When Elizabeth’s commissioners arrived at Fotheringhay, they did not stand before an ordinary prisoner. Mary Stuart was Queen of Scots, held captive in England for nearly eighteen years, and the sovereign who summoned her to judgment was likewise her cousin. The commission had been instituted under a recent statute designed to punish those who compassed the death of Elizabeth. Yet one question preceded all others: could an anointed queen be judged like a common subject, by men commissioned by another queen?
On the 11th of October 1586, several commissioners convened at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. On the following day, three of their number delivered to Mary the letters announcing the inquiry. She replied that her cousin grieved her by harbouring such suspicions, she who had repeatedly warned the Queen of the perils threatening her. She acknowledged no right in England to sit in judgment upon her. Her papers had been seized; she had neither counsellor nor advocate; the laws of the realm were unknown to her. She demanded to be heard as a sovereign, not as a captive.
The commissioners urged her to appear. At first, she refused to acknowledge the authority of the statute upon which their warrant rested, yet stated she would answer before a free parliament and, under certain conditions, before the Queen and her Privy Council. The debates were drawn out. Mary insisted she would never consent to demean herself as a subject of Elizabeth; the commissioners contended that whoever committed a crime within England must answer to English law. In the end, she agreed to appear solely to clear her honour, while preserving her solemn protest.
The chamber had been ordered like an argument. Within the presence chamber, a chair of state beneath a canopy of estate stood waiting for Elizabeth. Opposite, set lower and at a distance, another chair was reserved for Mary. The Queen of England did not come. Around the seats took their places the Lord Chancellor, the earls, the lords, the judges, and the crown lawyers charged with conducting the examination. On that day, the very disposition of the room proclaimed which sovereignty the court meant to enforce.
The moment she was seated, Mary rose to enter her protest. She declared that she was no subject of the Queen of England, yet appeared nonetheless to refute the crimes laid to her charge. The Chancellor answered that her protest could not set aside the law of the realm. The Queen’s Serjeant then opened the indictment: Mary was alleged to have known of Anthony Babington’s conspiracy, to have approved it, and to have assisted in contriving the assassination of Elizabeth, in the hope of usurping her throne.
Mary denied having known Babington, having received his letters, or having written with any intent to compass the death of Elizabeth. She admitted having corresponded with divers persons and having sought to regain her liberty; she refused to take these exchanges as proof of a murderous plot. If letters under her hand were produced, she demanded to be shown her own handwriting. The lawyers confronted her with transcripts, with Babington’s declarations, and with the confessions of other conspirators. She answered that the words of others could not be imputed to her, and that secretaries might well set down what she had never dictated.
The contest narrowed around two men: Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, her secretaries. Their depositions, cited by the commissioners, formed the pillar of the prosecution and served to connect the ciphered letters to Mary. She demanded that they be confronted with her face to face. She suspected Nau of being open to bribery or intimidation, and Curle of having written under orders without examining what he committed to paper. She declared that an anointed queen could not be condemned on the testimony of clerks and upon copies over which she had no control. Yet they were not brought forth to face her during this hearing.
The letters, the ciphers, and the projects of foreign intervention were debated at length. The councillors asserted that the correspondence disclosed a design to open England to a Spanish army and to remove Elizabeth from the way. Mary conceded that foreign princes had offered their assistance and that she sought her deliverance; she denied that these overtures proved any complicity in murder. She recalled that Catholics pressed her to defend their cause, yet denied ever willing that their relief should be purchased with the blood of any man. In that hall, the selfsame words—succour, religion, succession—could be read as a plea for protection or as a mortal threat against the Crown.
On the following day, Mary once more demanded her papers, an advocate, and an audience with Elizabeth. The commissioners pleaded the Great Seal that authorized their commission. Neither of the two secretaries was brought to answer before her.
On the 25th of October, the commissioners reassembled in the Star Chamber at Westminster. There Nau and Curle confirmed upon oath the letters and the copies produced. The commission unanimously pronounced that, since June 1584, Mary had been privy, within England, together with Babington and others, to compassing and imagining the death of Elizabeth. The sentence declared her guilty of high treason.
The verdict was confirmed by Parliament, then proclaimed in London in December. Mary received it without shame. According to the chronicle, she gave thanks to God for being accounted an enemy to the Protestant religion and requested a Catholic priest to shrive her conscience. Elizabeth, for her part, hesitated to sign the warrant for execution. Borrow’s account relates that she ultimately delivered a warrant to her secretary Davison, only to reproach him afterwards for having acted with undue haste; the Council, believing she consented to the execution, dispatched the instrument to Fotheringhay.
The earls who arrived at the castle announced to Mary that she must die on the morrow. She asked for her confessor, but the lords denied her his presence, offering instead an Anglican bishop. She refused. That evening, she supped with her servants, bade them cease their weeping, reviewed her testament, distributed her effects, and wrote letters to the King of France and the Duke of Guise on behalf of her household. She slept for a few hours, then spent the remainder of the night in prayer.
On the 8th of February 1587, Mary came forth to the scaffold attired as for a solemn festival, a crucifix in her hand. She requested that certain of her servants might remain beside her. The Earl of Kent feared they might perform some rite he deemed superstitious; she replied they wished only to bid her farewell. The warrant was read to her. The Dean of Peterborough exhorted her; she refused to renounce the Catholic faith. While the others prayed in English, she prayed in Latin with her servants.
She commended her soul to God, forgave those who had condemned her, and laid her head upon the block. Borrow’s narrative notes that it required two strokes of the axe to sever the head. The Queen of Scots died in England without ever having acknowledged that her judges possessed the right to judge her.