Elizabeth's Spymaster (25 page)

More evidence was produced at the next and final day’s hearing at Fotheringay, with one last telling exchange between Burghley and the Scottish queen. Mary had accused the minister of being her enemy. ‘No,’ said the Lord Treasurer: ‘I am enemy to the queen’s enemy.’
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The trial was adjourned to be reopened ten days later in the Star Chamber, within the security of the Palace of Westminster. There the commissioners reviewed the evidence against Mary and unanimously judged her guilty of having ‘compassed and imagined within this realm of England, tending to the hurt, death and destruction of the royal person of our said lady the queen’.
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Walsingham wrote to Leicester:

We had proceeded presently to sentence but we had a secret countermand and were forced under some colour to adjourn our meeting until the 25th of the month to Westminster. I see this wicked creature ordained of God to punish us for our sins and unthankfulness for her majesty has no power to proceed against her as her own safety requires.
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One can sense vividly Walsingham’s intense frustration at the slowness of events.

Even after the commissioners pronounced sentence, Elizabeth havered over issuing a public proclamation announcing the verdict against Mary. She needed a nudge towards signing the death warrant. Parliament reassembled on 29 October and petitioned the queen to agree to the execution.
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Burghley and Walsingham’s fingerprints were all over the wording:

Having of long time to our intolerable grief seen by how manifold most dangerous and execrable practices, Mary … commonly called Queen of Scots has encompassed the destruction of your majesty’s sacred and most royal person, in whose safety (next under God) our
chief and only felicity does consist; and thereby not only to bereave us of the sincerer and true religion of Almighty God, bringing us and this noble crown back again into the thraldom of the Romish tyranny, but also to utterly ruin and overthrow the happy state and commonwealth of this most noble realm.

The judgement and sentence upon Mary were ‘in all things most honourable, just and lawful’. Parliament could not discover ‘any possible means to provide for your majesty’s safety but by the just and speedy execution of the said queen, the neglecting whereof, may procure the heavy displeasure and punishment of Almighty God’. It is always comforting to have God agreeing with you in such matters, as Walsingham undoubtedly believed He did.

Elizabeth, with growing doubts over the planned regicide, eventually replied to the petition ‘with an answer without an answer’. It was an impressive display of semantics:

Your judgement I condemn not, neither do I mistake your reasons but pray you to accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulness, and take in good part my answer answerless.

If I should say I would not do what you request I might say perhaps more than I think.

And if I should say I would do it, I might plunge myself into peril, whom you labour to preserve.

No doubt her loyal Commons and Lords read over her convoluted prose many times and discussed its true import. But for all its foggy phrases, the meaning was crystal clear: Elizabeth had very real doubts about being seen to order the execution of the Scottish queen.

Burghley tried to force her hand and she eventually agreed to proclaim Mary’s sentence on 4 December – news greeted joyously by celebratory bonfires lit by the citizens of London.
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CHAPTER SIX

Thirst After Her Blood’

‘You may see that this dreadful delay breeds dread and danger on every side and that every day brings forth new mischief…
There will be no end until … the wrath of God be appeased by the sweet-smelling sacrifice of justice [be] executed upon this lady, whose life threatens ruin both to Prince and people.

SIR AMYAS PAULET’S LETTER TO WILLIAM DAVISON, JUNIOR SECRETARY OF STATE, 27 JANUARY 1586.
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Walsingham drafted a warrant for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots sometime during early December 1586.
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With an eye towards its public consumption, he made sure that the document graphically recounted the plans of Babington and his fellow conspirators. He added:

Mary, pretending title to the crown of this realm of England, had compassed and imagined … diverse things tending to the hurt, death and destruction of our royal person … By our proclamation under our great seal of England bearing date at Richmond the [blank] day of this month of December have published the said sentence and judgement …

By the ancient laws of this our realm, they do justly deserve death and that all the favours and tolerance by us heretofore used towards the said Mary have and do embolden her and her confederates to persevere in their mischievous attempts against us and this our realm, have therefore in like manner … moved us that execution of death, which she has so justly deserved, might be done on the same Mary.

The warrant directed ‘any two or more’ of the designated commissioners at ‘our castle of Fotheringay in our county of Northampton you do immediately cause the head of the same Mary to be cut off, whereof fail you not’. The document was endorsed carefully by Walsingham: ‘Note that this must bear date the day after the proclamation [be] made.’

On 19 November, at Fotheringay, Lord Buckhurst and Robert Beale, clerk to the Privy Council, told Mary of the sentence of death passed upon her. Two days later, her keeper Paulet and his new assistant Sir Dru Drury told her that as she was now legally regarded as a dead woman – moreover, one ‘without honour or dignity’ – they would remove the glittering cloth of estate that hung over a regal chair in her presence chamber. Her own attendants refused to remove it, but eight of Paulet’s servants tore it down in a deliberately callous attack on her royal status. He also churlishly and needlessly ordered the removal of her billiard table.
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The Scottish queen wrote to Mendoza in Paris on 23 November:

Praise God for me that, by His Grace, I had the courage to receive this very unjust sentence of the heretics with contentment, for the honour … to shed my blood at the demand of the enemies of His Church.

They honour me so much as to say, that theirs cannot exist if I live. The other point they affirm to be, that their queen cannot reign in security and for the same reason.

On both these conditions, I, without contradicting them, accepted the honour they were so anxious to confer upon me, as very zealous in the Catholic religion for which I had publicly offered my life.
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She was finding considerable comfort and moral strength in her new role of Catholic martyr.

On 1 December, a mere six days after the proclamation announcing the sentence on Mary was published, Burghley issued instructions to hand Mary over to Sir Thomas Andrews, the Sheriff of Northampton-shire, ready for her immediate execution after delivery to him of the as yet unsigned death warrant.
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Burghley and Walsingham clearly believed the matter would be wrapped up speedily – preferably before Christmas.

But all was not as clear cut as they hoped.

There remained nagging fears amongst Elizabeth’s advisers that Mary would throw herself on the queen’s mercy – and that such an emotional appeal, woman to woman, queen to queen, could win her a reprieve. Their concerns were heightened when Mary wrote to Elizabeth on 19 December, piously thanking her for the ‘happy tidings’ of her impending execution, adding, ‘While abandoning this world and preparing myself for a better and for all those whom you doom … I desire that my blood and my country may be remembered in that time.’ Paulet took it upon himself to delay delivery of the letter, fearing its impact on his emotionally tortured queen, but Elizabeth eventually received it by 23 December.
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It must have added to her torment of indecision, and could hardly have brightened her Twelve Days of Christmas.

Possible reaction to the execution overseas and the diplomatic consequences of the act were also troubling her.

Roger Aston, the confidential agent to Mary’s estranged son James VI reported that the ‘only thing’ the Scottish king craved ‘is her life; all other things to be just as her majesty [Elizabeth] pleases, her life only [be] saved’.
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Despite this emotional response, reports suggested there would be no ultimatum, no threat of war from Edinburgh, if the Scottish queen was executed.

Pompone de Bellièvre, a special ambassador from the French king Henry III, travelled to London to hand over a letter of protest to Elizabeth. He warned that his master would ‘look upon it as a personal affront’ if Mary was killed. Such weak, half-hearted coercion did not worry the English queen, who replied defiantly that any such intimidation was the
‘shortest way to make me dispatch the cause of so much mischief. But behind her bluster and bravado, Elizabeth was still far from convinced of the wisdom of slaughtering Mary.

Walsingham wrote her a closely reasoned paper arguing for a speedy execution:
The Dangerous Alteration likely to ensue both in England and Scotland in case the Execution of the Scottish Queen be Stayed.
He warned that

The number of Papists, atheists and malcontents will marvellously increase in respect of the hope they will conceive that the … Scottish Queen shall come to the crown as a thing fatal [to Elizabeth].

The Jesuits and seminaries and their confederates that build only the hope of alteration of religion upon her person, doubting that in respect of the infirmity of her body that a more strait keeping of her will hasten her death, will use the greater expedition for the prevention thereof in putting in execution such practices as may shorten her majesty’s days …

Now touching the perils that are to ensue either by the King of Scots or the King of Spain by a particular consideration of them, it will appear that they are nothing equal to the peril that is likely to grow from her.
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All his eloquence, all his passionate belief, were to no avail. The queen remained unable to take a decision.

In late December, frustrated and vexed by Elizabeth’s havering, Walsingham retired from the court in a huff to his home at Barn Elms.

Another perhaps more compelling factor behind his sudden departure was her refusal to grant him Babington’s forfeited estates (which she awarded to Sir Walter Raleigh early in January 1587)
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at a time when he was facing serious financial problems over the considerable debts left by his dead son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney and worried over the difficult delivery of a child by his newly widowed daughter, Frances.
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He may also have become jealous over the queen’s recent attention to Sir Christopher Hatton’s advice and opinions. On 16 December Walsingham wrote to Burghley, explaining his swift disappearance from
court, the anger scorching off the page, his bitterness shining out like a fiery beacon:

I humbly beseech your lordship to pardon me in that I did not take my leave of you before my departure from the court.

Her majesty’s unkind dealing with me has so wounded me as I could take no comfort to stay there.

And yet, if I saw any hope that my continuance there might either breed any good to the church or furtherance to the service of her majesty or of the realm, the regard of my particular should not cause me to withdraw myself.

In an angry jab at some of those at court opposed to Mary’s execution, he added: ‘But seeing the declining state we are coming into and that men of best descent are least esteemed, I hold them happiest in this government that may be rather lookers-on than actors.’

Walsingham begged Burghley not to press Elizabeth any further on the issue of Babington’s lands ‘which I am fully resolved to give over’. But, now faced with Sidney’s mountainous debts, he remained disappointed and disgruntled that further honours or other marks of royal favour had not come his way:

Whatsoever conceit her majesty makes either of me or of my [service], I would not spend so long a time as I have done in that place, subject to so infinite toil and discomfort, not to be made Duke of Lancaster.
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Here he was referring to his attempts to be appointed to the lucrative sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Piously, he added: ‘My hope is, however I am dealt with by an earthly prince, I shall never lack the comfort of the Prince of Princes.’

Eight days later, on Christmas Eve, Walsingham had recovered enough from his chagrin to write to Leicester, bemoaning Elizabeth’s indecision over Mary’s death: ‘The delay of the intended and necessary execution doth more trouble me, considering the danger her majesty [faces] than any other grief’
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He repeated his forthright views in a letter to Burghley on 5 January:

There is but one way (next after God) and that is that her majesty will be persuaded to preserve her safety before her treasure.

The diseases of her estate will not be cured with slight remedies, nor can endure long delay.

I pray God therefore, direct her majesty’s heart to do that which may be for her safety.
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