There was no inscription over the grave until Adam Blackwood, a servant of Mary, made a pilgrimage to Peterborough and erected an epitaph. The original was in Latin, but, translated it reads:
Mary, Queen of Scots, daughter of a king, widow of the King of France, cousin and next heir to the Queen of England, endowed with royal virtues and a royal mind (the right of Princes being oftentimes in vain implored) by barbarous and tyrannical cruelty, the ornament of our age, and truly Royal light is extinguished. By the same unrighteous judgement both Mary Queen of Scots with natural death, and all surviving kings (now made common persons) are punished with civil death. A strange and unusual kind of monument this is, wherin the living are included with the dead; for with the Sacred ashes of this blessed Mary, know that the Majesty of all Kings and Princes lieth here violated and prostrated. And because regal secrecy doth enough and more admonish kings of their duty – traveller, I say no more.
This was swiftly taken down.
The remaining servants were released two months later. Bourgoing was allowed to return to France and given service at the court of Henri III, presumably when he delivered Mary’s last letter. Gourion went to Mendoza and gave him the diamond ring destined for Philip II, who in turn fulfilled Mary’s request, and paid her servants’ wages. Elizabeth Curle joined Barbara Mowbray in exile and they were buried together in St Andrew’s Church in Antwerp. Jane Kennedy returned to Scotland where she married Andrew Melville, and became part of James VI’s court. Jane was sent as part of the mission to Denmark in 1589 to fetch the Princess Anne as James’s queen and, sadly, got no further than the Firth of Forth; crossing from Burntisland to Edinburgh, her boat capsized and she drowned.
Fotheringhay Castle was abandoned to suffer the fate of all such deserted buildings. Dressed and cut stone is expensive and local farmers and builders used the castle as a convenient and free stone quarry. By the end of the eighteenth century almost nothing remained.
Mary’s tomb in Peterborough remained undisturbed until on 14 August 1603, five months after his accession to the throne of England as James VI and I, the new king sent Dethick, Garter King at Arms, back to Peterborough with ‘a rich pall of velvet’ to be erected over his mother’s grave. Sermons in her memory were to be said by the bishop and his omnipresent dean.
Just over ten years later James wrote again to the dean: ‘We have ordered that her said body remaining now interred in that our cathedral church of Peterborough shall be removed to Westminster.’ With a keen memory and a sharp mind for economy he insisted that the same velvet pall be used during the transfer. James had already overseen the construction of a marble effigy of Elizabeth in an aisle of the funeral chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. Henry VII had commissioned the chapel for himself and his wife, Elizabeth of York, from the architect Robert Vertue, and it is dominated by the magnificent royal tomb by Torrigiano. Elizabeth Tudor had lain in an unmarked grave until James decided to honour her memory with a white marble effigy. Carved by Maximilian Colt and John de Criz, Elizabeth lies covered with pearls and other jewellery holding the sceptre of power and the orb of omnipotence.
Now James instructed William and Cornelius Cure to make the effigy for his mother Mary, who would lie in the opposite aisle. In contrast to the symbols of royal power held by Elizabeth, Mary Stewart lies with her hands together as if in prayer. Once again she has the widow’s peaked headdress and a royal cloak. Although the lion of Scotland is at her feet, it is an effigy more suited to an abbess than a royal queen. The monument is ‘of a grander scale as if to indicate the superiority of the mother to the predecessor, of the victim to the vanquisher.’
In September 1612, Mary’s body in its great lead coffin was finally transferred from Peterborough and re-interred in Westminster Abbey. All Mary’s detailed requests for burial in France among her family were ignored and she was now destined to lie in a Protestant abbey church only a few yards from her cousin Elizabeth. Mary’s hope that ‘a place will not be given to me near the kings your predecessors’ was in vain. However, to be fair, James may never have known that such a wish had been expressed.
Inevitably, Mary’s tomb became a focal point for Catholic worshippers and the predictable rumours of miracles began to spread. Some thirteen years later, the Catholic apologist William Dempster, who had never visited the tomb, wrote from Bologna that the place was ‘resplendent with miracles’. Ever since her solitary stay in the locked hall at Fotheringhay people had prayed for Mary’s intercession as near to her coffin as was possible, but worshippers offering similar prayers to her at Westminster were discouraged.
In 1750, Henry, Cardinal of York – brother to Mary’s direct descendant Bonnie Prince Charlie – sought her canonisation from Pope Benedict XIV. Although Benedict was known as the ‘Enlightenment’ Pope and Mary was found to have shown ‘magnanimity and charity’ at her death, therefore qualifying as a martyr, Rome found that her case could not be advanced without certain proof of her innocence in Darnley’s murder and adultery with Bothwell. Saints Peter, Paul, Augustine and Ignatius Loyola were all sinners forgiven by the Vatican and canonised, and therefore the Holy See’s refusal to grant the necessary forgiveness in Mary’s case cannot have been entirely on theological grounds. To grant such forgiveness it would have been necessary to accept Mary’s guilt; to dispense with its necessity would have been to accept her innocence. Either decision was fraught with political dangers.
In 1887, on the tercentenary of Mary’s death, Pope Leo XIII was approached, this time with a well-organised campaign led by no less than Queen Victoria, who was ‘enthusiastic in favour of her great ancestress and thankful she had no connection with Queen Elizabeth’. Mary’s canonisation was proposed to Rome along with forty other English martyrs. Cardinal Manning, with the recently-restored Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, William Smith, and supported by the English Jesuits, led a campaign of speeches and exhibitions, although England’s leading Catholic peer, the Duke of Norfolk, opposed the plea. The campaign faltered in 1892 with the deaths of Cardinal Manning and Archbishop Smith, with the result that by 1902, Mary was the sole candidate and the matter came to a halt. According to the Vatican ‘her file is still open’. A proposal to mark the 400th anniversary of her death in 1987 with her portrait on a postage stamp was also turned down.
Her burial site in Peterborough was despoiled, as was the tomb of Catherine of Aragon, by Cromwell’s men during the English Civil War and today the site is marked by banners presented to the cathedral by the Peterborough Caledonian Society.
Sadly, it cannot be said that Mary had found peace at last in Westminster Abbey. In February 1869 a search was being made among the royal tombs for the unmarked grave of James VI and I. Under the supervision of Giles Gilbert Scott and accompanied by the master mason of the abbey, Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, opened the tomb. Dean Stanley said,
I was determined to make an entry by removing the stones on the south side of the southern aisle of the Chapel among which one was marked ‘way’. This led to an ample flight of stone steps leading obliquely under the Queen of Scots’ tomb. A startling, it may almost be said awful, scene presented itself. A vast pile of leaden coffins rose from the floor; some of full stature, the larger number varying from that of the full-grown child to the merest infant, confusedly heaped upon the others.
Along the north wall were two coffins ‘much compressed’ by the weight of four or five lesser coffins heaped upon them. The second lowest was the coffin of Arabella Stuart, with bones and skull visible through the cracked lead coffin. The lower one was saturated with pitch and was deeply compressed by the weight above but the lead had not given way. This was the huge coffin of Mary, and it was decided not to open it or move it. The other occupants of this royal dumping ground were Henry, Prince of Wales, the son of James VI and I who had died in 1612; two infants of Charles I; Mary, Princess of Orange; Prince Rupert; Anne Hyde, the first wife of James II; Elizabeth of Bohemia; ten children of James II and the tra
gic eighteen children of Queen Anne, none of whom had achieved adulthood. ‘It was impossible to view this wreck and ruin of the Stuart dynasty without a wish if possible to restore something like order and decency amongst the relics of so much departed greatness.’ The investigators tidied up the coffins of the children and the various funerary urns but Mary’s coffin was left untouched. James’s coffin was found in the opposite aisle, nearer to Elizabeth than to his mother.
Mary’s tomb in London is magnificent but she lies among people she never knew and who were often her enemies. In Scotland, Mary is remembered by a replica of this tomb in the Museum of Scotland. In France there is nothing.
Mary Stewart, who lived ‘at a time when poetry and romance were the prevalent literature of the age’ had one of the most eventful lives it is possible to imagine, but it is difficult to find one as passive. Almost every one of the myriad events she experienced was the result of an accident, and the one event she went some way to initiate was the one which finally brought her to the scaffold. Mary Stewart is, therefore, remembered as part of a romantic tragedy – her role in that tragedy being the one of a thrice-widowed queen of great beauty. She was physically graceful, a keen dancer and horsewoman, enthusiastic for outdoor exercise, but intellectually no more than average for her position. When cornered in debate she always referred to her parentage and royal descent. No political or theological lessons had been learned from her Guise uncles, the careful tutelage of Diane de Poitiers in female guile was forgotten and the court diplomacy of Catherine de Medici was ignored. Mary enjoyed gallantry and flirtation but seemed to have had no interest in sex; socially she preferred the company of her close female friends and servants, to whom she was invariably kind, and only encouraged social interaction with male courtiers in the formal ceremonies of dances and pageants.
Her death was made unavoidable by the actions of her supporters – many of whom themselves went either to the block or a less merciful end – and she did nothing to deter these zealots. She allowed the effects of accidents to become overwhelming, until finally she, herself, was overwhelmed in a final accidental tragedy.
Appendix: The Scots Tongue
During the sixteenth century two languages were spoken in Scotland.
To the north and west of Glasgow the principal language was Gaelic, a Celtic language, totally different from English and generally only understood in the Highlands and Western Isles. In Galloway, to the south-west, there were still pockets of Gaelic speakers, although the Gaelic spoken there was closer to the version of the language spoken in Ireland. The rest of the country spoke various versions of Scots, and the argument as to whether these Scots tongues are a language or a dialect rages violently even today, when the debate has become coloured by political nationalism.
In 1074 Malcom Canmore’s queen, Margaret – herself Hungarian – complained that the clerics of the Scottish Church spoke nothing but Gaelic, but over the next 200 years the Anglian speech of Northumbria had spread north as far as the Moray Firth, and it is the root of Scots. The Wars of Independence and the physical barrier of the Cheviot Hills meant that from the late fourteenth century on Scots and English developed in different ways. The English court did not abandon French as its language until 1400; in Scotland, the court and the people spoke Scots.
By the sixteenth century Scotland was speaking Middle Scots, which had a rich background of literature and drama all of its own. Here the court, the law and the ordinary people all spoke in the same way and, even as far into modern times as the eighteenth century, the legal profession prided itself on the richness of its Scots vocabulary. The Reformation in Scotland saw a shift towards English – John Knox was heavily criticised for his English accent – and there was no Reformed Bible in Scots.
In The Complaynt of Scotland, believed to have been written by Robert Wedderburn in 1549, the author makes a claim for using plain Scots language in place of Latin. When reading these extracts it must be remembered that the spelling was entirely literal and therefore everything should be pronounced precisely as it is spelt. A description of a farmyard awakening gives scope for much onomatopoeia: ‘Than the suyne began to quhryne quhen thai herd the asse rair quhilk gart the hennis kekkyl quhen the cockis creu.’ The author explains his thinking in using Scots: ‘For I thocht it not neccessair til hef fardit and lardit this tracteit with exquisite termis, quhilkis are nocht daily useit, bot rather I hef usit domestic Scottis langage, maist intelligibil for the vulgare pepil.’ However, it was not ‘intelligibil’ for visitors. English ambassadors in Mary’s Scotland would have found the speech impenetrable and French would have been used by both sides – much to Mary’s relief. Mary’s nurses and body servants would use Scots and she would have learnt it from them for use with her courtiers – who, as educated gentlemen would all also speak French.
The official language of government can be found in the minutes of the Privy Council. A case of a disturbance in Leith was raised before the council on 13 April 1572:
Forasmeikle as my Lord Regentis Grace and Lordis of Secreit Counsale, considering that not only are the troubles the langar, bot the greittar confusion remains within this toun of Leyth, quhair His Grace, the Counsale and College of Justice remains, becaus of the impunitie gevin to offenouris, fautoris and furnissars of the rebellis and disobedient subjectis . . . the former ordinances and proclamationis being neglectit and not put to full execution.
A literary master of Scots was George Buchanan, who wrote The Chameleon in 1570. It was an attack on Mary, Darnley and Bothwell, and opens with a description of a strange animal:
Thair is a certane kynd of beist callit chamleon endgerderit in sic contreis as the sone has mair strength in than in this isle of Brettane, the quhilk albeit it be small of corporance noghtheless it is of ane strange nature, the quhilk makis it to be na less celebrat and spoken of than sum Beastis of greittar quantity.
South of the border the Middle English of Chaucer was giving way to the modern English which would flower in the works of Shakespeare at the end of the century. The written English of the sixteenth century is easily understood today, although the richness of local accents would have made spoken English difficult to grasp – as is the case with some strong regional accents today. The gradual erosion of Scots in favour of English was vigorously encouraged in schools and broadcasting until very recently, and a rich and vivid vocabulary was nearly suppressed. Mercifully the tide was stemmed, and regional speech variations are now encouraged.
Notes on Sources
1 As goodly a child as I have seen
Quotations during the early marriage negotiations are from Sir Ralph Sadler, State Papers and Letters (Edinburgh, 1809), or Hamilton Papers (ed. Joseph Bain, Edinburgh, 1890–92). Other quotations from ambassadors (throughout the book) are in the various Calendars of State Papers, or in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (Vaduz, 1965). For the condition of Scotland, Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, Historie and Cronicles of Scotland (Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1899), is useful, as is A Diurnal of Remarkable Occurrents (Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1833). Knox is quoted from John Knox, The History of the Reformation in Scotland (ed. W. Croft Dickinson, Edinburgh, 1949).
2 One of the most perfect creatures
A vital overview of the Rough Wooing is given by Marcus Merriman in the The Rough Wooings (East Linton, 2000), while a French view is given by Jean de Beaugué in Histoire de la Guerre d’Ecosse: pendant les campagnes 1548 et 1549 (Maitland Club, Edinburgh, 1830). Pitscottie and the Diurnal give the Scottish background as does John Leslie in The History of Scotland (Scottish Text Society, 1888–95). Mary’s journey to France is well documented by Jane Stoddart in The Girlhood of Mary, Queen of Scots (London, 1908) and Mary’s childhood in general is dealt with by Joseph Stevenson, S.J., in Mary Stuart, the First Eighteen Years of her Life, (Edinburgh, 1886).
3 We may be very well pleased with her
For a general history in this period I used Frederic J. Baumgartner�
��s France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1995). The same author’s Henry II (London, 1998) is a worthwhile biography, as are Diane de Poitiers, by Ivan Cloulas (Paris, 1997), Henry Sedgewick’s The House of Guise (London, 1938), and Lenonie Frieda’s Catherine de Medici (London, 2003). The Memoires (London, 1739) of Pierre de Brantôme and his Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1832), vols 2 and 5, are useful for quotations but are often unreliable, while Baron Alphonse de Ruble is authoritative in his La Première Jeunesse de Marie Stuart (Paris, 1891). For Mary’s arrival in France, see the recommended Baudouin-Matusek, ‘Mary Stewart’s Arrival in France’ (Scottish Historical Review, vol. 69, 1990). Mary’s letters are nearly all collected by Alexander Labanoff in Receuil de Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Marie Stuart (Paris, 1844–45), and can be identified chronologically. The list of female attributes can be found in Selections from unpublished manuscripts . . . illustrating the Reign of Queen Mary (Maitland Club, 1837).
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