It would be difficult to find any even approximate parallel to the position of Mary Stewart in England. Whatever her own attitude might be, she was the inevitable centre of Catholic plots of the most far-reaching order. While she lived, the throne of Elizabeth and the triumph of the Reformation in England could never be secure. She was held captive on no legitimate ground, but solely because her title to the English throne was so strong that the Queen could not afford to set her at liberty. In plain terms, the national security required her death, but unless she could be convicted of plotting against the life of Elizabeth, there was no legitimate ground for putting her to death. The eighth Henry would have made short work with her; there was no European sovereign who would not have made short work with any dangerous pretender to his crown who lay completely in his power. Yet even the Throgmorton conspiracy was not turned to her destruction; Elizabeth had her own reasons for preferring to keep her captive alive. But the Throgmorton revelations, with the assassination of Orange, the death of Alençon, the approach of the Spanish crisis, and the growing certainty that Mary’s son would not take her place as the figure-head for Catholic conspiracies, went far to cancel Elizabeth’s reasons. To Walsingham, alike as patriot and protestant, the death of Mary had long been about the most desirable event that could occur; and now he saw his way to compass it—to inveigle her within reach of the law.
He reckoned it as a certainty that if she found herself able to communicate with her partisans undetected, she would soon enough get involved in some plot of a character which would justify her doom in the eyes of the world. A supposed adherent of hers, a Jesuit, devised means of communicating with her and of passing her secret correspondence in and out of Chartley Manor. She fell into the trap: the supposed adherent was Walsingham’s agent. Every letter was opened and copied. A plot was soon on foot for her liberation, an invasion, and the deposition of Elizabeth, whose assassination by Anthony Babington was part of the scheme. From Walsingham’s point of view, the vital point was to get her definitely implicated in Babington’s part of the conspiracy. At last, Philips, the decipherer of the correspondence, produced a letter which was decisive. Then Walsingham struck. The bubble burst; Mary was tried and condemned.
Now an issue appears between Walsingham and Mary. The Scots Queen admitted participation in the plot up to a certain point: she denied in toto knowledge of the intended assassination. Apart from certain phrases in one letter, it cannot be conclusively shown that she was lying. The conditions made it possible that she never wrote those incriminating phrases; that they were forged. Did Walsingham fabricate that evidence in order that Mary might be prevented from escaping what he regarded as her just and necessary doom, on a technical plea? Did Philips forge it and persuade him that it was genuine? Or was it in fact genuine? Mendoza believed that Mary was in the secret, but Mendoza may have been under a misapprehension. No one will ever be able to answer that riddle decisively. But the form of Walsingham’s denial, when the imputation of forgery was made in court, is worth noting. “As a private person, I have done nothing unbecoming an honest man, nor, as I bear the place of a public person have I done anything unworthy my place.” If Walsingham did fabricate the evidence, he did it with a clear conscience; that is, with an honest conviction that he was discharging a duty; that he was “doing nothing unworthy his place.” The thing is perfectly conceivable. No one will deny that John Knox was a conscientious man; but John Knox justified assassination. Walsingham himself thought it permissible in certain circumstances. But the case is not proved one way or the other. The twist in his rigid conscience may not have been crooked enough for that. Yet the whole business of deliberately making arrangements to facilitate plotting on his victim’s part is hardly on a different plane. The point of interest lies in the fact that under sixteenth-century conditions such acts were committed and were sanctioned without compunction not only by men without conscience, or of careless conscience, or of conventional or adaptable conscience, but by the very men who held hardest to moral ideals: men whose serious purpose was to do all to the glory of God.
VI
THE END
For all her confidence in and dependence on Walsingham, the Secretary was never persona grata with Elizabeth. She abused him more roundly and more frequently than any other member of her Council. If an opportunity offered of setting him a task which was utterly against the grain, she would not let it go; and she liked him none the better for his share in making her responsible for the death of Queen Mary. In that, as in passing from covert to overt war with Spain, she was compelled to follow his policy; but she did not increase her favour to him and his allies, and she followed the policy with marked ill-will. Nothing could avert a desperate conflict, yet she continued to the last to drive the war-party half-frantic by parsimony, by issuing impracticable orders, by imposing paralysing restrictions, by temporising with Parma and threatening to betray her allies. And when the great Armada was triumphantly shattered by English seamen, and thereafter overwhelmed by the winds and the waves, and Drake would have delivered a still more fatal blow by rending Portugal from Philip, she carefully tied the Admiral up with instructions which doomed the Lisbon expedition to fruitlessness and its great organiser to discredit and practical retirement.
If Walsingham lived to see England freed from the nightmare of Mary Stewart, and on a palpable equality with Spain, the accession of the leader of “the Religion” in France to the throne, if not as yet to the rulership, of that country, and the rise of a worthy successor to William the Silent in the person of Maurice of Nassau, yet his last years were full enough of bitterness. He had striven devotedly with a single eye to the welfare of his country, so loyally and with such absence of self-seeking that he had beggared himself in the process. His services—invaluable yet unwelcome—were requited by chill disfavour; the assistance to which gratitude and justice should have entitled him was denied, since lavish bounty to Walter Raleigh suited the Queen’s humour better at the time; and the statesman who with Burghley had done most, for twenty years, for the honour and the safety of England, died so poor that he was buried quietly and privately—at his own desire—that his heirs might be spared the charges of a costly funeral. Whether he was in alliance with Burghley, or in occasional antagonism to the policy of his great colleague, the personal friendship and fidelity of the two to each other remained unbroken to the end. That is almost the only pleasing reflection to which his closing years give rise. For the rest, he passed from the world, one more example of the ingratitude of princes.