The Bardon papers : documents relating to the imprisonment & trial of Mary Queen of Scots / edited for the Royal Historical Society by Conyers Read ; with a prefatory note by Charles Cotton.

Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Bardon papers : documents relating to the imprisonment & trial of Mary Queen of Scots / edited for the Royal Historical Society by Conyers Read ; with a prefatory note by Charles Cotton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/196
    persistent enemy who ought to be rendered innocuous if possible. These two points of view were practically irreconcilable. It cannot be said that Elizabeth tried to reconcile them. But she passed with surprising facility from one to her other, striking covert blows at Mary when she was strong and going to her assistance when she was weak. Years afterwards Mary charged her with giving aid and comfort to the Scottish rebels.1 The charge was just, but she could reply with equal justice that she had been Mary’s good friend at a time when her rebellious subjects had all but destroyed her.2 Those who maintain that Elizabeth’s vacillating attitude in this regard constituted a definite well calculated policy must admit that it was a very tortuous one and that it deceived her councillors as well as her enemies. The probabilities are that this so-called policy was nothing more than the expression of a certain eccentricity in her own temperament. She had a provoking way of seeing the advantages of one course of action the moment she had decided upon the one diametrically opposed. Never perhaps in the whole course of her reign did she put her hand resolutely to the plough and follow it through to the end of the furrow. She preferred to stop every little while and to examine the soil she had turned and then, as like as not, to retrace her steps and try her best to make all smooth again. Fortunately her most trusted councillors were men of another stamp, but they found the problems which they were called upon to solve, and especially the problem of Mary Stuart, complicated a hundredfold by the habitual indecision of their queen. For something more than seven years Mary maintained a preca- rious position as Queen of Scotland. It will not be necessary to follow in detail the course of her troubled reign. Unlike her rival she was never from the beginning in sympathy with the aspirations of the sturdiest elements among her own people, and they were never deceived into believing that she was. Out of such a condition of affairs trouble was bound to develop, and it did develop in a 1 Cf. Document III, p. 9. 3 Cf. Document IV, p. 12.