Stand with me in fancy in the little chapel at Hinton, and recall some of the strange scenes beheld by that marble face.
Think of the sunny August morning in 1586, when Sir Amyas persuaded the unconscious queen to ride out nine miles to Tixall and kill a buck in Sir Walter Aston’s park. Mary is in high spirits, perhaps her many plots have seared her conscience, and if she does know of the purposed assassination of Elizabeth, it seems to her no high price to pay for her liberty. Sir Amyas on the other hand knows that Babington’s conspiracy is discovered, that he has had to flee from the forest of St. John’s Wood, and that in a few moments Queen Mary will be arrested for high treason. Deeply as he detests her Popish wiles, a little sympathy must surely cross his harsh features when the armed men whom she hails as her deliverers arrest her as a traitor in the Queen’s name.
Again. The fortnight of neglect and hardship at Tixall is over, and the queen returns to Chartley with her doom upon her to find her treasures and secrets all torn open, and her favourite attendant Barbara Curle stricken by terror to a bed of sickness with the new-born baby unchristened at her side. You can fancy the furrowed forehead of Sir Amyas as he harshly refuses to christen the poor babe by the traitor’s name of Mary, and the queen, ever with an instinct for the drama of history, as she promptly lays the infant on her lap and baptises it Mary in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
The weeks fly past. Elizabeth will not sign the death-warrant, but has a letter written to Poulett in which she roundly complains of his want of love and zeal for not having found some way to shorten the life of the Scottish Queen. The letter reaches Sir Amyas at five in the evening, and before an hour has passed he has written the letter, which you may see to this day, to say in hot haste, “God forbid that I should make so fowle a shipwracke of my conscience or leave so great a blot to my poor posteritie to shed blood without law or warrant.” Sir Amyas had to put up with Elizabeth’s angry pacings to and fro, and her words that he was “a dainty and precise fellow who would promise much and perform nothing,” but her later letters to him suggest that in the end she was not sorry that the rough honest man had stood like a rock.