On the 14th, two days afterwards, the tribunal sat in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle, and Mary, almost crippled with rheumatism, painfully hobbled to her place, supported by her Steward, Sir Andrew Melvil. On the right of the Lord Chancellor sat Lord Burghley. That the proceedings against Mary, in which he had from the first taken an active part, were in his opinion necessary for the safety of England, is clear from his many letters upon the subject; but it is equally evident that if he could decently have avoided personal identification with them he would have been better pleased. His letters to Popham, the Attorney-General, show that he wished to be absent from the trial; but as he wrote at the time to Sir Edward Stafford, the English Ambassador in France, “I was never more toiled than I have been of late, and yet am, with services that here do multiply daily; and whosoever scapeth I am never spared. God give me grace.” Much of the obloquy that has been unjustly cast upon him in the matter of Mary Stuart arises from his inveterate habit of putting everything in writing, which other men did not do. For instance, the draft of the whole case, or, as he puts it, “the indignities and wrongs done and offered by the Queen of Scots to the Queen,” is in his handwriting,[523] and the letters to the Queen detailing the progress of events at Fotheringay are sent from him, whilst Elizabeth’s instructions through Davison are all addressed to Walsingham and Burghley. But it must be remembered that he was the Queen’s most trusted and experienced Councillor, and the existence of records written by or to him does not show that he was more eager than the rest for the sacrifice of the Scottish Queen. Mary defended herself with consummate ability before a tribunal almost entirely prejudiced against her. She was deprived of legal aid, without her papers, and in ill health; and, according to modern notions, the procedure against her was unjust in the extreme. Once she turned upon Walsingham and denounced him as the contriver of her ruin, but soon regained her composure; and in her argument with Burghley, with respect to the avowals of Babington and her Secretaries, reached a point of touching eloquence which might have moved the hearts, though it did not convince the intellects, of her august judges.[524] But her condemnation was a foregone conclusion; and although the sentence was not pronounced until the return of the Commission to Westminster (October 25), Mary left the hall of Fotheringay practically a condemned felon on the 15th.