As Mary passed the table at which were seated the lawyers, she also addressed them: "Gentlemen," said she, with a smile, "you have shown little mercy in the exercise of your charge, and have treated me somewhat rudely, the more so as I am one who has little knowledge of the laws of quibbling; but may God pardon you for it, and keep me from having to do with you all again."
"The lawyers turned and smiled to each other, and Her Majesty did likewise."[42]
After their prisoner had withdrawn, the Commissioners were prepared to give sentence, but at the last moment Burleigh communicated to them Elizabeth's latest instructions, contained in a letter sent from Windsor on the 14th at midnight. In it Elizabeth desired the assembly, even in the event of the prisoner being found guilty, to suspend sentence until she herself should hear and consider their report.
The assembly therefore was prorogued for the space of ten days, and appointed to meet in the star-chamber at Westminster. The Commissioners (many of whom regretted this delay in passing sentence) lost no time in departing, the greater part of them returning to their houses in the neighbourhood until the 29th instant, when, as Bourgoing informs us, "it is said they returned to London to assist at Parliament, then assembling."
Thus terminated a trial which in legal history has probably no counterpart, and regarding which the following points especially strike us: the incompetence of the English tribunals, as then constituted, to judge an independent sovereign; the refusal of counsel to the prisoner, in violation of the laws of England, and in especial of the statutes of Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth; the absence of the witnesses, whose presence in face of the accused was essential to all just procedure; the forced position of Mary, not before independent and trustworthy judges, but before Commissioners carefully chosen beforehand, and who, combining the offices of judge and jury, united in endeavouring to nullify the defence.
At Fotheringay we find the prisoner standing alone before her judges. At Westminster the witnesses appear in the absence of the accused, while at neither is a single original document produced; copies, not of written letters, but pretended copies from ciphers were admitted and believed on the faith of men whose confessions were drawn from them by fear of torture or documents forged by Philipps. Such was the evidence by which Mary was tried and condemned.