CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The spring is past and yet it is not sprung;
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves be green;
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young;
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun;
And now I live and now my life is done.
Chidiock Tichborne, one of the Babington conspirators;
written while in the Tower of London, awaiting death
The harsh character of Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary’s new jailer, was apparent from his very first action. This was to take down from above her head and chair that royal cloth of state by which she set such store, since it constituted a proof of her queenship. Paulet’s reasoning was that as the cloth of state had never been officially allowed, it must be removed, however long it had been there. Mary first wept and protested vigorously, then retired to her chamber in a mood of great offence; finally she secured the return of the cloth. The incident was typical of the man, who believed profoundly in the letter of the law: ‘There is no other way to do good to this people than to begin roundly with them … whatsoever liberty or anything else is once granted unto them cannot be drawn back again without great exclamation,’ he wrote to London.1 Paulet came of a West Country family, and his father had been the governor of Jersey. He himself had been English ambassador to the French court for three years, but had otherwise not enjoyed a particularly distinguished career; he was certainly not of the high rank of a Shrewsbury, or a diplomat of great age and experience such as Sir Ralph Sadler, whom he replaced. But he had been specially selected by Walsingham for the task in hand, because, as all his contemporaries agreed, he was not only a prominent Puritan but also a mortal enemy of the queen of Scots and all she stood for. Walsingham understood his man; Paulet was quite immune to the charms of the queen of Scots and, unlike Knollys and even Cecil, found her irritating and even tiresome as a character. Since honour and loyalty were his gods, and these Mary Stuart seemed to offend with every action, Paulet’s Puritan conscience allowed him to hate her in advance. When they actually met, Paulet was able to transform charms into wiles in his own mind; like Knox so many years before, he disliked his captive all the more for her possible attractions.
Paulet’s instructions from London were clear: Mary’s imprisonment was to be transformed into the strictest possible confinement. She was not even to be allowed to take the air, that terrible deprivation which she dreaded so much, ‘for that heretofore under colour of giving alms and other extraordinary courses used by her, she hath won the hearts of the people that habit about those places where she hath heretofore lain …’.2 In particular her sources of untapped private letters and messages were to be stopped once and for all; the only letters she was to be allowed to receive were those from the French ambassador in London – and these Paulet read in any case and stopped at will, as he thought proper. At no point in her captivity so far had Mary been cut off so completely. Her correspondence with Beaton, her ambassador in Paris, Morgan, Paget and her other foreign agents, had depended on a secret pipeline of letters, without which no foreign plotting could have taken place. During the whole of 1585, under the orders of the Elizabethan government, this pipeline was shut off, and Mary was totally deprived of the news she wanted so much.
Paulet achieved this isolation – which had a calculated position in Walsingham’s scheme for Mary Stuart’s downfall – by the most rigorous supervision of the Scottish queen’s domestic arrangements. There were naturally to be no more pleasant sojourns at Buxton; on her last visit in the summer of 1584, still under the aegis of Shrewsbury, Mary had some premonition of this, for she wrote with a diamond on a window-pane at the springs:
Buxtona, quae calida celebriris nomine Lymphae
Forte mihi post hac non adeunda, Vale*
Mary complained furiously to Elizabeth of Paulet’s demeanour: she described him as being more fit to act as the jailer of a common criminal than of a crowned queen. But Elizabeth merely replied smoothly that Mary had often professed herself ready to accept whatever served Elizabeth best; in which case she would surely accept Paulet.3 In the meantime conditions under Paulet were very different from the easy days under Shrewsbury. Not only was Mary herself not allowed to ride abroad but Mary’s coachman Sharp was not allowed to ride out without permission, and then he had to be accompanied. He was also deprived of the privilege of dining with Paulet’s servants, as he had done with Sadler’s. Paulet also went at great lengths into the difficult and, to him, vexatious subject of the royal laundresses. These elusive maidens, under the pretext of carrying out their work, had carried on a merry trade of message-bearing; what was more, two of them turned out to be the coachman Sharp’s sister and sister-in-law. Paulet’s puritanical brow furrowed over the subject of the laundresses, and at one point, despairing of finding co-operation in their midst, thought of importing some more malleable creatures from Somerset. It was an easier matter to prohibit all Mary’s servants from walking on the thick walls of Tutbury (where they could wave, it was thought, in an enlightening manner, to passers-by). Another domestic change – of significance for the future – was that the brewer of beer and ale for the castle was installed at nearby Burton, with his family.†
Mary’s little private charities in which she had delighted, and by which she endeared herself to the local people, were sternly quelled by Paulet. His crushing comment – more applicable perhaps to the modern welfare state than to the Elizabethan policy – was that the laws of the realm had provided so carefully for the relief of the poor that no one could want for anything except through their own ‘lewdness’ or the negligence of the officers of several parishes. Mary said plaintively that she was ill in body or in mind, that she depended on the prayers of the poor to support her, and that it was barbarous to restrain her, but she did not get her way. Mary had a habit of presenting cloth to the poor on Maundy Thursday – in 1585 forty-two girls received 1¼ yards of woollen cloth and eighteen little boys, specified to be out of respect for her own son, were similarly endowed. Money was also given to the poor at Tutbury town. Paulet was furious to learn of such goings-on and demanded that they should cease; he said that such unpleasant practices might not be new to Mary, but they were certainly new to him.
In June there was further trouble over the arrangements for feeding Mary’s horses and Paulet grumbled that it was all due to the fact that the Cavendishes had all become far too friendly with the queen over the years. Paulet also tried to prevent Mary from making any personal payments to the Tutbury servants, since this would give her an opportunity of secretly bribing them. As a result, his own accounts underwent a financial crisis, augmented by the rocketing food prices in England at the time. ‘This Queen’s servants are always craving, and have no pity at all on English purses,’ wrote Paulet angrily.5 There was indeed apparently no end to the lack of consideration Mary’s servants were prepared to show: when Bastian’s wife Christina gave birth to a child, Paulet had to deal with the problem of a midwife, who might so easily try to slip secret messages in or out. Furthermore, the queen’s waiting-woman, Barbara Mowbray,* who had married Gilbert Curle in October 1585 (Paulet suspected they had been married by a priest disguised as one of Mary’s French ‘readers’), showed every sign of being about to produce a child herself.
Such domestic worries harried Paulet. But he stuck manfully to his duties, and executed them with as much if not more strictness than the government requested. How hopelessly optimistic then was Thomas Morgan’s suggestion from the safety of Paris that Mary should try to bribe Paulet to accord her further liberty, by hinting that on her liberation he would be given virtual autonomy in Jersey where he was hereditary governor; this was not at all the stuff of which Paulet was made. This renewed sojourn at damp and draughty Tutbury thoroughly broke down Queen Mary’s system, and her pleas for a change of air grew pitiful, as she wrote of the wind which whistled through the thin wooden walls into every corner of her chamber. Yet it is clear from Paulet’s letter-books that he felt no sympathy with her ill-health, and seems to have regarded it as just retribution for her sins. In his attitude to her religious beliefs, he showed, to put it at its kindest, the total incomprehension of the bigot, who can see nothing fine or even sincere in the convictions of those with whom they do not agree; and some of his actions or attempted actions on the subject even verged on the sadistic, as when he tried to burn a packet sent to Mary from Chérelles in London because it was full of ‘abominable trash’ – including rosaries, pictures in silk marked with the words Agnus Dei and other comparatively harmless by-products of the Catholic religion. All in all, Paulet may be said to have justified Mary’s own description of him as ‘one of the strangest and most farouche men she had ever known’.6
However, in the autumn of 1585 it was the protests of the French court to Elizabeth, rather than the compassion of Paulet, which led to the search for a new prison for Mary Stuart. Not only was Mary’s health itself weakened, but the famous middens of Tutbury were stinking to high heaven. Various Staffordshire residences were proposed, including Tixall, the home of Sir Walter Aston. But Sir Walter was a magistrate, and as it was by no means considered an honour to have a house chosen as a royal prison – rather the reverse – Paulet recommended against it, on the grounds that Aston was one of the few loyal men in ‘this infected shire’ and it would be a pity to forfeit his affections.7 Chillington, home of the Gifford family, was well furnished but lacked brewhouses; on the other hand Beaudesert, the Paget home, lacked furniture. Burton was too near a river, and Sir Thomas Gerard’s house (which Mary favoured) too small. In the end the lot fell upon Chartley Hall, an Elizabethan manor-house belonging to the young earl of Essex, with a large moat round it, which made it suitable for security reasons. However, at this point the young Essex protested violently against his mansion being used for this dishonourable purpose. Chartley had certainly been the scene of more chivalresque occasions: Queen Elizabeth herself had visited it during a round of summer visits with Leicester, and coming on from the famous festival of Kenilworth, had been entertained there by Lettice, Lady Essex. Chartley had romantic associations also, for it was there that Philip Sidney had first glimpsed Essex’s sister, the thirteen-year-old Penelope Devereux, the inspiration of his muse, the Stella of his sonnets. Now Essex feared that all the trees on his estates would be cut down to warm the queen of Scots, and he also, more neurotically – if less plausibly – dreaded the damage she might do to the house deliberately, because she had hated his father (since the days when he had commanded the troops which guarded her at Tutbury), and was now said to have transferred this dislike to him.
Essex’s protests managed to delay Mary’s departure for Chartley throughout the autumn; but Paulet himself greatly approved of the change, especially as the amount of water round the house meant that the over-spirited laundresses would have less excuse for passing in and out of the gates as they went about their work. On Christmas Eve the journey was finally made. On arrival Mary found herself so reduced in health that she fell severely ill, and even Paulet found himself ‘for charity’s sake’ bound to pass on her complaints about her bed which she said was ‘stained and ill-flavoured’; he recommended the down bed which she herself requested.8 On this occasion Mary was obliged to keep to her bed for more than four weeks, and it was towards the end of March, eight or nine weeks later, before she felt any real improvement from the ‘painful defluxions’ which plagued her. It was scarcely to be wondered at that her own servants were gravely worried for her, and feared that the move from Tutbury might have come too late to save her.
While considerations of the queen’s health appeared to engross the Chartley household, deep and very different currents were swirling beneath the surface of its domestic pattern. Walsingham took the opportunity of the move from Tutbury to Chartley to mount a new stage in his campaign to incriminate the queen of Scots. His aim was of course to provide England – and Elizabeth – with sufficient evidence to prove once and for all that it was too dangerous to keep Mary alive. Already the bond of Association passed through Parliament the previous year meant that a plot had only to be made in favour of the queen of Scots – rather than by her – and she would by English law merit the death penalty. Now Walsingham, through his many and devious agents, set about enmeshing Mary in two separate conspiracies against Elizabeth, which together made up the complicated and in part bogus machinations which are known as the Babington plot.
These machinations had two separate strands. In the first place there was the plot – whether genuine or not – to assassinate the English queen. Secondly there was the plot to rescue the Scottish queen from captivity. In both cases, or in any combination of these two plans, foreign aid in the shape of a foreign invasion of England was absolutely essential for success: although Queen Elizabeth might fall a victim of the assassin’s dagger, unless these assassins had sufficient resources to rescue Queen Mary immediately, they might find that by the time they reached her place of imprisonment, their candidate for the English throne had either been killed by her captors or else spirited away. In any case the English Catholics could not carry through such a revolution alone. This was a point which was thoroughly appreciated not only by all the level-headed conspirators, but also pre-eminently by Mary Queen of Scots herself, who never stopped stressing the danger to her personally of an amateur plan (as she had done many years before when Gerard and the Stanleys had thought of rescuing her). It was one of Walsingham’s most subtle moves to make his agents at all points exaggerate the possibility of this foreign aid, generally supposed to be Spanish. In this way the English conspirators were led to believe that a Spanish invasion was certain, and so travelled even further along the road towards fruition of their plans. The Catholic parties abroad were on the other hand given the impression that the plans and numbers of possible English Catholic insurgents were far more stabilized and numerous than in fact they were. Although Mary, from her prison, emphasized in every letter that a Spanish invasion was a sine qua non of a successful rescue, these constant pleas in her letters were quite ineffective compared to the havoc wrought among the Catholic conspirators by the fact that so many of their number were actually renegades, secretly in the pay of the English government.
One false agent in a chain of correspondence can cast a completely different slant on a whole subject: the preliminaries of the Babington plot involved not only Charles Paget and Thomas Morgan, but also a new Walsingham double-agent – Gilbert Gifford – at their very heart. The assassination plot against Elizabeth, which is at first sight a dastardly conspiracy to kill the English queen, changes character as it becomes clear that much of the plot consisted of mere provocation by which Walsingham hoped to entangle Mary. The first stages of the intrigue which ended in Mary’s downfall did not in fact involve Babington and his associates at all, but merely the protagonists of this earlier and dubious assassination plot. These were Gilbert Gifford, his cousin George Gifford, a failed priest of simple nature who was much under Gilbert’s influence named John Savage, and a more lively ordained priest, Ballard, who was in close touch with Thomas Morgan, and who had come to believe in his own political mission to overthrow Elizabeth. The key figure in these early plottings was Gilbert Gifford. He came from an ancient, still Catholic family whose main seat was at Chillington in Staffordshire; his cousin George came from a Hampshire branch of the same family, but in neither case was the possession of an honourable name any guarantee of integrity. Gilbert Gifford indeed seems to have had that peculiar subtle turn of mind which actually enjoys spying for spying’s sake; he had gone abroad as a Catholic in 1577, had joined the English college at Rome to train as a priest, been expelled, and then roamed Europe before being innocently received back into the fold by Dr William Allen, head of the English College at Rheims. With his talents – not only was he highly intelligent but also an excellent linguist – he knew how to make a strong impression on his friends so that he easily drew over the weaker characters to his way of thinking, however tortuous. By the time he landed in England in December 1585, he had become thoroughly involved in the detailed matters of Mary’s correspondence abroad, and let into the secret of all the new conspiracies to free her. On landing, however, he was apprehended and taken before Walsingham, and it was at this point that the details of their secret compact were arranged. It is not necessary to suppose that Walsingham had planned the meeting in advance; as one historian has put it, the probabilities seem to be that the opportunity suggested the expedient.9
The first time it was known by Mary’s supporters that some change in her isolated and news-deprived condition might be expected was when this same Gifford presented himself at the French embassy. The new ambassador who had replaced Castelnau de Mauvissière was Guillaume de l’Aubespine, baron de Châteauneuf; but Gifford was actually seen by Cordaillot, a secretary at the embassy. The secret letters from Morgan which could no longer be smuggled into the Scottish queen had been piling up at the embassy for the whole year. Now Gifford offered to get packets to Mary, saying that no one in Staffordshire was likely to recognize him, not even his father or his sister, since he had been abroad for so long; as he still looked strangely young, his real identity would remain unsuspected. This story hardly matched with his earlier offer to make a perfectly legitimate visit to Staffordshire on the excuse of seeing his father, and according to Châteauneuf’s later statement,10 the French embassy themselves never totally trusted Gifford, especially when he turned out to be lodging in London with Thomas Phelippes, one of Walsingham’s chief agents, and an expert decipherer. Nevertheless, whatever Châteauneuf’s inner suspicions, the die was cast. Thomas Morgan’s letters were entrusted to Gifford. On 16th January, 1586, to her unimaginable joy, Mary Stuart received the first secret communication she had had for over a year. Not only that, but she was informed that the same strange pipeline by which the packet had come – the local brewer – could be used to smuggle out her own notes.
The secret battle for the incrimination of the Scottish queen was now engaged. Mary was aware that Phelippes, Walsingham’s arch agent, had already paid a visit to Chartley to see Paulet, for she had passed some disparaging remarks on his character and his personal appearance; unfortunately she did not realize that the object of Phelippes’ visit had been to set up the exact workings of the snare in which she was to be trapped. Mary was intoxicated by the pleasure of renewed communications. As she wrote her first outward messages, to be handed to the agreeable brewer as she had been directed, she little realized that the treacherous Gifford still lurked in nearby Burton. The method by which Mary believed she contacted the outside world, but in fact merely signalled her private thoughts and schemes directly to her jailer Paulet at Chartley and her enemy Walsingham in London, was as follows:11 Mary’s secretary Nau first took down her letters, according to the queen’s directions and with the help of his own notes made along the way, and then put them into code. Next he would wrap the letters securely in a leather packet and hand them privately to the Cartley brewer. The packet was then slipped through a corked tube in the bung of the cask. The merry brewer – ‘the honest fellow’ as Paulet sarcastically termed him – then drove away, back to Burton. Here he handed the packet to Gifford, and the same evening Gifford would bring the packet secretly back to Chartley and Paulet. If Phelippes was still at Chartley then the message was opened and deciphered on the spot, and the decipher sent forward to Walsingham in London; otherwise the original packet was sent by express riders to London and the deciphering done by Phelippes there. The code set up by the conspirators was not an especially subtle one, involving the use of a mixture of Greek letters, numbers and other symbols for the letters of the alphabet and common words. But even if it had been of a more complicated nature, the deciphering would still not have been a very arduous task: at the opening of her new communications, this particular code had been specially set up for the future between Mary and her correspondents, and passed on to them through the post; Walsingham had thus merely to note it down, and any of its variations, as and when they were established.
Once the deciphering was achieved, the packet was resealed: this was the province of Arthur Gregory, an expert in this individual art. Then Gilbert Gifford rode to London, taking the packet with him, and handed it over to the French embassy, as had been the queen’s original intention. From here it went to Paris, enjoying diplomatic immunity at the ports, and was in Morgan’s hands in mid-March. The journey had thus taken two months, but of course such delays were only too easy to explain, since all parties agreed on the need for extreme secrecy. Nor was the return journey any problem: the process was merely reversed. Mary received her secret post via the brewer as before, in a small packet containing a covering note from Gifford, who had brought it down from London. By the time any message from France was received by Mary, therefore, it had been deciphered, scanned and its contents well and truly noted by Walsingham.
In the spring of 1586 all those concerned in the conspiracy, from whatever angle, felt something like happiness. Mary, in blissful unconsciousness of being betrayed, revelled in the new sap flowing through her rescue schemes. Her secretary Nau even cast the ‘honest fellow’ in the role of Cupid: he had fallen in love with Mary’s former bedfellow Bess Pierrepoint, Bess of Hardwicke’s granddaughter by the marriage of her daughter Frances Cavendish to Sir Henry Pierrepoint. In this case propinquity had not led to love, or if it had, it was on Nau’s side only. Nau’s courtship of Bess led to an unfortunate coolness between Mary and her secretary at this critical moment. Mary’s dearest ‘mignonne’, so charming as a child, had grown up into a proud and rather unattractive young woman, who had inherited some of her grandmother’s trouble-making nature. Despite the approval of Sir Henry, she was disdainful of the match with the voluble secretary, and enlisted Mary in her intrigues to get herself removed to court into Elizabeth’s service.*Nau, however, used the secret pipeline to forward his marriage schemes.
Gifford enjoyed the luxurious god-like superiority of the spy, who can observe the whole battlefield from above. Paulet had the grim satisfaction of watching this woman he had never for a moment trusted reveal herself to be every bit as deceitful as he had suspected. As for the brewer, he was happy enough, since he was being paid twice over, once by Mary, and once by Paulet; furthermore, he thoroughly understood his own value, for what was Paulet’s indignation when, despite the largesse inherent in the situation, the ‘honest fellow’ actually demanded a rise in his wages. Paulet’s whole instinct was against employing so many people, especially people of such gross calibre – ‘I had learned not to trust two where it sufficed to trust one,’ he wrote.12 But even Paulet had to admit that the harsh conditions to which Mary had previously been subjected had led her to leap joyously at any opportunity for correspondence: this, coupled with the need for secrecy which prevented Mary’s side from making any effective double check on their arrangements, combined to make the operation virtually foolproof.†
It was at this point that the original and largely spurious assassination plot of the Giffords, Ballard and Savage was joined by the quite different conspiracy of a number of young English Catholic gentlemen, under the leadership of Anthony Babington. These young men showed a very different attitude to the imprisoned queen of Scots from that of the previous generation: indeed the Babington plot may perhaps be regarded as the first manifestation of that romantic approach to the beleaguered Stuart dynasty which was afterwards to play such a part in British history. After all, Mary Stuart, although always a seductive figure to those who knew her personally, had often been judged extremely harshly by those who did not know her. Her domestic policy in Scotland in the 1560s could by no stretch of the imagination be inscribed as pro-Catholic. The previous Pope, Pius V, in particular, had gone out of his way to show that he disapproved of her marriage to Bothwell – a Protestant ceremony quite apart from its scandalous genesis – and had made it clear that the promulgation of the bull Regnans in Excelsis was intended in origin to safeguard the spiritual welfare of English Catholics, rather than advance the cause of Mary Queen of Scots.
But by 1577 the attitude of the papacy had signally changed: Pope Gregory XIII wrote in August of that year rejoicing that calamity had taught Mary patience, approving of her new virtue, and believing that God would soon requite it with eternal glory.13 As Pope Gregory bid his much-tried daughter to set great store by faith, hope and charity, he struck a very different note from Pope Pius. The attitude of Europe underwent an equal transformation: increasingly in the Catholic literature on the Continent, Mary came to symbolize the martyrdom of the Catholic faith in England. Gone indeed were the days when she had represented the spirit of religious compromise in Scotland. Mary’s Catholic apologists were already at work long before her death. Adam Blackwood, whose dramatically pro-Marian account of her execution, Martyre de la Royne d’Ecosse, was later to become a classic in this field, published De Regibus Apologia in 1581; in this work he defended Mary against the attacks of heretics, who, he maintained, had no right to attack kings at all. Towards the end of the 1570s, lives of Catholic martyrs, brought out in answer to Foxe’s Protestant martyrs, began to include the name of Mary, now considered to be a Catholic martyr in her English (Protestant) prison. Another Marian martryologist, Nicholas Sanders, was also at work in the 1570s, making such fanciful claims as that Mary had deliberately refused the English throne for the sake of the Catholic faith. The Act of Association in 1584 increased the spate. Mary, who had begun life as a beautiful young goddess of the French imagination, had progressed to become a controversial if exotic queen of Scotland, now became identified with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.14
English minds were not immune to the transformation. By 1586 a whole generation had grown up in England since those far-off days at Kirk o’Field and the shameful, hasty Bothwell marriage: to these young men Mary was a Catholic princess held in an English Protestant tower.15 To them it was Elizabeth who was the monstrous dragon who held Mary in thrall. These young men who dreamed their dreams were headed by Sir Anthony Babington: the quality of his romantic fancies can be seen in the high-flown language of his letters to the queen of Scots. Babington was a Catholic squire from Dethick, in Derbyshire: now twenty-five, he had been born about the time Mary returned to Scotland; he formed part of that Catholic Midlands society which included families like the Pagets (with whom he was on familiar visiting terms).16 As a boy he had actually been a page to Shrewsbury, when the latter was Queen Mary’s jailer, so that he had had ample opportunity to conceive a quixotic admiration for her. In 1580 he went to France and here became involved with Thomas Morgan, his schemes and his correspondence. Babington was rich – his family had benefited from two marriages to heiresses – and his income came to over £1000 a year in Elizabethan money; this put him in a position to entertain and act the host to his friends in a way which could back up any ideas he wanted to inculcate into them. Perhaps this fact was partly responsible for the influence he exercised over his immediate circle; or else Babington was one of those unlucky people who attract others to them by force of personality without possessing the other sterner attributes of leadership. In any case Babington, while admired and looked up to by his cronies, Chidiock Tichborne, Tilney and the rest, also had a strong streak of the dreamer in his nature, which made him a dangerous plotter with whom to be involved. In addition, when his character came to be tested in the crucible of an Elizabethan interrogation he lacked the necessary strength to withstand the terrible trial of pain.
Yet Babington in early 1586 was above all attractive and gay: Father William Weston gave the contemporary estimate of him – how he had ‘enchanting manners and wit’, he was well-read, well-travelled, good-looking with a quick intelligence, apart from his considerable wealth. Weston also commented on the appeal he exercised over his contemporaries: ‘When in London he drew to himself by the force of his exceptional charm and personality many young Catholic gentlemen of his own standing, gallant, adventurous and daring in defence of the Catholic faith in its day of stress; and ready for any arduous enterprise whatsoever that might advance the common Catholic cause.’17 It was Babington at the head of these men who concocted a second plan to rescue the queen of Scots, to be distinguished from the foreign-based plots of Ballard, the Giffords and Savage. Mendoza, the former Spanish ambassador to London, now in Paris, gave lavish promises of foreign aid; Ballard returned to England, contacted Babington and told him further wild tales of foreign armies on their way. Babington and his companions decided to rescue Mary from her prison, topple Elizabeth from her throne and place Mary on it.
These two separate plots now became entangled with each other, although the two sets of conspirators did not meet until comparatively late in the summer. In the meantime Mary received a mass of old correspondence which had been piling up in the French embassy by the secret brewer’s route, throughout March, April and May. The connection with Babington did not actually arise until Mary’s former emissary, Fontenay, who was Nau’s brother-in-law, wrote to Mary telling her that there was a dispatch for her from Scotland which was now lodged at the house of Sir Anthony Babington in London. At the same moment Mary received from Morgan in Paris a letter which officially approved Babington as a contact.18 Finding Babington independently approved from two sources, Mary now wrote off to Babington herself on 25th June, her first letter in this direction. It was short and to the point: ‘I have understood that upon the ceasing of our intelligence, there were addressed unto you from France and Scotland some packets for me. I pray you, if any have come to your hands, and be yet in place to deliver unto the bearer thereof who will make them be safely conveyed to me.’ This communication was duly put into the beer keg with the somewhat imprecise address of ‘Master Anthony Babington, dwelling most in Derbyshire at a house of his own within two miles of Wingfield, as I doubt not you know for that in this shire he hath many friends and kinsmen.’19
This brief and practical letter was duly read and noted by Walsingham and his agents. It finally reached Babington on 6th July. In reply, spurred on by Ballard and Gifford, he composed an extremely long letter which was neither brief nor practical, and under no circumstances could be considered discreet;* in short, as he himself put it, ‘I writ unto her touching every particular of this plot’.20 The main points of the conspiracy as outlined by Babington were as follows: first an invasion from abroad, of sufficient strength to ensure success; secondly, the invaders to be joined by ‘a strong party at every place’ of English Catholic sympathizers; thirdly, the deliverance of Mary; fourthly, ‘the dispatch of the usurping Competitor’, as Babington put it, ‘for the effectuating of all which it may please your Excellency [Mary] to rely upon my service’. He supplied Mary with details of each stage of the programme; the ‘dispatch of the usurping Competitor’ (Queen Elizabeth), for example, was to be accomplished by six noble gentlemen among Babington’s own friends. Mary was to be extracted from prison by Babington himself with ten of his other friends, at the head of a hundred followers. Babington concluded by hoping that he might assure his conspirators that in the event of the plot proving successful, they would be duly rewarded by Mary’s generosity and bounty.
Mary received this communication on 14th July, by which time of course it had been thoroughly scrutinized by Walsingham, and every detail of the plot was as well-known to the Elizabethan government as to Mary herself. It was Mary’s reaction which was crucial: for although she was already doomed by the terms of the Act of Association, it would have been far more difficult for Walsingham to work up Elizabeth’s odium against her if Mary had shown the Babingtons the cool reception she had displayed to other would-be rescuers in the past. While Mary pondered, she merely acknowledged receipt of Babington’s plan. She asked for Nau’s advice: Nau advised her to leave the letter unanswered as she had done before with similar offers. The English gloatingly attended her reply: ‘We await her very heart in the next,’ commented Phelippes. Finally on 17th July she wrote back to Babington an extremely long, full letter in principle approving his schemes.21 Like the other letters of the secret correspondence, it was composed by Mary in French, the language which still came most naturally to her, but then drafted by Nau and Curle in English, before being translated into cipher and dispatched into the brewer’s pipeline.
Babington in his letter had talked of the killing of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no doubt but that Mary in her reply took this prospect briefly into consideration, weighed it against the prospect of her own liberty, and did not gainsay it. From first to last, in this letter, she quite understandably viewed the matter from her own point of view, but when she wrote, ‘Orders must be given that when their design has been carried out I can be quant et quant got out of here,’ it was clear to the recipients of her letters – as it was to Walsingham – that the design of which she wrote and thus tacitly accepted was that same design of which they too had written, the assassination of the English queen. Throughout her own letter, Mary put all her emphasis on the practical details involved: the conspirators must have horsemen always with them to let her, Mary, know immediately that the deed had been done; otherwise, as no definite date had yet been fixed, Paulet might receive the news first and either transport her to another prison, or fortify the house successfully against her rescue; for the same reason, the conspirators must also take care to stop the progress of the ordinary posts.
Throughout the letter Mary took care to emphasize the terrible consequences to her personally should the plot explode prematurely and fail: the best that could happen to her would be that she would be buried in a dark prison for ever and ever. In this context Mary herself saw foreign help as being not so much desirable as absolutely essential. Not only did she reiterate to Babington that she would only be drawn forth from Chartley by ‘a good army, or in some very good strength’, but it was a point which she also tried to hammer home to Sir Francis Englefield in a letter written on 17th July, the same day as her fatal communication to Babington:22 ‘Before that they have sufficient promise and assurance, I have wished them plainly not to stir in any wise on this side, for fear they may ruin themselves in vain.’ As she had told Beaton on 18th May, the action of the Spanish king must be regarded as crucial to any actions the English Catholics might take.23
There was no wonder that Phelippes drew a gallows mark on the outside of this letter when he passed it on to Walsingham. Mary had fallen plumb into the trap which had been laid for her. When Walsingham wrote to Leicester in the Netherlands on 9th July – a whole week, incidentally, before Mary actually penned her reply – a highly confidential communication saying that the Scottish queen would shortly be caught out in practices which would condemn her, this was exactly the sort of letter which he had in mind.24 The schemes of Gifford, combined with the restrictions of Paulet, had worked their effect in Mary’s mind. Even so, Walsingham was not totally satisfied with Mary’s reply: he added a forged postscript to the end of the letter also in cipher in which she was made to ask for the names of the six gentlemen who would perform the deed. It would, he felt, represent the climax of her guilt, as well as providing the English government with some additional useful information. This forged postscript provides the final ironic touch to the setting up of the Babington plot by Walsingham and his agents:25 ‘I would be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment; for that it may be I shall be able, upon knowledge of the parties, to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein. … As also from time to time, particularly how you proceed: and as soon as you may, for the same purpose, who be already, and how far every one, privy hereunto.’
It is important to judge Mary’s acceptance in principle of the Babington conspiracy against the background of her own mood in the course of the late summer of 1586 and how it developed up till July. Her mental state was by now very different from what it had once been; the old notion of establishing her on the throne of England, however much it appealed to her youthful champions, was not uppermost in the mind of the middle-aged woman, by now quite out of touch with Europe, let alone with England. Mary herself was beginning to feel weary of the prolonged battle for some sort of decent existence, in which she had now been involved for eighteen years, and the constant strain of being ever on her guard, ever plotting, ever hoping, ever planning. The period in which she was perforce cut off from her secret post contributed much to this feeling of melancholy and lassitude. She began to speak of liberty in terms of retirement rather than government. After James’s betrayal of the Association, Mary told Elizabeth that her own desire had been to ‘retire out of this island in some solitary and reposeful place, as much for her soul as for her body’. She described herself poignantly at the end of May 1586 as knowing not ‘what line to sail, nor how to lift anchor’. This feeling of isolation and not understanding foreign matters any longer resounds through all her letters to Morgan, once the post was resumed: ‘My dear friend,’ she wrote to him on 20th May, ‘I can found no certain judgment nor know what course in the world to take in my affairs I shall hear amply and more recently from every part.’ On the same date, as if to prove her lack of contact with reality Mary also wrote to Mendoza in Paris confiding her rights to the crown of England conditionally to his master Philip II, if James had not become a Catholic by the date of her death. At the end of June, Nau told of how little Mary now felt she understood concerning the mind and intentions of other princes, thanks to her long solitude.26
In July this abandoned and exhausted frame of mind received a terrible fillip from the news that James and Elizabeth had actually signed a treaty of alliance. The maternal heart-break Mary had suffered in the spring of 1585 was now spiked with fearful bitterness. It was one thing to repudiate the idea of the Association but at Berwick on 6th July, only eleven days before Mary’s vital answer to Babington, a proper treaty was signed between the English and Scottish sovereigns, a treaty from which Mary and her interest were totally excluded. James was now to receive an actual agreed subsidy from Elizabeth. Mary’s letter of 12th July to Beaton in Paris on the subject of James was written in a tone of the utmost despair.27 There is no doubt that the publication of the treaty sent her temporarily off her balance, and robbed her of the sustained powers of calm reason which might have led her to act far more cautiously over the Babington plot. Even the fact that her health – for so long enfeebled – was now somewhat restored by the better conditions of Chartley contributed towards her downfall. On 3rd June Paulet reported that the queen was now well enough to be carried down in her chair to the ponds near the house to watch the duck-hunting.28 With renewed health came greater energy to escape, a prospect impossible to contemplate for an invalid endlessly confined to her chamber and her bed.
If to understand all is to forgive all, then it is certainly possible against this background to forgive Mary for tacitly acceding to – for her letter came to no more than that – a conspiracy involving the assassination of Elizabeth. Her own agreement was entirely in the context of a captive seeking to escape her guards, and may be compared to the actions of a prisoner who is prepared to escape by a certain route, even if it may involve the slaying of a jailer by another hand. If her own life in captivity could be considered to be in danger, then there was much theological doubt as to whether agreement to the slaying of Elizabeth was sinful at all. The immense theoretical problems which political assassination presented to the men of the sixteenth century caused Babington and his friends prolonged disquiet and heart-searching, but for Mary, illegally detained against her will, and not in any case concerned with the actual execution of the deed, or its instigation, the problem was considerably simpler: after so many years it was her rescue which mattered to her, not the safety of her jailer Elizabeth.* Even these same scruples of the Babington plotters do them credit in an age when many of the philosophers worked out good ethical reasons for the just death of a tyrant.
Yet in the sixteenth century the theory of resistance to one who had abused a ruler’s sacred duties was given much prominence in the writings of both Jesuits, such as de Mariana, Suarez and Mola, and Calvinists, such as Hotman who wrote Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The view of de Mariana in particular in De Rege et Regis Institutione, writing as he did in Catholic Spain, where there was religious unity, caused scandal in France and Germany where there was both religious and civil disorder: de Mariana’s view that an individual might be justified in slaying a manifestly evil ruler, in accordance with the wishes of the people, was furiously condemned in countries where this imprudent advice might only too easily be put into effect.29 Although many Jesuits rejected de Mariana openly, and later editions of his book contained modifications, the attitude of both Pius V and Gregory XIII to Elizabeth – first in the bull in 1570 and then in the ban of 1580 – was still susceptible of the interpretation by their Catholic flock that it would be a holy deed to rid England of this heretic ruler – even if they were certainly not specifically exhorted to do so. From the other side of the fence, John Knox had proclaimed without further ado that it was not only lawful but positively necessary to kill a king who had betrayed his people.
It says much for the innate goodness of ordinary people at the time that, although political actions like the papal bull or the bond of Association had truly wreaked havoc with the concept of public morality, nevertheless Babington and his friends were still bewildered about their moral position if they carried through Elizabeth’s assassination. Babington wrote to Mary apropos ‘the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free’, but revealed in his subsequent confession that he had been uncertain and worried as to whether this excommunication was still in force. Châteauneuf’s memoir also revealed the genuine doubts which all concerned felt on the subject.30 In an apparently violent age, when justification for the death of tyrants was openly discussed, and princes – like William of Orange – did meet their ends at the hands of the assassin, such scruples showed that it was easier for decent people to listen to the arguments in favour of such a deed than actually stifle their consciences to perform it. But such arguments, vivid as they might be throughout the sixteenth century, growing more intense after 1580, never really concerned Mary Stuart; she was never indeed at liberty in the society in which they were exploited; she continued to view the subject from the more personal standpoint of her own liberty.
The gallows letter was in Walsingham’s hands by Tuesday 19th July. On 20th July Gilbert Gifford fled to the Continent; his work as an agent provocateur completed, he was unwilling to be involved in the holocaust of arrests and cross-examinations which he was aware was about to break in England.* On 29th July Babington himself received the gallows letter and deciphered it the next day with the help of Tichborne. On 3rd August he wrote back to the Scottish queen acknowledging the fatal letter.31 By this date, however, as Mary’s hope of release began to rise, one of Walsingham’s agents, William Wade, had already secretly visited Chartley to work out with Paulet the best manner of securing her arrest. The gossamer plot began to fall apart. On 4th August Ballard was arrested and at the news Babington fled north through London to the leafy lanes of St John’s Wood; here he lay in safety for some time, until on 14th August he too was seized, and brought in hideous triumph to the Tower. William Weston, the Jesuit, lying in his own dark captivity, heard the unusual and ominous sound of the bells pealing at midnight: his guard told him that the city was celebrating the capture of certain papists – ‘traitors who had made a dastardly plot to assassinate the sovereign and declare the Queen of Scots her rightful heir’.32 Finally on 18th August Babington made the first of his confessions, in the course of which every detail of the conspiracy was placed in the hands of Walsingham: the queen of Scots, as well as all his fellow-conspirators, was fatally incriminated. Although Babington had destroyed Mary’s letters to him, he now compliantly reconstructed their text for Walsingham during his interrogations; and should his memory fail, Walsingham could always call on Phelippes, his decipherer, to help with the official reconstruction document – after all, Phelippes and Walsingham, through the medium of the secret pipeline, had read these letters long before they ever reached Babington himself.33
In the meantime Mary herself, cut off at Chartley, had absolutely no inkling of the dramatic turn which events had taken. Her commitment to the plot had been limited to letters; because of the time lag between the writing and delivery of messages by the secret post she knew very little of the various meetings which the conspirators had held up and down the country. Her spirits were high at the beginning of August: she felt she might even hope again. On 11th August, when the dour Paulet suggested that she might like to ride out of Chartley in the direction of Tixall in order to enjoy a buck hunt, this seemed yet another favourable omen of future happiness, since such manifestations of goodwill from her jailer were rare indeed. Mary took particular trouble with her costume under the impression that she might be meeting some of the local gentry at the hunt. The ebullient Nau was also smartly arrayed as usual. Also in the party were Curle, the queen’s other secretary, and Bourgoing, her personal physician (on whose journal we depend for so many of the details of the last months of Mary’s life). It was a fine August day. The queen’s mood was so gay and so gentle that when she noticed Paulet lagging behind, she remembered that he had recently been ill, and stopped her horse to let him catch her up.34
As the little procession wound its way across the moors, the queen suddenly spied some horsemen coming fast towards her. They were strangers. For one wild moment her heart leapt up and she actually believed that these apocalyptic horsemen were the Babington plotters, their plans more advanced than she supposed, coming to rescue her. The first words of their leader speedily undeceived her: this was none other than Sir Thomas Gorges, Queen Elizabeth’s emissary, dressed for this momentous occasion in green serge, luxuriously embroidered. As Paulet introduced him Gorges dismounted from his horse and strode over towards Mary. ‘Madame,’ said Gorges in a ringing voice, ‘the Queen my mistress finds it very strange that you, contrary to the pact and engagement made between you, should have conspired against her and her State, a thing which she could not have believed had she not seen proofs of it with her own eyes and known it for certain.’ As Mary, taken off her guard and flustered, protested, turned this way and that, explained that she had always shown herself a good sister and friend to Elizabeth, Gorges told her that her own servants were immediately to be taken away from her, since it was known that they too were guilty.
From Gorges’s tone, Mary even imagined that she might be now taken summarily to execution. She turned to Nau and Curle and begged them not to allow her to be snatched away without some defence. But there was little the wretched secretaries could do: they were now dragged from her side – in fact she never saw either of them again – and taken up to prison in London. Mary herself, with her physician, was conducted directly to Tixall, in the pretty riding clothes she had donned to impress the ‘pleasant company’ she expected to find there. She was so utterly unprepared for her fate that she did not even have the crucifix she habitually carried – when the inventory of her belongings was made at Chartley during her absence, it included the touching item: ‘the gold cross Her Majesty generally wore’.35 Mary tried at first to resist: at one point she actually sat on the ground and refused to proceed further. Paulet then threatened to bring her own coach and take her to Tixall by force if she would not ride on. Under duress Mary then consented to proceed; but first of all she knelt down underneath a tree and prayed out loud, asking God to remember David whom he had once delivered from his enemies, and imploring his pity. In vain Bourgoing tried to comfort her by saying that Elizabeth was dead, and that these strange proceedings were intended to ensure her safety. Mary cried out loud that she knew well she was no longer of any use to anyone in this world, and she personally desired nothing left on earth ‘neither goods, honours, power nor worldly sovereignty, but only the honour of His Holy Name and His Glory and the liberty of His Church and of the Christian people’.
Tixall, to which Mary was now taken without further protest on her part, was an Elizabethan house built about thirty years earlier; it included an imaginative novelty in the shape of an exquisite four-square gatehouse, the building of which had only been begun about 1580 and can therefore have only been very shortly completed – if completed it was – at the time of the Scottish queen’s incarceration there. But the beauties, or its detail, like those of the house itself – including the nearby River Trent ‘by lovely Tixall graced, of Aston the ancient seat’ as the Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton wrote lovingly later – must have been fairly lost on the distraught and anguished woman who was now imprisoned there. Mary did not leave her chambers for the entire fortnight which she spent at Tixall. She begged to be allowed to write to Queen Elizabeth, but Paulet refused to bring her paper. Bourgoing was sent back by Paulet to Chartley the next day. But Paulet subsequently allowed two of Mary’s ladies and Martin, an equerry, to join her, who presumably brought over at least some of her luggage, since the queen was otherwise without any clothes except that hopefully gay riding-habit.
Meanwhile Mary’s apartments and belongings at Chartley were thoroughly searched: her letters and ciphers were taken away to London. Paulet also took the opportunity to draw up a complete list of her household, with suggestions as to how it could be cut down ‘if this lady be restrained of her liberty’.36 The household of thirty-eight, counting the servants’ servants, could easily be reduced to nineteen in Paulet’s opinion, if outdoor categories like the coachmen were eliminated. Curle’s wife Barbara could be dispensed with, as could Christina Pages – which removal, Paulet hoped, would result also in the departure of her husband Bastian, who had never seemed able to win the hearts of the English since that first merry masque at Holyrood. Paulet now called him ‘cunning in his kind, full of sleights to corrupt young men’. The inventories of the queen’s belongings showed how her prized possessions, once rich jewels like the Great Harry, now merely comprised miniatures or pictures: there were lists of these little portraits, one of her son James, one of Elizabeth, one of her first husband, one even of the dead countess of Lennox, and that other Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, as well as pictures of Henry II and many other members of the French royal family, and Mary’s forebears the former kings of Scotland. It was as though she lived in the past, and sustained strength from the idea of the great many-branched family tree from which she had sprung.
After a fortnight at Tixall, in which anguish for the past mingled with apprehension for the future, Mary was conducted back to Chartley by Paulet. Outside Tixall’s gatehouse a touching sight met her eyes: she found the beggars of Staffordshire had gathered to greet her, knowing the famous reputation of her charity. As the beggars cried out for alms, Mary replied sadly: ‘Alas, good people, I have now nothing to give you. For I am as much a beggar as you are yourselves.’ The whole incident was reported to London by Paulet in terms of the utmost indignation.37 Back at Chartley, Mary found that her words to the beggars were only too true: her belongings had been rifled, her cupboards broken open; it was left for her to embrace her weeping servants ‘as one who had returned home’. The only domestic incident which had taken place had also its sad aspects: Barbara Curle had given birth to her child in the absence both of her husband, now in prison in London, and of her mistress. Paulet had refused to baptize it, and as there was now no Catholic priest left even in disguise to perform the ceremony the queen did it herself. She named the baby ‘Mary, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.*
The only thing which had not been taken from Mary was her actual money, on which she depended for paying her servants and for her own necessities; this she found still in the cupboard where she had left it. But later directives came from London that this too was to be seized; in order to effect the rapine, Paulet and Richard Bagot, a Staffordshire magistrate, forcibly entered the queen’s apartments when she was lying ill in bed. Armed men were left in the ante-room and Paulet and Bagot went forward alone, sending Mary’s servants out of the room, although Bourgoing managed to linger by the door, ‘very sad and thoughtful’. At first Mary absolutely refused to surrender what was in fact undeniably her own property. When she saw that there was no gainsaying Paulet, she instructed Elizabeth Curle to open up the cabinet; even then, she forced herself to step out of bed, limped across the room on her crippled leg, barefoot without any slippers or shoes, and beseeched Paulet one last time to leave her the money. She had put the sum aside, she told him, as a last resort for her funeral expenses, and to enable her servants to return each to their own country after her death. But Paulet was unmoved by this pleading, and the money was taken away. Mary was now left with the two things which could never be taken from her – as she told Paulet proudly on her return to Chartley – her royal blood and her Catholic religion.38
In the meantime the revelations which Walsingham was able to make to Elizabeth concerning the abominable perfidy of her good friend and sister Mary were eminently satisfactory from his own point of view. Elizabeth was plunged into a panic of acute physical fear, unaware how much of the assassination plot had in fact been elaborated by Walsingham’s own agents. The English queen’s letter to Paulet on the subject of the discovery of the Babington plot was ecstatic with relief: ‘Amyas, my most faithful and careful servant,’ she wrote, ‘God reward thee treble fold in three double for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.’ Mary was now ‘your wicked murderess’ and any future fate, however rigorous, no more than ‘her vile deserts’.39 It was understandable that Elizabeth should feel a mixture of keen fear at the danger to her personal safety and righteous horror at Mary’s ingratitude: the confessions of the Babington conspirators, arrested and examined in turn, did nothing to reassure her. In mid-September they were tried and condemned, having pleaded guilty to the indictment of wanting to kill the queen; Mary Stuart’s name was not introduced at any point into the trial, however, lest the assassination of Elizabeth would be further encouraged. The conspirators were then executed in two batches.
The manner of their ending was extremely savage, according to the general principle of the Elizabethan government that fierce penalties performed in public encouraged the people to believe the natural corollary that fierce crimes had been committed in private. As Camden put it: ‘They were all cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered.’ Babington murmured ‘Parce mihi, domine Jesu’; Chidiock Tichborne, whose poem written in the Tower is one of the most moving of all Elizabethan apologia, made a noble final speech, which aroused the pity of the spectators. Savage actually broke the rope and fell before being disembowelled. Those privy councillors present felt impelled to point out to the queen that such blood-thirsty vengeance would do more harm than good. The next day Salisbury, Dunn, Jones, Charnock, Travers, Gate and Bellamy were dragged to the scaffold on hurdles as before, but were only cut down when they were actually dead. This act of mercy was attributed officially to Queen Elizabeth – although she was not at this point in a particularly merciful mood.
The next desiderata to be secured by Walsingham and Cecil, to complete their case against the queen of Scots, were the revelations of her secretaries, Nau and Curle. The all-important point was that they should testify to the authenticity of Mary’s ‘gallows’ letter to Babington. At first the unhappy secretaries denied everything: Nau said afterwards that Walsingham shook his fist in his face, and had to be calmed down by Cecil. But the situation was a critical one, and neither of them was a man of steel. They were alone, helpless, and terrified out of their wits; they were quite cut off from any possible consultation with their mistress, and to Nau England was a dangerous foreign country. Not only that, but their antagonists were apparently able to produce in front of them the texts of all the secret letters they had written, in a way which must have seemed like some terrible witchcraft. As Curie himself said in his subsequent apologia:40 ‘They did show me the Majesty’s letters to my lord Paget, Mr Charles Paget, Sir Frances Englefield and the Spanish Ambassador, all penned in my own hand which I could not deny. … Moreover they showed me the two very letters written by me in cipher and received by Babington. … Upon which so manifest and unrefusable evidence I could not deny’. In fact the documents which Nau and Curle were shown, which they finally attested, were not ‘the two very letters’ as Curle believed, since Babington had destroyed these. They were copies, in which the master-forger Phelippes probably had a hand, but in view of the exact reconstruction of the text, and the fact that Babington himself had by now vouched for the letters, it is easy to understand how the wretched secretaries fell victim to the deception. As for Mary’s long detailed letter to Babington on 17th July, in which she ran through his plans at length, Nau and Curle were only asked to attest to the body of the letter itself; the forged postscript, added by Walsingham, in which he asked for the names of the six men destined to act as assassins, was deliberately left off the reconstructed letters. Babington specifically mentioned this postscript in his first confession; but when he was shown the reconstructed letter, he carelessly or compliantly passed it, without pointing out its absence. Had he insisted on its introduction, Nau and Curle would certainly have noticed such an obvious interpolation. Nor was the critical passage at the end of Babington’s first confession, alluding to the postscript, ever read out later in court – so that the forgery should not be uncovered.41
Mary afterwards both believed and said publicly that she had been betrayed by Nau. Cecil also took a cynical view of the secretaries’ moral stamina, when he wrote to Hatton on 4th September: ‘Nau and Curle will yield somewhat to confirm their Mistress’ crimes. But if they were persuaded that they themselves might escape, and the blow fall upon their Mistress betwixt her head and shoulders, surely we should have the whole from them.’42 But in retrospect, it is difficult to blame the secretaries too harshly for attesting a text whose validity they believed they could hardly in honesty refute. In the critical and terrifying atmosphere of the interrogation, under circumstances of fear and hopelessness, the impossibility of saving their mistress in face of such evidence jostled with their very human fears for their own safety. Nau’s betrayal of his mistress at the end does not necessarily mean that he was engaged in a long-term policy of villainy. It was true that Nau had fallen out with Mary over his use of the secret pipeline to forward his matrimonial plans with Bess Pierrepoint. According to his enemies, Nau was bribed with £7000 to betray Mary; he was certainly housed with Walsingham in London, and later sent back to his native France in a boat of his own after a few months, whereas the unfortunate Curle remained in close imprisonment for a year.43 Such signs of English favour, while they may point to the fact that Nau exposed the truth about Mary’s intrigues to save his own skin, does not prove any further degree of treachery. Paulet always hated Nau in the old days at Tutbury and Chartley, and wished that he could get rid of him, and Paulet’s dislike was an excellent indication of Nau’s loyalty towards Mary. Nau also managed to straighten out Mary’s finances to an admirable extent during the period in which he served her. Nau’s surrender should be equated with the outburst of Leslie in the Tower over the Norfolk conspiracy; they were both the unfortunate but explicable lapses of servants who were enmeshed in webs which were altogether too strong for men of their calibre. In the event, the betrayal of Nau and Curle can hardly be said to have much historical significance; if they had persisted in their denials, it is not likely that Walsingham would have allowed such petty obstacles to stand in his way. He would have found other ways of getting the letters vouched for.*
By now, with the Babington conspirators dead or dying, Nau and Curle under lock and key and the Act of Association, by which she was already guilty, hanging over her head, there was little left for Mary to hope for. But there was one terrible thing left for her to dread: the secret death, the slow drip of poison, the assassin’s knife, all the fates by which she would be deprived of the public martyrdom by which she now hoped to proclaim the Catholic faith at her death. During her fortnight at Tixall she seems to have thought coolly and courageously towards this end: from now on, she deliberately played every scene with this climax in view. Her hope was to triumph at the moment of her death; her fear was to be extinguished meaninglessly without an opportunity of bearing witness to the truths in which she believed. In September, while describing how wretchedly she was treated, she managed to write to this effect to her cousin the duke of Guise: ‘For myself, I am resolute to die for my religion.… With God’s help, I shall die in the Catholic faith and to maintain it constantly … without doing dishonour to the race of Lorraine, who are accustomed to die for the sustenance of the faith.’44 Mary was by now so convinced that death was at hand that she begged him to look after her poor servants, and gave the most detailed instructions for the disposal of her body, which she wished to have buried at Rheims, with that of her mother. Her hand was now so stricken with pain that she could hardly hold the pen to write the letter, the terror of the unknown death haunted her, and yet Mary ended proudly: ‘My heart does not fail me. … Adieu, mon bon cousin.’ It was in this heroic frame of mind that Queen Mary allowed herself to be taken without protest out of Chartley on 21st September and set on her last journey towards Fotheringhay. It was Mary’s triumph that by her deliberate behaviour in the last months of her existence, she managed to convert a life story which had hitherto shown all the elements of a Greek tragedy – disaster leading ineluctably to disaster – into something which ended instead in the classic Christian manner of martyrdom and triumph through death. This transfiguration in the last months of her life, which has the effect of altering the whole balance of her story, was no fortunate accident. The design was hers.
* Buxton, whose warm waters have made thy name famous, perchance I shall visit thee no more – Farewell.
† The obtaining of beer for domestic consumption was an important item in Elizabethan housekeeping. It has been estimated that a population of four million consumed eighteen million barrels of beer annually, three quarters of it brewed privately.4
* Barbara Mowbray was one of the two daughters of the laird of Barnbogle who served Mary Queen of Scots. She had joined her service by the beginning of 1584. About the time of her marriage, her sister Gillis Mowbray applied to join her in the royal service and was duly given a passport.
* In the end the arrogant Bess did not marry until she was thirty-five, and then to an Erskine, created Viscount Fenton and earl of Kellie, who had been loyal to James VI during the Gowrie conspiracy and had come to England with him.
† The story of ‘Barnaby’ shows how ready Mary’s heart was to be touched at this point. When Gifford needed to go to France, a certain ‘Barnaby’ was introduced to Mary by letter as being her substitute carrier; Barnaby was in fact the pseudonym for Thomas Barnes, a venal Catholic corrupted by Gifford. Mary developed such a fondness for the helpful ‘Barnaby’ that he was preserved as her nominal correspondent even after Gifford had in fact returned to England.
* Another example of Babington’s extraordinarily foolhardy nature was the fact that he had the whole group of conspirators sit for their portrait, with himself in the centre and the motto painted above them: Hi mihi sunt comites, quos ipsa pericula dicunt.
* Mary has been harshly judged for agreeing in principle to the assassination of Elizabeth, and this has been something held to justify Elizabeth’s own execution of Mary. But this is to continue the propaganda of Walsingham successfully beyond the grave since there was, after all, little real danger to Elizabeth from a plot vetted throughout by Walsingham. The action of Elizabeth in suggesting that Mary, who was in her charge, should be secretly assassinated by Paulet was far more morally culpable.
* Gifford got himself ordained priest in March 1587 in order to continue his informer’s trade; he was awarded an English pension of £100 a year for his services. But the next year hubris was his undoing: he was arrested in a brothel, put in the archbishop’s prison at Rheims and died there in 1590. However, all efforts to bring a case against him for his treachery to the Catholic cause in England failed, as Thomas Morgan would not testify against him.
* Paulet professed himself to be scandalized by the procedure, but it was well within the regulations of the Catholic Church.
* When Nau reached France, the Guises accepted his story that he had merely bowed to force majeure. In 1605 Nau went further and actually applied to James I and VI to have his good character established.