Note 489 — Chapter XIII · 1581-1584

Many of her compromising letters to Mendoza were intercepted and read. Mary herself, writing to Elizabeth from Tutbury (29th September 1584), thanking her for her change of lodging, protests against the stoppage of her correspondence with the French Ambassador Castelnau. “All that I write,” she says, “passes through the hands of your people, who see, read, examine, and keep back in order to point out to me any fault if they find in it anything offensive or injurious to you” (Harl. MSS., 4651). This was more true than Mary thought when she wrote it, for she had no idea that some of her more compromising letters to the Spaniards were read. A letter from Mary to Sir Francis Englefield, Philip’s English Secretary (9th October 1584), contains the following dangerous words: “Of the treaty between the Queen of England and me I may neither hope nor look for good issue. Whatsoever shall come of me, by whatsoever change of my state and condition, let the execution of the great plot go forward without any respect of peril or danger to me.” And she continues by saying that the plan (i.e. the rising and invasion) must take place at latest next spring or the cause will be ruined.