Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (209 page)

Why was everything so real, so hard? It was supposed to be dreamy and
soft and swallowed up in a blaze of ecstasy. Instead there was this
nubbly feel of cloth, these aching knees, the feel of the kerchief knot
that hurt the back of her head. She swallowed and waited, holding
herself still.

"In Te Domino con fido nan confundar in aetemum ..." she murmured, in
a private whisper. In Thee, O Lord have I put my trust, let me never
be put to confusion.

Something was touching her. A fat wide hand was steadying her,
pressing on her back. She felt the sweat passing through her garment
and outlining itself against the hand.

"In manus tuas ..." Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.

She could hear her own voice. Everything was achingly acute.

Nothing is ever as I expected. But always deeper, harder, wilder,
sweeter, grander ... I come, Lord, regardless .. . help me!

Shrewsbury, the Earl Marshal, lowered his baton as a signal. The
headsman raised his axe high, and brought it down with a smash. He saw
with horror that in his nervousness he had missed, and only gashed the
side of her skull. She groaned and said in the smallest of whispers,
"Sweet Jesus." The spectators screamed. Quickly he raised the axe
again and swung it with all his might. It bit through her neck,
cutting her head almost free. Angry and ashamed, he used the edge of
the axe like a saw to fray away the last ligaments. The head fell off
and rolled away. The body flopped over on its back, the shoulders
covered in blood, the neck still spurting.

"God save Queen Elizabeth!" cried the executioner, leaning down to
pick up the head. He grabbed it by the kerchief and held it aloft.
Suddenly part of it fell away; the head itself rolled away, and the
executioner was left holding the wig and the kerchief.

The people gasped to see how grey Mary's hair was. The head lay
looking at them, the lips moving.

"So perish all the Queen's enemies!" yelled Kent, straddling the
fallen head.

"Yea! Such be the end of all the Gospel's enemies!" cried the Dean.

Shrewsbury turned his head away and wept.

The executioner now tried to pull up Mary's skirts to take her garters,
which was his time-honoured prerogative. As his hands fumbled with the
skirts, a mournful yelp arose, and from out of the crumpled material a
little dog emerged. It was Geddon, who had followed his mistress out
of her chambers and hidden himself within her voluminous skirts.

"What " cried Bull, snatching his hand away.

Geddon rushed to the headless neck and circled it, confused. He sat
down next to it and began to howl, a loud, drawn-out otherworldly howl.
He rolled in the blood and guarded the body.

Jane and Elizabeth scrambled to the stairs. They had forgotten their
vow to their mistress, and her body was being desecrated. But their
way was blocked.

"No! You shall not go there!"

"We must attend upon her! We promised "

"Your duties to her are at an end."

The Dean leapt up on the platform and grabbed Geddon. He pushed the
dog's muzzle down into the pool of blood and tried to make him drink
it. "Remember what Knox prophesied about the dogs drinking her blood!"
he yelled. "Drink, you cur!"

But Geddon, with a howl, turned around and sank his teeth into the
Dean's wrist.

"Cursed beast!" he cried, letting him go.

Paulet had taken Mary's head and displayed it on a velvet cushion
before an open window for the people outside.

But nothing was as it should have been. The head no longer looked like
Mary, but like an unfamiliar old woman. The Earl of Shrewsbury was
weeping. Mary had not been afraid or broken on the scaffold, but
serene and happy. And suddenly the task of telling Queen Elizabeth
that her great enemy had perished was not an enviable one. Nothing was
ever as expected.

They took away her crucifix and her writing-book, her bloodstained
clothes, the block itself, and anything else that she had touched, and
burnt them to ashes in a bonfire in the castle courtyard. There were
to be no relics, no mementos. The earthly presence of the Queen of
Scots was to be utterly effaced. Nothing was ever as expected.

There remained still the body of the Queen herself, which would not
vanish; the witnesses at the execution, who would recite all the facts
to wider and wider audiences; the mementos she had already given away.
There were all the places she had lived, the people she had known, the
child she had borne all now elevated and enlarged by the death she had
just died. The more thorough the government in scrubbing the scaffold
and throwing her kerchief in the fire, the more treasured all the
remaining relics became. As the fire consumed her crimson gown,
somewhere in the castle the mouldering hangings with her motto, In My
End Is My Beginning, took on a new life and began to stir.

THIRTY-TWO

Adoro, imploro, Ut liberes me.

I Thee implore That Thou wilt Grant me liberty
. With her bodily
liberty, the many Mary Stuarts that had been contained in one body,
bundled together as it were, fled to their various domains, diverging
into irreconcilable elements.

The beautiful, youthful spirit returned to France. It flew to Reims
and saw at last its mother's grave, its beloved aunt, its bereft friend
Mary Seton. It lingered in fondness at the wall where the ivory
crucifix had originally hung. It flew, no bodily constraints now, but
pure spirit, to Notre Dame and heard its own funeral eulogy.

There, in the darkness of the great cathedral where she had married in
a blaze of earthly glory, her spirit heard an old priest young then
speak of her and of those days.

"Many of us saw, in the place where we are now assembled, this Queen on
the day of her bridal, arrayed in her regal trappings, so covered with
jewels that the sun himself shone not more brightly, so beautiful, so
charming withal, as never woman was. These walls were then hung with
cloth of gold and precious tapestries; every space was filled with
thrones and seats, crowded with princes and princesses, who came from
all parts to share in the rejoicings. The palace was overflowing with
magnificence, spend id fetes and masques; the streets with jousts and
tourneys. In short, it seemed as if our age had succeeded that day in
surpassing the pomp of all past centuries.

"A little time has flown on, and it is all vanished like a cloud. Who
could have believed that such a change could have befallen her who
appeared then so triumphant, and that we should have seen her a
prisoner who had restored prisoners to liberty; in poverty, she who was
accustomed to give so liberally to others; treated with contumely by
those on whom she had conferred honours; and finally, the axe of the
base executioner mangling the form of her who was doubly a queen; that
form which honoured the nuptial bed of a sovereign of France falling
dishonoured on a scaffold, and that beauty, which had been one of the
wonders of the world, faded in a dreary prison, and at last effaced by
a piteous death?"

He looked around the cathedral. "This place, where she was surrounded
by splendour, is now hung with black for her. Instead of nuptial
torches we have funeral tapers; in the place of songs of joy, we have
sighs and groans; for clarions and hautboys, the tolling of the sad and
dismal bell.

"It appears as if God had chosen to render her virtues more glorious by
her afflictions. Others leave to their successors the care of building
fair and splendid monuments to escape forgetfulness, but this Queen in
dying exonerates you from that care, having by her death itself
imprinted on the minds of men an image of constancy which should not be
for this age alone, but for time and eternity."

The youthful spirit was touched, and then moved on.

The Monstrous Dragon and Threat to Protestantism flew to London and
beheld Elizabeth at last. It saw her grief and shock when she was told
of the execution, and knew in its new knowledge that Elizabeth's
ministers had carried out the warrant on their own authority. But it
mattered not. It watched the celebrations in London, understood the
hatred, but was not touched by it.

The mother went to Scotland and saw James, a grown man, dressed all in
black. She saw the courtiers, too. New ones, ones that were not there
when she had ruled. And the old ones, the ones who had held sway and
terror in her time, now quite vanished. But Holyrood was the same;
Edinburgh Castle was the same.

She saw the Earl of Sinclair striding in in armour; heard James ask,
peevishly, if he had not received the order to wear mourning for the
Queen of Scotland; heard the Earl cry out, striking his armour, "This
is the proper mourning for the Queen of Scotland!" and flourish his
sword.

Scotland ... it had not changed. But now she could love it.

Mary the daughter of Rome, the martyr to the faith, saw the
proliferation of pamphlets, of accounts of her piety, of portraits and
poems that circulated as soon as her attendants escaped from England
and made their way to the Continent to tell their story of her last
days. Her spirit was touched by the devotion of her fellow Catholics.
But it did not recognize this staid, stern captive they had created.

There were two burials, two funerals. The first took place six months
after her death, in the nearby Peterborough Cathedral. The service was
Anglican, and conducted by the Dean. Her spirit was not vexed by it,
only filled with compassion. Father de Pre'au walked along behind him,
his cross prominently displayed. Elizabeth was chief mourner, but of
course was not there in person. She sent a proxy, the Countess of
Bedford. The day was very hot, the coffin enormously heavy. The
spirit knew that they had encased her body in a thousand pounds of
lead, as if they were afraid she would escape. They did not
understand, in spite of all their prayers and religion.

Time, which was no time, passed, and the second funeral took place.
The coffin made its way slowly to London on the orders of James, who
was now King of England and Scotland. He wished to honour his mother,
and lay her to rest (they did not understand) in the chapel of her
great-grandfather, Henry VII. In the same chapel, under a structure
and statue carved by the same sculptor, lay Elizabeth.

The spirit saw her own coffin passing only a few yards from Elizabeth's
monument. They were to be separated by the nave of the chapel, held
apart by the walls and carved stalls, never to gaze on one another's
tombs.

Mary's elaborate monument, with a black-and-white marble canopy, had a
white marble statue of her lying in state. It was beautiful as only
earthly things could be.

And so the spirit liked to visit it and linger there. Some of those
who came felt its presence, and soon they were talking of miracles and
sainthood.

They did not understand.

It wearied the spirit to see how little they understood, that the
presence of the spirit was not extraordinary, or even unusual; so that
in time, little by little, the spirit lost its desire to roam abroad.