CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘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 IIwere 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 Elizabeth 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.
Although the red lion of Scotland blazed forth in the nave of Peterborough Cathedral, and Elizabeth’s personal friend, the countess of Bedford, acted the role of chief mourner with due gravity, while the procession was headed with 100 poor widows also dressed for the occasion in black at the government’s expense, the dichotomy at the heart of this strange, apologetic ceremony was revealed by the fact that the coffin was actually transported from Fotheringhay to Peterborough at dead of night for fear of demonstrations. On Sunday, 30th July, Queen Mary’s body left the castle for the last time by the light of torches, in a coach draped in black velvet from which little pennons fluttered – ‘a chariot’ the state accounts called it later.9 The accompanying heralds rode with bared heads. They reached Peterborough at two o’clock in the morning, being met by a distinguished convoy of ecclesiastics including the bishop and the egregious Dean Fletcher. The coffin was then lodged temporarily in the Bishop’s Palace.
The whole ceremony was of course Protestant and thus sung in English. But the late queen’s servants, who had been allowed out of their seclusion at Fotheringhay to attend the service, were all pious Catholics with the exception of Andrew Melville and Barbara Mowbray. They therefore withdrew from the body of the church once the procession was over. Even so, the fact that the chaplain de Préau walked with a heavy gold crucifix on his breast during the procession called forth angry Protestant criticism. At the head of the procession, just behind the bailiff of Peterborough with his black staves of mourning, was borne the royal standard of Scotland with the motto: In my defence God me defend. Among the distinguished English mourners were Cecil’s elder son, and Shrewsbury’s daughter and daughter in-law, Lady Mary Savill and Lady Talbot. The ladies of Mary’s former household walked just ahead of the attendants of the English peeresses, in black taffeta headdresses, with veils of white lawn hanging down behind: their names recalled those last melancholy months at Fotheringhay, for they included Barbara Mowbray and her sister Gillis, Elizabeth Curle, Jane Kennedy, Christina Pages and her daughter Mary.
In one respect the ceremony deviated from the common practice at state funerals: it was not found possible to process the coffin round the cathedral owing to the great quantity of lead used on Walsingham’s instructions, estimated at over nine hundredweight. Not only was the weight inordinate, but it was feared by the prudent that the casing might even rip and ‘being very hot weather, might be found some annoyance’. The coffin was therefore placed immediately in its vault in the south aisle of the cathedral. Otherwise the arrangements were as was customary in such interments: a ‘representation’ or effigy of the queen of Scots was carried in the procession beneath a canopy supported by four knights.*10 The five pursuivants from London, Portcullis, Rouge Dragon Clarenceaux, the Somerset and the York herald bore the emblems of state, the sword, target, crown, the crest, the helmet and the like which were later hung formally over the grave. Even the sermon given by William Chaderton, bishop of Lincoln, represented a clumsy attempt to gloss over the very different circumstances in which the woman whom they were now burying with such honour had actually died. He called on God to bless the happy dissolution of the late Scottish queen, adding ‘of whose life and departure, whatsoever shall be expected, I have nothing to say, for that I was unacquainted with the one, and not present at the other’. By citing what he termed a charitable saying of Martin Luther, ‘Many one liveth a Papist and dieth a Protestant’, he even suggested that the queen of Scots might have undergone a last-minute conversion to the reformed faith, before adding that at any rate he had heard she took her death patiently, recommending herself at the last to Jesus Christ.
The service completed, the procession filed out of the cathedral once more, and as they passed the mourning women who had once served Queen Mary, standing at the side, in order to take no part in the Protestant service, some of the grand English ladies, many of whom like Shrewsbury’s family had known them well in happier days, embraced and kissed them sympathetically. The courtiers and the ecclesiastics now adjourned to the Bishop’s Palace for a funeral banquet of considerable festivity: but Mary’s former servitors were not so easily transferred from tears into laughter; what to the worshipful company from London was only a ritual proceeding to round off a distasteful incident in English history, was to them the last obsequies of their beloved mistress. There, while the English caroused, Mary’s servants gathered in another room and wept bitter tears.
The most passionate desire left to these poor people was that they should now be released from their melancholy prison and allowed to go their several ways. Despite the completion of the interment, there was a further delay of two months before they were allowed to depart, possibly because some report of their obstinate heretical behaviour at the burial service and their unseemly grief at the banquet had come to Elizabeth’s ears and displeased her. Shortly after the service, Adam Blackwood, one of Mary’s most loyal partisans, who was already at work on the task of presenting her to the world as a royal heroine and a Catholic martyr, came secretly to Peterborough and put up on the wall above her tomb a long epitaph in Latin protesting against the crime of regicide which had taken place at Fotheringhay: ‘A strange and unusual monument this is, wherein the living are included with the dead: for, with the Sacred Ashes of this blessed Mary, know, that the Majesty of all kings, and princes, lieth here, violated and prostrate. And because regal secrecy doth enough and more admonish Kings of their duty – traveller, I say no more.’ But this loyal monument was pulled down. Nor did ‘regal secrecy’ admonish any kings of their duty, beyond the £321 which Queen Elizabeth spent on this funeral to placate King James, of which pantry and buttery charges accounted for one third.11
At last in October the ordeal of the little royal household was at an end. Bourgoing went to King Henry III, as he had been instructed, and told his tale of the uplifting last months and hours of the late queen of Scots. Gorion went to Mendoza, handed him the diamond ring which Mendoza subsequently passed to Philip II, and he too related the story of his mistress’s martyrdom. The farewell letters written nearly a year before reached their destinations at last, and King Philip, moved by this reminder from beyond the grave of the woman who had once been his sister-in-law, and long his Catholic confederate, out of natural chivalry honoured Mary’s last requests for the payments of her servants’ wages, and her debts in France. He also pursued in correspondence with Mendoza the subject of what he believed to be Mary’s last gift to him in her will – the reversion of the English crown. In the interests of his own foreign policy, Philip conveniently allowed himself to credit the story that Mary had finally disinherited James altogether on the eve of her execution, and had consequently ceded to Philip directly her own claims to the English throne.* It was now late in 1587. It was in the next year, 1588, that King Philip took the momentous decision to pursue his supposed English inheritance with the great force of the Spanish Armada. Ironically enough, therefore, the mighty Spanish fleet of rescue for which Mary had waited so long and so hopefully only sailed towards England after, and as a direct result of, her death.
Mendoza was left in France to deal with the problems of these old servants: Philip had authorized a pension of 300 crowns a year for Jane, and forty crowns a month for Gilbert Curle, and Mendoza acted with kindness and charity in the course of his administration, receiving in the course of it such tremulous confidences as the fact that it had been Jane Kennedy not Elizabeth Curle who had tied the blindfold round the queen’s eyes at the end, ‘because I was of better family’.13 Having delivered a diamond ring which Mary bequeathed to Thomas Morgan for faithful service – many of her supporters would willingly have denied it to him for his supposed treachery – Jane Kennedy returned to Scotland, where she had the melancholy privilege of describing the scene of his mother’s death personally to King James. She subsequently married Mary’s steward, Andrew Melville; despite the differences in their religion they were drawn to each other by memories of the past and long years together in the royal service. But Jane did not live long enough to enjoy a peaceful old age with her husband: in 1589 King James commissioned her to go to Denmark to fetch back his bride Princess Anne, as a reward for her faithful service to his mother, and she was drowned in a storm at the outset of her journey. Gillis Mowbray also went back to Scotland, where she married Sir John Smith of Barnton: her relics of her royal mistress, which she bequeathed to her granddaughter, now form the heart of the Penicuik Bequest in the National Museum of Antiquities at Edinburgh.
Elizabeth Curle, and her sister-in-law Barbara Curle, born Mowbray, ended their lives together at Antwerp. Gilbert Curle, the sad but good-hearted secretary, died in 1609; but Barbara lived to 1616, and Elizabeth to 1620, over thirty years after the death of Mary. Before her death, Elizabeth Curle had an interesting memorial to the queen carried out in the shape of a full-scale portrait of her mistress at the time of her execution, the figure presumably modelled on the miniature which Mary confided to Jane on the eve of her death. The portrait was bequeathed by Elizabeth to her nephew Hippolytus Curle, a Jesuit, and from him it was handed on to the Scots College at Douai. On either side of the standing figure of the queen are shown two vignettes of the execution scene at Fotheringhay: on the left, the queen kneels at the block, and on the right are shown Elizabeth Curle and Jane Kennedy standing together, wearing the black religious habits these good ladies appear to have adopted for the rest of their lives in perpetual and devoutmourning for their mistress. At Douai the portrait even survived the depredations of the French revolutionaries, rolled up and built into a chimney; it has now come to rest at the Blairs College, Aberdeen. The pious legend that Elizabeth Curle somehow managed to carry the head of Mary Queen of Scots abroad and have it buried with her in her tomb may be dismissed in view of the extraordinary and zealous precautions which were taken at the time to prevent even a drop of the dead woman’s blood being taken as a martyr’s relic; the head itself was certainly replaced on the body by the surgeons, wrapped securely in the heavy lead coffin that very afternoon. But the joint memorial to Elizabeth and Barbara in St Andrew’s Church, Antwerp, flanked with their respective patron saints, is today still crowned with a portrait of Mary Stuart, the woman whom Elizabeth believed to have been a martyred queen, and to whose life she dedicated her service; the Latin inscription on the memorial still proclaims proudly that it was she, Elizabeth Curle, who received the last kiss of Mary Queen of Scots.
With the departure at last of the sorrowing servants, the castle of Fotheringhay was released from its spell; soon its very masonry began to decay. Although Camden loyally but inaccurately reported that it was King James who had the stones beaten to the ground in a rage, to avenge the deed of shame which had taken place there,14 in fact its demolition was a gradual process, increased as local builders and landowners helped themselves to its materials. The antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, conscious of his royal Bruce ancestry, actually acquired the great hall in which the execution had taken place, and incorporated it in his own nearby manor of Connington in Huntingdonshire (although that too was pulled down in the eighteenth century). Today not even the ruins of Fotheringhay survive. The interested wayfarer finds the site of the castle, which is not in public hands, but belongs to the owners of the nearby farm, at the end of a cart track. All that can be seen of the once mighty castle of Fotheringhay is a grassy mound indicating the position of the keep, and a huge Ozymandias-like hump of masonry, encased in railings, recalling Shelley’s line on the trunkless stone in the desert, ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair’. The river meanders by. Sheep peacefully graze on the meadows opposite. There is no national memorial or official commemoration of the stirring events, so much part of British history, which once took place at Fotheringhay.*
Even now with the burial at Peterborough, the earthly peregrinations of the queen of Scots were not at an end. When James ascended the throne of England in the spring of 1603, he marked his respect for his mother’s tomb the following August by dispatching a rich pall of velvet to Peterborough, with instructions to the bishop to hang it over her grave. By the time, however, that James had erected a large and handsome monument to Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey, it was generally felt that something still further ought to be done for his mother’s memory. Considerable influence in this respect was exerted by James’s favourite Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, brother of Mary’s Norfolk, who had strongly Catholic sympathies all his life and died an outright member of the Church. In 1606 Cornelius Cure, master mason of works, was instructed to commence the carving of an imposing monument, which was later continued and finished by his son William. By September 1612 the work was sufficiently completed for the order of exhumation to be given to the clergy at Peterborough: the corpse of James’s ‘dearest mother’ was to be taken up in ‘as decent and respectful manner as is fitting’. James did not, however, lose his head over the splendour of his gesture – for although the monument in Westminster Abbey was costly and sumptuous, the sculptors alone receiving £825, and an overall sum of £2000 being mentioned, James had not forgotten that rich pall he had sent down to Peterborough nine years earlier. This was to be employed again, and if the chapter happened to think it belonged to them, it was to be redeemed for a reasonable fee. Today the site of the original vault is covered by a marble pavement. The heraldic symbols over the grave were pulled down at the time of the Civil War, when the tomb of Queen Catherine of Aragon was also destroyed. The twenty-five-year-long sojourn of the queen of Scots’ body in Peterborough Cathedral is marked by a stone tablet on an adjoining pillar, and two Scottish banners hang facing the site, placed there in 1920 by the Peterborough Caledonian Society.
In Westminster Abbey at last, the queen of Scots’ body found its final resting-place. The tomb is magnificent, a monument to James’s taste if not to his filial piety. By the white marble of which it is composed, Mary Stuart becomes once more ‘la reine blanche’of her first widowhood. It shows her lying full-length beneath a great ornamental canopy, her face serene and noble, her eyes closed, her long fingers stretched out in an attitude of prayer; she wears the simple peaked head-dress in which she died, but a royal cloak edged with ermine stretches around her body; at her feet rests the lion of Scotland. The face is extremely realistic and was evidently modelled on either the death mask or the effigy taken from it at Peterborough, since it shows all the features which observers noticed at the time of her death, and bears also a strong resemblance to the later portraits. The chin is full and soft although still pointed, the oval shape of the face is characteristic as is the setting of the eyes with its pronounced gap before the hairline. The nose has a Roman bridge to it, and the aquiline tendency of later years, consonant with the Sheffield-type portraits, which was probably exaggerated by the conditions of the death mask. The mouth shows the delicate almost sensual curve of the portraits, but is set in a more tranquil expression than the sad martyr of the Sheffield-type pictures. Altogether the whole impression of this awe-inspiring catafalque is of beauty – beauty which is made up of both majesty and repose.
A long Latin epitaph was composed by the earl of Northampton and is now to be seen on the tomb: it extols Queen Mary’s virtues, and deplores her misfortunes and her wrongful English imprisonment, without going into the controversial events which led to this imprisonment. The Cotton MSS show that Northampton had composed other still more eulogistic versions, in which it was suggested that, as Mary had stated herself, she had been executed solely for her religious faith, and lured into England by the false promises of Elizabeth. These, however, James discarded in favour of an uncontroversial panegyric – which, however, Northampton still signed ‘H. N. Gemens’ – Henry Northampton mourning.15
So the queen of Scots found peace at last. There can be little doubt that Mary who cared so much and so prolongedly for the English succession would have been satisfied at the last with her burial place in Westminster Abbey among the kings and queens of England. Her rights as a queen, to which she attached such importance to the end, had thus been respected. Viewing that splendid edifice in marble, white in the darkness of the Henry VII Chapel, the last of the royal monuments and the most imposing of them all, she would surely have felt that the cruelty of Elizabeth in denying her the French burial she craved had been atoned for in an unlooked-for and glorious manner. Nor was the significance of her tomb entirely royal: a few years after this new interment, pious Catholics were spreading the news that holy benefits could be gained from a visit to the tomb as to a shrine; Demster in Bologna wrote in his history of the Scottish Church, published in 1627: ‘I hear that her bones, lately translated to the burial place of the Kings of England at Westminster, are resplendent with miracles.’16 As Mary’s literary supporters developed the theme of the martyr queen, the white tomb itself became a place of pilgrimage for the faithful.
Once more, however, the repose of the queen of Scots was destined to be disturbed. In 1867 a search was instituted by Dean Stanley within the royal tombs of Westminster Abbey for the body of James I, whose position was unrecorded. It was eventually discovered in the tomb of Henry VII, the first Tudor and the first Stuart monarch of England lying appropriately together with Elizabeth of York, the woman who had made the foundation of both dynasties possible. But in the course of the search, among the places it was thought he might have appropriately chosen for his own sepulchre was the tomb of his mother. An entry was made below the monument to Mary, and at the foot of an ample flight of steps marked WAY was found a large vault of brick, twelve feet long, six feet high and seven feet wide. A startling and harrowing sight greeted the gaze of the Victorian searchers: the queen of Scots was far from lying alone in her tomb. A vast pile of lead coffins rose upwards from the floor, some of them obviously of children, some so small as to be of mere babies, all heaped together in confusion, amid urns of many different shapes, which were scattered all through the vault.
It was discovered that Mary shared her catacomb with numbers of her descendants, including her grandson Henry, Prince of Wales, who died before his prime, her granddaughter Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen, and her great-grandson Prince Rupert of the Rhine, among the most romantic of all the offshoots of the Stuart dynasty. Most poignant of all were the endless tiny coffins of the royal children who had died in infancy: here were found the first ten children of James II, and one James Darnley, described as his natural son, as well as the eighteen pathetic babies born dead to Queen Anne, and her sole child to survive infancy, the young duke of Gloucester.
Finally the coffin of the queen of Scots herself was found, against the north wall of the vault, lying below that of Arbella Stuart, that ill-fated scion of the royal house who had been the child-companion of Mary’s captivity. The coffin itself was of remarkable size, and it was easy to see why it had been too heavy to carry in procession at Peterborough Cathedral at the first burial. But so securely had the royal body been wrapped in lead at the orders of the English government on the afternoon of the execution that the casing had not given way in the slightest, even after nearly 300 years. The searchers felt profoundly moved even by this inanimate spectacle. No attempt was made to open it now. ‘The presence of the fatal coffin which had received the headless corpse at Fotheringhay,’ wrote Dean Stanley, ‘was sufficiently affecting without endeavouring to penetrate further into its mournful contents.’17 The vault was thus reverently tidied, the urns rearranged, and a list made of the contents. But the queen’s own coffin was left untouched, and the little children who surrounded her were not removed.
Meanwhile in the opposite chapel, underneath the monument to Queen Elizabeth I also raised by James, were found together in one grave the two daughters of Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth. Barren in life, they had been left to lie alone together in death. Mary, however, lies amid her Stuart posterity, her face locked in the marble of repose on the monument above, and her hands clasped in prayer, her body in the vault below which harbours so many of her descendants. She who never reigned in England, who was born a queen of Scotland, and who died at the orders of an English queen, lies now in Westminster Abbey where every sovereign of Britain since her death has been crowned; from her every sovereign of Britain since her death has been directly descended, down to the present queen, who is in the thirteenth generation. As Mary herself embroidered so long ago at Sheffield on the royal cloth of state which was destined to hang over the head of a captive queen: In my end is my Beginning.
* To be compared in eloquence with the famous passage of Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette as dauphiness, written over 200 years later.
* It is thought that this effigy was modelled from a death mask taken shortly after the execution by the surgeons at Fotheringhay. The death mask from which this effigy was taken cannot, however, be identified with the Lennoxlove death mask, discovered at Holyrood Palace in the last century. This, although beautiful, is clearly the mask of a much smaller woman. It measures seven inches long and 4¾ inches across, to be compared with the Westminster Abbey monument which is nine inches by seven inches across. (Queen Elizabeth’s monument, also taken from a death mask, measures eight inches by eight inches and portraits confirm that she had a much broader face than Mary.) Nor can the Lennoxlove measurements be explained by wax shrinkage: Mr Wismark of Madame Tussaud’s told the author that a two-inch shrinkage would destroy portraiture altogether, ¼ inch being the maximum for which allowance could be made. In any case the Lennoxlove mask bears only a superficial resemblance to the Queen of Scots: the mouth and setting of the eyes are quite different; the nose is blunt at the end in profile, lacking any sort of aquiline finish, and in front view looks almost retroussé;the width of the jaw is remarkable in a small face, and quite unlike the bone structure shown in all Mary’s known portraits. The Lennoxlove face is also thin, lacking the fullness upon which every observer at Mary’s execution commented, and which is present, for example, in the face on the Westminster monument.
* But Philip was allowing himself to be deluded. Although Mary had twice confided England conditionally to Philip, if James failed to become a Catholic – in her will of 1577 and in her letter to Mendoza of May 1586 – no such clause existed in the last testament which Mary made on the eve of her death at Fotheringhay, and no other will has ever been found supporting his claims.12 In any case, it is clear from the contemporary accounts that Mary went to her death serenely, rather than in the bitter mood which might have led to a last-minute official disinheritance of her son.
* In 1913 two small notices were placed privately on the railings surrounding the block of masonry; one, at the instance of the Richard III Society, recorded his birth in the castle in 1452; the other, affixed by the Stuart History Society, commemorated Mary Queen of Scots’ death in 1587. More colourful were the visits of an eccentric Jacobite sympathizer, at the turn of the present century, who used to make an annual pilgrimage from Edinburgh to Northamptonshire on the anniversary of the queen’s death to lay a wreath at Fotheringhay. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm for the cause of Mary Stuart, he used such violent language about the existing British royal family that his visits had to be discouraged by the then owners of the site.