The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  The commission had no difficulty in finding her guilty, though they prorogued their assembly for ten days and did not pronounce the verdict until they had met in the Star Chamber. What next? Parliament had been summoned for 15 October, but it was prorogued, opening on 29 October (8 November, new style) with Elizabeth not appearing. Her absence was for reasons of decorum. She could not be seen to take part in proceedings against a queen.11 The Commons had already twice petitioned for the Scottish queen to be beheaded. Now a joint committee of Lords and Commons made a statement. The Queen of Scots regarded the Crown of England as belonging to herself. Ever since coming to England she had been a canker at its heart, corrupting its people. Mercy shown to her would be a cruelty to all loyal subjects. Sir Christopher Hatton made an impassioned speech. He described Mary as ‘the hope of all idolatry’, conceived by ‘a number of subjects terming themselves Catholics . . . to be a present possessor of the crown of England’. Her manner of life had from earliest years been ‘most filthy and detestable’; ‘her ambitious mind, grounded in Papistry’ had ‘thirsted after this crown . . . and our overthrow’. He called for her death. Otherwise ‘the Queen’s Majesty’s most royal person cannot be continued with safety. Ne pereat Israel, pereat Absalom – Absalom must perish, lest Israel perish.’12 Parliament unanimously agreed, and formally demanded that Mary Stuart be executed.

  Ever since news of the Babington conspiracy had begun to trickle out in August, England had been in suspense. When the sentence of Parliament was agreed – verbally – by Queen Elizabeth, it was received with rapture by the populace. Not only in the capital, but all over the country, bonfires blazed and bells rang. The bells of London rang for a full twenty-four hours in celebration.

  Crowds become ghoulish when there is war-fever in the air. They were not whooping with joy and lighting bonfires because a woman had been condemned to have her head chopped off, so much as exultant that a great threat to their collective nation had been checked.

  Elizabeth, as a rule, was intuitively in touch with her people, but not on this occasion. Her feelings were complicated, her emotions were tortured. Still, everyone waited for her to do the final, the legally necessary, thing and issue a death-warrant to enable the execution to take place. And still she continued to receive deputations from abroad: M. de Belièvre, the French Finance Minister, to entreat Elizabeth for mercy. If mercy were not offered, he was commissioned to pass on the fact that the King of France was in warlike mood; so was the Papal Nuncio in Paris, so was Mendoza. If the Scottish queen were executed, not only would the King resent it, but he would see it as a special affront to himself.

  ‘M. Belièvre,’ said the Queen, ‘does the King your Master bid you use these words to me?’

  ‘Yes, madam. It is his express command.’

  But England had spoken – the Council, the Parliament, the people. There could be no doubt what they all wanted. Walsingham had news of other conspiracies hatching, and the longer the Scottish queen lived, the more chance there was of such schemes gathering momentum. Walsingham became ill, an illness exacerbated by the strain; but perhaps there was an element of self-protection here. He was a cunning enough man. He knew Queen Elizabeth well. He knew the danger of being the man who actually put Mary, Queen of Scots’s death-warrant under Elizabeth’s nose and asking her to sign it.

  This task fell to Walsingham’s deputy, Mr William Davison. As they entered the month of February (Wednesday, 1 February, old style; 11 February, new style) he went down to Greenwich, that pleasantest of all the Queen’s palaces, where, from the windows of her apartments, she could watch the ships sailing down the Thames and out to sea. Davison decided not to deceive Her Majesty, but to numb the sharpness of what was needed by sandwiching the appalling document in a pile of trivial papers that required her signature. It appeared at first as if she knew his game, and wished to play it this way. She made small talk, and remarked upon the brightness of the morning. She signed the papers, all of them, including the death-warrant, casting them to the floor as she did so. Davison must have thought that he was going to get away without having to discuss the matter any further.

  But this was not Elizabeth’s way. Of course she could not allow the significance of what she had done to pass without notice. She told him to take the warrant at once to the Lord Chancellor and to have it sealed. Only when the Royal Seal was attached to it would it become a fully legal document. She specified the hall, rather than the lawn at Fotheringhay, as a more seemly place for the dreadful deed to happen. Then, with a bitter joke, she told Davison to call on Walsingham with the news, adding that the grief would probably kill him outright.

  As Davison withdraw, walking backwards, she called him back. It was then that she raised the possibility of an assassination rather than a formal execution. It would disarm the resentment of Scotland and France; it would remove any necessity that James VI or King Henri III might have for quarrelling with her. She asked him to approach Paulet or Walsingham. Davison was brave enough to tell her that he was sure they would refuse. Nevertheless she insisted that he should do so. As soon as Davison had taken the death-warrant to the Chancellor, a seal was attached to it. The Chancellor did not even bother to read it. The next day Davison received a note from the Queen telling him not to go to the Chancellor until she had spoken to him again. Davison hurried back to Greenwich and told the Queen that the document was already sealed and dispatched to Fotheringhay. After a spell of impatiently pacing the room, Elizabeth suddenly walked out on him and left him alone.

  Secretary Robert Beale, clerk to the Privy Council, was entrusted with the task of taking the death-warrant to Fotheringhay. He rode hard out of London, broke the journey at Wrest in Bedfordshire and reached Fotheringhay Castle on the Sunday evening. He then went in search of the Queen’s erstwhile guardian, Lord Shrewsbury, and on Monday evening Shrewsbury and the Earl of Kent assembled. A message was sent to the Sheriff of Northamptonshire to be in attendance on Wednesday morning.

  Shrewsbury had not been in London for some time. He had taken no part in the Parliament that insisted upon Mary Stuart’s death. Nor had he seen her since Amyas Paulet had taken charge of her. It was his task to break to her the awful news. With Kent at his side, on Tuesday, 7 February (17th), he told Mary that she must die in the morning. Perhaps in part because the bearer of these tidings was a man of whom she was fond, and who patently loved her, the emotion of the scene was too much for her. In Paulet’s presence she was able to keep up a cool disdain. At the trial she had maintained a lofty swagger. But now, as Shrewsbury told her that she was to be executed, and so soon, she found it impossible to believe. With much tossing of the head she called for her physician. When Shrewsbury and Kent made their awkward withdrawal from her presence, she had broken down altogether and both men were haunted by the spectre of her committing suicide in the night; or, when morning came, of the painful possibility of her having to be dragged to the block.

  They need not have feared. When morning came, Mary had composed herself and was ready to put on one last spectacular show.

  On that freezing day, 8 February (18th), the hall at Fotheringhay had been arranged as for a drama, with a miniature stage, three feet high and some twelve feet by eight, placed at its upper end; as if the company were expecting a troupe of travelling players. The new wood of the platform had been swathed in black velvet, and there, centre stage, was what they had all come to see: the block. At 7 a.m. nearly 300 spectators took their places: soldiers, local gentry. Outside the castle walls there was a crowd of thousands. At eight, the provost marshal knocked on the outer door of Mary’s apartments. There was no answer. Fearing the worst, he hurried to fetch the sheriff. By the time they had returned the doors were open and Mary Stuart stood there in a robe of black satin, with a black satin jacket, looped and slashed and trimmed with velvet. She must have had this costume in readiness. One of her greatest admirers, who witnessed her end, was to compare her demeanour on her last morning to that of a great actress (‘Si le
plus parfait tragique qui fust jamais venoit à present avec un desire et soing indicible de représenter sa contenance, paroles et gestes et façon de faire sur un theatre, il pourrut mériter quelques louanges, mais on le trouveroit court’.13). ‘If the most perfect tragedian, with indescribable desire and care had tried to represent her face and words and gestures on the stage, he might have won some praise, but he would still have fallen short [from her performance].’ She was dressed for her finest role. The cruel, but accurate, Victorian historian James Anthony Froude summed it up by saying, ‘she was a bad woman, disguised in the livery of a martyr’.14

  After some haggling about whether she should be permitted to take her attendants with her, she was allowed six: her physician Burgoyne, Andrew Melville, the apothecary Govian, and her surgeon, with two ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Kennedy and Barbara Mowbray (the wife of her secretary Gilbert Curle, whose baby Mary had herself baptised). Speaking in her first language, she said, ‘Allons donc’ – ‘Let us go’ – and, accompanied by the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, the procession set off.

  When it entered the hall, by a small side door, everyone remarked on Mary’s composure. Not a muscle of her face quivered. Round her neck she wore a gold crucifix, and another, made of ivory, was clutched in her ivory-white hands. Beale then mounted the platform and read the death-warrant. Lord Shrewsbury then said, ‘Madam, you hear what we are commanded to do.’

  ‘You will do your duty,’ she said.

  It was now the turn of the Church to speak its bootless lines. In full canonicals, Dr Richard Fletcher stepped forward. This jobsworth parson is chiefly known to history as the father of the dramatist Giles Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher fame. He was to rise through the ecclesiastical ranks, becoming Bishop of Worcester and then of London. When attending to that dignity in 1595, he very nearly lost it again – infuriating the Queen by marrying a widow. (How often she was made angry by marriages!) His must be one of the first recorded smoking mortalities. It occurred a year after he became Bishop of London, when he was fifty-one years old: puffing away, he removed his pipe from his lips to remark to his servant, ‘Boy. I die’, which he did.

  When he attended upon the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, he was merely the Dean of Peterborough. Clearing his throat and making a low bow, he began, ‘Madam, the Queen’s most excellent Majesty . . .’ Fletcher had no notes to help him if he stumbled and, although he had preached at her trial, he was now lost for words. ‘Madam,’ he began again, and again words failed him. He was only two or three years her junior – she was forty-three – and the inherent shockingness of what was about to happen was surely increased by the fact that she was a beautiful woman, with coils of auburn hair under her coif-caps, and with gold glinting on her white throat. ‘Madam, the Queen’s most excellent Majesty.’

  Again, Fletcher failed. Though nothing could have been further from the truth, it was as if this sturdily Protestant figure was deliberately giving her a cue.

  ‘Mr Dean’, she supplied with pious courtesy. ‘I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me but a little.’

  Suddenly Fletcher found his voice and he bellowed, ‘Change your opinion, Madam! Repent of your sins, settle your faith in Christ. By him be saved.’

  ‘Trouble not yourself further, Mr Dean’, she replied. ‘I am settled in my own faith, for which I mean to shed my blood.’

  ‘I am sorry, Madam,’ Shrewsbury interjected, ‘to see you so addicted to Popery.’

  And the Earl of Kent added, ‘That image of Christ you hold there will not profit you if he be not engraved in your heart.’

  She did not reply. This was a moment when such disputations were entirely inappropriate. The dean began to pray, and we are told that the crowd joined in, so it must have been some familiar form such as ‘Our Father’. The Queen of Scots, however, raised her voice above his and recited the penitential Psalms in Latin, translating them into English as she did so. Then, in English, she prayed aloud for her holy father the Pope, and for the Church, and for the Queen of England in whose murder both Mary and the Pope had conspired. She called on King Philip not to forget her in death and, kissing her crucifix, she cried, ‘Even as thy arms, O Jesus, were spread upon the cross, so receive me into Thy mercy and forgive my sins.’

  Now she was ready for the final scene of the melodrama. All eyes were on the stage. Shrewsbury’s were streaming with tears. The ladies helped her, with conspicuous care, to remove her lawn veil without disturbing the magnificent auburn tresses. Then began a spectacular striptease. Off came the black robe and the black jacket, to reveal Mary to be dressed in crimson satin, blood-red from head to toe. Hers was the only splash of colour on that black stage surrounded by ink-black-clad figures. Barbara Mowbray bound Mary’s eyes with a handkerchief. With a smile, Mary waved to her ladies: Adieu, au revoir! Then she sank to her knees and recited in Latin the psalm In te, Domine, confide – ‘In Thee, O Lord, have I put my trust.’ Finally, feeling blindly for the block, she declared the words of the Compline psalm that Christ Himself is said to have repeated as He died on the Cross. In manus tuas, Domine, tuas, commendo animam meam – ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

  The axe fell, but the practised headsman sent specifically from the Tower of London, like the Dean of Peterborough, was disconcerted by Mary. He wavered. The axe hit the knot in her handkerchief, scarcely breaking her skin. When Louis XIV was cut for the stone, without any anaesthesia, one of his attendant lords who held his hand was merely aware of a very faint tightening of the royal grip as the surgeon’s knife penetrated the royal innards. Mary Stuart showed comparable royal courage on the scaffold. She uttered not a squeak, she moved not a millimetre. The axeman tried again and this time he was successful. He moved to the next stage in the tradition of these gruesome procedures. Reaching for the luxuriant auburn hair, he intended to hold up the victim’s head. But the hair, like so much about her, was fake. He found himself ridiculously holding up a red wig. What rolled away from him on the platform was not what the audience had believed themselves to have seen only seconds before – not the head of a still-young beauty, but the grizzled, close-cropped grey head of a prematurely aged crone. With what seemed paranormal grotesqueness, its lips were still moving for a few seconds, as if determined to have the last word. From her skirts there escaped the Skye terrier that had been her companion to the end. It clung whimperingly to the corpse and had to be dragged away.

  For the joint perpetrators of this melancholy deed were determined that Mary should not be allowed her wish to be regarded as a Catholic martyr. The gauze veil that she had worn to be beheaded was preserved by one of her ladies and eventually passed to her descendant, the last of her doomed Stuart line, Henry, Cardinal of York. The prayer book and rosary that she had with her on the scaffold were bequeathed to Anne, wife of Philip, Earl of Arundel, and they may be seen to this day at Arundel Castle, the Duke of Norfolk’s seat in Sussex. These survive as what Catholics term ‘secondary relics’. Not a speck of her actual blood, flesh or bone was allowed to survive for the veneration of the faithful. The castle gates were kept firmly locked to prevent the intrusion of the mob. The blood-stained block was burned. All items of clothes and all personal belongings were burned or scoured. The executioners were tipped with cash to compensate them for loss of the victim’s jewels, a normal prerequisite of the job. The little dog, its fur matted with Mary’s blood, was washed and washed again. It pined away for sorrow and starved itself to death, refusing all inducements to eat.

  Mary’s body was stripped and swabbed and embalmed. The heart and other organs were secretly buried somewhere in the castle – no one knows where. The body, on Walsingham’s specific order, was wrapped in a wax winding sheet and enclosed in a heavy lead coffin. It was not buried for more than five months – on 30 July – at Peterborough Cathedral. The ceremony was conducted according to the rites of the English Church. She was accompanied by a procession of
a hundred mourning widows, five heralds, hooded and tabarded – and a seemly proportion of the nobility. In Peterborough Cathedral, near that other unfortunate queen, Catherine of Aragon, Mary lay until her son, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England. In 1612 she was moved in state to Westminster Abbey and commemorated by a splendid white-marble tomb. When Dean Stanley, a keen antiquarian, opened up the Stuart vaults in Westminster Abbey in 1867, he found Mary’s coffin against the north wall of the vault. He did not open it. Mary in death was surrounded by the coffins of her descendants: her grandson, Henry, Prince of Wales, who died prematurely; her granddaughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen; Rupert of the Rhine, her great-grandson, who was such a gallant cavalry officer in the Civil Wars; and dozens of tiny coffins – the first ten children of James II and the heart-rending eighteen dead babies of Queen Anne. The whole vault is yet another reminder of the extraordinary misfortune that hovered over the Stuart dynasty. Mary’s son, James I, eluded the search of the Victorian dean until he was eventually found in the tomb of Henry VII.15

  So much for Mary Stuart, resplendent in her death. As a political act, her execution was self-justificatory. ‘The entire Catholic organisation as directed against England was smitten with paralysis; and the Queen found herself, when the invader arrived at last, supported by the loyal enthusiasm of an undivided nation.’ Froude’s jingo-analysis is true.16

  But it is not the whole truth. The beheading of the Scottish queen was a tragic, as well as a grisly, act, and it showed Queen Elizabeth in an eerie light. Seen as a chess-game between Walsingham on the one hand and the King of Spain on the other, the removal of the Scottish queen from the board is a masterstroke. In the more nuanced psychological rivalry between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, the drama of Fotheringhay was a very hard act to follow. And in all her roles in the play, Elizabeth writhed with mixed feelings, nearly all of them painful: in her role as childless old maid upstaged by the three-times-married, ten years younger woman who left behind her a male heir; in her role as crowned head, deeply shocked that another monarch could be so easily removed; in her role of quasi-Catholic who hated the Protestantism of Fletcher or Walsingham much more than she hated the Romish ways of her cousin; in her role as a woman who, in spite of her imperiousness, her temper and her bursts of cruelty, could not but recoil at the thought of that castle hall, full of men, gathered for the ritual judicial killing of her younger, female cousin.