Mary Queen of Scots (91 page)

From Gorges’s tone, Mary even imagined that she might be now taken summarily to execution. She turned to Nau and Curle and begged them not to allow her to be snatched away without some defence. But there was little the wretched secretaries could do: they were now dragged from her side – in fact she never saw either of them again – and taken up to prison in London. Mary herself, with her physician, was conducted directly to Tixall, in the pretty riding clothes she had donned to impress the ‘pleasant company’ she expected to find there. She was so utterly unprepared for her fate that she did not even have the crucifix she habitually carried – when the inventory of her belongings was made at Chartley during her absence, it included the touching item: ‘the gold cross Her Majesty generally wore’.
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Mary tried at first to resist: at one point she actually sat on the ground and refused to proceed farther. Paulet then threatened to bring her own coach and take her to Tixall by force if she would not ride on. Under duress Mary then consented to proceed; but first of all she knelt down underneath a tree and prayed out loud, asking God to remember David whom he had once delivered from his enemies, and imploring his pity. In vain Bourgoing tried to comfort her by saying that Elizabeth was dead, and that these strange proceedings were intended to ensure her safety. Mary cried out loud that she knew well she was no longer of any use to anyone in this world, and she personally desired nothing left on earth ‘neither goods, honours, power nor worldly sovereignty, but only the honour of His Holy Name and His Glory and the liberty of His Church and of the Christian people’.

Tixall, to which Mary was now taken without further protest on her part, was an Elizabethan house built about thirty years earlier; it included an imaginative novelty in the shape of an exquisite four-square gatehouse, the building of which had only been begun about 1580 and can therefore have only been very shortly completed – if completed it was – at the time of the Scottish queen’s incarceration there. But the beauties, or its detail, like those of the house itself – including the near-by River Trent ‘by lovely Tixall graced, of Aston the ancient seat’ as the Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton wrote lovingly later – must have been fairly lost on the distraught
and anguished woman who was now imprisoned there. Mary did not leave her chambers for the entire fortnight which she spent at Tixall. She begged to be allowed to write to Queen Elizabeth, but Paulet refused to bring her paper. Bourgoing was sent back by Paulet to Chartley the next day. But Paulet subsequently allowed two of Mary’s ladies and Martin, an equerry, to join her, who presumably brought over at least some of her luggage, since the queen was otherwise without any clothes except that hopefully gay riding-habit.

Meanwhile Mary’s apartments and belongings at Chartley were thoroughly searched: her letters and ciphers were taken away to London. Paulet also took the opportunity to draw up a complete list of her household, with suggestions as to how it could be cut down ‘if this lady be restrained of her liberty’.
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The household of thirty-eight, counting the servants’ servants, could easily be reduced to nineteen in Paulet’s opinion, if outdoor categories like the coachmen were eliminated. Curle’s wife Barbara could be dispensed with, as could Christina Pages – which removal, Paulet hoped, would result also in the departure of her husband Bastian, who never seemed able to win the hearts of the English since that first merry masque at Holyrood. Paulet now called him ‘cunning in his kind, full of sleights to corrupt young men’. The inventories of the queen’s belongings showed how her prized possessions, once rich jewels like the Great Harry, now merely comprised miniatures or pictures: there were lists of these little portraits, one of her son James, one of Elizabeth, one of her first husband, one even of the dead countess of Lennox, and that other Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, as well as pictures of Henry
II
and many other members of the French royal family, and Mary’s forbears the former kings of Scotland. It was as though she lived in the past, and sustained strength from the idea of the great many-branched family tree from which she had sprung.

After a fortnight at Tixall, in which anguish for the past mingled with apprehension for the future, Mary was conducted back to Chartley by Paulet. Outside Tixall’s gatehouse a touching sight met her eyes: she found the beggars of Staffordshire had gathered to greet her, knowing the famous reputation of her charity. As the beggars cried out for alms, Mary replied sadly: ‘Alas, good people, I have now nothing to give you. For I am as much a beggar as you are yourselves.’ The whole incident was reported to London by Paulet in terms of the utmost indignation.
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Back at Chartley, Mary found that her words to the beggars were only too true: her belongings had been rifled, her cupboards broken open, it was left for her to embrace her weeping servants ‘as one who had returned home’. The only
domestic incident which had taken place had also its sad aspects: Barbara Curle had given birth to her child in the absence both of her husband, now in prison in London, and of her mistress. Paulet had refused to baptize it, and as there was now no Catholic priest left even in disguise to perform the ceremony the queen did it herself. She named the baby ‘Mary, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.
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The only thing which had not been taken from Mary was her actual money, on which she depended for paying her servants and for her own necessities; this she found still in the cupboard where she had left it. But later directives came from London that this too was to be seized; in order to effect the rapine, Paulet and Richard Bagot, a Staffordshire magistrate, forcibly entered the queen’s apartments when she was lying ill in bed. Armed men were left in the ante-room and Paulet and Bagot went forward alone, sending Mary’s servants out of the room, although Bourgoing managed to linger by the door, ‘very sad and thoughtful’. At first Mary absolutely refused to surrender what was in fact undeniably her own property. When she saw that there was no gainsaying Paulet, she instructed Elizabeth Curle to open up the cabinet; even then, she forced herself to step out of bed, limped across the room on her crippled leg, barefoot without any slippers or shoes, and beseeched Paulet one last time to leave her the money. She had put the sum aside, she told him, as a last resort for her funeral expenses, and to enable her servants to return each to their own country after her death. But Paulet was unmoved by this pleading, and the money was taken away. Mary was now left with the two things which could never be taken from her – as she told Paulet proudly on her return to Chartley – her royal blood and her Catholic religion.
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In the meantime the revelations which Walsingham was able to make to Elizabeth concerning the abominable perfidy of her good friend and sister Mary were eminently satisfactory from his own point of view. Elizabeth was plunged into a panic of acute physical fear, unaware how much of the assassination plot had in fact been elaborated by Walsingham’s own agents. The English queen’s letter to Paulet on the subject of the discovery of the Babington plot was ecstatic with relief: ‘Amyas, my most faithful and careful servant,’ she wrote, ‘God reward thee treble fold in three double for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.’ Mary was now ‘your wicked murderess’ and any future fate, however rigorous, no more than ‘her vile deserts’.
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It was understandable that Elizabeth should feel a mixture of keen fear at the danger to her personal safety and righteous horror at Mary’s ingratitude: the confessions of the Babington conspirators, arrested and examined in turn did nothing to reassure her. In mid-September they were tried and condemned, having pleaded guilty to the indictment of wanting to kill the queen; Mary Stuart’s name was not introduced at any point into the trial, however, lest the assassination of Elizabeth would be further encouraged. The conspirators were then executed in two batches.

The manner of their ending was extremely savage, according to the general principle of the Elizabethan government that fierce penalties performed in public encouraged the people to believe the natural corollary that fierce crimes had been committed in private. As Camden put it: ‘They were all cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered.’ Babington murmured
‘Parce mihi, domini Jesu’
; Chidiock Tichborne, whose poem written in the Tower is one of the most moving of all Elizabethan apologia, made a noble final speech, which aroused the pity of the spectators. Savage actually broke the rope and fell before being disembowelled. Those privy councillors present felt impelled to point out to the queen that such blood-thirsty vengeance would do more harm than good. The next day Salisbury, Dunn, Jones, Charnock, Travers, Gate and Bellamy were dragged to the scaffold on hurdles as before, but were only cut down when they were actually dead. This act of mercy was attributed officially to Queen Elizabeth – although she was not at this point in a particularly merciful mood.

The next desiderata to be secured by Walsingham and Cecil, to complete their case against the queen of Scots, were the revelations of her secretaries, Nau and Curle. The all-important point was that they should testify to the authenticity of Mary’s ‘gallows’ letter to Babington. At first the unhappy secretaries denied everything: Nau said afterwards that Walsingham shook his fist in his face, and had to be calmed down by Cecil. But the situation was a critical one, and neither of them was a man of steel. They were alone, helpless, and terrified out of their wits; they were quite cut off from any possible consultation with their mistress, and to Nau England was a dangerous foreign country. Not only that, but their antagonists were apparently able to produce in front of them the texts of all the secret letters they had written, in a way which must have seemed like some terrible witchcraft. As Curle himself said in his subsequent apologia:
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‘They did show me the Majesty’s letters to my lord Paget, Mr Charles Paget, Sir Frances Englefield and the Spanish Ambassador, all penned in my own hand which I could not deny…. Moreover they showed me the two very letters written by me in cipher and received by Babington…. Upon which so manifest and unrefusable evidence I could
not deny.’ In fact the documents which Nau and Curle were shown, which they finally attested, were not ‘the two very letters’ as Curle believed, since Babington had destroyed these. They were copies, in which the master-forger Phelippes probably had a hand, but in view of the exact reconstruction of the text, and the fact that Babington himself had by now vouched for the letters, it is easy to understand how the wretched secretaries fell victim to the deception. As for Mary’s long detailed letter to Babington on 17 July, in which she ran through his plans at length, Nau and Curle were only asked to attest to the body of the letter itself; the forged postscript, added by Walsingham, in which he asked for the names of the six men destined to act as assassins, was deliberately left off the reconstructed letters. Babington specifically mentioned this postscript in his first confession; but when he was shown the reconstructed letter, he carelessly or compliantly passed it, without pointing out its absence. Had he insisted on its introduction, Nau and Curle would certainly have noticed such an obvious interpolation. Nor was the critical passage at the end of Babington’s first confession, alluding to the postscript, ever read out later in court – so that the forgery should not be uncovered.
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Mary afterwards both believed and said publicly that she had been betrayed by Nau. Cecil also took a cynical view of the secretaries’ moral stamina, when he wrote to Hatton on 4 September: ‘Nau and Curle will yield somewhat to confirm their Mistress’ crimes. But if they were persuaded that they themselves might escape, and the blow fall upon their Mistress betwixt her head and shoulders, surely we should have the whole from them.’
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But in retrospect, it is difficult to blame the secretaries too harshly for attesting a text, whose validity they believed they could hardly in honesty refute. In the critical and terrifying atmosphere of the interrogation, under circumstances of fear and hopelessness, the impossibility of saving their mistress in face of such evidence jostled with their very human fears for their own safety. Nau’s betrayal of his mistress at the end does not necessarily mean that he was engaged in a long-term policy of villainy. It was true that Nau had fallen out with Mary over his use of the secret pipeline to forward his matrimonial plans with Bess Pierrepoint. According to his enemies, Nau was bribed with £7,000 to betray Mary; he was certainly housed with Walsingham in London, and later sent back to his native France in a boat of his own after a few months, whereas the unfortunate Curle remained in close imprisonment for a year.
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Such signs of English favour, while they may point to the fact that Nau exposed the truth about Mary’s intrigues to save his own skin, does not prove any further degree of treachery. Paulet always hated Nau in the old days at Tutbury and Chartley,
and wished that he could get rid of him, and Paulet’s dislike was an excellent indication of Nau’s loyalty towards Mary. Nau also managed to straighten out Mary’s finances to an admirable extent during the period in which he served her. Nau’s surrender should be equated with the outburst of Leslie in the Tower over the Norfolk conspiracy: they were both the unfortunate but explicable lapses of servants who were enmeshed in webs which were altogether too strong for men of their calibre. In the event, the betrayal of Nau and Curle can hardly be said to have much historical significance; if they had persisted in their denials, it is not likely that Walsingham would have allowed such petty obstacles to stand in his way. He would have found other ways of getting the letters vouched for.
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By now, with the Babington conspirators dead or dying, Nau and Curle under lock and key and the Act of Association, by which she was already guilty, hanging over her head, there was little left for Mary to hope for. But there was one terrible thing left for her to dread: the secret death, the slow drip of poison, the assassin’s knife, all the fates by which she would be deprived of the public martyrdom by which she now hoped to proclaim the Catholic faith at her death. During her fortnight at Tixall she seems to have thought coolly and courageously towards this end: from now on, she deliberately played every scene with this climax in view. Her hope was to triumph at the moment of her death, her fear was to be extinguished meaninglessly without an opportunity of bearing witness to the truths in which she believed. In September, while describing how wretchedly she was treated, she managed to write to this effect to her cousin the duke of Guise: ‘For myself, I am resolute to die for my religion…. With God’s help, I shall die in the Catholic faith and to maintain it constantly … without doing dishonour to the race of Lorraine, who are accustomed to die for the sustenance of the faith.’
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Mary was by now so convinced that death was at hand, that she begged him to look after her poor servants, and gave the most detailed instructions for the disposal of her body, which she wished to have buried at Rheims, with that of her mother. Her hand was now so stricken with pain that she could hardly hold the pen to write the letter, the terror of the unknown death haunted her, and yet Mary ended proudly: ‘My heart does not fail me…. 
Adieu, mon bon cousin.
’ It was in this heroic frame of mind that Queen Mary allowed herself to be taken without protest out of Chartley on 21 September and set on her last journey towards Fotheringhay. It was Mary’s triumph that by her deliberate behaviour in the last months of her existence, she managed to convert a life story which had hitherto shown all the elements of a Greek tragedy – disaster leading ineluctably to disaster – into something which ended instead in the classic Christian manner of martyrdom and triumph through death. This transfiguration in the last months of her life, which has the effect of altering the whole balance of her story, was no fortunate accident. The design was hers.