Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

by John Guy

When Norfolk was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Elizabeth dithered over his execution, whereas Cecil and his Protestant allies wanted Mary dead too.

But could Mary, the anointed Queen of Scots, commit treason in England? Elizabeth did not yet think so. She refused to hand Parliament an ax for Mary’s execution, instead encouraging members to seek an act excluding her from the succession. When the bill was passed, however, she vetoed it. She claimed it was not technically a veto, but in this she played with words. She could not bring herself to proceed against an anointed queen, yielding only to Parliament’s pleas to execute the Duke of Norfolk, who went to the block on June 2, a month before Parliament ended. Cecil was wholly frustrated.

Mary was left untouched. Cecil had gotten neither an ax nor an act.

Beale was sent back to Sheffield, where Mary again proposed a deal in which she and James would share the throne. They would recognize Elizabeth as queen of England for as long as she lived, while reserving their own dynastic claim to the succession. It was hardly a new idea. But Elizabeth was willing to consider

She had urged Castelnau to do all he could to assist him, which was enough to prove that she was dabbling in conspiracy while she was negotiating with Elizabeth to be restored as coruler in Scotland. Elizabeth’s fury at this deception ended all further prospects of a political accord with Mary. From this point on, there was no more talk of a rapprochement.

Cecil proposed a Great or Grand Council that would come into effect on the queen’s death, governing as a council of regency and summoning a Parliament that would choose a Protestant successor, whose authority would be confirmed by a statute. It was a quasi-republican solution to the succession issue, one that guaranteed Mary’s exclusion, since Catholics were ineligible to sit in Parliament after the legislation of 1571. But it was a risky proposition, and in Elizabeth’s view an almost scandalous subversion of the principles of monarchy and hereditary right. She wielded her power and instructed Cecil to drop his plans for the succession.

James was male, Protestant and available. His flirtation with d’Aubigny and his Jesuit friends had been little more than a teenage crush. He was deeply resentful of the constraints to which he had been subjected by the lords, especially those imposed by Buchanan, his hated tutor. He longed for a throne more powerful than that of Scotland, and with so spectacular a reward as England within his reach, he decided it was not in his interest to think of sharing his dynastic claim with a mother he could not even remember.

There could be no question of joint sovereignty or her return to Scotland as queen. To Mary it was the cruelest of blows.

And yet, a year later, the treaty with England was signed. James, perhaps without ever fully realizing it, made his mother’s execution at Fotheringhay inevitable. With his signature, he made her irrelevant and disposable. To Mary, who had suffered so many setbacks when her enemies and rivals thought she was in their way, it was the ultimate rejection.

From now on, Mary was prepared to listen to any plot that might offer a chance of escape, however implausible it might seem and however obscure its advocates. And Walsingham was waiting for her.

There was no further need for pretense. Her letters were sent directly to Walsingham to be forwarded. Mary was indignant at this blatant intervention, but to no avail. No longer were any of her letters remotely confidential, because Cecil’s spymaster was reading them openly.

The evidence would be obtained by fair means or foul, and Elizabeth compelled to proceed under the Act for the Queen’s Safety. Cecil would be victorious, and Mary sent to the block.

Once again Walsingham’s chief decipherer did not have to crack the code, which was inadvertently supplied to him, this time by Mary herself. It was just the first of a series of misjudgments that led to her downfall.

Instead of looking for spies at the French embassy, Mary should have been less trusting when Gifford appeared out of nowhere to offer his services as a postman.

When the two letters are read together, Mary’s complicity in the plot is undeniable. She protested at her trial that the evidence against her was purely circumstantial. She demanded to be judged only by her own words and writing, saying that in her own words there would be found no consent or incitement to assassination. She refused to accept that the two letters should be taken together. This became the crux of her defense, and not the later allegation of forgery.

On September 5, Paulet was told to confiscate Mary’s money and isolate her as much as possible from her servants. Even Walsingham was alarmed at these measures, in case they should “cast her into some sickness.” If Mary died unexpectedly, she would become a martyr to the Catholic cause, the center of a glare of publicity. He wished to avoid this at all costs. But Elizabeth was adamant. For the first time since she had quarreled with her cousin over the ratification of the treaty of Edinburgh, she had hardened her heart.

Unlike Cecil and Walsingham, Elizabeth preferred Mary to die of natural causes. Her idea was that by seizing her money and keeping her as much as possible in solitary confinement, she would become so seriously demoralized, her existing illnesses and afflictions would fatally worsen.

She was not squeamish, but did not want the responsibility of executing an anointed queen, with all the implications that would have for undermining the ideal of monarchy.

Elizabeth had a clear grasp of the issues. She knew that regicide authorized by a statute made in Parliament would alter the future of the monarchy in the British Isles. It would tend to make the ruler accountable to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.” This was of slender concern to Cecil, whose aim for nearly twenty years had been Mary’s execution and a guaranteed Protestant succession.

In the event, more than forty commissioners were appointed, but seven or eight did not turn up. To Elizabeth’s great displeasure, a number evaded the summons on the excuse of illness. They too wanted no part in a regicide.

But she was grasping at straws, since in the coded letter to Babington she had appealed for foreign (i.e., Spanish) aid to assist her on the field of battle after her liberation. Her rationale was that she was an independent queen wrongfully held in captivity. From her point of view, even an act of war was legitimate if it allowed her to recover her freedom. If she was not an independent queen, she was guilty. If she was, and Elizabeth’s death was no more than a providential incident in her legitimate struggle to regain her rights, she was innocent. This was how she saw it, but the commissioners could hardly be expected to agree with her.

After she had departed, Cecil adjourned the commission for ten days. He had received a letter from Elizabeth ordering him to delay sentence if Mary was found guilty. Elizabeth wanted nothing to be done in haste.

Parliament, steered by Cecil and Walsingham, openly petitioned Elizabeth to execute Mary. Behind the scenes, however, a battle royal was in progress. Elizabeth was amenable to a petition, but insisted on the Bond of Association as the basis of action against her cousin. She preferred her to be quietly smothered by a private citizen, someone who had subscribed to the bond, whereas Cecil wanted Elizabeth to sign a warrant to justify a public execution as a means to validate regicide. At stake was the future of divine-right monarchy in the British Isles. If Mary was to be executed by a private citizen who had signed the bond, he would act in a private capacity, whereas an official execution sanctioned by Elizabeth under the terms of the Act for the Queen’s Safety would justify regicide as a legal precedent and permanently cede to Parliament some measure of the ruler’s prerogative.

Instead, she told her secretary to order Walsingham to write a letter in his own name to Paulet, asking him to do away with Mary without a warrant. Paulet was to act on his own initiative, just because he had been told it was a good idea. Elizabeth wanted Mary dead, but without taking any of the responsibility. Paulet had been among the first to sign the Bond of Association, and this letter from Walsingham was to serve as the “direction” referred to by the Act for the Queen’s Safety. And yet if Paulet acted on it, he would kill Mary as a private citizen, with all the risks that entailed. Paulet was shocked. He had once proudly boasted that he would rather forgo the joys of heaven than disappoint Elizabeth in his duty. When forced to live up to his claim, he ate his words.

Robert Beale, who was later responsible for delivering the execution warrant to Fotheringhay on Cecil’s orders and without Elizabeth’s knowledge,

the councilors agreed among themselves that they would not tell Elizabeth about the execution “until it were done.”

That was her main aim, but by now she had skillfully contrived things so that she would win whatever happened. If Mary was killed under the Bond of Association, Elizabeth could disclaim responsibility. If Cecil covertly sealed the warrant and sent it to Fotheringhay behind her back, she could claim she had been the victim of a court conspiracy.

How little did Mary guess that Elizabeth’s firm intention, as Drury knew very well, had been that she should be surreptitiously done to death by “one Wingfield,” a hired assassin, and that she owed the relative privilege of a public execution almost entirely to the will of Cecil and Walsingham.

But she had discovered a new role. She would die as a martyr for her Catholic faith.

But the proclamation is luminously clear that James succeeded by virtue of his hereditary rights. Henry VIII’s will was disregarded. This was little short of a recognition of Mary’s own claim to be Elizabeth’s lawful successor had she lived. She had finally won. Her victory was more conclusive than even she might have dared to hope, because every subsequent British ruler has been descended from her, and all derive their claim to the throne from her and not Elizabeth.

As Mary’s champions could scarcely fail to remark, few of the Scottish lords who had thwarted her during her turbulent reign had lasted long.

Moray’s quick intelligence, bluff humor and infamously “regal manner” were not enough to see him through. He lived to enjoy his coveted position as regent of Scotland for less than eighteen months. He was assassinated in January 1570 while riding through the streets of Linlithgow.

But the two queens had much more in common than this reductionist model allows. In particular, they had a clear understanding of the ideological issues. That is, when female monarchs had to deal with male councilors in a dynamic political environment informed by religious sectarianism, more than just business as usual was at stake.

What we glimpse in Elizabeth’s relationship with Mary are the contradictions inscribed in a monarchy where the vagaries of dynastic succession competed with loyalties to an ideal of an exclusively Protestant commonwealth. When Elizabeth spoke in her own voice, hereditary rights took priority over religion, but when Cecil did the talking, it was always the other way around.

Where she went disastrously wrong was in allowing Bothwell, still a married man, to seduce her at Dunbar. Her worst mistake was to allow herself, a queen, to fall in love.

But to let the end of her life overshadow the whole is an injustice. The odds were stacked against her from the beginning.