Mary at Fotheringhay

A queen who has lost her crown can still choose the shape of her ending. Nineteen years in another woman's keeping will teach her that the body is a poor possession and the manner of its leaving is the last estate she owns. When the warrant is finally read in the lower hall, the question is no longer whether she will die, but what she will make the killing mean.

THE LONG KEEPING

Mary Stewart had been Queen of Scots since her sixth day of life and Queen of France by marriage at sixteen. By twenty-five she had been deposed by her own lords, by twenty-six she had crossed the Solway into England seeking her cousin's protection, and by forty-four she had been moved between Tutbury, Sheffield, Chatsworth, Wingfield, Chartley and now Fotheringhay, in the keeping of seven successive English custodians. The Babington letters, ciphered and answered in her own hand, had reached Walsingham's desk through a brewer at Chartley; the Star Chamber had condemned her in October 1586; Elizabeth had signed the warrant on the first of February and then, in the days afterward, tried to set the signing aside from the execution. Robert Beale rode north with the parchment by the Privy Council's authority. The hall at Fotheringhay was hung in black velvet through the night of the seventh.

THE CHAMBER OVER THE GATEHOUSE

It is twenty past eight on the morning of the eighth of February 1587, in the chamber over the gatehouse, in the low pale light off the moat. 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. Jane Kennedy dresses her hair, which is grey now and short under the auburn wig she has worn for state in her last decade. The terrier, the only living thing in the room she still consents to call her own, lies at her feet. Below, in the lower hall, Beale has read the warrant aloud. The Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent wait, and the Sheriff of Northamptonshire, and Bull the executioner with his assistant. The procession will form when she is sent for. She has asked for her chaplain de Préau and been refused; she will pray in the Latin of the Mass without him.

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR BEFORE THE STAIR

She has prepared for this morning for nineteen years and the hardest part of the morning is now done. The letters are written, to Henri III of France, to her cousin the Duke of Guise, to her son James in Edinburgh, and they are with Beale, who, whatever else he is, is a clerk and will see that paper reaches its address. What remains is the calculation, the last calculation of a reign that has not been a reign for twenty years. She has wept enough in private rooms; she will not weep in this one. The world that hears of this morning will hear of a Catholic queen put to death in a Protestant country for her faith and her descent, and that is, in the first place, the truth, and in the second place, the only argument that gives her son a clean inheritance of this country's throne in the next reign. So: English, not French, on the scaffold, because the report will travel in English. Brief, because brevity carries. No denunciation of Elizabeth, because a queen who dies cursing another queen makes a martyr of neither. A prayer for Elizabeth, because the prayer is what they will remember. She crosses herself. The terrier shifts at her foot. En ma fin gît mon commencement, she had once embroidered in thread on a cloth of state at Sheffield, in my end is my beginning; she had taken the device from her mother. The thread had outlasted the throne. She finds the device still answers. She is sent for at twenty to nine.

THE HALL

She walks down the broad oak stair on the arms of two of her own gentlemen. The hall is hung in black velvet. The scaffold, three steps high, stands at the upper end; the block, a low oak frame, sits in the middle of the platform. Bull and his assistant are at the side; Shrewsbury and Kent behind. She mounts the steps and crosses herself. 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, as is the standard practice, and the wig comes off in his hand. The head, falling, is the head of a grey-haired woman of forty-four. Robert Wynkfield, writing his deposition within the hour, records that the lips moved as if she had a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.

THE DOG UNDER THE GOWN

When the body is lifted for the surgeon, something stirs under the skirts of the black satin gown. The terrier comes out from where it had been hiding through the three strokes and the speeches and the dressing of the hair before dawn. By the testimony of three witnesses it will not be parted from her; it lies between the head and the shoulders, and has to be carried out by force. Jane Kennedy takes it, and washes the blood from its coat. It would not eat for the rest of its short life and was dead within a fortnight. The body was disembowelled at Fotheringhay that morning and the entrails buried in the castle ground; the trunk was laid in lead and kept at the castle for five months, while Elizabeth, in London, deliberated.

THE COUSIN IN THE NORTH AISLE

In July 1587 the body was removed to Peterborough Cathedral and given a state Anglican funeral and a tomb in the south aisle. Elizabeth ruled sixteen more years. James VI of Scots, the son who at the news of his mother's death had observed the diplomatic forms and made no war for her, became James I of England in 1603 by the inheritance she had spent her last morning protecting. In 1612, on his order, the body was raised and brought to Westminster Abbey, and laid in a great marble tomb in the south aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, directly opposite the tomb of Elizabeth in the north aisle. The two cousins, who never met in life, lie in marble across a narrow chapel, the daughter of Henry VIII and the granddaughter of his sister, and the line that comes down from England to this day runs through the Scottish tomb, not the English one.

THE STONE AT WESTMINSTER

A queen who has lost her crown can still choose the shape of her ending, and the shape, once chosen, outlasts the choosing. The carved effigy in the south aisle wears the carved wig; the carved hair beneath the wig is uncarved, because the wig, in marble as in the hall, is not lifted. At the foot of the tomb, in low relief, is the small dog. The eight-year-old Walter Scott, taken to the abbey in 1779, wrote in his school-book that he had stood on the spot for half an hour. The terrier, which by Jane Kennedy's word was a Skye of the breed kept at the French court, has no name in the records. The witnesses of that morning at Fotheringhay agreed in only one thing without prompting: that the dog under the gown was the one creature in the hall that did not stand on form.