by John Guy
Soon after nine o’clock, the commissioners took their places in the courtroom, and Mary arrived wearing a gown of black velvet with her distinctive white cambric cap on her head to which was attached a long white gauze veil. As she entered slowly and purposefully through the door, the commissioners removed their hats as a mark of respect. She graciously acknowledged them and took her seat, her eyes darting around eagerly to see who was there and which of them might be on her side.
When the court was brought to order, Mary registered her protest, after which the prosecuting counsel opened the case against her. He delivered what the official transcript of the trial describes as “an historical discourse” of the Babington plot. He argued point by point that she knew of the plot, approved of it, assented to it, promised her assistance and “showed the ways and means.”
One of Mary’s objections to the court’s legitimacy was that its procedure was that of a treason trial. She was not allowed a lawyer, she was not able to call witnesses, and she was not allowed to use notes or examine documents in the course of conducting her own defense. Despite these unbending restrictions, which swung the balance heavily against her, she was ready to enter her plea.
She offered a robust denial. The court reporter was favorably impressed, remarking on her “stout courage.” “I knew not Babington,” said Mary. “I never received any letters from him, nor wrote any to him. I never plotted the destruction of the queen. If you want to prove it, then produce my letters signed with my own hand.”
“But,” replied the prosecutor, “we have evidence of letters between you and Babington.”
“If so,” countered Mary, “why do you not produce them? I have the right to demand to see the originals and the copies side by side. It is quite possible that my ciphers have been tampered with by my enemies. I cannot reply to this accusation without full knowledge. Until then, I must content myself with affirming solemnly that I am not guilty of the crimes imputed to me.”
What Mary could not yet have known was the full extent of Babington’s confession and the evidence collected by Walsingham. Babington had pleaded guilty at his own trial, but that was kept from her. All she knew was that her reply to him had been sent in code by one of her secretaries and was not written in her own hand. She did not know that the letter had been intercepted en route. She assumed (correctly) that Babington had burned the document after reading it, as she had ordered him to do. As the “final” and most incriminating text was the one he had destroyed, she may have thought the case against her was weak, especially regarding Elizabeth’s assassination, as she well knew that she had not specified in her own letter what the “work” of the six gentlemen was to be.
Mary was sadly deluded. She had seriously underestimated Cecil’s spymaster. He had the deciphered transcript in English of her fatal reply to Babington. He had a copy of this English text as authenticated by Babington himself under interrogation (happily without the need for torture), and without the forged postscript, so the evidence could be produced in court. Most important, he had a craftily “reciphered” copy of Mary’s original letter, to replicate the missing document she had actually sent. That was Walsingham’s pièce de résistance. A facsimile of the lost original had been reconstructed by Phelippes to stand in for the evidence Babington had burned. The facsimile was so brilliantly done, it looked exactly like the “final” version of the original letter and could easily be taken for it. When it was shown to Mary’s secretaries during the last stages of their interrogation, they broke down and confessed everything. Their confessions were at once taken down. Thereafter, their statements were the crucial “corroboration” that the reconstituted cipher was the true text of Mary’s original letter—the one she had actually sent to Babington! And of course the contents of the facsimile exactly matched the English transcript on which the chief decipherer had earlier drawn a gallows. By this sleight of hand was Walsingham able to persuade the commissioners that the case against Mary was invincible.
Mary must have been stunned when the prosecuting counsel went on to produce what now seemed to be watertight evidence against her. Piece by piece, the evidence was read out. As these damning documents were placed before the court, she could no longer contain her emotions. She burst into tears of despair. But despite her distress, she kept her wits about her. She turned to Walsingham, taxing him for the uncanny perfection of these proofs. “It was an easy matter,” she said, “to counterfeit the ciphers and characters of others.” She knew there had been trickery. She was not sure just what it was or how it had been done, but all a forger had to do, she said, was to consult her lately purloined “alphabet of ciphers” to discover the codes, assuming he did not already know them.
It was Walsingham’s turn to be stung; he rose to defend himself. “I call God to record,” he said, “that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, nor as I bear the place of a public person have I done anything unworthy of my place.” It was a Delphic explanation of the arcane rules of politics, worthy of a Machiavelli. Only Cecil and his spymaster could know where the boundaries had been drawn in this instance between private and public duties. Did the ends justify the means? Walsingham hinted at the correct answer when he admitted that he had always been “very careful for the safety of the queen and the realm.”
Mary accepted Walsingham’s reply with extraordinary good grace. Perhaps its subtler meaning had escaped her under the pressure of this courtroom drama. She asked him not to be angry with her, and to give no more credit to those who slandered her than she did to those who accused him. She then wept again. Drying her eyes, she cried out, “I would never make shipwreck of my soul by conspiring the destruction of my dearest sister.”
After this electrifying exchange, the court adjourned at about one o’clock for dinner. When everyone returned, the rest of the evidence was read out, notably the confessions of Mary’s secretaries. She was deeply shocked. She saw how damaging their statements were, and tried to counter them by suggesting that passages might have been added to her letters after she had approved the final drafts. She drew herself up to her full height and with all the remaining dignity she could muster said, “The majesty and safety of all princes falleth to the ground if they depend upon the writings and testimony of their secretaries.” She paused for a moment, then locked horns with the prosecution. “I am not,” she said, “to be convicted except by mine own word or writing.” She pointed out that her secretaries had not been called as witnesses and so could not be cross-examined. And she observed in a gently mocking tone that her initial memo of rough headings for the letters she had discussed with her secretaries on the crucial day had disappeared. She sensed a weakness in the prosecution’s case, because she knew these notes should have been retained in the archives seized by Walsingham’s men from her rooms at Chartley. (Walsingham had, in fact, searched in vain for the notes and also for Nau’s initial draft in French of the reply to Babington.)
Although forced to defend herself without being allowed to subject any of the documents exhibited against her to legal or forensic scrutiny, Mary stood up remarkably well to her ordeal. The afternoon debates continued until late in the evening, and resumed on Saturday morning. The case turned on whether she had consented to Elizabeth’s assassination: the crux was the court’s insistence that her reply to Babington be read in conjunction with his letter proposing that “the usurper” be “dispatched” in a “tragical execution.” This way, the “work” of the six gentlemen was shown to be the plot to kill Elizabeth.
Mary contended that the circumstances of her guilt might be proved, but never the fact. She does seem genuinely to have convinced herself of it, because even after the trial she made a clear distinction in her letters between “intending to assassinate” and “leaving to God and the Catholics under God’s Providence.” She had not, she said, at any point specified the work that the six gentlemen were to undertake.
But she was grasping at straws, since in the coded letter to Babington
she had appealed for foreign (i.e., Spanish) aid to assist her on the field of battle after her liberation. Her rationale was that she was an independent queen wrongfully held in captivity. From her point of view, even an act of war was legitimate if it allowed her to recover her freedom. If she was not an independent queen, she was guilty. If she was, and Elizabeth’s death was no more than a providential incident in her legitimate struggle to regain her rights, she was innocent. This was how she saw it, but the commissioners could hardly be expected to agree with her.
No one who attended Mary’s trial could ever have forgotten it. Perhaps the most memorable clash was on the last day with Cecil himself. Becoming more and more impatient with what he saw as her futile semantics over her right to make a bid for freedom, Elizabeth’s chief minister finally put in the knife. With scant respect for the majesty and dignity of a queen, he told Mary that all her failed efforts to liberate herself were the result of her own actions and those of the Scots, not those of Elizabeth. Hearing this, Mary turned to him. “Ah, I see you are my adversary.”
“Yea,” he replied. “I am adversary to Queen Elizabeth’s adversaries.” In that brief but fiery exchange was captured all the ardor of a contest that had lasted for almost thirty years.
From then on, the trial, in Mary’s opinion, was over. While she continued to participate, her hopes had faded. “I will hear the proofs,” she said, “in another place and defend myself,” by which she clearly meant she awaited judgment in heaven. Bourgoing, whose account is slightly different, says she exclaimed, “My lords and gentlemen, my cause is in the hands of God.”
She kept her seat until the proceedings drew to a close, but when she was asked if she had anything more to say, she ended as she had begun. “I again demand to be heard,” she said, “in a full Parliament, or else to speak personally to the queen, who would, I think, show more regard of another queen.” She then stood up (as the official reporter noted) “with great confidence of countenance,” spoke disparagingly to Cecil, Walsingham and Hatton about the conduct of her two secretaries, then swept out of the room.
After she had departed, Cecil adjourned the commission for ten days. He had received a letter from Elizabeth ordering him to delay sentence if Mary was found guilty. Elizabeth wanted nothing to be done in haste. The commissioners were told to reconvene on October 25 in the Star Chamber at Westminster. There the evidence was reviewed in full, and Mary’s secretaries had to swear under oath that their written statements were true. They were then examined viva voce by the commissioners to check their stories. Mary was found guilty in her absence.
Now Cecil called for the verdict to be publicly proclaimed according to the Act for the Queen’s Safety so that Mary’s execution warrant could be issued. But Elizabeth stayed his hand. Cecil and Walsingham drew up a memo, yet nothing happened. When Parliament reassembled on the 29th, a stormy session was guaranteed. The debates turned immediately to Mary’s sentence, and she was denounced in a series of prepared speeches. All the old charges of adultery with Bothwell and Darnley’s murder were resurrected alongside the new. Mary was demonized in a frenzy of invective couched in the language of biblical fundamentalism.
Parliament, steered by Cecil and Walsingham, openly petitioned Elizabeth to execute Mary. Behind the scenes, however, a battle royal was in progress. Elizabeth was amenable to a petition, but insisted on the Bond of Association as the basis of action against her cousin. She preferred her to be quietly smothered by a private citizen, someone who had subscribed to the bond, whereas Cecil wanted Elizabeth to sign a warrant to justify a public execution as a means to validate regicide. At stake was the future of divine-right monarchy in the British Isles. If Mary was to be executed by a private citizen who had signed the bond, he would act in a private capacity, whereas an official execution sanctioned by Elizabeth under the terms of the Act for the Queen’s Safety would justify regicide as a legal precedent and permanently cede to Parliament some measure of the ruler’s prerogative.
Elizabeth asked Cecil to make sure that the parliamentary petition referred to the Bond of Association. Cecil gave a dishonest answer. He said such a change of wording could not be made for lack of time. In reality, the wording that Elizabeth expected had been included in the first draft of the petition, but Cecil had personally deleted it.
The result was deadlock. When Elizabeth gave her answer to the petition for execution, she cloaked her meaning in mist. “If I should say I would not do what you request, it might peradventure be more than I thought; and to say I would do it might perhaps breed peril of that you labor to preserve.” She herself called this an “answer answerless.”
Cecil, determined to get his way, struck out on his own. On December 4, the guilty sentence against Mary was publicly proclaimed. Elizabeth agreed to this, but for her own reasons. When overruling Cecil the previous year, she had insisted on putting her own wording into the Act for the Queen’s Safety. According to this, when the verdict against a conspirator was proclaimed, then the guilty person, “by virtue of this act and Her Majesty’s direction in that behalf,” was to be hunted down and killed. By the final wording as Elizabeth had approved it, an execution warrant was unnecessary. Those who had signed the Bond of Association were already empowered to take the responsibility once she signaled her desire to them.
And this is how Elizabeth planned Mary’s end. The deadlock lasted for six weeks. It was broken by Cecil and Walsingham, who visited Châteauneuf at the French embassy in London. Again France refused to intervene in Mary’s defense: Catherine de Medici and her son Henry III by now regarded her as a dangerous embarrassment. She simply had to go.
Châteauneuf connived with Cecil in a shabby little conspiracy. They pretended that another plot to kill Elizabeth had been discovered. It was actually an old plot, known to Châteauneuf for over a year, that had never amounted to anything, but it served its purpose now. Cecil helped to foster a rumor that Spanish troops had landed in Wales, and ordered justices of the peace to instigate the hue and cry.
When Elizabeth was told to double her bodyguards, she momentarily caved in. On February 1, she sent for her secretary and asked him to bring the warrant for Mary’s execution. She called for pen and ink, then signed. She even made a joke. Walsingham was ill again at home. “Communicate the matter with him,” she said, “because the ‘grief’ therefore would grow near to kill him outright!”
The idea that Walsingham would die of grief at Mary’s death was darkly amusing. Except that Elizabeth did not jest in vain. She never intended the warrant to be used. Instead, she told her secretary to order Walsingham to write a letter in his own name to Paulet, asking him to do away with Mary without a warrant. Paulet was to act on his own initiative, just because he had been told it was a good idea. Elizabeth wanted Mary dead, but without taking any of the responsibility. Paulet had been among the first to sign the Bond of Association, and this letter from Walsingham was to serve as the “direction” referred to by the Act for the Queen’s Safety. And yet if Paulet acted on it, he would kill Mary as a private citizen, with all the risks that entailed.
Paulet was shocked. He had once proudly boasted that he would rather forgo the joys of heaven than disappoint Elizabeth in his duty.
When forced to live up to his claim, he ate his words. Robert Beale, who was later responsible for delivering the execution warrant to Fotheringhay on Cecil’s orders and without Elizabeth’s knowledge, tells the story:
When I was come to Fotheringhay, I understood from Sir A my as Paulet and Sir Drue Drury that they had been dealt with by a letter if they could have been induced to suffer her [Mary] to have been violently murdered by some that should have been appointed for that purpose. But they disliked that course as dishonorable and dangerous, and so did Robert Beale. And therefore [they] thought it convenient to have it done according to law, in such sort as they might justify their doings by law. One Wingfield (as it was thought) should have been appointed for this deed . . . Her Majesty would fain have had it so, alleg
ing the Association . . . [Italics added.]
When Paulet had protested, “God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience,” Elizabeth had stormed at his “daintiness.” Cecil, meanwhile, pressed ahead on his own. When Elizabeth had signed the warrant even though it was not really to be used, he took over, arranging for it to be quickly sealed. He then convened a secret meeting of ten privy councilors in his private rooms, and within two days they had ordered the warrant to be dispatched to Fotheringhay. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent were chosen to direct Mary’s execution, their letters of appointment drafted by Cecil on his own initiative and signed on the authority of his fellow councilors. Lastly, the councilors agreed among themselves that they would not tell Elizabeth about the execution “until it were done.” A covering letter to the earls, to which Walsingham added his signature from his sickbed, justified this as “for [the queen’s] special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole realm.”
Such a rationale was needed, because Elizabeth had sent for her secretary again, telling him that she had dreamed of Mary’s death. She spoke elliptically, but made it clear that what she wanted was for Mary to be assassinated. That was her main aim, but by now she had skillfully contrived things so that she would win whatever happened. If Mary was killed under the Bond of Association, Elizabeth could disclaim responsibility. If Cecil covertly sealed the warrant and sent it to Fotheringhay behind her back, she could claim she had been the victim of a court conspiracy.
