The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Her secretary kept quiet. He knew that the warrant was already on its way to Fotheringhay. Beale had been sent posthaste to find the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent at their houses, to show it to them and hand them their letters of appointment. Also riding north was the executioner, disguised as a “servingman,” his ax concealed in a trunk. Walsingham had personally selected him and promised to pay his fee and a bonus.

  Cecil was utterly implacable; he had acted clandestinely. It was a truly historic moment. He was prepared to take no chances and chose to go ahead regardless. He had waited so long for this day. In this respect, he was far more than just the adversary of the ill-fated Queen of Scots. He really was her nemesis. And now that the time had arrived, not even the queen of England was going to stop him.

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  The Final Hours

  MARY WAS IN surprisingly good spirits in the few remaining weeks and months after her trial. Her apartments at Fotheringhay Castle were comparatively spacious and comfortable, and her money had been returned to her, which allowed her to purchase some additional luxuries. Perhaps this, combined with Elizabeth’s “answer answerless” to Parliament and the delay in issuing the proclamation against her, raised her hopes and encouraged her to think that no one would in the end dare to put the verdict of the trial commissioners into effect.

  An open sore on one of her shoulders and a stiff right arm added to the pain she suffered from her other ailments, but she was otherwise cheerful. Paulet found her “taking pleasure in trifling toys, and in the whole course of her speech free from grief of mind in outward appearance.” She kept going over the events of the trial: who had said what in the courtroom, and what she had overheard whispered by those commissioners sitting nearest to her.

  Then, on Saturday, February 4, 1587, Robert Beale reached the vicinity of Fotheringhay. His first task was to find and brief the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, which took up most of the next three days, as they were visiting their estates and on the move. When this was done and all three had arrived at Fotheringhay Castle, they approached Mary’s privy chamber, where they would inform her that she would be executed shortly after eight o’clock the following morning. Paulet and his assistant, Sir Drue Drury, led the earls upstairs. When they were admitted, the man who so obviously relished his role as Mary’s jailer barged in and pulled down her cloth of state for the last time. According to Beale’s account, the warrant for her execution was read while she listened in silence.

  She sat still for several minutes, then suddenly frowned as she remembered how the deposed King Richard II had been quietly murdered at Pontefract Castle. She asked if this would be done to her, to which Drury, an honorable man who was gentler and kinder than Paulet, answered, “Madam, you need not fear it, for that you are in the charge of a Christian queen.”

  How little did Mary guess that Elizabeth’s firm intention, as Drury knew very well, had been that she should be surreptitiously done to death by “one Wingfield,” a hired assassin, and that she owed the relative privilege of a public execution almost entirely to the will of Cecil and Walsingham.

  Mary calmly addressed the earls. “I thank you for such welcome news. You will do me a great good in withdrawing me from this world, out of which I am very glad to go.” She spoke at some length, recalling her ancestry and dynastic claim, and giving her own account of her attempts to reach a political accord with Elizabeth over the years and her willingness to compromise. All her overtures, she said, had been rejected. There was nothing more that she felt she could have done. “I am of no good and of no use to anyone,” she concluded. For all these years, perhaps ever since the death of her first husband, she had been in someone else’s way.

  But she had discovered a new role. She would die as a martyr for her Catholic faith. She crossed herself in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. “I am quite ready and very happy to die, and to shed my blood for Almighty God, my savior and my creator, and for the Catholic Church, and to maintain its rights in this country.”

  Mary asked that her own chaplain should be allowed to comfort her, but her request was cruelly denied. She then inquired about her place of burial. Would she be allowed to lie next to her first husband at the royal mausoleum at St.-Denis or beside her beloved mother at the convent of St.-Pierre-des-Dames at Rheims?

  Shrewsbury answered that while nothing had been decided, she could hardly expect Elizabeth to allow her to be buried in France. “At least then,” said Mary, “my requests in favor of my servants will be granted?”

  Since her clashes as a teenager, she had been famous for her generosity to her servants, and she now expressed her earnest wish to reward those of her gentlewomen and domestic staff who had loyally stood by her for so long. As the earls had received no instructions on this point, they offered no objection.

  When they had taken their leave and Mary was alone with her gentlewomen, she kept up her defiance. “Weeping,” she told them, “is useless.” She ate little at supper, but knelt to pray for an hour or so. Then she gathered her strength and set to work. She made her last will. She said that she died in the true Catholic faith, and left instructions for Requiem Masses to be said for her soul in France, which all her servants might attend. She directed that all her debts should be paid, and whatever money was left over used to reward her servants. She named as her principal executor her cousin Henry, Duke of Guise.

  Next Mary consulted the inventory of her wardrobes and cabinets and distributed their contents among her gentlewomen and servants. Bourgoing, whose narrative is the most reliable account of Mary’s final hours, received two rings, two small silver boxes, two lutes that Mary herself had sometimes played, her music book bound in velvet, and her red valances and bed curtains.

  When Mary had distributed her possessions, she went to her writing desk. She had already said goodbye to the Duke of Guise, whom she regarded as the head of her family. “I bid you adieu,” she had written a little over two months before and a month after the guilty verdict, “being on the point of being put to death by an unjust judgment, such a one as never any belonging to our house yet suffered, thanks be to God, much less one of my rank.” She hoped that her death would bear witness to her Catholic faith and willingness to suffer “for the support and restoration of the Catholic Church in this unfortunate island.”

  She sent her love to all her relatives. The bitterness she still felt toward her son, James VI, for his rejection of her was barely concealed. “May the blessing of God, and that which I should give to my own children, be upon yours, whom I commend to God not less sincerely than my own unfortunate and deluded son.”

  It was time for Mary to finish her goodbyes. She had always loved to send and receive letters, and allowing for documents that no longer exist she must have written perhaps two or three thousand over the course of her forty-four years. Now she sat down to write her very last one. It was naturally to be sent to France, the country she regarded as home, even while she was a reigning queen in Scotland. The chosen recipient was her brother-in-law, Henry III, whom she had known since he was a baby in the royal nursery at St.-Germain and Fontainebleau.

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning when she began. There were only six hours left before her execution, but despite her usual tendency to scribble, the letter is in her best handwriting. Some slight blotches on the first page may mark the places where her tears fell onto the paper as she wrote.

  Today, after dinner, I was advised of my sentence. I am to be executed like a criminal at eight o’clock in the morning. I haven’t had enough time to give you a full account of all that has happened, but if you will listen to my physician and my other sorrowful servants, you will know the truth, and how, thanks be to God, I scorn death and faithfully protest that I face it innocent of any crime . . .

  The Catholic faith and the defense of my God-given right to the English throne are the two reasons for which I am condemned, and yet they will not allow me to say that it is for the Catholic faith that I die . . .
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  I beg you as Most Christian Majesty, my brother-in-law and old friend, who have always protested your love for me, to give proof now of your kindness on all these points: both by paying charitably my unfortunate servants their arrears of wages (this is a burden on my conscience that you alone can relieve), and also by having prayers offered to God for a Queen who has herself been called Most Christian, and who dies a Catholic, stripped of all her possessions . . .

  Concerning my son, I commend him to you inasmuch as he deserves it, as I cannot answer for him . . .

  I venture to send you two precious stones, amulets against illness, trusting that you will enjoy good health and a long and happy life.

  Mary at last lay down on her bed and tried to sleep. She could barely doze, but managed to keep still until six o’clock, when the candelabra were lit and she briskly rose and began to prepare herself. Her gentlewomen had been busy throughout the night, making ready her clothes, makeup and wig.

  She dressed and stayed seated on a stool until her gentlewomen had finished their work. She then gave orders that all her household should assemble in her presence chamber. Bourgoing read her will aloud, after which she signed it and gave it to him to deliver to the Duke of Guise. She bade everyone farewell, then knelt to pray with her servants.

  She had barely begun to mouth the words when a loud knocking was heard at the outer door. It was Thomas Andrews, sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, with the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent beside him.

  Mary’s last hour had come. The earls had arrived to escort her down the stairs to the great hall on the ground floor. She was about to take her final walk, the one for which she will always be remembered.

  She picked up her ivory crucifix in one hand and her illuminated Latin prayer book in the other. She almost forgot the prayer book, but Bourgoing reminded her. She kissed the crucifix, then approached the door.

  This was the moment. She had been the star of so many glittering spectacles during her life, beginning with her wedding to the dauphin at Notre-Dame when she was not yet sixteen, and she knew that she could keep her nerve. Her most compelling act of theater awaited her. She stepped forward and crossed the threshold. The rest, whatever view is taken of the extent to which she truly ranks as a martyr for the Catholic faith and for the ideal of monarchy, forever settles her place in the pantheon of history as a fully realized tragic heroine.

  Epilogue

  ELIZABETH I DIED shortly before three o’clock on the morning of March 24, 1603. She had lived to her seventieth year—sixteen years after the death of her cousin queen—and was the first English ruler to survive to that age. She was still unmarried and had steadfastly refused to identify her successor, at least officially. The myth that she named Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, as her successor on her deathbed is unsupported by solid evidence. As she had by then lost the power of speech, the most she might have done was to signal her assent by a gesture. And even that is guesswork.

  All the same, James was acknowledged as king-in-waiting. He was proclaimed James I of England and Ireland with beguiling ease. The formalities took no more than a few hours. At ten o’clock, a group of nobles and privy councilors appeared with the heralds at the gates of Whitehall Palace and in the City of London to declare the new king’s accession.

  The proclamation is a memorable document. It said that James was rightfully king of England because he was “lineally and lawfully descended” from Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. He was the great-great-grandson of the founder of the Tudor dynasty, the great-grandson of Margaret Tudor, who—the heralds took considerable pains to stress—was Henry VIII’s sister. He was therefore king “by law, by lineal succession and undoubted right.”

  Mary, of course, was not mentioned. But the proclamation is luminously clear that James succeeded by virtue of his hereditary rights. Henry VIII’s will was disregarded. This was little short of a recognition of Mary’s own claim to be Elizabeth’s lawful successor had she lived. She had finally won. Her victory was more conclusive than even she might have dared to hope, because every subsequent British ruler has been descended from her, and all derive their claim to the throne from her and not Elizabeth.

  Once James had arrived in London and established himself as king, he came to regret his rejection of his mother, for which he attempted to atone. After her execution, Mary’s embalmed body had been kept in a lead coffin at Fotheringhay Castle for six months before it could be buried. A series of highly charged debates took place as to whether she should be buried obscurely in the local parish church or allowed a state funeral at Peterborough Cathedral. In the end, she was given a state funeral, but with a strictly limited number of mourners, the ritual of interment performed in the dead of night. She was placed on the south side of the chancel, not far from the tomb of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first and most unhappy queen.

  Soon after his accession, James commissioned two magnificent monumental tombs, each with a recumbent effigy, to be built in Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey, one for Elizabeth and the other for his mother. Elizabeth’s memorial was built in the north aisle of the chapel and Mary’s in the south. James did not envisage a pair of precisely matching designs. The tombs were similar in style, but Mary’s was larger and cost the astronomical sum of £2000, whereas only £765 was spent on Elizabeth’s.

  In October 1612, Mary’s body was exhumed from Peterborough and reinterred at Westminster. An exercise in mythmaking was under way. When Elizabeth died, the Venetian ambassador reported that many portraits of her were taken down and replaced by those of Mary. She was a queen worthy of honor again, whereas Edward VI and Mary Tudor, Elizabeth’s brother and sister, were eclipsed. James built no memorials for them. He left Edward where he lay, and although Elizabeth had originally been laid to rest in her grandfather Henry VII’s grave beneath the altar of his chapel, James moved her to the aisle to share her elder sister’s grave. He then built her monument over the site as if she were its only occupant. Only a short Latin verse on the side of the tomb indicated that Mary Tudor was also tucked away beneath.

  His mother, Mary Stuart, was then carried in a solemn procession from Peterborough and reburied in the south aisle along with the bodies of Margaret Beaufort, Henry VI Is mother, and James’s paternal grandmother, the Countess of Lennox. This was a shameless piece of dynastic revisionism, intended to put James himself at the hub of British history.

  Yet it was very successful. The new dynastic symbols were literally set in stone: to this day they are among Westminster Abbey’s biggest tourist attractions. And the “Mary” who occupies the larger and grander monument is Mary Queen of Scots! At a stroke, James honored his two “parents,” his natural mother find his political one, and in the process legitimized the Stuarts as the founders of what James loved to call his “empire” of Great Britain.

  The new king also encouraged the leading historian of the age, William Camden, to complete his unfinished Annals of Elizabeth’s reign. Camden was a serious and independent-minded scholar who worked from original documents. He was highly respected, and his account of Mary’s reign in Scotland was carefully researched, providing the perfect foil to the vilification of her by his Scottish counterpart, George Buchanan, in his History of Scotland and elsewhere.

  This was what James was looking for. Camden eulogized Mary to the point where the first English abridged edition of his Annals could be published in 1624 as a History of the Life and Death of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and not as a History of Elizabeth at all. His interpretation of Mary’s rule in Scotland flatly contradicted Buchanan’s traducement of her.

  According to Camden, Mary was “fixed and constant in her religion, of singular piety towards God” and possessed “invincible magnanimity of mind, wisdom above her sex, and admirable beauty.” Her political catastrophe could not be discounted. She had to be ranked among those rulers “which have changed their felicity for misery and calamity,” but that was not through her own defects of character, bu
t because she was a princess “tossed and disquieted” by fortune. She was a victim of her “ungrateful and ambitious subjects,” chiefly her half-brother and leading councilor, James Stuart, Earl of Moray.

  Camden swiped at Buchanan, whom he accused by name. He was particularly skeptical of the lords’ story as presented in the dossier that Buchanan had supplied to Moray and through him to Cecil after Mary’s flight to England in 1568. It was this same dossier that had underscored the accusations of the Casket Letters and the Detection of the doings of

  Mary Queen of Scots, touching the murder of her husband . . . , which Cecil had authorized for publication in imitation Scots.

  “What Buchanan hath written,” said Camden trenchantly, “there is no man but knoweth by the books themselves printed.” This was far more insulting than it sounds today. Camden was saying he could find nothing in the archival sources to justify Buchanan’s allegations. His remarks were stinging because his knowledge of Cecil’s and Walsingham’s papers—to which he and his collaborators had enjoyed a uniquely privileged access—was known to be encyclopedic.

  A more reckless and tendentious defense of Mary came from the pen of Adam Blackwood, a Catholic Scot and ultraroyalist exiled in France, the doyen of her apologists at the time of her execution. He even traveled to Peterborough to hang an inscription on a pillar next to her grave, eulogizing her as “the ornament of our age” and a martyr to “the majesty of all kings and princes.” She was “a light truly royal . . . by barbarous and tyrannical cruelty extinct.” He published a defense of her martyrdom, Martyre de la Royne d’Éscosse, in Paris in 1587, starting a debate that fiercely intensified when her tomb at Westminster came to be revered as the shrine of a canonized saint and was associated with a number of miracles.