CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Trial

‘As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator, and I beg Him to forgive me, but as Queen and Sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below.’

Mary Queen of Scots to Sir Amyas Paulet, October 1586

On 21st September Mary Queen of Scots was taken out of Chartley Hall and away to an unknown destination. It was a sinister and frightening scene. The men who came to fetch her, Gorges and Stallenge, arrived with pistols at their belts. Her own servants were locked in their rooms and their windows guarded, so that they should not witness her departure or signal their sympathy to her. The most that Paulet had imparted to Mary officially on the subject of her new prison was the mere fact that she was going to be moved. From hints gleaned secretly through the servants, Mary actually believed she was going to a royal castle about thirty miles from London!*¹ Under these doleful conditions Mary was conducted out of Chartley and Staffordshire by a body of Protestant gentlemen of the country, including Walter Aston and Richard Bagot. The first night was spent at Hill Hall, near Abbot’s Bromley, where the queen’s stay was commemorated by her name and the date scratched on a pane of glass by a Paget sympathizer at the end of the century:Maria regina Scotia quondam transibat istam villam, 21st Septembris, 1586 usque Burton Fortheringhay.* The next morning Gorges, on instructions from Elizabeth, attacked the queen on the dual subject of her culpability and her ingratitude, although Mary firmly and steadfastly refused to admit either guilt or guilty intentions. The next two nights were spent at Leicester, in the house of the earl of Huntingdon in Lord’s Place: here the ordinary people showed signs of favouring the prisoner rather than her jailer, Paulet, and his coach had to be guarded against demonstrations. Finally, on 25th September, the queen reached the castle of Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, about twenty miles south-west of Peterborough.

Mary Stuart first sighted its ancient towers from a path called since the days of the Domesday Book, Perryho Lane – which according to tradition enabled her to make a melancholy little play on the name as she exclaimed aloud, ‘Perio! I perish.’ Quite apart from its heavy, brooding appearance, Fotheringhay had a stark history. Ironically Mary might have been able to claim it for her own, since at one point it had been made the dowry of Maud de Senlis, the English bride of King David of Scotland. It had been built in the time of the Conqueror and rebuilt in the reign of Edward III. It subsequently became a Yorkist castle and here in 1452, Richard III, that sad and twisted king, had been born. It was now used entirely as a state prison, but was considered of sufficiently bleak reputation for the wretched Catherine of Aragon to refuse to go there unless, as she said, she were to be bound with cart ropes and dragged thither. The front of the castle and the enormous gateway faced north, the mighty keep rose to the north-west; a large courtyard filled the interior of the building, which included a chapel and a great hall; there was a double moat system along three sides, and the River Nene winding along the very edge of the castle made up the fourth side of the defences. Around its grim tower stretched the level Northamptonshire countryside; this had more of the flatness of eastern England, and plains stretching onwards to the Fens themselves, than the mountainous midland landscape which Mary had been accustomed to in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.

Despite the size of Fotheringhay, Mary found herself incarcerated in comparatively mean apartments: this brought back all her phobia of a secret killing, the sort of barbarous death that stained the history of English medieval castles. But when her servants reported that many of the state rooms had been left empty, Mary drew the correct conclusion that she was about to be tried, and the rooms were awaiting the arrival of dignitaries from London. At this evidence that she was about to undergo the public martyrdom she sought, as Bourgoing reported: ‘Her heart beat faster and she was more cheerful and she was in better health than ever before.’² When Paulet came to inform her on 1st October that her misdeeds were now to be punished by the interrogation of certain lords, and advised her in her own interests to beg pardon and confess her faults, before she would officially be declared culpable by law, Mary was able to meet him in an extraordinarily calm and even detached mood; she even made a little joke saying Paulet was behaving like a grownup with a small child, asking her to own up to what she had done. Then she went on more seriously: ‘As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator, and I beg Him to forgive me, but as Queen and Sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below. …’ And she concluded loftily: ‘As therefore I could not offend, I do not wish for pardon; I do not seek, nor would I accept it from anyone living.’ Disgruntled, since he laid great emphasis on the fact that this sinner should personally confess her misdeeds, Paulet reported carefully back to London all that had happened.³ A few days later Mary was cheered by the arrival of her steward Melville and his daughter, and Bastian Pages also with his daughter Mary, who was the Queen’s god-daughter. However, she rightly interpreted the dismissal of her coachmen – Paulet had at last succeeded in effecting this domestic economy – as an ominous sign that her days of driving abroad were over.

In London the commissioners appointed to judge the Scottish queen assembled at Westminster on 8th October. They were read copies of the letters sent by Babington to Mary, her answers and the evidence of Nau and Curle. It was then agreed that Mary should be brought to trial under the Act of Association enacted in 1585: this provided means whereby a commission of twenty-four peers and privy councillors might be appointed to investigate any conspiracy or attempt to hurt Elizabeth ‘by any person or with the privity of any person that shall or may pretend to the title to the Crown of this realm’.⁴ The punishments for anyone found guilty under this act were to be two-fold: firstly they were to be deprived of their title to the English crown forever, and secondly they could be lawfully put to death under the provisions of the Act. It had been quite clear at the time that this Act had been especially framed in order to be able to try and execute the queen of Scots: now it was coming into its own. It was under this Act that the commissioners and peers were now summoned to meet in a few days’ time at Fotheringhay – including Mary’s former jailer, Shrewsbury. In vain he tried to duck this unpleasant task on grounds of health. Shrewsbury was smartly reminded by Cecil that his failure to appear might be interpreted by the malicious as confirmation of all those old rumours that he had been too lenient towards his prisoner; the Lord Chancellor Bromley also wrote meaningfully to Shrewsbury: ‘I would advise you not to be absent.’

The provisions of the Act of Association were so heavily weighted against Mary that she stood absolutely no chance of acquittal even if it had not been quite clear to all and sundry that her case had been pre-judged. Indeed Cecil mentioned calmly to Shrewsbury that if his health really did prevent him from attending, he ought to authorize Cecil in advance to deliver his (Shrewsbury’s) opinion of Mary’s guilt.⁵ It was of no avail for Châteauneuf, the French ambassador, to plead with Elizabeth for Mary at least to have counsel to defend her on what was a capital charge: Elizabeth told him sharply that she did not need advice from strangers on how to manage her own business. At the forthcoming trial, therefore, Mary was to be allowed neither counsel nor witnesses in her defence; she was not even to be allowed a secretary or amanuensis to help her prepare her own case – her own secretaries being of course still in prison in London. She was to be left quite alone, a sick woman and a foreigner, who knew nothing of England, its laws, or customs, and had only begun to learn its language comparatively late in life, to conduct and manage her own defence against the best legal brains in the country. These eminent lawyers on the other hand were not even to be put to the simple task of bringing witnesses for the prosecution for none was to be called.

Yet, curiously enough, by the standards of the sixteenth century the innate injustice of the trial of Mary Queen of Scots lay not so much in its arrangements – the accused was never allowed counsel at an English treason trial at this date, and the barbarity of the Scottish treason trials has been sufficiently commented upon* – as in the fact that the trial took place at all. How, indeed, could it ever be legal for Mary as sovereign, the queen of a foreign country, to be tried for treason, when she was in no sense one of Elizabeth’s subjects? In 1586 the sovereignty of a ruler was taken extremely seriously with regard to his own subjects – how much more difficult then was it to try and execute one who was actually or had been the sovereign of another country? Elizabeth herself was the first to perceive the dangers for the future of pulling down any monarch to the rank where he or she could be punished like any other subject – let alone the monarch of another country. If Mary had partaken in treasonable activities in England where in any case she was a prisoner, held against her will, the correct remedy (although of course it was never considered) was surely to expel her from the country. The mere judicial proceedings for trying a sovereign presented enormous difficulties by English common law. In England it was the foundation-stone of justice that every man had a right to be tried by his peers; Mary being a queen had no peers in England except Elizabeth herself. Neither privy councillors nor earls nor barons gathered together in no matter what profusion could be said to be the equals of one who was an anointed queen.

As the English lawyers pondered these questions, it was even suggested that the old claims of England to feudal suzerainty over Scotland (last used by Henry VIII to justify his depredations) might be brought out again, dusted over and employed to prove that Mary was Elizabeth’s subject and as such capable of both treason against her, and of trial by English law. In the end the line of proceedings taken consisted of a long narration of circumstances ranging down from ancient times – some of them very ancient indeed – when it had been considered suitable for one sovereign to try another for treason done within their state. The most recent case cited was that of Conradin, last of the Hohenstaufen, who, four centuries earlier, had been beheaded by the papal nominee for his father’s thrones, Charles, duke of Anjou, after being captured in battle and subjected to a form of treason trial. But the two cases were hardly comparable, as Mary had certainly not been captured in battle, and in any case was utterly ignorant of the laws of England, a country in which she had never been permitted to live at liberty.*⁶

In truth, the only possible justification for what was in fact unjustifiable was the Act of Association itself which, by defining the commission which was to try anyone found coming within the terms of the Act, disposed of such knotty problems as sovereignty and a queen’s peers by merely cutting through them and all the laws, both national and international, of the time. In the case of the trial of Mary Queen of Scots the traditional blindfold across the eyes of Justice was ruthlessly torn aside by the English commissioners so that the desired verdict might be reached. In order to strengthen a weak case, Cecil took trouble to recall Parliament: it so happened that the English Parliament had been prorogued until November, and the existing Commons could not be brought back before then. Therefore the old Parliament was dissolved and writs of commission for the new one sent out on 14th September, in order that the Commons might be already sitting at the time of the trial. This would help to gloss over the illegality of the proceedings in France and elsewhere or, as Cecil put it, ‘to make the burden better borne, and the world abroad better satisfied’. The hatred of the Commons for the queen of Scots had in no way abated over the years, but rather increased in violence: she was now regarded, in the words of one of its members, her former keeper, Sir Ralph Sadler, as ‘this most wicked and filthy woman’; Cecil knew that he could rely on the faithful Commons to present this point of view forcibly after the trial to Elizabeth, herself more likely to be haunted by the spectacle of a crowned head rolled in the dust.

On Saturday, 11th October, the commissioners began to arrive at Fotheringhay, the most important lodging in the castle, the others in the village and neighbouring farms. Mary was given a copy of the commission which had summoned them. The next day a deputation of lords waited on her – Sir Walter Mildmay, Stallenge, the usher of Parliament, Barker, Elizabeth’s notary, and Paulet himself. The object of this mission was to get Mary to consent to appear in person at the trial and thus acknowledge its legality. They handed the Scottish queen an epistle from Elizabeth in which she announced to her that she had sent some peers and legal counsellors to examine Mary and judge her case since Mary persistently denied her participation in a plot against Elizabeth, despite the cogent proofs of her part in it which Elizabeth possessed. As for the legality of such proceedings – since Mary was in England, concluded Elizabeth boldly, she was subject to the laws of the country.

To this Mary replied in fine style, and without in any way conceding their right to try her: ‘I am myself a Queen, the daughter of a King, a stranger, and the true kinswoman of the Queen of England. I came to England on my cousin’s promise of assistance against my enemies and rebel subjects and was at once imprisoned.’* She stressed her oft expressed, never gratified, wish to speak to Elizabeth and ended: ‘As an absolute Queen, I cannot submit to orders, nor can I submit to the laws of the land without injury to myself, the King my son and all other sovereign princes. … For myself I do not recognize the laws of England nor do I know or understand them as I have often asserted. I am alone, without counsel, or anyone to speak on my behalf. My papers and notes have been taken from me, so that I am destitute of all aid, taken at a disadvantage.’⁸ On the subject of her actual guilt, whereas Mary admitted that she had thrown herself under the protection of Catholic kings and princes, she denied any knowledge of an actual attempt against Elizabeth. Mary’s views were duly written down, to be communicated to the English queen.

The next morning Mary received another less courteous deputation, as she was sitting at her early dinner (ten o’clock in the morning). The Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley told her that whatever she might protest, she was subject to the laws of England, whether as a sovereign or as a captive, and that if she did not appear in person at her trial she would merely be condemned in absentia. Mary shed a few tears at such brusqueness and exclaimed that she was no subject, and she would rather die a thousand deaths than acknowledge herself one, since she would both betray the majesty of kings, and virtually admit that she was bound to submit to the laws of England even over religion. Once more, as she had done before, Mary offered to appear before a free Parliament and answer questions, rather than submit to the commissioners who she suspected had already condemned her unheard. But even in her distress Mary managed to produce another dramatic watchword or rallying-cry for her supporters, if the news of it should ever leak out, as she cried: ‘Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’⁹

Cecil now interrupted the conversation with considerable passion: his vehemence probably had a private cause, for there had been some embarrassing rumours that Cecil himself was favourably disposed towards Mary, based on the fact that his grandson William Cecil had visited Rome and had there been converted to the Catholic faith. Mary herself seems to have been under the illusion that the grandson had persuaded the grandfather into a more clement frame of mind.* Now Cecil was disposed to put an end publicly to such idle notions, and the process ‘made him it is thought more earnest against her’, for he now broke out quite rudely to the queen: ‘Will you therefore hear us or not? If you refuse, the assembled Council will continue to act according to the Commission.’

The matter of Mary’s personal appearance at the trial – by which she would acknowledge in some measure at least to the public eye their jurisdiction over her – was now the subject of prolonged discussion between Mary and her would-be judges. Mary continually reiterated her sovereign status: it was not until 14th October that she finally succumbed, and agreed to appear in order to answer the single charge that she had plotted the assassination of Elizabeth. During the discussions, Mary received a letter from Elizabeth in London, in which reproach and anger were mixed: ‘You have planned in divers ways and manners to take my life and to ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘I never proceeded so harshly against you; on the contrary, I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself.’ Now Elizabeth commanded Mary to reply to the peers of her kingdom as if she herself were present. The only possible note of friendliness was in the last phrase of the letter: ‘But answer fully, and you may receive greater favour from us.’¹⁰

Did Mary detect in these ambiguous words some hint that, if she appeared before the judges, she would in the end receive pardon, whatever her crimes, and was this then the motive that determined her to accede to their pressing demands, thus jeopardizing her sovereign position? But by this stage in her life, and in the frame of mind in which she had found herself since August, and that grim meditative fortnight at Tixall, it does not seem that Mary Stuart was animated by any hope of being shown further mercy. The strange serenity which now possessed her, on which both Paulet and Bourgoing commented from different viewpoints, was the calm of a woman who perfectly well realized that she was about to die. The heroism of her sentiments was carefully and brilliantly angled towards the martyr’s death which would bear witness to the cause of the Catholic Church: as Mary herself had said, she was playing her last role towards the theatre of the world, rather than the realm of England.

Mary has been criticized for rescinding her determination never to appear before this illegal court; but there can be no doubt that her noble bearing at this trial, and the magnificent speeches she made there, all directed towards showing her in the light of the martyr queen, did much to enhance this picture when they gradually became known after her death. Furthermore the full publicity she was able to give at it to her wrongs also distracted attention from points on which she might be held considerably more vulnerable (although the court was still not competent to judge it) such as the letter she had written to Babington. Although on the one hand Mary sacrificed her royal position by appearing before a tribunal which had no right to try her, on the other she greatly improved her position in the eyes of history. The queen of Scots was clever to see this when she agreed to appear before the judges – intuition in this case being more potent than legal knowledge. Even so, the stress of making this critical decision reduced Mary to faintness, and she had to be revived with wine before her resolve could be committed to writing.

The trial of Mary Queen of Scots began on the next day, Wednesday, 15th October, in a room directly above the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle. Even Bourgoing considered this chamber spacious and convenient: it was nearly seventy feet long including the window, and twenty-one feet wide. The most detailed plans were made for the trial, and the position of every participant was carefully mapped out in Cecil’s chart. At the upper end of the room there was a throne and a royal canopy with the arms of England over it; opposite the throne for the benefit of the prisoner was placed one of Mary’s own crimson velvet chairs, and a crimson velvet cushion for her feet. The room was divided in two by a wooden barrier with a door through it. Above the barrier two parallel benches were positioned on each side of the room: on the right sat the Lord Chancellor Bromley, Cecil as Lord Treasurer, and the earls including Shrewsbury. In front of them sat the two chief justices and the high Baron of the Exchequer. On the left sat the barons and knights of the Privy Council including Walsingham, Christopher Hatton and Sir Ralph Sadler, with four other judges and two doctors of civil law in front of them. A large table in front of the canopy was for the use of the crown representatives including the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General and Barker, the notary, and on it were placed the documents to be used in the case. Below the barrier, the remaining twenty-four feet of the room was for the use of the spectators – the ordinary people of the village, and the servants of the commissioners.

Queen Mary entered the great hall at nine o’clock, with an escort of soldiers. She wore her chosen garb of the sad years of captivity – a dress and mantle of flowing black velvet, her traditional white head-dress with its widow’s peak, and a long white gauzy veil. Her maid Reneé de Beauregard bore her train, but Queen Mary was now so lame with rheumatism, and her muscles had lacked exercise for so long, that she could scarcely walk or even limp along, and had to be supported by Melville and Bourgoing. She was followed by her surgeon Jacques Gervais, her apothecary Pierre Gorion and three of her women, Jane Kennedy, Elizabeth Curle and Gillis Mowbray. The commissioners respectfully uncovered their heads as the queen passed, but there was still one delicate moment when the prisoner appeared to be about to jib at her treatment: this was when she realized that she was not to sit on the throne as she had imagined, but on the crimson velvet chair. Mary exclaimed spontaneously: ‘I am a Queen by right of birth and my place should be there under the dais!’ But after this first instinctive reaction, she recovered her composure, as though she had in advance decided to go through with the ordeal, no matter what the humiliation, and this cry had merely been wrung from her by surprise. The queen sat down quietly in the chair allotted to her and merely observed to Melville as she scanned the faces of the English peers: ‘Ah! here are many counsellors, but not one for me.’¹¹

The trial was opened by a speech from the Lord Chancellor in which he explained the motives which had impelled Queen Elizabeth to institute these proceedings – how she had been informed that the queen of Scots had planned her fall and was therefore bound to convoke a public assembly to examine the accusation – and ended by stating that Queen Mary would have every opportunity of declaring her own innocence. To all this Mary replied in terms very much as before, not only denying the jurisdiction of the court over a queen, but also laying great stress on the conditions under which she had first arrived in England: ‘I came into this kingdom under promise of assistance, and aid, against my enemies and not as a subject, as I could prove to you had I my papers; instead of which I have been detained and imprisoned.’ Queen Mary emphasized that the only reason she had condescended to appear before the commission was in order to show that she was not guilty of the particular crime of conspiring against Elizabeth’s life. In answer the Lord Chancellor utterly denied that Mary had arrived in England under promise of assistance from Elizabeth, as also he declared futile her protests against the jurisdiction of the court itself over her. The commission to try the Scottish queen was then read aloud in Latin, at which Mary now made a further protest against the laws on which it was based, which she said had been expressly framed to destroy her.

Gawdy, the royal sergeant, now rose in his blue robe, with a red hood lying flatly on the shoulders. He detailed the events leading up to the Scottish queen’s arrest, including the seizure of Babington, and the listing of six men who were intended to assassinate Elizabeth. To this Mary replied that she had never met Babington, had never ‘trafficked’ with him and knew nothing of the six men. Letters said to have been dictated by Babington before his death were then read aloud, and copies of the correspondence between Mary and Babington passed round, together with the signed depositions of Curle and Nau, and the confessions of the other conspirators. Mary strongly protested against this second-hand evidence and very sensibly continued to demand to see the originals of her so-called correspondence with Babington. She refused to admit anything at all on such indirect proofs, and suggested that her own ciphers could all too easily have been tampered with. Despite her lonely position without counsel, Mary never for a moment lost her head: she continued to draw a sharp distinction between the actions which she as a prisoner had inevitably taken to try and secure her own rescue (‘I do not deny that I have earnestly wished for liberty and done my utmost to procure it for myself. In this I acted from a very natural wish’) and actual connivance at the death of Elizabeth, which she strongly denied. As for the letters, once more she rejected them in toto. ‘Can I be responsible,’ she demanded passionately, ‘for the criminal projects of a few desperate men, which they planned without my knowledge or participation?’

The depositions and letters of Babington were now read aloud. The mention of the name Arundel and his brothers, who had been involved in conspiracies in her favour, drew from Mary the exclamation: ‘Alas, why should this noble house of Howard have suffered so much for me. …’ After the midday meal further letters were read aloud including the depositions and confessions of Nau and Curle. Throughout the trial, the speeches were addressed to the lords rather than to Mary, so that in order to make a point about a passage in a letter she had to interrupt them; she also complained that the evidence was produced in no particular order, on purpose to confuse her in her answers for she had after all no previous warning of what was going to be produced against her, no opportunity to study the letters privately, and of course no counsel to assist her in making her case. The strain of keeping sufficiently mentally alert was considerable. Nevertheless Mary continued calmly to emphasize the wrongfulness of her imprisonment and call to witness her own ill-health – ‘I cannot walk without assistance nor use my arms, and I spend most of my time confined to bed by sickness’. She also said that much of her memory had faded with age, captivity and ill-health, and she hardly knew any longer how to act the queen, since it had been so long – nearly twenty years – since she had actually reigned. Although Mary vehemently contradicted the ludicrous notion that the English might have the right to try her because they had in ancient times claimed suzerainty over Scotland, which she claimed would dishonour the memory of her own ancestors, yet she freely admitted that she no longer wished to rule: ‘My advancing age and bodily weakness both prevent me from wishing to resume the reins of government. I have perhaps only two or three years to live in this world, and I do not aspire to any public position, especially when I consider the pain and desperance which meet those who wish to do right, and act with justice and dignity in the midst of so perverse a generation, and when a whole world is full of crimes and troubles’ – this was indeed the cry of sad, disillusioned middle-age.¹²

At this Cecil, either determined to make an impressive showing of his disapproval of the queen of Scots, or with his memory of those far-off days of the abortive Treaty of Edinburgh nearly thirty years before, in which he had been much involved, still burning in his mind, reproached Queen Mary with having assumed the English royal arms at the time of her French marriage and having thus attempted to usurp Elizabeth’s throne.

Mary gave in reply her stock answer to this accusation: that being then very young, she had merely acted in obedience to the commands of her father-in-law, Henry II. To this Cecil retorted that she had later aggravated the offence by refusing to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh in which her pretensions to the English throne were formally abandoned, and the argument then proceeded as often before on well-worn lines, except that Mary took care to reiterate at every turn the significance of her status as a queen, which meant that she could never be expected to cede her rights without receiving any concessions about the succession in return. Cecil now accused her of having personally coveted Elizabeth’s throne, and Mary responded with a long and closely argued speech on the subject of the English royal succession, which she had evidently prepared carefully in advance, and may be regarded as incorporating her ultimate views on the subject. She made two main points: firstly, she had never at any time wished to usurp the English throne while Elizabeth lived; secondly, and in no way contradicting her previous point, she had ‘no scruple of conscience in desiring the second rank as being the legitimate and nearest heir’. It was the right to inherit at the proper time rather than the right to reign immediately which Mary was not prepared to surrender.

The queen now went on to declare that although she knew that her enemies wished to compass her death by unlawful means, yet with God’s help she would still manage to meet her end publicly, as a witness to the faith in which she believed. In a moving passage, which marked her out as far more tolerant than the age in which she lived, and contrasted with the sly venom of Cecil and the cold vindictiveness of Paulet, Mary gave her own philosophy of life, in which there was no place for revenge: ‘I do not desire vengeance. I leave it to Him who is the just Avenger of the innocent and of those who suffer for His Name under whose power I will take shelter. I would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith.’ And she reminded the judges once more that she had come to England seeking Elizabeth’s protection. Mary now attempted valiantly to combat the charges based on the cipher letters. She accused Walsingham of inventing the ciphers and manufacturing the whole plot, and said that she had been warned long before from France to be on her guard against Ballard since he had ‘great intelligence’ with Walsingham. She repudiated her own letter to Babington in its entirety. She battled with Cecil in a game of wits in which Cecil denied that any Catholic had been put to death in England for religion merely, but only for treason against the queen. Walsingham, stung by Queen Mary’s charges, made his own apologia, as vivid as Mary’s own on the subject of vengeance, in which he drew a sharp distinction between public and private morality. ‘God is my witness,’ he declared, ‘that as a private person I have done nothing unworthy of an honest man, and as a Secretary of State, nothing unbefitted of my duty.’ Another topic discussed in this first day of the trial was that of Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent in France, now in prison there for his involvement in the Parry plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Cecil tried to make out that the fact that Morgan was her pensioner contaminated Mary with his guilt. Mary answered with some asperity that Morgan was not her pensioner, but merely someone to whom she had given money from time to time, much as England had subsidized the master of Gray, and many other Scots, including the king, James himself. It was a pertinent point.

The evidence of Nau and Curle was now examined in much detail; in vain the queen inquired angrily why the two secretaries themselves were not produced in court as witnesses, since their absence cast a sinister light on the truth of their depositions. Mary pointed out that as it was admitted that Nau had actually written the text of the letters in cipher, it would have been easy enough for him to have incorporated some extra matter without her knowledge, more especially since over the past year he had taken to doing the correspondence apart in his own little cabinet, giving the excuse that it was thus easier to compose and concentrate. ‘Nau had many peculiarities, likings and intentions that I cannot mention in public,’ added Mary darkly.¹³ Despite this outburst, at heart Mary realized the truth about her secretaries, and even in this extremity was prepared to show the human understanding for which she was rightly famous; for she went on: ‘For my part, I do not wish to accuse my secretaries, but I see plainly that what they have said is from fear of torture and death. Under promise of their lives and in order to save themselves, they have excused themselves at my expense, fancying that I could thereby more easily save myself, at the same time, not knowing where I was, and not suspecting the manner in which I am treated.’ She also distinguished the betrayal of Nau from that of Curle, knowing the characters of both men, saying that if Curle had done anything wrong, he must have been forced into it by Nau. Mary and Cecil now argued about who had employed Nau – whether the fact that he was paid by the king of France might explain his disloyalty to Mary. Having made this point, however, Mary returned to her main thesis on the subject of the secretaries, that they themselves in person rather than their evidence should have been produced against her: ‘If they were in my presence now they would clear me on the spot of all blame and would have put me out of case. …’ Mary was right in the importance she attached to the secretaries’ evidence: Walsingham smugly reported to Leicester the next day that the fact that her own secretaries had testified against Mary was proof of her guilt, in the minds of even her friends on the commission.¹⁴

According to the physician Bourgoing’s account, the whole trial now broke down into a bedlam of accusations on the part of Mary’s judges: these chicaneurs (as he persistently termed them – pettifogging lawyers) attacked her like furies, sometimes one by one, sometimes all together, all shouting that she was guilty. When Mary returned to her own apartments, she was so exhausted that she told her own servants, without wishing to carry the comparison too far, that the whole scene had reminded her of the Passion of Christ: for the judges had treated her as the Jews treated Jesus, shouting at him ‘Tolle, Tolle, Crucifige’. And so ended the first day of the trial. The queen passed an anxious and sleepless night, and began the next day early praying in her private oratory.

As she entered the great hall on the second morning of her ordeal, it was noticed that the queen was extremely pale. But her first action was to make it known that she wished to address the assembly personally. Curiosity to hear her was enormous, for over the years the legend of the imprisoned Scottish queen, whether a dragon or a captive princess, had grown quite sufficiently to arouse the keen interest of the spectators. Mary’s first point was to protest strongly and movingly against the manner in which she had been treated on the previous day, being attacked on every issue, although she had only consented to answer accusations specifically related to the assassination plot against Elizabeth. Weak and ill as she was, she was alone among them, a sick woman, with no paper, no notes and no secretary, taken by surprise by a commission which had long been preparing such charges against her: under such circumstances she concluded ‘there is not one, I think, among you, let him be the cleverest man you will, but would be incapable of resisting or defending himself were he in my place’.¹⁵

Strangely enough this speech met with a moderate reply from Cecil, in contrast to the roughness of the previous day. Bourgoing noted that the whole behaviour of the judges was now more courteous and that Cecil on several occasions gave them hints on how to proceed. Not only that, but servants, with the quick observation of those long imprisoned, noticed that many of the nobles had come to the assembly in riding-dress and boots, from which they deduced that the proceedings were already designed, willy-nilly, to end that day. The morning was spent in going over most of the main points again – the pretended overthrow of Elizabeth, Mary’s correspondence with foreign princes and her attempts to be delivered from prison. Cecil took particular care to try and persuade Mary that she was being well treated, and that although she was only being examined on the subject of the assassination, all the other evidence had to be taken into account. Cecil concluded by saying that Mary had behaved particularly badly in seeking to escape at the exact moment when the last treaty for her freedom had been about to be concluded (he was referring to the Association with James) and sending Parry to kill Elizabeth. At this corruption of the truth, Mary burst out, ‘Ah! You are indeed my adversary!’ ‘I am the adversary to the adversaries of Queen Elizabeth,’ replied Cecil smoothly.¹⁶

The second stage of the trial concerned Mary’s transference of the inheritance rights of the Scottish crown to Philip II. In a tone not unlike that of her cousin Elizabeth when her Commons grew too presumptuous, Mary sharply repudiated the right of the court even to consider this matter. It was true that as an English prisoner she hardly had much of a crown to offer, but in any case ‘It is not your affair to speak of matters concerning princes, and to inquire whether they have secret intelligences with each other’. When Cecil questioned her as to how she would have acted if the Spanish army had arrived, Mary stuck to the answer that she was not answerable for the Spanish, and again and again declared: ‘I desired nothing but my own deliverance.’ Accusations were now piled on her head from the intended murder of the queen to the prayers said at Rome for Mary as the true queen of England. Throughout all these speeches, Mary adhered steadfastly to the statement that she had neither planned nor known of any lethal enterprise. She appealed to her own reputation for mercy and how in Scotland she had always been blamed for being so tolerant to the Protestants: ‘It has been the cause of my ruin,’ she reflected sadly, ‘for my subjects became sad and haughty and abused my clemency; indeed they now complain that they were never so well off as under my government.’¹⁷

In short Mary took her stand on the two things which she had always desired, and freely admitted to having done so – her own deliverance and the support of the Catholic cause in England. Beyond these aims, she no longer wished for anything, neither honours nor kingdoms; and in defence of this last aim she was prepared to die. If the Pope in Rome had chosen to give her the title of queen of England, it was not for her to correct him. As for the famous bull, she herself had offered to prevent its execution. Yet she felt herself more than ever as one with the whole Catholic community in England, whose prayers were sustaining her, and against whose cruel persecution she once more vigorously protested. The queen’s last demand was to be granted a full hearing in front of Parliament, instead of being limited to this unjust trial, and to be permitted to confer personally with Queen Elizabeth. Mary then rose. As she proceeded from her chair, she regarded the whole assembly, and most regally declared that she pardoned them for what they had done. Mary then had a few private words with Walsingham, which seemed to displease him, for she once more turned and addressed the assembly as a whole: ‘My lords and gentlemen, I place my cause in the hands of God.’ As the queen passed the table full of lawyers she permitted herself a last little pleasantry: she called on God to pardon them for the way they had treated her – ‘somewhat rudely’, as she put it – and she added with a smile: ‘May God keep me from having to do with you all again.’ At this the lawyers also exchanged smiles.¹⁸

In answer to the express wish of Elizabeth who wanted no sentence pronounced before she herself had considered the proceedings, the court was now prorogued, to meet in ten days’ time at the Star Chamber at Westminster. The noblemen, booted and spurred in advance, rode away from Fotheringhay. Mary was left to go back once more to the little round of captivity. Her tranquillity was not in the slightest disturbed by the harrowing ordeal through which she had just passed. It was as though she had predicted long ago in her own mind the course which events were likely to take and had even found in the working out of her prophecies, melancholy as they were, a source of strength. Just as the populace had been curious to see the baleful queen of Scots, Mary herself had derived some minor enjoyment from this brief glimpse of English society – the only true sight of it she ever had. Throughout the trial she questioned Paulet concerning the faces of various English gentlemen among the judges, many of whose names had been long familiar to her. After so many years of virtual solitude the crowded court scene brought at least the compensation of satisfying her curiosity about England.

Paulet of course found her conduct at the trial utterly distasteful: to his way of thinking, the queen of Scots was never more odious than when displaying the full counterfeit charm of her character. He wrote to London that her intention had been by ‘long and artificial speeches’ to excite the pity of the judges, and throw all the blame on Elizabeth, or rather, upon her Council. Whereas Mary told her servants she had discerned expressions of compassion among the crowd, Paulet cheered himself with the reflection that they had all been ‘of one consent and mind to hear her cause with indifference’.¹⁹ But to those less prejudiced than the queen’s jailer, and to those who would come after him and attempt to pass the judgement of history upon the Scottish queen, Mary would elicit not so much pity as profound admiration for the cool and clever manner in which she had single-handedly conducted her defence against all the odds. In her Essay on Adversity she had referred to the ‘disagreeable and ugly slough of pusillanimity’, the one pitfall into which those called by God to wield the sceptre should never fall.²⁰ It was not a trap into which Mary had fallen herself. Throughout her trial she had shown herself unwaveringly regal, and not all the petty spite of Paulet could take this triumph from her.

The next few weeks represented a strangely serene interlude in Mary’s life, the Indian summer of her captivity, when she was able to add to the self-discipline of the long-held prisoner the peace of mind of one who knew her confinement was rapidly moving towards its finish. Mary now read much concerning English history, a habit she had already begun to develop at Chartley, since the inventory of her belongings in June 1586 mentions a number of books on the subject as well as a map. She embroidered. She made arrangements in her own mind for the final journey she was now convinced lay ahead. Bourgoing found her so far from being troubled by what had passed that ‘I had not seen her so joyous, nor so constantly at her ease for the last seven years. She spoke only on pleasant subjects, and often in particular, gave her opinion on some points of the history of England, in the study of which she passed a good portion of the day, afterwards discoursing on the subject of her reading with her household, quite familiarly and joyously, showing no signs of sadness, but with even a more cheerful countenance than previous to her troubles.’²¹ It was clear that Mary’s words at her trial were no hypocrisy – she truly did not fear to die in a good cause. Mary, like many other philosopher-prisoners, took comfort in the perusal of the past, from whose study one lesson can always be learnt: that the single action of a human being, be it a heroic life or a noble death, can have incalculable effects upon the course of history.

On 25th October the commissioners met again in the Star Chamber in London. On this occasion Nau and Curle were actually produced, raising once more the question why in all decency they could not have appeared at Fotheringhay. Both reaffirmed their evidence on oath and stated that they had given it ‘frankly and voluntarily’. The commission accordingly found Mary guilty of ‘compassing and imagining since June 1st matters tending to the death and destruction of the Queen of England’. Only Lord Zouch, a youngish peer, who had lived through a somewhat wild youth in which he spent his patrimony, had the courage to express himself not altogether satisfied. The commission took particular trouble to except King James from his mother’s guilt since, by the terms of the Act of Association, her disablement from the succession would have applied also to her son. The two Houses of Parliament now presented an address to Queen Elizabeth in which they prayed fervently for the execution of the Scottish queen for the sake of Elizabeth’s own safety which would be in peril ‘so long as the said Scottish Queen shall be suffered to continue and shall not receive that due punishment, which by justice and the laws of this your realm she hath so often and for so many ways for her most detestable and wicked offences deserved’. Elizabeth replied in a long and ambivalent speech in which she showed how much she personally was aware, even if her Commons were not, that ‘we princes are set as it were upon stages, in the sight and view of all the world’ and that the execution of Mary was one thing for the Commons to demand, quite another for Elizabeth, a fellow-queen, to confirm.²² Twelve days later, Elizabeth, having indicated that it would be highly desirable in any case to secure a full confession from the queen of Scots, asked her two Houses with further ambiguity whether they could not devise some better remedy whereby the queen of Scots’ life might be spared and her own security provided for.

Mary herself was not immediately informed that the sentence of death had been passed against her in London. In the meantime Paulet endeavoured to carry out his instructions from London and secure that full confession, that humiliating pleading for pardon from the Scottish queen, for which the English queen so passionately wished. On 1st November, the Feast of All Saints, which Mary spent in prayer and reading the lives of the saints since she was still deprived of her chaplain, de Préau, she received a visit from Paulet after dinner. Paulet showed unexpected courtesy in actually waiting until her prayers were over. They argued a little on the subject of history. Mary observed how blood never ceased to flow in the course of English history, and Paulet commented that this was the same in many countries, especially in time of national peril. Mary then inquired after one or two people at her trial whom she had imagined to be sympathetic to her, and asked their names that she might remember them. ‘Not one of them was favourable to your cause,’ said Paulet crossly. ‘And everyone else is astonished to see you so calm under the circumstances in which you find yourself. No living person has ever been accused of crimes so frightful and odious as yours.’ But Mary was not disposed to admit in any way to these frightful and odious crimes. Instead she reiterated her claim that she stood witness for the truths of the Catholic religion, and argued with Paulet about whether or not Elizabeth claimed to be supreme head of the Church. Paulet maintained that Elizabeth was on the contrary ‘head and governor under God of things ecclesiastical and temporal in England’, but Mary dismissed the difference between the two titles in an expressive French phrase: ‘C’était manteau blanc ou blanc manteau,’ she remarked. Paulet was obliged to report back to London his disappointment: ‘I see no change in her, from her former quietness and serenity, certified in my letters,’ he wrote. In the meantime Paulet greatly disliked these battles of wits, in which he could scarcely hold himself to be the winner. He told Walsingham: ‘I pray you let me hear from you whether it is expected that I should see my charge often, which as I do not desire to do, so I do not see that any good can come of it.’²³

On the evening of 19th November, Lord Buckhurst, who had arrived at Fotheringhay with Beale, the clerk of the Council, delivered his message to Mary. Buckhurst now warned Mary that it was considered impossible that both she and Elizabeth should continue to live. Although Elizabeth had not given her consent to the execution, Buckhurst solemnly called on Mary to repent; to that end he offered her the services of a Protestant clergyman, the bishop or dean of Peterborough. Mary described the whole interview in her letter to Beaton in Paris at the end of November. ‘I thanked God and them,’ she wrote proudly, ‘for the honour they did me in considering me to be such a necessary instrument for the re-establishing of religion in this island. … In confirmation of all this as I had before protested, I offered willingly to shed my blood in the quarrel of the Catholic Church.’ This was of course the very last answer which Paulet and Buckhurst were prepared to receive: they told Mary roughly that as she was to die for the intended murder of Elizabeth, she would certainly not be regarded as either a saint or a martyr. But Mary was quite intelligent enough to see that despite Paulet’s protests matters were going in the direction she hoped. It was no wonder Camden heard that her face was now illumined with extraordinary joy at the thought that God had thus chosen her to be a martyr. It was left to Paulet to castigate her speeches angrily in his report to London as ‘superfluous and idle’, and tell Walsingham that he had no doubt Buckhurst too had found the queen of Scots’ endless speech-making extremely tedious.²⁴

Such pieces of oratory might be superfluous and idle to Paulet but to Mary they were essential planks in the platform from which she intended to undergo her martyrdom for the Catholic faith: Paulet’s opinion was a matter of indifference to her, so long as her words would one day echo forth in the theatre of the world. But Paulet’s next action – the removal of the royal cloth of state over Mary’s chair, by which she set such store – offended her in the vital matter of her queenship. The reasons which Paulet gave hardly added to the grace of the occasion: ‘You are now only a dead woman,’ he said, ‘without the dignity or honours of a Queen.’ Mary responded with a spirited defence of her station, in which her studies in English history prompted her to compare herself to King Richard II in the hands of his enemies. Her own attendants refused to obey Paulet’s command to remove the canopy, so that it had to be thrown down by his own men. Paulet now added insult to injury by sitting in the queen’s presence with his head covered, and furthermore ordering the removal of the royal billiard table, on the grounds that it was now no time for the queen to be indulging in amusement. However, it would seem from Paulet’s own account of the scene that he had exceeded his instructions to a certain extent; the removal of the canopy was due to his own excess of zeal, prompted rather by a rumour from London that Elizabeth disliked the idea of the canopy, than by the specific instructions of the English queen. The next day Paulet went to Mary and offered to write to London for official leave to restore the canopy, saying it had been removed on the Council’s orders. This merely gave Mary opportunity to point sublimely to the symbol which she had already hung in the place of the vanished cloth of state – a crucifix. In her own words to Henry of Guise, ‘I showed them the Cross of my Saviour in the place where my canopy had been’.²⁵

It was now the end of November. Mary imagined that her days were truly numbered. She spent two days writing her farewell letters, with a hand crippled by rheumatism.* She wrote to the Pope at length, professing the truth of the Catholic faith by which she had always lived, and towards which she had ever done her duty in the past, so far as the dour conditions of captivity and illness had enabled her. Now, however, she was to be granted a supreme opportunity, as the one remaining Catholic member of the royal house of England and Scotland, to testify on behalf of her religion by her death ‘for my sins and those of this unfortunate island’.²⁶ Religious rather than dynastic interests were now paramount in her mind, and it was the Catholic faith, rather than maternal feelings, which now swayed Mary in the dispositions she laid down for the English throne after her death: she begged the Pope to let the Catholic king of Spain secure her rights to the crown of England, in place of James, if he remained obstinately outside the Catholic Church.

Another letter went to Mendoza, that companion of her intrigues, now in Paris, assuring him that she had all the courage necessary to receive her sentence for the honour of God.²⁷ To Mendoza, Mary repeated solemnly her bestowal of the rights of the English throne upon the Spanish king if James did not embrace the Catholic religion. She recommended to him her poor destitute servants, including Leslie, the bishop of Ross, whom she had heard was in dire straits, and bequeathed to Mendoza, who had cared so prolongedly and so passionately for the cause of her deliverance, the diamond which Norfolk had given her so long ago. Lastly Mary wrote to her cousin, Henry of Guise, whom she now held to be her closest blood relation since the betrayal of James and addressing him ‘as you whom I hold as dearest to me in the world’. To him once more she stressed the nobility of the end which awaited her: ‘Although no executioner has ever before dipped his hand in our (Guise) blood, be not ashamed of it, my dear friend, for the condemnation of heretics and enemies of the Church (and who have no jurisdiction over me, a free Queen) is profitable before God for the children of His Church.’ As for the Faith: ‘I esteem myself born, both on the paternal and the maternal side to offer my blood for it. …’²⁸ Yet lest the full details of her martyrdom should be concealed by the English, and because not everything could be trusted to letters, Mary begged Henry of Guise and Mendoza to listen carefully to the eye-witness accounts of her own servants after her death, when they should manage to deliver them.

As she wrote, Queen Mary could hear the banging of the workmen in the great hall of the Council. She imagined quite genuinely that she was listening to the sound of her own scaffold being erected. She mentioned the subject to Mendoza as she wrote: ‘I think they are making a scaffold to make me play the last scene of the Tragedy. …’ In fact it was to be over two months before this final scene was actually played. The reason of course was that Elizabeth obstinately hesitated to confirm the sentence. The most the Parliament could secure from her was the public proclamation of the sentence of death on 4th December, on the understanding of which Parliament was prorogued till the spring. The English people might rejoice and ring their bells at the news, but their queen was still very far from resolving her own dilemma. Quite apart from the fact that Mary was an anointed queen and her own cousin, there were the problems of foreign relations to consider. How would France, where Mary had once been queen, react to the news of her death – and still more Scotland, where Mary had once actually reigned, and her own son now ruled. As the prospect of war with Spain loomed nearer, the goodwill of France and the continuance of the alliance with Scotland became more important than mere diplomatic friendship. Were such vital benevolences really worth sacrificing for the death of one old and sick woman, who had been a prisoner for nearly twenty years? It was Mary the prisoner at Fotheringhay who was calm and tranquil, who wrote her letters, considered how she could best dispose her affairs for her servants, contemplated her crucifix, and showed herself more joyous than she had been for years. It was Elizabeth the jailer, in London, muttering to herself Aut fer aut feri, ne feriare, feri – suffer or strike, strike or be struck – who suffered the torments of indecision.

* The Privy Council wanted to bring the Scottish queen to the Tower of London, but Elizabeth refused to hear of it.

* The signature is not actually that of Mary herself, lacking the characteristic level letters. The pane of glass is still to be seen in the William Salt Library, Stafford.

* The practice of allowing no counsel to the defendant at a treason trial persisted: in 1746 at the trial in London of Simon, Lord Lovat for his part in the ’45, Horace Walpole described how pathetic it was to see the old man (he was over eighty) struggling with his defence without any counsel in what to him was a foreign country.

* In his history, Froude attempted to justify the trial by pointing out that Mary had a place within the English succession which gave Elizabeth rights over her; this would be a more effective argument if Mary had not been persistently denied these rights by Elizabeth all her life despite her many attempts to secure their acknowledgment.

* On the subject of Mary’s conviction that Elizabeth had promised her assistance if she came to England, it may be recalled that Cecil in his memorandum of summer 1568 concerning the pros and contras of the imprisonment of the queen of Scots cited, as one argument contra, the fact that the queen of England had made Mary promises of assistance ‘frequently expressed’.⁷

* Throughout her captivity she seems to have been under the impression that Cecil was more generously inclined towards her than his private papers actually show him to have been. This suggests that Cecil, wise in his own generation, did not allow himself to forget altogether Mary’s prominent position in the table of the English succession.

* These letters, which Mary handed to her servants to deliver, did not reach their destinations until the following autumn, owing to the long imprisonment of these servants after their mistress’s death.