[1586 A.D.] ward the two secretaries, not that they might be confronted with Marywho was absent, immured in the castle of Fotheringay-but that they might affirm the truth of the depositions which they had previously made. This they certainly did; but, if we may believe Nau, it was not all. He moreover maintained, as he had on all occasions maintained, that the principal heads of accusation, those on which alone could be based any pretext for condemnation, were false. Walsingham rose with warmth, reproached him with speaking contrary to his conscience, and endeavoured to silence him with the depositions of the conspirators already executed, and of some of Mary's servants. But Nau repeated his former assertion, summoned the commissioners to answer before God and all Christian kings and princes, if on such false charges they should condemn a queen, no less a sovereign than their own; and loudly demanded that this his protestation should be entered on the record. But his efforts were fruitless. With the exception of the lord Zouch on the separate charge of assassination the commissioners unanimously gave judgment that after the last session of parliament, and before the date of their commission, Mary, daughter of James V, commonly called queen of Scotland, and pretending title to the crown of England, had, with the aid and abettance of her secretaries Nau and Curle, compassed and imagined divers matters tending to the hurt, death, and destruction of the queen, contrary to the form of the statute specified in the commission. This, by the act, was equivalent to a sentence of death against all the three, to be carried into execution at the pleasure of the queen. A provision was, however, added, that the judgment against the mother should not derogate from the right or dignity of her son James, king of Scotland, but that he should continue in the same place, rank, and right, as if it had never been pronounced. The judgment was then entered in the form of a record, and afterwards subscribed by the several commissioners, even by those who had not attended at Fotheringay. The life of the Scottish queen now lay at the mercy of Elizabeth. From foreign powers, she could expect no effectual relief. The Spanish monarch had to maintain his ground in Flanders against the combined army of the insurgents and the English; the king of France, harassed by religious wars, might entreat, but could not intimidate; and with respect to her son, the Scottish king, it was plain that his claim to the succession would render him unwilling, and the English pensioners in his council would render him unable, to draw the sword in her defence. But indecision was one of the leading traits in the character of her adversary. ELIZABETH'S HESITATION AND DISSIMULATION Elizabeth, while her object was at a distance, pressed towards it with impatience; but always hesitated to grasp it when it came within her reach. The death-warrant of her rival lay ready for her signature; but sometimes her imagination conjured up phantoms of danger from the desperation of Mary's partisans, and the resentment of James and the Catholic powers; sometimes she shuddered at the infamy which would cover her name if she shed the blood of a kinswoman and a sovereign. As was usual, she sought refuge in procrastination. Anticipating the conviction of her prisoner, Elizabeth had summoned a parliament to meet on the 15th of October; the length of the trial at Fotheringay compelled her to prorogue it to the 29th of the same month. The [1586 A.D.] proceedings on the trial were laid before each house; the commissioners, in long speeches, maintained the guilt of the royal prisoner; and the lords and commons united in a petition that speedy execution might be done upon the convict. The unwelcome task of announcing these proceedings to the Scottish queen was imposed on Lord Buckhurst in company with Beale, the clerk of the council. It had probably been expected that this announcement would tame the spirit of the Scottish queen, but she had already nerved her mind for the shock, and thanked them for the honesty of their avowal that her death was the only security for their church. She had long known that she was to be sacrificed for that purpose. They might say that she had been privy to a conspiracy against the life of their queen. She utterly denied it. She had never contrived, nor imagined, nor commanded any such thing. She had, indeed, accepted an offer made to rescue her from prison; and where was the person in her situation who would not, after an unjust captivity of twenty years, have done the same? No; her real crime was her adhesion to the religion of her fathers, a crime of which she was proud, and for which she would be happy to lay down her life. With respect to any secret communication, she had but two requests to make to the English queen: (1) That her money and jewels might be restored to her, for the purpose of bequeathing them as legacies to her servants; and (2) that she might be indulged with the attendance of a Catholic priest; for, as she had always lived, so it was her resolution to die, a member of the Catholic church. On the second day after this (November 21st) she received a visit from Paulet, who told her that since she had made no use of the time that was granted to her to confess and ask pardon, the queen had ordered her chair of state and canopy to be removed. She was a woman dead in law, and not entitled to the insignia of royalty. They were taken down by a party of his men. He then seated himself before her, face to face, put on his hat, and ordered her billiard table to be carried away, saying that she ought to prepare herself for death, and could have no time to spend in idle amusements. She replied, that she had never played on it yet; for they had given her employment enough in other ways. Mary was now occupied for some days in writing several important letters -to Pope Sixtus V, to the duke of Guise, the archbishop of Glasgow, and Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris. Her servants, to supply the place of her canopy of state, had affixed to the wall a large cross bearing an image of Christ in the agony of death. This, in other circumstances, would have aroused the iconoclast zeal of Paulet; but the next time that he came into her presence he was an altered and an humbled man. He had been severely rebuked by Elizabeth for his former rudeness to Mary. He came to apologise, saying that he had mistaken an order from the council for an order from the queen, and to inform Mary that her requests by Lord Buckhurst had been so far granted that her money would be restored to her, and Préau, her almoner, would have the same freedom of waiting upon her as any of her other servants. She gladly availed herself of this concession, and confided to the care of Préau the letters which she had written. They all reached their destination. The judgment of the commissioners had at length been proclaimed (December 6th) by sound of trumpet in London. The bells tolled for twenty-four 1 Sir James Croft, who seems to have excelled all others in religious cant, moved that some earnest and devout prayer to God, to incline her majesty's heart to grant the petition, might be composed and printed, in order to be used daily in the house of commons, and by its members in their chambers and lodgings. [1586 A.D.] hours, bonfires blazed in the streets, and the citizens appeared intoxicated with joy. This intelligence awakened new alarms in the breast of the unfortunate queen. She knew that by the late statute her life lay at the mercy of every member of the association; she recollected the fate of the earl of Northumberland in the Tower; and she persuaded herself that it would be her lot to fall by the hand of an assassin. After many solicitations she obtained permission to make her last requests to Elizabeth. They were four: That her dead body might be conveyed to France and deposited near that of her mother; that she might send a jewel, her farewell, and her blessing to her son; that her servants might be allowed to retain the small bequests which it was her intention to make them; and that she might not be put to death in private, otherwise her enemies would of her, as they had said of others, that despair had induced her to shorten her days. say Throughout the whole letter she carefully avoided every expression which might be interpreted as a petition for mercy. She thanked God that he had given her the courage to suffer injustice without murmuring; expressed her regret that her papers had not been honestly and entirely submitted to the inspection of Elizabeth, who would then have seen whether the safety of their sovereign was the real object of her adversaries; and, as she was about to leave this world and was preparing herself for a better, hoped it would not be deemed presumption if she reminded her good sister that the day would come when she must render an account of her conduct to an unerring Judge, no less than those who had gone before her. This noble letter, worthy of a queen and a martyr, was the last which Mary wrote to her English cousin. It drew tears from Elizabeth, but nothing more. No answer was returned. These extraordinary proceedings had attracted the notice and excited the wonder of the neighbouring nations. All sovereigns felt a common interest in the fate of Mary; the kings of France and Scotland, as more nearly allied in blood, were more eager to rescue her from death. Though Henry III might hate the house of Guise, he could not see, with indifference, the head of a princess who had worn the crown of France fall beneath the axe of the executioner. But the weight of his interposition was lightened by the knowledge of his necessities, and the harshness of a direct refusal was eluded by fraud and cunning. At the request of Châteauneuf he had sent Bellièvre with instructions to remonstrate in the most forcible and pointed language. The ambassador found unusual obstacles thrown in his way. L'Aubespine, the resident ambassador, resumed the negotiation; but was silenced by a low and unworthy artifice. An uncertain rumour had been spread of a new plot to assassinate the queen, which had been traced to the French embassy. The ministers assured L'Aubespine that they believed him incapable of the crime; but they imprisoned his secretary, examined witnesses, and produced documents in proof of the plot. The Frenchman remonstrated in haughty and offensive language; all official communication between the two courts was suspended; and five despatches from the ambassador were at different times intercepted, and opened in presence of the council. The object of this quarrel, on the part of the English ministers, was to prevent any further application in favour of the queen of Scots. Henry, to show that he felt the insult, laid an embargo on the English shipping and refused audience to the English ambassador. Still his anxiety to save the life of Mary subdued his pride. He condescended to despatch another envoy with new credentials. But these efforts were useless: Elizabeth had no leisure H. W.-VOL. XIX. 2 B [1586-1587 A.D.] to admit him till Mary had perished; then apologies were made; the innocence of L'Aubespine was acknowledged; and both the king and the ambassador were loaded with praise and compliments. James of Scotland felt little for a mother whom he had never known, and whom he had been taught to look upon as an enemy, seeking to deprive him of his authority. He would probably have abandoned her to her fate without a sigh, had he not been roused from his apathy by the admonition of the French court that her execution would exclude him from the succession to the English throne; and by the remonstrances of the Scottish nobles, who could not brook the notion that a Scottish queen should perish on a scaffold. James had already written to Elizabeth and the chief of her councillors, and had commissioned Archibald Douglas, the Scottish resident, to expostulate; he next sent Sir Robert Keith, a young man without weight or experience and a pensionary of the English court, to request that proceedings against his mother might be stayed till he should be made acquainted with her offence; and when he received for answer that such delay might prove dangerous to the life of Elizabeth, he was prevailed upon to despatch two new envoys, the master of Gray and Sir Robert Melville, to employ entreaties and threats. They suggested that Mary's life should be spared, on condition that she resigned all her rights to her son; this would secure Elizabeth from the fear of a competitor, and the established church from the enmity of a Catholic successor. It was replied, that after her condemnation Mary had no rights to resign. They protested, in their master's name, that he would be compelled, in honour, to avenge her death. The menace was received with the most marked contempt.1 After the publication of the sentence, Elizabeth spent two months in a state of apparent irresolution; but that irresolution arose not from any feeling of pity, but from her regard to her own reputation; and she was often heard to lament that among the thousands who professed to be attached to her as their sovereign, not one would spare her the necessity of dipping her hands in the blood of a sister queen.2 2 A letter was accordingly forwarded to Fotheringay on the same day, in the name of both secretaries. It informed the two keepers that the queen charged them with lack of care for her service, otherwise they would long ago have shortened the life of their captive. Of her guilt they could not doubt after her trial; and the oath of association which they had taken would have cleared their consciences before God, their reputations before men. Paulet was a stern and unfeeling bigot. He hated Mary because she was a Catholic; he sought her death because he believed her the enemy of his religion. Yet he was an honest man. He replied immediately, that he would never make so foul a shipwreck of his conscience, or leave so great a blot on his posterity, as to shed blood without law or warrant. A postscript added that Drury "subscribed in heart to Paulet's opinion." "She would not understand their proposal. So the earl of Leicester answered that our meaning was that the king should be put in his mother's place," says Gray in his despatch. "Is it so," the queen answered, "then I put myself in a worse case than before; by God's passion, that were to cut my own throat, and for a duchy or an earldome to yourself, you, or such as you, would cause some of your desperate knaves to kill me. No, by God! he shall never be in that place." Stuart, another envoy, assured her that James had sent them merely to save appearances, and that whatever he might pretend, he would be easily pacified with a present of dogs and deer. See EGERTON. [Elizabeth became pensive and solitary, and she was frequently heard to sigh and to mutter to herself these words, Aut fer aut feri ("Bear or strike"), and Ñe feriare feri ("Strike, lest you be struck.")-KEIGHTLEY.d] |