The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Following an old tradition, the executioner, “one Bulle, the hangman of London,” and his assistant knelt before her and “desired her Grace to forgive them her death.” She answered, “I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.” As she fell silent, Bulle made to remove her gown. Mary stopped him and even managed a joke, though it drew not a smile. “Let me do this, I understand this business better than you. I never had such a groom of the chamber.” As her ladies in waiting helped to remove it, she added that she had “never put off her clothes before such a company.” Beneath the black gown she was wearing a bodice and petticoat of crimson satin—the martyr’s colour—vivid as fire in that sombre, monochrome hall. Even the most dour Puritan must now have been craning his neck, the better to see the scene unfolding on the platform. Mary “helped to make ready herself . . . with some haste as if she had longed to be gone.” She took the gold cross from her neck and asked the executioner to allow her maid to keep it. In return he would be paid “more than its value in money.” Bulle refused, claiming the traditional right of the executioner to the personal effects of the victim, and “put it in his shoe.”13

  She had earlier told the Earl of Kent that “he is not worthy of the joys of heaven, whose body cannot suffer the stroke of the executioner,” and she knelt on the cushion “most resolutely and without any token of fear of death . . . she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both hands.” The Earl of Shrewsbury had already raised his hand ready to signal the execution, when Bulle’s assistant noticed that Mary’s hands were still under her chin and would have been “cut off had they not [been] espied.” The assistant moved her hands and Bulle stepped forward and raised his axe. Mary, Queen of Scotland, Dowager Queen of France, heir to the English throne and the lawful Queen of England in the eyes of all adherents to the old religion, stretched out her arms in the pose of Christ crucified and offered her final prayer in Latin, consigning herself into the hands of her God. 14 “She cried, ‘In manus tuas, Domine,’ etc., three or four times,” then lay motionless, held “slightly” by the executioner’s assistant, as the axe fell once, twice, the dull thud of the blade on wood echoing through the room, “she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay. And so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder,” Bulle stooped to complete the final, preordained part of the ritual. He straightened, raising his right arm and crying out “God save the Queen,” to an answering chorus of “Amen.” But all he held was the kerchief and an auburn wig. The shaved head, stubbled with grey, rolled across the platform. “It appeared as grey as one of three score years and ten, polled [cropped] very short, her face in a moment being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face.”15

  The Earl of Kent pronounced the final words over her lifeless body: “May it please God that all the Queen’s enemies be brought into this condition. This be the end of all who hate the Gospel and Her Majesty’s government.” Bulle then “placed her head on a salver” and showed it from the window to the crowd in the courtyard, holding it up three times. The castle gates had been closed and barred before the axe had fallen so that none could leave until the official messenger, Shrewsbury’s third son, Henry Talbot, had been dispatched to carry the news of Mary’s death to the Court in London. Her servants who had witnessed her end were hustled away, “lest some of them with speeches would . . . disquiet the company . . . or seek to wipe their napkins in some of her blood,” and, “every man being commanded out of the hall,” the head and body were at once gathered up and taken to a side-room. There the lifeless body was stripped, placed in a coffin and removed to the chapel. The gold cross was taken from the executioners and they were sent away empty-handed save for their fee, “not having any one thing that belonged to her.” Mary’s rosary was thrown into the fire blazing in the great hearth, while her robes, the black serge fabric that had covered the executioner’s block and everything stained with her blood were consigned to the flames of a bonfire in the courtyard; no holy relics of the martyr were to be preserved. The blaze set off a chain of beacons in every town and village, for as Henry Talbot passed by with his escort, shouting the news as they rode hell for leather towards London, bonfires were “lit for joy all over the countryside” and church bells rung in celebration.16

  Talbot reached the Royal Palace at Greenwich within twenty-four hours of Mary’s death, but the Queen, mounting her horse to go hunting, did not see him arrive and instead Lord Burghley was the first to hear the news. By the time Elizabeth returned from the hunt, the palace and half of London were abuzz with it. A mob gathered outside the home of the French ambassador and forced him to provide the fuel for “a very large fire opposite his door . . . a piece of insolent intolerance such as [had] never been practised . . . on the ambassador of so great a King.” According to a witness, the Queen took the news with equanimity at first, displaying no visible sign of emotion, but reports carried to Mary’s son, James VI, claimed that Elizabeth had been so astonished and heartbroken over the execution that she had burst into torrents of weeping and taken to her bed. Some historians, as besotted with the Queen as her courtiers affected to be, have taken this as a sign of genuine grief on the part of Elizabeth. They cite the tongue-lashing she gave to her Privy Council, abusing them with such force and vehemence that even Burghley was reduced to helpless silence. In all her reign, one counsellor said afterwards, he had never seen her “so much moved.” She refused to see Burghley for a month, but reserved her particular vitriol for her Secretary, Sir William Davison, who was arrested, tried by the Lords and sentenced to a fine of 10,000 marks and confinement in the Tower at the Queen’s pleasure, infuriating the Commons, which refused to “vote any of the supplies requested until he was liberated.”17

  The Queen at once eased the conditions under which Davison was being held, and he was quietly released eighteen months later. Although her fury with him may have been genuine enough, it was not over the death of Mary but the means by which it was achieved. She had not the slightest trace of affection for Mary, who had been a constant thorn in her side and a threat to her throne and her life throughout her reign. But in disposing of her rival, Elizabeth had executed a foreign national, a former Queen of France and Scotland and a woman with connections to some of the greatest families of Europe, not only mother of James VI of Scotland but sister-in-law to Philip of Spain and Henri III of France, and the cousin of Henri, Duc de Guise, leader of the Catholic League, a shadowy Spanish-funded organization, dedicated to the extirpation of Protestantism in France and throughout Europe.

  Even in the act of signing the death warrant, she had indicated to Davison that there were more seemly ways for a queen to die than by the headsman’s axe. When such hints failed to bear fruit, she made her meaning absolutely explicit: she wanted Mary to be assassinated. At her direction, Davison then wrote to Sir Amyas Paulet, who had been given the task of keeping Mary confined, asking him to kill her without warrant according to the Bond of Association he had signed. Paulet refused even to consider the idea, saying “God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience.” Elizabeth, furious at his “daintiness,” then spoke of “one Wingfield” instead, who might be persuaded to do the deed. However, none was willing to assassinate Mary, knowing that the inevitable consequence would be the sacrifice of a scapegoat to appease the Scots and Mary’s Catholic allies in France and Spain.

  Frustrated in her schemes, Elizabeth then signed the death warrant, well knowing what would ensue, but she took steps to distance herself from the act as much as she could by her floods of tears, her abuse of her Privy Counsellors and the imprisonment of Secretary Davison. She also laid on a lavish funeral for Mary at Peterborough Cathedral, albeit “without bells or chanting,” though she did not attend in person; it was further north than she cared to venture. Mary was interred in a vault directly
opposite the tomb of Catherine of Aragon; “the same grave-digger, Scarlet, prepared both vaults.” As was the custom, a wax figure of the dead Queen of Scots presided over a “most royal feast” held at the Bishop’s Palace after the funeral, but Mary’s grave remained unmarked until her son, James VI and I, succeeded to the throne.18

  Elizabeth’s performance was highly effective, sufficient to placate James and at least some of the Scottish lords, despite an earlier warning from one of his ambassadors that the King would “exact satisfaction from any person who assailed her [Mary’s] honour or her safety and with that object would appeal for help to all Christian princes,” including Philip of Spain. James himself had written a warning letter to Elizabeth a fortnight before his mother’s execution. “What thing, Madam, can greater touch me in honour both as a king and a son, than that my nearest neighbour, being in straight friendship with me, shall rigorously put to death a free sovereign prince and my natural mother?” Fearing a Scots invasion of the North of England, and knowing that Spanish bribes and subsidies were being paid to Scottish lords to foment a rebellion, Walsingham had been urging Elizabeth to award the Scottish king a substantial increase in his annual pension of £4,000, a bribe to buy his acquiescence in Mary’s death. Elizabeth’s tears, and a copy of the intercepted letter from his mother leaving her rights in the English throne not to him but to Philip of Spain—Elizabeth had burned the original on Burghley’s advice—achieved the same result at no additional cost, though James was also shrewd enough to realize that his own prospects of succeeding Elizabeth would be best served by remaining loyal to her. “The old enmities between the countries would be aroused by a war and the English would then never accept a Scots-man for their King . . . and neither France nor Spain will help him except for their own ends,” while Philip’s own “ambition and claims will make him a dangerous ally.” “How fond and inconstant I were, if I should prefer my mother to my title,” James argued, with chilling logic.19

  The diplomatic offensive mounted by Elizabeth and Walsingham extended across Europe. The Venetian ambassador reported that the Queen bitterly regretted that, having signed the warrant only as a gesture in the hope of satisfying the demands of her counsellors and subjects, her officers had then greatly exceeded their brief. English diplomats spread similar stories in the other European Courts, and even Mendoza, now the Spanish ambassador in Paris and one of Elizabeth’s most implacable enemies, was sufficiently convinced to write to his master that she was so grief-stricken at Mary’s death that she had taken to her bed. Philip was not so easily fooled. “It is very fine for the Queen of England now to want to give out that it was done without her wish, the contrary being so clearly the case.”

  Elizabeth also wrote, expressing her shock, fury and sorrow, to Mary’s brother-in-law Henri III, King of France, last of the Valois line and one of “les trois Henris” locked in an increasingly bloody struggle with the Protestant and Catholic aspirants to his throne. The French Court had gone into official mourning at the news of Mary’s death and a Requiem Mass was held in Notre Dame, but the sincerity of such gestures was open to question. Despite the comment of Believre, the French ambassador, that Elizabeth “must think that monarchs’ heads were laced on, to have done such a knavish thing to the Queen of Scotland,” Mendoza claimed that while Henri had ostensibly sent his ambassador to London to plead for Mary’s life, he had actually been charged with ensuring that the axe would fall by promising France’s tacit support. “The way in which the King of France is behaving towards the Englishwoman, it might be thought that they would fall out in real earnest, but I can assure you nothing is further from their thoughts.” Whatever the true feelings of the French monarch, there was no doubting the popular outrage at Mary’s execution. Preachers and demagogues throughout Catholic Europe poured out a stream of invective against Elizabeth, lauding the martyred Mary and urging retribution for the crime.20

  The most potent internal threat to Elizabeth’s throne had now been eliminated, but through her death Mary might yet fulfil the words of her cryptic motto, “My end is my beginning,” and achieve the aim that had eluded her in life, for the execution had also removed the most significant obstacle to Spanish intervention. Philip II was a Habsburg and the prime aim of Habsburg diplomacy was always to prevent an alliance between England and France, the greatest threat to Spanish hegemony in Europe. While Mary remained alive, Philip had stayed his hand, hesitating to topple Elizabeth lest it prove a Pyrrhic victory, restoring England to the true faith only by placing a French queen upon the throne. With Mary dead, that was no longer a fear and his appetite for fresh crowns and kingdoms could now be safely assuaged.

  The commander of Philip’s forces in The Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the most ruthless and brilliantly effective military leader of his age, was strident in his calls for vengeance for Mary’s death. “This cruel act must be the last of many which she of England has performed . . . our Lord will be served if she receives the punishment she has deserved for so many years . . . Above all I beg Your Majesty that neither on this nor on other occasions will you relax in any way in regard to your preparations for the prosecution of the war and the Enterprise [the invasion of England] which was conceived in Your Majesty’s heart.” Mendoza was equally emphatic. “As God has so willed that these accursed people, for His ends, should . . . commit such an act as this . . . I pray that Your Majesty will hasten the Enterprise of England to the earliest possible date, for it would seem to be God’s obvious design to bestow upon Your Majesty the crowns of these two kingdoms.”21

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the Cause of God

  The last of the winter snows blocking the passes through the Pyrenees and the storms battering shipping on the open seas delayed the messengers bringing news of Mary Stuart’s execution to Spain, and it was 23 March before the first reports reached Philip II. For some days they may have lain unregarded among the endless streams of papers, reports and pleas received daily from his ambassadors, spies and informers at every court and seat of government, and from all his sprawling dominions—Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Milan, Franche-Comté and The Netherlands; Guinea, Angola and Mozambique in Africa; Sri Lanka, Goa, Malacca, the Philippines and Macao in Asia; the Azores, Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, the West Indies, Florida and the South and Central American mainlands in the New World—but in any event, it was not Philip’s custom to take hasty action.

  His father, the brilliant soldier, statesman and diplomat the Emperor Charles V, was a formidable example to follow, and from his earliest childhood Philip had been schooled in the responsibilities he would one day assume. The size of the known world had doubled in less than a century and Philip was to become ruler of by far the greater part of it. At sixteen years old he was made Regent of Spain and he became the King of Naples and King-Consort of England at the age of twenty-seven. Within a month of her taking the English throne, Mary Tudor and Charles V had sealed an alliance by arranging her marriage to Philip, even though she was eleven years older than he. A lean, ascetic, deeply religious man, the sword of the Counter-Reformation, he had already buried one wife and had few illusions about the purpose of his second wedding. He told one of his retainers, “I am going to a crusade, not a marriage feast,” but the birth of a Catholic heir would seal the succession in England and cement the alliance between England and Spain that their fathers had fostered. Philip was brought to Southampton by a peaceful armada of 130 ships on 18 July 1554; England was reconciled with the Catholic Church before the end of the year and the first of a long succession of Protestant martyrs went to the stake that winter.

  While in England, Philip also met Elizabeth. He had persuaded Mary to spare Elizabeth’s life in the aftermath of Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554 and, according to the accounts of the French and Venetian ambassadors in London, Philip secretly visited her in 1555, while Mary was confined with the first of two phantom pregnancies, and saw her again on a number of occasions, both in Mary’s company and
alone. The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, reported that “at the time of the Queen’s pregnancy, Lady Elizabeth contrived so to ingratiate herself with all the Spaniards and especially the King, that ever since, no one has favoured her more than he does . . . the King had some particular design towards her.”1

  At the end of August 1555 Philip returned to Spain to succeed his ailing father, who abdicated in October and divided his great but unwieldy European kingdom in two. His surviving brother, Ferdinand I, took the title of Emperor and ruled over the Habsburg dominions in Central Europe, while Philip was crowned King of Spain and ruler of a global empire. In June 1557 he persuaded Mary to join his war on France, but her army was defeated and England lost its last foothold in Europe, the city of Calais. Philip made only one more brief visit to England before Mary’s cruel death in November 1558, her second “pregnancy” being the cancerous tumour that killed her.

  Philip’s affection for Elizabeth led his ambassador, the Count de Feria, to tell the Privy Council that, despite her Protestant faith and her assertion to Feria that she would “acknowledge no obligations” to Philip, Spain would support her claim to the throne. Philip then proposed marriage to the newly crowned Elizabeth but, as was to be her habit throughout her reign, she procrastinated over a decision. After waiting in vain for a reply, Philip instead married the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth of Valois, daughter of Henri II of France, prompting Elizabeth of England to complain to the Spanish ambassador, “Your master must have been much in love with me not to be able to wait four months.” It was said that she kept Philip’s portrait in her private cabinet for many years afterwards, but, as with so much about Elizabeth, that may have been more propaganda for overseas consumption than a statement of fact; the cabinet also contained a picture of her Court favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.