Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  Inspired by this holy quest, Babington wrote to Mary, addressing her as “My dread sovereign and Queen,” and informed her of the plan. One key element, he made clear, was the murder of Elizabeth: “For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free,e there be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.”

  Mary’s initial response to Babington was simply to let him know that she was considering his proposal and would reply as soon as possible. Walsingham’s code breaker, Thomas Phelippes, was delighted upon deciphering the message, writing, “We attend her very heart at the next.” Sure enough, within a week, Mary implicated herself entirely when she agreed to Babington’s plan—including the killing of her cousin: “The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both within and without the realm, then it shall be time to set the six gentlemen to work, taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design I may be suddenly transported out of this place.”

  A roundup of the conspirators ensued, followed by their brutal executions. While traitors were normally hanged until unconscious, then disemboweled and cut into quarters, some of the Babington plotters were still very much alert when they were castrated and gutted. The queen’s wrath was dreadful indeed, except when it came to Mary. Killing her was still too horrible to contemplate. Nevertheless, there would have to be a trial.

  Mary was taken to Fotheringhay Castle on September 25, 1586. At first she refused to appear before the gathered commissioners, insisting that “she was no subject [of Elizabeth’s] and rather would die a thousand deaths than acknowledge herself a subject.” The commission then carried a letter to Mary from Elizabeth. It was short and concise:

  You have, in various ways and manners, attempted to take my life, and to bring my kingdom to destruction and bloodshed. I have never proceeded so harshly against you, but have, on the contrary, protected and maintained you like myself. These treasons will be proved to you, and all made manifest. Yet it is my will, that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I were myself present. I therefore require, charge and command that you make answer, for I have been well informed of your arrogance. Act plainly, without reserve, and you will sooner be able to obtain favor of me.

  Mary agreed at last to appear, and the trial commenced on October 15. Though denied counsel, or the opportunity to inspect the evidence against her, she defended herself well. Still, the proof against her was overwhelming, and on October 25 the commissioners pronounced that she was guilty of the “compassing, practicing and imagining of Her Majesty’s death.”

  Despite the verdict, and the subsequent calls for Mary’s head in Parliament, Elizabeth could not bring herself to inflict the ultimate penalty. Her agony was evident in a candid speech she gave before a parliamentary delegation that came before her to plead for the Scottish queen’s dispatch.

  “And since it is now resolved that my surety [safety] cannot be established without a princess’s end,” the queen told the delegation, “I have just cause to complain that I, who have in my time pardoned so many rebels, winked at so many treasons, and either not produced them or slipped them over with silence, should now be forced to this proceeding against such a person.” She openly wondered what would become of her reputation abroad “when it should be spread that for the safety of her life, a maiden queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?” And though she acknowledged the very real danger Mary posed—stating that she was not “so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat; nor so careless as not to weigh that my life daily is in hazard”—she said “that many a man would put his life in danger for the safeguard of a king. I do not say that so will I, but I pray you think that I have thought upon it.” The queen concluded by stating how grateful she was for the love and care the delegation had demonstrated toward her, but “as for your petition: your judgment I condemn not, nor do I mistake your reasons, but pray you to accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulness, and take in good part my answer answerless.”

  Elizabeth did eventually relent and allow a public proclamation of Mary’s sentence to be read, which resulted in an eruption of celebration across London. But she had yet to sign the death warrant, and there was little indication that she was prepared to do so. While her own subjects were clamoring for Mary’s blood, pressure—especially from Scotland and France—was mounting at the same time for her to show mercy. Though King James VI had already abandoned his mother, he nevertheless pleaded for her life, and quite tactlessly at that, writing to Elizabeth that “King Henry VIII’s reputation was never prejudged but in the beheading of his bedfellow [Anne Boleyn].” The French king, Henry III, another of Mary’s former brothers-in-law, warned that he would “look upon [her execution] as a personal affront.”

  Elizabeth’s recognition that neither king would be in a position to retaliate for Mary’s execution alleviated some pressure, but a letter she received from the former Queen of Scots herself left her devastated. Mary wrote that she was glad for the “happy tidings” that she had come “to the end of my long and weary pilgrimage,” and said that she wished to die in perfect charity with everyone. “Yet while abandoning this world and preparing myself for a better, I must remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge, and for all those whom you doom, and that I desire that my blood and my country may be remembered in that time.”

  With her counselors becoming more and more vociferous about the dangers threatening with Mary’s continual existence, Elizabeth desperately scrambled to find a solution without publicly executing her cousin. In one of the less savory acts of her long and proud reign, she tried to convince Paulet to do away with the Scottish queen privately. But the queen’s jailor balked at the suggestion, writing that “his good livings and life are at her Majesty’s disposition … but God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, to shed blood without law or warrant!”

  “Elizabeth has been censored for seeking to rid herself of Mary underhand,” wrote Anne Somerset, “but she had sound enough reasons for thinking it more seemly to proceed by stealth.… In her own eyes and those of God, nothing could alter the fact that the killing of a Queen was wrong, but since circumstances forced her to countenance such a deed, she took the view that an evil committed out of sight was less obnoxious than one performed brazenly before the world.”

  There was no escaping the fact that Mary’s fate rested squarely with Elizabeth, and though she finally signed her cousin’s death warrant, she still maintained the unrealistic hope that one of her servants would take the matter out of her hands. It was not to be, for on February 8, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, was led into the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle and there beheaded.f

  Mary had paid the ultimate penalty, but it was Elizabeth who would suffer the consequences. She seemed stunned upon receiving the news of her cousin’s execution. According to William Camden, the contemporary historian of Elizabeth’s reign, “her countenance altered, her speech faltered and failed her and, through excessive sorrow, she stood in a manner astonished, insomuch that she gave herself over to passionate grief, putting herself into a mourning habit and shedding abundance of tears.” Then she viciously lashed out at her ministers. They had procured the Scottish queen’s death, Elizabeth insisted; she had only signed the death warrant as a precaution. It was the justification the queen gave her fellow monarchs, but as the French ambassador so accurately observed, “This death will wring her heart as long as she lives.”

  * She was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, who had married James IV of Scotland. Thus, she was actually Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed (see Tudor family tree, this page).

  † Catholic France had long held sway in Scotland, especially under the regency of Mary’s mother, a member of t
he House of Guise, who ruled while her daughter, the Queen of Scots, was away in France. The Treaty of Edinburgh came about after Protestant forces in Scotland, with the aid of England, finally ejected the French in 1560.

  ‡ Francis II was only sixteen, and had reigned less than two years, when he succumbed to an ear infection that abscessed in his brain. His widowed wife, Mary, was just shy of her eighteenth birthday.

  § The queen’s aversion to marriage was rooted not only in the lethal connotations it held for her—with the violent demises of, among others, her mother, Anne Boleyn, and her stepmother, Catherine Howard, both of whom had been beheaded—but also in her reluctance to share any of her power with a husband. As Sir James Melville put it so succinctly to Elizabeth: “Your Majesty thinks that if you were married you would be but Queen of England, and now you are both King and Queen. I know your spirit cannot endure a commander.”

  ‖ Elizabeth and Dudley were strong intimates who had known each other since childhood. In fact, they were both imprisoned in the Tower of London during the reign of Bloody Mary (Dudley having risen up with his father, the Duke of Northumberland, to put his sister-in-law Jane Grey on the throne). There is no question that the queen adored Dudley, whom she immediately made Master of the Horse upon her accession, and flirted with him outrageously, always dangling before him the possibility of marriage. But it is highly improbable that she slept with him (or any of her other favorites). Elizabeth’s honor meant far too much for her to ever risk losing it in a sexual affair, where shameful pregnancy was always a possibility—particularly in the absence of effective birth control.

  a A coroner’s inquest absolved him of any wrongdoing in his wife’s death.

  b Darnley was Margaret Tudor’s grandson by her second marriage, to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, which made him, like Mary, Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed. (See Tudor family tree, this page.)

  c Mary agreed to give herself up if Bothwell would be allowed to escape. After fleeing Scotland, he was eventually captured and imprisoned in Denmark, where his confinement was apparently harsh enough to drive him insane. And in that sad state he died in 1578.

  d The plot centered around the scheming of a Florentine banker by the name of Roberto di Ridolfi, a fanatic Catholic with close contacts to both Pope Pius V and Philip II of Spain. The aim of the Ridolfi Plot, as it came to be called, was to have Elizabeth assassinated and replaced on the throne by Mary. The Queen of Scots was implicated in the scheme when it was exposed, as was Elizabeth’s cousin, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, who was to wed Mary and rule by her side. Elizabeth reluctantly signed Norfolk’s death warrant, but she absolutely refused to move against her fellow queen.

  e In 1570, Pope Pius V issued the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of wickedness” as a heretic, deprived her of her throne, and released her subjects from any allegiance to her.

  f The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was an unusually gruesome affair. After she placed her head on the block, the headsman raised his axe and brought it down hard. The blow missed the queen’s neck, however, and struck the back of her head instead. “Sweet Jesus,” Mary was heard to mutter, before a second blow all but decapitated her. The remaining sinew was then severed by using the axe as a saw.

  With the head finally off—but with the lips still moving, as they would for the next quarter of an hour—the executioner held it aloft before the gathered witnesses, shouting, “God save the queen.” As he did so, the head suddenly fell to the floor and the executioner was left holding the auburn-colored wig Mary wore to cover her own hair, which had turned gray and was cut very short.

  After this unnerving spectacle, the dead queen’s pet dog, Geddon, crept out from beneath her petticoats, where he had been hidden, and came to rest between her shoulders and head, covered in his mistress’s blood.

  Finally, after her clothes and adornments were burned to prevent them from becoming relics, Mary’s corpse was sealed in a coffin. But it was not sent to France for burial, as she had requested before her death. Instead, it lay moldering at Fotheringhay for months before at last being interred at Peterborough cathedral. (After Mary’s son, James, became king of England he had his mother’s body reburied with an elaborate monument at Westminster Abbey.)

  House of Stuart

  JAMES I (VI OF SCOTLAND)

  (reigned 1603–1625)

  CHARLES I

  (r. 1625–1649)

  COMMONWEALTH-NO MONARCHY

  (1649–1660)

  CHARLES II

  (r. 1660–1685)

  JAMES II

  (r. 1685–1688)

  WILLIAM III AND MARY II

  (William: r. 1689–1702; Mary: r. 1689–1694)

  ANNE

  (r. 1702–1714)

  7

  James I (VI of Scotland) 1603–1625:

  Kissing Cousins

  Nourished in fear

  —MARQUIS DE FONTENAY MAREUIL

  James VI of Scotland, son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded his cousin Elizabeth I in 1603 and established the Stuart dynasty in England as James I. Thus the two kingdoms were ruled under one crown (although it would take another century before England and Scotland were officially joined to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707). Before ascending the English throne, James endured a very turbulent childhood in Scotland, where he reigned since he was just over a year old.

  The christening of the infant Prince James at Stirling Castle seemed to bode well for a brilliant future. Representatives of the great European powers were gathered at the ceremony, bearing rich gifts. Charles IX of France, the child’s godfather, sent a necklace of pearls and rubies. His godmother and cousin, Elizabeth I of England, whose throne James was destined to inherit, sent a gold baptismal font. The chapel at Stirling, where in 1543 the baby’s mother, Mary, had been crowned queen of Scotland at just nine months old, glowed with torches, gilded cloth, and hopeful prayers for Scotland’s future King James VI (and England’s James I).

  But all was not well at Stirling that December day in 1566. The castle, rising high on a crag above the plains of central Scotland, had a dark history dating back centuries. It was there, among many bloody episodes, that James II had the corpse of the Earl of Douglas, whom he had just murdered, contemptuously tossed out of a window in 1452. And it was where the baby prince, whose baptism was being celebrated with feasts, masques, and fireworks, would grow up “nourished in fear,” as the French ambassador the Marquis de Fontenay Mareuil later wrote.

  Indeed, all the royal pomp and ceremony surrounding the christening was an illusion, masking seething hatreds and murderous conspiracies. The child’s father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was not even present at the grand occasion. Instead, he remained holed up in his room at Stirling, estranged from his wife, the queen, who had grown to despise him, and nursing his many resentments.

  When he married the Queen of Scots in 1565, Darnley had been given the title of king but none of the power he craved. Spoiled and weak, he bitterly resented the influence of David Rizzio, the queen’s Italian secretary, and was lured into a plot to kill him. Queen Mary was six months pregnant with James when Rizzio was dragged away from her, screaming for his life, and stabbed more than fifty times before his mutilated corpse was dumped down a flight of stairs.

  To be rid of the queen’s upstart secretary was the main reason for Rizzio’s murder, but Darnley also hoped that his wife would miscarry from the trauma of witnessing the violent demise, for he didn’t believe the child she was carrying was his. Yet despite his father’s evil intent, James survived. Years later, in a speech to the English Parliament after the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605,* King James stated that his “fearful nature” could be traced “not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth: and while I was in my mother’s belly.”

  Darnley had fallen so low in the queen’s estimation “that it is heartbre
aking for her to think that he should be her husband,” wrote Mary’s secretary of state, William Maitland, “and how to be free of him she sees no out gait [way out].” It just so happened, however, only two months after the baptism of Prince James at Stirling, Mary did find a convenient way out of her miserable marriage. Darnley was found dead outside the house where he was staying, Kirk o’ Field, which was destroyed in an explosion. Suspicions that the queen had been complicit in her husband’s murder were only inflamed when she married the chief suspect, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, only three months later.

  Just before her ill-advised wedding, the queen went to see her baby son, James, at Stirling—some believed with the intention of snatching him away. It was the last time mother and child would ever see each other. Mary had sacrificed her credibility and the confidence of her people by marrying Bothwell. She was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favor of her only son, who was crowned king in the Protestant church just outside the gates of Stirling Castle. He was thirteen months old.

  Scotland was in chaos at the time of James VI’s accession, torn by religious wars and savage rivalries among nobles. The young king was the pawn everyone wanted to control. He was not yet four when his uncle the Earl of Moray, then serving as regent, was assassinated and replaced by the boy king’s paternal grandfather, the Earl of Lennox. The following year, during a clash at Stirling between the Catholic supporters of the king’s deposed mother and reform Protestants, Lennox was slaughtered. James would later say that his conscious life began the morning he saw his grandfather’s bloody corpse being carried past him through the castle gates.