Mary was held a prisoner in England for seventeen years. In 1585 she was
accused of favoring Anthony Babington's plot against the life of
Elizabeth, her captor. Anthony Babington, in his boyhood a ward of
Shrewsbury, resident in the household at Sheffield castle, and thus
subjected to the charm before which so many victims had already fallen,
was now induced to undertake the deliverance of the Queen of Scots by
the murder of the Queen of England. It is maintained by those admirers
of Mary who assume her to have been an almost absolute imbecile, gifted
with the power of imposing herself on the world as a woman of
unsurpassed ability, that, while cognizant of the plot for her
deliverance by English rebels and an invading army of foreign
auxiliaries, she might have been innocently unconscious that this
conspiracy involved the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth. In the
conduct and detection of her correspondence with Babington, traitor was
played off against traitor, and spies were utilized against assassins,
with as little scruple as could be required or expected in the diplomacy
of the time.
As in the case of the casket letters, it is alleged that forgery was
employed to interpolate sufficient evidence of Mary's complicity in a
design of which it is thought credible that she was kept in ignorance by
the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her
service--that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a
would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen
and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as
inevitable and inseparable from the general design.
Pages:
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140