Mary Queen of Scots (39 page)

Despite making this bequest to Philip, Mary continued to hope for James’s accession in England. In July only two months later, she repeated to Châteauneuf rumors she had heard concerning secret articles in the Treaty of Berwick, which reportedly promised the English throne to her son. That her progeny should succeed in England if she, herself, could not, she explained, was the chief reason she had been able to endure her captivity. If she were deprived of that hope, there was no extremity, even a dishonorable one, which she might not venture to win release from her misery.
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On 20 May the same day she informed Mendoza she was bequeathing her English succession rights to Philip, Mary also sent a message to Paget concerning James’s religious and political views. If her son failed, she explained, to support the enterprise to free her, she wanted Catholic lords in Scotland to seize him and deliver him to Philip, who should then convert him to Catholicism. While James was absent from his realm, she thought the prudent and loyal Lord Claud Hamilton should serve as regent. He had, she continued, greater influence than his older brother, Lord John.

Besides channeling Mary’s letters through Walsingham’s hands, Gifford also encouraged Anthony Babington, a young well-to-do Derbyshire gentleman, to participate in a plot to free Mary. As Babington had served as Shrewsbury’s page in the 1570s, the young man might have met her but they would have had little contact since their households were mostly kept apart. Later in 1580 while touring France, he became conversant with Morgan and Beaton, and after returning home with their recommendations, acted as Mary’s secret messenger for two years, probably in 1583–84.

In the spring of 1586 Babington learned about a number of Catholic plots against Elizabeth. On 30 and 31 May fresh from a mission to France concerning the raising of armed forces to invade England, John Ballard, a priest, consulted with Babington, an acquaintance of his, about employing those troops to liberate Mary. Besides seeking to raise an invasion force, Ballard had been meeting with English Catholics to discuss their fomenting an uprising against Elizabeth and had traveled to Scotland to sound out Mary’s allies, including Lord Claud, about aiding their captive queen. Ballard also revealed a regicide vow of John Savage to the horrified Babington, who initially shrank from involvement in a conspiracy to kill Elizabeth. Earlier at Rheims, Savage had sworn to assassinate the English queen, but after reaching home and entering Barnard’s Inn, he had failed to act upon his vow. Babington soon became reconciled to Elizabeth’s assassination and attended several meetings in June with Gifford, Ballard, Savage, and other friends to ascertain if these schemes could be combined into one venture that would end in the liberation of Mary and the death of Elizabeth. Soon wearying of the plotting, however, Babington decided to seek Walsingham’s permission to travel abroad and actually met with him three times between 25 June and 13 July. Walsingham refused to grant him a passport and by hinting at secret goings-on with Mary attempted unsuccessfully to elicit information from him about the plans to free her.

Mary’s communications with Babington had resumed on 25 June, when at Morgan’s urging, she asked the young man to forward any secret correspondence of hers he still possessed. On 6 July three days after the second of his three sessions with Walsingham, Babington received Mary’s letter and sent her the requested messages along with a plan for achieving two goals: first, he would lead ten gentlemen and 100 followers to release her from captivity, and second, six persons would commit the “tragical execution” of Elizabeth, “the usurper.” Later in the text, he repeated that Mary’s deliverance needed to be first, for “thereupon dependeth our only good.”
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In her reply on 17 July extant only in a deciphered copy, she first described the armed forces both local and foreign that were necessary for achieving her liberation and recommended that Babington seek Mendoza’s assistance in raising and supplying them. Next, she requested that as soon as the six gentlemen completed their task, messengers immediately rush to alert her so that she could gain release from her prison before Paulet could act against her.
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Finally, she suggested various plans for her liberation. In sharp contrast to Babington’s design, Mary’s proposal provided for him and his allies to execute Elizabeth before, not after, liberating her. The importance of this altering of the sequence of events will be discussed in more detail below. While she did not specify her final destination once she gained freedom, Mary did inform Châteauneuf in late July that her physicians had recommended she receive medical treatment at some very hot baths in Italy.

Although a few days after responding to Babington, Mary rode on her horse to a nearby park to kill a deer with her crossbow and to chase after her hounds, she still could not walk alone. A month earlier desperate to cure her lameness, she had taken a special physic that kept her secluded in her chamber for several days. It not only failed to ease her symptoms but also made her weak and faint. Because she had long claimed her captivity caused her chronic ailments, it was not surprising that in July 1586 she would approve generally of Babington’s plot although it included Elizabeth’s murder. Mary believed her strict confinement had greatly diminished the quality of her life physically and socially and felt tremendous disappointment at James’s rejection of his filial duty to assist her in alleviating the conditions of her captivity. Consequently, she began to commit somewhat reckless acts: she consented to Babington’s plot despite the threatening Bond of Association, facilitated Philip’s invasion of England by pledging to grant him her English succession rights unless James converted to Catholicism, and initiated plans to have her son delivered to the Spanish king for religious indoctrination. She made these secret offers knowing that if they were publicized she risked English, French, and Scottish reprisals.

Mary’s response to Babington’s letter was in Curle’s rather than her own handwriting. She sent Babington Curle’s ciphered rendition of his English translation of Nau’s polished French version of her dictated statements. After Phelippes received and deciphered it, he recopied the ciphered letter in order to add at least one part: a postscript requesting the six assassins’ identities. Walsingham forwarded this recopied message with the postscript to Babington, who obtained it on the 19th. That all historians agree that Phelippes created the postscript has led some scholars to make the unlikely claim that he invented the entire text. Her apparently disjointed composition has also attracted attention. As noted, her ciphered letter envisioned three phases: Babington was to obtain sufficient armed forces; next the six gentlemen were to proceed; and then her liberators were to act. In a later paragraph, she explained some concerns:

And to take me forth of this place...before well assured to set me in the midst of a good army...it were sufficient cause given to that Queen in catching me again to enclose me forever in some hole.
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This statement indicates that she took seriously Persons’ warning about the danger to herself if the invasion forces failed to free her.

Since Mary ignored the six gentlemen’s role in this comment and assumed that during her escape attempt Elizabeth would still be living, some writers have claimed that all the brief references to the assassins in her letter were, like the postscript, forged insertions. Because the drafts of her letter were destroyed, the question of whether the original French did refer to the six gentlemen is impossible to determine definitively. Some of Phelippes’s statements to Walsingham after deciphering it can be interpreted to mean he believed Mary had approved of regicide, but it is difficult to understand why she did not refer explicitly to the assassination in her 27 July 1586 encoded message to Mendoza or in any other extant comment about the plot.

Her ciphered letter to Babington, as copied by Phelippes, makes its first allusion to Elizabeth’s death in the form of a brief question: “By what means do the six gentlemen deliberate to proceed?” It can be found at the beginning of her letter in a list that sets out various matters that needed to be considered before she went on to elaborate upon them individually. It is the only item in the list that is a complete sentence and is the only issue raised there on which she did not subsequently expound: she later discussed plans both for the raising of troops and her liberation but offered no strategies for murdering Elizabeth. Her other references to the six gentlemen’s task were limited to requests that messengers should notify her immediately when the deed was done. She advised Babington to station four men at court, who could speedily bring her the news of Elizabeth’s death, permitting her opportunity to escape from prison before Paulet could learn of his queen’s execution and retaliate against his captive. No explanation was given as to how those messengers could inform her while Paulet still kept her closely watched. Mary’s liberation strategies, moreover, were not structured as mere hasty responses to message bearers arriving at top speed to announce Elizabeth’s death. The schemes she elaborated required advanced planning and careful timing. In one scenario, for example, she proposed that her liberators arrive at midnight and set adjoining buildings on fire to distract Paulet and his soldiers while she escaped.

That her first reference to the six gentlemen in the ciphered letter was in the form of a question and that she failed subsequently to offer strategies for the men’s task make it possible to suggest that Phelippes purposely inserted the reference into the text in the form of an inquiry, hoping to elicit details from Babington about his plans for the regicide. Keeping in mind Phelippes’s postscript asking the assassin’s identities, it can be surmised that after copying over Mary’s long letter in cipher, he realized that while he had inserted a question in the text about the six gentlemen’s deliberations, he had neglected to solicit their names. To obtain that vital information, he created the postscript rather than undertake the arduous task of recopying the entire letter to include that question.

An interesting aspect of Mendoza’s role in this conspiracy is that he learned about Elizabeth’s proposed murder but not from Mary. On 21 July, two days after Phelippes deciphered Mary’s letter, Gifford departed for France. There he met with Mendoza ostensibly to arrange the assembling and arming of the invasion forces required for Mary’s escape. In discussions with the ambassador, Gifford revealed that six men would murder Elizabeth before the other conspirators freed Mary, thus conveying information from her ciphered letter that Phelippes recopied rather than from Babington’s message. When predicting to Philip that if Elizabeth were assassinated first, Parma would aid her killers, the gratified ambassador explained that he had heard of earlier English schemes to murder Elizabeth but that none of them had proposed to commit this act before Mary’s liberation.

Socialized to accept the honor code of the early modern network of dynastic families, Mary most likely would have shrunk from approving regicide. A ruler’s violent death showed disrespect for the royal hierarchy that God had created and jeopardized the lives of her noble counterparts. Even tolerating public criticism of another monarch could be viewed as breaching royal protocol. In 1570 Mary complained to Elizabeth about a minister at Lichfield who criticized her in a sermon, pointing out her disbelief that a prince would permit evil to be spoken of another prince in her realm. Elizabeth subsequently promised to punish the cleric.

Like most hereditary monarchs, Mary maintained that only God could judge her and her activities. Since in July 1586 she also expressed concerns to Châteauneuf and to an unknown correspondent that if she were still an English prisoner when Elizabeth died, her life would not be safe in Paulet’s hands, it is extremely unlikely that she would have consented that same month to her cousin’s assassination as the initial step in her own liberation. In a document summarizing the events of 1586, Châteauneuf agreed with Mary’s analysis.

Earlier in 1581, Mary had complained to Archbishop Beaton about Walsingham’s rumored assertion that she would leave no stone unturned to escape, implying apparently that she would approve any dishonorable act to gain her freedom perhaps even murder. She had also predicted that Walsingham would use his opinion of her evil nature to restrict further her activities. Probably confirming her assessment of his character, Walsingham instructed Phelippes to add certain brief phrases to her ciphered letter to Babington when recopying it to create evidence for the charge that she had specifically assented to Elizabeth’s assassination as a prelude to gaining her freedom. If so, it was Phelippes’s textual insertions that created her letter’s disjointed structure.

In his edition of this correspondence Conyers Read dismissed the importance of the disjointedness with the quip, but “if we argue that every documents,” failing, however, to identify the other female inconsistencies in question.
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His biased analysis appears even more invalid when compared to the equally biased comment of Antony Perrenot, cardinal of Granvelle, Philip’s regent in Madrid during his absence in Portugal. In 1582 Granvelle indicated he admired the epistolary skills of Mary’s correspondence. After reading her message about the enterprise, he surmised that she employed a very intelligent secretary. It was impossible to explain with greater clarity than she had in her lengthy letter the manner in which the business should be conducted, the extent of financial support that would be necessary, and the number and kind of armed forces that would be required.
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Mary’s recent biographers, including those who have generally written favorably about her, such as Antonia Fraser and John Guy, have either failed to note or at least to consider seriously the inconsistencies in Mary’s letter. Accepting the extant decoded version as a true reflec-tion of her intent, their reading of it in association with Babington’s letter provides adequate proof for them that the references to the six men’s design meant Mary did approve of Elizabeth’s assassination as a prelude to her own release from prison. Earlier sympathetic writers also failed to understand the significance of the placement of Elizabeth’s death before Mary’s liberation.
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This altered sequence of events did not make sense given Mary’s fears that her guardian would kill her or could not protect her if Elizabeth died first either peacefully or violently.