Elizabeth's Spymaster (28 page)

If in a tender care of her surety, they should have been what she desire, she must either allow their act or disallow it.

If she allowed it, she took the matter upon herself, with her infinite peril and dishonour.

If she disallowed it, she should not only overthrow the gentlemen themselves, but also their estates and posterities.
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But in truth, Elizabeth knew her law. And the law of England was very clear, whether for the highest or lowest in the realm. Mary Queen of Scots could not legally be killed unless her death was sanctioned by a death warrant issued under the Great Seal of England. Without that, Paulet and Drury would be common murderers, their lives, estates and possessions immediately forfeit to the crown. Even Elizabeth, in this, her darkest moment of rage and frustration, could see the injustice of that.

Walsingham pressed grimly on with the arrangements for Mary’s judicial murder. One of his servants, Anthony Hall, interviewed the notorious Bull, the expert public executioner employed at the Tower of London, at his dwelling outside Bishopsgate in the City of London. He agreed a price of £10 (or £1,560 in today’s prices) for beheading Mary. The Secretary then sought to lodge Bull with his brother-in-law Sir Walter Mildmay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at his home at Apthorpe just three miles north-west of Fotheringay, and therefore convenient for the execution. But Sir Walter ‘misliked’ the idea of putting up such a socially unacceptable guest and the headsman and his assistant were eventually accommodated ‘in an inn at Fotheringay’, their presence ‘kept secret until the day’.
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Walsingham also warned Paulet of Bull’s arrival:

I send down the executioner [escorted] by [a] trusty servant of mine [George Digby] who will be at Fotheringay sometime upon Sunday night.

His instrument [the axe] is put into a trunk and he passes as a serving man.

There is great care taken to have the matter pass in secrecy.

Sometime after dinner on Tuesday 7 February, Beale, having collected and briefed Henry Grey and George Talbot, the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury, arrived with them at the castle of Fotheringay. Escorted by Paulet and Drury, they went upstairs to Mary’s apartments to tell her of her impending execution. The death warrant was read out. She was remarkably calm – but then a frown crossed her brow. Remembering her English history, she enquired politely whether she would be murdered as Richard II had been in Pontefract Castle in 1400.
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Sir Dru Drury, who had only days earlier received that outrageous letter containing Elizabeth’s dark suggestions as to Mary’s fate, told her: ‘Madam, you need not fear it, for that you are in charge of a Christian Queen.’ A heavy sense of irony must have almost overwhelmed him as he uttered these reassuring words.

The Scottish queen then turned to the two earls:

I do not think the queen, my sister, would have consented to my death, [as I] am not subject to your law and jurisdiction.

But, seeing her pleasure so, death shall be to me most welcome, neither is that soul worthy of the high and everlasting joys above, whose body cannot endure one stroke of the executioner.

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 …

I am of no good and of no use to anyone.
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Mary devoutly crossed and blessed herself and added: ‘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.’ She asked if she could talk to her almoner, confessor and Andrew Melville, her steward. The almoner, Camille de Préau, was denied her, and the staunchly Protestant Kent told her: Tour life will be the death of our religion, as contrariwise, your death will be the life thereof.’
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She ate a small supper, drank to her servants’ health and prayed privately for more than an hour. Then she wrote out her will in French, naming her cousin Henry, Duke of Guise, James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, and John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, amongst her executors, and asking that her body should be buried in France.
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At around two o’clock in the morning she wrote her last letter – to her brother-in-law Henry III, king of France – in her best italic hand, three pages in the fashionable, neat Italian style:

Royal brother, having by God’s will, for my sins, I think, thrown myself into the power of the queen my cousin, at whose hands I have suffered much for almost twenty years, I have finally been condemned to death by her and her estates …

Tonight, after dinner, I have been advised of my sentence. I am to be executed as a criminal at eight o’clock in the morning.

I have not had enough time to give you a full account of everything that has happened but if you will listen to my physician
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and my other unfortunate servants, you will learn the truth and how, thanks be to God, I scorn death and vow that I face it innocent of any crime, even if I were their subject.

The Catholic faith and the defence of the rights, which God has given me to this [English] crown are the two reasons why I am condemned.

Yet, I fear they will not permit me to say that I die for my religion, for fear of interference with theirs. As a proof of it, they have taken from me my chaplain, who though he is in the house, I cannot obtain leave for him to come and confess me and give me the Communion at my death but they are very pressing that I should receive comfort and instruction from their minister, brought here for that purpose.

I beg you as a Most Christian Majesty, my brother-in-law and my oldest ally, who has always protested your love for me … to reward my unfortunate servants by leaving them their wages and … [to] offer prayers to God for a queen who has borne the name of
Most Christian and dies a Catholic, stripped of all her possessions.

I have taken the liberty of sending you two precious stones of rare virtue, talismans against illness, trusting that you may enjoy good health, and a long and happy life …

For the sake of Jesus Christ, to whom I shall pray for you tomorrow as I die, I be left enough to found a memorial Mass and give the customary alms.
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She signed it: Tour most loving and most true sister, Mary R.’

Mary managed to get a few hours’ sleep but was awakened by her ladies at six o’ clock. She dressed carefully in a black satin dress over a bodice of crimson velvet, her sombre appearance only relieved by a flowing long white linen veil fastened to her head beneath a cap of white cambric. Her household was summoned to her presence, her will read out and committed to her physician Dominique Bourgoing for safekeeping. Prayers were said, amid the weeping of her women.

Shortly after eight, the two earls and Andrews, the sheriff, knocked loudly on the outer door of her privy chamber. The time had come for her to die.

There were more tears, more prayers, many more farewells. Then Mary’s procession to the scaffold formed up and left her apartments.

In the ground-floor ante-room to the great hall of Fotheringay Castle, her steward Andrew Melville awaited her on his knees, his face also puckered by tears. Supported by two soldiers, Mary paused and told him:

Lament not but rather rejoice. By and by, you shall see Mary Stuart freed from all her cares. Good servant, all the world is but vanity and subject still to more sorrow than a whole ocean of tears can bewail.

Tell them that I die a true woman to my religion and like a true woman of Scotland and France.

But God forgive them that have long desired my end and thirsted for my blood as the hart the water brooks.
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Turning to the two earls, she asked for ‘womanhood’s sake’ that her ‘poor
distressed servants’ could attend the execution, ‘that their eyes might behold and their hearts might be witnesses how patiently their queen and majesty should endure’ death.

Kent immediately turned down her request, fearing trouble from her household or that her servants might ‘put some superstitious trumpery [into] practice … In dipping their handkerchiefs in your grace’s blood whereof it were very unmeet for us to give allowance’.

Mary burst into hopeless tears once again and for a terrible moment her escorts feared they would have to drag her, screaming, to her place of execution next door in the great hall. After a hurried whispered consultation, the earls agreed that she could choose ‘half a dozen of her best loved men and women’ to accompany her. Mary, drying her eyes, chose Melville, her surgeon Jacques Gervais, the apothecary Pierre Gorion ‘and one other old man’,
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° together with her two favourite gentlewomen, Elizabeth Curie and Jane Kennedy.
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‘Allons
done. Now let us go,’ said the Scottish queen, her composure swiftly recovered after her bout of histrionics.

The scene that confronted her was dominated by the scaffold – a black-draped, five-foot-high wooden stage, twelve feet wide, built alongside a large fireplace in which a huge log fire blazed against the raw, damp chill of the morning.
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A high wooden chair had been placed in one corner of its straw-strewn floor, but all eyes were quickly drawn to the squat block positioned at the opposite corner of the platform. The axe, the instrument of Mary’s destruction, was casually propped up against the eighteen-inch-high rail that ran around three sides of the scaffold. The executioner Bull and his assistant, both masked and dressed in black gowns with white aprons, awaited their victim to one side. Despite the arrangements to keep the execution secret, word of what was happening had quickly spread locally. The hall was crowded with spectators of quality – the local gentry and their neighbours from adjacent counties – come to see a page of history written that morning. The hoi polloi, probably more than a thousand strong, waited shoulder to shoulder outside in the cold courtyard of the castle’s lower bailey.

Mary slowly climbed the low steps to the scaffold, a soldier on each
arm to assist her, and sat down on the high-backed chair. Robert Beale read out the death warrant and the loyal onlookers dutifully cried out, ‘God save the queen.’ Mary listened silently as if the dread words had not concerned her at all – ‘nay with so merry and cheerful a countenance as if it had been a pardon from her majesty for her life’,
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according to one onlooker.

Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough,
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then stepped forward to administer to the Scottish queen’s soul. ‘Madam,’ he began politely,

The queen’s most excellent majesty … standing this preparation for the execution of justice justly to be done upon you for your many trespasses against her sacred person, [and] state, a tender care upon your soul which presently departing out of your body must either be separated in the true faith of Christ, do offer you the comfortable promises of Almighty God to all penitent believing Christians …

As he continued with his long and rather pompous Protestant dissertation, Mary interrupted him two or three times.

Mr Dean! Trouble not yourself nor me, for know that I am settled in the ancient Catholic and Roman religion and in defence thereof, I mean, by God’s help, to spend my blood.

What was intended as a pious sermon had suddenly lapsed into an unseemly religious debate. Fletcher was forced to abandon his discourse and, kneeling, began to pray aloud. But he was again interrupted by Mary, saying her own prayers in Latin, the tears pouring down her face, with her six servants on the scaffold joining in, louder and louder, intentionally trying to drown out the dean’s words. She slipped weakly, painfully from her chair and slumped down onto her knees, and continued, now in English, praying for ‘Christ’s afflicted church; for an end to her troubles, for her son [James VI] that he might truly and uprightly be converted to the Roman Catholic church’ and, rather cheekily for Elizabeth, ‘that she may long and peacefully prosper and serve God aright’.
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It was a scene of pure tragedy, an act of high theatre – as she had intended it to be. Clasping her ivory crucifix to her bosom, she begged the saints to intercede
for her soul and that God, in his mercy and goodness, might avert his plagues from England, ‘this silly island’.
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This was all too much for the devout Kent, sitting behind her. ‘Madam,’ he said earnestly, ‘I beseech you: settle Christ in your heart … and leave the addition of these Popish trumperies to themselves.’ Mary flatly ignored him and continued her prayers, milking the inherently powerful drama of the occasion for all she was worth.

Bull the executioner and his assistant, menacing and sinister in their black masks, then stepped forward and knelt before her, making their traditional request for the victim’s forgiveness for what they were about to inflict upon her. The Scottish queen told the axeman: ‘I forgive you with all my heart, for I hope that this death shall give me an end to all my troubles.’
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Helped by her two weeping ladies, Elizabeth Curie and Jane Kennedy, the executioner then began to disrobe Mary. Bull lifted the
Agnus Dei
medallion from around her neck, as custom asserted that he could claim all valuables worn by the queen on the scaffold as his own property, as part of his professional fee. It was just one of the perks of the job. She swiftly stopped him, saying it would be given to one of her women as a gift. Now smiling, Mary remarked dryly that she ‘never had such grooms before to make her ready, nor ever did put off her clothes before such a company’. She stripped down to her petticoat, and as this was revealed, there came an astonished and horrified gasp in the crowded hall.