Mary Queen of Scots (100 page)

Despite the vivid sorrow of the French nation and in spite of Mary’s own desire to be buried in France, either at St Denis or Rheims, her wishes in this respect were never met. Elizabeth could scarcely plead ignorance of her request, since it had been expressed most passionately in Mary’s letter of 15 December, the letter which Paulet had finally forwarded. However, in other respects, Mary’s last wishes were being met. By 7 March Mendoza, who was in Paris, was able to spread the tale of her heroic death to Spain for, despite all the English precautions, news of her bravery during the last hours had leaked out. Not only her courage but even her sanctity was discussed. Pierre l’Estoile recorded in his Journal that Paris was the scene of mass demonstrations, as well as sermons that virtually canonized Mary as a saint who had died in the cause of the Catholic faith.
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Among those who hailed her death as a form of martyrdom in the cause of the faith, was the youthful Maffeo Barbarini, the future Pope Urban
VIII
, who wrote a lyrical elegy on the subject referring to her ‘darkened sorrows turned to glorious joy’. The woman who deliberately chose the story of the good thief to be read aloud to her on the eve of her death because she considered herself in all humility to be a great sinner would have viewed this popular canonization with detachment; on the other hand Mary would undoubtedly have been pleased at the way the Catholic League and Philip
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were galvanized by her death as by a Catholic rallying-cry; even the French king, who generally viewed the Guise-inspired Catholic League with suspicion, gave vent to some newly bellicose sentiments towards the Protestants, on receiving the news of Mary’s death.

The grief of the French court was genuine enough in its personal
aspects. That of the Scottish court was more difficult to estimate, and contemporary accounts differ radically in their reports of how James received the news of his mother’s execution. According to one story, he shammed sorrow in public, but observed to his courtiers gleefully in secret: ‘Now I am sole King.’
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Archibald Douglas on the other hand was told that the ‘King moved never his countenance at the rehearsal [telling] of his mother’s execution, nor leaves not his pastimes more than of before’.
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Still other reports spoke of his evident grief, how he became very sad and pensive when the intelligence reached him, and went to bed without eating. Whatever James’s outward show of lamentation, it is difficult to believe that the news of his mother’s death aroused at long last the filial pasison of which he had shown so little evidence during her life. His conduct subsequently showed that so long as the English crown still dangled within his reach, he was prepared to swallow the insult to his family and his nation. The Scottish people as a whole showed more spirit than their king: and seemed to evince both humiliation and anger at the killing of one who had once sat on the throne of Scotland. When James ordered the Scottish court into mourning as a formal gesture, according to one tradition
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the earl of Sinclair appeared before him dressed in steel armour in place of black. When James asked him whether he had not seen the general order for mourning, Sinclair replied sternly: ‘This
is
the proper mourning for the Queen of Scotland.’ Prayers were said for the defunct queen in a form specially prescribed by the Council. Some of Mary’s former subjects discussed plans for reprisals. One of Cecil’s spies heard that the Hamiltons had proposed to burn Newcastle with a levy of 5,000 men, if only James would match their force with an equivalent army. Walsingham was also advised that there were posters in the streets against England and James, and a general clamour for war. To indicate the prevailing atmosphere, his agent in Scotland sent him a piece of hemp tied like a halter and the accompanying jingle, aimed by a patriot at Elizabeth:

James did make the gesture of breaking off formal communications with England. Sir Robert Carey was sent north by Elizabeth with the unenviable mission of explaining that his mistress had not authorized the execution personally and had been dumbfounded and grief-stricken when it was carried out. James refused at first to receive him. But by the end of
February Gray was writing to Douglas in London, indicating that James would now be susceptible to further arguments from Elizabeth and that old Latin tag –
necessa est unum mori pro populo
– it is necessary for one person to die for the sake of the people – might perhaps be brought into play.
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Finally James consented to listen to Carey’s arguments, and accepted Elizabeth’s explanation of her own ‘unspotted’ part in the execution. By mid-March the English were confident that James would not fight to avenge his mother’s death. The Anglo-Scottish alliance remained un-severed by the axe of Fotheringhay.

It was, however, in deference to James’s feelings, or the sort of appropriate feelings he might be supposed to cherish for his mother, that the subject of the burial of the queen of Scots was raised again in the summer after her death. Walsingham had specified in his instructions that the coffin should be bestowed ‘by night’ on an upper shelf of the local Fotheringhay church – and Cecil afterwards underlined the word
upper
in his own hand.
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But in fact the coffin had not been accorded even this obscure resting-place, but remained quite unburied, like the corpse of Achilles, within Fotheringhay itself. Now it was planned to give the coffin an honourable burial at Peterborough Cathedral. So far as anything explained this curious ceremony the line adopted seemed to be that Mary had been a revered dowager queen of Scotland who happened to die in England of natural causes. Under the auspices of Garter King of Arms, heralds, nobles and mourners were imported from London to give the occasion the right degree of solemnity due to the mother of the king of Scotland.
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But no Scots were present: and although the cathedral was hung with black paid for by the master of the wardrobe, and the heraldic details of the decoration worked out with care – there were the royal arms of Scotland, for example, as well as those of Mary’s first two husbands Francis
II
and Darnley [James’s father] – neither in the escutcheons nor in the service was there any reference to her third husband Bothwell, to the events leading to her imprisonment in England, let alone the manner of her death.

Although the red lion of Scotland blazed forth in the nave of Peterborough Cathedral, and Elizabeth’s personal friend, the countess of Bedford, acted the role of chief mourner with due gravity, while the procession was headed with 100 poor widows also dressed for the occasion in black at the government’s expense, the dichotomy at the heart of this strange apologetic ceremony was revealed by the fact that the coffin was actually transported from Fotheringhay to Peterborough at dead of night for fear of demonstrations. On Sunday 30 July, Queen Mary’s body left
the castle for the last time by the light of torches, in a coach draped in black velvet from which little pennons fluttered – ‘a chariot’ the state accounts called it later.
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The accompanying heralds rode with bared heads. They reached Peterborough at two o’clock in the morning, being met by a distinguished convoy of ecclesiastics including the bishop and the egregious Dean Fletcher. The coffin was then lodged temporarily in the Bishop’s Palace.

The whole ceremony was of course Protestant and thus sung in English. But the late queen’s servants, who had been allowed out of their seclusion at Fotheringhay to attend the service, were all pious Catholics with the exception of Andrew Melville and Barbara Mowbray. They therefore withdrew from the body of the church once the procession was over. Even so, the fact that the chaplain de Préau walked with a heavy gold crucifix on his breast during the procession called forth angry Protestant criticism. At the head of the procession, just behind the bailiff of Peterborough with his black staves of mourning, was borne the royal standard of Scotland with the motto:
In my defence God me defend.
Among the distinguished English mourners were Cecil’s elder son, and Shrewsbury’s daughter and daughter-in-law, Lady Mary Savill and Lady Talbot. The ladies of Mary’s former household walked just ahead of the attendants of the English peeresses, in black taffeta head-dresses, with veils of white lawn hanging down behind; their names recalled those last melancholy months at Fotheringhay, for they included Barbara Mowbray and her sister Gillis, Elizabeth Curle, Jane Kennedy, Christina Pages and her daughter Mary.

In one respect the ceremony deviated from the common practice at state funerals: it was not found possible to process the coffin round the cathedral owing to the great quantity of lead used on Walsingham’s instructions, estimated at over nine hundredweight. Not only was the weight inordinate, but it was feared by the prudent that the casing might even rip and ‘being very hot weather, might be found some annoyance’. The coffin was therefore placed immediately in its vault in the south aisle of the cathedral. Otherwise the arrangements were as was customary in such interments: a ‘representation’ or effigy of the queen of Scots was carried in the procession beneath a canopy supported by four knights.
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The five pursuivants from London, Portcullis, Rouge Dragon Clarenceaux, the Somerset and the York herald bore the emblems of state, the sword, target, crown, the crest, the helmet and the like which were later hung formally over the grave. Even the sermon given by William Chaderton, bishop of Lincoln, represented a clumsy attempt to gloss over the very different circumstances in which the woman whom they were now burying with such honour had actually died. He called on God to bless the happy dissolution of the late Scottish queen, adding ‘Of whose life and departure, whatsoever shall be expected, I have nothing to say, for that I was unacquainted with the one, and not present at the other’. By citing what he termed a charitable saying of Martin Luther: ‘Many one liveth a a Papist and dieth a Protestant’, he even suggested that the queen of Scots might have undergone a last-minute conversion to the reformed faith, before adding that at any rate he had heard she took her death patiently, recommending herself at the last to Jesus Christ.

The service completed, the procession filed out of the cathedral once more, and as they passed the mourning women who had once served Queen Mary, standing at the side, in order to take no part in the Protestant service, some of the grand English ladies, many of whom like Shrewsbury’s family had known them well in happier days, embraced and kissed them sympathetically. The courtiers and the ecclesiastics now adjourned to the Bishop’s Palace for a funeral banquet of considerable festivity: but Mary’s former servitors were not so easily transferred from tears into laughter; what to the worshipful company from London was only a ritual proceeding to round off a distasteful incident in English history, was to them the last obsequies of their beloved mistress. There, while the English caroused, Mary’s servants gathered in another room and wept bitter tears.

The most passionate desire left to these poor people was that they should now be released from their melancholy prison and allowed to go their several ways. Despite the completion of the interment, there was a further delay of two months before they were allowed to depart, possibly
because some report of their obstinate heretical behaviour at the burial service and their unseemly grief at the banquet had come to Elizabeth’s ears and displeased her. Shortly after the service, Adam Blackwood, one of Mary’s most loyal partisans, who was already at work on the task of presenting her to the world as a royal heroine and a Catholic martyr, came secretly to Peterborough and put up on the wall above her tomb a long epitaph in Latin protesting against the crime of regicide which had taken place at Fotheringhay: ‘A strange and unusual monument this is, wherein 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 prostrate. And because regal secrecy doth enough and more admonish Kings of their duty – traveller, I say no more.’ But this loyal monument was pulled down. Nor did ‘regal secrecy’ admonish any kings of their duty, beyond the £321 which Queen Elizabeth spent on this funeral to placate King James, of which pantry and buttery charges accounted for one third.
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At last in October the ordeal of the little royal household was at an end. Bourgoing went to King Henry
III
, as he had been instructed, and told his tale of the uplifting last months and hours of the late queen of Scots. Gorion went to Mendoza, handed him the diamond ring which Mendoza subsequently passed to Philip
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, and he too related the story of his mistress’s martyrdom. The farewell letters written nearly a year before reached their destinations at last, and King Philip, moved by this reminder from beyond the grave of the woman who had once been his sister-in-law, and long his Catholic confederate, out of natural chivalry honoured Mary’s last requests for the payments of her servants’ wages, and her debts in France. He also pursued in correspondence with Mendoza the subject of what he believed to be Mary’s last gift to him in her will – the reversion of the English crown. In the interests of his own foreign policy, Philip conveniently allowed himself to credit the story that Mary had finally disinherited James altogether on the eve of her execution, and had consequently ceded to Philip directly her own claims to the English throne.
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It was now late in 1587. It was in the next year, 1588, that King Philip took the momentous decision to pursue his supposed English inheritance with the great force of the Spanish Armada. Ironically enough, therefore, the mighty Spanish fleet of rescue for which Mary had waited so long and so hopefully, only sailed towards England after, and as a direct result of, her death.