The Wild Queen

by Carolyn Meyer

  “How do you know who I am?” I asked, surprised, for I was mud spattered and uncombed and looked anything but regal.

  Still smiling she reached out and touched a lock of my auburn hair, which had gone without dressing for several days. I understood: she recognized me by my hair.

  My companions insisted that we could not afford to rest any longer. We rode through the night and stopped in the hour just before dawn at the home of the laird of Lochinvar, where I borrowed clean linens and a mantle and hood.

  “Have you a knife, Willie?” I asked. The boy hovered nearby, ready to be of assistance whenever I let him.

  He hesitated, no doubt fearing that I intended to do harm to someone, perhaps even myself. “Aye, my lady,” he replied tentatively.

  “Then do me the favor of cutting off my hair. I do not wish to be recognized by it.”

  Willie did as I asked, working quickly, until hanks of long reddish hair lay on the ground. I saw Willie twist a lock of hair into a circlet and put it away in the bosom of his shirt, and Geordie did the same.

  We were on our way again, stopping briefly at Lord Herries’s castle for fresh horses and then pressing on to a castle belonging to Lord Maxwell, a friend of Herries and a man faithful to my cause. It was the opinion of these two lords that I would be safe there while I decided on my next move.

  “You can surely hold out here for at least forty days,” said Lord Maxwell. “That will give us time to rally our forces and to conquer the regent Moray once and for all.”

  “Or to arrange to have help sent by your family in France, troops to assist you or a boat to take you there,” said Lord Herries.

  I heard them out, listening carefully to the arguments advanced by each of my devoted friends. Then I interrupted them. “Gentlemen,” I began, “I do value your advice, but I have already made my decision. I will go to England and place myself in the hands of my dear cousin and friend Queen Elizabeth. I have no doubt that the good lady will make me welcome, and when the time is right, she will do whatever is necessary to help me regain the throne of Scotland.”

  My friends objected vehemently to my plan. “I will say it bluntly, madam,” declared Lord Herries, “you must not trust Queen Elizabeth. The English have a reputation for clapping Scottish sovereigns in prison. What persuades you that she will not do the same to you?”

  The more they tried to convince me otherwise, the more stubbornly I held to my belief that my sister-queen could not refuse to help me. Though I had lost or had taken from me most items of value—including the bond James had given to me before he rode off, and a silver casket containing a number of important letters—I had somehow kept hold of the diamond ring that Elizabeth had sent me as a token of her friendship. I produced it now from the chain I wore around my neck and proposed to send it to the queen along with a letter begging for her help.

  “Permit me to have my own way,” I told the sad-faced men gathered around me.

  The two lords and the rest of my disconsolate friends stared at me. I did not want to wait for Elizabeth’s reply. She would not refuse me.

  “My mind is made up,” I said. “Who will come with me?”

  I sent the letter and the diamond ring off to Elizabeth. Then, my head shorn and my clothing disguised, I made my way from Lord Maxwell’s castle to Glenluce, a Cistercian abbey on the coast of Solway Firth, opposite the shores of England, which were barely visible in the distance.

  The next day, the sixteenth of May in the year 1568, after hearing Mass at the abbey chapel, I prepared to leave Scotland, not quite seven years after I had returned there from France. At three o’clock in the afternoon, with a handful of friends, Little Willie and Geordie Douglas among them, I boarded a small fishing boat.

  The boat cast off from the jetty, and the sails bellied and snapped as the winds filled them, carrying us into turbulent waters. I did not bid a tearful farewell to Scotland as I left its shores. Soon Elizabeth would receive my letter and the ring enclosed as a token. She would surely respond with an invitation to come to London. I would have to procure a periwig to cover my shorn head, and I had no proper gowns in which to be received by the queen, but these were small problems, easily solved!

  For now, I kept my face turned bravely toward England, certain that I would return one day to my kingdom as the triumphant queen of Scots.

  I could not have been more terribly wrong.

  Chapter 50

  Fotheringhay

  AS THE FISHING BOAT made its way across Solway Firth toward England, there came a moment when I was seized by the certainty that I was making a great mistake by putting my life in the hands of Queen Elizabeth. Better, I thought, if I had elected to go to France, as Lord Herries had tried to persuade me.

  I hurried to the captain of the little vessel and told him I wished to change course. “Take me to France,” I pleaded, though I knew the fishing boat was ill-equipped for such a voyage.

  He looked at me as though I were mad. “Cannot do it, my lady,” he replied gruffly. “Tide is against us. Wind too.” He squinted up at a leaden sky. “Storm coming. Take shelter in the cabin. Save France for another day.”

  I had no choice but to acquiesce. I had to tell myself that it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to summon French ships. Calling upon Elizabeth for aid was the better course.

  After four hours, the fishing boat reached the small and undistinguished village of Workington. When the lord of Workington Manor recognized who had just disembarked—my shorn head fooled no one—he took us all to his home and offered food and rest and hospitality. The next day, every local person having learned of my arrival, I was greeted by an honor guard and a band of gentlemen and conveyed to Carlisle Castle, where I was installed in pleasant quarters. My needs were well attended, and I was treated with dignity and respect, but I soon realized that I was being kept under heavy guard. I had once again been made a prisoner, but of whom?

  As the days went by, one by one by one, I understood that I was imprisoned by order of the queen of England. Elizabeth seemed to have no intention of inviting me to London.

  I learned that I was to stand accused of the murder of King Henry.

  Through all the years I had tried so earnestly to seal my friendship with Queen Elizabeth and at the same time to assert my God-given right to succession to the English throne, the queen’s chief adviser, William Cecil, had implacably opposed me. Cecil wanted to be rid of me by one means or another. If I had never before recognized how dangerous William Cecil was to my very existence, I had to acknowledge it now.

  Cecil called for an investigation. He hoped to prove my guilt and keep me shut up forever. My brother Lord Moray was only too willing to help him in order to maintain his position as regent.

  I did what I could. Over and over I wrote to my sister-queen begging to see her, but to no avail. Queen Elizabeth refused to meet with me in private or receive me at her court until I had been cleared of the charges of murdering my husband.

  In July, after two months at Carlisle, I was removed to Bolton Castle, a high-walled fortress remote from London and equally remote from the Scottish border, so as to preclude any chance of rescue. Many of my servants—cooks, seamstresses, and others—made their way from Scotland to attend me, but the most welcome addition to my modest household was Mary Seton.

  We fell into each other’s arms, weeping and laughing a little. But when she saw my hair, and the scraps of it that were now growing back to cover my naked skull, Seton, who had been fixing my hair since we were both little more than children, threw up her hands and cried, “Now I know that God has truly sent me to you.”

  My trial commenced in October. I was not allowed to speak on my own behalf. I will not detail here the events of the trial, but as a result of the machinations of my hated brother and Elizabeth’s adviser Cecil, I was found neither guilty nor not guilty. Still I was not allowed to go free.

  At the end of January of 1569 I was removed from Bolton Castle to a place even more remote a
nd with even less of a possibility of rescue. From there I was moved again, and yet again. Some of my servants and friends remained with me through it all—Mary Seton was one, Geordie Douglas another. Willie was sent away, a sad parting for us both. There were schemes for my escape, all foiled. So it went, month after month.

  ***

  My greatest heartache has been the loss of my son. After Lord Moray persuaded me to abdicate, James was crowned king of Scotland when he was still a wee lad of little more than a year; Moray ruled as regent until he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet a year and a half later. I wasted not a single tear when I learned of it. James’s grandfather the earl of Lennox succeeded as regent, and at Lennox’s death, another took his place. I was not permitted to write to James, and if he or his guardians wrote to me at any time during those years, I did not receive their letters. I had very little news of my son, though I was told he was being brought up in the Protestant faith. I longed to see him, to speak with him, to at least have some word of him. All of this was denied me.

  The years passed, and I clung to the hope that my son would one day help me to leave my prison and return to Scotland to rule jointly with him. Then in July of 1586, as King James VI of Scotland, my twenty-year-old son signed a treaty with England. Finally I grasped that my son would do nothing for me. He would, he said, honor me with the title of queen mother. I was crushed and furious, in equal measure.

  Do not further insult me with the title of Queen Mother, I wrote. There is neither king nor queen in Scotland but me, and I signed it Marie R, as I always had and still do. I do not know if the letter was ever delivered to him, for I have heard nothing from him since.

  That same year, letters were found implicating me in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, and I was again brought to trial but denied access to the papers and to legal counsel. On the twenty-sixth of October, 1586, I was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  Here I have waited, Elizabeth’s prisoner for nineteen years. I was twenty-five when I fled Scotland for England, begging for the queen’s mercy. I pass the hours with embroidery, remembering how I was tutored in this womanly art by Queen Catherine. I often dream of my early days in France and weep when I awaken to the reality of my life. Sometimes I think of James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell. Years ago, I learned that after a desperate attempt to elude his enemies resulted in his capture, he endured years of solitary confinement, chained to a wall in a Danish prison, and died miserably there in 1578.

  For nineteen years I had not given up the hope of meeting face to face the queen whom I call sister and cousin. I learned yesterday that this is now impossible. Six days ago Elizabeth signed the warrant for my execution. The warden has told me to prepare to die today on the scaffold. The hammering in the great hall has stopped. All is silent.

  ***

  In a few hours, my imprisonment will end, and so will my life.

  I write these words from my chamber at Fotheringhay the last of several English castles where I have been kept prisoner. I have had more than enough time to contemplate the course of my life. From my earliest days I have too often found myself at the center of disastrous events. Many I could not have prevented—the death of my father, for example. The death of François, surely not. But what of the others? David Rizzio? My second husband, Henry? Am I guilty of their deaths? Sometimes I blame the wildness in me; other times I believe it was God’s will.

  One weakness I surely acknowledge: I have given my trust too easily and to the wrong people. Those closest to me have betrayed me, turned against me, or let me down: my uncles; my brother; my second husband, Henry; my third husband, James Hepburn.

  It no longer matters.

  In a few hours I will mount the steps to the scaffold to meet the executioner and his bloody ax. I will try to remember my mother’s advice given to me many years ago, when I was a child: It is your duty as queen to appear calm and steadfast, no matter what you may feel.

  That will be the end of it. In a few hours I will die.

  Perhaps someone will take note of a motto I once embroidered—In my end is my beginning—and remember the life of Mary, queen of Scots.

  Fotheringhay Castle, England

  February 8, 1587

  Epilogue

  AT NINE O’CLOCK on the morning of Wednesday, February 8, 1587, Mary, queen of Scots, dressed in a black satin gown trimmed in velvet and carrying a crucifix and a prayer book, walked calmly to the scaffold in the great hall of Fotheringhay. She was accompanied by the sheriff and other officials and six of the women closest to her. A large crowd of spectators watched in silence. With great dignity she mounted the steps to the scaffold, knelt, and began to pray.

  When her prayers were finished, the executioners asked her forgiveness. “I do forgive you,” Mary told them, “with my whole heart, for you are about to bring an end to all my troubles.” Mary stood, and her weeping women removed her black gown, revealing a red petticoat and bodice, the color of martyrs. One of the women covered Mary’s eyes with a blindfold. Mary knelt on the white satin cushion, placed her head on the block, and began to pray in Latin. The executioner raised his ax.

  It took three blows to do the deed. Afterward, the executioner seized a handful of auburn hair and raised the severed head, crying, “God save the queen!” But suddenly the hair separated from the skull, and the head fell to the scaffold floor and rolled away while the executioner stared at the wig he was left holding. The crowd gasped. Mary’s own hair had turned quite gray during her long captivity. She had chosen to wear a wig to her beheading.

  ***

  Sixteen years later, Queen Elizabeth died, on March 24, 1603. Although Elizabeth had never officially named him her successor, Mary’s son, King James VI of Scotland, was immediately proclaimed King James of England and Ireland. It is said that he eventually regretted his hardhearted treatment of his mother. To atone for it, he arranged for her entombment in Westminster Abbey and honored her with a memorial effigy, larger and more magnificent than the one he also commissioned for Elizabeth.

  It is interesting to note that every British monarch from King James’s son Charles I to the present-day ruler is descended in a direct line from Mary, queen of Scots. Biographers and historians still debate the innocence or guilt of Mary in the death of her second husband, Henry Stuart. A few still hold that the so-called Casket Letters, offered as evidence against her, are damning. Others insist that the letters are out-and-out forgeries. Nearly everyone agrees that much of the Scottish queen’s wildness remains shrouded in mystery.

  Bibliography

  Fraser, Antonia. Mary Queen of Scots (New York: Random House, 1969)

  Guy, John. Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

  Weir, Allison. Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley (New York: Ballantine, 2003)

  www.marie-stuart.co.uk The official site of the Marie Stuart Society based in Scotland.

  Plus innumerable additional websites for details of dress, food, customs, language, etc.