It is important to judge Mary’s acceptance in principle of the Babington conspiracy against the background of her own mood in the course of the late summer of 1586 and how it developed up till July. Her mental state was by now very different from what it had once been; the old notion of establishing her on the throne of England, however much it appealed to her youthful champions, was not uppermost in the mind of the middle-aged woman, by now quite out of touch with Europe, let alone with England. Mary herself was beginning to feel weary of the prolonged battle for some sort of decent existence, in which she had now been involved for eighteen years, and the constant strain of being ever on her guard, ever plotting, ever hoping, ever planning. The period in which she was perforce cut off from her secret post contributed much to this feeling of melancholy and lassitude. She began to speak of liberty in terms of retirement rather than government. After James’s betrayal of the Association, Mary told Elizabeth that her own desire had been to ‘retire out of this island in some solitary and reposeful place, as much for her soul as for her body’. She described herself poignantly at the end of May 1586 as knowing not ‘what line to sail, nor how to lift anchor’. This feeling of isolation and not understanding foreign matters any longer resounds through all her letters to Morgan, once the post was resumed: ‘My dear friend,’ she wrote to him on 20th May, ‘I can found no certain judgment nor know what course in the world to take in my affairs I shall hear amply and more recently from every part.’ On the same date, as if to prove her lack of contact with reality Mary also wrote to Mendoza in Paris confiding her rights to the crown of England conditionally to his master Philip II, if James had not become a Catholic by the date of her death. At the end of June, Nau told of how little Mary now felt she understood concerning the mind and intentions of other princes, thanks to her long solitude.26
In July this abandoned and exhausted frame of mind received a terrible fillip from the news that James and Elizabeth had actually signed a treaty of alliance. The maternal heart-break Mary had suffered in the spring of 1585 was now spiked with fearful bitterness. It was one thing to repudiate the idea of the Association but at Berwick on 6th July, only eleven days before Mary’s vital answer to Babington, a proper treaty was signed between the English and Scottish sovereigns, a treaty from which Mary and her interest were totally excluded. James was now to receive an actual agreed subsidy from Elizabeth. Mary’s letter of 12th July to Beaton in Paris on the subject of James was written in a tone of the utmost despair.27 There is no doubt that the publication of the treaty sent her temporarily off her balance, and robbed her of the sustained powers of calm reason which might have led her to act far more cautiously over the Babington plot. Even the fact that her health – for so long enfeebled – was now somewhat restored by the better conditions of Chartley contributed towards her downfall. On 3rd June Paulet reported that the queen was now well enough to be carried down in her chair to the ponds near the house to watch the duck-hunting.28 With renewed health came greater energy to escape, a prospect impossible to contemplate for an invalid endlessly confined to her chamber and her bed.
If to understand all is to forgive all, then it is certainly possible against this background to forgive Mary for tacitly acceding to – for her letter came to no more than that – a conspiracy involving the assassination of Elizabeth. Her own agreement was entirely in the context of a captive seeking to escape her guards, and may be compared to the actions of a prisoner who is prepared to escape by a certain route, even if it may involve the slaying of a jailer by another hand. If her own life in captivity could be considered to be in danger, then there was much theological doubt as to whether agreement to the slaying of Elizabeth was sinful at all. The immense theoretical problems which political assassination presented to the men of the sixteenth century caused Babington and his friends prolonged disquiet and heart-searching, but for Mary, illegally detained against her will, and not in any case concerned with the actual execution of the deed, or its instigation, the problem was considerably simpler: after so many years it was her rescue which mattered to her, not the safety of her jailer Elizabeth.* Even these same scruples of the Babington plotters do them credit in an age when many of the philosophers worked out good ethical reasons for the just death of a tyrant.
Yet in the sixteenth century the theory of resistance to one who had abused a ruler’s sacred duties was given much prominence in the writings of both Jesuits, such as de Mariana, Suarez and Mola, and Calvinists, such as Hotman who wrote Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The view of de Mariana in particular in De Rege et Regis Institutione, writing as he did in Catholic Spain, where there was religious unity, caused scandal in France and Germany where there was both religious and civil disorder: de Mariana’s view that an individual might be justified in slaying a manifestly evil ruler, in accordance with the wishes of the people, was furiously condemned in countries where this imprudent advice might only too easily be put into effect.29 Although many Jesuits rejected de Mariana openly, and later editions of his book contained modifications, the attitude of both Pius V and Gregory XIII to Elizabeth – first in the bull in 1570 and then in the ban of 1580 – was still susceptible of the interpretation by their Catholic flock that it would be a holy deed to rid England of this heretic ruler – even if they were certainly not specifically exhorted to do so. From the other side of the fence, John Knox had proclaimed without further ado that it was not only lawful but positively necessary to kill a king who had betrayed his people.
It says much for the innate goodness of ordinary people at the time that, although political actions like the papal bull or the bond of Association had truly wreaked havoc with the concept of public morality, nevertheless Babington and his friends were still bewildered about their moral position if they carried through Elizabeth’s assassination. Babington wrote to Mary apropos ‘the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free’, but revealed in his subsequent confession that he had been uncertain and worried as to whether this excommunication was still in force. Châteauneuf’s memoir also revealed the genuine doubts which all concerned felt on the subject.30 In an apparently violent age, when justification for the death of tyrants was openly discussed, and princes – like William of Orange – did meet their ends at the hands of the assassin, such scruples showed that it was easier for decent people to listen to the arguments in favour of such a deed than actually stifle their consciences to perform it. But such arguments, vivid as they might be throughout the sixteenth century, growing more intense after 1580, never really concerned Mary Stuart; she was never indeed at liberty in the society in which they were exploited; she continued to view the subject from the more personal standpoint of her own liberty.
The gallows letter was in Walsingham’s hands by Tuesday 19th July. On 20th July Gilbert Gifford fled to the Continent; his work as an agent provocateur completed, he was unwilling to be involved in the holocaust of arrests and cross-examinations which he was aware was about to break in England.* On 29th July Babington himself received the gallows letter and deciphered it the next day with the help of Tichborne. On 3rd August he wrote back to the Scottish queen acknowledging the fatal letter.31 By this date, however, as Mary’s hope of release began to rise, one of Walsingham’s agents, William Wade, had already secretly visited Chartley to work out with Paulet the best manner of securing her arrest. The gossamer plot began to fall apart. On 4th August Ballard was arrested and at the news Babington fled north through London to the leafy lanes of St John’s Wood; here he lay in safety for some time, until on 14th August he too was seized, and brought in hideous triumph to the Tower. William Weston, the Jesuit, lying in his own dark captivity, heard the unusual and ominous sound of the bells pealing at midnight: his guard told him that the city was celebrating the capture of certain papists – ‘traitors who had made a dastardly plot to assassinate the sovereign and declare the Queen of Scots her rightful heir’.32 Finally on 18th August Babington made the first of his confessions, i
n the course of which every detail of the conspiracy was placed in the hands of Walsingham: the queen of Scots, as well as all his fellow-conspirators, was fatally incriminated. Although Babington had destroyed Mary’s letters to him, he now compliantly reconstructed their text for Walsingham during his interrogations; and should his memory fail, Walsingham could always call on Phelippes, his decipherer, to help with the official reconstruction document – after all, Phelippes and Walsingham, through the medium of the secret pipeline, had read these letters long before they ever reached Babington himself.33
In the meantime Mary herself, cut off at Chartley, had absolutely no inkling of the dramatic turn which events had taken. Her commitment to the plot had been limited to letters; because of the time lag between the writing and delivery of messages by the secret post she knew very little of the various meetings which the conspirators had held up and down the country. Her spirits were high at the beginning of August: she felt she might even hope again. On 11th August, when the dour Paulet suggested that she might like to ride out of Chartley in the direction of Tixall in order to enjoy a buck hunt, this seemed yet another favourable omen of future happiness, since such manifestations of goodwill from her jailer were rare indeed. Mary took particular trouble with her costume under the impression that she might be meeting some of the local gentry at the hunt. The ebullient Nau was also smartly arrayed as usual. Also in the party were Curle, the queen’s other secretary, and Bourgoing, her personal physician (on whose journal we depend for so many of the details of the last months of Mary’s life). It was a fine August day. The queen’s mood was so gay and so gentle that when she noticed Paulet lagging behind, she remembered that he had recently been ill, and stopped her horse to let him catch her up.34
As the little procession wound its way across the moors, the queen suddenly spied some horsemen coming fast towards her. They were strangers. For one wild moment her heart leapt up and she actually believed that these apocalyptic horsemen were the Babington plotters, their plans more advanced than she supposed, coming to rescue her. The first words of their leader speedily undeceived her: this was none other than Sir Thomas Gorges, Queen Elizabeth’s emissary, dressed for this momentous occasion in green serge, luxuriously embroidered. As Paulet introduced him Gorges dismounted from his horse and strode over towards Mary. ‘Madame,’ said Gorges in a ringing voice, ‘the Queen my mistress finds it very strange that you, contrary to the pact and engagement made between you, should have conspired against her and her State, a thing which she could not have believed had she not seen proofs of it with her own eyes and known it for certain.’ As Mary, taken off her guard and flustered, protested, turned this way and that, explained that she had always shown herself a good sister and friend to Elizabeth, Gorges told her that her own servants were immediately to be taken away from her, since it was known that they too were guilty.
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’.35 Mary tried at first to resist: at one point she actually sat on the ground and refused to proceed further. 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 nearby 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’.36 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 had 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 forebears 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.37 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’.*
The only thing which had not been taken from Mary wa
s 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.38