suspicion of a plot laid to entrap her by the policy of Sir Francis
Walsingham, the most unscrupulously patriotic of her English
enemies, who four years afterwards sent word to Scotland that
the execution of Morton, so long the ally of England, would be
answered by the execution of Mary. But on that occasion
Elizabeth again refused her assent either to the trial of Mary or
to her transference from Sheffield to the Tower. In 1581 Mary
accepted the advice of Catherine de’ Medici and Henry III.
that she should allow her son’s title to reign as king of Scotland
conjointly with herself when released and restored to a share of
the throne. This plan was but part of a scheme including the
invasion of England by her kinsman the duke of Guise, who was
to land in the north and raise a Scottish army to place the released
prisoner of Sheffield beside her son on the throne of Elizabeth.
After the overthrow of the Scottish accomplices in this
notable project, Mary poured forth upon Elizabeth a torrent of
pathetic and eloquent reproach for the many wrongs she had
suffered at the hands of her hostess, and pledged her honour to
the assurance that she now aspired to no kingdom but that of
heaven. In the spring of 1583 she retained enough of this saintly
resignation to ask for nothing but liberty, without a share in the
government of Scotland; but Lord Burghley not unreasonably
preferred, if feasible, to reconcile the alliance of her son with
the detention of his mother. In 1584 the long-suffering earl of
Shrewsbury was relieved of his fourteen years’ charge through
the involuntary good offices of his wife, whose daughter by her
first husband had married a brother of Darnley; and their
orphan child Arabella, born in England, of royal descent on the
father’s side, was now, in the hopeful view of her grandmother,
a more plausible claimant than the king or queen of Scots to the
inheritance of the English throne. In December 1583 Mary had
laid before the French ambassador her first complaint of the
slanders spread by Lady Shrewsbury and her sons, who were
ultimately compelled to confess the falsehood of their imputations
on the queen of Scots and her keeper. It was probably at
the time when a desire for revenge on her calumniatress made
her think the opportunity good and safe for discharge of such a
two-edged dart at the countess and the queen that Mary wrote,
but abstained from despatching, the famous and terrible letter
in which, with many gracious excuses and professions of regret
and attachment, she transmits to Elizabeth a full and vivid
report of the hideous gossip retailed by Bess of Hardwick regarding
her character and person at a time when the reporter of these
abominations was on friendly terms with her husband’s royal
charge. In the autumn of 1584 she was removed to Wingfield
Manor under charge of Sir Ralph Sadler and John Somers, who
accompanied her also on her next removal to Tutbury in January
1585. A letter received by her in that cold, dark and unhealthy
castle, of which fifteen years before she had made painful and
malodorous experience, assured her that her son would acknowledge
her only as queen-mother, and provoked at once the threat
of a parent’s curse and an application to Elizabeth for sympathy.
In April 1585 Sir Amyas Paulet was appointed to the office of
which Sadler, accused of careless indulgence, had requested to
be relieved; and on Christmas Eve she was removed from the
hateful shelter of Tutbury to the castle of Chartley in the same
county. Her correspondence in cipher from thence with her English
agents abroad, intercepted by Walsingham and deciphered
by his secretary, gave eager encouragement to the design for
a Spanish invasion of England under the prince of Parma,—an
enterprise in which she would do her utmost to make her son
take part, and in case of his refusal would induce the Catholic
nobles of Scotland to betray him into the hands of Philip, from
whose tutelage he should be released only on her demand, or if
after her death he should wish to return, nor then unless he had
become a Catholic. But even these patriotic and maternal
schemes to consign her child and re-consign the kingdom to the
keeping of the Inquisition, incarnate in the widower of Mary
Tudor, were superseded by the attraction of a conspiracy against
the throne and life of Elizabeth. Anthony Babington, in his
boyhood a ward of Shrewsbury, resident in the household at
Sheffield Castle, and thus subjected to the charm before which so
many victims had already fallen, was now induced to undertake
the deliverance of the queen of Scots by the murder of the
queen of England. It is maintained by those admirers of Mary
who assume her to have been an almost absolute imbecile, gifted
with the power of imposing herself on the world as a woman of
unsurpassed ability, that, while cognisant of the plot for her
deliverance by English rebels and an invading army of foreign
auxiliaries, she might have been innocently unconscious that this
conspiracy involved the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth.
In the conduct and detection of her correspondence with Babington,
traitor was played off against traitor, and spies were utilized
against assassins, with as little scruple as could be required or
expected in the diplomacy of the time. As in the case of the
casket letters, it is alleged that forgery was employed to interpolate
sufficient evidence of Mary’s complicity in a design of
which it is thought credible that she was kept in ignorance by
the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her
service,—that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray
and a would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving
what her keen and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid
to anticipate as inevitable and inseparable from the general
design. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was
arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her
under pretence of a hunting party. At Tixall she was detained
till her papers at Chartley had undergone thorough research.
That she was at length taken in her own toils even such a dullard
as her admirers depict her could not have failed to understand;
that she was no such dastard as to desire or deserve such defenders
the whole brief course of her remaining life bore consistent
and irrefragable witness. Her first thought on her return to
Chartley was one of loyal gratitude and womanly sympathy.
She cheered the wife of her English secretary, now under arrest,
with promises to answer for her husband to all accusations
brought against him, took her new-born child from the mother’s
arms, and in default of clergy baptized it, to Paulet’s Puritanic
horror, with her own hands by her own name. The next or the
twin-born impulse of her indomitable nature was, as usual in all
times of danger, one of passionate and high-spirited defiance
on discovering the seizure of her papers. A fortnight afterwards
her keys and her money were confiscated, while she, bedridden
and unable to move her hand, could only ply the terrible weapon
of her bitter and fiery tongue. Her secretaries were examined
in London, and one of them gave evidence that she had first
heard of the conspiracy by letter from Babington, of whose
design against the life of Elizabeth she thought it best to take
no notice in her reply, though she did not hold herself bound to
reveal it. On the 25th of September she was removed to the
strong castle of Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. On the 6th
of October she was desired by letter from Elizabeth to answer
the charges brought against her before certain of the chief
English nobles appointed to sit in commission on the cause.
In spite of her first refusal to submit, she was induced by the
arguments of the vice-chamberlain, Sir Christopher Hatton, to
appear before this tribunal on condition that her protest should
be registered against the legality of its jurisdiction over a
sovereign, the next heir of the English crown.
On the 14th and 15th of October 1586 the trial was held in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. Alone, “without one counsellor on her side among so many,” Mary conducted the whole of her own defence with courage incomparable and unsurpassable ability. Pathos and indignation, subtlety and simplicity, personal appeal and political reasoning, were the alternate weapons with which she fought against all odds of evidence or inference, and disputed step by step every inch of debatable ground. She repeatedly insisted on the production of proof in her own handwriting as to her complicity with the project of the assassins who had expiated their crime on the 20th and 21st of the month preceding. When the charge was shifted to the question of her intrigues with Spain, she took her stand resolutely on her own right to convey whatever right she possessed, though now no kingdom was left her for disposal, to whomsoever she might choose. One single slip she made in the whole course of
