Mary Queen of Scots (101 page)

Mendoza was left in France to deal with the problems of these old servants: Philip had authorized a pension of 300 crowns a year for Jane, and forty crowns a month for Gilbert Curle, and Mendoza acted with kindness and charity in the course of his administration, receiving in the course of it such tremulous confidences as the fact that it had been Jane Kennedy not Elizabeth Curle who had tied the blindfold round the queen’s eyes at the end: ‘because I was of better family’.
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Having delivered a diamond ring which Mary bequeathed to Thomas Morgan for faithful service – many of her supporters would willingly have denied it to him for his supposed treachery – Jane Kennedy returned to Scotland, where she had the melancholy privilege of describing the scene of his mother’s death personally to King James. She subsequently married Mary’s steward, Andrew Melville; despite the differences in their religion they were drawn to each other by memories of the past and long years together in the royal service. But Jane did not live long enough to enjoy a peaceful old age with her husband: in 1589 King James commissioned her to go to Denmark to fetch back his bride Princess Anne, as a reward for her faithful service to his mother, and she was drowned in a storm at the outset of her journey. Gillis Mowbray also went back to Scotland, where she married Sir John Smith of Barnton: her relics of her royal mistress, which she bequeathed to her grand-daughter, now form the heart of the Penicuik Bequest in the National Museum of Antiquities at Edinburgh.

Elizabeth Curle, and her sister-in-law Barbara Curle, born Mowbray, ended their lives together at Antwerp. Gilbert Curle, the sad but good-hearted secretary, died in 1609; but Barbara lived to 1616, and Elizabeth to 1620, over thirty years after the death of Mary. Before her death, Elizabeth Curle had an interesting memorial to the queen carried out in the shape of a full-scale portrait of her mistress at the time of her execution, the figure presumably modelled on the miniature which Mary confided to Jane on the eve of her death. The portrait was bequeathed by Elizabeth to her nephew Hippolytus Curle, a Jesuit, and from him it was handed on to the Scots College at Douai. On either side of the standing figure of the queen are shown two vignettes of the execution scene at Fotheringhay: on the left, the queen kneels at the block, and on the right are shown Elizabeth Curle and Jane Kennedy standing together, wearing the black religious habits these good ladies appear to have adopted for the rest
of their lives in perpetual and devout mourning for their mistress. At Douai the portrait even survived the depredations of the French revolutionaries, rolled up and built into a chimney; it has now come to rest at the Blairs College, Aberdeen. The pious legend that Elizabeth Curle somehow managed to carry the head of Mary Queen of Scots abroad and have it buried with her in her tomb may be dismissed in view of the extraordinary and zealous precautions which were taken at the time to prevent even a drop of the dead woman’s blood being taken as a martyr’s relic; the head itself was certainly replaced on the body by the surgeons, wrapped securely in the heavy lead coffin that very afternoon. But the joint memorial to Elizabeth and Barbara in St Andrew’s Church, Antwerp, flanked with their respective patron saints, is today still crowned with a portrait of Mary Stuart, the woman whom Elizabeth believed to have been a martyred queen, and to whose life she dedicated her service; the Latin inscription on the memorial still proclaims proudly that it was she, Elizabeth Curle, who received the last kiss of Mary Queen of Scots.

With the departure at last of the sorrowing servants, the castle of Fotheringhay was released from its spell; soon its very masonry began to decay. Although Camden loyally but inaccurately reported that it was King James who had the stones beaten to the ground in a rage, to avenge the deed of shame which had taken place there,
¹⁴
in fact its demolition was a gradual process, increased as local builders and landowners helped themselves to its materials. The antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, conscious of his royal Bruce ancestry, actually acquired the great hall in which the execution had taken place, and incorporated it in his own near-by manor of Connington in Huntingdonshire (although that too was pulled down in the eighteenth century). Today not even the ruins of Fotheringhay survive. The interested wayfarer finds the site of the castle, which is not in public hands, but belongs to the owners of the near-by farm, at the end of a cart-track. All that can be seen of the once mighty castle of Fotheringhay is a grassy mound indicating the position of the keep, and a huge Ozymandias-like hump of masonry, encased in railings, recalling Shelley’s line on the trunkless stone in the desert,
‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair
’. The river meanders by. Sheep peacefully graze on the meadows opposite. There is no national memorial or official commemoration of the stirring events, so much part of British history, which once took place at Fotheringhay.
§

Even now with the burial at Peterborough, the earthly peregrinations of the queen of Scots were not at an end. When James ascended the throne of England in the spring of 1603, he marked his respect for his mother’s tomb the following August by despatching a rich pall of velvet to Peterborough, with instructions to the bishop to hang it over her grave. By the time, however, that James had erected a large and handsome monument to Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey, it was generally felt that something still further ought to be done for his mother’s memory. Considerable influence in this respect was exerted by James’s favourite Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, brother of Mary’s Norfolk, who had strongly Catholic sympathies all his life and died an outright member of the Church. In 1606 Cornelius Cure, master mason of works, was instructed to commence the carving of an imposing monument, which was later continued and finished by his son William. By September 1612 the work was sufficiently completed for the order of exhumation to be given to the clergy at Peterborough: the corpse of James’s ‘dearest mother’ was to be taken up in ‘as decent and respectful manner as is fitting’. James did not, however, lose his head over the splendour of his gesture – for although the monument in Westminster Abbey was costly and sumptuous, the sculptors alone receiving £825, and an overall sum of £2,000 being mentioned, James had not forgotten that rich pall he had sent down to Peterborough nine years earlier. This was to be employed again, and if the chapter happened to think it belonged to them, it was to be redeemed for a reasonable fee. Today the site of the original vault is covered by a marble pavement. The heraldic symbols over the grave were pulled down at the time of the Civil War, when the tomb of Queen Catherine of Aragon was also destroyed. The twenty-five-year-long sojourn of the queen of Scots’ body in Peterborough Cathedral is marked by a stone tablet on an adjoining pillar, and two Scottish banners hang facing the site, placed there in 1920 by the Peterborough Caledonian Society.

In Westminster Abbey at last, the queen of Scots’ body found its final resting-place. The tomb is magnificent, a monument to James’s taste if not to his filial piety. By the white marble of which it is composed, Mary Stuart becomes once more
‘la reine blanche’
of her first widowhood. It shows her lying full-length beneath a great ornamental canopy, her face
serene and noble, her eyes closed, her long fingers stretched out in an attitude of prayer; she wears the simple peaked head-dress in which she died, but a royal cloak edged with ermine stretches around her body; at her feet rests the lion of Scotland. The face is extremely realistic and was evidently modelled on either the death mask or the effigy taken from it at Peterborough, since it shows all the features which observers noticed at the time of her death, and bears also a strong resemblance to the later portraits. The chin is full and soft although still pointed, the oval shape of the face is characteristic as is the setting of the eyes with its pronounced gap before the hairline. The nose has a Roman bridge to it, and the aquiline tendency of later years, consonant with the Sheffield-type portraits, which was probably exaggerated by the conditions of the death mask. The mouth shows the delicate almost sensual curve of the portraits, but is set in a more tranquil expression than the sad martyr of the Sheffield-type pictures. Altogether the whole impression of this awe-inspiring catafalque is of beauty – beauty which is made up of both majesty and repose.

A long Latin epitaph was composed by the earl of Northampton and is now to be seen on the tomb: it extols Queen Mary’s virtues, and deplores her misfortunes and her wrongful English imprisonment, without going into the controversial events which led to this imprisonment. The Cotton MSS show that Northampton had composed other still more eulogistic versions, in which it was suggested that, as Mary had stated herself, she had been executed solely for her religious faith, and lured into England by the false promises of Elizabeth. These, however, James discarded in favour of an uncontroversial panegyric – which, however, Northampton still signed ‘H.N. Gemens’ – Henry Northampton, mourning.
¹⁵

So the queen of Scots found peace at last. There can be little doubt that Mary who cared so much and so prolongedly for the English succession would have been satisfied at the last with her burial place in Westminster Abbey among the kings and queens of England. Her rights as a queen, to which she attached such importance to the end, had thus been respected. Viewing that splendid edifice in marble, white in the darkness of the Henry
VII
Chapel, the last of the royal monuments and the most imposing of them all, she would surely have felt that the cruelty of Elizabeth in denying her the French burial she craved had been atoned for in an unlooked-for and glorious manner. Nor was the significance of her tomb entirely royal: a few years after this new interment, pious Catholics were spreading the news that holy benefits could be gained from a visit to the tomb as to a shrine; Demster in Bologna wrote in his history of the Scottish Church, published in 1627: ‘I hear that her bones, lately translated to
the burial place of the Kings of England at Westminster, are resplendent with miracles.’
¹⁶
As Mary’s literary supporters developed the theme of the martyr queen, the white tomb itself became a place of pilgrimage for the faithful.

Once more, however, the repose of the Queen of Scots was destined to be disturbed. In 1867 a search was instituted by Dean Stanley within the royal tombs of Westminster Abbey for the body of James
I
, whose position was unrecorded. It was eventually discovered in the tomb of Henry
VII
, the first Tudor and the first Stuart monarch of England lying appropriately together with Elizabeth of York, the woman who had made the foundation of both dynasties possible. But in the course of the search, among the places it was thought he might have appropriately chosen for his own sepulchre was the tomb of his mother. An entry was made below the monument to Mary, and at the foot of an ample flight of steps marked
WAY
was found a large vault of brick, twelve feet long, six feet high and seven feet wide. A startling and harrowing sight greeted the gaze of the Victorian searchers: the queen of Scots was far from lying alone in her tomb. A vast pile of lead coffins rose upwards from the floor, some of them obviously of children, some so small as to be of mere babies, all heaped together in confusion, amid urns of many different shapes, which were scattered all through the vault.

It was discovered that Mary shared her catacomb with numbers of her descendants, including her grandson Henry, prince of Wales, who died before his prime, her grand-daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen, and her great-grandson Prince Rupert of the Rhine, among the most romantic of all the offshoots of the Stuart dynasty. Most poignant of all were the endless tiny coffins of the royal children who had died in infancy: here were found the first ten children of James
II
, and one James Darnley, described as his natural son, as well as the eighteen pathetic babies born dead to Queen Anne, and her sole child to survive infancy, the young duke of Gloucester.

Finally the coffin of the queen of Scots herself was found, against the north wall of the vault, lying below that of Arbella Stuart, that ill-fated scion of the royal house who had been the child-companion of Mary’s captivity. The coffin itself was of remarkable size, and it was easy to see why it had been too heavy to carry in procession at Peterborough Cathedral at the first burial. But so securely had the royal body been wrapped in lead at the orders of the English government on the afternoon of the execution, that the casing had not given way in the slightest, even after nearly 300 years. The searchers felt profoundly moved even by this
inanimate spectacle. No attempt was made to open it now. ‘The presence of the fatal coffin which had received the headless corpse at Fotheringhay,’ wrote Dean Stanley, ‘was sufficiently affecting without endeavouring to penetrate further into its mournful contents.’
¹⁷
The vault was thus reverently tidied, the urns rearranged, and a list made of the contents. But the queen’s own coffin was left untouched, and the little children who surrounded her were not removed.

Meanwhile in the opposite chapel, underneath the monument to Queen Elizabeth
I
also raised by James, were found together in one grave the two daughters of Henry
VIII
, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth. Barren in life, they had been left to lie alone together in death. Mary, however, lies amid her Stuart posterity, her face locked in the marble of repose on the monument above, and her hands clasped in prayer, her body in the vault below which harbours so many of her descendants. She who never reigned in England, who was born a queen of Scotland, and who died at the orders of an English queen, lies now in Westminster Abbey where every sovereign of Britain since her death has been crowned; from her every sovereign of Britain since her death has been directly descended, down to the present queen, who is in the thirteenth generation. As Mary herself embroidered so long ago at Sheffield on the royal dais of state which was destined to hang over the head of a captive queen:
In my end is my Beginning.