“If she signed the warrant she would be setting a precedent for condemning an anointed queen to death, and would also be spilling the blood of her kinswoman. To do this would court the opprobroum of the whole world, and might provoke the Catholic powers to vengeful retribution. Yet, if she showed mercy, Mary would remain the focus of Catholic plotting for the rest of her life, to the great peril of Elizabeth and her kingdom. Elizabeth knew where her duty lay, but she did no want to be responsible for Mary’s death.” (Extract from
Elizabeth the Queen by Alison Weir, 1998)
With the anniversary of her trial in England for her alleged role in a plot to assassinate her cousin, Elizabeth I, the excellent Claire Ridgway over at
The Elizabeth Files overs a provocative but fair analysis of Mary's role and her probable guilt in plotting Elizabeth's murder in 1586.
Claire builds on the assessment of Professor John A. Guy, Mary's most sympathetic modern biographer and author of
My Heart is My Own, in which he presents Mary as a courageous and intelligent woman, but also rejects the notion that she was framed by Elizabeth's chief ministers, Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham. Instead, he argues that the Babington plot to murder Elizabeth in the middle of the 1580s was genuine and furthermore that Mary was complicit in it. However, Guy also argues that Burghley and Walsingham - whose espionage network was terrifyingly effective - actually allowed the plot to spiral to the point where Mary had firmly committed herself to it, via letters which she imagined to be secret. With that proof, they could at last lobby the English Queen to execute her Scottish cousin, since for the last two decades Elizabeth had twisted and turned out of ever taking firm action against Mary, buoyed along by her firm and unassailable belief in the sanctity of royal blood. As Professor Guy writes: -
"The plot as not in itself a ‘projection’ to frame her – it really existed; but rather than nipping it in the bud, Cecil’s spymaster allowed it to develop so that he could obtain the written evidence to put her on trial for her life”. Walsingham and Cecil let the plot continue so that Mary would ‘hang herself’ by getting involved and she did by replying to Babington who was conspiring to get Elizabeth assassinated by a group of ’six gentlemen’... Mary’s meaning is clear. She had consented to Elizabeth’s assassination and a foreign invasion. Strictly, she had not specified what the ‘work’ of the six gentlemen was to be, but the letter from Babbington to which she was replying included the graphic passage, ‘For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by the excommunication of her made free, there are six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.’ When the two letters are read together, Mary’s complicity in the plot was undeniable." (Extract from
My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots by John Guy, 2004)
Anyone who has read Guy's life of Mary will know that he is not someone to criticise her, unless he felt the proof against her was incontrovertible. Naturally, people could more credibly argue that after twenty years of de facto house arrest, the ex-Queen of Scotland had been driven to such a point of despair and distraction that she was willing to countenance a Catholic plot that would end in her cousin's murder, because that was the only means by which she could ever see herself being released from the purgatory of her imprisonment. I have some sympathy with that argument - in fact, I have a great deal of sympathy both for the argument and for Mary. But you cannot have one's cake and eat it; if Mary's actions are to be justified within the context of her wanting so desperately and so naturally to escape the unhappiness of her imprisonment, then you cannot reconcile that argument to say that she was a martyr for her Catholic faith. Mary undoubtedly behaved with phenomenal courage during her execution in February 1587 and she lovingly and piously surrounded herself with the symbols and comforts of her religion. However, Mary's devotion to her Catholicism does not mean that she was martyred because of that faith. She was undoubtedly loathed and despised by men like Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham precisely because she was a Roman Catholic princess, but Elizabeth herself had not once evinced any sign of hostility towards Mary on the basis of her religious beliefs. Elizabeth's fear was not religious, but rather political; she distrusted the Grey sisters in the same manner and for much the same reasons. Likewise they were her cousins, likewise they had made disastrous mistakes when it came to men (something unimaginably stupid in Elizabeth's eyes), but the Greys were Protestants. Had their eldest sister, Jane, been alive when Elizabeth came to the throne, it's highly probable that Elizabeth would have found Jane's fire-and-brimstone Protestantism as irritating as Mary's Catholicism, but what would really have mattered was the fact that Jane, like Mary, simply stood too close to the throne for comfort. It was a situation her late sister, Mary Tudor, had struggled with in the form of young Jane Grey back in 1554; now Elizabeth was experiencing exactly the same anguish with Mary of Scotland thirty years later.
The debate over at
The Elizabeth Files is a lively one - like everything pertaining to Mary, Queen of Scots. Claire's assessment of the situation is, I think, fair and balanced, but do check-out the page and leave your comment, as Claire is inviting a debate. She's a brave woman; I don't know if I would rile Mary's devotees, unless it was absolutely necessary!
"Recently, this site has been bombarded with comments ... proclaiming Mary Queen of Scots’ innocence, protesting that she was the rightful queen of England, Scotland and France, calling Elizabeth a “Killer queen”, accusing Elizabeth of framing Mary and accusing me of romanticising Elizabeth. They were hard to take seriously when that person also thought that Mary Queen of Scots was the daughter of Mary I (!), but they did make me think about how Mary has been romanticised in the past and seen as a tragic heroine and even a Catholic martyr. Even today, she is proclaimed a martyr, not just by the commenter on this site but also the the New Advent Catholic Encylopedia who say:- 'There can be no question that she died with the charity and magnanimity of a martyr; as also that her execution was due, on the part of her enemies, to hatred of the Faith.' ... Mary saw herself as a martyr. At her execution, on the 8th February 1587, she wore a crucifix and a black gown and as she prepared herself for her beheading she took off her gown to reveal a bodice and petticoat of scarlet, the colour of martyrdom. In her final moments she was proclaiming that she was a martyr to her faith.
However, whatever Mary thought and whatever message she was sending by her garb, I don’t believe that she was a martyr, well, not in the sense that she meant... she did not died for her Catholic faith, she was executed because she plotted to kill the Queen of England. Uh oh, now I’m treading on dangerous ground with those who believe she was framed. Well, I do believe that William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham did all they could to bring down Mary Queen of Scots, but I don’t believe that they framed her. They set a trap and she fell into it. She gave them the evidence that they were looking for and that they needed to convince Elizabeth to get rid of her once and for all..."
Read the full article and the debate, here.
Forgive my ignorance here, I'm no expert on Queen Mary and I have not yet read Professor Guy's book. I am confused about something, though: were Mary's *original* letters to Babington ever produced at the trial, or subsequently? Do we have them now?
ReplyDeleteMatterhorn, I have to confess that the minutiae of Mary's trial in 1586 is not my strong point in Tudor history, but it's worth noting that Mary did not argue herself that the two Babington letters were forgeries. It's Professor Guy's belief that this argument was one formulated by Mary's supporters, anxious to excuse their heroine of attempting to do what they were lambasting Elizabeth for having done (regicide.) She instead argued that the two letters she had sent to Sir Anthony Babington should not be taken as two halves of the same correspondence (i.e. they didn't constitute one coherent plot against Elizabeth's life.) One was in French, the other in English - and via the translation, a very clear incitement to assassinating Elizabeth was made, hence Mary's insistence that they shouldn't be read together. To quote from Professor Guy: -
ReplyDelete"When the two letters are read together, Mary's complicity in the plot is undeniable. She protested at her trial that the evidence against her was purely circumstantial. She demanded to be judged only by her own words and writing, saying that in her own words there would be found no consent or incitement to assassination. She refused to accept that the two letters should be taken together. This was to become the crux of her defence, and not the later allegation of forgery. There has been much confusion over a postscript that Walsingham's chief decipherer added to the 'authentic' final version of her letter before it was returned to its box in the beer cask for onward delivery to Babington. A whole conspiracy theory has been built on this brief postscript, one in which the decipherer is accused of 'doctoring' the main body of the letter to incriminate Mary in the murder plot. But there is no evidence to support the claim that the main text of the letter was altered, and the postscript - a blatant and audacious forgery ... was not used against Mary."
Interesting. Yes, if one takes those two letters together (and I don't see how else one can take them) it really does seem undeniable that Mary endorsed the murder plot.
ReplyDeleteI am still puzzled, though, as to how she could be accused of treason, when she had been the queen of another country- in what sense was she a subject of Elizabeth?
Well, THAT is a more serious question to the legitimacy of the trial and one which Elizabeth herself was clearly unhappy with. Basically, there were two things which placed Mary's legal position in a judicial grey area, if you will. The first was that she was no longer Queen of Scotland; although it had been coerced, the abdication had still been signed in Mary's own hand. She was thus, by her own volition, a former Sovereign, not a reigning one. Had she been either the de jure or de facto Queen of Scots by 1586, then the trial would not only have been grossly illegal but absurdly farcical by contemporary and modern standards. However, against this was the fact that Mary remained a foreign national, as well as been the ex-queen of Scotland and one of the current Queen Dowagers of France, a position she shared with Catherine de Medici and Elisabeth of Austria. This of course meant that technically she could not be tried for treason, since she was neither Elizabeth's subject and her equal in blood, if not in political authority.
ReplyDeleteThe second fuzzy grey area of Mary's legal position was that since she was the next in line to the English and Irish thrones THAT was what made her subject to Elizabeth's laws. That is, in fact, probably the strongest argument in favour of placing Mary under full English legal jurisdiction in 1586 and correctly stating that her plot to collude with Elizabeth's murder equated with high treason. In their own times as heiresses-apparent, Elizabeth and her late half-sister, Mary Tudor, had both been brought under enormous pressure by their siblings' regimes, who insisted that their exalted social position did not mean that they were less obliged to follow the kingdom's more difficult laws, but rather it meant they were more obliged than anybody else. However, even this argument in favour of Mary Stewart's actions been interpreted as treasonous was undermined by the fact that although Mary was considered heiress-apparent, she had not legally been deemed so. Remembering that from 1553 to 1558, she had found herself as the focus of opposition to her sister's government, Elizabeth was permanently reluctant to name anyone as her heir, even though she always insisted that the true claim would be decided by primogeniture. Elizabeth's resistance to Mary's pleas that she acknowledge her as the official heiress could be used by Mary's supporters to claim that she did not need to abide by the laws of the realm as a legally-recognised Heiress-Apparent would.
Basically, I would say that despite Mary's probable complicity in the Babington plot, her trial actually stood on flimsy legal grounds - certainly by the standards of her own time.
The entire trial was illegal in that Elizabeth had no right to hold Mary captive to begin with and certainly no right to put her on trial or execute her. Mary was an anointed sovereign plus dowager Queen of France, not subject to the laws of England. http://www.lawbuzz.com/justice/maryq/sham.htm
ReplyDeleteMary was involved in the Babington plot to the degree that they planned to overthrow Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, a throne which many people, including Mary and the Pope, thought that Mary had a better claim to sit on than did Elizabeth. So in Mary's mind she was doing no wrong to plot to escape from an unjust imprisonment in order to get her son back and gain a throne which was rightfully hers. Plotting Elizabeth's overthrow was different from plotting her murder, which Mary did not want. Many of the letters used to implicate her were forged.
http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2009/02/execution-of-mary-queen-of-scots.html
Mary did agree to a plot to overthrow Elizabeth,not kill her.Unfortunately the letters where forged and twisted to make it sound like Mary wanted Elizabeth killed.I do think most historians who believe in Mary's guilt are anticatholic biased.
ReplyDelete