Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  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 devout mourning 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 importanc
e 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.