Twelve days after the delivery of this speech, her majesty sent a message to both houses, entreating that her parliament would carefully reconsider the matter, and endeavour to hit upon some device by which the life of the queen of Scots might be rendered consistent with her own safety and that of the country. Her faithful parliament, however, soon after acquainted her, that with their utmost diligence they had found it impracticable to form any satisfactory plan of the kind she desired; and the speakers of the two houses ended a long representation of the mischiefs to be expected from any arrangement by which Mary would be suffered to continue in life, with a most earnest and humble petition, that her majesty would not longer deny to the united wishes and entreaties of all England, what it would be iniquitous to refuse to the meanest individual; the execution of justice.
Elizabeth, after pronouncing a second long harangue designed to display her own clemency, to upbraid the malice of her libellers, and to refute the suspicion, which her conscience no doubt helped her to anticipate, that all this irresolution was but feigned, and that the decisions of the two houses were influenced by a secret acquaintance with her wishes,—again dismissed their petitions without any positive answer. Soon after, however, she permitted herself to authorize the proclamation of the sentence, and sent lord Buckhurst, and Beal clerk of the council, to announce it to Mary herself.
During the whole of this time, the kings of France and of Scotland were interceding by their ambassadors for the pardon of the illustrious prisoner. How the representations of Henry III. were received, we do not find minutely recorded; but Elizabeth knew that they might be safely disregarded: that monarch was himself too much a sufferer by the arrogance and ambition of the house of Guise, to be very strenuous in his friendship towards any one so nearly connected with it; and it is even said that, while a sense of decorum extorted from him in public some energetic expressions of the interest taken by him in the fate of a sister-in-law and queen-dowager of France, a sentiment of regard for Elizabeth, his friend and ally, prompted him to counsel her, through a secret agent, to execute the sentence with the least possible delay. Of the treatment experienced by the master of Gray, the envoy of James, we gain some particulars from an original memorial drawn up by himself.
He appears to have reached Ware on December 24th, whence he sent to desire Keith and Douglas, the resident Scotch ambassadors, to announce to the queen his approach; and she voluntarily promised that the life of Mary should be spared till his proposals were heard. His reception in London was somewhat ungracious;—no one was sent to welcome or convoy him, and it was ten days before he and sir Robert Melvil his coadjutor were admitted to an audience. Elizabeth's first address to them was, "A thing long looked for should be welcome when it comes; I would now see your master's offers." Gray desired first to be assured that the cause for which those offers were made was "still extant;" that is, that the life of Mary was still safe, and should be so till their mission had been heard. She answered, "I think it be extant yet, but I will not promise for an hour." They then brought forward certain proposals, not here recited, which she rejected with contempt; and calling in Leicester, the lord-admiral, and Hatton, "very despitefully" repeated them in hearing of them all. Gray then propounded his last offer:—that the queen of Scots should resign all her claims upon the English succession to her son, by which means the hopes of the papists would, as he said, be cut off. The terms in which this overture was made Elizabeth affected not to understand; Leicester explained their meaning to be, that the king of Scots should be put in his mother's place. "Is it so?" the queen answered; "then I put myself in a worse case than before:—By God's passion, that were to cut my own throat; and for a duchy or an earldom to yourself, you, or such as you, would cause some of your desperate knaves to kill me. No, by God, he shall never be in that place!" Gray answered, "He craves nothing of your majesty, but only of his mother." "That," said Leicester, "were to make him party (rival or adversary) to the queen my mistress." "He will be far more party," replied Gray, "if he be in her place through her death." Her majesty exclaimed, that she should not have a worse in his mother's place, and added; "Tell your king what good I have done for him in holding the crown on his head since he was born, and that I mind (intend) to keep the league that now stands between us, and if he break it, it shall be a double fault." With this speech she would have left them; but they persisted in arguing the matter further, though in vain. Gray then requested that Mary's life might be spared for fifteen days; the queen refused: sir Robert Melvil begged for only eight days; she said not for an hour, and so quitted them.
After this, the Scotch ambassadors assumed a tone of menace: but the perfidious Gray secretly fortified Elizabeth's resolution with the proverb, "The dead cannot bite;" and undertook soon to pacify, in any event, the anger of his master, whose minion he at this time was.
No sooner had Elizabeth silenced with this show of inflexibility all the pleadings or menaces by which others had attempted to divert her from her fatal aim, than she began, as in the affair of the French marriage, to feel her own resolution waver. It appears unquestionable that to affected delays a real hesitation succeeded. When her pride was no longer irritated by opposition, she had leisure to survey the meditated deed in every light; and as it rose upon her view in all its native deformity, anxious fears for her own fame and credit, yet untainted by any crime, and perhaps genuine scruples of conscience, forcibly assailed her resolution. But her ministers, deeply sensible that both she and they had already gone too far to recede with reputation or with safety, encountered her growing reluctance with a proportional increase in the vehemence of their clamors for what they called, and perhaps thought, justice. All the hazards to which her excess of clemency might be imagined to expose her, were conjured up in the most alarming forms to repel her scruples. A plot for her assassination was disclosed, to which the French ambassador was ascertained to have been privy;—rumors were raised of invasions and insurrections; and it may be suspected that the queen, really alarmed in the first instance by the representations of her council, voluntarily contributed afterwards to keep up these delusions for the sake of terrifying the minds of men into an approval of the deed of blood.
At length, on February 1st 1587, her majesty ordered secretary Davison to bring her the warrant, which had remained ready drawn in his hands for some weeks; and having signed it, she told him to get it sealed with the great seal, and in his way to call on Walsingham and tell him what she had done; "though," she added smiling, "I fear he will die of grief when he hears of it;"—this minister being then sick. Davison obeyed her directions, and the warrant was sealed. The next day he received a message from her, purporting that he should forbear to carry the warrant to the lord keeper till further orders. Surprised and perplexed, he immediately waited upon her to receive her further directions; when she chid him for the haste he had used in this matter, and talked in a fluctuating and undetermined manner respecting it which greatly alarmed him. On leaving the queen, he immediately communicated the circumstances to Burleigh and Hatton; and thinking it safest for himself to rid his hands of the warrant, he delivered it up to Burleigh, by whom it had been drawn and from whom he had at first received it. A council was now called, consisting of such of the ministers as either the queen herself or Davison had made acquainted with the signing of the warrant; and it was proposed that, without any further communication with her majesty, it should be sent down for immediate execution to the four earls to whom it was directed.
Davison appears to have expressed some fears that he should be made to bear the blame of this step; but all his fellow-councillors then present joined to assure him that they would share the responsibility: it was also said, that her majesty had desired of several that she might not be troubled respecting any of the particulars of the last dismal scene; consequently it was impossible that she could complain of their proceeding without her privity. By these arguments Davison was seduced to give his concurrence; and Beal, a person noted for the vehemence of his attachment to the protestant cause and to the title of the countess of Hertford, was dispatched with the instrument; in obedience to which Mary underwent the fatal stroke on February 8th.
The news of this event was received by Elizabeth with the most extraordinary demonstrations of astonishment, grief, and anger. Her countenance changed, her voice faltered, and she remained for some moments fixed and motionless; a violent burst of tears and lamentations succeeded, with which she mingled expressions of rage against her whole council. They had committed, she said, a crime never to be forgiven; they had put to death without her knowledge her dear kinswoman and sister, against whom they well knew that it was her fixed resolution never to proceed to this fatal extremity. She put on deep mourning, kept herself retired among her ladies abandoned to sighs and tears, and drove from her presence with the most furious reproaches such of her ministers as ventured to approach her. She caused several of the councillors to be examined as to the share which they had taken in this transaction. Burleigh was of the number; and against him she expressed herself with such peculiar bitterness that he gave himself up for lost, and begged permission to retire with the loss of all his employments. This resignation was not accepted; and after a considerable interval, during which this great minister deprecated the wrath of his sovereign in letters of penitence and submission worthy only of an Oriental slave, she condescended to be reconciled to a man whose services she felt to be indispensable.
But the manes of Mary, or the indignation of her son, could not be appeased, it seems, without a sacrifice; and a fit victim was at hand. From some words dropped by lord Burleigh on his examination, it had appeared that it was the declaration of Davison respecting the sentiments of the queen, as expressed to himself, which had finally decided the council to send down the warrant; and on this ground proceedings were instituted against the unfortunate secretary. He was stripped of his office, sent to the Tower in spite of the warm and honest remonstrances of Burleigh, and after several examinations subjected to a process in the Star-chamber for a twofold contempt. First, in revealing her majesty's counsels to others of her ministers;—secondly, in giving up to them an instrument which she had committed to him in special trust and secrecy, to be kept in case of any sudden emergency which might require its use.