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Body of a Queen
From: Columbia University
| By:
Simon Schama |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
For 20 years, Elizabeth I of England refused to authorize the execution of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, despite accusations of her treachery and deceit. But as the religious wars in Europe intensified in the mid-1580s and concrete proof of treason surfaced, Elizabeth acquiesced to the pleas of her counselors. She signed the death warrant of Mary Stuart and set the stage for an execution wrought with drama and historical significance.In this excerpt from his book A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World?, Simon Schama, University Professor at Columbia University, recounts the events that led up to the beheading of the Catholic Queen and the details that made her death one of the most remarkable events in Britain's past. |
 he execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was as fraught with drama as her life.
It was the last act of a historical drama that for sexual havoc and hapless pathos has never been bested. Murder, arson, rape, and abduction are the least of it: Queen of Scotland from December 13, 1542, when she was six days old, Mary Stuart was immediately pitched into the shark-infested waters of Renaissance politics; all three of her marriages were disastrous; she saw herself in reputation go from heroine to harlot in under a year; for 20 years, she was the prisoner of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth of England. Often, there would be talk of eliminating her, but Elizabeth would have none of it. |
Then, in the mid-1580s, everything changed. The cold war between Catholic and Protestant Europe had turned hot. Prince William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule and the great hero of the Protestant world, was assassinated in Delft in 1584. English troops were sent to the Netherlands to forestall the nightmare of a victorious Spanish army across the Channel. But an "Enterprise of England" had already been planned by Philip II--the Armada--designed to carry out the papal plan of eliminating Elizabeth and restoring England to the Roman church. Under surveillance or not, Mary of Scotland was a dagger pointing at Elizabeth's heart. |
Catching a traitor
Preemptive action was required. Mary was given a much harsher jailer, Amyas Paulet, an ardent Puritan who made no secret of his detestation for her. She was taken to a house where the conditions of her confinement could be minutely monitored. By making a French agent of hers an offer he couldn't refuse, Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's secretary of state and, incidentally, head of her secret service, infiltrated Mary's network of correspondents, even supplying a "safe" route for her letters concealed in a waterproof pouch inserted into a beer cask. So when Mary thought her responses to a genuine plotter, Anthony Babington, were going to his house in London, they were in fact going straight to the overjoyed Walsingham. The letters were better than anything Walsingham could have forged. Babington's plan was to kill Elizabeth, start a Catholic uprising, and support it with a Spanish invasion from the Netherlands. Mary's replies made it crystal clear that she approved of all of this. Her only anxieties were, of course, for her own safety. |
On August 11, 1586, Amyas Paulet suggested Mary take the air on horseback. On the brow of a hill, Mary saw a small group of riders coming toward her. Babington! Vindication day! But instead of being liberated, she was arrested for plotting the death of Queen Elizabeth. Now that she was playing the endgame, Mary began to assume the identity of victimized martyr. To Paulet's hectoring demand that she confess her sins and her treason she replied: "As a sinner I am truly conscious of having offended my Creator and I beg him to forgive me, but as Queen and Sovereign I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below." At her trial she was deprived of counsel and access to evidence, but defended herself eloquently, denying the jurisdiction of English courts and complaining she had been illegally detained. She claimed no knowledge of Babington until she was shown her own incriminating letters, and then she claimed forgery. |
The Queen's dilemma
When the proceedings resumed (without Mary) in London some weeks later, the verdict was never in doubt; the punishment was less certain. Furious at Mary's collusion in the Babington plot, Elizabeth wrote her in a tone usually reserved for weekend guests who have made off with the towels. "You have planned in divers ways and manners to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood. I never proceeded so harshly against you. On the contrary I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself." But even though her counselors pleaded with Elizabeth to authorize Mary's execution, she somehow could not bring herself to sign the death warrant of her cousin. The rational, strategic side of her may have worried that by killing off Mary she would trigger the Spanish invasion. Perhaps the irrational side of her recoiled from spilling the blood of a prince. Elizabeth had witnessed so many executions in her lifetime: her mother Anne Boleyn when she was a small child; her uncle Thomas Seymour, who had cuddled her in bed and who ended on the scaffold. She herself had come that close to the scaffold in the reign of her fanatically Catholic half-sister, Mary I of England (Bloody Mary). |
But as soon as she asked herself that question, back must have come an unequivocal answer, one that may in the end have nudged her hand toward the death warrant in the first week of February 1587. For Elizabeth had always known that a queen had two bodies: the personal and the political, and that to be a head of state was to subject the former to the latter. Unwaveringly, over 30 years, Elizabeth had done just that. By saving herself for England alone, she had become its personification in a way no monarch had ever done (or has ever done since). By loving the English, she had made England beloved. And under this discipline, she must put aside her personal feelings and deal with Mary for England's good. |
Patriotism was something that Mary had never inspired. But if she was always the much more conventional of the two monarchs, exercising her royal self-will in her own personal causes, in one respect Mary's conventions served her and Scotland better than Elizabeth's defiance served herself and England. The English queen was the case for the English monarchy, but she had made a biological decision that made that monarchy literally beyond reproduction. Mary, on the other hand, had produced an heir, not just to her throne but to the English throne as well. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that one day a ring would be taken from the finger of dead Elizabeth and placed on the finger of her own son, James. |
A final performance
Any Roberts or Binoche brave enough to step into Mary's farthingale had better realize that she will be competing with one of the best performers of all time. "Remember that the theater of the world is wider than the realm of England," Mary haughtily told her English judges, and when she walked into the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle on February 8, 1587, for her date with the executioner, Mary demonstrated yet again her born instinct for the stage. To spectators, she must have looked both widow and bride, a lace-trimmed white veil cascading down the back of a raven-black dress, the demureness of the outfit precisely calculated to confound English caricatures of her as a wanton doll of fashion. |
Mary knew that, for all the pains Elizabeth had taken to hide her death from the public gaze, every detail of her last hours would be smuggled out from Fotheringhay. Her execution would be turned into priceless copy for the Catholic world by hagiographers. Indignantly and noisily, she brushed aside the attempts of the Protestant Dean of Peterborough to harangue her. "Mr. Dean," she said, "I am settled in the ancient Catholic Roman religion and mind to spend my blood in defense of it." Voices on the scaffold rose in unseemly competition--the Protestant lords in charge of the proceedings attempting (in vain) to stop Mary from invoking the Virgin and kissing the crucifix. |
And this was just the warm-up. When the moment came for the decapitation, Mary's black overmantle was slipped off to reveal a petticoat of blood-crimson silk, the hue of Catholic martyrdom. Now there's nothing that puts an executioner off his work more thoroughly than a subject who imagines that she, not he, is in charge. And before this big, hushed audience, the axman got a bad case of sticky palms. He took a good swing but connected only with the back of her head. "Sweet Jesus," Mary was heard to utter. A second swing produced a more decisive result, but there was still a tendon connecting head to body. To finish the job, the executioner was forced to use his weapon like a saw. |
Following the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay castle, her lips were seen to move, as if in silent prayer. And when the time came for the executioner to perform the ritual of holding up the head of an executed conspirator and proclaim, "God Save the Queen," he made the mistake of holding it by the auburn curls. They came away in his hand, a skilled piece of wigmaking. The head, crowned only with a mat of cropped gray stubble, rolled across the floor of the hall like a bowling ball. The next task was to remove the clothes from the headless body prior to embalming. But as the blood-soaked petticoat was being pulled from Mary's trunk, something moved within the folds. The something was the Queen's lapdog, a Skye terrier, who emerged from his comforting hiding place, gripping the fabric with his teeth. When the dog was finally wrenched free, he was scrubbed mercilessly in an attempt to get the blood out of his coat. It was no good. The clots clung to his hair just as stubbornly as he had clung to his mistress's gown. The dog was Mary's first mourner, but he certainly wouldn't be her last. |
The two queens side by side
When James duly became King of both England and Scotland in 1603, called for the first time Great Britain, he made an extraordinary decision about where his mother should finally repose after her lifetime of wandering. He took her embalmed body from Peterborough Cathedral, where it had rested since her execution, and had it transferred to Westminster Abbey. And there, today, the tourists look at Mary, in her brilliantly colored costume, upstaging the plain stone effigy of Elizabeth, the two of them side by side in the only place where they ever spent time in each other's company. |
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