Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Dolorous Stroke

  Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose

  It was no death to me but to my woe;

  The bud was opened to let out the rose,

  The chain was loosed to let the captive go.

  From Decease, release, ode by Robert Southwell, SJ,

  on the death of Mary Queen of Scots

  When King James first heard the news of his mother’s arrest at Chartley, he contented himself with observing that she should ‘drink the ale she had brewed’ and in future be allowed to meddle with nothing except prayer and the service of God.1 Not only did he ostentatiously ignore the possibility that his mother might now be in danger of her life, but he also chose this moment to sound out Elizabeth on the question of a marriage between them, through the medium of Archibald Douglas. Elizabeth was now over fifty, thirty years senior to James, and, although James was evidently prepared to pardon the disparity in their ages most magnanimously if he could thus strengthen his claim to the English throne, Elizabeth herself showed no inclination towards this bizarre union.2 Nevertheless throughout the autumn James continued to maintain in public that he had no objections to his mother being imprisoned in the most rigorous manner in the world – let her be put in the Tower or some other ‘firm Manse’ – so long as her actual life was not forfeited. It was not until after the trial and death sentence that it was made clear to James by Archibald Douglas from London that he might shortly have to choose between his mother’s life and the continuation of the newly formed Anglo- Scottish alliance, which in turn involved his hopes of inheriting the English throne.

  James’s dilemma in Scotland did not cause him the human anguish which Elizabeth in her reluctance to confirm the death sentence was undergoing in England. She told the French ambassador at the beginning of December that she had never shed so many tears over anything, not even at the deaths of her father, her brother Edward or her sister Mary, as at what she termed this ‘unfortunate affair’, and whether her grief was at her own indecision or at the prospect of shedding Mary’s blood, there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of her emotion.3 James, on the other hand, felt considerable perplexity as to what course to take, but no purely personal feelings; the chief concern of the Scottish mission to Elizabeth in November was to ensure that nothing would be done against Mary ‘to the prejudice of any title of the King’s’. In the meantime it was widely rumoured in Scotland that James feared to request any sort of favour from Elizabeth as regards Mary, lest he should lose the goodwill of the English queen, although Scottish public opinion was reacting most strongly to the idea that their former sovereign should be executed by a foreign country. As Gray wrote to Douglas on 23rd November, James would find it hard to keep the peace if her life were touched. ‘I never saw all the people so willing to concur in anything as in this. They that hated most her prosperity regret her adversity.’ James himself pointed out his invidious position to Elizabeth in language which made clear that it was fear of a national outcry which animated him, rather than some more personal emotion: ‘Guess ye in what strait my honour will be, this disaster being perfected,’ he wrote, ‘since before God I already scarce dare go abroad, for crying out of the whole people.’4

  Despite these fears, the one sanction which James had it in his power to invoke to save his mother’s life – and which in the opinion of at least one historian would have effectively preserved her from execution at English hands5 – was never made. James hovered over the subject of the death sentence with a series of dire but meaningless threats. At no point did he say that he would break the Anglo-Scottish league if his mother’s death was brought about by England, although Elizabeth anxiously inquired of his ambassadors whether that was in fact his intention. His fulminations and his embassy were both intended to save his face in Scotland; they were not intended to save his mother’s life in England. Nor did all his emissaries agree with Gray in expressing their disgust at the idea of the execution: Sir Alexander Stewart expressed the damaging view that James would somehow manage to digest his mother’s death.* Once it became apparent to the English that despite all James’s protests the league was to be considered inviolable whatever action they took against Mary, the date of the Scottish queen’s death drew appreciably nearer.

  The protests made by the French were more authentically passionate, but proved in the end equally ineffective: a special ambassador, de Bellievre, was sent by King Henry III to plead with Elizabeth who was answered, in Cecil’s words, ‘that if the French King understood her Majesty’s peril, if he loveth her as he pretendeth, he would not press her Majesty to hazard her life’. The resident French ambassador, Châteauneuf, continued to make valiant efforts to save Mary, but in January his attempts were sh
arply curtailed by the fortunate discovery by Walsingham of yet another plot against Elizabeth’s life. This providential coincidence led to Châteauneuf’s house arrest, and rendered him impotent to help Mary further during the crucial weeks in the new year; it also aroused a wave of anti-French feeling in England – although the plot itself was highly dubious in origins, and seems to have been largely concocted by Walsingham to produce these precise effects.7 In December Cecil had drawn up in his own handwriting a list of reasons against the execution of the queen of Scots. Among the reasons cited was the cogent argument Sanguis sanguinem procreat – blood breeds blood – the supposition that Mary’s health was in any case so afflicted that she might die naturally at any moment, and the fact that the king of France had promised to go surety in the future for the end of the attempts on Elizabeth’s life.8 By January, it appeared that as Mary’s foreign champions had either retired or were being swept from the lists, the fact that blood might breed blood was no longer so important.