The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  At none of this, said Cecil, had Elizabeth taken umbrage. Mary was a captive queen. These were no more than “those devices tending to her liberty.” What rankled, and what Elizabeth “understandeth certainly,” so it was said, were her cousin’s ‘labors and devices to stir up a new rebellion in this realm and to have the king of Spain to assist it.” Of all these facts, concluded Cecil, Elizabeth was “certainly assured and of much more.”

  He greatly exaggerated. His information about Philip’s invasion plan came from Walsingham’s double agent and was strictly verbal. Later he claimed to have confessions from Norfolk and the Bishop of Ross, a damaged letter from the pope to Mary and an encrypted letter from her to Norfolk, found under a mat in the duke’s house, containing “great discourses in matters of state, more than woman’s wit doth commonly reach unto.” But there was no proof that Mary had endorsed a plan to depose and kill Elizabeth. The most incriminating letter, intercepted from Mary and written a few months before the Northern Rising, did not say what Cecil needed it to say.

  The letter comes to us in the form of a copy of the deciphered original. In it, Mary spoke generally and allusively. She thanked her unnamed supporters for their “care how to enlarge our liberty, to restore us to our rightful seat, to cease our daily griefs, to suppress our usurping and undeserved foes, to quench the rage of erroneous tyrants, to the furtherance of God’s word, to the releasement and comfort of Christians.”

  What works could be more acceptable to God than to succor the Catholic Church, to defend the rightful title of a prince, to deliver afflicted Christians from bondage, and to restore justice to all men, by cutting of the most faithless antichrist and usurper of titles, the destroyer of justice, the persecutor of God and his Church, the disturber of all quiet states, the only maintainer of all seditious and mischievous rebels of God and all Catholic princes, having a way made by our Holy Father. Wherefore we beseech you to proceed in God’s name and our Blessed Lady’s, with the assistance of the whole company [i.e., of all the saints in heaven].

  Nowhere did the letter mention Spain or Elizabeth by name. The “antichrist” referred to could also have been meant literally. Mary had neither called explicitly for an attempt on her cousin’s life nor requested aid from Philip II or the pope. “Works . . . acceptable to God” were no more than the workings of divine Providence, and what earthly creature could resist them? And to “proceed in God’s name” was not in itself an incitement to assassination or invasion.

  Mary’s meaning is, of course, perfectly clear. But such evidence would not have stood up in a court of law, supposing that she, who was neither English nor a subject of Elizabeth, was bound by English law.

  Cecil did not have enough evidence to put Mary on trial. To obtain more damaging admissions, Shrewsbury was ordered to confront her and “tempt her patience in this sort to provoke her to answer somewhat.” But she could not be caught out in this way. She could be impulsive or naive, but was rarely stupid. In dealing with Ridolfi, she had followed the Cardinal of Lorraine’s maxim, “Discretion sur tout,” to the letter.

  If Cecil could not put her on trial, he could isolate her diplomatically. He sent his friend and fellow privy councilor Sir Thomas Smith to Catherine de Medici, playing up the Spanish threat in Europe and urging her to persist in the dissociation of France from Mary’s cause. This was the start of an Anglo-French entente that lasted for a decade. It survived even the setback of the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24, 1572), when some three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and ten thousand more killed in provincial France over a period of three weeks.

  The massacres caused panic in England. The Bishop of London advised Cecil “forthwith to cut off the Scottish queen’s head.” Cecil only wished he could comply. When he had visited Mary at Chatsworth in October 1570 in an attempt to silence her demands to return to Scotland, she had burst into tears and their interviews were inconclusive. How he impressed her and how she impressed him are maddeningly not recorded. But Cecil was impervious to women’s tears. He had no more room than Paulet for “foolish pity” and precious little scruple in his dealings with Mary. He had already followed Knox in identifying her as “Athalia”—a biblical precedent for regicide. And he had been advised by Knox before he left for Chatsworth that if he “struck not at the root, the branches that appeared to be broken would bud again with greater force.” To give his warning maximum impact, Knox informed his old ally that he had written his letter “with his one foot in the grave.”

  When Cecil met Mary, he had piously claimed how Elizabeth had “always forborne to publish such matters as she might have done to have touched the queen of Scotland for murder of her husband.” If Elizabeth had such reservations, Cecil did not. The judges who had examined the Casket Letters had been sworn to secrecy, but now Cecil broke their silence. He arranged for his friend Thomas Wilson, author of the acclaimed treatise The Art of Rhetoric, to prepare a vernacular edition of Buchanan’s dossier for the press, telling the lords’ side of the story and translating it from Latin into imitation Scots, in order to create the false impression that it was authorized by the lords in Scotland and not by anyone in England.*

  A proof copy was ready by late November or early December 1571, to which Wilson craftily appended a damning but anonymous “oration” against Mary and translations of the Casket Letters. Cecil was delighted. He had the book rushed out by his “tame” printer, John Day, under the tortuous but highly informative titled Detection of the doings of Mary Queen of Scots, touching the murder of her husband, and her conspiracy, adultery, and pretended marriage with the Earl of Bothwell. And a defence of the true Lords, maintainers of the King’s grace’s action and authority. The king of the title was James VI.

  Cecil had smeared Mary with the old and legally unproven allegations of the Casket Letters. An adulteress who could plot to murder her husband would have no qualms about conspiring to depose and kill Elizabeth. It made her guilt as a co-conspirator in the Enterprise of England seem more credible. It also hit out collaterally at Norfolk shortly before his trial for treason began. The innuendo was that anyone prepared to take Mary as his wife was tarred with the brush of Darnley’s murder.

  In publishing the Detection in this underhand way, Cecil was playing with fire. It is unlikely Day was allowed to sell the book openly in his shop. Elizabeth would have been enraged at Cecil’s meddling had she been able to link the work directly to him. It was circulated privately to his inner caucus, at least at first. A final exhortation set the tone:

  Now judge Englishmen if it be good to change Queens. Oh uniting confounding! When rude Scotland has vomited up a poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative? Oh vile indignity! While your Queen’s enemy liveth, her danger continueth. Desperate necessity will dare the uttermost . . .

  And this was the point. The Detection set the keynote for the Parliament that met in May 1572 to debate Elizabeth’s “safety.” When Norfolk was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Elizabeth dithered over his execution, whereas Cecil and his Protestant allies wanted Mary dead too. They had secured this Parliament to make a bid to execute her as well as the duke. Their aim was a bill of attainder by which Mary would be “convicted” of treason by an act of Parliament and without a formal trial, thus avoiding the trouble of providing proof.

  In a memo on the eve of the Parliament, Cecil rebuked Elizabeth for her “doubtful dealing with the Queen of Scots.” His verdict was chilling. The only “good” Mary was a dead one. Elizabeth’s mistake was her desire to give her cousin the benefit of the doubt. The threat she posed, far from diminishing, was increasing. All the Catholics supported her dynastic claim, as did anyone who emphasized hereditary right. Mary enjoyed Spanish and potentially Guise support. Her “party” maintained her title to be the legitimate queen of England. All she needed were the forces and the opportunity to launch a coup d’état.

  When Parliament assembled, the members of Cecil’s inner caucus called vociferously
for Mary’s execution. It was an unusually hot spring, the temperature in the House of Commons even hotter. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce her, echoing each other often almost word for word.

  Mary, they argued, had disqualified herself. She was no longer queen, but “the late Queen of Scots.” She was “a Queen of late time and yet through her own acts now justly no Queen.” She was Elizabeth’s kinswoman “and yet a very unnatural sister.” “She hath sought to dispossess the Queen’s Majesty of her crown . . . [She] hath made so small account of the Queen’s goodness towards her as she deserveth no favor.” She “is but a comet, which doth prognosticate the overthrow of this realm.” “She is no Queen of ours, she is none of our anointed. The examples of the Old Testament be not few for the putting of wicked Kings to death.”

  Cecil’s circulation of the Detection had done its work. Mary was “this Jezebel,” this “Athalia,” this “idolatress,” this “most wicked and filthy woman.” She was “the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth.” There was no safety for Elizabeth as long as Mary lived. “She hath been a killer of her husband, an adulteress, a common disturber of the peace of this realm, and for that to be dealt with as an enemy. And therefore my advice is to cut off her head and make no more ado about her.”

  Precedents from legal and historical treatises were quoted to justify her trial and execution:

  Every person offending is to be tried in the place where he committeth the crime . . .

  A King passing through another’s realm or there resident is but a private person . . .

  A King deposed is not to be taken for a King . . .

  A King though not deposed may commit treason . . .

  Punishments ought to be equal to the offences committed . . .

  Death is the penalty for treason.

  One of Cecil’s protégés, Thomas Norton, summed up Parliament’s mood. “The execution of the Scottish Queen is of necessity, it may lawfully be done . . . A general impunity to commit treason was never permitted to any . . . You will say she is a Queen’s daughter and therefore to be spared; nay then, spare the Queen’s Majesty that is a King’s daughter and our Queen.” This speaker even quoted from the Detection: “desperate necessity dareth the uttermost . . .” Who knew what mischief the serpent might do if she was allowed to live?

  But could Mary, the anointed Queen of Scots, commit treason in England? Elizabeth did not yet think so. She refused to hand Parliament an ax for Mary’s execution, instead encouraging members to seek an act excluding her from the succession. When the bill was passed, however, she vetoed it. She claimed it was not technically a veto, but in this she played with words. She could not bring herself to proceed against an anointed queen, yielding only to Parliament’s pleas to execute the Duke of Norfolk, who went to the block on June 2, a month before Parliament ended.

  Cecil was wholly frustrated. As he wrote to Walsingham, then still in France: “All that we have labored for and had with full consent brought to fashion—I mean a law to make the Scottish queen unable and unworthy of succession to the crown—was by Her Majesty neither assented to nor rejected, but deferred.” And in a second letter, he made a shrill complaint about how the “highest person” in the realm (meaning Elizabeth) had failed to act, and so brought shame on her councilors.

  Cecil was not foolhardy enough to tell Elizabeth this to her face. He did not need to, as she was well aware that she had invoked the royal prerogative to defend her cousin in defiance of Parliament, exonerating herself by promising that the bill of exclusion might be revived at a later date. But the appointed day came and went, and almost four years elapsed before Parliament met again. Mary was left untouched. Cecil had gotten neither an ax nor an act.

  This most intrepid of spiders did not let up for a moment. Lady Catherine Grey, the heir apparent under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, and her sister were both dead. Cecil turned his full attention to achieving Mary’s exclusion from the succession by fair means or foul. He sent his brother-in-law, Henry Killigrew, on a secret mission to Scotland to see whether, if Mary was handed back to them, the Protestant lords would put her on trial and execute her. To fulfill this delicate task, Killigrew was recalled from France, where his instructions had been to drum up support for Mary’s execution among the enemies of the Guise family.

  Another of Cecil’s intermediaries was Robert Beale, Walsingham’s brother-in-law. He set about demonizing Mary and lobbying for an integrated policy linked to English support for the Protestant cause abroad and the “extirpation” of Catholicism at home. Where the Catholics were concerned, Beale advised that “their chiefest head must be removed.” “I mean,” he said, “the Queen of Scots, who as she hath been the principal cause of the ruin of the two realms of France and Scotland, hath prettily played the like part here.”

  It was a matter of waiting until Mary was trapped. Patience and surveillance were needed. When Walsingham returned to England, the interception of her letters was stepped up. A huge pile of deciphered transcripts accumulated, much of it concerning pensions granted by Mary to Catholic exiles abroad. She had also generously rewarded those who had fled after the debacle of the Northern Rising. “I pray you,” she wrote in 1577 to her agent in Paris, “give the pope to understand as soon as you can that all I have remaining from my dowry (as you are able to inform him) is not enough for the maintenance of my household affairs and to furnish the necessity of the banished English and Scots whom I am constrained to relieve.”

  The same year, she appealed to Philip II to “take care of those that are banished out of England, and especially the Earl of Westmorland.” Her cousin the young Duke of Guise was to be a recipient of similar pleas.

  Step by step, Walsingham pieced together a jigsaw puzzle linking Mary’s agents to Philip II, the pope, the Guise family, the grand master of Malta and the Spanish ambassador in Rome. But nothing out of the ordinary was found for him to spin malice from until 1579.

  That year, Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny, first cousin of Mary’s second husband, Lord Darnley, returned to Scotland from France. His courtly style and handsome looks captivated the impressionable young James, who showered him with gifts and created him Duke of Lennox. Within a month, James abandoned his schoolroom at Stirling Castle and took up his place at Holyrood. D’Aubigny reformed the court and the royal household on the French model, then turned his attention to his enemies among the remaining Confederate Lords. In December 1580, Morton was arrested on a charge of complicity in Darnley’s murder and executed the following June. Mary was overjoyed; she believed that events were turning in her favor and that she would soon be restored as Queen of Scots.

  She made contact with Castelnau at the French embassy in London. They agreed to work together to achieve the independence of Scotland under the protection of France and with Mary as queen. Their project was to revive the “auld alliance.” As Castelnau reminded Catherine de Medici and Henry III—at no small cost to himself, since his attachment to Mary would bring about a premature end to his career—“It behoves Your Majesty to preserve the alliance with Scotland, which has always been the bridle for England.”

  All Cecil’s work since the treaty of Edinburgh in 1560 seemed about to be undone. D’Aubigny had the support of the Guises, who were fast making a comeback in the 1580s in their capacity as Philip II’s allies in the French Catholic League. Would their combined influence on James be sufficient to persuade the susceptible teenager to invite his mother back to Scotland as queen?

  In November 1581, Elizabeth sought to recover lost ground. She sent Beale to Sheffield to see if Mary could be used as a distraction against her son. Mary was thrilled to be back in the limelight, but did not intend to play such games. She put an alternative scheme to Beale, one by which she would be restored to her throne as co-ruler with her son. She used every weapon in her arsenal to obtain Beale’s support for her idea, but he was impervious to her powers of persuasion.

  When Mary’s tactics failed, she tried a more theatrical a
pproach. She exaggerated her illness, exploiting it to dramatic effect by conducting her interviews from her sickbed. She claimed to be dying. She had been vomiting and was partially immobilized because of lack of exercise, but she was secretly elated at the prospect of recovering her freedom.

  Beale was not so easily fooled. When he found Mary and her gentlewomen “weeping in the dark,” he withdrew, later commenting that “the parties are so wily with whom a man deals.” He left Sheffield with Mary’s assurances that she would recognize Elizabeth as the lawful queen of England and not have dealings with foreign powers or rebels. Within a few months, however, she was writing to Bernardino de Mendoza, de Spes’s successor as Spanish ambassador in London, asking for information about new plots devised by d’Aubigny and the Jesuits. She was determined to keep all her options open.

  Her hopes were dashed when a reversal in Scotland led to d’Aubigny’s exile. In August 1582, while out hunting, James was lured into Ruthven Castle, where he was imprisoned by the Protestants and d’Aubigny ousted.

  Mary was distraught at the news. “When I heard that my son was taken and surprised by rebels as I was myself certain years ago,” she said, “I cannot but pour out my grief out of a just fear that he should fall into the same estate as I am in.”

  But all was not lost. James by now was sixteen and finding his feet. In 1583, he escaped from his captors and declared his minority to be at an end. No longer would a regent rule in Scotland. Almost overnight, Henry III of France started a competition with Elizabeth to dazzle him. Henry sent two ambassadors to Scotland with instructions to renew the “auld alliance.” He even recognized James as king, a move that ensured a lavish welcome for his ambassadors. Some progress was made in this diplomacy, and in retaliation Elizabeth talked of granting Mary her freedom under strict conditions. Until French influence on James could be neutralized, the Queen of Scots was still a card worth playing.