Mary, Queen of Scots (79 page)

Mary was apparently referring to Morton.

Balfour, who had almost certainly been a leading player in the Darnley murder, died in his bed in 1583. He “had served with all parties, had deserved all, yet had profited by all.”
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Mary called him “a traitor who offered himself first to one party and then to the other.”
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Yet, of all those who had been involved in the Darnley conspiracy, he was one of the few who met a peaceful end.

Between April and November 1583, Archibald Douglas, now in France, was doing his best to ingratiate himself with Mary in the hope that she would be a suitor to James VI on his behalf. On 12 November, Mary wrote to Castelnau that she had promised to do her best for Douglas, but desired to know “the main cause of his banishment, for if he is in any way connected with the death of the late King my husband, I will never intercede for him.”
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Soon afterwards, Douglas wrote to her, stating that in 1566, Moray, Atholl, Bothwell, Argyll and other Lords had entered into a bond with the then exiled Lords to have nothing to do with Darnley as King, and to sue for the return of the exiles; this, he said, had been discussed at the Craigmillar Conference. Douglas naturally made no mention of the murder Bond. He added that he had been chosen as the intermediary between the Lords and the exiles.

Around this time, the plot to place Mary on the English throne was revealed to the English government by one of its participants, Francis Throckmorton, who was later executed. Mary was heavily implicated, as was the Spanish ambassador, who was expelled. Elizabeth was urged to bring Mary to justice, but refused out of hand.

In May 1584, after he had again been discovered conspiring against James VI, the Earl of Gowrie was executed; it was at this time that the Casket Letters came into the possession of the King. Neither James nor his mother had any reason to love the Ruthven family, and when, in 1600, the Earl’s sons were involved in another treasonable plot, Parliament ruled that the name of Ruthven be abolished for all time. The last of the line died in the Tower of London in 1652, nearly a century after Patrick, Lord Ruthven had burst into Mary’s supper chamber at Holyrood and demanded that Rizzio leave it.

Mary was gratified by the punishment meted out to Gowrie, and soon afterwards sent a messenger to James to demand the head of Lindsay also, which she had sworn she would have after Carberry Hill. James, however, contented himself with imprisoning Lindsay at Tantallon Castle. Lindsay died in 1589.

Walsingham still feared that Mary was plotting against Elizabeth, and in August 1584, he tightened the security net around her. The next month, he showed Elizabeth a letter that convinced her that Mary was again conspiring to overthrow her. This led in October to the famous Bond of Association, whereby thousands of English gentlemen pledged themselves under oath to take up arms and destroy Mary if it became known that, knowingly or otherwise, she was the focus of any plot against the Queen’s life. The principles of this bond were enshrined in the Act of Association, passed by Parliament in February 1585. The following month, King James wrote to his mother to tell her that it was impossible to ally himself with her because she was “captive in a desert”; in truth, he was anxious not to jeopardise his hopes of the English succession by favouring one who was regarded with such deep suspicion by the English. In May, he concluded a treaty with Elizabeth that made it clear that he had abandoned all ideas of sharing sovereignty with his mother and implied that Mary was to remain in captivity. For Mary, this was a devastating betrayal that marked the end of her long-cherished hopes of freedom and restoration. Deeply embittered, she resolved to bequeath her crown and her dynastic claim to England to Philip of Spain, effectively disinheriting her son.

Increasing demands that Mary be kept under stricter surveillance led in April 1585 to the appointment of the sternly puritanical disciplinarian, Sir Amyas Paulet, as her custodian. Under his rule, Mary was allowed no visitors and no correspondence.

In May 1586, nearly twenty years after the event, Archibald Douglas was at last tracked down and tried for the murder of Darnley. The trial—which was the last of those related to the crime—was a farce, since Douglas had in his possession evidence of collusion between the English and Scottish governments, and Elizabeth bribed James to ensure a favourable verdict, even though most people now knew that Douglas was the man who had killed Darnley. Of the nineteen chosen jurors, ten deemed it unwise to put in an appearance, and their places were filled by ten others “who happened to be at the bar,” amongst them Douglas’s man, George Home. The court was packed with the Douglases and their supporters.

The depositions of Ormiston, Hay, Paris and Binning were offered in evidence, despite the fact that there was no reference to Douglas in any of them. No witnesses were called to testify against the accused. In his defence, Douglas stated he could not have lost his velvet mule at Kirk o’Field because he was not wearing it, since the road that led there from his house was too rough for a man in armour to walk on in slippers. At the end of the day, he was pronounced “clean and acquit of being in company with Bothwell, Ormiston, Hay and Hepburn in committing the crime.”
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Douglas’s rehabilitation led to his being restored to his lands and appointed ambassador to England.

Douglas’s acquittal and the treachery of her son may have been factors in Mary’s decision, made in July 1586, to approve the plan of a young Catholic gentleman, Anthony Babington, to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with the Scottish Queen. Mary was unaware that Walsingham was being sent all her letters and had in fact set up the means by which she was able to smuggle them out to her friends, and she walked straight into his trap when, against Nau’s advice, she approved in writing Babington’s treasonable conspiracy. After nineteen years in unjust captivity, she was desperate for freedom and the opportunity to win by force that which she believed to be hers by right. She was so detached from reality that she had little idea that she was hated and feared by the majority of Elizabeth’s subjects.

Elizabeth reacted to news of the plot with panic, and had the cousin whom she referred to as a “wicked murderess” arrested on 9 August. The English government could now proceed against Mary under the Act of Association. Under questioning, Nau admitted sending her letter and did not refute its contents. Mary saw this as a betrayal, but it was no more than the truth.

Babington and his associates were tried and condemned on 13 September, and executed a week later with horrific barbarity. On 25 September, Mary was moved to mediaeval Fortheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire to await trial. Thirty-six commissioners appointed by Elizabeth assembled there on 11 October, but Mary insisted that no court was competent to try her since she was “a queen and sovereign” and not one of Elizabeth’s subjects. But when Elizabeth wrote that it was her will that Mary answer the charges “as if I were myself present,” Mary capitulated, although she continued to refuse to acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction.

Her trial took place on 15 and 16 October. Although Mary put up a spirited defence and denied all the charges, its outcome was a foregone conclusion, for the evidence was incontrovertible. But just as the commissioners were about to give their verdict, Elizabeth’s messenger arrived, proroguing the court to the Star Chamber at Westminster, to meet again in ten days’ time. There, on 25 October, Mary was pronounced guilty. Four days later, Parliament ratified the verdict and pressed for “a just sentence”; in their view, there could only be one just sentence.

Elizabeth embarked on her usual stalling tactics, but Parliament was determined to resolve the problem of the Queen of Scots for good. On 12 November, it petitioned Elizabeth to have Mary executed. Elizabeth was plunged into an agony of indecision. Mary was undoubtedly guilty and had increasingly menaced Elizabeth’s security ever since the latter’s accession in 1558. On the other hand, Elizabeth knew that executing an anointed queen would establish a dangerous precedent and undermine the whole institution of monarchy, which she held as sacred, and she feared the reaction of Catholic Europe, and her Catholic subjects, if she took such a drastic step. Over the years, it had been Elizabeth, with her hatred of bloodshed, who time and again had intervened to save Mary’s life, even when Mary had plotted against hers; now she was being pressurised to kill her. Understandably, she refused. But the demands of Parliament and her Council for justice grew ever more insistent. At last, on 1 February 1587, Elizabeth gave way and signed Mary’s death warrant, which was immediately sent by her Councillors to Fotheringhay. Later, she would deny that she had authorised its dispatch and punish those concerned.

The warrant arrived on 7 February, and Mary was told to prepare for death on the morrow. That night, she wrote her last letter, to Henry III of France,
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in which she protested that she would meet death “innocent of any crime”: as a devout Catholic, she would not have counted the assassination of the heretical Elizabeth as a crime because the Pope had sanctioned and urged it, but she was almost certainly also referring to the murder of Darnley. She further asserted that “the Catholic faith and the assertion of my God-given right to the English crown are the two issues on which I am condemned.”
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In her own eyes, she was dying as a martyr for her faith.

The following morning, she walked calmly to the scaffold in the great hall of the castle, and there, before a large concourse of people, removed her black gown to reveal a kirtle of red, the Catholic colour of martyrdom. It took three strokes to sever her head, but she was probably unconscious after the first. Afterwards, her body was sealed in a lead coffin and stored in the castle until late July, when Elizabeth authorised its burial in Peterborough Cathedral. There was a solemn funeral with the banners of Mary, Francis II and Darnley hung on the pillars of the nave; Bothwell’s was deliberately omitted. In his funeral sermon, the Protestant Dean of Peterborough could not resist raking up old scandals and portraying Mary’s execution as divine retribution: “The day [of the execution] being very fair did, as it were, show favour from Heaven and commended the justice; the eighth day of February, that judgement was repaid home to her, which the tenth day of the same month, twenty years past, she measured to her husband.”
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But Mary’s courageous demeanour on the scaffold obliterated for many—as it still does—the earlier image of her as an adulteress and murderess, and led to perceptions of her as a tragic heroine rather than a fallen woman.

When Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603, James VI of Scotland succeeded her as James I of England, and Mary’s and Maitland’s vision of the union of the crowns was fulfilled. However, this was a Protestant union, and Mary’s hopes of the two kingdoms being returned to the Church of Rome were never to be realised.

Although James had loudly condemned his mother’s execution, he did not allow it to prejudice his friendship with Elizabeth nor his hopes of the English succession. But his conscience remained disquieted, and in 1612, to ease it, he translated Mary’s remains to a magnificent tomb in Westminster Abbey, in the opposite side chapel of the Henry VII Chapel to that where Elizabeth lay. Mary’s tomb is next to that of Lady Lennox, and bears a beautiful effigy of white marble. She lies among the English monarchs, whose throne she so coveted in life but was destined never to occupy.

It is said that James also ordered the demolition of Fotheringhay Castle, but in fact he sold it off. It was already decaying and was described as ruinous in 1635, ten years after James’s death. It was later dismantled and its stones used for local buildings. The staircase down which Mary walked to her execution is now in the Talbot Hotel at Oundle, which was built in 1626. All that remains of Fotheringhay today is the grassy mound on which it once stood and a single block of masonry.

Most of those who had been involved in one way or another in Darnley’s murder had now died or come to a violent end. Only Archibald Douglas, the actual murderer, survived in prosperity.

Given the nature of the circumstantial evidence against Mary, it is not surprising that so many writers have concluded, with the Dean of Peterborough, that her execution was a just punishment for one who had killed her husband. But it can be demonstrated again and again—and has been in this text—that the bulk of the evidence against Mary is flawed. Apart from the notorious Casket Letters and the highly dubious deposition of Paris, there is no documentary evidence of an adulterous relationship with Bothwell, nor is there any contemporary evidence that Mary plotted Darnley’s death. Leaving aside the later libels and the claims of her enemies, who had powerful motives for constructing a case against her, there is nothing but the often ill-informed opinions of historians to condemn her. The arguments for her innocence are many, and have been well rehearsed in the foregoing chapters. Taken together, they constitute a strong case in her defence.

It is easy to see why Mary’s detractors consider her guilty. Even after extensive research, I believed, as I began to write this book, that Mary was guilty. But when I came to analyse the source material in depth, it became increasingly obvious that such a conclusion was not possible. Mary’s own reluctance to answer the Lords’ charges against her has been seen as suspicious, but it clearly arose from her conviction that she was not answerable to anyone but her equal, Elizabeth, rather than from a wish to evade awkward questions. It has been said that she never directly refuted the charges, but, as we have seen, that is not so.

Mary’s poor judgement repeatedly served her ill. Her imprudent marriage to Darnley, her rash favour shown to Rizzio and her utterly foolish decision to flee to Protestant England rather than Catholic France, and to ask for succour from a queen whose throne she had laid claim to, all contributed to her ruin. Yet she had no control over the events that overtook her, the plotting that led to Darnley’s death, and her own frail health which prevented her from responding to his murder as her contemporaries expected. Nor, as an inexperienced Catholic female sovereign, could she halt the reformist movement in Scotland, of which her removal from power was a natural progression. Instead, in an age that did not understand religious tolerance, she followed a policy of conciliation whilst making the right noises to the Pope about the restoration of Catholicism, and consequently lost credibility with both sides. Her tragedy was that she was in many respects innately unsuited for the role to which she had been born. Compared with her cousin Elizabeth, she was a political innocent, and as such she was thrust into a situation in which a seasoned, hard-headed male ruler might have floundered.