Queen Elizabeth

There was nothing for it, therefore, but to bring her to trial. A Special Commission was nominated under the provisions of the Statute of 1585, consisting of forty-five persons – peers, privy councillors, and judges – who proceeded to Fotheringay Castle, whither Mary had been removed.6 She at first refused their jurisdiction; but on being informed that they would proceed in her absence, she appeared before them under protest (October 14, 1586). After sitting at Fotheringay for two days, the Court adjourned to Westminster, where it pronounced her guilty (October 25).7 A declaration was added that her disqualification for the succession, which followed by the Statute, did not affect any rights that her son might possess. The verdict was immediately known; but its proclamation was deferred till Parliament could be consulted.

A general election had been held while the trial was going on, and Parliament met four days after its conclusion (October 29). The whole evidence was gone into afresh. Not a word seems to have been said in Mary’s favour; and an address was presented to the Queen praying for execution. If precedents were wanted for the capital punishment of an anointed sovereign, there were the cases of Agag, Jezebel, Athaliah, Deiotarus, king of Galatia, put to death by Julius Cæsar, Rhescuporis, king of Thrace, by Tiberius, and Conradin by Charles of Anjou. In vain did Elizabeth request them to reconsider their vote, and devise some other expedient. Usually so deferential to her suggestions, they reiterated their declaration that “the Queen’s safety could no way be secured as long as the Queen of Scots lived.”

Elizabeth’s hesitation has been generally set down to hypocrisy. It has been taken for granted that she desired Mary’s death, and was glad to have it pressed upon her by her subjects. I believe that her reluctance was most genuine. If not of generous disposition, neither was she revengeful or cruel. She had no animosity against her enemies. She lacked gall. She was never in any hurry to punish the disaffected, or even to weed them out of her service. She rather prided herself on employing them even about her person. Since her accession only two English peers had been put to death, though several had richly deserved it. She could affirm with perfect truth that, for the last fifteen years, she, and she alone, had stood between Mary and the scaffold, and this at great and increasing risk to her own life. There had, perhaps, been a time when to destroy the prospect of a Catholic succession would have driven the Catholics into rebellion. But that time had long gone by, as every one knew. Elizabeth had only two dangers now to fear, invasion and assassination, the latter being the most threatening. There would be little inducement to attempt it if Mary were not alive to profit by it. Yet Elizabeth hesitated. The explanation of her reluctance is very simple. She flinched from the obloquy, the undeserved obloquy, which she saw was in store for her. Careless to an extraordinary degree about her personal danger, she would have preferred, as far as she was herself concerned, to let Mary live. It was her ministers and the Protestant party who, for their own interest, were forcing her to shed her cousin’s blood; and it seemed to her unfair that the undivided odium should fall, as she foresaw it would fall, on her alone.

The suspense continued through December and January. In the meantime it became abundantly clear that no foreign court would interfere actively to save Mary’s life. While she had been growing old in captivity, new interests had sprung up, fresh schemes had been formed in which she had no place. She stood in the way of half-a-dozen ambitions. Everybody was weary of her and her wrongs and her pretensions. The Pope had felt less interest of late in a princess whose rights, if established, would pass to a Protestant heir. Philip could not intercede for her even if he had desired to save her life. He was already at war with England, and, if she had known it, not with any intention of supporting her claims.8 James by his recent treaty with England had tacitly treated his mother as an enemy. Her scheme for kidnapping and disinheriting him, found among her papers at Chartley, had been promptly communicated to him. Decency required that he should make a show of remonstrance and menace. But he had every reason to desire her death, and his only thought was to use the opportunity for extorting from Elizabeth a recognition of his title to the English crown and an increase of his pension. He sent the Master of Gray to drive this bargain. The very choice of his envoy, the man who had persuaded him to break with his mother, showed Elizabeth how the land lay, and she did not think it worth her while to bribe him in either way. The Marian nobles blustered and called for war. Not one of them wanted to see Mary back in Scotland or cared what became of her; but they had got an idea that Philip would pay them for a plundering raid into England, and the doubly lucrative prospect was irresistible. James, however, though pretending resentment and really sulky at his rebuff, knew his own interests too well to quarrel with England. What the action of the French King was is less certain. Openly he remonstrated with considerable vigour and persistence; not entering into the question of Mary’s guilt, but protesting against the punishment of a Queen and a member of his family. Probably his efforts, so far as they went, were sincere, for he instructed his ambassador to bribe the English ministers if possible to save her life. But it was evident that, however offended Henry III. might be by the execution of his sister-in-law, he would not be provoked into playing the game of Spain.

A warrant for the execution had been drawn soon after the adjournment of Parliament, and all through December and January Elizabeth’s ministers kept urging her to sign it. At length, when the Scotch and French ambassadors were gone, and with them the last excuse for delay, she signed it in the presence of Davison (who had lately been made co-secretary with Walsingham), and directed him to have it sealed (February 1). What else passed between them on that occasion must always remain uncertain, because Davison’s four written statements, and his answers at his trial, differ in important particulars not only from the Queen’s account but from one another. So much, however, will to most persons who examine the evidence be very clear. Elizabeth meant the execution to take place. There is no reason to doubt Davison’s statement that she “forbade him to trouble her any further, or let her hear any more thereof till it was done, seeing that for her part she had now performed all that either in law or reason could be required of her.” But signing the warrant, as both of them knew, was not enough. The formal delivery of it to some person, with direction to carry it out, was the final step necessary. This, by Davison’s own admission, the Queen managed to evade. He saw that she wished to thrust the responsibility upon him and Walsingham, and he suspected that she meant to disavow them. Although, therefore, she had enjoined strict secrecy, he laid the matter before Hatton and Burghley.

Burghley assembled in his own room the Earls of Derby and Leicester, Lords Howard of Effingham, Hunsdon, and Cobham, Knollys, Hatton, Walsingham, and Davison (February 3). These ten were probably the only privy councillors then at Greenwich.9 He laid before them Davison’s statement of what had passed between the Queen and himself at both interviews. He said that she had done as much as could be expected of her; that she evidently wished her ministers to take whatever responsibility remained upon themselves without informing her; and that they ought to do so. His proposal was agreed to. A letter was written to the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury instructing them to carry out the execution. This letter all the ten signed, and it was at once despatched along with the warrant. They quite understood that Elizabeth would disavow them. They saw that she wished to have a pretext for saying that Mary had been put to death without her knowledge, and before she had finally made up her mind. They were willing to furnish her with this pretext. Of course there would be more or less of a storm to keep up the make-believe. But ten privy councillors acting together could not well be punished.

On Thursday (February 9) the news of the execution arrived. Elizabeth now learnt for the first time that the responsibility which she had intended to fix on the two secretaries, one a nobody and the other no favourite, had been shared by eight others of the Council, including all its most important members. Storm at them she might and did, and all the more furiously because they had combined for self-protection. But to punish the whole ten was out of the question. Yet if no one were punished, with what face could she tender her improbable explanation to foreign courts? The unlucky Davison was singled out. He could be charged with divulging what he had been ordered to keep secret and misleading the others. He was tried before a Special Commission, fined 10,000 marks, and imprisoned for some time in the Tower. The fine was rigidly exacted, and it reduced him to poverty. Burghley, whose tool he had been almost as much as Elizabeth’s, took pains to make his disgrace permanent, because he wanted the secretaryship for his son, Robert Cecil.

The strange thing is, that Elizabeth not only expected her transparent falsehoods to be formally accepted as satisfactory, but hoped that they would be really believed. Her letter to James was an insult to his understanding. “I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen… I beseech you that as God and many more know how innocent I am in this case, so you will believe me that if I had bid [bidden] ought I would have bid [abided] by it… Thus assuring yourself of me that as I know this [the execution] was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it on others’ shoulders, no more will I not damnify myself that thought it not.”

Little as James cared what became of his mother, it was impossible that he should not feel humiliated when he was expected to swallow such a pill as this – and ungilded too. He had no intention of going to war with the country of which he might now at any moment become the legitimate King. But to let Elizabeth see that unless he was paid he could be disagreeable, he winked at raids across the border and coquetted with the faction who were inviting Philip to send a Spanish army to Scotland. It was but a passing display of temper. The end of the year (1587) saw him again drawing close to Elizabeth, and she was able to give her undivided attention to the coming Armada.

It cannot be seriously maintained that because Mary was not an English subject she could not be lawfully tried and punished for crimes committed in England. Those, if any there now be, who adopt her own contention that, being an anointed Queen, she was not amenable to any earthly tribunal, but to God alone, are beyond the reach of earthly argument. The English government had a right to detain her as a dangerous public enemy. She, on the other hand, had a right to resist such restraint if she could, and she might have carried conspiracy very far without incurring our blame. But for good reasons we draw a line at conspiracy to murder. No government ever did or will let it pass unpunished. If Napoleon at St. Helena had engaged in conspiracies for seizing the island, no one could have blamed him, even though they might have involved bloodshed. But if he had been convicted of plotting the assassination of Sir Hudson Lowe, he would assuredly have been hanged.

That the execution was a wise and opportune stroke of policy can hardly be disputed. It broke up the Catholic party in England at the moment when their disaffection was about to be tempted by the appearance of the Armada. There had been a time when they had hopes of James. But he was now known to be a stiff Protestant. Only the small Jesuitical faction was prepared to accept Philip either as an heir of John of Gaunt or as Mary’s legatee. There was no other Catholic with a shadow of a claim. The bulk of the party therefore ceased to look forward to a restoration of the old religion, and rallied to the cause of national independence.

NOTE ON PAULET’S ALLEGED REFUSAL TO MURDER MARY

I have not alluded in the text to the story, generally repeated by historians, that Elizabeth urged Paulet and Drury to murder Mary privately. There is no doubt that, after the signature of the warrant, Walsingham and Davison, by Elizabeth’s direction, urged Paulet and Drury to put Mary to death, and that they refused. But was it a private murder that was meant or a public execution without delivery of the warrant? There is nothing in any of Davison’s statements inconsistent with the latter and far more probable explanation. The blacker charge is founded solely on the two letters which are generally accepted as being those which passed between the secretaries and Paulet, but which may be confidently set down as impudent forgeries. They were first given to the world in 1722 by Dr. George Mackenzie, a violent Marian, who says that a copy of them was sent him by Mr. Urry of Christ Church, Oxford, and that they had been found among Paulet’s papers. Two years later they were printed by Hearne, an Oxford Jacobite and Nonjuror, who says he got them from a copy furnished him by a friend unnamed (Urry?), who told him he had copied them in 1717 from a MS. letter-book of Paulet’s. There is also a MS. copy in the Harleian collection, which contains erasures and emendations – an extraordinary thing in a copy. It is said to be in the handwriting of the Earl of Oxford himself. There is nothing to show whence he copied it.

No one has ever seen the originals of these letters. Neither has any one, except Hearne’s unnamed friend, seen the “letter-book” into which Paulet is supposed to have copied them. Where had this “letter-book” been before 1717? Where was it in 1717? What became of it after 1717? To none of these questions is there any answer. The most rational conclusion is that the “letter-book” never existed, and that the letters were fabricated in the reign of George I. by some Oxford Jacobite, who thought it easier and more prudent to circulate copies than to attempt an imitation of Paulet’s well-known handwriting, with all the other difficulties involved in forging a manuscript.

But it may be said, Do not the letters fit in with Davison’s narrative? Of course they do. It was for the very purpose of putting an odious meaning on that narrative that they were fabricated. It was known that letters about putting Mary to death had passed. The real letters had never been seen, and had doubtless been destroyed. Here therefore was a fine opportunity for manufacturing spurious ones.

CHAPTER X

WAR WITH SPAIN: 1587-1603

ELIZABETH is not seen at her best in war. She did not easily resign herself to its sacrifices. It frightened her to see the money which she had painfully put together, pound by pound, during so many years, by many a small economy, draining out at the rate of £17,000 a month into the bottomless pit of military expenditure. When Leicester came back she simply stopped all remittances to the Netherlands, making sure that if she did not feed her soldiers some one else would have to do it. She saw that Parma was not pressing forward. And though rumours of the enormous preparations in Spain, which accounted for his inactivity, continued to pour in, she still hoped that her intervention in the Netherlands was bending Philip to concessions. All this time Parma was steadily carrying out his master’s plans for the invasion. His little army was to be trebled in the autumn by reinforcements principally from Italy. In the meantime he was collecting a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats. As soon as the Armada should appear they were to make the passage under its protection.

It would answer no useful purpose, even if my limits permitted it, to enter into the particulars of Elizabeth’s policy towards the United Provinces during the twelve months that preceded the appearance of the Armada. Her proceedings were often tortuous, and by setting them forth in minute detail her detractors have not found it difficult to represent them as treacherous. But, living three centuries later, what have we to consider but the general scope and drift of her policy? Looking at it as a whole we shall find that, whether we approve of it or not, it was simple, consistent, and undisguised. She had no intention of abandoning the Provinces to Philip, still less of betraying them. But she did wish them to return to their allegiance, if she could procure for them proper guarantees for such liberties as they had been satisfied with before Philip’s tyranny began. If Philip had been wise he would have made those concessions. Elizabeth is not to be over-much blamed if she clung too long to the belief that he could be persuaded or compelled to do what was so much for his own interest. If she was deceived so was Burghley. Walsingham is entitled to the credit of having from first to last refused to believe that the negotiations were anything but a blind.

Though Elizabeth desired peace, she did not cease to deal blows at Philip. In the spring of 1587 (April-June), while she was most earnestly pushing her negotiations with Parma, she despatched Drake on a new expedition to the Spanish coast. He forced his way into the harbours of Cadiz and Corunna, destroyed many ships and immense stores, and came back loaded with plunder. The Armada had not been crippled, for most of the ships that were to compose it were lying in the Tagus. But the concentration had been delayed. Fresh stores had to be collected. Drake calculated, and as it proved rightly, that another season at least would be consumed in repairing the loss, and that England, for that summer and autumn, could rest secure of invasion.

The delay was most unwelcome to Philip. The expense of keeping such a fleet and army on foot through the winter would be enormous. Spain was maintaining not only the Armada but the army of Parma; for the resources of the Netherlands, which had been the true El Dorado of the Spanish monarchy, were completely dried up. So impatient was Philip – usually the slowest of men – that he proposed to despatch the Armada even in September, and actually wrote to Parma that he might expect it at any moment. But, as Drake had calculated, September was gone before everything was ready. The naval experts protested against the rashness of facing the autumnal gales, with no friendly harbour on either side of the Channel in which to take refuge. Philip then made the absurd suggestion that the army from the Netherlands should cross by itself in its flat-bottomed boats. But Parma told him that it was absolutely out of the question. Four English ships could sink the whole flotilla. In the meantime his soldiers, waiting on the Dunkirk Downs and exposed to the severities of the weather, were dying off like flies. Philip and Elizabeth resembled one another in this, that neither of them had any personal experience of war either by land or sea. For a Queen this was natural. For a King it was unnatural, and for an ambitious King unprecedented. They did not understand the proper adaptation of means to ends. Yet it was necessary to obtain their sanction before anything could be done. Hence there was much mismanagement on both sides. Still England was in no real danger during the summer and autumn of 1587, because Philip’s preparations were not completed; and before the end of the year the English fleet was lying in the Channel. But the Queen grudged the expense of keeping the crews up to their full complement. The supply of provisions and ammunition was also very inadequate. The expensiveness of war is generally a sufficient reason for not going to war; but to attempt to do war cheaply is always unwise. “Sparing and war,” as Effingham observed, “have no affinity together.”

Drake strongly urged that, instead of trying to guard the Channel, the English fleet should make for the coast of Spain, and boldly assail the Armada as soon as it put to sea. This was the advice of a man who had all the shining qualities of Nelson, and seems to have been in no respect his inferior. It was no counsel of desperation. He was confident of success. Lord Howard of Effingham, the Admiral, was of the same opinion. The negotiations were odious to him. For Burghley, who clings to them, he has no more reverence than Hamlet had for Polonius. “Since England was England,” he writes to Walsingham, “there was never such a stratagem and mask to deceive her as this treaty of peace. I pray God that we do not curse for this a long grey beard with a white head witless, that will make all the world think us heartless. You know whom I mean.”

With the hopes and fears of these sea-heroes, it is instructive to compare the forecast of the great soldier who was to conduct the invasion. Always obedient and devoted to his sovereign, Parma played his part in the deceptive negotiations with consummate skill. But his own opinion was that it would be wise to negotiate in good faith and accept the English terms. Though prepared to undertake the invasion, he took a very serious view of the risks to be encountered. He tells Philip that the English preparations are formidable both by land and sea. Even if the passage should be safely accomplished, disembarkation would be difficult. His army, reduced by the hardships of the winter from 30,000 men, which he had estimated as the proper number, to less than 17,000, was dangerously small for the work expected of it. He would have to fight battle after battle, and the further he advanced the weaker would his army become both from losses and from the necessity of protecting his communications.

Parma had carefully informed himself of the preparations in England. From the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, attention had been paid to the organisation, training, and equipment of the militia, and especially since the relations with Spain had become more hostile. On paper it seems to have amounted to 117,000 men. Mobilisation was a local business. Sir John Norris drew up the plan of defence. Beacon fires did the work of the telegraph. Every man knew whither he was to repair when their blaze should be seen. The districts to be abandoned, the positions to be defended, the bridges to be broken, were all marked out. Three armies, calculated to amount in the aggregate to 73,000 men, were ordered to assemble in July. Whether so many were actually mustered is doubtful. But Parma would certainly have found himself confronted by forces vastly superior in numbers to his own, and would have had, as he said, to fight battle after battle. The bow had not been entirely abandoned, but the greater part of the archers – two-thirds in some counties – had lately been armed with calivers. What was wanting in discipline would have been to some extent made up by the spontaneous cohesion of a force organised under its natural leaders, the nobles and gentry of each locality, not a few of whom had seen service abroad. But, after all, the greatest element of strength was the free spirit of the people. England was, and had long been, a nation of freemen. There were a few peers, and a great many knights and gentlemen. But there was no noble caste, as on the Continent, separated by an impassable barrier of birth and privilege from the mass of the people. All felt themselves fellow-countrymen bound together by common sentiments, common interests, and mutual respect.

This spirit of freedom – one might almost say of equality – made itself felt still more in the navy, and goes far to account for the cheerful energy and dash with which every service was performed. “The English officers lived on terms of sympathy with their men unknown to the Spaniards, who raised between the commander and the commanded absurd barriers of rank and blood which forbade to his pride any labour but that of fighting. Drake touched the true mainspring of English success when he once (in his voyage round the world) indignantly rebuked some coxcomb gentlemen-adventurers with, ‘I should like to see the gentleman that will refuse to set his hand to a rope. I must have the gentlemen to hale and draw with the mariners.’ ”10 Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher were all born of humble parents. They rose by their own valour and capacity. They had gentlemen of birth serving under them. To Howard and Cumberland and Seymour they were brothers-in-arms. The master of every little trading vessel was fired by their example, and hoped to climb as high.