"Let repentance take place; and let not the fiend possess so as her best part be lost. Which I pray, with hands lifted up to him that may both save and spill. With my loving adieu and prayer for thy long life,
"Your assured and loving sovereign in heart,
by good desert induced,
"Eliz. R."
Soon, after the arrival of Mary at Fotheringay, Elizabeth, according to the provisions of the late act, issued out a commission to forty noblemen and privy-councillors, empowering them to try and pass sentence upon Mary daughter and heir of king James V. and late queen of Scots; for it was thus that she was designated, with a view of intimating to her that she was no longer to be regarded as possessing the rights of a sovereign princess. Thirty-six of the commissioners repaired immediately to Fotheringay, where they arrived on October 9th 1586, and cited Mary to appear before them. This summons she refused to obey, on the double ground, that as an absolute princess she was free from all human jurisdiction, since kings only could be her peers; and that having been detained in England as a prisoner, she had not enjoyed the protection of the laws, and consequently ought not in equity to be regarded as amenable to their sentence. Weighty as these objections may appear, the commissioners refused to admit them, and declared that they would proceed to judge her by default. This menace she at first disregarded; but soon after, overcome by the artful representations of Hatton on the inferences which must inevitably be drawn from her refusal to justify herself for the satisfaction of a princess who had declared that she desired nothing so much as the establishment of her innocence, she changed her mind and consented to plead. None of her papers were restored, no counsel was assigned her; and her request that her two secretaries, whose evidence was princicipally relied on by the prosecutors, might be confronted with her, was denied. But all these were hardships customarily inflicted on prisoners accused of high treason and it does not appear that, with respect to its forms and modes of proceedings, Mary had cause to complain that her trial was other than a regular and legal one.
On her first appearance she renewed her protestation against the competence of the tribunal. Bromley lord-chancellor answered her, showing the jurisdiction of the English law over all persons within the country; and the commissioners ordered both the objection and the reply to be registered, as if to save the point of law; but it does not appear that it was ever referred for decision to any other authority.
Intercepted letters, authenticated by the testimony of her secretaries, formed the chief evidence against Mary. From these the crown lawyers showed, and she did not attempt to deny, that she had suffered her correspondents to address her as queen of England; that she had endeavoured by means of English fugitives to incite the Spaniards to invade the country; and that she had been negotiating at Rome the terms of a transfer of all her claims, present and future, to the king of Spain, disinheriting by this unnatural act her own schismatic son. The further charge of having concurred in the late plot for the assassination of Elizabeth, she strongly denied and attempted to disprove; but it stood on equally good evidence with all the rest; and in spite of some suggestions of which her modern partisans have endeavoured to give her the benefit, there appears no solid foundation on which an impartial inquirer can rest any doubt of the fact.
The deportment of Mary on this trying emergency exhibited somewhat of the dignity, but more of the spirit and adroitness, for which she has been famed. She justified her negotiations, or intrigues, with foreign princes, on the ground of her inalienable right to employ all the means within her power for the recovery of that liberty of which she had been cruelly and unjustly deprived. With great effrontery she persisted in denying that she had ever entertained with Babington any correspondence whatever; and she urged that his pretending to receive, or having in fact received, letters written in her cipher, was no conclusive proof against her; since it was the same which she used in her French correspondence, and might have fallen into other hands. But finding herself hard pressed by evidence on this part of the subject, she afterwards hazarded a rash attempt to fix on Walsingham the imputation of having suborned witnesses and forged letters for her destruction. The aged minister, greatly moved by this attack upon his character, immediately rose and asserted his innocence in a manner so solemn, and with such circumstantial corroboration, as compelled her to retract the accusation with an apology.
On some mention of the earl of Arundel and lord William Howard his brother, which occurred in the intercepted letters, she sighed, and exclaimed with a feeling which did her honor, "Alas, what has not the noble house of Howard suffered for my sake!"
On the whole, her presence of mind was remarkable; though the quick sensibilities of her nature could not be withheld from breaking out at times, either in vehement sallies of anger or long fits of weeping, as the sense of past and present injuries, or of her forlorn and afflicted state and the perils and sufferings which still menaced her, rose by turns upon her agitated and affrighted mind.