Mary Queen of Scots (96 page)

26 The Dolorous Stroke

When King James first heard the news of his mother’s arrest at Chartley, he contented himself with observing that she should ‘drink the ale she had brewed’ and in future be allowed to meddle with nothing except prayer and the service of God.
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Not only did he ostentatiously ignore the possibility that his mother might now be in danger of her life, but he also chose this moment to sound out Elizabeth on the question of a marriage between them, through the medium of Archibald Douglas. Elizabeth was now over fifty, thirty years senior to James, and, although James was evidently prepared to pardon the disparity in their ages most magnanimously if he could thus strengthen his claim to the English throne, Elizabeth herself showed no inclination towards this bizarre union.
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Nevertheless throughout the autumn James continued to maintain in public that he had no objections to his mother being imprisoned in the most rigorous manner in the world – let her be put in the Tower or some other ‘firm Manse’ – so long as her actual life was not forfeited. It was not until after the trial and death sentence that it was made clear to James by Archibald Douglas from London that he might shortly have to choose between his mother’s life, and the continuation of the newly formed Anglo-Scottish alliance, which in turn involved his hopes of inheriting the English throne.

James’s dilemma in Scotland did not cause him the human anguish which Elizabeth in her reluctance to confirm the death sentence was undergoing in England. She told the French ambassador at the beginning of December that she had never shed so many tears over anything, not even
at the deaths of her father, her brother Edward or her sister Mary, as at what she termed this ‘unfortunate affair’, and whether her grief was at her own indecision or at the prospect of shedding Mary’s blood, there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of her emotion.
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James, on the other hand, felt considerable perplexity as to what course to take, but no purely personal feelings; the chief concern of the Scottish mission to Elizabeth in November was to ensure that nothing would be done against Mary ‘to the prejudice of any title of the King’s’. In the meantime it was widely rumoured in Scotland that James feared to request any sort of favour from Elizabeth as regards Mary, lest he should lose the goodwill of the English queen, although Scottish public opinion was reacting most strongly to the idea that their former sovereign should be executed by a foreign country. As Gray wrote to Douglas on 23 November: James would find it hard to keep the peace if her life were touched. ‘I never saw all the people so willing to concur in anything as in this. They that hated most her prosperity regret her adversity.’ James himself pointed out his invidious position to Elizabeth, in language which made clear that it was fear of a national outcry which animated him, rather than some more personal emotion: ‘Guess ye in what strait my honour will be, this disaster being perfected,’ he wrote, ‘since before God I already scarce dare go abroad, for crying out of the whole people.’
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Despite these fears, the one sanction which James had it in his power to invoke to save his mother’s life – and which in the opinion of at least one historian would have effectively preserved her from execution at English hands
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– was never made. James hovered over the subject of the death sentence with a series of dire but meaningless threats. At no point did he say that he would break the Anglo-Scottish league if his mother’s death was brought about by England, although Elizabeth anxiously enquired of his ambassadors whether that was in fact his intention. His fulminations and his embassy were both intended to save his face in Scotland: they were not intended to save his mother’s life in England. Nor did all his emissaries agree with Gray in expressing their disgust at the idea of the execution: Sir Alexander Stewart expressed the damaging view that James would somehow manage to digest his mother’s death.
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Once it became apparent to the English that despite all James’s protests the league was to be considered inviolable whatever action they took against Mary, the date of the Scottish queen’s death drew appreciably nearer.

The protests made by the French were more authentically passionate, but proved in the end equally ineffective: a special ambassador, de Bellievre, was sent by King Henry
III
to plead with Elizabeth who was answered, in Cecil’s words ‘that if the French King understood her Majesty’s peril, if he loveth her as he pretendeth, he would not press her Majesty to hazard her life’. The resident French ambassador, Châteauneuf, continued to make valiant efforts to save Mary, but in January his attempts were sharply curtailed by the fortunate discovery by Walsingham of yet another plot against Elizabeth’s life. This providential coincidence led to Châteauneuf’s house arrest, and rendered him impotent to help Mary further during the crucial weeks in the new year; it also aroused a wave of anti-French feeling in England – although the plot itself was highly dubious in origins, and seems to have been largely concocted by Walsingham to produce these precise effects.
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In December Cecil had drawn up in his own hand-writing a list of reasons against the execution of the queen of Scots. Among the reasons cited was the cogent argument
Sanguis sanguinem procreat
– blood breeds blood – the supposition that Mary’s health was in any case so afflicted that she might die naturally at any moment, and the fact that the king of France had promised to go surety in the future for the end of the attempts on Elizabeth’s life.
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By January, it appeared that as Mary’s foreign champions had either retired or were being swept from the lists, the fact that blood might breed blood was no longer so important.

There was certainly to be no question of the captive eluding her fate: at Paulet’s request the garrison at Fotheringhay was strengthened to seventy foot-soldiers and fifty bowmen. In November Paulet had been joined in his charge by Sir Drue Drury. In mid-December Mary sent for both her custodians, and asked them to despatch on her behalf a farewell letter to Elizabeth. Dramatically, Mary wiped her cheeks with both sheets, in order to show that the leaves were not poisoned. She then sealed the letter with Spanish wax and closed it with white silk.
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Mary’s main points to Elizabeth concerned firstly the disposal of her body after death – she was anxious that her servants should be allowed to convey it to France, rather than Scotland, where the Protestant burial rites would constitute a profanation by her standards; secondly she expressed her fears of the ‘secret tyrannies’ of those whom Elizabeth had placed around her, which she dreaded would result in her secret assassination; thirdly Mary asked to be allowed to send a jewel and last farewell to her son James; finally Mary raised once more the vexed question of the royal dais. She concluded on a magisterial note of warning to Elizabeth: ‘Do not accuse me of presumption if, on the eve of leaving this world and preparing myself for a better
one, I remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge, as well as those that are sent before….’ Mary signed the letter: ‘Your sister and cousin, wrongfully imprisoned.’
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Despite the innocuous character of Mary’s last requests, Paulet and Drury did not immediately despatch this missive, not so much out of fear of Elizabeth’s anger, as out of dread that its mildness might move the English queen to clemency, and further delay the execution of justice. Paulet confided to Davison, the secretary of the Council, that as they were strongly hoping the sentence would be carried out before Christmas, it was planned that the letter should arrive a few days afterwards, when the queen of Scots would be already dead and it would be too late for Elizabeth to exercise mercy. In Paulet’s opinion, there were many pressing reasons why the sentence should be carried out as fast as possible, not the least among them being the return of Mary’s priest (or almoner as she always termed him) de Préau.
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On de Préau’s arrival, Paulet took the precaution of searching his papers, and was rewarded by finding two leaves of paper in the form of a diary inserted among his philosophical exercises; luckily he decided de Préau was of no particular account – being ‘of weak and slender judgment’. All the same, for what he chose to describe as Christian reasons, Paulet wished that de Préau had been restricted to a single visit to the queen on the eve of her death: the spiritual perils of his continual association with his mistress seemed yet another reason for bringing Mary’s life to a speedy close. After all, expostulated Paulet, Mary showed no signs of repentance, no signs even of wishing to live, and an ignorant papist priest would surely only confirm her in such reprobate tendencies. The return of the little store of money which had been seized from Mary at Chartley, although performed by Paulet with some reluctance, seemed a minor evil compared to this quite unnecessary display of tolerance on behalf of the central government.

Around Christmas Paulet either fell ill or pleaded a diplomatic illness to avoid those argumentative interviews with Mary which he so greatly disliked. Paulet’s withdrawal affected Mary herself depressively: Paulet might dread the interviews, but to Mary they were her solitary contact with the outside world, and represented her only source of stimulus, to rehearse her arguments, and in arguing to keep up her spirits. The weeks now passed slowly and heavily: without Paulet to joust with verbally, for the first time Mary began to feel the suspense of her situation. By 8 January Mary was begging Paulet to pay her another visit, for although both were within the confines of the same castle, she had not seen him since before Christmas,
and as to his illness she had heard he had been out of doors the previous day. Part of Mary’s anxiety arose through having heard nothing from Elizabeth in answer to her farewell requests. On 12 January she wrote another long letter, in which she pleaded with Elizabeth to end the miserable uncertainty of the situation, not so much for herself as for her poor servants, on whom the strain was telling. In her last paragraph she even tried to tempt Elizabeth’s curiosity once more by enquiring to whom she might confide her death-bed’s secrets; it was as though the notion of the unfulfilled meeting still haunted her after all these years, and she had some wild hope that Elizabeth might still pay her a personal visit at the end. The bait, however, was never extended where Elizabeth might see it: for Paulet refused to despatch this second letter at all, on the grounds that he was lying in bed with his arms bandaged, and that Mary must content herself with awaiting the answer to her first missive. Later he explained that he would not send the letter at all, because he had no orders to do so.
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