POLITICAL HISTORY 



There is a letter from Mary dated from ' my prison at Tutbury, 

 October ist,' complaining of the severity shown to her servants, and that she 

 was not allowed to receive any news from Scotland or France : 



instead of which they have forbid me to go out, and have rifled my trunks, entering 

 my chamber with pistols, not without putting me in bodily fear, and accusing my people, 

 rifle them and place them under arrest. 233 



As soon as the rebellion was over Mary came back to Tutbury, 234 where, 

 to prevent her escape, among other precautions, the lock of her outer 

 chamber door was removed so that her movements might be watched more 

 closely. Next May she went to Chatsworth. In the beginning of 1585 the 

 ill-fated queen arrived again at Tutbury from Wingfield, most reluctantly, as 

 it was the most wretched of all her prisons in England, and when she arrived 

 she found her rooms had been unoccupied since her last stay. The place was 

 miserably furnished, the walls damp, doors and windows ill-fitting, and in a 

 letter written at the time Mary thus describes it : 



I am in a walled enclosure on the top of a hill, exposed to all the winds and in- 

 clemencies of heaven. Within the enclosure there is a very old hunting lodge, built of 

 timber and plaster cracked in all parts ; the said lodge, distant three fathoms or there- 

 abouts from the wall, and situated so low that the rampart of earth behind the wall is 

 on a level with the highest part of the building so that the sun can never shine upon it on 

 that side nor any fresh air come to it ... The only apartments that I have for my own 

 person consists of two little miserable rooms so very cold that but for the ramparts and 

 entrenchments of curtains and tapestry I have made it would not be possible for me to 

 stay in them. 



The garden for exercise was a potato ground ' fitter to keep pigs in than to 

 bear the name of a garden,' and it need hardly be said that the sanitary 

 arrangements were disgusting. 235 



The neighbouring gentry 238 lent her linen and bedding, otherwise she 

 would have fared ill, as she was now a martyr to rheumatism ; and little 

 pity could be expected from Sir Amyas Paulet, who was made her guardian 

 in April. 



Elizabeth apparently was not aware of the wretched condition of the 

 place, for when she heard of it she wrote expressing her anger at the persons 

 ' who had furnished Tutbury so basely, and thus given the Queen of Scots 

 such just cause of complaint against her." 



When at Tutbury Mary was visited by Nicholas White, who discreetly 

 advised that ' very few should have access to or conference with this lady, for 

 besides that she is a goodly personage, she hath without an alluring grace, 

 a pretty Scotch speech, and a searching wit clouded with mildness.' !S7 



At the end of the year she was removed to Chartley, avowedly in 

 answer to her own demands for a less rigorously unpleasant residence, but 

 really that Walsingham might trap her. 



Chartley was now in the ownership of the second Earl of Essex, then 

 a very young man, whose consent to Mary's imprisonment there was not 



233 Cal. of Scot. Pap. ii, 682. *" Ibid, iii, 41. 



235 Strickland, Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, ii, 161. 



>3il An order was sent to Thomas Gresley, sheriff of the county 7 Nov. 1 5 84, to convey the household 

 stuff of Lord Paget, who had lately been attainted, to Tutbury for the use of the Queen of Scots, but it was- 

 of indifferent quality, as the best had been sold ; Harwood (ed. 1844), Erdeswick, 532 ; and see Cal. S.P. 

 Dm. 1581-90, p. 226. Rep. on SaRibury MSS. (Hist. MSS. Com.), i, 400. 



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