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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. 251