MARY WAS IN SURPRISINGLY good spirits in the few remaining weeks and months after her trial. Her apartments at Fotheringhay Castle were comparatively spacious and comfortable, and her money had been returned to her, which allowed her to purchase some additional luxuries. Perhaps this, combined with Elizabeth’s ‘answer answerless’ to Parliament and the obvious delay in issuing the proclamation against her, raised her hopes and encouraged her to think that no one would in the end dare to put the verdict of the trial commissioners into effect?
An open sore on one of her shoulders and a stiff right arm added to the pain she suffered from her other ailments, but she was otherwise cheerful. Paulet found her ‘taking pleasure in trifling toys, and in the whole course of her speech free from grief of mind in outward appearance’. She kept going over the events of the trial: who had said what in the court room, and what she had overheard whispered by those commissioners sitting nearest to her.
Then, on Saturday, 4 February 1587, Robert Beale reached the vicinity of Fotheringhay. His first task was to locate and brief the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, which took up most of the next three days as they were on the move visiting their estates. When this was done, and all three had arrived at Fotheringhay Castle, they approached Mary’s privy chamber, where they were to inform her that she would be executed shortly after eight o’clock the following morning.
Paulet and his assistant, Sir Drue Drury, led the Earls upstairs. When they were admitted, the man who so obviously relished his role as Mary’s gaoler barged in and pulled down her cloth of state for the very last time. According to Beale’s account, the warrant for her execution was read out, while she listened in silence.
She sat still for several minutes, then suddenly frowned as she remembered how the deposed King Richard II had been quietly murdered at Pontefract Castle. She asked if this would be done to her, to which Drury, an honourable man who was gentler and kinder than Paulet, answered, ‘Madam, you need not fear it, for that you are in the charge of a Christian Queen.’ How little did Mary guess that Elizabeth’s firm intention, as Drury knew very well, had been that she should be surreptitiously done to death by ‘one Wingfield’, a hired assassin, and that she owed the relative privilege of a public execution almost entirely to the standpoint of Cecil and Walsingham.
Mary calmly addressed the Earls. ‘I thank you for such welcome news. You will do me a great good in withdrawing me from this world, out of which I am very glad to go.’ She spoke at some length, recalling her ancestry and dynastic claim, and giving her own account of her attempts to reach a political accord with Elizabeth over the years and her willingness to compromise. All her overtures, she said, had been rejected. There was nothing more that she felt she could have done. ‘I am of no good and of no use to anyone’, she concluded. For all these years, perhaps ever since the death of her first husband, she had always been in someone else’s way.
But she had discovered a new role. She would die as a martyr for her Catholic faith. She crossed herself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. ‘I am quite ready and very happy to die, and to shed my blood for Almighty God, my Saviour and my Creator, and for the Catholic Church, and to maintain its rights in this country.’
Mary asked that her own chaplain should be allowed to comfort her, but her request was cruelly denied. She then enquired about her place of burial. Would she be allowed to lie next to her first husband at the royal mausoleum at St-Denis or beside her beloved mother at the Convent of St-Pierre des Dames at Rheims?
Shrewsbury answered that while nothing had been decided, she could hardly expect Elizabeth to allow her to be buried in France. ‘At least then’, said Mary, ‘my requests in favour of my servants will be granted?’ She had been famous since her clashes as a teenager for her generosity to her servants, and she now expressed her earnest wish to reward those of her gentlewomen and domestic staff who had loyally stood by her for so long. As the Earls had received no instructions on this point, they offered no objection.
When they had taken their leave and Mary was alone with her gentlewomen, she kept up her defiance. ‘Weeping’, she told them, ‘is useless.’ She ate little at supper, but knelt to pray for an hour or so. Then, she gathered her strength and set to work. First, she made her will. She said that she died in the true Catholic faith and left instructions for requiem masses to be said for her soul in France, which all her servants might attend. She directed that all her debts should be paid, and whatever money was left over used to reward her servants. She named as her principal executor her cousin, Henry Duke of Guise.
Next, Mary consulted the inventory of her wardrobes and cabinets and distributed their contents among her gentlewomen and servants. Bourgoing, whose narrative is the most reliable account of Mary’s final hours, received two rings, two small silver boxes, two lutes that Mary herself had sometimes played, her music book bound in velvet, and her red valances and bed curtains.
When Mary had shared out her possessions, she went to her writing desk. She had already said goodbye to the Duke of Guise, whom she regarded as the head of her family. ‘I bid you adieu’, she had written a little over two months before and a month after the guilty verdict, ‘being on the point of being put to death by an unjust judgement, such a one as never any belonging to our house yet suffered, thanks be to God, much less one of my rank.’ She hoped that her death would bear witness to her Catholic faith and willingness to suffer ‘for the support and restoration of the Catholic Church in this unfortunate island’. She sent her love to all her relatives. The bitterness she still felt towards her son, James VI, for his rejection of her was barely concealed. ‘May the blessing of God, and that which I should give to my own children, be upon yours, whom I commend to God not less sincerely than my own unfortunate and deluded son.’
It was time for Mary to finish her goodbyes. She had always loved to send and receive letters, and allowing for documents that are lost or have perished she must have written perhaps two or three thousand over the course of her forty-four years. Now she sat down to write her very last one. It was naturally to be sent to France, the country she had always regarded as home, even while she was a reigning Queen in Scotland. The chosen recipient was to be her brother-in-law, Henry III, whom she had known since he had been a baby in the royal nursery at St-Germain and Fontainebleau.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning when she began. There were only six hours left before her execution, but despite her usual tendency to scribble, the letter is beautifully scripted in her best handwriting. Some slight blotches on the first page may mark the places where her tears fell onto the paper as she wrote. ‘Today, after dinner,’ she began, ‘I was advised of my sentence.’
I am to be executed like a criminal at eight o’clock in the morning. I haven’t had enough time to give you a full account of all that has happened, but if you will listen to my physician and my other sorrowful servants, you will know the truth, and how, thanks be to God, I scorn death and faithfully protest that I face it innocent of any crime …
The Catholic faith and the defence of my God-given right to the English throne are the two reasons for which I am condemned, and yet they will not allow me to say that it is for the Catholic faith that I die …
I beg you as Most Christian Majesty, my brother-in-law and old friend, who have always protested your love for me, to give proof now of your kindness on all these points: both by paying charitably my unfortunate servants their arrears of wages (this is a burden on my conscience that you alone can relieve), and also by having prayers offered to God for a Queen who has herself been called Most Christian, and who dies a Catholic, stripped of all her possessions …
Concerning my son, I commend him to you inasmuch as he deserves it, as I cannot answer for him …
I venture to send you two precious stones, amulets against illness, trusting that you will enjoy good health and a long and happy life.
Mary at last lay down on her bed and tried to sleep. She could barely doze, but managed to keep still until six o’clock, when the candelabra were lit and she briskly rose and began to prepare herself. Her gentlewomen had been busy throughout the night, making ready her clothes, make-up, and wig.
She dressed and stayed seated on a stool until her gentlewomen had finished their work. She then gave orders that all her household should assemble in her presence chamber. Bourgoing read her will aloud, after which she signed it and gave it to him to deliver to the Duke of Guise. She bade everyone farewell, then knelt to pray with her servants.
She had barely begun to mouth the words when a loud knocking was heard at the outer door. It was Thomas Andrews, Sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, with the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent beside him.
Mary’s last hour had come. The Earls had arrived to escort her down the stairs to the great hall on the ground floor. She was about to take her final walk, the one for which she will always be remembered.
She picked up her ivory crucifix in one hand and her illuminated Latin prayer book in the other. She almost forgot the prayer book, but Bourgoing reminded her. She kissed the crucifix, then approached the door.
This was the moment. She had been the star of so many glittering spectacles during her life, beginning with her wedding to the Dauphin at Notre-Dame when she was not yet sixteen, and she knew that she could keep her nerve. Her most compelling act of theatre awaited her. She stepped forward and crossed the threshold. The rest, whatever view is taken of the extent to which she truly ranks as a martyr for the Catholic faith and for the ideal of monarchy, for ever settles her place in the pantheon of history as a fully realized tragic heroine.