by John Guy
The sheriff called for silence, after which Robert Beale, the clerk of Elizabeth’s Privy Council and the man responsible for delivering the execution warrant to Fotheringhay, read it out. As he spoke—the warrant would have taken about ten minutes to read—Mary sat completely still. She showed no emotion, listening, as Robert Wingfield of Upton, Northamptonshire, who was within ten yards of her, reported, “with as small regard as if it had not concerned her at all; and with as cheerful a countenance as if it had been a pardon.” Her nerve was to be tested, however, when Dr. Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, and at this time one of Elizabeth’s favorite preachers, stepped forward at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s signal.
Fletcher, the father of the dramatist John Fletcher, who was Shakespeare’s collaborator on Henry VIII, had been brought in to deliver a setpiece “admonition” to Mary that strictured her for her traitorous Catholicism, and to lead the assembly in prayers. He was one of Elizabeth’s chaplains in ordinary, renowned for his “comely person” and “courtly speech.”
But his admonition backfired spectacularly; the attempted sermon—for that is all it was—was the greatest faux pas of his career. When the moment came, he started to stammer nervously. “Madam,” he began, “the queen’s most excellent majesty”; “Madam, the queen’s most excellent majesty . . .” Three times he stumbled, but when he started for the fourth, Mary cut him off. In a clear and unwavering voice, she said, “Mr. Dean, I will not hear you. You have nothing to do with me, nor I with you.”
Fletcher, somewhat abashed, countered, “I say nothing but that I will justify before the majesty of the mighty God.” He was not at first willing to give way to her, believing that God would never abandon the just, but would minister to them through his angels. If Mary had been condemned to die, it was God’s work and the preacher would be called to account for his sermon only before God.
Hearing this, Mary got into her stride, as she always did in an argument. “I am settled,” she said, “in the ancient Roman Catholic religion, and mind to spend my blood in defense of it.”
Fletcher unwisely responded, “Madam, change your opinion and repent you of your former wickedness, and settle your faith only in Jesus Christ, by him to be saved.” This was not the way to speak to a queen. Mary, visibly coloring, ordered him to be silent. There was an awkward pause. Then the earls gave way. Fletcher was told to omit the sermon, which in a fit of pique he insisted be transcribed from his notes into a report of the day’s proceedings.
A bizarre, even farcical scene ensued. The Earl of Kent urged Fletcher to begin the prayers, but as the dean started speaking again, Mary prayed loudly and in Latin with her crucifix before her eyes.
There followed a battle of wills, because as the knights and gentlemen in the hall joined Fletcher in his versicles and responses, Mary and her six servants shouted louder and louder until the queen, in tears, slipped off her stool, at which point she knelt and continued as before.
Even after Fletcher had ceased praying, Mary carried on, in English now to cause maximum embarrassment. She prayed for the Church, for an end to religious discord, for her son, the twenty-year-old James VI of Scotland—whom her enemies had brought up as a Protestant—that he might be converted to the true Catholic faith. She prayed that Elizabeth might prosper and long continue to reign, serving God aright. She confessed that she hoped to be saved “by and in the blood of Christ at the foot of whose crucifix she would willingly shed her blood.” She petitioned the saints to pray for her soul, and that God would in his great mercy and goodness avert his plagues from “this silly island.”
To the Earl of Kent, himself a staunch Protestant, this was highly offensive. “Madam,” he said, “settle Christ Jesus in your heart and leave those trumperies.” But Mary ignored him. Eventually she finished, kissing the crucifix and making the sign of the cross in the Catholic way.
This was largely contrived. Mary had never truly been the ideological Catholic that she now wished to appear to the world. She was far too political for that. As a ruler in Scotland, she had sensibly accepted a compromise based on the religious status quo and the inroads made by the Protestant Reformation. Only after her imprisonment in England had she reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. What happened in the great hall at Fotheringhay was for show, and it worked. By humiliating Fletcher, Mary won a propaganda victory that resounded around Catholic Europe.
Satisfied, she calmly turned to Bull, who meekly knelt and sought her forgiveness. She answered, “I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.”
The executioners helped Mary’s gentlewomen to undress her down to her petticoat. As they unbuttoned her, she smiled broadly and joked that she “never had such grooms before to make her unready” nor did she “ever put off her clothes before such a company.”
She laid her crucifix and prayer book on her stool, and one of the executioners took the medallion from around her neck, since custom allowed that such personal items were a perquisite. But Mary interposed, saying that she would give these things to her servants and that he would receive money in lieu of them.
As Mary’s veil and black outer garments were removed, stifled cries of shock and astonishment reverberated around the hall. Her petticoat was of tawny velvet, her inner bodice of tawny satin. One of her gentlewomen handed her a pair of tawny sleeves with which she immediately covered her arms. A metamorphosis had occurred.
For several minutes Mary stood stock still on the stage, clad in the color of dried blood: the liturgical color of martyrdom in the Roman Catholic Church. It was a sight so melodramatic, so abhorrent to the earls, that they omitted all reference to it from their official report to the Privy Council. The incident is known only from a contemporary French account based on the reports of Mary’s attendants, which is confirmed by two independent English accounts, one by Shrewsbury’s servant, who was writing to a friend and had no reason to lie.
Mary kissed her gentlewomen, who burst into uncontrolled fits of sobbing. “Ne criez vous,” she said, “j’ai promis pour vous.” Or as one of the English eyewitness accounts renders it, “Peace, peace, cry not, I have promised the contrary, cry not for me but rejoice.”
She raised her hands and blessed them, and turning to her other servants, Melville especially, who were weeping aloud and continually crossing themselves, she prayed in Latin and blessed them too, bade them farewell, and asked them to remember her in their prayers.
She knelt down “most resolutely” on the cushion while Jane Kennedy covered her eyes with a white Corpus Christi cloth embroidered in gold that Mary had chosen the previous night. Jane kissed the cloth, tied it around Mary’s face in the shape of a triangle and pinned it securely to her cap. The two gentlewomen then left the platform.
As Mary knelt, she recited in Latin the psalm In te Domino confido, “In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust.” Reaching out for the block, she laid down her head, positioning her chin carefully with her hands and holding them there, so that if one of the executioners had not moved them, they would have been cut off. She stretched out her arms and legs and cried, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meurm”—“Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” She repeated these words three or four times until, with one executioner holding down her body, the other severed her head.
Except it was the headsman’s turn to blunder. It should have taken only a single blow, but the strain was too great even for England’s most experienced executioner. His first strike was misaligned, and the blow fell on the knot of the blindfold, missing the neck and hacking into the back of the head. One account says Mary made a “very small noise,” but another says she cried out in agony, “Lord Jesus receive my soul.” A second strike severed the neck, but not completely, and the executioner sliced through the remaining sinews, using the ax as a cleaver. At length he raised the head, shouting “God save the queen.” An audible gasp went up from the hall, because Mary’s lips were
still moving as if in prayer, and continued to do so for a quarter of an hour.
And then the final twist. As the executioner lifted up the head, Mary’s auburn curls and white cap became detached from her skull. The illusion of monarchy dissolved as the executioner found himself clutching a handful of hair while the head fell back to the floor, rolling like a misshapen football toward the spectators, who saw that it was “very grey and near bald.”
Suddenly everything was clear. The Queen of Scots had worn a wig. The assembly was struck dumb, until the Earl of Shrewsbury could stand it no longer and burst into tears.
As the executioner retrieved the skull, Dr. Fletcher recovered his wits. He bellowed, “So perish all the queen’s enemies,” to which the Earl of Kent, standing over the corpse, echoed, “Such be the end of all the queen’s and the gospel’s enemies.” But it was a gruesome finale, a harrowing catharsis. Even in the London theaters, where revenge plays and tragedies were newly in vogue, no one had seen anything quite like this.
Mary’s distraught servants were led from the scene and locked in their rooms. The executioners were disrobing the corpse when one of them saw that her favorite pet dog, a Skye terrier, had hidden itself in the folds of her petticoat and sneaked onto the stage. When detected, it ran about wailing miserably and lay down in the widening pool of blood between her severed head and shoulders. Since it could not be coaxed away, it was forcibly removed and washed, whereupon it refused to eat. One of Mary’s servants claimed it soon died, but this is not corroborated.
In the afternoon, by order of the earls, the black cotton sheets, the execution block and cushion, Mary’s clothes and ornaments, and anything else with blood on it were burned in the open fireplace so that no relics of the “martyrdom” she had so conspicuously sought to evoke could be obtained by her Catholic supporters. Still present in the great hall to observe these cleansing operations were the knights and gentlemen of the county, and when the earls wrote their official account of the execution, these men signed their names to the report as solemn witnesses.
The Earl of Shrewsbury’s fourth son, Henry Talbot, was sent posthaste to London to deliver the report to the Privy Council that same night. When he had departed, the mortal remains of the dead queen were put on a stretcher and carried back upstairs to be embalmed. The scaffold was demolished and everyone except the sheriff, who had the job of burying the heart and inner organs in a secret place within the foundations of the castle, was sent home. Some of Mary’s ornaments must also have been buried in the deep recesses of the castle, because the ring she was given at her betrothal to her second husband, Henry Lord Darnley, was later unearthed in the ruins and exhibited at Peterborough in 1887.
No one who had witnessed Mary’s last day could ever have forgotten it. Whatever view is taken of her character, whatever credence is given to the stories told about her as away of justifying her forced abdication and execution, the business on that day was regicide. Mary was an anointed queen. Elizabeth, her fellow sovereign as much as her rival for the past thirty years, was herself all too anxious to defend the ideal of monarchy: the principle that rulers were accountable to God alone. She had done everything possible to prevent Mary’s execution until she felt it could no longer be avoided, and then to shift the blame for it onto the shoulders of others.
Elizabeth had a firm grasp of the issues. She knew that Mary’s death would alter the way that monarchy was regarded in the British Isles. A regicide would give a massive boost to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.” It would help to propagate the theory of popular sovereignty—the belief that political power lies in the people and not in the ruler—and the idea that the representatives of the people were those they elected to Parliament. This was the ideology invoked by Mary’s rebel lords in Scotland to depose her. And the same theory would be instilled there, and more subversively in parts of France, for 250 years after her death, finally to cross the Atlantic when Dr. William Small, a Scot, taught ethics and political science to the young Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
How did so versatile a queen as Mary, one so beautiful and intelligent, so convivial and down-to-earth, so full of life and irresistible, end up disgraced and deposed? One of the reasons is that Elizabeth’s chief minister and leading adviser for forty years, William Cecil, was her antagonist. More than anyone else, he was her great nemesis. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary was a Catholic, and Cecil’s overriding ambition was to remold the whole of the British Isles into a single Protestant community. He had little room for an independent Scotland, hence his intermittent clashes with his Scottish allies over the extent of English domination. Whereas Elizabeth did all she could to protect the ideal of divine-right monarchy irrespective of the religion of its incumbent, Cecil believed that Parliament had the right to settle the succession to the throne on religious grounds, meaning that Mary’s dynastic claim had at all costs to be discounted.
In death as in life, Mary always aroused the strongest feelings. To her apologists she was an innocent victim. She was mishandled and traduced: a political pawn in the hands of those perfidious Scottish lords and ambitious French and English politicians who found her inconvenient and in their way. To her critics she was fatally flawed. She was far too affected by her emotions. She ruled from the heart and not the head. She was a femme fatale, a manipulative siren, who flaunted her sexuality in dancing and banqueting and did not care who knew it.
Her enemies largely won the argument. Mary has come down to us not as a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country, but rather as someone who cared more about her luxuries and pets. She knew how to play to the gallery. One of the accounts of her execution dismissed her as “transcending the skills of the most accomplished actress.” But a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century, and there was far more to Mary than so cynical a judgment implies.
This book tries to get to the truth about her, or as close to the truth as possible: to see her not merely as a bundle of stereotypes or as a convenient and tenuously linked series of myths, but as a whole woman whose choices added up and whose decisions made sense. The rationale relates closely to the method: to write Mary’s life and tell her story using the original documents rather than relying on the familiar printed collections or edited abstracts, themselves often compiled to perpetuate rather than to engage with the legends. It may come as a surprise to learn that such documents survive in voluminous quantities, preserved in archives and research libraries as far apart as Edinburgh, Paris, London, the stately homes of England, and Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Some of them have not been read by a historian since 1840. Many have not been freshly examined since the 1890s, and among these are unrecognized handwritten transcripts of two of the famous Casket Letters.
The aim is to tell Mary’s story, where possible letting her speak for herself in her own words, but also to consider why the stories of others about the very same events are often so strikingly different. Only when this is done can the myriad of facts be properly sifted, the sequence of events be explained and understood, and a searchlight cast on a turbulent life.
1
The First Year
MARY STUART was born in the coldest of winters. Snow blanketed the ground, and the narrow pathways and rough winding tracks between England and Scotland were completely blocked. The cattle that roamed the Lowlands and the valleys of the border region during the summer months were crouching in their low stone byres. The River Tweed, often a raging torrent as it flowed to the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed on the eastern side of the border, was frozen over. Whereas it normally took a rider five or six days to carry important dispatches from Edinburgh to London, the news of Mary’s birth took four days to reach Alnwick in Northumberland, only a few miles south of Berwick.
The new baby was the only daughter and sole surviving heir of James V of Scotland and his second queen, Mary of
Guise. She was born at Linlithgow Palace, some seventeen miles west of Edinburgh, on Friday, December 8, 1542.
The deep frost scarcely troubled the occupants of the queen’s suite on the third floor of the northwest tower of the palace. Recent construction had transformed Linlithgow into a luxurious residence. James V had lavish tastes and sought to introduce the latest Renaissance styles. The windows of the palace were glazed, the ceilings painted, the stonework and woodwork intricately carved with crowns and thistles. In the great hall and throughout the dozen or so rooms of the royal apartments, logs blazed in the fireplaces. The finest Flemish tapestries and hangings of rich arras and cloth of gold covered the stone walls to keep out drafts.
Linlithgow, along with Falkland in Fife, was a favorite lodging of Mary of Guise. She had helped to redesign both palaces like French châteaux. This was hardly surprising, because she was herself French. She was the widowed Duchess of Longueville, the eldest daughter of Claude, Duke of Guise, and his wife, Antoinette of Bourbon. The Guises were one of the most powerful noble families in France. Their patrimonial seat was at Joinville in the Champagne region, their estates scattered across strategically important areas of northern and eastern France.
The family of her first husband, Louis d’Orléans, Duke of Longueville, owned significant estates in the Loire region, so Mary of Guise knew all about Renaissance palaces. She compared Linlithgow for its elegance and picturesque setting to the châteaux of the Loire, where the French royal family lived when not near Paris. Like Chenonceaux, the jewel of the Loire, Linlithgow was a pleasure palace partly surrounded by water. The outer walls stood on a semicircular knoll extending into the loch on the north side, overlooking St. Michael’s parish church and the town of Linlithgow to the south.
