by Neil Hanson
The murmur of voices died away and a silence fell on the room as Mary mounted the steps of the platform and walked slowly towards the single high-backed, black-draped chair at the far end. In front of it was a kneeling cushion and then the scalloped shape of the executioner’s block, both also draped in black serge. As she sank into the chair, Mary raised her eyes, dark as the velvet she wore, and surveyed her audience. The firelight reflected from the breastplates and helmets of the row of guards facing her, sheriff’s men, each holding a halberd in his right hand. Her expression betrayed no emotion as her gaze moved from them to two powerfully built, masked and black-clad figures, one of them resting his hands on the haft of his double-headed axe, “like those with which they cut wood.” Robert Beale, the Clerk to the Privy Council and brother-in-law to the principal Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, unrolled the parchment bearing the Queen’s seal and began to read from it. The warrant cited Mary’s “stubborn disobedience and incitement to insurrection against the life and person of Her Sacred Majesty.” The crime was high treason and the sentence was death.
Mary was nine years younger than Elizabeth—“the Virgin Queen” or “the English Jezebel,” depending on the observer’s religious persuasion. Daughter of James V of Scotland and Marie de Guise of France, she had become Queen of the Scots in 1542 at just one week old, following the death of her father, who collapsed and died after hearing that his invading army had been slaughtered by Henry VIII’s troops at Solway Moss. At the age of six, she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, the future Francis II of the royal house of Valois, and became a ward of Catherine de’ Medici at the French court. She duly married at the age of fifteen and within a year was Queen of France, but she soon showed her talent for intrigue by passing secret information to her uncles the de Guises, the enemies of the Valois kings.
The granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary felt herself, not Elizabeth, to be the rightful heir to his throne. Monarchs were not constrained by the same laws as their subjects in civil or ecclesiastical matters; many inconvenient marriages had been dissolved with the compliance of the Vatican, and many bastard offspring, including the Emperor Charles V’s son, Don Juan of Austria, and daughter, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, had been declared legitimate. But Henry VIII had gone too far ever to be forgiven, even posthumously. He had not only divorced a woman of the imperial blood—Catherine of Aragon was Charles V’s aunt—he had also wrenched his populace from the Church of Rome, and confiscated its assets. There was no possibility that Elizabeth would ever be seen in Paris, Madrid or Rome as anything but the bastard daughter of Henry’s bigamous marriage to Anne Boleyn, and moreover one whose self-proclaimed virginity hid a score of scandals: “Wife to many and to many daughter-in-law, oh foul queen, nay no queen, but lustful, beastly whore.” Even among Englishmen, the title the “Virgin Queen” may well have been entirely ironic when first bestowed.2
After Mary Tudor’s death in 1558, Francis II declared himself and his wife to be “rulers of France, Scotland, England and Ireland” and quartered the English coat of arms with his own, but following Mary’s bloody reign of terror few Englishmen could stomach the idea of another Catholic monarch, and Elizabeth began to consolidate her hold on power. The immediate threat to her throne was removed when Francis died suddenly on 6 December 1560, having reigned for only sixteen months, leaving Mary, Queen of Scots, a widow at just eighteen. She accepted the Scottish crown, but scandal surrounded her from the first. She took a string of lovers, was implicated in the murder of David Rizzio, her secretary, and of her second husband, Lord Darnley, and then compounded the outrage by marrying her husband’s murderer, the Earl of Bothwell. Imprisoned and forced to abdicate, she escaped from her captivity and rallied forces loyal to her, but they were defeated at the battle of Langside in 1568 and she then fled to England, seeking the protection of Elizabeth. She spent the remainder of her life under confinement, but it was a gilded cage—she was allowed a retinue of forty and was permitted to hunt and visit spas to take the waters— and she was the constant focus and sometimes the wellspring of intrigues and plots.
Mary’s son, the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, “a sickly, backward lad, shambling, awkward and unattractive,” had been taken from his mother at the age of ten months and raised as a Protestant, and by her will of 1577 Mary made plain her intention to bequeath her rights to the English throne not to her son but to Philip II of Spain. The former husband of Mary Tudor, Philip had also once been a suitor of Elizabeth, albeit for purely pragmatic and dynastic reasons: “Nothing would make me do this except the clear knowledge that it might gain the kingdom.” He had constructed a tenuous claim to the English throne in his own right through his descent from Constanza of Castile’s marriage to John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. Some saw Mary’s gesture as an invitation for Philip to invade and place her on the throne, though it might equally have been a calculated attempt to stay Elizabeth’s hand, for fear of unleashing an even greater danger.
Elizabeth had dithered over the fate of Mary since she took up the crown. Her father, Henry VIII, would not have hesitated for a moment; he would have had Mary executed as soon as she came into his hands and defied all of Europe’s popes and princes to do their worst. He had done as much by divorcing Catherine of Aragon and breaking with Rome, and had built the most powerful navy in Europe to defend his shores against his enemies. Elizabeth had already been given ample grounds for executing Mary. In 1569, the Rising of the North, a rebellion led by the northern Catholic earls, was an immediate reminder of the dangers posed by a rival for the throne. It was crushed with great brutality, but no action was taken against Mary, even when she was then implicated in a plot against Elizabeth in 1572. Funded by the Florentine banker Roberto di Ridolfi, the conspirators included the Spanish ambassador, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk and the privateer John Hawkins. Hawkins sent a message to Philip professing to be weary of Elizabeth’s “fickle and tyrannical rule,” and when asked for proof, he sent a letter “cunningly procured” from Mary, Queen of Scots. Philip then sent gold “to be used by him in making traitors of other Englishmen and in preparing some English ships for Spanish service.” Hawkins pocketed the money, but passed information on every move that the plotters made to Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, who ran a chain of 500 agents operating as far afield as Constantinople. He liked to remark that “knowledge is never too dear” and “might well have been compared to him in the Gospel that sowed his tares in the night; so did [he sow his] seeds in division, in the dark.” 3
Hawkins was certainly a consummate double agent, Ridolfi may well have been, and Elizabeth’s ministers were so well informed about the plot that all the chief conspirators were arrested. Under interrogation that would certainly have included torture, the Bishop of Ross, Mary’s confessor, implicated her not only in the plot to depose Elizabeth but also in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, and, less plausibly, her first, Francis II. The Duke of Norfolk, who was to have married Mary on her assumption of the throne, was convicted of treason on 16 January 1572, and executed after much hesitation by Elizabeth on 2 June, but she stayed her hand from administering the same punishment to Mary herself. She vetoed a bill of attainder in favour of her own bill making Mary “unable to enjoy the Crown of this realm” and then vetoed that bill too. “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.” After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants the same year, Bishop Sandes advised Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, “forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen’s head.” His advice was ignored and Mary remained alive, closely confined, but still the focus of a succession of plots and intrigues against Elizabeth.4
In 1582, Walsingham, an expert linguist and cryptographer, had deciphered the codes used in secret messages passing between Mary and the French and Spanish courts. From then on, everything that Mary wrote
was intercepted and read. The first fruit of it came that same year, when Walsingham revealed a plot involving Mary and her kinsmen the de Guises, the Pope, the Jesuits, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, then Spanish ambassador in London, and Philip II himself to restore Scotland to the old faith and then invade England. In the winter of 1583 Walsingham exposed the Throckmorton Plot, again involving Mendoza. The leading conspirators, including Francis Throckmorton, were arrested and tortured, and Mendoza was expelled in January 1584; no Spanish ambassador replaced him for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, but Philip continued to intrigue against her and fund the Queen of Scots.
Several Spanish plots against the Dutch leader William the Silent, of the House of Orange, had also failed, but his assassination in 1584, coupled with the exposure of a plan by John Somerville to shoot Elizabeth, caused terror in England, where it seemed all too likely that she might suffer a similar fate. Her crown was “not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it.” As a result, access to her wardrobe, laundry and kitchens was rigidly controlled and in October 1584 Burghley and Walsingham drew up a Bond of Association. Members swore to defend Elizabeth’s life with their own and “pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge all manner of persons of what estate so ever they shall be . . . that shall attempt . . . the harm of Her Majesty’s royal person . . . [and] never desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons to the uttermost extermination of them . . . No pretended successor by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed” would be allowed to take the throne.5
The implication was clear: if a plot in which Mary, Queen of Scots, was either a co-conspirator or even the innocent beneficiary should succeed, the members of the Association swore to strike her down before she could claim the throne. This could also apply to James VI, Elizabeth’s putative heir, if the members of the Association so chose, a clear warning to him not to involve himself in plots and conspiracies in order to bring forward the time of his accession. As soon as Parliament reassembled in November, an “Act for the Queen’s Safety” was proposed and passed, including a provision that any attempt on the Queen’s life with the aim of advancing a claimant to the throne rendered any then supporting that claimant guilty of treason. However, the claimant’s heirs were exempted from any penalty unless they were “privy” to the crime, making it clear that the Act’s target was Mary, not her son James. The Act also authorized the persecution of Jesuits and Catholic priests, and laid down that Englishmen studying at Catholic seminaries abroad were to return home within six months or be found guilty in absentia of treason.
The legislation had no visible effect on the frequency of plots against Elizabeth. The Parry Plot—William Parry, MP for Queens-borough, plotted to murder the Queen—was exposed in 1585, causing fresh panic over the succession, but Elizabeth still stayed her hand, more scared of French and Habsburg hostility than of the threat that Mary represented to her throne. The memory of the beheading of her own mother, Anne Boleyn, on Tower Green no doubt weighed heavily with her, and she perhaps feared even more the dangerous precedent she would set by implying that any “prince” anointed by God could be subject to mere mortal justice at the hands of man; “absolute princes ought not to be accountable for their actions to any other than to God alone.”6
Yet though she professed to find the idea of a judicial execution “utterly repugnant,” she also went out of her way to encourage her subordinates to find means to dispose of Mary without recourse to the executioner’s block. She both hated and was jealous of Mary and missed few opportunities to humiliate her. When Mary fled to England without even a change of raiment, Elizabeth sent her a gift of clothing— “two torn shifts, two pieces of black velvet, two pairs of shoes and nothing else”—and then bought Mary’s jewels from the Scottish regent. When a diplomat remarked that Mary was very beautiful, Elizabeth haughtily announced that she herself was far “superior to the Queen of Scotland.” In the early 1570s, Elizabeth had sent Sir Henry Killigrew to offer three successive Scottish regents—Moray, Lennox and Mar—a lavish bribe in return for their agreement that if Mary were released and returned to Scotland, she would be immediately executed, “so as neither that realm nor this should be endangered by her hereafter.” 7 Each regent perished of natural causes before any deal could be concluded and the next one, the Earl of Morton, though no better disposed to Mary than his predecessors, was also “too old a cat to draw such a straw as that after him,” knowing that whatever the financial rewards, he would either be a scapegoat for the killing or the target of assassins seeking revenge. However, as England’s long-simmering conflict with Spain grew more open, Mary’s presence became an ever greater threat, and her involvement in yet another conspiracy sealed her fate.8
After the Throckmorton Plot, Mary had been placed in the custody of the puritan Sir Amyas Paulet and kept isolated, but a secret channel of communication was set up between her and the French ambassador using a watertight box hidden inside an ale barrel. Unknown to Mary, Walsingham had devised the method and was monitoring the correspondence. The Babington Plot to murder Elizabeth, endorsed by Mary in a secret letter dictated by her on 17 July 1586 and at once intercepted by Walsingham, was her death sentence. The evidence was overwhelming; Anthony Babington was so enamoured of the fame that would be his if the plot succeeded that he even had his portrait painted with the six chosen assassins.
The Earl of Leicester, always a fierce opponent of Mary, even though he had once been dispatched as a reluctant suitor for her hand, saw the chance to put an end to the plots and conspiracies that had bedevilled Elizabeth’s reign. “If the matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices during Her Majesty’s reign.” Mary was incarcerated at Fotheringay, a safe distance from both London and her potential supporters in the north, and her trial began on 14 October 1586, by which time her fellow conspirators had already been tried and hanged. After hearing of the tortures that had been inflicted on the assassin of William the Silent, Elizabeth demanded that the Privy Council should find similar means to execute Anthony Babington and his co-conspirators, so that they should suffer a more terrible end than “mere” hanging, drawing and quartering. Only when Burghley had convinced her of the terrible pain and duration of the latter punishment did she relent. Typically she then changed her mind after hearing of the torments Babington had suffered and ordered that the other conspirators should be hung without drawing or quartering.9
Mary at first refused to attend her trial, claiming the court had no jurisdiction over her, but when Elizabeth gave her a “veiled hint of clemency” she defended herself for two days with such “vigour and ability” that proceedings were suspended and then reconvened in the closed Star Chamber. The guilty verdict was pronounced on 25 October but, as her Private Secretary William Davison complained, Elizabeth still hesitated to take her rival’s life “unless extreme fear compels her.” Parliament sent her a petition to execute Mary, “whilst the Queen of Scotland lived she would never be free from such conspiracies,” and backed it up by a threat to withdraw the funds they had just voted for Crown expenditure if their wishes were not heeded. Elizabeth delivered her response on 24 November: “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 labour to preserve.” She described this as an “answer answerless” but even those unskilled in deciphering Elizabeth’s meaning would not have been troubled to decide that she wanted Mary dead, but also wanted to appear blameless in the deed.10
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, prepared the death warrant in early December, but it remained unsigned by Elizabeth for two months, during which time Mary was permitted to write to the Pope, Philip of Spain, Mendoza, Henri III and the Duc de Guise in France and other Catholic leaders, appealing for support and confirming her bequest of her claim to the throne of England to His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II. Elizabeth’s procrastination at
last came to an end on 11 February, when, as Davison had predicted, terrified by rumours that Spanish troops had landed in Wales and that Mary had escaped from her confinement at Fotheringay, she ordered him to bring the document, called for pen and ink and signed it. She then gave Davison contradictory verbal orders—to have the royal seal fixed to the warrant, and not to do so until so ordered. Davison, “a terrible heretic and an enemy of the queen of Scotland,” acted on the first instruction. A meeting of eleven Privy Counsellors arranged for the sentence to be carried out with all possible speed but, fearing yet another royal change of mind, they did not inform Her Majesty of this “before the execution were past.” 11
As Mr. Beale finished reading the warrant and fell silent, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, addressed the Queen of Scots. “Madam, you hear what we are commanded to do?”
“Do your duty,” she said. “I was born a queen and sovereign princess, not subject to laws, a near relative of the Queen of England and her legitimate heir. After having been long and unlawfully imprisoned in this country, where I have endured many pains and evils . . . I thank my God that He has permitted that in this hour, I die for my religion.” Anxious to stem the heretical discourse, the earl signalled to Dr. Fletcher, the dean of Peterborough, who stood up and tried to speak, but his nerves were so great that three times he began and each time he stumbled to a halt after a few words. Mary raised a hand to silence him. “Mr. Dean, trouble me not. I am settled and persuaded in the Catholic Roman faith and mean to shed my blood in defence of it.” As he continued to try to speak, she “began with tears and loud voice to pray in Latin.” Her voice drowned his and still rang out long after the dean abandoned his prepared speech and resumed his seat. She raised her crucifix over her head so that it glinted in the firelight and, switching to English, offered prayers for “the conversion of England to the true faith, the perseverance of Catholics in their creed and their constancy in martyrdom.” It was a powerful performance, and one aimed at an audience that extended far beyond those assembled at Fotheringay. 12
