CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose
It was no death to me but to my woe;
The bud was opened to let out the rose,
The chain was loosed to let the captive go.
From Decease, release, ode by Robert Southwell, SJ,
on the death of Mary Queen of Scots
When King James first heard the news of his mother’s arrest at Chartley, he contented himself with observing that she should ‘drink the ale she had brewed’ and in future be allowed to meddle with nothing except prayer and the service of God.1 Not only did he ostentatiously ignore the possibility that his mother might now be in danger of her life, but he also chose this moment to sound out Elizabeth on the question of a marriage between them, through the medium of Archibald Douglas. Elizabeth was now over fifty, thirty years senior to James, and, although James was evidently prepared to pardon the disparity in their ages most magnanimously if he could thus strengthen his claim to the English throne, Elizabeth herself showed no inclination towards this bizarre union.2 Nevertheless throughout the autumn James continued to maintain in public that he had no objections to his mother being imprisoned in the most rigorous manner in the world – let her be put in the Tower or some other ‘firm Manse’ – so long as her actual life was not forfeited. It was not until after the trial and death sentence that it was made clear to James by Archibald Douglas from London that he might shortly have to choose between his mother’s life and the continuation of the newly formed Anglo- Scottish alliance, which in turn involved his hopes of inheriting the English throne.
James’s dilemma in Scotland did not cause him the human anguish which Elizabeth in her reluctance to confirm the death sentence was undergoing in England. She told the French ambassador at the beginning of December that she had never shed so many tears over anything, not even at the deaths of her father, her brother Edward or her sister Mary, as at what she termed this ‘unfortunate affair’, and whether her grief was at her own indecision or at the prospect of shedding Mary’s blood, there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of her emotion.3 James, on the other hand, felt considerable perplexity as to what course to take, but no purely personal feelings; the chief concern of the Scottish mission to Elizabeth in November was to ensure that nothing would be done against Mary ‘to the prejudice of any title of the King’s’. In the meantime it was widely rumoured in Scotland that James feared to request any sort of favour from Elizabeth as regards Mary, lest he should lose the goodwill of the English queen, although Scottish public opinion was reacting most strongly to the idea that their former sovereign should be executed by a foreign country. As Gray wrote to Douglas on 23rd November, James would find it hard to keep the peace if her life were touched. ‘I never saw all the people so willing to concur in anything as in this. They that hated most her prosperity regret her adversity.’ James himself pointed out his invidious position to Elizabeth in language which made clear that it was fear of a national outcry which animated him, rather than some more personal emotion: ‘Guess ye in what strait my honour will be, this disaster being perfected,’ he wrote, ‘since before God I already scarce dare go abroad, for crying out of the whole people.’4
Despite these fears, the one sanction which James had it in his power to invoke to save his mother’s life – and which in the opinion of at least one historian would have effectively preserved her from execution at English hands5 – was never made. James hovered over the subject of the death sentence with a series of dire but meaningless threats. At no point did he say that he would break the Anglo-Scottish league if his mother’s death was brought about by England, although Elizabeth anxiously inquired of his ambassadors whether that was in fact his intention. His fulminations and his embassy were both intended to save his face in Scotland; they were not intended to save his mother’s life in England. Nor did all his emissaries agree with Gray in expressing their disgust at the idea of the execution: Sir Alexander Stewart expressed the damaging view that James would somehow manage to digest his mother’s death.* Once it became apparent to the English that despite all James’s protests the league was to be considered inviolable whatever action they took against Mary, the date of the Scottish queen’s death drew appreciably nearer.
The protests made by the French were more authentically passionate, but proved in the end equally ineffective: a special ambassador, de Bellievre, was sent by King Henry III to plead with Elizabeth who was answered, in Cecil’s words, ‘that if the French King understood her Majesty’s peril, if he loveth her as he pretendeth, he would not press her Majesty to hazard her life’. The resident French ambassador, Châteauneuf, continued to make valiant efforts to save Mary, but in January his attempts were sharply curtailed by the fortunate discovery by Walsingham of yet another plot against Elizabeth’s life. This providential coincidence led to Châteauneuf’s house arrest, and rendered him impotent to help Mary further during the crucial weeks in the new year; it also aroused a wave of anti-French feeling in England – although the plot itself was highly dubious in origins, and seems to have been largely concocted by Walsingham to produce these precise effects.7 In December Cecil had drawn up in his own handwriting a list of reasons against the execution of the queen of Scots. Among the reasons cited was the cogent argument Sanguis sanguinem procreat – blood breeds blood – the supposition that Mary’s health was in any case so afflicted that she might die naturally at any moment, and the fact that the king of France had promised to go surety in the future for the end of the attempts on Elizabeth’s life.8 By January, it appeared that as Mary’s foreign champions had either retired or were being swept from the lists, the fact that blood might breed blood was no longer so important.
There was certainly to be no question of the captive eluding her fate: at Paulet’s request the garrison at Fotheringhay was strengthened by seventy foot-soldiers and fifty bowmen. In November Paulet had been joined in his charge by Sir Drue Drury. In mid-December Mary sent for both her custodians, and asked them to dispatch on her behalf a farewell letter to Elizabeth. Dramatically, Mary wiped her cheeks with both sheets, in order to show that the leaves were not poisoned. She then sealed the letter with Spanish wax and closed it with white silk.9 Mary’s main points to Elizabeth concerned firstly the disposal of her body after death – she was anxious that her servants should be allowed to convey it to France, rather than Scotland, where the Protestant burial rites would constitute a profanation by her standards; secondly she expressed her fears of the ‘secret tyrannies’ of those whom Elizabeth had placed around her, which she dreaded would result in her secret assassination; thirdly Mary asked to be allowed to send a jewel and last farewell to her son James; finally Mary raised once more the vexed question of the royal dais. She concluded on a magisterial note of warning to Elizabeth: ‘Do not accuse me of presumption if, on the eve of leaving this world and preparing myself for a better one, I remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge, as well as those that are sent before. …’ Mary signed the letter: ‘Your sister and cousin, wrongfully imprisoned.’10
Despite the innocuous character of Mary’s last requests, Paulet and Drury did not immediately dispatch this missive, not so much out of fear of Elizabeth’s anger, as out of dread that its mildness might move the English queen to clemency, and further delay the execution of justice. Paulet confided to Davison, the secretary of the Council, that as they were strongly hoping the sentence would be carried out before Christmas, it was planned that the letter should arrive a few days afterwards, when the queen of Scots would be already dead and it would be too late for Elizabeth to exercise mercy. In Paulet’s opinion, there were many pressing reasons why the sentence should be carried out as fast as possible, not the least among them being the return of Mary’s priest (or almoner as she always termed him) de Préeau.11
On de Préau’s arrival, Paulet took the precaution of searching his papers, and was rewarded by finding two leaves of paper in the form of a diary inserted among his philosophical exercises; luckily he decided de Préau was of no particular account – being ‘of weak and slender judgment’. All the same, for what he chose to describe as Christian reasons, Paulet wished that de Préau had been restricted to a single visit to the queen on the eve of her death: the spiritual perils of his continual association with his mistress seemed yet another reason for bringing Mary’s life to a speedy close. After all, expostulated Paulet, Mary showed no signs of repentance, no signs even of wishing to live, and an ignorant papist priest would surely only confirm her in such reprobate tendencies. The return of the little store of money which had been seized from Mary at Chartley, although performed by Paulet with some reluctance, seemed a minor evil compared to this quite unnecessary display of tolerance on behalf of the central government.
Around Christmas Paulet either fell ill or pleaded a diplomatic illness to avoid those argumentative interviews with Mary which he so greatly disliked. Paulet’s withdrawal affected Mary herself depressively: Paulet might dread the interviews, but to Mary they were her solitary contact with the outside world, and represented her only source of stimulus, to rehearse her arguments, and in arguing to keep up her spirits. The weeks now passed slowly and heavily; without Paulet to joust with verbally, for the first time Mary began to feel the suspense of her situation. By 8th January Mary was begging Paulet to pay her another visit, for although both were within the confines of the same castle, she had not seen him since before Christmas, and as to his illness she had heard he had been out of doors the previous day. Part of Mary’s anxiety arose through having heard nothing from Elizabeth in answer to her farewell requests. On 12th January she wrote another long letter, in which she pleaded with Elizabeth to end the miserable uncertainty of the situation, not so much for herself as for her poor servants, on whom the strain was telling. In her last paragraph she even tried to tempt Elizabeth’s curiosity once more by inquiring to whom she might confide her death-bed’s secrets; it was as though the notion of the unfulfilled meeting still haunted her after all these years, and she had some wild hope that Elizabeth might still pay her a personal visit at the end. The bait, however, was never extended where Elizabeth might see it for Paulet refused to dispatch this second letter at all, on the grounds that he was lying in bed with his arms bandaged, and that Mary must content herself with awaiting the answer to her first missive. Later he explained that he would not send the letter at all, because he had no orders to do so.12
Slowly the winter days passed by. It was now over three months since those booted and spurred judges had galloped away from Fotheringhay and there was still no news from London that the end was even near. It was inevitable that the hopes of those faithful partisans and observers, Mary’s servants, should begin to rise. Although Mary had no doubts herself that sooner or later she would die, when Christmas had passed, the long delay encouraged her retainers to begin to hope on her behalf. On 20th January Melville interpreted a remark of Paulet’s on the subject of the royal servants’ wages as meaning that the period of their service to Mary was likely to be extended indefinitely into the future. This made the blow which fell upon them the next day all the more painful to bear: brusquely Paulet informed Melville and the chaplain de Préeau that although they were to continue in residence at Fotheringhay, henceforth they were to be parted from their mistress. Only the physician Bourgoing was to be allowed to continue in attendance. The removal of these loyal servants lowered Mary’s spirits further: her old fears of a secret death were revivified. But when Mary expressed these anxieties to Paulet through the medium of Bourgoing, she succeeded in causing him considerable offence: he fell into a rage at her taunts, and told Bourgoing that ‘he was a man of honour and a gentleman, and he would not wish so to dishonour himself as to wish to exercise such cruelty or to conduct himself like a Turk’.13 Man of honour as he professed himself – and time was to prove the truth of his claim – Paulet had no objections to imposing a series of further petty humiliations on his prisoner. On the following Monday Mary’s butler was forbidden to carry the rod before her meat dishes, a service he was performing in the absence of the steward Melville. Once again Mary jumped to the conclusion that this regal dignity was being stripped from her in order to kill her secretly. In answer to her protest she received the chilling reply from Paulet that her priest, her steward, her canopy and her rod had all been taken from her for the same reason: because she was no longer a queen but ‘an attainted, convicted and condemned woman’. It was left for Mary to derive what consolation she could from the reflection that King Richard II also had been treated in this opprobrious manner.
Attainted, convicted and condemned Mary might be, yet there was still no official word concerning her execution. But it was said afterwards that on the Sunday, 29th January, between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, the heavens gave their own portent that the end was not far off, for a great flame of fire illuminated the windows of the queen’s room three times. The light was bright enough to read by, and blinded the guards stationed beneath her chamber, already made nervous and apprehensive by the phenomenon, which was seen nowhere else in the castle.14 This supernatural warning,* if warning it was, was certainly borne out by events. Three days later, at her court at Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth at last sent for Davison to bring the warrant for the execution, which for so long had lacked her own signature. Davison discreetly placed the warrant in the middle of a pile of other papers which the queen was due to sign. The ruse – for Elizabeth had made it increasingly clear to her anxious ministers that she must be the subject of a ruse – was successful. It was thus, in the midst of an innocuous conversation on the subject of the weather, that Elizabeth finally signed the warrant, with all her other papers, and having done so, threw them idly down on the table. But the queen could not quite bear to let this vexatious yet momentous subject, on which she had expended so much emotion, pass so easily. She asked Davison teasingly if he felt distressed to see her give the famous signature after so long. Davison replied tactfully that he preferred to see the death of a guilty person to that of an innocent one. Elizabeth now instructed Davison to get the Great Seal of England attached to the warrant by the Lord Chancellor and then take it to Walsingham. Her vein of humour was not exhausted: ‘I fear the grief thereof will go near to kill him outright,’ said Elizabeth happily. She then concluded the subject with a practical direction – the execution was under no circumstances to be held in public, but in the great hall of the castle. Elizabeth then laid it down that she personally was to be told no more on the subject until the execution was successfully completed.16
Despite this Pilate-like observation, Elizabeth still did not totally wash her hands of the matter. Mary’s fears of a secret death were not altogether groundless. Even before Elizabeth had affixed her signature to the warrant, she had been heard muttering in the hearing of her ministers that the provisions of the Act of Association might make it a positive duty for a loyal subject to kill the queen of Scots … thus ridding the English queen of the responsibility. Her ministers, understanding her intentions only too well, pretended not to grasp her meaning. On 1st February, however, Elizabeth was more explicit. Having signed the warrant she murmured wistfully to Davison that if a loyal subject were to save her from embarrassment by dealing the blow, the resentment of France and Scotland might be disarmed. The obvious loyal subjects to assume this helpful role were Paulet and Drury at Fotheringhay. Davison’s first reaction was to fear yet another excuse for delaying the execution itself. But against his advice, the queen insisted on the point being made to Paulet: a letter was duly sent to the custodians regretting that they had not ‘found out some way to shorten the life of that Queen [Mary] considering the great peril she [Elizabeth] is subject unto hourly, so long as the said Queen shall live’.17
Now the issue which Mary had so long dreaded was squarely placed before her jailer; and it is one of the ironies of history that Paulet, the man whom Mary had for so long both disliked and feared, hesitated for an instant, but seized his pen and wrote back to his royal mistress in the most trenchant language refusing the odious commission: ‘I am so unhappy to have lived to see this unhappy day,’ he replied, ‘in which I am required by direction from my most gracious sovereign to do an act which God and the law forbiddeth. … God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot on my poor posterity, to shed blood without law or warrant.’18 Paradoxically Mary was saved from the private extinction which she dreaded by the action of the Puritan who had done so much to make her last months uncomfortable and humiliating. Elizabeth, on the other hand, by a course of action which did neither her courage, her character nor her reputation any credit, gave Paulet a chance to redeem himself at the bar of history – unimaginative, bigoted, petty tyrant be might be, he was still no assassin. It was left to Elizabeth when his answer was conveyed to her to exclaim furiously over his ‘daintiness’, the ‘niceness’ of ‘those precise fellows’ such as Paulet, who professed great zeal for her safety, but would perform nothing.19
Elizabeth’s Council, experienced in the ways of their mistress, did not wait for Paulet’s answer before acting. With the warrant in their possession, it was unanimously decided to set proceedings in hand immediately. Elizabeth’s ability to continue to toy with the subject despite her signature was confirmed on 5th February when she told Davison roguishly that she had dreamt the night before she was running him through with a sword for causing the death of Mary. Her interest in assassination was also not exhausted: she appeared to play with the idea of having Mary smothered by Robert Wingfield, pretending that this had been the advice of Archibald Douglas. The Council did not wait to see through the full comedy of such behaviour before acting. The warrant was handed to Beale, the clerk of the Council, who was instructed to set forth immediately for Fotheringhay, accompanied by Shrewsbury and the earl of Kent, with a covering commission to go into Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire to hear ‘hues and cries’, in order to cloak his mission in the utmost secrecy.* The greatest thought was given to the details of the execution in Walsingham’s memorial on the subject – down to the speeches which the two earls were to make at the ceremony. Cecil added his own comment on the subject in the margin of the memorial: the speeches should be used ‘To express her many attempts both for destruction of the Queen’s person, and the invasion of this realm’.20
More practical aspects of the affair were not neglected. Walsingham made himself responsible for contacting the actual executioner. In the greatest secrecy, his servant Anthony Hall acquired the services of one Bull, £10 being the agreed fee for ‘his labour’. Another of Walsingham’s servants, Digby, conducted Bull down to Fotheringhay, disguised as a serving-man with ‘his instrument’ – the axe – hidden in a trunk. Such efficiency resulted in the smooth working of all the preliminary arrangements, except that Sir Walter Mildmay, whether out of fear of public opinion, apprehension regarding Elizabeth’s reactions, or genuine fastidiousness, refused to house the executioner at his own house of Apethorpe, so that he had to be lodged secretly in an inn at Fotheringhay. On arrival, in order to give every appearance of legality to the proceedings, Beale took care to inform the local justices of the peace and officials, both of Northamptonshire and Huntingdon, including the sheriff of Northampton who was to be responsible for providing the surgeons for the occasion.21
Still the sadly depleted royal household at Fotheringhay had no inkling of what was afoot. On the Saturday, 4th February, Bourgoing went to Paulet and asked if he could go visit the neighbouring villages and search for certain herbal remedies which might help the queen against her rheumatism for the rest of the winter season. Paulet was evasive, and said he could take no decision until the Monday. On Sunday, however, Mary learnt that Beale had arrived at Fotheringhay and, interpreting the significance of his arrival correctly, told Bourgoing he might cease searching for a cure since she would now have no need of it. But no authoritative intimation was given to the queen concerning her fate, which left her servants free to continue to hope for the next few days. It was not until the Tuesday, 7th February, that the arrival of several more people at the castle, including Shrewsbury and Kent who had been lodging at Orton nearby, ‘threw the household into a terrible state of apprehension. Having for the last three months imagined many coming evils for Her Majesty,’ as Bourgoing put it,22 there could now be no doubt that the blow so long anticipated was about to fall.
The official time given to the queen to prepare for death was of the minimum. It was not until after dinner that the two custodians and the two earls asked to see Mary. She had retired to bed, but on being told that the matter was urgent, asked for a little time in which to dress, and then received them in her room, seated in a chair at the foot of her bed. Of the deputation, including Beale, it was Shrewsbury who told Mary that she had been found guilty and condemned to death. Beale now read aloud from the warrant, from which the yellow wax Great Seal of England dangled, in order to emphasize once more that Mary’s judges were acting legally, in accordance with the Act of Association. Mary received the news with absolute calm. When Beale had done, she replied with great dignity and no show of emotion: ‘I thank you for such welcome news. You will do me great good in withdrawing me from this world out of which I am very glad to go.’ She touched on her queenly position and royal blood, adding that in spite of this ‘all my life I have had only sorrow’, and saying that she was now overjoyed to have the opportunity at the end to shed her blood for the Catholic Church. Mary then placed her hand on the New Testament and solemnly protested herself to be innocent of all the crimes imputed to her. When Kent objected that it was a Catholic version of the Bible, Mary answered: ‘If I swear on the book which I believe to be the true version, will your lordship not believe my oath more than if I were to swear on a translation in which I do not believe?’
But Mary’s captors were not prepared to concede either the sincerity of her religious convictions or the need to display a certain tolerance towards a woman in extremis. They now offered her the services of the Protestant dean of Peterborough to help her make ready for her end, and eliminate from her mind at the last ‘the follies and abominations of popery’. Mary crossed herself, and utterly refused even to consider the suggestion, saying that when she had first arrived in England she had listened to both sides of the question, but now all that was passed, and the hour of her death was the very moment to show constancy. The result of this interchange, in which as Paulet reported afterwards ‘we prevailed nothing’, was that when Mary proceeded to ask for her own chaplain to be readmitted to her presence, in order to make ready her soul, in Paulet’s words ‘we utterly denied that unto her’. This was a serious blow to Mary, who had not anticipated this final inhumanity. However, when Kent exclaimed: ‘Your life would be the death of our religion, your death would be its life,’ her face lit up.23 At least his words revealed that already in the opinion of the world her death was linked with the survival of the Catholic Church in England.
When the queen asked at what hour she was to die, Shrewsbury replied in a faltering voice: ‘Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.’* Mary remarked that the time was very short since it was already late. She then made a series of requests, all of which were denied to her: she applied for her papers and account books, which were refused on the grounds that they were still in London in the hands of Wade; once more she begged vainly for her chaplain; thirdly she asked that her body might be interred in France at either St Denis or Rheims, only to be told that Elizabeth had ruled against it. Her last questions were on the subjects of Nau and Curle, and whether they were already dead; on hearing that Curle was in prison, and that Nau had gone to France, Mary exclaimed sadly that she was about to die for him who had borne false witness against her. Mary’s servants, in a state of hysteria, tried to get some sort of reprieve or at least a stay of execution, weeping and crying and protesting that the time was too short. Bourgoing pleaded with Shrewsbury, recalling not only how he had cured him of his illness, but also all the mercies which Shrewsbury himself had shown to Mary in the past. Shrewsbury either was not or dared not be moved. He said there was to be no delay.24
The queen of Scots was left alone to spend the last evening of her life with her servants, some of whom like Jane Kennedy had spent a whole generation in her service. She tried to rally them. ‘Well, Jane Kennedy,’ said the queen. ‘Did I not tell you this would happen? … I knew they would never allow me to live, I was too great an obstacle to their religion.’ Mary then asked for her supper to be served as speedily as possible, in order that she might have time to put her affairs in order. It was a heart-breaking meal, the servants outdoing themselves in the assiduousness of their service, as though there was some comfort to be had in making each little gesture as perfect as possible: Bourgoing, acting as steward in Melville’s absence, presented the dishes to his mistress and, as he did so, he could not control the tears from pouring down his cheeks. The queen herself ate little. She sat in a sort of dream, from time to time referring to Kent’s outburst on the subject of her death and her religion: ‘Oh how happy these words make me,’ she murmured. ‘Here at last is the truth.’ When the meal was over, the queen asked her servants to drink to her, and as they did so, kneeling before her, their tears mingled with the wine.
Mary now seated herself and went through the contents of her wardrobe in detail. Her remaining money she sorted personally into little portions, and placed in packets, on which she wrote in her own hand the name of the servant for whom they were destined. From belongings she divided off certain mementoes for royalties and her relations abroad, such as the king and queen of France, Queen Catherine, and the Guises; from the rest she bestowed numerous little personal objects on all her servants: * Bourgoing received rings, silver boxes, her musicbook bound in velvet to remind him of the many musical evenings of the captivity, as well as the red hangings of Mary’s bed; Elizabeth Curle received miniatures set in gold and enamelled tablets of Mary, Francis II and James; Melville received a little tablet of gold set with another portrait of James. Having thus disposed of those actual physical possessions which remained within her sphere, the queen drew up an elaborate testament25 of which Henry, Duke of Guise, Beaton, the bishop of Ross, and du Ruisseau, her chancellor in France, were to be executors. She asked for Requiem Masses to be held in France, and made elaborate financial arrangements for the benefit of her servants, whether of her household or superior rank such as Beaton in France: Curle, for example, was to receive the marriage portion which had been promised him but never paid, and even the graceless Nau was to be allowed his pension, if he should manage to prove his innocence. Beyond that, there were charitable bequests for the poor children and friars of Rheims, and instructions that her coach was to be used to convey her women to London, when the horses were to be sold to defray their expenses, and her furniture likewise, that they might be able to afford to return to their countries of origin.*
Having completed these detailed dispositions for the welfare of those she would leave behind, Mary considered her own spiritual welfare in the shape of a farewell letter to be handed to the chaplain de Préau. Deprived of his physical presence, she used the medium of the letter as a general confession of her sins, in which she asked him to spend the night in prayer for her.26 Mary’s last letter of all was to her brother-in-law, King Henry of France: she related the abrupt circumstances in which her sentence had been broken to her, and her conviction that it was her religion, coupled with her place in the English succession, which was the true cause of her death, as it had been with Francis of Guise; she begged him to listen to the personal testimony concerning her execution which her physician should give to him so soon as he could reach France, and not trust to her letter alone; her last thoughts were the faithful servants who had served her for so long – she asked that their pensions and wages might be paid throughout their lives, and in particular that de Préau her chaplain might be awarded some little benefice in France from which he could spend the rest of his days in prayer for his dead mistress.27 When these elaborate dispositions were finally completed, it was already two o’clock in the morning. Mary’s letter to the king of France was thus dated Wednesday, 8th February, 1587, the day of her execution.
The traveller was now ready for her last journey on earth. The queen lay down on her bed without undressing. She did not try to sleep. Her women gathered round her already wearing their black garments of mourning, and Mary asked Jane Kennedy to read aloud the life of some great sinner. The life of the good thief was chosen, and as the story reached its climax on the cross, Mary observed aloud: ‘In truth he was a great sinner, but not so great as I have been.’ She then closed her eyes, and said nothing further. Throughout the night the sound of hammering came from the great hall where the scaffold was being erected. The boots of the soldiers could be heard ceaselessly tramping up and down outside the queen’s room, for Paulet had ordered them to watch with special vigilance in these final hours, lest their victim escape her captors at the last. The queen lay on her bed without sleeping, eyes closed and a half smile on her face.
So the short night passed. At six o’clock, long before light, the queen rose, handed over the will, distributed her purses, and gave her women a farewell embrace. Her men servants were given her hand to kiss. Then she went into her little oratory and prayed alone. She was extremely pale but quite composed. Bourgoing handed her a little bread and wine to sustain her. The day now dawned fine and sunny; it was one of those unexpected early February days when it suddenly seems possible that the spring will come. It was between eight and nine when a loud knocking was heard at the door, and a messenger shouted through it that the lords were waiting for the queen. Mary asked for a moment to finish her prayers, at which the lords outside in a moment of panic feared some sort of last-minute resistance might be planned; unable to believe in the courage of their captive, they had given credit to reports that the queen of Scots had said she would not come to the block of her own accord, but would have to be dragged thither. But when the sheriff of Northampton, Thomas Andrews, entered, he found Mary kneeling quietly in prayer in front of the crucifix which hung above her altar.
It was this crucifix which her groom Hannibal Stuart now bore before her as she was escorted towards the great hall. The queen was totally calm, and showed no signs of fear or distress. Her bearing was regal, and some of the contemporary observers afterwards even described her as cheerful and smiling.28 The last moment of agony came in the entry chamber to the hall, when her servants were held back from following her and the queen was told that she was to die quite alone, by the orders of Elizabeth. Melville, distracted at this unlooked-for blow, fell on his knees in tears and exclaimed: ‘Oh Madam, it will be the sorrowfullest message that I ever carried when I shall report that my Queen and dear mistress is dead.’ The queen dashed away her own tears and said gently: ‘You ought to rejoice and not to weep for that the end of Mary Stuart’s troubles is now done. Thou knowest, Melville, that all this world is but vanity and full of troubles and sorrows. Carry this message from me and tell my friends that I died a true woman to my religion, and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman. …’ And commending Melville to go to her son, and tell him that her dearest wish had always been to see England and Scotland united, that she had never done anything to prejudice the welfare of the kingdom of Scotland, she embraced Melville and bade him farewell. Mary now turned to Paulet and the lords and pleaded with them to allow at least her own servants to be with her at the death, so that they could later report the manner of her death in other countries. Kent replied that her wish could not well be granted, for before the execution her servants were sure to cry out and upset the queen herself, as well as disquieting the company, while afterwards they might easily attempt to dip their napkins in her blood for relics which, said Kent grimly, ‘were not convenient’. ‘My Lord,’ replied Mary, ‘I will give my word and promise for them that they shall not do any such thing as your Lordship hath named. Alas poor souls, it would do them good to bid me farewell.’ As for her women she refused to believe that these were the instructions of Queen Elizabeth herself, for surely Elizabeth, herself a maiden queen, would not condemn a fellow-woman to die without any ladies about her to attend her, besides which, added Mary, ‘You know that I am cousin to your Queen and descended from the blood of Henry VII, a married Queen of France, and the anointed Queen of Scotland.’ She then appealed to history where she had read in chronicles that other gentlewomen had had their ladies with them at their execution. After a hurried whispered consultation, the lords decided that Mary might have after all the choice of six of her servants to accompany her. Thus Melville, Bourgoing, Gervais, and the old man Didier who had been for many years Mary’s porter, were allowed to go forward, together with the two dearest of Mary’s women, who shared her bed, Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle. Mary then went to follow the sheriff, having first bestowed a small gift (probably a seal) on Sir William Fitzwilliam, the castellan of Fotheringhay: he, unlike Sir Amyas Paulet, had shown especial courtesy to her in the carrying-out of his office.
The queen now entered the great hall in silence.* The spectators gathered there – about 300 of them by one account – gazed with awe and apprehension at this legendary figure whose dramatic career was about to be ended before their eyes. They saw a tall and gracious woman, who at first sight seemed to be dressed entirely in black, save for the long white lace-edged veil which flowed down her back to the ground like a bride’s, and the white stiffened and peaked head-dress that too was edged with lace, below which gleamed her auburn hair. Her satin dress was all in black, embroidered with black velvet, and set with black acorn buttons of jet trimmed with pearl; but through the slashed sleeves could be seen inner sleeves of purple, and although her shoes of Spanish leather were black, her stockings were clocked and edged with silver, her garters were of green silk, and her petticoat was of crimson velvet. She held a crucifix and a prayer book in her hand, and two rosaries hung down from her waist; round her neck was a pomander chain and an Agnus Dei. Despite the fact that Mary’s shoulders were now bowed and stooping with illness, and her figure grown full with the years, she walked with immense dignity. Time and suffering had long ago rubbed away the delicate youthful charm of herface, but to many of the spectators her extraordinary composure and serenity had its own beauty. Above all, her courage was matchless, and this alone in many people’s minds, whatever honours and dignities had been stripped from her by Paulet, still gave her the right to be called a queen.
In the centre of the great hall, which lay on the ground floor of the castle, directly below the room in which Mary had been tried, was set a wooden stage, all hung with black, about twelve feet square and two feet high off the ground. Within the precincts of the stage were two stools for Shrewsbury and Kent. Beside them was placed, about two feet high, also draped in black, the block, and a little cushioned stool on which it was intended that the queen should sit while she was disrobed. The great axe was already lying there – ‘like those with which they cut wood’, said Bourgoing later. Outside the stage were two other seats for Paulet and Drury, and a rank of soldiers enclosing it; behind them gathered the ordinary people who had been given the privilege of watching the execution, as well as some local dignitaries including Shrewsbury’s eldest son Lord Talbot, Sir Edward Montagu, and his son and brother, Sir Richard Knightly, and Mr Thomas Brudenell. A huge blaze had been lit in the fireplace against the cold of the great hall.
Once led up the three steps to the stage, the queen listened patiently while the commission for her execution was read aloud. Her expression never changed. Cecil’s own official observer, Robert Wise, commented later that from her detached regard, she might even have been listening to a pardon, rather than the warrant for her own death. The first sign of emotion was wrung from her when Dr Fletcher, the Protestant dean of Peterborough – he who afterwards described the fine weather as a sign that Heaven looked with favour on the execution – stepped forward, and proposed to harangue the queen according to the rites of the Protestant religion. ‘Mr Dean,’ said the queen firmly, ‘I am settled in the ancient Catholic Roman religion, and mind to spend my blood in defence of it.’ Shrewsbury and Kent both exhorted her to listen to him, and even offered to pray with the queen, but all these proposals Mary resolutely rejected. ‘If you will pray with me, my lords,’ she said to the two earls, ‘I will thank you, but to join in prayer I will not, for that you and I are not of one religion.’ And when the dean, in answer to the earls’ direction, finally knelt down on the scaffold steps and started to pray out loud and at length, in a prolonged and rhetorical style as though determined to force his way into the pages of history, Mary still paid no attention but turned away, and started to pray aloud out of her own book in Latin, in the midst of these prayers sliding off her stool on to her knees. When the dean was at last finished, the queen changed her prayers, and began to pray out loud in English, for the afflicted English Catholic Church, for her son, and for Elizabeth, that she might serve God in the years to come. Kent remonstrated with her: ‘Madam, settle Christ Jesus in your heart and leave those trumperies.’ But the queen prayed on, asking God to avert his wrath from England, and calling on the Saints to intercede for her; and so she kissed the crucifix she held, and crossing herself, ended: ‘Even as thy arms, O Jesus, were spread here upon the cross, so receive me into Thy arms of mercy, and forgive me all my sins.’
When the queen’s prayers were finished, the executioners asked her, as was customary, to forgive them in advance for bringing about her death. Mary answered immediately: ‘I forgive you with all my heart, for now I hope you shall make an end of all my troubles.’ Then the executioners, helped by Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle, assisted the Queen to undress – Robert Wise noticed that she undressed so quickly that it seemed as if she was in haste to be gone out of the world. Stripped of her black, she stood in her red petticoat and it was seen that above it she wore a red satin bodice, trimmed with lace, the neckline cut low at the back; one of her women handed her a pair of red sleeves, and it was thus wearing all red, the colour of blood, and the liturgical colour of martyrdom in the Catholic Church, that the queen of Scots died.* According to their usual practice, the executioners stretched forth their hands for the queen’s ornaments which were their perquisites. When they touched the long golden rosary, Jane Kennedy protested, and the queen herself intervened and said that Bull would be compensated with money in its place, and the same promise had to be made regarding the Agnus Dei.* Yet all the time her belongings were being stripped from her, it was notable that the queen neither wept nor changed her calm and almost happy expression of what one observer called ‘smiling cheer’; she even retained her composure sufficiently to remark wryly of the executioners that she had never before had such grooms of the chamber to make her ready. It was the queen’s women who could not contain their lamentations as they wept and crossed themselves and muttered snatches of Latin prayers. Finally Mary had to turn to them and mindful of her promise to Shrewsbury that they would not weep aloud if they were admitted to the hall, she admonished them softly in French: ‘Ne crie point pour moi. J’ai promis pour vous …’ Once more she bade them not mourn but rejoice, for they were soon to see the end of all her troubles; turning to her menservants, standing on a bench close by the scaffold, who also had tears pouring down their faces and were calling out prayers in French and Scots and Latin, and crossing themselves again and again, she told them to be comforted, with a smile on her lips to reassure them. She asked the men too to pray for her unto the last hour.
The time had come for Jane Kennedy to bind the queen’s eyes with the white cloth embroidered in gold which Mary had herself chosen for the purpose the night before. Jane Kennedy first kissed the cloth and then wrapped it gently round her mistress’s eyes, and over her head so that her hair was covered as by a white turban and only the neck left completely bare. The two women then withdrew from the stage. The queen, without even now the faintest sign of fear, knelt down once more on the cushion in front of the block. She recited aloud in Latin the Psalm In te Domino confido, non confundar in aeternum – In you Lord is my trust, let me never be confounded – and then feeling for the block, she laid her head down upon it, placing her chin carefully with both her hands, so that if one of the executioners had not moved them back they too would have lain in the direct line of the axe. The queen stretched out her arms and legs and cried, ‘In manus tuas, Domine, confide spiritum meum’ – ‘Into your hands O Lord I commend my spirit’ – three or four times. When the queen was lying there quite motionless, Bull’s assistant put his hand on her body to steady it for the blow. Even so, the first blow, as it fell, missed the neck and cut into the back of the head. The queen’s lips moved, and her servants thought they heard the whispered words: ‘Sweet Jesus.’ The second blow severed the neck, all but the smallest sinew, and this was severed by using the axe as a saw. It was about ten o’clock in the morning of Wednesday, 8th February, the queen of Scots being then aged forty-four years old, and in the nineteenth year of her English captivity.
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 things 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.