The New World: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume II (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading Series)

ELIZABETH WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD WHEN, UNTRIED IN THE affairs of State, she succeeded her half-sister on November 17, 1558. It was England’s good fortune that the new Queen was endowed by inheritance and upbringing with a combination of very remarkable qualities. There could be no doubt who her father was. A commanding carriage, auburn hair, eloquence of speech, and natural dignity proclaimed her King Henry’s daughter. Other similarities were soon observed: high courage in moments of crisis, a fiery and imperious resolution when defied, and an almost inexhaustible fund of physical energy. She enjoyed many of the same pastimes and accomplishments as the King had done—a passion for the chase, skill in archery and hawking, and in dancing and music. She could speak six languages, and was well read in Latin and Greek. As with her father and grand-father, a restless vitality led her hither and thither from mansion to mansion, so that often none could tell where in a week’s time she might be sleeping.

A difficult childhood and a perilous adolescence had been Elizabeth’s portion. At one stage in her father’s lifetime she had been declared illegitimate and banished from Court. During Mary’s reign, when her life might have been forfeited by a false step, she had proved the value of caution and dissemblance. When to keep silence, how to bide her time and husband her resources, were the lessons she learnt from her youth. Many historians have accused her of vacillation and parsimony. Certainly these elements in her character were justly the despair of her advisers. The royal treasury however was never rich enough to finance all the adventurous projects urged upon her. Nor was it always unwise amid the turbulent currents of the age to put off making irrevocable decisions. The times demanded a politic, calculating, devious spirit at the head of the state, and this Elizabeth possessed. She had, too, a high gift for picking able men to do the country’s work. It came naturally to her to take the credit for their successes, while blaming them for all that went wrong.

In quickness of mind the Queen was surpassed by few of her contemporaries, and many envoys to her Court had good reason to acknowledge her liveliness of repartee. In temperament she was subject to fits of melancholy, which alternated with flamboyant merriment and convulsive rage. Always subtle of intellect, she was often brazen and even coarse in manners and expression. When angered she could box her Treasurer’s ears and throw her slipper in her Secretary’s face. She was outwardly very free in her more tender relations with the opposite sex, so that, in the words of an illustrious counsellor, “one day she was greater than man, and the next less than woman.” Nevertheless she had a capacity for inspiring devotion that is perhaps unparalleled among British sovereigns. There may be something grotesque to modern eyes in the flattery paid her by the Court, but with her people she never went wrong. By instinct she knew how to earn popular acclaim. In a sense her relationship with her subjects was one long flirtation. She gave to her country the love that she never entirely reposed in any one man, and her people responded with a loyalty that almost amounted to worship. It is not for nothing that she has come down to history as Good Queen Bess.

Few sovereigns ever succeeded to a more hazardous inheritance than she. England’s link with Spain had brought the loss of Calais and the hostility of France. Tudor policy in Scotland had broken down. The old military danger of the Middle Ages, a Franco-Scottish alliance, again threatened. In the eyes of Catholic Europe Mary, the Queen of Scots, and wife of the Dauphin of France, who became King Francis II in 1559, had a better claim to the English throne than Elizabeth, and with the power of France behind her she stood a good chance of gaining it. Mary of Guise, the Regent and Queen-Mother of Scotland, pursued a pro-French and pro-Catholic policy, and in Edinburgh and Paris the Guises held the keys of power. Even before the death of Henry VIII England’s finances had been growing desperate. English credit at Antwerp, the centre of the European money market, was so weak that the Government had to pay 14 per cent for its loans. The coinage, which had been debased yet further under Edward VI, was now chaotic. England’s only official ally, Spain suspected the new regime for religious reasons. This is how a former Clerk of the Council under Edward VI surveyed the scene when Elizabeth ascended the throne: “The Queen poor, the realm exhausted, the nobility poor and decayed. Want of good captains and soldiers. The people out of order. Justice not executed. All things dear. Excess in meat, drink, and apparel. Divisions among ourselves. Wars with France and Scotland. The French King bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland. Steadfast enmity but no steadfast friendship abroad.”

Elizabeth had been brought up a Protestant. She was a paragon of the New Learning. Around her had gathered some of the ablest Protestant minds: Matthew Parker, who was to be her Archbishop of Canterbury; Nicholas Bacon, whom she appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; Roger Ascham, the foremost scholar of the day; and, most important of all, William Cecil, the adaptable civil servant who had already held office as Secretary under Somerset and Northumberland. Of sixteenth-century English statesmen Cecil was undoubtedly the greatest. He possessed a consuming thirst for information about the affairs of the realm, and was to display immense industry in the business of office. Cautious good judgment marked all his actions. Elizabeth, with sure instinct, summoned him to her service. “This judgment I have of you,” she charged him, “that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gifts, that you will be faithful to the State, and that, without respect to any private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best.” It was a tremendous burden which the young Queen imposed upon her First Minister, then aged thirty-eight. Their close and daily collaboration was to last, in spite of shocks and jars, until Cecil’s death, forty years later.

Religious peace at home and safety from Scotland were the foremost needs of the realm. England became Protestant by law, Queen Mary’s Catholic legislation was repealed, and the sovereign was declared supreme Governor of the English Church. But this was not the end of Elizabeth’s difficulties. New ideas were in debate, not only on religious doctrine and Church government, but on the very nature and foundations of political power. Ever since the days of Wyclif in the 1380’s there had been, running in secret veins under the surface of society in England, a movement of resistance to the Church order. With the Reformation the notion that it might be a duty to disobey the established order on the grounds of private conviction became for the first time since the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Empire the belief of great numbers. But so closely were Church and State involved that disobedience to the one was a challenge to the other. The idea that a man should pick and choose for himself what doctrines he should adhere to was almost as alien to the mind of the age as the idea that he should select what laws he should obey and what magistrates he should respect. The most that could be allowed was that he should outwardly conform and think what he liked in silence. But in the great turmoil of Europe silence was impossible. Men talked: secretly to one another, openly in their writings, which were now printed in a thousand copies, kindling excitement and curiosity wherever they were carried. Even if it were granted that Affairs of State could only be lawfully debated by those called thereto, common men could still search the Scriptures, and try the doctrines of the Church, its government, its rites and ceremonies, by the words of the Evangelist and Apostles.

It is at this point that the party known as the Puritans, who were to play so great a role in the next hundred years, first enter English history. Democratic in theory and organisation, intolerant in practice of all who differed from their views, the Puritans challenged the Queen’s authority in Church and State, and although she sought for freedom of conscience and could maintain with sincerity that she “made no windows into men’s souls,” she dared not let them organise cells in the body religious or the body politic. A discordant and vigorous minority could rupture the delicate harmony that she was patiently weaving.

Protestantism must be saved from its friends. She saw in practical terms what her successor, James I, expounded in theory, “No Bishop, no King,” and she realised that unless the Government controlled the Church it would be too weak to survive the Counter-Reformation now gathering head in Catholic Europe. So Elizabeth had soon to confront not only the Catholic danger from abroad, but Puritan attack at home, led by fanatical exiles of Mary’s reign who now streamed back from Geneva and from the Rhineland towns.

Nevertheless the Reformation in Europe took on a new aspect when it came to England. All the novel questions agitating the world—the relation of the National Church to Rome on one side and to the national sovereign on the other; its future organisation; its articles of religion; the disposal of its property, and the property of its monasteries—could only be determined in Parliament, where the Puritans soon formed a growing and outspoken opposition. The gentry in Parliament were themselves divided. On two points alone perhaps were they heartily in accord: once they had got their share of abbey lands they did not mean to part with them, and anything was better than having the Wars of the Roses over again. Otherwise they fell into two great divisions, those who thought things had gone far enough, and those who wanted to go a step farther. It was the future distinction of Cavalier and Puritan, Churchman and Dissenter, Tory and Whig. But for a long time it was subdued by common horror of a disputed succession and a civil war, and by the rule that only the crown could initiate policy and public legislation.

The immediate threat lay north of the Border. French troops supported the French Queen-Mother in Scotland. A powerful Puritan party among the Scottish nobility, abetted by the persecuted preachers, were in arms against them, while John Knox raised his harsh voice against foreign rule and from exile in Geneva poured forth his denunciations of “the monstrous regiment of women.” He meant of course that rule by women seemed to him unnatural. Elizabeth watched these doings with interest and anxiety. If the French party got control of Scotland their next move would be against her throne. Want of money forbade a major military effort, but the Fleet was sent to blockade the Scottish ports and prevent reinforcements arriving from France. Arms and supplies were smuggled across the Border to the Protestant party. Knox was permitted to return to his native land by way of England, and his preachings had a powerful effect. A small English army intervened on the Scottish Protestant side, and at this moment Mary of Guise died. Elizabeth’s efforts had been modest, but they prevailed. By the Treaty of Leith in 1560 the Protestant cause in Scotland was assured for ever. France herself now plunged into religious strife, and was obliged at the same time to concentrate her forces against the Habsburg Empire. Elizabeth gained a respite and could look squarely to the future.

One thing seemed certain to all contemporaries. The security of the English State depended in the last resort on an assured succession. The delicate question of the Queen’s marriage began to throw its shadow across the political scene, and it is in her attitude to this challenge that the strength and subtleties of Elizabeth’s character are revealed. The country was well aware of the responsibility which lay upon her. If she married an Englishman her authority might be weakened, and there would be fighting among the suitors. The perils of such a course were borne in on her as she watched the reactions of her Court to her long and deep affection for the handsome, ambitious Robert Dudley, a younger son of Northumberland, whom she made Earl of Leicester. This was no way out. During the first months of her reign she had also to consider the claims of her brother-in-law, Philip II of Spain. A Spanish marriage had brought disaster to her sister, but marriage to Philip might buy a powerful friend; refusal might drive his religious animosity into the open. But by 1560 she had achieved a temporary security and could wait her time. Marriage into one of the reigning houses of Europe would mean entangling herself in its European policy and facing the hostility of her husband’s rivals. In vain the Houses of Parliament begged their Virgin Queen to marry and produce an heir. Elizabeth was angry. She would admit no discussion. Her policy was to spend her life in saving her people from such a commitment, and using her potential value as a match to divide a European Combination against her.

Meanwhile there was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Her young husband, King Francis II, had died shortly after his accession, and in December 1560 she returned to her own kingdom. Her mother’s uncles, the Guises, soon lost their influence at the French Court, and her mother-in-law, Catherine de Médicis, replaced them as Regent for King Charles IX. Thus in the last half of the sixteenth century women for a time controlled three countries—France, England, and Scotland. But of the three only the grip of Elizabeth held firm.

Mary Stuart was a very different personality from Elizabeth, though in some ways her position was similar. She was a descendant of Henry VII; she held a throne; she lived in an age when it was a novelty for a woman to be the head of a state; and she was now unmarried. Her presence in Scotland disturbed the delicate balance which Elizabeth had achieved by the Treaty of Leith. The Catholic English nobility, particularly in the North, were not indifferent to Mary’s claims. Some of them dreamed of winning her hand. But Elizabeth knew her rival. She knew that Mary was incapable of separating her emotions from her politics. The Queen of Scots lacked the vigilant self-control which Elizabeth had learnt in the bitter years of childhood. Mary’s marriage points the contrast between the two sovereigns. Elizabeth had seen and avoided the danger of choosing a husband from her Court. Mary had only been a few years in Scotland when she married her cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a weak, conceited youth who had both Tudor and Stuart blood in his veins. The result was disaster. The old feudal factions, now sharpened by religious conflict, seized Scotland in their grip. Mary’s power melted slowly and steadily away. Favourites brought from the cultured French Court to cheer her in this grim land were unpopular, and one of them, David Riccio, was killed before her eyes. Her husband became a tool of her opponents. In desperation she connived at his murder, and in 1567 married his murderer, a warlike Border lord, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whose unruly sword might yet save her throne and her happiness. But defeat and imprisonment followed, and in 1568 she escaped into England and threw herself upon the mercy of the waiting Elizabeth.

Mary in England proved even more dangerous than Mary in Scotland. She became the focus of plots and conspiracies against Elizabeth’s life. The survival of Protestant England was menaced by her existence. Secret emissaries of Spain crept into the country to nourish rebellion and claim the allegiance of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects. The whole force of the Counter-Reformation was unloosed against the one united Protestant country in Europe. If England were destroyed it seemed that Protestantism could be stamped out in every other land. Assassination was to be the first step. But Elizabeth was well served. Francis Walsingham, Cecil’s assistant and later his rival in the Government, tracked down Spanish agents and English traitors. This subtle intellectual and ardent Protestant, who had remained abroad throughout the reign of Mary Tudor, and whose knowledge of European politics surpassed that of anyone else in Elizabeth’s counsel, created the best secret service of any Government of the time. But there was always a chance that someone would slip through; there was always a danger so long as Mary lived that public discontent or private ambition would use her and her claims to destroy Elizabeth. In 1569 the threat became a reality.

In the North of England society was much more primitive than in the fertile South. Proud, independent, semi-feudal nobles now felt themselves threatened not only by Elizabeth’s authority but by a host of new gentry like the Cecils and the Bacons, enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries and hungry for political power. Moreover, there was a deep religious division between North and South. The South was largely Protestant; the North remained dominantly Catholic. In the bleak, barren dales the monasteries had been the centre of communal life and charity. Their destruction had provoked the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII, and still incited a stubborn and passive resistance to the religious changes of Elizabeth. The idea was now advanced that Mary should marry the Duke of Norfolk, senior of the pre-Tudor nobility, and his somewhat feeble head was turned at the prospect of gambling for a throne. He repented in time. But in 1569 the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland led a rising in the North. Mary was confined at Tutbury in the care of Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s soldier cousin on the Boleyn side, a trustworthy servant throughout her reign, and one of her few relations. Before the rebels could seize many she was conveyed hurriedly southwards. Elizabeth was slow to realise the danger. “The Earls,” she said, “were old in blood but poor in force.” The rebels planned to hold the North of England and wait to be attacked. They were far from sure of each other. In the South the Catholic lords made no move. There seems to have been no common plan of action, and the rebel force scattered into small parties in the northern hills. Ignominiously they dribbled across the Border to safety, and the first act of the widespread Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth was over. After twelve years of very patient rule she was unchallenged Queen of all England.

Rome was prompt to retaliate. In February 1570 Pope Pius V, a former Inquisitor-General, issued a Bull of excommunication against Elizabeth. From this moment Spain, as head of Catholic Europe, was supplied with a spiritual weapon should the need for attack arise. Elizabeth’s position was weakened. Parliament became increasingly agitated at the spinsterhood of their Queen, and their constant petitioning irritated her into action. She entered into negotiations with Catherine de Médicis, and a political alliance was concluded at Blois in April 1572. Both women distrusted the Spanish power, since Catherine realised that Catholic France had as much to fear from Spain as Protestant England. For a short time events ran with Elizabeth. Spain’s weakness centred in the Netherlands, where a robust population with immense taxable resources had long fretted under Philip’s rule. The whole territory was on the edge of rebellion, and the treaty was hardly signed when the famous Dutch resisters of tyranny, who were known as the “Sea Beggars,” seized the town of Brill, and the Low Countries blazed into revolt. Elizabeth now had a potential new ally on the Continent. She even thought of marrying one of Queen Catherine’s younger sons, on condition that France did not take advantage of the turmoil to expand into the Netherlands. But a terrible event in Paris dashed such prospects. By a sudden massacre of the Huguenots on the eve of the feast of St. Bartholomew, August 23, 1572, the Guises, pro-Spanish and ultra-Catholic, recaptured the political power they had lost ten years earlier. Feeling ran high in London. The English Ambassador, Francis Walsingham, was recalled. When the French Ambassador came to explain away the event Elizabeth and her Court, clothed all in black, received him in silence. Having thus done her duty as a Protestant Queen, Elizabeth stood godmother to the French King’s baby and continued her matrimonial negotiations with his brother.

Her alliance with the French Court however had clearly failed and Elizabeth was now driven to giving secret subsidies and support to the French Huguenots and the Dutch. Success depended on the most accurate timing, as her funds were very limited and she could seldom afford to help except when the rebels were on the edge of disaster. Walsingham, now Secretary of State, and second only to Cecil in the Queen’s Council, was far from content. Exile in Mary’s reign and service as Ambassador in Paris had convinced him that Protestantism would only survive in Europe if England gave it unlimited encouragement and aid. In the long run there could be no compromise with the Catholics. Sooner or later war would come, and he urged that everything should be done to preserve and secure potential allies before the final clash.

Opposed to all this was Cecil, now Lord Burghley. Friendship with Spain, symbolised in the marriage of Catherine of Aragon and nourished by commercial interests, had been a Tudor tradition since the days of Henry VII, and good relations with the Power that still controlled a large part of the Netherlands could alone preserve the great market for English wool and cloth. Queen Mary’s marriage with Philip had been widely unpopular in England; but in Burghley’s view this was no time to go to the opposite extreme and intervene in the Netherlands on the side of Philip’s rebels. Such a step would inflame the Puritan extremists and inject a dangerous fanaticism into foreign policy. When Burghley became Lord Treasurer in 1572 his attitude hardened. Aware of the slender resources of the State, deeply concerned for the loss of trade with Spain and the Netherlands, he maintained that Walsingham’s policy would founder in bankruptcy and disaster.

Elizabeth was inclined to agree. She did not much like assisting other people’s rebels—“you and your brethren in Christ,” she once said mockingly to Walsingham. She was unsympathetic to irreconcilable Puritanism. But Walsingham’s case had been violently strengthened by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and she was compelled to move into a cold war in the Netherlands, and an undeclared war at sea, until she was confronted with the massive onslaught of an Armada.

These happenings had their effect on politics in England. Most of the Puritans had at first been willing to conform to Elizabeth’s Church settlement in the hope of transforming it from within, but they now strove to drive the Government into an aggressive Protestant foreign policy, and at the same time secure their own freedom of religious organisation. Their position in the country was strong. They had allies at Court and Council, like Walsingham, with whom the Queen’s favourite, Leicester, was now closely associated. In the towns and counties of South-Eastern England they were vociferous. In defiance of the Church Settlement they began to form their own religious communities, with their own ministers and forms of worship. Their aim and object was nothing less than the establishment of a theocratic despotism. Like the Catholics they held that Church and State were separate and independent. Unlike them, they believed the seat of Church authority lay in the council of elders, the Presbytery, freely chosen by the flock, but, once chosen, ruling with unlimited scope and supplanting the secular power over a large area of human life.

To such men the Elizabethan Settlement, the Anglican Church, with its historic liturgy and ceremonial, its comprehensive articles and its episcopal government, were abhorrent because unscriptural, as Calvin interpreted Scripture. It had indeed some of the weaknesses of a compromise. Moreover, outside London, the universities, and a few great towns, the average parson in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign was not an impressive figure. Sometimes he had kept his benefice by conforming under Edward VI, changing his creed under Mary, and finally accepting what a rural bench once described as “the religion set forth by Her Majesty” as the only way of earning a living. With barely enough Latin to read the old service books, and scarcely literate enough to deliver a decent sermon, he was no match for the controversialists and disputants charged with enthusiasm and new ideas, eloquent preachers, scurrilous pamphleteers, who were stealing his flock from him, and implanting in them novel and alarming notions about the rights of congregations to organise themselves, to worship in their own way, and to settle their own Church order. And why not, some day, their own political order? If not in England, perhaps in another land? A crack was opening in the surface of English society, a crack which would widen into a gulf. The Lutheran Church fitted well enough with monarchy, even with absolutism, but Calvinism, as it spread out over Europe, was a dissolving agency, a violent interruption of historic continuity, and with the return and resurgence of the exiles who had fled from Mary Tudor an explosive element was lodged in the English Church and State which ultimately was to shatter both. Elizabeth knew that the Puritans were perhaps her most loyal subjects, but she feared that their violent impulse might not only provoke the European conflict she dreaded, but imperil the very unity of the realm. Neither she nor her Government dared yield a fraction of their authority. This was no time for religious war or upheaval at home.

Elizabeth’s Council therefore struck back. The censorship of the Press was entrusted to a body of ecclesiastical commissioners, known as the Court of High Commission, which had been constituted in 1559 to deal with offences against the Church Settlement. This combining of the functions of bishop and censor infuriated the Puritan party. They set up a secret, itinerant Press which poured forth over the years a stream of virulent and anonymous pamphlets, culminating in 1588 with those issued under the name of “Martin Marprelate,” attacking the persons and office of “the wainscot-faced bishops.” Their sturdy and youthful invective shows a robust and relishing consciousness of the possibilities of English prose. The pamphlets are loaded with coarse, effective adjectives, and the sentences lumber along like the hay-cart in which the press itself was at one time concealed. For months the agents of High Commission hunted the originators of this secret propaganda. In the end an accident precipitated the press out of the hay-cart in a village street and led to the arrest of the printers. The authors were never traced.

The Catholic onslaught also gathered force. Throughout the 1570’s numbers of Catholic priests were arriving in England from the English seminaries at Douai and St. Omer, charged with the task of nourishing Catholic sentiment and maintaining connection between the English Catholics and Rome. Their presence at first aroused little apprehension in Government circles. Elizabeth was slow to believe that any of her Catholic subjects were traitors, and the failure of the 1569 rising had strengthened her confidence in their loyalty. But about the year 1579 missionaries of a new and formidable type began to slip into the country. These were the Jesuits, the heralds and missionaries of the Counter-Reformation. Their lives were dedicated to re-establishing the Catholic faith throughout Christendom. They were fanatics, indifferent to personal danger, and carefully chosen for their work. By their enemies they were accused of using assassination to achieve their aims. Foremost among them were Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons. Their movements were carefully watched by Walsingham’s spies, and a number of plots against Elizabeth’s life were uncovered. The Government was forced to take more drastic measures. Queen Mary had burnt some three hundred Protestant martyrs in the last three years of her reign. In the last thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign about the same number of Catholics were executed for treason.

The conspiracies naturally focused upon the person of Mary Queen of Scots, long captive. She was the heir to the English throne in the event of Elizabeth’s removal from the world. Elizabeth herself was reluctant to recognise the danger to her life, yet the plots sharpened the question of who should succeed to the English throne. The death of Mary would make her son James the heir to the crown of England, and James was in safe Calvinist hands in Scotland. To avoid having another Catholic Queen it was only necessary to dispose of Mary before the Jesuits, or their allies, disposed of Elizabeth. Walsingham and his party in the Council now concentrated their efforts on persuading the Queen that Mary must die. Plying her with evidence of Mary’s complicity in the numerous conspiracies, they pressed hard on Elizabeth’s conscience; but she shrank from the calculated shedding of royal blood.

There were signs that the Jesuit missions were not entirely without result. But Elizabeth would not be hurried. She would wait upon events. They were soon decisive. In the midsummer of 1584 William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Protestant revolt against Spain, was fatally wounded by a Spanish agent in his house at Delft. Walsingham’s arguments against Mary were overwhelmingly strengthened by this assassination, and English opinion reacted vehemently. At the same time Spanish feeling against England, already embittered by the raids conducted with Elizabeth’s connivance of the English privateers, blazed into startling hostility. The Netherlands, once Spanish order had been restored, were to be a base for a final attack upon the Island, and Elizabeth was compelled to send Leicester with an English army to Holland to prevent the complete destruction of the Dutch.

A voluntary association of Protestant gentry was formed in 1585 for the defence of Elizabeth’s life. In the following year evidence of a conspiracy, engineered by one Anthony Babington, an English Catholic, was laid before the Council by Walsingham. One of his agents had mingled with the conspirators for over a year. Mary’s connivance was undeniable. Elizabeth was at last persuaded that her death was a political necessity. After a formal trial Mary was pronounced guilty of treason. Parliament petitioned for her execution, and Elizabeth at last signed the death warrant. Within twenty-four hours she regretted it and tried, too late, to stop the execution. She had a natural horror of being responsible for the judicial murder of a fellow sovereign, although she knew it was essential for the safety of her country. She was anxious that the supreme and final decision should not rest upon her. The scene of Mary’s death has caught the imagination of history. In the early morning of February 8, 1587, she was summoned to the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. Accompanied by six of her attendants, she awaited the servants of the English Queen. From the neighbouring countryside the gentry gathered to witness the sentence. Mary appeared at the appointed hour soberly clad in black satin. In the quietness of the hall she walked with stately movements to the cloth-covered scaffold erected by the fireplace. The solemn formalities were smoothly completed. But the zealous Dean of Peterborough attempted to force upon the Queen a last-minute conversion. With splendid dignity she brushed aside his loud exhortations. “Mr Dean,” she said, “I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me but little.”

Mary had arrayed herself superbly for the final scene. As she disrobed for the headsman’s act, her garments of black satin, removed by the weeping handmaids, revealed a bodice and petticoat of crimson velvet. One of her ladies handed her a pair of crimson sleeves, which she put on. Thus the unhappy Queen halted, for one last moment, standing blood-red from head to foot against the black background of the scaffold. There was a deathly hush throughout the hall. She knelt, and at the second stroke the final blow was delivered. The awed assembly had fulfilled its task. In death the majestic illusion was shattered. The head of an ageing woman with false hair was held up by the executioner. A lapdog crept out from beneath the clothes of the bleeding trunk.