by Lisa Hilton
The involvement of Francis Walsingham in the Babington plot has led some writers to conclude that the whole thing was stage-managed from beginning to end as a means of entrapping Mary. Mary’s own defense rested upon the fact that, as an anointed queen, she was answerable to no one: “I am an absolute prince, and not within compass of your laws … for that I am equal to any prince in Europe.”8 She stated truthfully that, since no word or writing of her own could be produced against her, she ought not to be charged. Yet her best defense would have required her to admit her own complicity in a plan which, while Walsingham had to a great extent controlled, he had neither incited nor, entirely, executed. Babington had destroyed the fatal “gallows letter,” but Cecil was able to produce a “copy” of it at Mary’s trial, re-encrypted by Thomas Phelippes but without the damning addition of the forged postscript. Mary knew that the letter was fake. But to have admitted her knowledge would have contradicted her assertion that she had not known anything of Babington. Destroying the crown’s evidence against her would be effectively to admit her guilt. Mary was indeed a sovereign monarch; she had been detained illegally and entirely against her will; she had been harried, pressured, spied upon, and conspired against for an intolerable length of time, yet under the terms of the law, she was still guilty. She knew it, and the commissioners knew it, and the rest, like so much of Renaissance politics, was theatre.
Mary Stuart’s trial commenced beneath Elizabeth’s cloth of estate in the hall at Fotheringhay on 14 October. Cecil had arranged the stage carefully. Ten earls, one viscount, twelve barons, Lord Chancellor Bromley, and Cecil himself faced one another, seated precisely according to rank, along the lengths of the room. A table in the center was provided for clerks and notaries. Facing Elizabeth’s throne sat Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Amyas Paulet, and Walsingham, with local notables packed in behind. Opposite was the door through which Mary made the entrance which had been thirty years in the making. All parties had rehearsed their roles long before that door opened. To the Duc de Guise, some weeks before the trial, Mary had written, “I am resolute to die for my religion… . With God’s help I shall die in the Catholic faith.” Cecil had written to the Earl of Leicester on 1 October,
I hope that God which hath given us the light to discover it [the conspiracy] will also give assistance to punish it. For it was intended not only Her Majesty’s person, and yours, and mine, but utterly to have overthrown the glory of Christ’s Church and to have erected the synagogue of Antichrist.9
So they faced one another, martyr and minister, for the opening of the last act.
The substance of the case against Mary was put by Lord Bromley and two sergeants, Puckering and Gawdy. Had Mary “compassed and imagined” Elizabeth’s death? After the terms of the royal commission and the Act for the Queen’s Surety had been read, Mary protested that she could not submit herself to answer before this “insufficient” law. Cecil countered that the law was adequate and that the trial would proceed whether or not Mary herself remained present. “Then I will hear and answer,” she replied. As the Babington plot was delineated, Mary stated that she did not know him; even when confronted with his confession, she persisted that “I never wrote of any such letter… . If Anthony Babington and all the world say of it, they lie of it.” When Mary was confronted with the forged copy of the gallows letter, she wept. Then she turned on Walsingham: “Master Walsingham, I think you are an honest man. And I pray you in word of an honest man whether you have been so or no.”
Walsingham’s response was an “answer answerless” worthy of his mistress:
I call God to record 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. I confess, that being very careful for the safety of the queen and the realm, I have curiously searched out the practices against the same.
On the evening of the 14th, Elizabeth wrote that she wished any sentence to be delayed until she had been personally informed of the discoveries of the commission, which reconvened the following morning. Mary stated that she thought the charges against her were “laid long and advisedly premeditated of.” Employing the biblical images so commonly associated with queenship, she claimed that she was no murderous Judith, but a peaceable Esther, who would pray for her people’s deliverance, not kill for it. Elizabeth herself, she remarked, had suffered no such treatment during her time in the Tower during the Wyatt conspiracy of the 1550s, and therefore she refused to answer any further. In the absence of any meaningful defense, dignity was the last card she held. Mary in fact spoke aloud twice more, to assert that Sergeant Puckering’s summation that her correspondence proved that she had claimed title to the English crown since the Act for the Queen’s Surety was false, and then, as she left the hall, to ask Hatton to make her petition to Elizabeth. She added, “God bless me and my cause from your laws.” It was done.
But was it? Elizabeth ordered a ten days’ stay on the commission, which met in Star Chamber at Westminster on 25 October. Nau and Curll, Mary’s secretaries, were examined again and admitted “without any threat or constraint” that the papers they had been shown earlier were accurate. Curll confirmed that Mary had personally instructed him to burn Babington’s letter to her and the draft of her reply. The commissioners then pronounced a verdict of guilt. The only question which remained was whether Elizabeth would now be prepared to sentence Mary to death.
The actual killing of Mary was not such a moral complication to Elizabeth. Whatever residual sympathy or loyalty she felt towards her fellow queen had dissipated in her genuine fear of assassination, which Cecil and Walsingham had not been slow to encourage. In a private letter to Paulet, she described Mary’s behavior as “wicked,” “vile,” “treacherous,” “dangerous and crafty.” She came precariously close to endorsing a private assassination, which would have solved the problem discreetly. There was even a precedent in the death of Henry VI, who had been simply (and to this day mysteriously) eliminated in 1471, when his continued existence proved an impossible political conundrum. A quiet murder was one thing, but what the council and Parliament demanded was the formality of a state-sanctioned execution. In her speeches to Parliament in response to its petition for such an execution, Elizabeth was careful to state how personally abhorrent she found the idea of Mary’s death, and that, were it left to her, she would happily have been merciful, even to the extent of sacrificing her own life:
And if even yet, now that the matter is made but too apparent, I thought she truly would repent (as perhaps she would easily appear in outward show to do) and that for her none other would take the matter upon them; or that we were but as two milkmaids with pails upon our arms, or that there were no more dependency on us than mine own life were only in danger and not the whole estate of your religion and well-doings, I protest … I would most willingly pardon and remit this offence.10
The dissonance Elizabeth had to resolve was that which Mary herself had identified. If a monarch could be tried and executed by Parliament, was that then not to reduce a sovereign to a subject? It was a dangerous precedent. Cecil believed that the only viable means of ridding the realm of the problem of Mary definitively had to be a public one—he knew as well as Elizabeth that princes were set on stages with the eyes of the world upon them. If Mary were disposed of privately, the least damaging potential consequence would be to Elizabeth’s reputation. The conflict between Elizabeth and her mentor, friend, and servant was not, then, over whether Mary ought to die but the constitutional impact this would have. In effect, it was a debate about the limits of monarchical authority.
Inevitably, the dispute has been cast in terms of gender. It has been argued that Tudor ministers viewed the conciliar structure in terms of a marital relationship, with the king, the imperium, as the “husband,” and the councilor, the consilium, as his subordinate “wife.” According to this model, Elizabeth’s relationship with her councilors represented a disturbing inv
ersion of a “natural” order. But divine right overrode such considerations, and neither Elizabeth nor her council ever recognized a diminution of her imperium—or at least not until now. So was the disagreement between Elizabeth and her ministers indicative of “fundamentally different perceptions of the Elizabethan polity”?11 Cecil, Walsingham, Hatton, and Puckering believed that they were acting according to God’s will—hence Walsingham had been able, in conscience, to reply to Mary at Fotheringhay. But how could Elizabeth claim that she was acting according to God’s will in striking at another of His anointed? How to balance the princely imperative to protect the realm at all costs against a legislative gesture which ripped the heart from princely authority? It was a dispute Machiavelli might have enjoyed.
In the two answers Elizabeth made to delegations from the Lords and Commons, on 12 and 24 November, we can see her answer being worked out. First, she emphasized that she was acting on sovereign authority and sovereign authority alone. In a draft of the Richmond speech on the 12th, Elizabeth altered the verbal reference to the Bond of Association from “Which as I do acknowledge as a perfect argument of your hearts and a great zeal to my safety, for which I think myself bound to consider carefully of it and respect you therein” (italics mine) to, in the second part of the sentence, “so shall my bond be tied to greater care for all good.” She repeatedly asserted her exclusive right to take counsel only from God. In her famous reference to princes being set upon stages, she acknowledged the Machiavellian principle that being seen to possess moral qualities is less important than their actual possession, and also alluded to the Machiavellian principle that virtue is no protection against evil. There is a curious echo here. Mary had referenced Elizabeth’s own time in the Tower during her trial. During her incarceration in 1554, Elizabeth could not but have been aware of that earlier prisoner, her mother, and of the hopelessness of innocence in the face of political expedience. As Wyatt’s witnessing poem has it:
By proof, I say, there did I learn
Wit helpeth not defense to yearn,
Of innocency to plead or prate,
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern,
For sure, circa Regni tonat.
On her release, Elizabeth had written her own poem on the subject, from her captivity at Woodstock. Writing on Fate, she declared,
Thou causeth the guilty to be loosed
From bands wherein innocents enclosed,
Causing the guiltless to be strait reserved,
And freeing those that death had well deserved.
Henry VIII had executed an anointed queen for treason, according to the laws of the land. In her first declaration at Richmond, Elizabeth insisted that the statutes for her protection had not been made against Mary, as the Scots queen claimed; that is, she was not being legally manipulated into guilt. Like Anne, Mary was guilty under English law. But in balancing mercy against pragmatism, Elizabeth was confronting precisely the Machiavellian problem which had destroyed her own mother. Machiavelli’s “anti-Ciceronian” stance, which Elizabeth’s tutor Ascham had rejected, argued that since virtue is in itself no defense, it can be ruinous. Mercy can create threat, while the preservation of the realm can be achieved only through action which can be perceived as vice. “I have found treason in trust,” Elizabeth told the delegation, adding in her second reply that “I am not so ignorant … as not to know it were a foolish course, to cherish a sword to cut my own throat.” If mercy was no option, then vice required authority. The Prince endorses the idea that it is better to remove an individual, rather than allow discord to spread. Wyatt’s advice is that only God can lead, and, as Elizabeth was later to write to Ralegh, the only power superior to Fortune is God’s. In another of her poems, the queen invoked a well-known description of Mary Stuart as:
The daughter of debate,
That eke discord doth sow,
Shall reap no gain where former rule,
Hath taught still peace to grow.
In her replies, Elizabeth stressed over and over again her divine appointment as a bringer of peace, one of the most ancient tropes of English queenship. Thus far, she fashioned her justification in accord with the divine providence invoked by her ministers. But the authority for the destruction of the “daughter of discord” must be Elizabeth’s, lest her imperium be compromised. First, Elizabeth cast Mary as a Machiavelle. In her speech, with its cunningly disarming pastoral image of the queens as twin milkmaids, Elizabeth’s urge to mercy is tempered by the Scots queen’s duplicity, as she will only repent “in outward show.” Recognizing this, Elizabeth called on her divine right, as she had so long ago in the conclusion of her poem written at Woodstock:
But by her [Fortune’s] envy can be nothing wrought,
So God send to my foes all they have thought.
On 29 November, the commissioners once more assembled in Star Chamber to “subscribe the sentence” on Mary Stuart. A press campaign was under way, which included the publication of Elizabeth’s speeches, alerting Europe to her dreadful moral predicament and showing her as regretfully adopting a necessary course which nonetheless was “contrary to her own disposition and nature.”12 The proclamation of Mary’s guilt was made public all over London on 6 December. Meanwhile, Cecil had prepared the death warrant, which he gave into the keeping of Secretary William Davison until the queen should request it. On 1 February 1587, Elizabeth signed.
There are two ways to read what followed. Either Elizabeth countermanded her instructions and was ignored by her ministers, who proceeded to execute Mary without her permission, though with a signed and sealed warrant, or Elizabeth outmanipulated her beloved colleague and succeeded in placing both the initiative and the blame on Cecil. There can be no doubt that Elizabeth wanted Mary dead. On the same day that she signed the warrant, she ordered Davison and Walsingham to write to Paulet at Fotheringhay with a report of a conversation they had recently shared. Elizabeth gave out that she was somewhat surprised that under the terms of the sworn bond of Association, which made it a duty for citizens to kill anyone who threatened her life, Paulet had not already acted. The message was clear: assassinate Mary. Paulet was horrified. He returned a reply within an hour of the letter’s receipt, declaring that such an act would make “a foul shipwreck of his conscience” and that he could never compromise himself by such an illegal act.
Meanwhile, according to the ministerial version of events, progress towards Mary’s execution was proceeding smoothly. Elizabeth had given the signed document to Davison, with instructions that it go to Lord Chancellor Bromley and Francis Walsingham. Davison claimed that he retained the warrant overnight and presented it once more to the queen on the 2nd. Via Davison, Hatton and Cecil had now been informed. It was decided that Walsingham’s brother-in-law, Robert Beale, should transport the warrant, which was shown to him by Davison at Walsingham’s London home on 3 February. Paulet was informed that the executioner, Bull (who was to receive £10 for his performance), was on his way, accompanied by one of Walsingham’s servants. The axe designated to sever the Queen of Scots’s head was to be hidden in a trunk so as not to attract attention. Davison and Beale then rowed to Greenwich, where, in Cecil’s lodgings, they met Leicester, Hatton, Lord Howard of Effingham, and five other senior councilors, who presented Beale with letters to the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury and Paulet. Beale reached Fotheringhay by Sunday, the 5th, after alerting the Earl of Kent, then rode to fetch the Earl of Shrewsbury before returning to Fotheringhay. With Paulet’s authority, a letter was written to the local deputy lieutenant, requiring his presence at Fotheringhay on the morning of 8 February. The company was fully assembled on the evening of the 7th, with the exception of Bull, who was lodged in a nearby inn.
Mary went to her death between eight and nine on the morning of the 8th. Her cloth of estate had once more been ceremoniously dismantled. In a particularly cruel gesture, she was informed that she would have to proceed to the block alone, without her women. Their weeping might create a scandal, she was told,
and moreover, they might seek to make blasphemous relics from linen dipped in her blood. Mary reminded Paulet of her cousinship to Elizabeth and argued that surely the queen would not sanction something so improper; she was finally allowed to choose six ladies to accompany her. It was done with two blows of the axe, though, horribly, a saw was used to sever the final sinews of Mary’s neck. At the end, Mary prayed in English, “Even as Thy arms, O Jesus, were spread here upon the cross, so receive me into Thy arms of mercy and forgive me all my sins.” In her own mind, and in the eyes of Catholic Europe, the Queen of Scots died a martyr.
