth was apparently at first not able to comprehend it. “Her words failed her,” claimed William Camden. “She was in a manner astonished.”40 She remained that way for the rest of the evening, giving no indication of the storm that was about to come. The next morning, she flew into a rage so fierce that her councillors had never seen the like. One observer tremblingly noted that she was in such “heate and passion” that she screamed out against the execution “as a thing she never commanded or intended.” She then set about “casting the burthen generallye uppon them all,” but, as Davison lamented, “chiefly upon my shoulders.”41

  Elizabeth’s storms usually passed as swiftly as they had arrived. This one did not. As the days passed, it seemed only to grow in intensity, and in her near-hysterical fury, she threatened to throw all her councillors in the Tower for such blatant defiance of her orders. In the meantime, she “commanded them out of her sight.”42 Even her closest adviser, Lord Burghley, was said to be in “deep disgrace” for many weeks after the event. Ten of the offending councillors were ordered to appear before the lord chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in order to justify their actions. It was Davison who bore the brunt of the Queen’s rage. Determined to create a scapegoat for the whole affair, Elizabeth stripped him of his office, sent him to the Tower, and subjected him to a full interrogation by the Star Chamber. He was subsequently fined £10,000, a sum far beyond his means, and ordered to stay in prison for as long as Her Majesty pleased. While few people believed that he was truly to blame, a rash of propaganda was put forward casting him as the villain.43

  As well as lambasting Davison and her other councillors, Elizabeth also effected a show of extreme sorrow at the death of her cousin. Her first biographer noted: “She gave her selfe over to griefe, putting her selfe into mourning weedes, and shedding abundance of teares.” An ambassador at court concurred that she had “taken to her bed owing to the great grief she suffered through this untoward event.”44 Elizabeth’s “great grief” was viewed with some skepticism by her enemies abroad. Philip II declared: “It is very fine for the Queen of England now to give out that it was done without her wish, the contrary being so clearly the case.”45 Indeed, her show of anguish may have been largely for the benefit of such potentates: One of the reasons why she had held back from ordering the execution for so long was because she feared an international backlash. In the immediate aftermath of Mary’s death, it seemed that her fears were justified. The English ambassador in Paris noted with some alarm: “Truly I find all men here in a fury, and all that love no
t her Majesty in a great hope to build some great harm to her upon it.” He added that the French king “took it very evil” when he heard the news.46

  Worse was expected from James VI, for quite apart from the political implications, it was his mother who had been executed. It was reported that he took her death “very heavily.”47 Elizabeth wrote an impassioned letter to him, full of grief at Mary’s execution and putting the blame squarely upon others. “I would you knew, though felt not, the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident which, far contrary to my meaning, has befallen,” she wrote. “I beseech you that as God and many more know how innocent I am in this case.”48 James was all too easily appeased. Shortly after receiving this letter, it was reported that if the Queen persisted in declaring her innocence, “the King shall love her and honour her before all other princes.” He went on to publicly excuse her of all blame in “the late execution of his mother, and layeth the same upon her Council.” The swiftness with which James forgave Elizabeth sparked a great deal of criticism. Melville scornfully remarked that “the blood was already fallen from his Majesty’s heart.” By contrast, this news of his pardon “did wonderfully content her Majesty, who desireth nothing more than to have it generally conceived that she had least part in the action.”49

  It had certainly been politically expedient for Elizabeth to deny any involvement in Mary’s death, but the near hysteria of her reaction suggests that she was more than just a consummate actress. At least some of the fury she directed against her hapless councillors may have been inspired by resentment at the fact that, for the first time in her reign, they had forced her into making a decision. Until then, she had always succeeded in giving them “answers answerless” and procrastinating just long enough for the issue at hand to be resolved or superseded by another, more pressing, concern. But with Mary, she had been placed under relentless pressure, not just in the weeks following her trial and sentence, but throughout the nineteen years of her imprisonment. As Elizabeth herself told her councillors accusingly at the time: “You have laid a hard hand on me.”50 If she did not really believe that they had issued the warrant unlawfully, then she did blame them—indirectly—for Mary’s death. Had she been left to her own devices, she would undoubtedly have settled upon more of a compromise, dangerous though that might have been to her own security. As it was, she had been forced into taking a course of action that would plague her for the rest of her life. It was the first occasion upon which she—a female sovereign—had allowed herself to be bullied by her male councillors. She resolved that it would never happen again.