Jérôme Pasquier (courtier)
Jérôme Pasquier (1560–1605) was a French servant of Mary, Queen of Scots, involved in writing and deciphering coded letters.
[6] Pasquier married Madeleine Champhoun, a daughter of Mary's French administrator Jean Champhuon, sieur du Ruisseau and Claude Nau's sister Claire.
On 20 March 1586, at Chartley, Pasquier and Bastian Pagez witnessed a document in which Jacques Gervais, Mary's surgeon, placed his affairs in the hands du Ruisseau.
[18] In June 1586, Nau sent Pasquier to Amias Paulet to complain that Mary's letters ought to be sent when they were ready and not depend on the opportunity of a bearer to take them.
[19] In August 1571, before Pasquier joined her service, Mary mentioned her practice of writing cipher in a letter to the Archbishop of Glasgow.
[24] This was not unprecedented, ten years before, in February 1575, a French diplomat heard that one of Mary's cipher clerks or messengers, a young man, had been taken to the Tower of London.
[25] Pasquier was questioned by Owen Hopton, Edward Barker, and the code expert Thomas Phelippes twice in September 1586.
[28] He did remember encoding a letter in cipher for Mary in 1584 to send to the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau asking him to negotiate a pardon for Francis Throckmorton after his treason trial.
[29] William Cecil wrote to Christopher Hatton discussing the idea of threatening Nau, Curle, and Pasquier so they would confirm Mary's crime and ensure their own escape.
[33] Walsingham sent news to the Scottish Court in September 1586 that Mary was to be moved to Fotheringhay, and that "the matters whereof she is guilty are already so plain and manifest (being also confessed by her two secretaries), as it is thought, they shall required no long debating".
He related that he ciphered and deciphered letters, including to the Archbishop of Glasgow, to Albert Fontenay, Thomas Morgan, and to the French ambassadors in London, Castelnau and Châteauneuf.
He knew little about the origins of the "Enterprise", a plan for Mary's Spanish or French allies to invade England and depose Elizabeth, but said that it was indefinitely postponed by changing political circumstances.
[35] He thought that Mary was averse to plans to invade England, considering that she might have to renounce her claim to the throne in favour of her son James VI.
[41] Leo Hicks highlighted details in Pasquier's 1586 confessions which appear to shed light on Mary's policy, particularly noting her opposition to French invasion schemes which might prejudice her son's inheritance of the English crown.
[44][45] According to Adam Blackwood, who was informed by the account of Dominique Bourgoing,[46] Mary came to distrust Pasquier and Nau, assuming that they had betrayed her.
