Seizure of Mary's papers.
One day, when Mary was going out to ride, just as she was entering her carriage, officers suddenly arrived from London. They told her that the plot in which she had been engaged had been discovered; that fourteen of the principal conspirators had been hung, seven on each of two successive days, and that they had come to arrest some of her attendants and to seize her papers. They accordingly went into her apartments, opened all her desks, trunks, and cabinets, seized her papers, and took them to London. Mary sat down in the scene of desolation and disorder which they left, and wept bitterly.
Her son James.
The papers which were seized were taken to London, and Elizabeth's government began seriously to agitate the question of bringing Mary herself to trial. One would have thought that, in her forlorn and desolate condition, she would have looked to her son for sympathy and aid. But rival claimants to a crown can have little kind feeling to each other, even if they are mother and son. James, as he gradually approached toward maturity, took sides against his mother. In fact, all Scotland was divided, and was for many years in a state of civil war: those who advocated Mary's right to the crown on one side, and James's adherents on the other. They were called king's men and queen's men. James was, of course, brought up in hostility to his mother, and he wrote to her, about a year before Babington's conspiracy, in terms so hostile and so devoid of filial love, that his ingratitude stung her to the heart. "Was it for this," she said, "that I made so many sacrifices, and endured so many trials on his account in his early years? I have made it the whole business of my life to protect and secure his rights, and to open before him a prospect of future power and glory: and this is the return."
Elizabeth resolves to bring Mary to trial.
Fotheringay Castle.
The English government, under Elizabeth's direction, concluded to bring Mary to a public trial. They removed her, accordingly, to the Castle of Fotheringay. Fotheringay is in Northamptonshire, which is in the very heart of England, Northampton, the shire town, being about sixty miles northwest of London. Fotheringay Castle was on the banks of the River Nen, or Avon, which flows northeast from Northampton to the sea. A few miles below the castle is the ancient town of Peterborough, where there was a monastery and a great cathedral church. The monastery had been built a thousand years before.
Great interest in the trial.
They removed Mary to Fotheringay Castle for her trial, and lawyers, counselors, commissioners, and officers of state began to assemble there from all quarters. The castle was a spacious structure. It was surrounded with two moats, and with double walls, and was strongly fortified. It contained numerous and spacious apartments, and it had especially one large hall which was well adapted to the purposes of this great trial. The preparations for the solemn ordeal through which Mary was now to pass, brought her forth from the obscurity in which she had so long been lost to the eyes of mankind, and made her the universal object of interest and attention in England, Scotland, and France. The people of all these nations looked on with great interest at the spectacle of one queen tried solemnly on a charge of high treason against another. The stories of her beauty, her graces, her misfortunes, which had slumbered for eighteen years, were all now revived, and every body felt a warm interest in the poor captive, worn down by long confinement, and trembling in the hands of what they feared would be a merciless and terrible power.
Preparations for it.
The throne.
Mary was removed to the Castle of Fotheringay toward the end of September, 1586. The preparations for the trial proceeded slowly. Every thing in which kings and queens, or affairs of state were concerned in those days, was conducted with great pomp and ceremony. The arrangements of the hall were minutely prescribed. At the head of it a sort of throne was placed, with a royal canopy over it, for the Queen of England. This, though it was vacant, impressed the court and the spectators as a symbol of royalty, and denoted that the sovereignty of Elizabeth was the power before which Mary was arraigned.