Mary Queen of Scots (95 page)

In answer to the express wish of Elizabeth who wanted no sentence pronounced before she herself had considered the proceedings, the court was now prorogued, to meet in ten days’ time at the Star Chamber at Westminster. The noblemen, booted and spurred in advance, rode away from Fotheringhay. Mary was left to go back once more to the little round of captivity. Her tranquillity was not in the slightest disturbed by the harrowing ordeal through which she had just passed. It was as though she had predicted long ago in her own mind the course which events were likely to take and had even found in the working out of her prophecies, melancholy as they were, a source of strength. Just as the populace had been curious to see the baleful queen of Scots, Mary herself had derived some minor enjoyment from this brief glimpse of English society – the only true sight of it she ever had. Throughout the trial she questioned Paulet concerning the faces of various English gentlemen among the judges, many of whose names had been long familiar to her. After so many years of virtual solitude the crowded court scene brought at least the compensation of satisfying her curiosity about England.

Paulet of course found her conduct at the trial utterly distasteful: to his way of thinking, the queen of Scots was never more odious than when displaying the full counterfeit charm of her character. He wrote to London that her intention had been by ‘long and artificial speeches’ to excite the pity of the judges, and throw all the blame on Elizabeth, or rather upon her Council. Whereas Mary told her servants she had discerned expressions of compassion among the crowd, Paulet cheered himself with the reflection that they had all been ‘of one consent and mind to hear her cause with indifference’.
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But to those less prejudiced than the queen’s jailer, and to those who would come after him and attempt to pass the judgement of
history upon the Scottish queen, Mary would elicit not so much pity as profound admiration for the cool and clever manner in which she had single-handedly conducted her defence against all the odds. In her essay on Adversity she had referred to the ‘disagreeable and ugly slough of pusillanimity’, the one pitfall into which those called by God to wield the sceptre should never fall.
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It was not a trap into which Mary had fallen herself. Throughout her trial she had shown herself unwaveringly regal, and not all the petty spite of Paulet could take this triumph from her.

The next few weeks represented a strangely serene interlude in Mary’s life, the Indian summer of her captivity, when she was able to add to the self-discipline of the long-held prisoner, the peace of mind of one who knew her confinement was rapidly moving towards its finish. Mary now read much concerning English history, a habit she had already begun to develop at Chartley, since the inventory of her belongings in June 1586 mentions a number of books on the subject as well as a map. She embroidered. She made arrangements in her own mind for the final journey she was now convinced lay ahead. Bourgoing found her so far from being troubled by what had passed that ‘I had not seen her so joyous, nor so constantly at her ease for the last seven years. She spoke only on pleasant subjects, and often in particular, gave her opinion on some points of the history of England, in the study of which she passed a good portion of the day, afterwards discoursing on the subject of her reading with her household, quite familiarly and joyously, showing no signs of sadness, but with even a more cheerful countenance than previous to her troubles.’
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It was clear that Mary’s words at her trial were no hypocrisy– she truly did not fear to die in a good cause: Mary, like many other philosopher-prisoners, took comfort in the perusal of the past, from whose study one lesson can always be learnt: that the single action of a human being, be it a heroic life or a noble death, can have incalculable effects upon the course of history.

On 25 October the commissioners met again in the Star Chamber in London. On this occasion Nau and Curle were actually produced, raising once more the question why in all decency they could not have appeared at Fotheringhay. Both reaffirmed their evidence on oath and stated that they had given it ‘frankly and voluntarily’. The commission accordingly found Mary guilty of ‘compassing and imagining since June 1st matters tending to the death and destruction of the Queen of England’. Only Lord Zouch, a youngish peer, who had lived through a somewhat wild youth in which he spent his patrimony, had the courage to express himself not altogether satisfied. The commission took particular trouble to except King
James from his mother’s guilt since, by the terms of the Act of Association, her disablement from the succession would have applied also to her son. The two Houses of Parliament now presented an address to Queen Elizabeth in which they prayed fervently for the execution of the Scottish Queen for the sake of Elizabeth’s own safety which would be in peril ‘so long as the said Scottish Queen shall be suffered to continue and shall not receive that due punishment, which by justice and the laws of this your realm she hath so often and for so many ways for her most detestable and wicked offences deserved’. Elizabeth replied in a long and ambivalent speech, in which she showed how much she personally was aware, even if her Commons were not, that ‘we princes are set as it were upon stages, in the sight and view of all the world’ and that the execution of Mary was one thing for the Commons to demand, quite another for Elizabeth, a fellow-queen, to confirm.
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Twelve days later, Elizabeth, having indicated that it would be highly desirable in any case to secure a full confession from the queen of Scots, asked her two Houses with further ambiguity whether they could not devise some better remedy whereby the queen of Scots’ life might be spared and her own security provided for.

Mary herself was not immediately informed that the sentence of death had been passed against her in London. In the meantime Paulet endeavoured to carry out his instructions from London and secure that full confession, that humiliating pleading for pardon from the Scottish queen, for which the English queen so passionately wished. On 1 November, the Feast of All Saints, which Mary spent in prayer and reading the lives of the saints since she was still deprived of her chaplain, de Préau, she received a visit from Paulet after dinner. Paulet showed unexpected courtesy in actually waiting until her prayers were over. They argued a little on the subject of history. Mary observed how blood never ceased to flow in the course of English history, and Paulet commented that this was the same in many countries, especially in time of national peril. Mary then enquired after one or two people at her trial whom she had imagined to be sympathetic to her, and asked their names that she might remember them. ‘Not one of them was favourable to your cause,’ said Paulet crossly. ‘And everyone else is astonished to see you so calm under the circumstances in which you find yourself. No living person has ever been accused of crimes so frightful and odious as yours.’ But Mary was not disposed to admit in any way to these frightful and odious crimes. Instead she reiterated her claim that she stood witness for the truths of the Catholic religion, and argued with Paulet about whether or not Elizabeth claimed to be supreme head of the Church. Paulet maintained that Elizabeth was on the contrary ‘head and governor
under God of things ecclesiastical and temporal in England’, but Mary dismissed the difference between the two titles in an expressive French phrase:
‘C’était manteau blanc ou blanc manteau’
, she remarked. Paulet was obliged to report back to London his disappointment: ‘I see no change in her, from her former quietness and serenity, certified in my letters,’ he wrote. In the meantime Paulet greatly disliked these battles of wits, in which he could scarcely hold himself to be the winner. He told Walsingham: ‘I pray you let me hear from you whether it is expected that I should see my charge often, which as I do not desire to do, so I do not see that any good can come of it.’
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On the evening of 19 November, Lord Buckhurst, who had arrived at Fotheringhay with Beale, the clerk of the Council, delivered his message to Mary. Buckhurst now warned Mary that it was considered impossible that both she and Elizabeth should continue to live. Although Elizabeth had not given her consent to the execution, Buckhurst solemnly called on Mary to repent; to that end he offered her the services of a Protestant clergyman, the bishop or dean of Peterborough. Mary described the whole interview in her letter to Beaton in Paris at the end of November. ‘I thanked God and them,’ she wrote proudly, ‘for the honour they did me in considering me to be such a necessary instrument for the re-establishing of religion in this island…. In confirmation of all this as I had before protested, I offered willingly to shed my blood in the quarrel of the Catholic Church.’ This was of course the very last answer which Paulet and Buckhurst were prepared to receive: they told Mary roughly that as she was to die for the intended murder of Elizabeth, she would certainly not be regarded as either a saint or a martyr. But Mary was quite intelligent enough to see that despite Paulet’s protests matters were going in the direction she hoped. It was no wonder Camden heard that her face was now illumined with extraordinary joy at the thought that God had thus chosen her to be a martyr. It was left to Paulet to castigate her speeches angrily in his report to London as ‘superfluous and idle’, and tell Walsingham that he had no doubt Buckhurst too had found the queen of Scots’ endless speech-making extremely tedious.
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Such pieces of oratory might be superfluous and idle to Paulet but to Mary they were essential planks in the platform from which she intended to undergo her martyrdom for the Catholic faith: Paulet’s opinion was a matter of indifference to her, so long as her words would one day echo forth in the theatre of the world. But Paulet’s next action – the removal of the royal cloth of state over Mary’s chair, by which she set such store – offended her in the vital matter of her queenship. The reasons which Paulet
gave hardly added to the grace of the occasion: ‘You are now only a dead woman,’ he said, ‘without the dignity or honours of a Queen.’ Mary responded with a spirited defence of her station, in which her studies in English history prompted her to compare herself to King Richard
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in the hands of his enemies. Her own attendants refused to obey Paulet’s command to remove the dais, so that it had to be thrown down by his own men. Paulet now added insult to injury by sitting in the queen’s presence with his head covered, and furthermore ordering the removal of the royal billiard table, on the grounds that it was now no time for the queen to be indulging in amusement. However, it would seem from Paulet’s own account of the scene that he had exceeded his instructions to a certain extent; the removal of the dais was due to his own excess of zeal, prompted rather by a rumour from London that Elizabeth disliked the idea of the dais, than by the specific instructions of the English queen. The next day Paulet went to Mary and offered to write to London for official leave to restore the dais, saying it had been removed on the Council’s orders. This merely gave Mary opportunity to point sublimely to the symbol which she had already hung in the place of the vanished cloth of state – a crucifix. In her own words to Henry of Guise, ‘I showed them the Cross of my Saviour in the place where my dais had been’.
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It was now the end of November. Mary imagined that her days were truly numbered. She spent two days writing her farewell letters, with a hand crippled by rheumatism.
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She wrote to the Pope at length, professing the truth of the Catholic faith by which she had always lived, and towards which she had ever done her duty in the past, so far as the dour conditions of captivity and illness had enabled her. Now, however, she was to be granted a supreme opportunity, as the one remaining Catholic member of the royal house of England and Scotland, to testify on behalf of her religion by her death ‘for my sins and those of this unfortunate island’.
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Religious rather than dynastic interests were now paramount in her mind, and it was the Catholic faith, rather than maternal feelings, which now swayed Mary in the dispositions she laid down for the English throne after her death: she begged the Pope to let the Catholic king of Spain secure her rights to the crown of England, in place of James, if he remained obstinately outside the Catholic Church.

Another letter went to Mendoza, that companion of her intrigues, now in Paris, assuring him that she had all the courage necessary to receive her sentence for the honour of God.
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To Mendoza, Mary repeated solemnly her bestowal of the rights of the English throne upon the Spanish king if James did not embrace the Catholic religion. She recommended to him her poor destitute servants, including Leslie, the bishop of Ross, whom she had heard was in dire straits, and bequeathed to Mendoza, who had cared so prolongedly and so passionately for the cause of her deliverance, the diamond which Norfolk had given her so long ago. Lastly Mary wrote to her cousin, Henry of Guise, whom she now held to be her closest blood relation since the betrayal of James and addressing him ‘as you whom I hold as dearest to me in the world’. To him once more she stressed the nobility of the end which awaited her: ‘Although no executioner has ever before dipped his hand in our [Guise] blood, be not ashamed of it, my dear friend, for the condemnation of heretics and enemies of the Church (and who have no jurisdiction over me, a free Queen) is profitable before God for the children of His Church.’ As for the Faith: ‘I esteem myself born, both on the paternal and the maternal side to offer my blood for it….’
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Yet lest the full details of her martyrdom should be concealed by the English, and because not everything could be trusted to letters, Mary begged Henry of Guise and Mendoza to listen carefully to the eye-witness accounts of her own servants after her death, when they should manage to deliver them.

As she wrote, Queen Mary could hear the banging of the workmen in the great hall of the Council. She imagined quite genuinely that she was listening to the sound of her own scaffold being erected. She mentioned the subject to Mendoza as she wrote: ‘I think they are making a scaffold to make me play the last scene of the Tragedy….’ In fact it was to be over two months before this final scene was actually played. The reason of course was that Elizabeth obstinately hesitated to confirm the sentence. The most the Parliament could secure from her was the public proclamation of the sentence of death on 4 December, on the understanding of which Parliament was prorogued till the spring. The English people might rejoice and ring their bells at the news, but their queen was still very far from resolving her own dilemma. Quite apart from the fact that Mary was an anointed queen and her own cousin, there were the problems of foreign relations to consider. How would France, where Mary had once been queen, react to the news of her death – and still more Scotland, where Mary had once actually reigned, and her own son now ruled. As the prospect of war with Spain loomed nearer, the goodwill of France and the continuance of the alliance with Scotland became more important than mere diplomatic friendship. Were such vital benevolences really worth
sacrificing for the death of one old and sick woman, who had been a prisoner for nearly twenty years? It was Mary the prisoner at Fotheringhay who was calm and tranquil, who wrote her letters, considered how she could best dispose her affairs for her servants, contemplated her crucifix, and showed herself more joyous than she had been for years. It was Elizabeth the jailer, in London, muttering to herself
Aut fer aut feri, ne feriare, feri
– suffer or strike, strike or be struck – who suffered the torments of indecision.