by Jane Dunn
Mary, herself, at the centre of the storm, seemed beatifically calm while all around her were fearful and grieving. She had always shown great care for her immediate servants and this concern was made more urgent as she contemplated her fate. She wrote both to Elizabeth and the King of France asking them to consider their safety and welfare. Her last weeks were busy with administration and communication, with speeding letters to the courts of Europe, desirous as she was to protect her posthumous reputation.
So eager were Elizabeth’s ministers to have some sort of confession from the Queen of Scots before she died that Walsingham asked Sir Amyas Paulet to engage Mary in conversation as often as possible. The dour and disapproving Paulet admitted he had avoided any but the minimum of talk with his royal charge, but dutifully hung around and offered a willing ear. His self-sacrifice proved fruitless. Mary was in complete control of the situation and although more than willing to talk to anyone as she whiled away the long hours, and still clearly full of the injustices done to her, she was not about to tell Paulet, of all people, her guilty secrets. He reported somewhat irascibly to Walsingham: ‘followinge your direction I have geven her full scope and tyme to say what she would, and yet at some tymes fyndinge no matter to come from her worthye of advertisement; I have departed from her as otherwyse she would never have left me; and I am deceaved yf my Lord of Buckhurst [who had just left] will not geve the same testimonye of her tediousness’.36
In her reply to Parliament’s pleadings, Elizabeth expressed the kernel of her character and governing style when she asked them to be content for the present with ‘this answer answerless … assuring yourselves that I am now and ever will be most careful to do that which will be best for your preservation. And be not too earnest to move me to do that which may tend to the loss of that which you are most desirous to keep.’37 Here she was in the role she had most naturally assumed for the first twenty-eight years of her reign, like Janus, ambivalent between past and future, seeing both sides, judicious, measured, sometimes risking stasis in the quest for equilibrium. But she was about to be forced into a more active and decisive form of leadership, and the transition period was painful for her and those closest to her.
Under mounting pressure from her ministers to face up to her responsibilities, Elizabeth finally allowed Burghley to draw up the warrant for Mary’s execution at the beginning of December. The proclamation was read out in public and bonfires lit all over London in celebration. William Davison, joint Secretary of State, however, was left with the task of obtaining Elizabeth’s signature. They all remembered with foreboding the queen’s painful indecision over the Duke of Norfolk’s execution fourteen years before.
Close to Christmas and in the middle of this fevered anxiety, Mary’s valedictory letter to Elizabeth arrived. Calm, magnanimous, wishing to make her peace with everyone, she mentioned the debacle over her canopy of state and said she ‘praised God that such cruelty serving only to exercise malice and to afflict me after having condemned me to death has not come from you’. But like all her subtle letters to Elizabeth, the sweetness carried a hidden barb: Mary prayed that God would pardon all those responsible for her death, and ‘I esteem myself happy that my death will precede the persecution which I foresee to threaten this Isle, where God is no longer truly feared and reverenced, but vanity and worldly policy rules and directs all’. She then delivered the coup de grâce: ‘Do not accuse me of presumption if, on the eve of leaving this world and preparing myself for a better one, I remind you that one day you will have to answer for your charge, as well as those that are sent before, and that my blood and the misery of my country will be remembered.’ She signed herself with royal assertion, ‘Your sister and cousin, wrongfully a prisoner, Marie, Royne’.38
Anxiously her ministers watched Elizabeth’s reactions. Tears sprang to her eyes, but otherwise she was calm. They feared anything that might soften her heart or encourage her natural equivocation. Leicester reported to Walsingham that the letter ‘hath wrought tears, but I trust shall do no further harm’.39 It was Mary who had the upper hand, her power gained through action and decision. Elizabeth struggled with contradictory advice and demands, and her innate fear of commitment. Although she ‘sate many times melancholick and mute’ muttering to herself ‘Aut fer, aut feri [bear with her, or smite her]’ and ‘Ne feriare, feri [Strike, lest thou be stricken]’,40 she had not yet exhibited the same terrible indecision shown before Norfolk’s execution.
The only way that Elizabeth could be induced to permit Mary’s execution was if she feared that the country was in peril. At the beginning of the new year of 1587 a variety of sinister rumours began to gain credence as they inflamed an already anxious people. There was a general expectation that the Scottish nobility were preparing for war with England in the event of the execution of Mary; at the beginning of February, the Mayor of Exeter wrote to Cecil about a hue and cry that swept the West Country to ‘make diligent search’ for the Queen of Scots ‘who is fledd’. Other broadcast cries told that the city of London ‘by the enemyes is set on fyre’41 and men were exhorted to assemble in armour and in haste and readiness to defend the kingdom. There was even another confused half-plot to murder the queen, said to involve the French ambassador, L’Aubespine. Independently, it seemed, he had started a rumour specifically to cause alarm, that ‘the Queen of Scotland, disguised as a sailor, had fled from her palace’ and had reached the sea, intent on reaching Brittany. All this made for a febrile atmosphere of threat and ever-present danger.
Elizabeth was not shielded from any of this hysterical alarm. Suddenly on the first day of February, she sent for the death warrant and signed it without fuss. Davison could hardly believe his good fortune. Then Elizabeth called him back. Frightened of taking sole responsibility for such a deed, she asked Davison to write to Paulet to ask him secretly to murder Mary and make it look as if she had died of natural causes. Although he could not salve her conscience and rescue her relationship with God, in this way he would protect his sovereign from the outside world. Elizabeth feared that personal defamation, loss of diplomatic alliances and even military aggression would follow any judicial execution. Davison was reluctant and, as he had surmised, Paulet was absolutely opposed. His principled rejection of the idea enraged Elizabeth. So much for the empty promises of the Bond of Association, she railed: in the absence of will and action, such bold declarations of loyalty from her subjects were useless hot air.
There was much anxious discussion amongst her closest ministers as to what exactly Elizabeth wished should be done with this now signed and sealed death warrant. She was utterly confused and confusing in her directives. Davison, inexperienced at dealing with his fearsome, exasperating queen, went to Hatton for advice and together they sought out Cecil. A council meeting was called for 3 February and they all agreed that they would proceed without further consultation, it being ‘neither fit nor convenient to trouble her Majesty any further’.42 With the precious document in hand, they dispatched Beale, the Clerk of the Council and a stalwart Protestant, to speed to Fotheringhay. With him went two executioners, their axe hidden in a trunk. The same day, 4 February, Elizabeth told a nervous Davison about a distressing dream she had had. She dreamt, she said, that Mary had been executed.
At Fotheringhay, Mary was told late on 7 February that she was to die the following morning. Shrewsbury was saddened by having to impart such news; he was her longest serving jailer and another who had not failed to warm to Mary’s charms. Her servants protested at the brutal suddenness and lack of notice, but the lords had come with directives not to delay. Mary accepted her sentence with composure, ‘I did not think that the Queen my Sister would have consented to my Death, who am not subject to your Law and Jurisdiction: but seeing her Pleasure is so, Death shall be to me most welcome: neither is that soul worthy of the high and everlasting Joys above, whose Body cannot endure one Stroak of the Executioner.’ She took much satisfaction from the fact that the Earl of Kent burst out with, ‘Your Life wi
ll be the Death of our Religion, as contrariwise your Death will be the Life thereof.’43 This confirmed how significant they considered the threat of her faith and how important she was as a flame of that faith.
Back in London, it appeared that Elizabeth was still half hoping that Paulet could be induced to contrive some underhand way of getting rid of Mary. At Fotheringhay, Mary was in calm control of the situation. She spent her last hours in consoling her servants, dispensing her goods and any money left to her and remaking her will. She also wrote letters to Henri III and her almoner. To all the sorrowful faces around her she offered hope, by bidding them, ‘leave Mourning, and rather rejoyce that she was now to depart out of a world of Miseries’.44 The rest of the time she spent in prayer.
By eight o’clock on the morning of 8 February, the day designated for her execution, Mary had long been up. She had asked her women to dress her as if for a festival and, in response to the knock on the door, processed slowly in the company of her servants to the Great Hall where the scaffold had been erected. There would be many witnesses to the portentous events that followed, their accounts capturing vividly aspects of the gruesome drama. ‘Forth she came with State, Countenance and Presence majestically composed’, Elizabeth’s chronicler Camden recorded. The Scottish queen was dressed in black with a floor-length veil of finest white linen falling from her hair. In her hands she carried her ivory crucifix, her rosary hung from her girdle.
At the entrance to the room she was prevented from bringing in her full retinue of servants. Sir James Melville, her long-time friend, was in tears before her. In the consolation she offered him she bade him take the news back to Scotland that she had died constant in her faith and ‘firm in my Fidelity and affection towards Scotland and France’. She asked to be commended to her son, to have him reminded how greatly she had desired the unification of Scotland and England. Although her letters to Mendoza and the pope still stood, offering her rights to the English throne to Philip II, should her own son obstinately continue Protestant, she requested that Melville assure James VI ‘that I have done nothing which may be prejudicial to the Kingdom of Scotland’.45
By calling on her consanguinity with Elizabeth, her status as an anointed queen and their shared sensibilities as women and sisters in a masculine world, Mary managed to get the presiding lords to agree she could be accompanied by six of her servants. She had been keen they were present not just for their support but also to bear witness and relate the detail of the extraordinary events of that morning to the foreign courts in which her reputation mattered most to her.
Mary was led to a low platform with a chair, a stool and the scaffold block, all draped with black velvet. A huge log fire was blazing in an attempt to keep some of the February chill from the room. Once Beale had read out the warrant, the Dean of Peterborough began an oration, urging her to repent and accept the true faith. Mary interrupted him, requesting he should not ‘trouble himself, protesting that she was firmly fixed and resolved in the ancient Catholick Roman Religion, and for it was ready to shed her last Bloud’. When he attempted to pray for her sins, she and her servants recited their own prayers in Latin. She then prayed in English for her Church, her son and Queen Elizabeth, ‘beseeching [God] to turn away his wrath from this Island’.
As was customary, Mary then forgave the executioners for what they were about to do. She seemed in a hurry to proceed and her women helped her out of her outer garments, in order to bare her neck for the axe. Her petticoat of deepest red suddenly showed startling against the sombreness of their surroundings: the colour heavy with symbolism as the liturgical colour of martyrdom. Binding her eyes with a linen cloth, she lay her neck upon the block, repeating continually ‘In manus tuas, Domine [Into thy hands, O Lord]’. The watching officials and Mary’s servants recoiled to see the first blow of the axe miss her neck and slice into the side of her skull. The second blow severed her head. The emotion was palpable. A queen had been killed on the orders of a sister queen.
The Dean of Peterborough cried out ‘So let Queen Elizabeth’s Enemies perish’ while the witnesses wept. All kinds of eyewitness reports replayed the ceremonial agony of the event and the rapt nobility of the queen. Rumours became entwined with fact, inevitably embellished in the telling of something more awesome and traumatic than anything they would ever see again. The Queen of Scots’ head was held up for all to see, her lips still moving for a further fifteen minutes, it was said, in silent prayer; the lustrous auburn curls fell away in the executioner’s hand to reveal the dead queen’s own grey hair cropped close, transforming her from a beauty to an old woman in front of their eyes; one of her favourite pets, a Skye terrier, smuggled in under her skirts, emerged howling piteously and would not leave the severed head of his mistress: all these stories wracked the hearts of the Marian faithful and filled Elizabeth’s supporters with an uneasy shame.
With faith and courage Mary had turned defeat and death into transcendent victory. The martyr was made. Amplified by the fraught publicity of her execution, the myth was born. The English councillors present on the day realized this too, for they insisted that every splash of blood was scrubbed away, every object and relic removed and destroyed. Her body, quickly wrapped in a cloth, was carried away and immediately embalmed. Her servants were kept confined in the castle and England’s seaports were closed. The sense of threat that had inspired Mary’s execution did not abate with her death.
As Mary’s star shot heavenwards, Elizabeth’s sank. Through personal insecurity and fear she failed to show the necessary princely virtue. Her behaviour following Mary’s death was uncontrolled, dissembling and in certain aspects ignoble. The demons of her youth had returned to haunt her. But for Elizabeth too, Mary’s death would mark a turning point in her life and reign.
Burghley was afraid at first to tell Elizabeth that the deed was done. When she learnt the truth she appeared little concerned. For Elizabeth, however, the night was always a time when fears seemed to multiply and loneliness went deep: it was at two o’clock in the morning that she had lost her nerve over the execution of the Duke of Norfolk and in a last-minute panic rescinded his death warrant. Now on the night of the momentous news of Mary’s death a similar fear and panic gripped her. But this time it was too late. In the morning she sent for Sir Christopher Hatton and berated him for his part in what she saw as a shameful duplicity. She ranted and raved, she blamed everyone, and declared to the world that Mary’s execution was something she had never intended. Someone had to pay for the grief and anxiety that engulfed her: peremptorily she sent Davison to the Tower. Despite her councillors’ pleading on their knees for clemency, by the end of the month she was even threatening to have him summarily hanged.
Elizabeth’s storms, frightening and destructive while they lasted, usually blew over pretty fast. This one did not. Her grief and anger seemed to grow with the days. Her now elderly and gout-wracked Burghley was banished from her presence. He remained out of favour for months, enduring from her the kind of defamation, by ‘calling him traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch’, that such a loyal man found hard to bear. Aged sixty-six and in great pain, he was reduced to writing to Elizabeth pleading to be allowed even just to lie at her feet, in hope that ‘some drops of your mercy [might] quench my sorrowful panting heart’.46 For a while the queen was beyond reason, neither eating nor sleeping, distracted with woe.
Elizabeth was particularly careful of her fame abroad and fearful of what France and Scotland might do to avenge the Queen of Scots’ death. Within four days and in the throes of her passion, she wrote to James VI denying she had authorized the execution of his mother:
My dear Brother, I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolor that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen … I beseech you that as God and many more know, how innocent I am in this case … I am not so base minded that fear of any living creature or Prince should make me afraid to do that were just; or done, to deny th
e same. I am not of so base a lineage, nor carry so vile a mind. Thus assuring yourself of me, that as I know this was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it on others’ shoulders; no more will I not damnify myself that thought it not … for your part, think you have not in the world a more loving kinswoman, nor a more dear friend than myself; nor any that will watch more carefully to preserve you and your estate … Your most assured loving sister and cousin, Elizab. R.47
Breathtakingly hypocritical as it may appear on the surface, this letter nevertheless expressed the depth of her ambivalent anguish. Despite her miserable protestations, she ‘had meant it’ and had shamefully ‘laid it on others’ shoulders’, but it was also true that she had not meant it and the guilt cut deeply into her heart. The extremity of Elizabeth’s emotion and the fact that she remained overwrought for so long suggested there was something more troubling to her in the execution of Mary than the obvious tensions of safeguarding her reputation, balancing the Catholic powers, and squaring her conscience with God.
At first there were fears of Scottish revenge. The country was in uproar. Robert Carey was chosen by Elizabeth for the task, that no one else would perform, of delivering that letter to the King of Scots. Riding north he was stopped on the border and warned he would be murdered if he proceeded further. James suggested he go to Berwick instead, for the king admitted that ‘given the fury [the people] were in … no power of his could warrant my life at that time’.48 Certainly on the streets of Edinburgh ferocious attacks on Elizabeth had spontaneously erupted. An example of the kind of libel being freely circulated was this simple and salty verse, attached with a hemp cord tied like a halter: