QUEEN OF SCOTS ANSWERS CHARGE OF PLOT AGAINST ELIZABETH

FOTHERINGHAY, 1586-10-15. — Mary Stuart, the deposed Queen of Scots, has stood before Queen Elizabeth’s commissioners at Fotheringhay Castle upon an accusation that she consented to a conspiracy against the English sovereign’s life. Over two days of proceedings, the Crown’s officers have laid before the tribunal correspondence attributed to Mary and to Anthony Babington, whose enterprise joined the proposed deliverance of the Scottish queen to the killing of Elizabeth. Mary denies approving the murder. She also denies that an English commission may lawfully sit in judgment upon her, maintaining that she came into this kingdom as a sovereign seeking assistance, not as a subject owing obedience.

The hearing brings into one chamber a dispute which has troubled England for eighteen years: whether a queen deprived of her throne abroad may be held answerable here for designs conducted in her name. Among the commissioners are Lord Burghley, the lord treasurer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, whose intelligence service uncovered the present conspiracy. Sir Thomas Bromley, the lord chancellor, presides. The proceeding is no ordinary trial before a jury. Its authority rests upon an Act passed last year for the security of Elizabeth’s person and government, empowering a special commission to examine conspiracies touching those who may advance a claim to her crown.

Mary at first resisted appearing before the commissioners. Her objection goes beyond the substance of the letters: she contends that submission would prejudice the dignity of sovereign princes and admit a jurisdiction which she does not acknowledge. “I am no subject,” she declared in contesting the tribunal’s authority. Nevertheless, she has come forward to answer, rather than permit silence to pass for an inability to defend herself. She has no advocate to conduct her cause, and has complained of the disadvantages under which she must meet trained officers of the Crown, without the assistance and access to papers which such a defence requires.

The accusation arises from the correspondence of Babington, a young Catholic gentleman of Derbyshire. His letter to Mary proposed her rescue and described a separate undertaking against Elizabeth by “six noble gentlemen.” The Crown maintains that an answer sent in Mary’s name approved the enterprise and connected her liberation with the intended assassination. That distinction is the heart of the case. Efforts to regain liberty, the Scottish queen argues, do not establish consent to murder. The commissioners must therefore determine not merely whether Babington wished to serve her, but whether she knowingly authorised the particular violence which he proposed.

The papers have reached the government through a secret channel which the conspirators believed secure. Communications passing into and out of Mary’s confinement were intercepted and deciphered for Walsingham’s service. The prosecution also relies upon statements obtained from her secretaries, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, concerning the handling of her correspondence. Mary disputes the force of this evidence and seeks to distinguish what she herself dictated or approved from what others might have written, copied or construed. Her secretaries have not been brought before her for questioning at the hearing. Thus written testimony carries a burden which the accused insists ought to be tested in person.

Babington cannot now answer further questions before this tribunal. He and other principal conspirators were executed in London last month, after proceedings for treason. Their deaths have not ended the inquiry, for the government regards the alleged assent of the Scottish queen as the matter of greatest consequence. A plotter without a royal claimant might threaten the sovereign’s person; a plot conducted for one who claims succession to the crown threatens the settlement of the realm as well. Yet it remains necessary to separate what the condemned men intended from what Mary knew. Their devotion to her cause does not, by itself, resolve that question.

Mary’s present danger has its beginning in the overthrow of her government in Scotland. Compelled to abdicate in 1567 in favour of her infant son, James, she escaped confinement the following year, only to see her supporters defeated at Langside. She then crossed into England and sought Elizabeth’s aid. Instead of restoration, she encountered detention, moved from one guarded residence to another as ministers weighed the perils of releasing her, returning her to Scotland, or permitting her to remain at liberty in England. Her descent from Henry VII gives her a claim of succession which many English Catholics regard as stronger than any settlement founded upon Elizabeth’s religious establishment.

This is not the first conspiracy in which that claim has figured. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 sought, among its objects, to release Mary; the later Ridolfi enterprise linked her prospects to foreign intervention and the Duke of Norfolk. Such precedents explain the severity with which Elizabeth’s councillors now regard correspondence promising another deliverance. They do not relieve those councillors of the need to prove the present charge. The government’s position is that repeated danger has made exceptional safeguards indispensable. Mary’s answer is that the acts of those who desire her advancement cannot all be laid at her door.

Beyond the castle, the political stakes extend to Scotland, France and Spain. James VI must reckon with proceedings against his mother while pursuing his own relations with England. Mary’s French connections and her standing among Catholic princes give the case a reach far beyond an English prison. At home, councillors seeking Elizabeth’s security confront the grave example of one anointed sovereign being judged under another sovereign’s law. The immediate issue is consequently not a matter of ordinary commerce or revenue, but of succession, foreign relations and the authority upon which government rests. Whatever finding emerges will be read abroad as closely as it is read at court.

The hearings at Fotheringhay have brought no public sentence here. Further deliberation remains, and the disposition of the Scottish queen is still unsettled. The Crown has presented what it considers proof that rescue and assassination formed parts of one design; Mary has denied the murderous intention and challenged both the evidence and the court. Elizabeth must now confront a question long deferred by custody: whether keeping a rival claimant under guard is sufficient protection when her adherents continue to scheme for her release. For the present, Mary remains a prisoner, and England awaits the commissioners’ judgment upon a charge that reaches from intercepted private letters to the safety of the throne.