Elizabeth (38 page)

She spoke slowly as Nau wrote, asking for details, enquiring about the help of Spanish troops, and then, as the secretary paused, she made the final committal:

“‘When all is ready the six gentlemen must be set to work … you will provide that when their design is accomplished, I may be rescued from this place.' Now give me the letter, Nau, and I will sign it.”

“Well, my Lords, our work is nearly done.”

Walsingham looked at Burleigh and then at Leicester. His usually dour face was shining with animation; even his gestures were a little exaggerated. He kept looking at the copy of Mary Suart's letter to Babington and he was unable to restrain his triumph.

“‘The six gentlemen must be set to work …' she has signed her own death warrant with that one sentence.”

“I congratulate you,” Burleigh said. “You have done a wonderful service, Sir Francis. The Queen will be truly grateful.”

“Nobody questions what you have achieved,” Leicester remarked quietly, “but I have a doubt about the Queen's gratitude. She has never wanted the death of Mary Stuart, and this letter may force her hand. Don't be too sanguine; she is quite capable of changing her mind and refusing to take action on the strength of one piece of paper.”

“I have thought of that.” The Secretary frowned. “Though the Queen authorized everything I have done, I am well aware that she may decide to disregard her own instructions. We all know and love Her Majesty but I think we all agree that she is er—somewhat capricious. But this is one time, my Lords, when we must protect the Queen against herself. I propose to amass every scrap of evidence of the Scottish Queen's guilt and lay it before the Council. They, and not I, will insist that the Queen proceeds against her cousin. And I doubt if the Queen herself will hesitate when she sees the proof of Mary Stuart's enormities before her own eyes.”

“Where is this proof, and how will you obtain it?” Burleigh asked.

“We will find it in Queen Mary's private papers,” Walsingham answered. “I ask your permission, gentlemen, to have them seized and brought to London.”

There was a moment's silence, and then Leicester spoke.

“We dare not do such a thing without the Queen's permission. I certainly won't take the responsibility and I doubt if even Lord Burleigh would.”

Burleigh shook his head.

“I have sought the death of Mary Stuart for many years,” he said quietly, “but I know Her Majesty too well to try and encompass it behind her back … she must authorize the seizure. I will approach her, but I cannot do more than that.”

“Why not let Lord Leicester try and persuade her?” Walsingham suggested. He had never endeared himself to Elizabeth but he had a profound respect for Leicester's understanding of her. Burleigh would be clear and logical and talk to her as if she were a cool-headed statesman like himself. But she was growing more erratic every day, and increasingly apt to act on the dictates of her own emotions. Leicester understood those emotions and knew how to play on them. It was safer to send him than Burleigh. Walsingham was so anxious to bring his project to a successful conclusion that he risked offending the powerful Minister by his suggestion. He was ready to override anyone except Elizabeth herself, rather than see Mary Stuart escape from the trap he had closed over her.

“I agree,” Burleigh said. “You go to her, Leicester. You know best how to persuade Her Majesty these days. She may listen to you where an old greybeard like me might well antagonize her. Now, Sir Francis, when we have the papers, what do you propose?”

“I propose that we take her secretaries too,” Walsingham said. “Have them brought here and I will question them myself in my own house. At the same time we will arrest Babington and his associates and question them—in the Tower. We will disclose the plot to Parliament, and I will compile the evidence against the Queen of Scots and lay it in front of the Queen and the rest of the Council. The rest must be achieved by you, my Lords.”

“Have no fear.” Burleigh rose and held out his hand. “What you have begun so well, we will finish.” He turned to Leicester. “My Lord, will you go to the Queen today, and get a written permission from her and if you can, Sir Francis will see to the details.”

“I will.” Leicester bowed. “The Queen is expecting me this afternoon. I will ask her then.”

It was almost five years since Mary had been allowed to hunt. When Sir Amyas Paulet asked her if she cared to take a small retinue and ride to Tixhall, where the stags were plentiful, she could hardly believe that he was serious. But Paulet had no sense of humour, cruel or otherwise. She could go under his escort, and he gave the permission so ungraciously that it never occurred to her for a moment that the invitation of the Lord of Tixhall was a subterfuge to get her out of Chartley without her destroying her correspondence. She said goodbye to her servants and managed to sit her horse as if she had never had rheumatism and been caged up in her apartments through the whole winter. She was gay and full of high spirits, secretly buoyed up with her hopes of Anthony Babington's success and her joy at the prospect of following the sport which had once been her passion. They rode through the green English countryside, and the Queen set a fast pace in her impatience to reach Tixhall. She had prepared a gracious speech for the owner, and was even a little curious about him. His invitation was an act of true charity and it was also brave. She looked forward to meeting him and finding yet another friend.

But Mary never saw the Lord of Tixhall, and she never hunted the stags which roamed his parklands. At the gates of the house a troop of horsemen met her, and forced her secretaries, Curle and Nau, away from her retinue. Then she saw Paulet's eyes looking at her, full of triumph and contempt at the ease with which she had let herself be deceived. When she tried to ride to the secretaries and cried out in protest, he told her they were under arrest for suspected treason against the Queen of England, and seized her bridle and whipped her horse through the gates of Tixhall. Then she was lifted down and hurried into the house and locked into a small upper room. Some miles away at Chartley, Walsingham's commissioners were breaking open the doors of her writing-cabinet and listing and sealing all her papers. They also packed up her jewels and anything in her personal belongings which were of value, and they took everything to London.

After ten days of close confinement at Tixhall, she was returned to Chartley and it was there that she heard from Paulet that Babington and his friends had been tried and executed.

Sir Amyas stood in front of her with the list in his hand and solemnly read out the names and the sentences passed upon them, while the Queen sat as if she were petrified, refusing to look at him and wishing that she could sacrifice her dignity and put her hands over her ears. Babington and the priest Ballard and a certain Robert Barnewall were among the six who suffered the full rigours of their penalty, he announced, looking up.

“They confessed everything, Madam, in their last extremities. The others were executed the next day, and the Queen's Majesty was moved to mitigate their sufferings; they were hanged until dead.…”

Mary raised her eyes to his face. It was hard and grave, and there was still that expression of contempt which humiliated her.

He despised her and he hated her; to him she was a worthless, perfidious woman, responsible for the deaths of all those men, and she could see that he had read that dreadful recital to shame her with the evidence of her own responsibility.

“God have mercy on them,” she said unsteadily. “And on me, for they all died for my sake. I shall remember their courage and their sacrifice when my own time comes.”

“It will come, Madam,” Paulet said grimly; he was irritated because the Queen was holding her rosary and moving the beads nervously through her fingers. He viewed all evidence of Catholicism with superstitious horror, and he also considered her an unrepentent hypocrite.

“It will come,” he repeated. “Your papers betrayed your treason to Queen Elizabeth with Babington and with every traitor who's conspired against her in the last nineteen years. You will be tried, Madam, and condemned, if there is any justice in this world.”

“Elizabeth Tudor is not my Queen.”

Mary rose, leaning on the arm of her chair; she felt faint and trembling.

“She cannot try me, for I am not her subject; she can only condemn me to an unlawful death and I am ready to suffer that. Now be good enough to leave me.”

When she was alone she went to the small alcove which she used as an oratory and fell on her knees, desperately trying to pray for the men who had died so cruelly. The thought of Anthony Babington brought out the floods of tears she had been too proud to shed in front of Paulet; she saw him as a boy of sixteen, very fair and earnest, gazing at her with his eyes full of adolescent love, promising to give his life in her service. And his life had been required of him, accompanied by such physical agony that she shuddered. Nau had been right when he begged her to ignore that letter, and Nau had been tortured and would die like the others. Poor Nau; she had thrown his life away as well as her own. She bent her head on her hands; she felt suddenly too tired and empty to weep. Nor could she pray; the words dried in her mouth. She knelt in silence with her eyes closed, unable to feel or think. For the first time in the whole nineteen turbulent years of her captivity, Mary felt certain of her death, but if she was empty of hope, even of sorrow, she was also untroubled by bitterness or hatred. When her lady-in-waiting, Jane Kennedy, found her two hours later, the Queen was still kneeling but she was fast asleep.

Elizabeth was writing; she had been sitting alone in her Privy Chamber for most of the afternoon, staring at the sheets of paper, writing a few lines and then destroying what she had put down. The afternoon light was gone; her page had lit the candles on her table and withdrawn, and the room was full of shadows. She had sent her secretaries away, refusing to dictate, refusing to see Burleigh or Leicester, or any of the men who had been surrounding her, humming like bees in the past few weeks, all sounding the same, maddening, triumphant note. The proof of Mary Stuart's activities against her was so voluminous she had pushed the pile of documents aside after reading the first dozen. One paper had been specially shown to her. It was a decoded list of all those of her nobles who were secret partisans of Mary. She had read it in silence, her eyes expressionless, and then thrown it on the fire. She was not surprised; she was not particularly enthusiastic to find tangible proof that Mary had been encouraging rebellion and assassination, when they had all been aware of it for years. She was angry and irritable and inwardly furious with Walsingham who was being lauded to the heavens by the Council for his skill in the affair. She had almost forgotten that moment of exasperation at Hampton Court when she obliquely suggested the very plan which had been carried out so successfully. She had wanted peace and security, and all Walsingham had done was to present her with a mass of evidence against her cousin and put her in a position where she had no choice but to put her on trial and execute her.

She had been tempted to ignore it all, but Parliament and her Council would not be fobbed off with autocracy or excuses now. Their enemy was in their hands and they would not let Elizabeth release her. There were times when she had no intention of having Mary brought to trial; the idea of a sovereign standing arraigned before a jury of commoners outraged Elizabeth's sense of what was due to Princes; later, when she felt calmer and able to consider all the factors clearly, she admitted that Mary must be put to death if her own life was to be safe. She talked to Leicester, who used every argument to prick her pride and her feelings in an effort to make her lose her temper and wreak a quick vengeance on the prisoner, and to Burleigh, who had a hundred excellent reasons for doing what she did not want to do. And still she did not want to do it. She hated Mary and she had punished Babington with such ferocity that her hardened sensibilities revolted when she heard the details of his death. She had spared the next batch of prisoners. It was almost as if the force of her human vindictiveness had spent itself in that awful bloodbath when some of the flower of her young nobles had perished slowly before a crowd of hundreds at Tyburn.

Now Mary stood alone, the last of the principals alive, and her death would still the clamour of treason and discontent for the rest of Elizabeth's reign. That was the argument of the short-sighted who refused to see beyond the scaffold to the ports of Spain, where a huge fleet of ships had been gathering. It was Elizabeth's old argument and she was not distracted from it by public hysteria. When Mary died, Spain would attack, and the ships fitting out at Cadiz, and the troops training across the Channel in the Netherlands, were all poised, waiting like an arrow pointed at her throat. Mary's death would loose them at her, and she paced up and down her apartments, cursing Walsingham and her Council and Robert and everyone who was pressing her to kill Mary and expose her country to the inevitable war with Spain. She was in a circumstantial vice, and she was also being squeezed by her own inherent dislike of condemning an anointed Queen to a felon's death.

But there was an alternative, which might stave off the final decision. It would not please anybody except Elizabeth, who had proved over and over again that it was always easy to be bold, but infinitely better to be cautious. If Mary was utterly discredited before the world and especially in the eyes of the religious fanatics in England, it might be possible to let her live.

And so Elizabeth was writing offering her her life. Normally she wrote with fluency; her pen had always been a master weapon, but now it was stiff in her fingers and the words laboured. Mary had been taken to Fotheringay Castle, the bleakest and strongest of all her prisons, and there the trial would be held and the sentence carried out. She knew what was being prepared for her; her gaolers saw to that. She must be waiting in daily anticipation of death, and Elizabeth could only hope that her spirit would falter when she saw a suggestion of hope. She remembered her own mental state, so many, many years ago when she was a young girl imprisoned in the Tower, her life threatened by the suspicions of a jealous, ailing sister and the plots of a succession of hotheaded incompetents, determined to compromise her whether she wished it or not. She had been very much afraid because she was young and passionately fond of life; the thought of death had terrified her, and there was nothing ignoble about her fear. Unlike Mary she had not been soured by sufferings and disappointments; she had not been middle-aged and abandoned to despair and disillusion. But even if she had been, if she and not her cousin were at Fotheringay, ruined and helpless, with nothing to look forward to but a twilight existence in one fortress after another, she, Elizabeth, would always choose to hope on and live on.