16
ELIZABETH’S ACCESSION WAS quickly followed by the assertion of a rival claim to her throne. In France, Henri II encouraged his daughter-in-law, the sixteen-year-old Dauphine, Mary, Queen of Scots, and his son, François, to adopt the style of King and Queen of England and to quarter the royal arms of England on Mary’s shield. It was a provocative gesture. In the eyes of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth, daughter of a bigamous marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, conducted while his first wife was still alive, was a bastard. As such she had no right to the crown. In lieu of Elizabeth, Mary had the best claim to the English throne, as the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, by her first marriage to James IV of Scotland. For the next three decades, Mary Stuart remained a thorn in Elizabeth’s side.
Elizabeth and Mary, queens whose rivalry could end only in the destruction of one by the other, never met. By 1560, Mary – now the widowed Queen of France – decided to return to her own kingdom; Elizabeth refused to offer her safe passage through England, forcing Mary to take the more hazardous sea route. Elizabeth’s favour was not forthcoming while Mary refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, which contained a clause renouncing her claim to the English throne. Mary, slightly modifying her position, refused to sign unless she was at least designated Elizabeth’s successor.
Not content to be just Queen of Scotland – a paltry kingdom, in her view – Mary’s gaze was forever fixed on England. In this, her attitude was in marked contrast to Elizabeth’s, who loved her country and was fiercely patriotic. Mary, who had become Queen of Scotland when she was one week old and had been brought up as the spoilt darling of the French court, tended to take her good fortune for granted. Elizabeth, through the perils of her youth, had learned to take nothing for granted. It was because she herself had been placed in such danger during her sister’s reign, the figurehead of conspiracy, that Elizabeth was reluctant to name anyone her successor, let alone the Catholic Queen of a neighbouring state.
As she told Mary’s Secretary of State, William Maitland of Lethington: ‘Howsoever it be, so long as I live, I shall be Queen of England; when I am dead, they shall succeed that has most right. If the queen your sovereign be that person, I shall never hurt her; if another have a better right, it were not reasonable to require me to do a manifest injury.’ Naming Mary her successor, she explained, would not cement friendship between them; on the contrary. ‘Think you that I could love my winding-sheet? Princes cannot like their own children, those that should succeed unto them.’
‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England,’ she continued, ‘how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’ People naturally prefer the rising to the setting sun. ‘I have good experience of myself in my sister’s how desirous men were that I should be in place, and earnest to set me up. And if I would have consented, I know what enterprises would have been attempted to bring it to pass.’ Men who bore her good will when she was Lady Elizabeth or thought they had her favour no doubt expected to be rewarded when she came to the crown. ‘No prince’s revenues be so great that they are able to satisfy the insatiable cupidity of men.’ Elizabeth is sure her subjects love her, but some are bound to be discontented, and might they not in that case turn to her successor, if she should name that person? ‘And what danger it were, she being a puissant princess and so near our neighbour, ye may judge; so that in assuring her of the succession we might put our present estate in doubt.’
It was likely that the Queen of Scots would remarry, complicating the issue. Elizabeth was as preoccupied by the question of Mary’s marriage as her own. Having had the field to herself as ‘the best match in her parish’, suddenly Elizabeth had a rival. The Kings of Sweden and Denmark and Habsburg archdukes – even Don Carlos, the inbred, imbecilic son of Philip II – were now contenders for the hand of the Queen of Scots. She, too, had a crown to offer, perhaps eventually the crown of England as well. Her charms were already legendary.
No man could remain impervious to her seductive allure: those fascinating, slightly slanted hazel eyes, the luminous white complexion in a face framed by rich auburn hair, the melodious voice with its French-tinged Scottish accent, her infectious joie de vivre. The haunting Deuil Blanc portrait of Mary in white mourning, painted before her departure from France, had just come into Elizabeth’s possession and she must have scrutinized it for clues. There was something crafty, enigmatic and beguiling about the woman in the portrait, a look that has prompted myriad interpretations of her character and left her vulnerable to the calumnies of her enemies.
Elizabeth and Mary were curious to see each other, but the intended meeting never came about. Instead, Elizabeth pressed the Scottish envoy, Sir James Melville, to describe his Queen. Who was the fairer? she asked him. ‘She was the fairest Queen in England, and mine the fairest Queen in Scotland,’ he answered diplomatically. ‘They were both the fairest ladies in their countries; that her Majesty was whiter, but my Queen was very lovely.’ Elizabeth asked which of them was taller, to which Melville replied that Mary was. ‘Then,’ she pounced triumphantly, ‘she is too high; for I myself am neither too high nor too low.’ She asked if Mary played well, to which he replied, ‘reasonably, for a Queen’, after which Elizabeth treated him to an impromptu performance on the virginals. He then watched her dance and had to admit that Mary ‘danced not so high, and disposedly as she did’.
Elizabeth had no wish to see Mary married to a foreign, Catholic prince, undoing all her good work securing an Anglophile, Protestant government north of the border and posing a threat to England. Giving encouraging noises that if Mary would marry as she directed, she might see her way to recognizing her as her successor, failing any children of her own, Elizabeth put forward the extraordinary suggestion that Mary marry Robert Dudley. All too conscious throughout her life of her royal status, Mary was outraged at the very idea that she would stoop so low as to marry a mere commoner, a man suspected of complicity in his wife’s death, and – if the rumours she had heard were true – the Queen of England’s discarded lover. Knowing by now that she could not marry Dudley herself, Elizabeth probably felt that he was the one person she could trust to keep the Scottish Queen under her thumb. Mary was highly insulted by the suggestion, so much so that she veered off in another direction entirely.
Perhaps it had been Elizabeth’s purpose all along to push Mary into the arms of the other candidate. For in the very act of creating Dudley Earl of Leicester, she asked Melville what he thought of ‘yonder long lad, pointing to my lord Darnley’. Melville answered carefully that ‘no woman of spirit would make choice of such a man, who more resembled a woman than a man. For he was handsome, beardless and lady-faced.’ However, he added conspiratorially in his memoir, ‘I had secret charge to deal with my Lady Lennox, to endeavour to procure liberty for him to go to Scotland … under pretext of seeing the country.’
Elizabeth loathed Margaret Lennox, the daughter of Margaret Tudor, with her pretensions to the English throne. The fact that she had been born in England gave her an advantage over Mary Stuart. On the other hand, there was some doubt about the validity of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to the Earl of Angus, since it seems to have taken place while he was still married to his previous wife. It was a moot point, therefore, if Lady Lennox’s pretensions were justified. Like her mother, she had made a similarly impetuous marriage to Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, a Scottish exile at the English court. Lennox had now returned to Scotland and was requesting that his son, the English-born Henry, Lord Darnley, be allowed to visit him. Someone as shrewd as Elizabeth must have been aware of the machinations of Darnley’s ambitious mother to marry him to the Queen of Scots, yet she gave Darnley leave to visit Scotland on a three-month passport.
For Mary, with her sights ever set on the English crown, a partnership with Darnley – one of her strongest rivals by blood for it – could only strengthen her claim and that of any children of the marriage. Of a similar height to her at around six foot, slim and graceful, the auburn-haired youth with the pretty if rather Pan-like features – those slanted eyes and pointed ears – made a favourable first impression on Mary, who thought him ‘the lustiest and best proportioned long man that ever she had seen’.
Darnley had been carefully tutored by his mother in all aspects of courtly behaviour, but it was not long before the surface charm gave way to the vicious and debauched personality that was his natural bent, now that he had escaped his mother’s tight leash. Mary, who seems to have fallen headlong in love, ascribed his nastiness to the illness that struck him in April. It was believed to be measles, but it is just possible that this was an early manifestation of the virulent syphilis which he was probably suffering from at the time of his death less than two years later.
It was now, with an exquisite sense of timing, that Elizabeth let it be known that she would not, after all, name her successor until such time as she herself had decided whether she would marry or not. Nor could she approve the Darnley match. In a fit of pique, Mary would be bound to marry Darnley now, and the question has to be asked whether this was Elizabeth’s strategic goal. A shrewd judge of character, despising Lady Lennox and recognizing Darnley for a wastrel, had she sent him north to bring trouble and ruin to the Queen of Scots? Perhaps she had, although it is hard to see why she would have wanted these two strong claimants to her throne to unite. By July, when she recalled Lennox and Darnley from Scotland, they were sufficiently sure of themselves to defy her, so that Lady Lennox was treated to a spell in the Tower.
In Scotland opposition to the marriage of the Queen to this arrogant youth with his outbursts of temper and drunken loutishness was steadily mounting. In particular, Mary’s bastard brother, James Stuart, Earl of Moray, who had hitherto been her chief counsellor, was jealous and resentful of the newcomer. With characteristic Stuart obstinacy, the more opposition to her marriage Mary encountered, the more determined she was to defy them all. On 29 July 1565 she married Darnley, according to Catholic rites, in the Chapel Royal at Holyroodhouse, proclaiming him titular King of Scots. Not even Elizabeth could have reckoned how quickly events would spiral out of control after this.
Love soon turned to disillusionment and hate. Humiliated by her husband’s boorish behaviour and his nightly forays into Edinburgh to consort with the lowest prostitutes, Mary bitterly regretted her marriage. She had alienated Moray and the others for nothing. Her growing dislike for Darnley turned to revulsion after his part in the murder of her Piedmontese secretary, David Riccio. Darnley had held his wife’s arms pinioned behind her back as one of his fellow conspirators had pressed a loaded pistol against her heavily pregnant belly and another had thrust his dagger over her left shoulder – almost slicing her ear off in the process – into the victim, who had taken refuge behind her, clinging to her skirts. There followed an orgy of killing, as each of the conspirators plunged his dagger into the man whose only crime was to have been a foreigner who had crept too far into the Queen’s confidence.
It had almost certainly been Darnley’s intention that his wife should miscarry and die as a result of this experience, leaving him – as he foolishly imagined – to take the crown of Scotland. For this Mary would never forgive him, but before she could take revenge, she had to seduce him into betraying and abandoning his co-conspirators. Once Mary gave birth to Prince James, in June 1566, and the child had been acknowledged as his, Darnley had served his purpose. Mary’s dilemma now was how to endure her miserable marriage, or how to be rid of him? She authorized her counsellors, including Moray and Maitland, to explore legal means of ending the marriage without jeopardizing the legitimacy of Prince James. Maitland assured her that a way would be found. Mary hastened to say, ‘I will that you do nothing whereunto any spot may be laid to my honour or conscience.’ Perhaps, after all, it would be better to leave things until ‘God of His goodness put remedy thereto’. Darnley had made many enemies in Scotland who were only too happy to arrange his demise and Mary must have been aware of this. Either she was powerless to call a halt to plots to eliminate him, or she turned a blind eye.
It was Melville’s unhappy duty to bring the news of Prince James’s birth to the Queen of England. He found Elizabeth ‘in great mirth, dancing after supper’. As Cecil whispered the news in her ear, ‘all her mirth was laid aside … she did sit down, putting her hand under her cheek, bursting out to some of her ladies, that the Queen of Scots was lighter of a fair son, while she was but a barren stock.’ Not particularly maternal herself, there is no reason to think that Elizabeth was anything more than momentarily nonplussed by the news. She always hinted in her speeches that even if she did not have any children of her own, God would provide an heir to her crown. Perhaps He had just done so. She gladly agreed to stand godmother to the Scottish Prince, sending a valuable gold font encrusted with jewels as his christening gift.
In January 1567 Mary suddenly decided to travel to Glasgow to visit Darnley, who had taken refuge with his father, and beguiled him into returning to Edinburgh with her. In view of subsequent events, her motives seem suspicious, because she must have known that he would be safer in Lennox territory than in Edinburgh, where so many of his enemies lurked. Later, her enemies implied that she was already involved with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, and intended to lure her husband to his death in order to make way for Bothwell. Certainly Mary had come to rely increasingly on Bothwell’s loyalty and strength. By now, Darnley was very ill, possibly with syphilis, as his whole body was covered in suppurating sores. Mary brought him to Kirk o’Field on the edge of the town. While he was there, Mary slept two nights at the house. Just before midnight on the third night, Maitland reminded her that she was due to attend a wedding party and she hurriedly said farewell to the protesting Darnley and left. As she left the house, she encountered a former servant of Bothwell’s, French Paris, who was now in the royal service. He was so covered in what looked like soot, but was probably the gunpowder at that moment being laid in the cellar, that the Queen exclaimed, ‘Jesu, Paris, how begrimed ye are!’
At two in the morning, Edinburgh was rocked by an enormous explosion. The house where Darnley had been lodged lay in total ruin, and according to a drawing of the scene immediately despatched to Cecil in London, Darnley himself lay dead in the garden wearing only his nightshirt, his semi-dressed valet lying near by with a chair, a quilt and a dagger. It was in the garden, as he escaped from the house, alerted perhaps by some untoward sound or the smell of burning, that Darnley met the party who were waiting to kill him by asphyxiation, almost certainly his Douglas cousins, bent on revenge for his betrayal of them after the Riccio murder. A neighbour allegedly heard a voice cry, ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the sake of Jesus Christ who pitied all the world…’ It was only after this that the explosion occurred.
There is good reason to believe that Darnley’s murder was the outcome of several plotters either working independently or in loose association. The consensus seems to have been to let Bothwell, the independent loner, take the blame; he was almost certainly implicated, but only as one among several parties to the murder. Whether or not Mary knew of the plot, or suspected it, or was already involved with Bothwell, the point was how she would behave now and what action she would take to bring the perpetrators to justice. She did nothing, withdrawing to Seton and sinking into a state of catatonic collapse, while in Edinburgh a cleverly orchestrated placard campaign was under way accusing Bothwell of the murder, but soon also the Queen, depicted as a crowned mermaid or prostitute, as his accomplice. Alarmed for her sister queen and the disrepute she was bringing to monarchy generally, Elizabeth wrote to Mary in the strongest terms:
My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder … that I scarcely yet have the wits to write about it … O madam, I would not do the office of faithful cousin or affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than employed myself in preserving your honour. However I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about: which is that you will look through your fingers at the revenging of this deed, and that you do not take measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in doing it … I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thing so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you [Bothwell] if the thing touches him, and that no persuasion will prevent you from making an example out of this to the world: that you are both a noble princess and a loyal wife. I do not write so vehemently out of doubt that I have, but out of the affection that I bear you in particular. For I am not ignorant that you have no wiser counsellors than myself.
Far from heeding her advice, Mary careered headlong down the path to her destruction. As she was returning from a visit to her son at Stirling in April, Mary’s party was halted by Bothwell and several hundred troops; seizing the bridle of her horse, he demanded that she accompany him to Dunbar for her own safety. Here, apparently, he raped her. ‘And then the Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against her will.’ As John Knox sarcastically remarked: ‘It was true she was taken against her will, but, since her taking, she had no occasion to complain; yea, the courteous entertainment she had, made her forget all former offences.’ It is unlikely that Mary colluded in her own abduction, but even if Bothwell had forced himself upon her, there was no need to marry him. Strangely apathetic, perhaps a willing party to what looked like a sado-masochistic relationship with the rough-and-ready border lord, Mary seemed to have lost her grip on reality.
Elizabeth was outraged. As queen, she had always placed her realm first, sacrificing her personal happiness with Leicester, while as the daughter of Anne Boleyn she had had to be especially careful of her honour. Now here was Mary Stuart – who had had the temerity to claim her crown and call her a bastard – behaving like a common whore. She had allowed her neediness for Bothwell and her own lusts to come before her duty as a queen and as the mother of a prince. Elizabeth fired off another letter, lambasting her:
Madam, to be plain with you, our grief hath not been small that in this your marriage so slender consideration hath been had that … no good friend you have in the whole world can like thereof … For how could a worse choice be made for your honour than in such haste to marry such a subject, who besides other and notorious lacks, public fame has charged with the murder of your late husband, beside the touching of yourself also in some part, though we trust that in that behalf falsely. And with what peril have you married him that hath another lawful wife alive [Lady Jean Gordon, whom Bothwell had hurriedly divorced days before marrying Mary], whereby neither by God’s law nor man’s yourself can be his leeful [lawful] wife, nor any children betwixt you legitimate.
A month after the marriage, Mary and Bothwell met their enemies on the battlefield. After parlaying all day in the hot sun as their forces slipped away, Mary was persuaded to give herself up in exchange for Bothwell’s freedom. It was in all their interests to allow Bothwell, the man who could point to all those implicated in Darnley’s murder, to escape. He rode away and Mary was dragged into Edinburgh – her hair hanging wild and loose about her shoulders, her dress rent and her breasts exposed – before a howling mob. She had lost all the respect due to a queen. Lashed to a fury of Calvinist righteousness against a woman whom they believed to be a murderess and an adulteress, the crowd – especially the women – screamed, ‘Burn the whore! Kill her, drown her!’ Imprisoned on the island of Loch Leven, she gave birth to stillborn twins prematurely and, while laid low, was forced to abdicate.
As ‘a good neighbour, a dear sister, and a faithful friend’, Elizabeth could not stand by and do nothing:
For which purpose we are determined to send with all speed one of our own trusty servants, not only to understand your state but also thereupon so to deal with your nobility and people as they shall find you not to lack our friendship and power for the preservation of your honour in quietness. And upon knowledge had what shall be further requisite to be done for your comfort and for the tranquillity of your realm, we will omit no time to further the same, as you shall well see.
In May 1568 Mary escaped her island prison and, defeated in battle, fled to England. Her supporters had begged her not to put her trust in the fair words of the Queen of England, but Mary would not listen. She was sure that she would find refuge there and that Elizabeth would restore her to her throne. Indeed, it was Elizabeth’s first instinct to do so. She could not condone the behaviour of the Scottish rebels towards their anointed Queen. But Cecil and others persuaded her to change her mind. Mary confidently expected to be brought straight to Elizabeth, and was dismayed to learn that there could be no question of meeting the Queen until she was cleared of complicity in Darnley’s murder. Moray produced the Casket Letters, purporting to be highly incriminating correspondence between the Queen and Bothwell. They may or may not have been doctored. No conclusion as to Mary’s guilt or innocence was reached. The Scots did not want her back. She was to be Elizabeth’s problem in England for the next nineteen years, disrupting the peace and forcing Elizabeth into extreme courses of action she would rather have avoided.
Elizabeth’s dearest wish was for the peace and unity of her realm, which she felt would be best assured by outward conformity to an all-embracing state religion. A mark of the success of the Elizabethan Church settlement of 1559 was the fact that England did not suffer the religious wars tearing apart so many of its continental neighbours. With little active papal leadership to rally the Catholic cause, many Catholics were content to conform outwardly while practising their religion in secret, or drifted into conformity with the Established Church. If they were left unmolested, Elizabeth believed that in time Catholicism would die out, or operate on the margins as a harmless minority religion. Mary Stuart’s arrival in England acted as a rallying cry, however, awakening Catholic opposition and giving it a focus. Having made her peace with the Pope and reinvented herself as a Catholic martyr, Mary was to be the willing figurehead of every Catholic plot to dethrone and kill Elizabeth. Why should she not plot for Elizabeth’s crown, she would argue, since Elizabeth denied her her freedom?
In November 1569 Elizabeth faced the most serious rebellion of her reign, the Northern Rising, as the old, conservative Catholic nobility in the North, led by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, took up Mary’s cause. It was firmly suppressed. In 1571 a conspiracy was discovered which involved Elizabeth’s kinsman, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, other disgruntled English noblemen, the Spanish ambassador, agents of Mary Stuart, and a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, who might have been a double agent working for Cecil. Norfolk, who had already spent some time in the Tower for entering into discussions about a possible marriage between him and Mary Stuart, had been contacted on his release by Ridolfi and persuaded to enter the conspiracy for the deposition of Elizabeth. Mary, married to Norfolk, would rule in her place. The Duke was found guilty of treason. After a long period of delay, Elizabeth signed his death warrant; she hated to spill blood. She firmly ignored demands that Mary be put on trial.
On 25 February 1570 Pope Pius V’s bull, Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicated Elizabeth, declaring ‘the pretended Queen of England’ deposed and absolving her subjects from any oath of allegiance or fealty that they might have sworn. At the same time, the Catholic exile William Allen’s English college at Douai was busy training priests, an army of missionaries who would infiltrate England in the 1570s, bringing Catholics back to the faith and strengthening their resolve. The number of recusants – from the Latin, recusare, to refuse – who declined to attend the Established Church, incurring increasing fines and running the risk of imprisonment, rose rapidly. As they became more vociferous, Parliament tightened legislation against them.
In 1580 the first Jesuits, including the Oxford scholar Edmund Campion, were unleashed, their aim being to bring about the return of England to the papal fold and mass conversion. The overthrow of Elizabeth was implicit. In retaliation, Parliament passed new legislation declaring that anyone who persuaded English subjects to abandon the Established Church for that of Rome would be guilty of high treason. Anyone reconciled with Rome would suffer the same fate. Protestantism was linked with patriotism, while Catholicism was increasingly seen as something alien, foreign and hostile. Most Catholics were loyal to Elizabeth, asking only to have the freedom to worship in peace. Now, they were being indelibly labelled as traitors. Campion’s capture and his terrible suffering as he underwent the full punishment for treason – being hanged, brought down alive, dismembered, his bowels torn out and burned before his eyes, and quartered – in December 1581 demonstrated the government’s new, more ruthless approach. Hundreds of priests, operating in fear of their lives as they slipped from one safe house to the next, suffered the same fate.
There was a very real danger that Elizabeth would be assassinated. On the Continent the Pope, Philip II in Spain, Mary’s relatives the Guises, head of the Catholic party in strife-torn France, and the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, waiting for the signal from Philip to invade England, all plotted her overthrow. Mary remained at the epicentre of all the conspiracies, at home and abroad, to depose Elizabeth. In 1584 an association was formed and sanctioned by Parliament to pursue to the death anyone plotting against the Queen, as well as any person on whose behalf they plotted. Such a person would be excluded from the English throne. Mary was not named as such, but the implication was clear. The association had carte blanche to act against her. Elizabeth intervened to insist that such a person would not be condemned without trial. Significantly, in the event of Elizabeth’s assassination, Cecil formulated a plan whereby a Council of State would govern the country until such time as the Council and Parliament could decide on her successor. Naturally, Elizabeth did not approve of this attempt to encroach on the royal prerogative or alter the natural order of the succession.
Elizabeth had entrusted the task of detecting Catholic plotters to Sir Francis Walsingham. Clever, devious and utterly unscrupulous, he had built up a highly efficient spy network of agents and agents provocateurs both at home and abroad. He was determined to ensnare the Queen of Scots. He initiated false plots, such as the Parry plot in 1585, in the hope that Mary would become involved and condemn herself. For many years, Mary had enjoyed relative comfort under the kindly eye of her guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and the companionship of his wife, Bess of Hardwick, in Derbyshire, but the conditions of her imprisonment became more severe when Shrewsbury was replaced by the unbending Puritan Sir Amyas Paulet, and she was removed to less salubrious surroundings. Paulet abruptly cut off her correspondence with the outside world.
By now, Mary was ill and depressed. Her son James, anxious to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth, had abandoned her. Frustrated by the years of confinement, she would condone any rash move to effect a change in her circumstances. Walsingham had infiltrated a spy, Gilbert Gifford, into her household and when a brewer who delivered beer offered to convey messages for her, Mary did not stop to think before plunging headlong into the trap.
Walsingham discovered that a group of young Catholic idealists, led by Sir Anthony Babington, were plotting to release Mary. It was easy to facilitate the correspondence between Mary and Babington, by smuggling the letters in and out of Chartley in the bottom of the brewer’s beer-kegs. Rashly committing herself in writing, Mary gave her approval to all Babington’s plans, in which the removal of Elizabeth was implicit. As soon as Walsingham’s agent decoded the message, he saw that Mary had fallen into the trap. He drew a gallows on the letter and forwarded it to Walsingham. Walsingham forged a postscript, in which Mary asked for the names of the men involved in the conspiracy. He then re-sealed the letter and sent it to Babington. The trap snapped shut.
Babington and six fellow conspirators were arrested, hanged, drawn and quartered. At the end of September 1586 Mary was taken to Fotheringhay for trial. Always very insistent on her rights as a queen, if not so conscientious in fulfilling her responsibilities, Mary was still proclaiming her innocence. She told Paulet: ‘As a sinner I am truly conscious of having 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 below … As therefore I could not offend, I do not wish for pardon. I do not seek it, nor would I accept it from anyone living.’
There was no question that she was guilty and must die, but Elizabeth shrank from putting to death an anointed sovereign, a sister queen and kinswoman. The consequences did not bear thinking of. She was only too aware what the rest of the world would make of such a monstrous act. ‘Princes, you know, stand upon stages so that their actions are viewed and beheld by all men; and I am sure my doings will come to the scanning of many fine wits, not only within the realm, but in foreign countries.’
She bemoaned the fact that
since now it is resolved that my surety cannot be established without a princess’s end, I have just cause to complain that I, who have in my time pardoned so many rebels, winked at so many treasons … should now be forced to this proceeding against such a person … What will they not now say when it shall be spread that for the safety of her life, a maiden queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?
Unlike her father and unusually for such a brutal age, Elizabeth possessed the quality of mercy. A king was ‘scant well furnished’, she said, ‘if either he lacked justice, temperance, magnanimity, or judgement’. She was essentially humane. ‘I may therefore full well complain that any man should think me given to cruelty … Yea, I protest I am so far from it that for mine own life, I would not touch her.’
As ever, she sought refuge in prevarication, telling a parliamentary delegation petitioning her to act: ‘I shall pray you for this present to content yourselves with an answer without answer. Your judgement I condemn not, neither do I mistake your reasons, but pray you to accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulness, and take in good part my answer answerless.’
The crisis of Mary Stuart’s trial and execution put Elizabeth under enormous strain. She was as trapped as Mary, unable to find a way out. She hesitated and resisted pressure to sign the death warrant for many weeks. Yes, she wanted Mary dead; she wanted the nuisance dealt with, but not in such a way as to incur the opprobrium of her fellow sovereigns. In desperation, she suggested that Paulet find the means of shortening Mary’s life; after all, he had been quick enough to sign up to the association. He was outraged: ‘God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience!’
Finally, on 1 February 1587 Elizabeth’s secretary, William Davison, handed her a pile of papers for signature. She signed each one with barely a glance, pretending she did not know what they contained. Later, she protested that although she had signed the warrant, she had told Davison she did not want it to be executed until further notice. Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester and other members of the Council appended their signatures and decided that the warrant should be rushed to Fotheringhay without further delay, so that the execution could be carried out before the Queen changed her mind.
When she discovered that Mary was dead, Elizabeth was furious that her orders, as she saw them, had been countermanded. The Council, acting together, had seized the initiative and proceeded to carry out this terrible deed without her express permission. As a woman, Elizabeth’s greatest fear was that her male counsellors would unite against her and overrule her wishes. This was the most flagrant example of it. They had plotted together to bring a queen down. They had exposed the limits of monarchy and, in executing an anointed sovereign, set a dangerous precedent for the future. It was incipient republicanism. She wrote to James of Scotland telling him how much she deplored ‘the miserable accident, which far contrary to my meaning hath befallen’. She was innocent. Burghley was banished from her sight for four months and Davison sent to the Tower. Elizabeth collapsed in genuine grief. Authorizing her cousin’s execution had been one of the severest tests of her queenship.
Never to meet in life, both queens would perhaps have been surprised to find themselves brought together in death, lying close to each other in Westminster Abbey. In spite of the long, destructive course of their relationship, something positive had come out of it. Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, would succeed the childless Elizabeth as James I of England, uniting the two realms under the crown, although they would not be politically integrated as Great Britain until the reign of James’s great-granddaughter, Queen Anne, in 1707. Elizabeth and Mary had, after all, produced something far greater than themselves.