In the great hall of Fotheringhay, before the wondering eyes of the crowd, the executioner now held aloft the dead woman’s head, crying out as he did so: ‘God save the Queen.’ The lips still moved and continued to do so for a quarter of an hour after the death. But at this moment, weird and moving spectacle, the auburn tresses in his hand came apart from the skull and the head itself fell to the ground. It was seen that Mary Stuart’s own hair had in fact been quite grey, and very short at the time of her death: for her execution she had chosen to wear a wig. The spectators were stunned by the unexpected sight and remained silent. It was left to the dean of Peterborough to call out strongly, ‘So perish all the Queen’s enemies’, and for Kent, standing over the corpse, to echo: ‘Such be the end of all the Queen’s, and all the Gospel’s enemies.’ But Shrewsbury could not speak, and his face was wet with tears.
It was now the time for the executioners to strip the body of its remaining adornments before handing it over to the embalmers. But at this point a strange and pathetic memorial to that devotion which Mary Stuart had always aroused in those who knew her intimately was discovered: her little lag dog, a Skye terrier, who had managed to accompany her into the hall under her long skirts, where her servants had been turned away, had now crept out from beneath her petticoat, and in its distress had stationed itself piteously beneath the severed head and the shoulders of the body. Nor would it be coaxed away, but steadfastly and uncomprehendingly clung to the solitary thing it could find in the hall which still reminded it of its dead mistress. To all others save this poor animal, the sad corpse lying now so still on the floor of the stage, in its red clothes against which the blood stains scarcely showed, with its face now sunken to that of an old woman in the harsh disguise of death, bore little resemblance to her whom they had known only a short while before as Mary Queen of Scots. The spirit had fled the body. The chain was loosed to let the captive go.
At Fotheringhay now it was as if a murder had taken place. The weeping women in the hall were pushed away and locked in their rooms. The castle gates were locked, so that no one could leave and break the news to the outside world. The body was lain unceremoniously in the presence chamber, and even, so Brantôme heard from Mary’s distraught women who had peeped through a crack in the door, wrapped in the coarse woollen covering of her own billiard table. The blood-stained block was burnt. Every other particle of clothing or object of devotion which might be associated with the queen of Scots was burnt, scoured or washed, so that not a trace of her blood might remain to create a holy relic to inspire devotion in years to come. The little dog was washed and washed again, although he subsequently refused to eat, and so pined away. The remaining rosary which Jane Kennedy had not managed to rescue and which the queen had worn was burnt. Even the executioners were not allowed to enjoy the benefits of the perquisites for which they had fought, since the custodians confiscated them, and replaced them with money.* At about four o’clock in the afternoon the body was further stripped and the organs including the heart were removed and handed to the sheriff, who with the fear of creating relics ever in his mind, had them buried secretly deep within the castle of Fotheringhay. The exact spot was never revealed. The physician from Stamford examined the body before he embalmed it with the help of two surgeons: he found the heart sound, and the health of the body itself, and the other organs apart from a slight quantity of water, not so much impaired as to justify Cecil’s prognosis that the queen would have died anyway. The body was then wrapped in a wax winding-sheet and incarcerated in a heavy lead coffin, on Walsingham’s explicit orders.
Only Shrewsbury’s eldest son, Lord Talbot, was allowed to gallop forth from the castle at about one o’clock, hard towards London, to break the news of what had taken place that morning to Elizabeth. He reached the capital next morning at nine. The queen was at Greenwich and had been out riding early; on her return she held a conversation with the Portuguese pretender. When she was told the news, according to Camden, she received it at first with great indignation, and then with terrible distress: ‘her countenance changed, her words faltered, and with excessive sorrow she was in a manner astonished, insomuch as she gave herself over to grief, putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears’.31 In the meantime, before grief could overcome her altogether, she turned like an angry snake on the secretary Davison and had him thrown into prison for daring to use the warrant for the execution which she herself had signed. Elizabeth now maintained that she had only signed the warrant ‘for safety’s sake’ and had merely given it to Davison to keep, not to use. Her Council were cross-examined as though they were criminals, and Davison impeached before the Star Chamber. Further ostentatious manifestations of her displeasure might have followed, had not Cecil himself felt obliged to remonstrate with Elizabeth. He pointed out that such theatricals even if they salved her own conscience would cut little ice with the outside world, when it was known that Davison had both her Commission and her seal at his disposal. On the other hand, the papists and the queen’s enemies might all too easily be encouraged, if it was suggested that the queen of Scots had been killed unlawfully. In the end Davison, the scapegoat, underwent a token period of imprisonment and had a fine of £10,000 imposed on him; the other members of the Council went free. Unlike its queen London itself suffered from no such doubts: the bells were rung, fires were lighted in the streets and there was much merry-making and banqueting to celebrate the death of her whom they had been trained to regard as a public enemy. Some bold spirits even asked the French ambassador to give them some wood for their bonfires, and when he indignantly refused, lit an enormous blaze in the street in front of his house.
But at Fotheringhay itself nothing was changed. It was as though the castle, cut off from the rest of the world, had fallen asleep for a thousand years under an enchantment, as a result of the dolorous stroke which had there slain Mary Queen of Scots. The queen’s servants were permitted to have one Requiem Mass said by de Préau the morning after her death, but otherwise everything went on as before. Her attendants were still kept in prison within the castle, in conditions which were harsher than ever; nor were any of them allowed to return to their native lands of France and Scotland as Mary had so urgently stipulated at the last. Sir Amyas Paulet, made a knight of the Garter in April for his pains, was still in charge of arrangements at Fotheringhay, and continued to complain over the excessive expenses of his prisoners’ diet.32 The queen’s farewell letters to the Pope remained unposted and undelivered, lingering in the hands of her household. Spring turned to summer. The snowdrops which had scattered the green meadows round the River Nene on the day of her death gave place to purple thistles, sometimes romantically called Queen Mary’s tears. Still the body of the dead queen, embalmed and wrapped in its heavy lead coffin, was given no burial, but remained walled up within the precincts of the castle where she had died.
* Dr D. H. Willson, in his biography of James I, thinks it not impossible that Stewart had secret instructions over Gray’s head on the subject; in spite of James’s publicly expressed anger at Stewart’s statements, Stewart was allowed to return to Scotland with impunity.6
* A more rational explanation might be that the mysterious fire was produced by a comet. In Elizabethan England, comets were traditionally associated with the deaths of famous people, or as Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar: ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the deaths of princes.’15
* Afterward Beale believed that this mission had fatally blighted his career: in 1599 he attributed his failure to find advancement ‘for that my name was made odious to the whole world for conveying down the Commission for the execution of the Scottish Queen’.
* In fact, so far as can be made out from divergent accounts, the queen did not die at 8 a.m., but later.
* These objects did not appear in the later inventories as Paulet reported: ‘They have nothing to show for these things from their mistress in writing … all the smaller thin
gs were delivered by her own hands.’ It seems, from the subsequent history of some of these mementoes, that in certain instances they were entrusted to servants still in attendance at Fotheringhay to be handed on to others who had left, or been debarred from the queen’s service, at the end.
* It is notable that in his extremely detailed account of the queen’s last hours, Bourgoing does not mention that she paused to compose or extemporize the Latin prayer O Domine Deus! speravi in te traditionally attributed to her, on the eve of her execution.
* An adagio piece of music marked as having been played at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots was reproduced by George Robert Gleig in his Family History of England (1836); he related that ‘a fortunate accident’ had thrown a copy of it in his way. But as the contemporary sketch of the scene within the great hall itself does not illustrate musicians, and none of the contemporary accounts mentions the fact that there was music, the piece, if authentic, must presumably have been played before the queen’s appearance.29
* But it was a dark red, a sort of crimson-brown, not scarlet as is sometimes suggested.30
* This gold rosary was intended for Mary’s friend Anne Dacres, wife of Philip, earl of Arundel, to whom it was subsequently delivered by Jane Kennedy; it is now in the possession of the earl of Arundel’s descendant, the 16th duke of Norfolk.
* These rigorous precautions on the part of the English government, carried out savagely, cast a doubtful light on the many so-called relics of Mary Stuart which are said to date from her execution.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Epilogue: The Theatre of the World
‘Remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’
Mary Queen of Scots before her judges, October 1586
As the gates of Fotheringhay were locked, so were the English ports closed immediately after the death of the queen of Scots. It was three weeks before the French ambassador Châteauneuf could write back to his master in Paris with tidings of the calamity. The news of the death of Mary Stuart, their own queen dowager, was received in France with national and solemn mourning. On 12th March a Requiem Mass was held in the black-draped cathedral of Notre Dame; the whole court was present including King Henry III, the Queen Mother Catherine, others who had known Mary well such as her uncle René of Elboeuf, and the younger generation of Guises. The preacher was Renaud de Beaune, archbishop of Bourges, a man old enough to recall in poignant language that day nearly thirty years before when Mary had been married in that self-same cathedral to the dauphin of France:* ‘Many of us saw in the place where we are now assembled to deplore her, this Queen on the day of her bridal, arrayed in her regal trappings, so covered in jewels that the sun himself shone not more brightly, so beautiful, so charming withal as never woman was. These walls were then hung with cloth of gold and precious tapestry; every space was filled with thrones and seats, crowded with princes and princesses, who came from all parts to share in the rejoicing. The palace was overflowing with magnificence, splendid fêtes and masques; the streets with jousts and tourneys. In short it seemed as if our age had succeeded that day in surpassing the pomp of all past centuries combined. A little time has flowed on and it is all vanished like a cloud. Who would have believed that such a change could have befallen her who appeared then so triumphant, and that we should have seen her a prisoner who had restored prisoners to liberty; in poverty who was accustomed to give so liberally to others; treated with contumely by those on whom she had conferred honours; and finally, the axe of a base executioner mangling the form of her who was doubly a Queen; that form which honoured the nuptial bed of a sovereign of France, falling dishonoured on a scaffold, and that beauty which had been one of the wonders of the world, faded in a dreary prison, and at last effaced by a piteous death. This place, where she was surrounded with splendour, is now hung with black for her. Instead of nuptial torches we have funereal tapers; in the place of songs of joy, we have sighs and groans; for clarions and hautboys, the tolling of the sad and dismal bell. Oh God, what a change! Oh vanity of human greatness, shall we never be convinced of your deceitfulness.…’1
Despite the vivid sorrow of the French nation and in spite of Mary’s own desire to be buried in France, either at St Denis or Rheims, her wishes in this respect were never met. Elizabeth could scarcely plead ignorance of her request, since it had been expressed most passionately in Mary’s letter of 15th December, the letter which Paulet had finally forwarded. However, in other respects, Mary’s last wishes were being met. By 7th March Mendoza, who was in Paris, was able to spread the tale of her heroic death to Spain for, despite all the English precautions, news of her bravery during the last hours had leaked out. Not only her courage but even her sanctity was discussed. Pierre l’Estoile recorded in his Journal that Paris was the scene of mass demonstrations, as well as sermons that virtually canonized Mary as a saint who had died in the cause of the Catholic faith.2 Among those who hailed her death as a form of martyrdom in the cause of the faith was the youthful Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, who wrote a lyrical elegy on the subject referring to her ‘darkened sorrows turned to glorious joy’. The woman who deliberately chose the story of the good thief to be read aloud to her on the eve of her death because she considered herself in all humility to be a great sinner would have viewed this popular canonization with detachment; on the other hand Mary would undoubtedly have been pleased at the way the Catholic League and Philip II were galvanized by her death as by a Catholic rallying-cry; even the French king, who generally viewed the Guise-inspired Catholic League with suspicion, gave vent to some newly bellicose sentiments towards the Protestants, on receiving the news of Mary’s death.
The grief of the French court was genuine enough in its personal aspects. That of the Scottish court was more difficult to estimate, and contemporary accounts differ radically in their reports of how James received the news of his mother’s execution. According to one story, he shammed sorrow in public, but observed to his courtiers gleefully in secret: ‘Now I am sole King.’3 Archibald Douglas on the other hand was told that the ‘King moved never his countenance at the rehearsal [telling] of his mother’s execution, nor leaves not his pastimes more than of before.’4 Still other reports spoke of his evident grief, how he became very sad and pensive when the intelligence reached him, and went to bed without eating. Whatever James’s outward show of lamentation, it is difficult to believe that the news of his mother’s death aroused at long last the filial passion of which he had shown so little evidence during her life. His conduct subsequently showed that so long as the English crown still dangled within his reach, he was prepared to swallow the insult to his family and his nation. The Scottish people as a whole showed more spirit than their king, and seemed to evince both humiliation and anger at the killing of one who had once sat on the throne of Scotland. When James ordered the Scottish court into mourning as a formal gesture, according to one tradition5 the earl of Sinclair appeared before him dressed in steel armour in place of black. When James asked him whether he had not seen the general order for mourning, Sinclair replied sternly: ‘This is the proper mourning for the Queen of Scotland.’ Prayers were said for the defunct queen in a form specially prescribed by the Council. Some of Mary’s former subjects discussed plans for reprisals. One of Cecil’s spies heard that the Hamiltons had proposed to burn Newcastle with a levy of 5000 men, if only James would match their force with an equivalent army. Walsingham was also advised that there were posters in the streets against England and James, and a general clamour for war. To indicate the prevailing atmosphere, his agent in Scotland sent him a piece of hemp tied like a halter and the accompanying jingle, aimed by a patriot at Elizabeth:
To Jezabel that English whore
Receive this Scottish chain
A presage of her great malheur
For murdering our Queen.
James did make the gesture of breaking off formal communications with England. Sir Robert Carey was sent north by Elizabet
h with the unenviable mission of explaining that his mistress had not authorized the execution personally and had been dumbfounded and grief-stricken when it was carried out. James refused at first to receive him. But by the end of February Gray was writing to Douglas in London, indicating that James would now be susceptible to further arguments from Elizabeth and that old Latin tag – necesse est unum mori pro populo; it is necessary for one person to die for the sake of the people – might perhaps be brought into play.6 Finally James consented to listen to Carey’s arguments, and accepted Elizabeth’s explanation of her own ‘unspotted’ part in the execution. By mid-March the English were confident that James would not fight to avenge his mother’s death. The Anglo-Scottish alliance remained unsevered by the axe of Fotheringhay.
It was, however, in deference to James’s feelings, or the sort of appropriate feelings he might be supposed to cherish for his mother, that the subject of the burial of the queen of Scots was raised again in the summer after her death. Walsingham had specified in his instructions that the coffin should be bestowed ‘by night’ on an upper shelf of the local Fotheringhay church – and Cecil afterwards underlined the word upper in his own hand.7 But in fact the coffin had not been accorded even this obscure resting-place, but remained quite unburied, like the corpse of Achilles, within Fotheringhay itself. Now it was planned to give the coffin an honourable burial at Peterborough Cathedral. So far as anything explained this curious ceremony the line adopted seemed to be that Mary had been a revered dowager queen of Scotland who happened to die in England of natural causes. Under the auspices of Garter King of Arms, heralds, nobles and mourners were imported from London to give the occasion the right degree of solemnity due to the mother of the king of Scotland.8 But no Scots were present, and although the cathedral was hung with black paid for by the master of the wardrobe, and the heraldic details of the decoration worked out with care – there were the royal arms of Scotland, for example, as well as those of Mary’s first two husbands Francis II and Darnley (James’s father) – neither in the escutcheons nor in the service was there any reference to her third husband Bothwell, to the events leading to her imprisonment in England, let alone the manner of her death.