Authors: Sarah Gristwood
*
Alençon, confusingly, had himself become Duc d’Anjou when Henri succeeded to the throne. For clarity’s sake, however, I shall continue to refer to him as Alençon.
44
Prise
Fotheringhay, 1587
Anyone who has ever been near a chessboard knows that if you manage to threaten your opponent’s king you give a chivalrous warning: ‘Check.’ Learning to play chess in the latter part of the twentieth century, I was taught a partial survival of an older tradition: that if you manage to get into a position where your next move would let you take the other player’s queen, then you must, by the same token, give a warning: ‘Prise.’ ‘Prise’ as in
en prise
, in a position to be taken. Up for grabs, you might say.
In one sense, of course, Mary Stuart had been
en prise
from the moment she put herself into Elizabeth Tudor’s hands. But the danger would be that her actions – her very existence – caused Elizabeth herself to feel the same vulnerability.
Mary’s plotting had never ceased. As the 1570s turned to the 1580s, with the overthrow and execution of the last of her enemies, the Earl of Morton, in Scotland, Mary had hoped she might soon be back in that country, perhaps ruling jointly with her son James VI, perhaps even with Elizabeth’s agreement. But while nothing came of that, she – or those who supported her – had never ceased to eye the other, English, throne. And there would soon be no distinction made between Mary Stuart herself and those who perceived themselves as acting in her cause.
In 1584, after the assassination of William of Orange in the Netherlands, after several Catholic plots against Elizabeth, came the Bond of Association. The signatories swore not only to defend Queen Elizabeth but to kill anyone who attempted to harm her, and anyone ‘for whom’ such an attempt was made. Mary herself offered to sign it, ironically.
An act passed by parliament the following spring modified some of the Bond’s more draconian elements, requiring at least a trial for the accused. But that same month, James VI in Scotland informed his mother Mary that, considering her captivity, he had no option other than that ‘of declining to associate himself with her in the sovereignty of Scotland, or to treat her otherwise than as Queen-Mother’. Elizabeth, by contrast, his envoy assured her, could rely on James’s affection for her ‘as though he were her natural son’. Their letters continued to employ the rhetoric of parent and child, and Elizabeth was James’s godmother, an important bond in the sixteenth century.
Mary reacted with a surge of distress. ‘I pray you to note I am your true and only Queen’, she wrote to her son. ‘Do not insult me further with this title of Queen Mother . . . there is neither King nor Queen in Scotland except me.’ To Elizabeth she protested: ‘Without him I am, and shall be of right, as long as I live, his Queen and Sovereign . . . but without me, he is too insignificant to think of soaring.’ She was ignored and when, a year later, James VI signed his treaty with England, she ceased to be valuable even as a pawn one side or the other might wish to play.
If Mary Stuart’s life ceased to have value for others, so it now had only a conditional value for herself. She had no reason not to lend herself to another plot. Instigated by the young Catholic hothead Anthony Babington, it was a plot well-known to Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham and a tool ready to his hand; a matter which, as he wrote to Leicester, if it be ‘well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices’. And of practitioners.
There could be no doubt Mary was guilty, yet when they came to accuse her in August 1586, she still protested that she had always shown herself Elizabeth Tudor’s ‘good sister and friend’. In October the case was tried, at the castle of Fotheringhay where Mary was held. Mary, after protesting that as a queen the commissioners had no right to try her, continued implausibly to protest her innocence: ‘I would never make shipwreck of my soul by conspiring the destruction of my dearest sister.’
Crocodile tears? And yet it seems almost as if she did still half-believe. No wonder Elizabeth herself seemed almost puzzled. To Mary’s gaoler she spat that he should ‘let your wicked mistress know how with hearty sorrow her vile deserts compels these orders, and bid her from me ask God’s forgiveness’. But Elizabeth also swore that:
if the case stood between her and myself only, if it had pleased God to have made us both milkmaids with pails on our arms, so that the matter should have rested between us two; and that I knew she did and would seek my destruction still, yet could I not consent to her death.
The judgment of ‘guilty’ was made public on 4 December. Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation declared that: ‘we were greatly and deeply grieved in our mind to think or imagine that any such unnatural and monstrous fact should be either devised or willingly assented to against us by her, being a princess born, and of our sex and blood’. But Elizabeth had still to sign the warrant for the penalty required by the act: execution.
In December the council were reluctantly forced to deliver to Elizabeth a letter from Mary herself, begging her cousin to ‘favour your equal’; a letter which, in its requests about the fate of her servants, and the disposal of her body, was calculated to bring home the full enormity of the prospective death.
‘Do not accuse me of presumption’, Mary wrote ‘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 . . . and that my blood and the misery of my country are remembered’. She signed herself ‘Your sister and cousin, wrongfully a prisoner,
Marie
,
Royne
’.
Several years earlier, she had expressed to Elizabeth her readiness to shed her blood; telling the Spanish ambassador Mendoza that she hoped God would accept her death as an offering ‘freely made by me for the maintenance of His church’. But that readiness did not mean Elizabeth was to be allowed to forget one jot of the horror of what she was doing.
Leicester wrote to Walsingham: ‘There is a letter from the Scottish Queen, that hath wrought tears, but I trust shall do no further herein: albeit, the delay is too dangerous’. Elizabeth kept to herself as the new year came in but the antiquarian William Camden reported that she could be heard murmuring: ‘Strike, or be stricken, strike, or be stricken.’ It was her kinsman Lord Howard of Effingham who finally, on 1 February, persuaded her to end this excruciating delay. She signed the warrant for Mary’s execution, handing it over with just enough vagueness as to allow her later to claim she had never meant it to be acted upon. Her councillors, however, under Cecil’s leadership, agreed to take upon themselves the responsibility for the warrant’s being put into effect.
Machiavelli had advised his prince that crime, when necessary, should be delegated to others. Here and elsewhere Elizabeth seemed to have learnt his lessons, as well as those of Anne de Beaujeu. Elizabeth’s motto was ‘
Video et taceo
’: I see, but say nothing. Or, as Anne de Beaujeu wrote: ‘you should have eyes to notice everything yet to see nothing, ears to hear everything yet to know nothing, and a tongue to answer everyone yet to say nothing prejudicial to anyone’. Least of all anything prejudicial to your own sovereignty.
On 7 February Mary was told she would be executed the next morning. She would die, she wrote, as a good Scotswoman and a good Frenchwoman – that odd dual role – but above all as a good Catholic. Her rule on earth had been a disaster, redeemed only (in the traditional, consort, model of a queen’s role) by whatever successes her son James could win. But she had found her role as a martyr in heaven.
The scene of her execution is well known, in all its horror and pathos. A report sent to Cecil described how the executioners helped her women strip her of her ornaments and outer clothes and how she herself helped them make speed, ‘as if she longed to be gone’. She had pleaded with Elizabeth that her servants should be allowed to be with her at the end, ‘by the honour and dignity we have both held, and of our sex in common’. Briefly, the nobles escorting Mary to her death tried to ban her women from accompanying her but her frantic remonstrance prevailed.
All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words, ‘that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company’ . . . groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied . . . Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade ‘God save the Queen’.
Her lips, Cecil’s correspondent wrote, ‘stirred up and down a quarter of an hour’ after she was dead.
Now she was dead she could safely be hailed as a Catholic heroine by the continental powers. Catherine de Medici told her ambassador: ‘I am most grieved that you have been unable to do more for the poor Queen of Scotland. It has never been the case that one queen should have jurisdiction over another having placed herself into her hands for her safety.’ (Shades of Jeanne d’Albret?) Philip of Spain wrote to his ambassador Mendoza that, ‘You cannot imagine the pity I feel for the Queen of Scots.’ But the fact was that he could now continue preparations for his great enterprise of England, his Armada, without having to question whether he really wished to place a queen committed to France on England’s throne.
When the news was brought to Elizabeth early the next day, she ‘gave herself over to grief’, as Camden put it; a hysterical and histrionic paroxysm, meant to convince a watching Europe of her innocence, but doubtless springing from a real and complex cocktail of emotions.
It is perhaps not too over-dramatic to say that Elizabeth Tudor knew the sisterhood of queens had also died that day. Could it all have gone differently, looking back to the beginning? Could Elizabeth have, in effect, mentored Mary Stuart? Probably not: their religion, with all its implications for the rights to the English throne, was in the way. It would be overly simplistic to say that religion ended any real possibility of sisterhood among Europe’s powerful women. There were, after all, plenty of powerful women within Catholic Europe among whom the game might still be played. But perhaps it had always been a fragile plant, capable of flowering only in very particular conditions. And towards the end of the sixteenth century, the climate was growing cold.
Postscript
‘For myself, I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a king or royal authority of a queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument . . . There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself.’
Elizabeth Tudor, the ‘Golden Speech’, 30 November 1601
For Elizabeth Tudor, the eighteen months after Mary Stuart’s death represented something of another turning point. The Armada victory in the summer of 1588 might have owed more to good luck and bad weather than to leadership and in a sense it represented what she had always dreaded: a military crisis in which she, as a woman, could not take direct command. Yet the speech she made to her troops at Tilbury, with the Armada ships in the Channel and Margaret of Parma’s son planning an invasion from the Netherlands, became the most iconic of her career.
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too – and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. To the which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will venter my royal blood; I myself will be your general . . .
As so often before, she played on her femininity, her vulnerability, making it into a strength. A text underneath a contemporary painting in a Norfolk church has a variant on Elizabeth’s words which tackles the issue more aggressively: ‘The enemy may challenge my sex for that I am a woman, so may I likewise charge their mould, for they are but men.’
She made a point of leaving her ladies behind and rode among the troops with the sword of state carried before her: ‘sometimes like a Woman, and anon, with the countenance and pace of a Soldier’, as Camden put it two decades later. Yet Leicester, in the days before Tilbury, had told her that her person was ‘the most sacred and dainty thing we have in this world to care for, a man must tremble when he thinks of it’. She was at once appealing to her subjects’ chivalry and impressing them with her potency. If this were a great failure of the peace for which she and her sister queens had so often striven, it allowed to take unto herself the persona of the warrior, for which male rulers had chiefly been admired.
1
Yet the last years of the 1580s marked, for Queen Elizabeth I, the start of a ‘second reign’ by no means as successful as what had gone before. On the wider stage the 1570s and 1580s saw an epic battle between Catholics and Protestants played across northern Europe; dividing France, threatening England, confirming Spain in its crusading Catholicism and stretching out long tentacles across the seas.