justified, and should have been effected openly, as had been urged by Parliament.
But Elizabeth hated personal responsibility, and though she was as eager as any one for Mary's death, she was determined if possible to have a scapegoat to relieve her of the blame of executing judgment on an anointed sovereign—a woman of her own family and her own royal caste. Elizabeth resisted all pressure for the regular execution, but caused Walsingham and Davison, her two secretaries, to write to Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary's keeper and a strong Puritan: "Her Majesty doth note in you both a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looketh for at your hands, in that you have not in all this time of yourselves, without other provocation, found out some way to shorten the life of that Queen, considering the peril she is subject to hourly, so long as the said Queen shall live. Wherein, besides a lack of love towards her, she noteth greatly that you have not that care of your particular safeties, or rather the preservation of religion and the public good and prosperity of your country, that reason and policy commandeth. … She taketh it most unkindly towards her that men professing that love towards her that you do should in any kind of sort, for lack of the discharge of your duties, cast the burden upon her, knowing, as you do, her indisposition to shed blood, especially of one of that sex and quality, and so near to her in blood as that Queen is." The men who wrote this letter for the Queen distrusted her, and urgently prayed Paulet to burn it. They were right in their distrust, as we shall see; but Paulet knew his mistress, too, and replied almost indignantly, "God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, as to shed blood without, a warrant." And when the Queen learned that Paulet declined to become her catspaw, she exclaimed with an oath against "such precise fellows," and sought another scapegoat.
Soon after the sentence on Mary had been pronounced (December 6, 1586), Elizabeth had directed Burghley to have the warrant ready for signature, and he, after drafting it in rough, gave it to the Junior Secretary of State, William Davison, to have engrossed, clever Walsingham being laid up with a diplomatic illness at the moment. When Davison laid the document before the Queen for signature she spoke petulantly about it, and told him to keep it back for the present. Thus passed six weeks, and there was some murmuring and complaint amongst the Puritan and court parties about the delay in carrying out the sentence. It was then that the hint was given to Paulet to kill the Queen of Scots privately without a warrant.
On the morning of the same day that the letter to Paulet, already quoted, was written (February 1, 1587), Elizabeth told Lord Admiral Howard to send for Davison and direct him to lay the warrant before her for signature. Davison promptly carried the document to the Queen, whom he found full of smiles and amiability, asking him, as if surprised, what he had in his hand. The Secretary told her, and she appended her signature to the warrant, explaining to him whilst doing so that she had thitherto delayed it for the sake of her own reputation. Then with a joke she handed him the signed warrant, and, according to Davison's story, bade him carry it at once to the Lord Chancellor, to have it sealed with the Great Seal as privately as possible, and send it without delay to the commissioners who were with Mary, in order that she (Elizabeth) might hear no more about it. She said some angry words as Davison left about the laxity of Paulet that had made a warrant necessary at all, and told Davison to call on Walsingham, who was still sick, and with him draft the letter to Paulet which has been mentioned. Davison then went to Burghley and Walsingham, and, in accordance with the Queen's message, every detail of the execution was arranged in writing; whilst it was settled that "the lords and court are to give out that there will be no execution."
From Burghley's papers, now at Hatfield, it is clear that not the Queen alone, but her council also, had entered into a plot to make Davison the scapegoat of Mary's death. On the morning of the 2d of February the Queen sent a message telling Davison not to go with the warrant to the Lord Chancellor yet. When he entered her chamber,
