An Accidental Tragedy (61 page)

Mary alone was calm, her servants, still separated from her, were weeping to distraction, and the officials – perhaps remembering her remark of the ‘theatre of the world’ – were nervous to the point of terror that something might go wrong. None of them had any previous experience in what was to occur. Many sovereigns had met violent deaths in both England and Europe, but a judicial execution was totally unprecedented.

Inexplicably, considering the severity shown to her in other respects, Mary was allowed a reunion with Melville at the foot of the stairs. She besought him to serve James as he had served her and he said, ‘Madame, it will be the sorrowfullest message that ever I carried when I shall report to him that my Queen and mistress is dead.’ She told him that ‘today, good Melville, thou seest the end of Mary Stewart’s miseries’. In this conversation Mary used the familiar form ‘tu’; it was the only time she used it when speaking to a servant. Kent and Shrewsbury, confident that everything would now go according to plan, allowed her five or six servants to accompany her, even, after some masculine prevarication, allowing two women, Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle, to attend her along with Melville, Bourgoing, Gourion, her surgeon and Gervais, her apothecary.

There were so many witnesses to the execution, each with their
own unique memory, that the accounts of the subsequent events are varied in many details. Today’s police forces will attest that four witnesses to an event will produce four quite different versions; Mary’s execution was no exception. According to Robert Wise, who wrote an account for Burghley immediately after the event, Mary climbed the two steps to the twelve-foot-broad scaffold, which was draped in black cloth, as was the block itself – some other reports tell us that the block was only a few inches high. Paulet helped her up the steps and she said to him, ‘I thank you, sir. This is the last trouble I shall ever give you.’ She then sat on a low stool with Kent and Shrewsbury beside her and listened in silence as Beale read out the death warrant again. Mary was not silent, however, when the Dean of Peterborough launched into a long sermon attempting to convert her to Protestantism. The seventeenth-century historian William Camden called it ‘a tedious speech’. Mary interrupted him: ‘Good Mr Dean, trouble not yourself any more about this matter, for I was born in this religion [Catholicism], have lived in this religion, and am resolved to die in this religion.’ Unperturbed, the dean went on, calling on God to confound Elizabeth’s enemies and praying for mercy for all. Mary then prayed aloud in Latin, knelt and prayed in English for the Catholic Church, for James, for Elizabeth and for an end to her troubles. The executioner Bull and his assistant then begged forgiveness, and Mary said, ‘I forgive you with all my heart. For I hope this death shall give an end to all my troubles.’ As Mary started to remove her outer clothes, one of the executioners took her Agnus Dei since, traditionally, the executioners were allowed the jewellery and clothes of their victim as an extra reward. However, Mary took it back from him saying that she had promised the jewel to one of her servants. Then, as Bull continued and made to remove her sleeves she prevented him: ‘I am not used to be undressed by such attendants, or to put off my clothes before so much company.’ She took the pins out of her hair herself, while Kennedy and Curle removed her outer clothes down to her underskirt and bodice and gave her fresh sleeves. All these
garments were a crimson or russet colour so that not only was Mary now the only person in the hall not wearing black, she was now dressed in the red signifying a Catholic martyr. Mary Stewart had prepared carefully for her apotheosis.

Her women, in spite of promises to the contrary, were now weeping uncontrollably. Dry-eyed, she asked them not to cry and assured them she would pray for them. She made the sign of the cross over her servants and the silk handkerchief was tied around her eyes. Bourgoing, another eye-witness, said that she knelt in front of her stool and recited the penitential psalm ‘
In te, domine, confido
’, then stretched her neck upwards. Perhaps Mary was expecting to be despatched in the French manner with a sword. Bull realised that Mary had not seen the low block and led her to it, where, gropingly, she was laid prone. Other witnesses tell us that she knelt on finishing her prayers. However, now understanding what was to take place, Mary lifted her chin clear of the block and laid her neck down. There was no need for ‘restraining ropes’, but one of the executioners had now to move her hands clear of the block otherwise they too would have been struck with the axe. Then, in the total silence which filled the hall, Mary, in a loud voice, called out ‘
In manus tuas, domine, commendam spiritum meum
’ ‘three or four times’ and Bull swung his axe. It was a short-handled woodman’s felling axe.

Presumably through nervousness, he mistook his aim and the blade struck Mary on the back of the head. She made no movement and his next blow severed her head from her body except for a piece of sinew, which Bull then sawed through. Finally her head rolled into the straw. ‘Thus died Mary, Queen of Scots, in the 45th year of her age, and the 19th of her imprisonment.’ It was about ten o’clock in the morning.

According to custom, Bull lifted up her head and declared, ‘God save the Queen’, while the Dean of Peterborough added, ‘So perish all the Queen’s enemies’ and the Earl of Kent alone said ‘amen’. The solemnity of the moment was ruined when Mary’s head fell from Bull’s grasp, leaving him holding the silk bandage and an auburn wig. The hair of the fallen head was grey and sparse. Bull and his assistant went to pull off Mary’s garters
and were surprised to find a little dog under her skirts. It had clearly come from her bedchamber and all attempts to remove it failed until it trotted up to lie between her neck and her head, covered in Mary’s blood.

Melville led Mary’s servants to gather up their mistress’s body but they were forced from the hall and locked in their rooms, where, later, the little paper packets of personal gifts were taken from them. Under Paulet’s orders the gates of Fotheringhay were locked after Lord Talbot, Shrewsbury’s son, had galloped off to take the news to London. The guards removed Mary’s body to an adjacent room, used as a presence chamber, where, bizarrely, her body was wrapped in the green cloth taken from her confiscated billiard table. The scaffold and block, along with her clothes, were all publicly burnt and the hall was diligently scrubbed free of blood so that no relics of the dead queen would remain as objects of veneration for her supporters. Even the little dog was washed clean.

An hour later, her severed head was displayed on a black velvet cushion in one of the windows of the hall in sight of the crowds outside in the courtyard. The next day, Mary’s corpse was hastily embalmed by ‘a country doctor, assisted by the village surgeon’ and her internal organs examined by the ‘country doctor’ who found no abnormalities except for the presence of internal fluid, ‘which gives credence to her indisposition being the result of dropsy’. Her organs were then secretly burnt by the sheriff. A wax death mask was taken from her head and her body was wrapped in waxed linen and placed in a double coffin of oak and lead. This huge coffin was left alone in the centre of the great hall. Paulet forbade Mary’s servants to pray beside it and had all the locks on the doors of the hall sealed up.

As night fell on 9 February only Mary’s servants were still living under strict confinement while Paulet and Drury’s guards kept to their own quarters. Mary’s little dog refused all food and pined itself to death. The gates of the castle were locked shut and in the centre of the great building the sealed Great Hall was empty except for the double coffin containing the earthly remains of Mary Stewart.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A place near the kings

When Lord Talbot reached Greenwich with the expected news, Elizabeth launched into one of the most elaborate, if totally unbelievable, charades of her reign. While church bells were rung and bonfires celebrated Mary’s death throughout England, Elizabeth shed ‘an abundance of tears’ and alternated between hysterical grief and political fury, claiming that her entire Privy Council had betrayed her and that she had only signed the death warrant ‘for safety’s sake’ – whatever that meant – and she immediately had Davison thrown into the Tower. Knowing full well that he was cast in the role of scapegoat, he described his and Elizabeth’s actions in detail, realising that he would be found guilty of having betrayed the queen. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower and fined the huge sum of £10,000. The fine was never collected, he continued to be paid his salary as Elizabeth’s private secretary, enjoyed a liberal regime in the Tower and was released after a year with a life pension. Burghley was – temporarily – banished from the royal presence, Walsingham remained diplomatically ill, and Hatton, who as Lord Chancellor had affixed the seal to the warrant, expected his arrest by the minute. Beale, who had carried the warrant, was banished to a junior position in York and, unfairly, was perhaps the only one to suffer in the long term. In April Paulet was appointed Chancellor of the Garter and breathed a sigh of relief.

All seaports were closed and traffic with Europe stopped for three weeks, but a garbled version of the events was smuggled out by Châteauneuf. The English ambassadors in Paris were
banished from the court and a judicial indictment of Mary’s trial as illegal was sent to London. On 12 March 1587 a Requiem Mass was held in Notre Dame, attended by the entire French court in deep mourning, totally ignoring Mary’s wishes for either St Dénis or Reims. The funeral oration was given by Renauld de Beaune, Archbishop of Bourges, and was eulogistic to say the least: ‘It was not easy to find so many [virtues] centred on one human being, for besides that marvellous beauty which attracted the eyes of all the world, she had a disposition so excellent, an understanding so clear and judgement so sound as could rarely be paralleled by a person of her sex and age . . . she possessed great courage but it was tempered by feminine gentleness and sweetness’. He went on to reminisce on how he had seen her married in the same church. He deplored her execution, horrified ‘to see that form which honoured the nuptial bed of a King of France, falling dishonoured on a scaffold . . . It appears as if God had chosen to render her virtues more glorious by her afflictions.’ He called on Christian princes everywhere to invade England and avenge the death of the martyr. Antonia Fraser points out that this oration may have been used as the basis of Edmund Burke’s eulogy on Marie Antoinette some 200 years later. The point of the oration was not personal grief, however, but rather public show on behalf of the Valois monarchy and this requiem can be taken as the start of the cult of Mary Stewart.

Shortly after the requiem, lives and tributes, some with no regard for truth, flooded on to the market. First to publish was Sartorio Loscho with a wildly romantic tale in which Mary fled Scotland to sail to France but was cruelly diverted to England by contrary winds. Anonymous pamphlets came next the ‘Discours de la Mort de Marie, Royne d’Ecosse’ was followed by an anonymous life in German. A Latin pamphlet was published in Cologne in which the Dean of Peterborough was a Calvinist minister and his sermon was full of ‘diabolical temptations’. The author ended with ‘Long Live Mary, a secular martyr in Christ.’ Adam Blackwood, probably our first homegrown Mariolater, published his
La mort de la Royne d’Ecosse
, in which the Sheriff of
Nottingham – a bold malapert person – bursts in on Mary while she is in mid prayer, then paces up and down behind her and drags her to the door. The executioners – ‘butchers’ – attempt to tear her clothes from her, and they drag her corpse unceremoniously away in spite of the anguished screams of the waiting women. Poems of praise also followed in abundance, with Elizabeth cast as Jezebel; there were sonnets, poems with anagrams of Mary’s name and funeral odes by Malherbe, Robert Garnier and Cardinal du Perron. Uncomfortable facts were glossed over and events rearranged to fit the accusations. In one pamphlet, Elizabeth was accused of creating the Act of Association solely to entrap Mary in the Babington plot, while the completely innocent Mary was merely seeking her freedom from illicit imprisonment. The smoke of legend was starting to swirl thickly around Mary Stewart.

In Scotland, the execution might have been the cause of immediate and violent reactions, since Elizabeth had murdered their queen and the mother of their 21-year-old king. James’s ambassadors had been in London since the previous December, pleading for Mary’s life. Indeed, Elizabeth had been reluctant to give them a decision and to let them return to Scotland. Since there was a league of friendship between James and Elizabeth the ambassadors were treading on eggshells and, in any case, the king’s view of his mother, carefully formed by Elizabeth and George Buchanan, was ambivalent. He said, ‘My honour constrains to insist for her life,’ while telling Walsingham, ‘Let her be put in the Tower or some other firm manse and kept from intelligence.’ There were rumours that ‘an unnamed person’ had offered to trade Mary’s life in turn for James renouncing his claim to the English throne. James begged Elizabeth not to take him for a chameleon, which he seemed to be, and declared, ‘How fond and inconstant I were if I should prefer my mother to the title let all men judge.’ This statement, like many of James’s declarations, could be read in any number of ways. Elizabeth was irritated by his seeming ambivalence and wrote to him, ‘The greatest hinder which our negotiations have found is a persuasion that either
your majesty deals superficially with the matter or that with time you may be moved to digest it.’ Her reply to James’s ambassadors was much more direct: ‘Tell your king what good I have done him in holding the crown on his head since he was born, and that I mind to keep the league that now stands between us, and if he break, it shall be a double fault.’