Clan Stewart · 1587
Mary at Fotheringhay
On the morning of the eighth of February 1587, in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, Mary, Queen of Scots, formerly Queen of France, claimant to the throne of England by descent from Henry VII, twice married, twice widowed, mother of James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England), in her forty-fourth year, in the nineteenth year of imprisonment in England, was beheaded by Bull, the executioner, on a black-draped scaffold raised in the hall, in the presence of three earls, the sheriff of Northamptonshire, and a small party of her own household. She had been condemned at the Star Chamber in October 1586 for involvement in the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne. Elizabeth had signed the warrant on the first of February 1587 and tried, in the days afterward, to disavow having intended its execution. The execution went forward on the morning of the eighth, the warrant carried by Robert Beale, by the Privy Council's authority. The first stroke of the axe failed to sever the neck. The second sufficed. The third was needed to sever the last sinew. As the head was lifted, the wig that Mary had been wearing came off in Bull's hand, revealing the queen's grey hair. Beneath the skirts of the gown her terrier, by the tradition of the eyewitnesses, was found alive and would not leave her body, and had to be carried out by force.
It is twenty past eight on the morning of the eighth of February 1587, in the chamber over the gatehouse at Fotheringhay Castle, on the river Nene in Northamptonshire, in low pale light off the moat. She is forty-four years old. She is Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots from her sixth day to the abdication of 1567, formerly Queen of France through her marriage to Francis II from 1559 to 1560, mother of King James VI of Scots. She has been a prisoner in England for nineteen years, in the keeping of seven successive English custodians; she has been at Fotheringhay for the past four months. Her hair, which is now grey and short under the auburn wig she has worn for state in her last decade, is dressed by her woman Jane Kennedy. She is in a black satin overgown over a red kirtle of velvet, with a white lace collar and the gold cross of her devotion on a chain at her neck. Her terrier, the only living being in the room she still consents to call her own, is at her feet on the floor.
Sir Robert Beale, clerk of the Privy Council, has just read the warrant in the lower hall. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, the Sheriff of Northamptonshire, and the executioner Bull and his assistant are below. The procession will form when she is sent for.
She thinks: I have prepared for this morning for nineteen years. The hardest part of the morning is now done.
She thinks: I have written the letters: to Henri III of France, to my cousin the Duke of Guise, to my son James in Edinburgh. The letters are with Beale. They will reach those they were addressed to.
She thinks: I have asked the Earl of Shrewsbury for my Catholic chaplain de Préau to attend me on the scaffold. He has refused. I will pray in the Latin of the Mass without him.
She thinks: the world will not see me weep. The world will see me as a Catholic queen who has been imprisoned in a Protestant country and who is being killed for her faith and her descent.
She thinks: that is, in the first place, the truth. That is, in the second place, the only line of argument that gives my son a clean accession to the throne of this country in the next reign.
She thinks: I will speak in English on the scaffold. I will speak briefly. I will not denounce. I will pray for Elizabeth.
She is sent for at twenty to nine. She walks down the broad oak stair into the hall on the arms of two of her own gentlemen. The hall has been hung in black velvet. The scaffold, three steps high, is at the upper end. The block, a low oak frame, is in the middle of the platform. Bull and his assistant are at the side. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent are behind.
She stands on the scaffold and crosses herself. She speaks briefly in English: she forgives those who have brought her to this place; she dies in the Catholic faith of her ancestors; she prays for the Queen of England. She kneels on the cushion at the block. Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle her women are at her elbows. She lays her head down without flinching.
Bull's first stroke goes wide and lands across the back of the head, breaking the skull but not severing the neck. She does not move. She does not, by the testimony of every man and woman in the hall, cry out. The second stroke severs the neck. The third cuts the last sinew. Bull lifts the head by the hair, by the standard practice. The wig comes off in his hand. The head, falling, is the head of a grey-haired woman of forty-four. The hand of the head, by Robert Wynkfield's deposition written within the hour, is moving in a involuntary spasm of the jaw. Wynkfield writes that this lasts a quarter of an hour.
And under the skirts of the black satin gown, when the body is being lifted by Bull's assistants for the surgeon, the terrier comes out from where it had been hiding, by the testimony of three witnesses, whining and unwilling to be parted from the queen. It is taken from the body by Jane Kennedy and washed; it would not eat for the rest of its short life and was dead within a fortnight.
The body of Mary Queen of Scots was disembowelled by the surgeon and the entrails buried that morning at Fotheringhay; the trunk was laid in lead and kept at the castle for five months, awaiting Elizabeth's decision on burial. In July 1587 it was removed to Peterborough Cathedral and given a state Anglican funeral and a tomb in the south aisle. Twenty-five years later, in 1612, on the orders of her son James (who had inherited the English throne in 1603), the body was raised, taken to Westminster Abbey, and reburied in a great marble tomb in the south aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, immediately opposite the tomb of her cousin Elizabeth in the north aisle. The two tombs face each other across the narrow chapel. By the direction of the late twentieth-century guide-books, the visitor is told that, in the lit chapel, looking at the recumbent effigy of Mary in marble in the south aisle, the wig has been carved on the head and the small dog at her feet, and that the carved hair underneath, where the marble effigy's wig has been notionally lifted, is uncarved. The eight-year-old Walter Scott visited the tomb in 1779 and wrote in his school-book that he had stood on the spot for half an hour. The terrier, which by the testimony of Jane Kennedy was a Skye terrier of the breed kept at the French court, has its own carved relief at the foot of the tomb, but no name. The records do not preserve one. The witnesses of the morning at Fotheringhay agree that the terrier was the only thing in the hall that did not stand on form.