Elizabeth's Spymaster (29 page)

Mary Queen of Scots was now dressed all in blood-red satin – the universally acknowledged colour of Catholic death or martyrdom.

She quickly knelt down on the cushion placed in front of the block, without ‘the least token of the fear of death’, and Jane Kennedy took out a white cloth embroidered in gold with the Corpus Christi. She kissed it, folded it three ways into a neat triangle and tied it over her mistress’s eyes as a blindfold. Mary prayed, using the words of the
Te Deum
taken from Psalm 30: ‘In
te Domino confido me confundar in eternum’ –
‘In thee, O Lord, I put my trust. Let me never be confounded’ – and groped forward, reaching out for the foot-high wooden block, finally laying her head and neck in the hollowed recess. Bull’s assistant removed her hands
from the block and she stretched out her arms and legs, crying out ‘three or four times’:
‘In
manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum’ –
‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

It was now around eleven o’clock. A breathless silence fell in the hall.

Shrewsbury signalled to the executioner.

The moment of Mary’s death had finally come.

Bull lifted his axe high above his head for the fatal strike and brought down the weapon with the full force of his considerable weight behind it.

His blow was misaimed. The blade hit the knot of the blindfold and, glancing off, cut deeply into the back of Mary’s skull. The Scottish queen made ‘a very small noise’ but did not move.

Bull’s second strike severed her head from her neck, apart from ‘a very little gristle’. Crouching over her, he hastily shortened his grip on the heavy axe to finally slash through the last remaining sinews, using it like a butcher’s cleaver to finish his grisly task.
⁶⁸
He then picked up the severed head by the pinned cap and, straightening up, cried out in a loud voice: ‘God save the queen!’
⁶⁹

Suddenly, shockingly, the head fell from his grasp, leaving him dumbly holding only her white cap and her auburn curls in his gory hands. Mary had been wearing a wig, and her bloody head now rolled across the scaffold, very grey and nearly bald. Horribly, her lips continued to move soundlessly, as if she was trying to speak. The nerves in her dead face were twitching still.

Robert Wingfield, who earlier may have been earmarked to assassinate the Scottish queen, was watching in the packed hall. He reported:

Her dressing [cap] of lawn fell from her head, which appeared grey as if she had been seventy years old, cut very short … Her lips stirred up and down [for] almost a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
⁷⁰

Mary had largely dictated the grim proceedings throughout and even after death she had destroyed her adversaries’ moment of triumph with another telling piece of theatre. A stunned and speechless Shrewsbury helplessly burst into tears.

The dazed silence was at last broken by Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, stepping forward and shouting: ‘So perish all the queen’s enemies!’ – bravely echoed by Kent: ‘Such be the end of all the queen’s and the Gospel’s enemies!’

The hall was quickly cleared of spectators, some exultant, some cowed by what they had witnessed. Mary’s weeping household were shepherded under guard to their quarters and locked in. Bull and his assistant began to strip her body but found her small pet Skye terrier Geddon, hiding amongst her blood-soaked clothes. It ‘would not be gotten forth but without force and afterward would not depart from the corpse but came and lay between her head and shoulders … The same dog, being imbued in her blood, was carried away and washed.’
⁷¹

All her clothes and belongings that were covered in blood were burnt outside on a huge bonfire, together with the black cotton hangings from the scaffold – to avoid any scrap being used as a sacred relic of her death. Walsingham wanted no trappings of martyrdom to survive for use as a rallying point for future conspiracies.

The body, crudely wrapped in the baize stripped from her confiscated billiard table,
⁷²
was taken upstairs on a stretcher for embalming by a physician from the nearby town of Stamford, assisted by two surgeons. Her heart and other organs were secretly buried within the castle by Andrews, the Sheriff of Northamptonshire.
⁷³

News of Mary’s death was taken to the court by Henry Talbot, Shrewsbury’s fourth son, with strict instructions to hand over the official reports of what had happened only to the Privy Councillors.

The businesslike Paulet, writing to Walsingham later that day, enclosed a lengthy inventory of Mary’s possessions – plate, hangings and ‘other household stuff.

All the best stuff was removed from hence yesterday under the conduct of some of my servants, praying you to signify forthwith to my servant Robert Hacksaw remaining in London, in what place there the said plate and other stuff shall be discharged.

The jewels, plate and other goods belonging to the late Queen
of Scots were already divided into many parts before the receipt of your letters … the whole company (saving Kennedy and Curie’s sister) affirming that they have nothing to show for these things from their mistress in writing and that all the smaller things were delivered by her own hands.

I have, according to your direction, committed the custody of the said jewels, plate and other stuff to Mr Melville, the physician and Mrs Kennedy, one of the gentlewomen.
⁷⁴

The following morning, Burghley decided it was ‘not fit to break suddenly to her majesty’ the news of Mary’s execution, and he kept it from Elizabeth all that day. However, she heard of Mary’s death that evening ‘by other means’ and took it quietly enough, but having a whole night to work herself into a torrent of righteous indignation, she sent for Sir Christopher Hatton early the next morning. As Davison reported, she ‘fell into some heat and passion’ and denied having commanded or intended the execution, ‘casting the burden generally upon them all, but chiefly upon my shoulders’. She told him angrily that ‘I had, in suffering it [the death warrant] to go out of my hands, abused the trust she reposed in me.’
⁷⁵

Outside, in stark contrast, Protestant London rejoiced at the news of Mary’s death. Bells were rung joyfully in all the towers of the city churches for twenty-four hours and bonfires were lit in the streets at every crossroads.
⁷⁶

Elizabeth’s Councillors had fully anticipated her ritual tantrum and warned Davison to absent himself from court for a day or two, to allow time for the regal rage to blow itself out. He was compelled to be away regardless because of ‘an unhappy accident [which had] befallen me the day before, together with some indisposition of my health at that time’. Truly a well-timed diplomatic illness! But Elizabeth needed a scapegoat and now had Davison firmly in her sights.

I returned home where the next news I heard was that her majesty resolved to commit me to the Tower; which at the first seemed a matter very strange to me and such as I could by no means believe
until my lord Buckhurst came with orders from her majesty to execute this her pleasure, which by reason of my sickness was deferred for two or three days and afterwards on the fourteenth of this month accomplished.
⁷⁷

On 12 February, a chastened Privy Council tried, rather pathetically, to rationalise and explain their actions to a still incandescent Elizabeth. Two rough drafts of their obsequious and remorseful letters to her survive, bearing Burghley’s holograph. It remains uncertain whether either was sent. If they were, the letters would have seemed, at the very least, overanxious in their protestations of innocence to the queen. The first described England’s domestic situation as

every hour grow[ing] daily more and more dangerous … whilst the Queen of Scots was suffered to live.

This danger we found even at our daily meeting to increase upon the universal hourly hues and cries with rising of multitudes of people in arms in all corners of the realm and sundry of them concerning the Queen of Scots, whereof we had cause to fear that some great treasons were hid under these stirs and that the Queen of Scots might by force … be recovered out of the place where she was and her majesty be brought thereby into great danger.

We thought it our most bounden duty and that we were charged in our consciences after God not to delay the proceedings … and therefore perceiving that it pleased almighty God to incline her mind to sign a commission lawfully devised and being showed to us by Mr Davison under her hand and Great Seal of England, whereby, according to honour and justice, the said great dangers might be prevented and her majesty’s life surely continued and preserved, we did with one mind conclude it was most necessary to use all secrecy herein and to delay no time for fear of greater danger.
⁷⁸

So why was Elizabeth kept in the dark about the instructions for the execution? The Councillors pleaded that

it was thought by us all unwell to acquaint her majesty with the form and circumstances for the time and manner of the doing … presuming it for diverse causes not convenient to trouble her majesty therewith …

They did not elaborate on these ‘diverse causes’. These were hardly convincing explanations and they were far from enough to quell the royal rage.

The second draft is much more repentant, much more contrite, and written after they had been told that Elizabeth’s fury had made her ill. It seems likely she had suffered some form of nervous collapse, refused food and sleep was denied her.
⁷⁹

We, your born, bound and sworn servants and counsellors … do most lowly, humbly and sorrowfully pray and beseech your majesty that you will suspend your heavy censure against us until we may declare the intention of our late counsels for the orderly removal of the danger of your life and the manner of our proceeding therein.

And in the meantime, to the bottom of our hearts, we confess that we are most heartily sorry to hear that your majesty is so deeply grieved in your mind as thereby your health, the maintenance of your life, must needs be hindered and the present government of your state, being now environed with many difficulties or rather dangers for lack of your favourable audience to be given to us, must needs receive great detriment and hardly to be recovered.
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Robert Beale, the agent of the Privy Council, was less repentant. ‘I thought that I ought to fulfil the order,’ he wrote.

I was the queen’s servant and bound to obey her. If, in those circumstances, the queen had been exposed to some danger, it would have been my fault. I was convinced that her safety depended upon the death of the Queen of Scotland [and] I found sufficient warrant in an order signed by herself.
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Elizabeth, however, was not going to be placated and was looking for retribution amongst more senior members of her government. On 13 February, Walsingham pleaded with the Lord Treasurer to intervene with the queen on his friend Davison’s behalf: ‘I beseech you to use all means to remove her majesty’s heavy displeasure from Mr Secretary Davison.’
⁸²

But he was too late. Davison was sent to the Tower.

Burghley was the next to feel the full weight of the queen’s ire. She refused to see him, refused even to read his letters – although they were filled with a torrent of self-deprecating remorse. One pleaded that the Lord Treasurer might ‘be laid upon the floor near your majesty’s foot’ to soak up ‘some drops of your mercy to quench my sorrowful panting heart’.
⁸³
After almost three decades of faithful service, her Chief Minister had fallen perilously from grace.

On February 14, Elizabeth wrote to Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, astonishingly denying any part in the execution of his mother. She began:

My dear brother: I would you knew, though felt not, the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident which, far contrary to my meaning has befallen …

I beseech you that as God and many more know how innocent I am in this case …

For your part, think you have not in the world a more loving kinswoman nor a dearer friend than myself, nor any that will watch more carefully to preserve you and your estate.
⁸⁴

The queen also sent Sir Richard Wigmore to Scotland ‘on secret employment’. His mission was to discover James’s private feelings, ‘divert him from all thoughts of revenging his mother’s death’, induce him to resolutely profess his Protestant faith and depend upon Elizabeth and England’s friendship rather than any other potentate.
⁸⁵

Mendoza heard news of the execution in Paris on 28 February and dashed off a quick dispatch to his master, King Philip II. He claimed that a Privy Council cabal had forced Elizabeth to sign the death warrant by threatening that Parliament would otherwise refuse to approve funds for the war in Holland.

As Secretary Walsingham was ill, this warrant was taken to the queen for her signature by Davison and after she signed it she ordered him not to give it to anyone unless she gave him personally her authority to do so.

Davison, who is a terrible heretic and an enemy of the Queen of Scotland, like the rest … delivered the warrant to them.

They took a London executioner and sent him with the warrant to the justice of the county where the queen was. The moment the justice received it, he entered the Queen of Scotland’s chamber with Paulet and Lord Grey who had charge of her, and there they had her head cut off with a hatchet in the presence of the four persons only …