The Queen Who Dressed for Martyrdom

On the evening of 7th February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, was told she would die at eight o’clock the following morning. She had been a queen since she was six days old. She had been a prisoner in England for nineteen years. She was 44.

That night, her gaoler Sir Amyas Paulet entered her chamber and had her cloth of estate — the canopy symbolising her royal status — torn down over her head. She spent her last night without it.

The Horror

On the morning of 8th February, Mary walked into the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle wearing a black gown. Once on the scaffold, she removed it to reveal a bodice and petticoat of deep crimson, the traditional Catholic colour of martyrdom. She knew she was performing for an audience that went beyond the English officials in the room.

She forgave the executioner. She knelt. Her ladies tied a linen cloth over her eyes, and, blindfolded, she had to grope for the block before finding it and laying down her head. Witness Robert Wingfield records that she stretched out her arms and cried “In manus tuas, Domine” — “Into your hands, Lord” — several times.

The first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head. She made almost no sound. The second blow severed most of the neck, and the executioner then cut through the last sinews with his axe.

He lifted the head by the hair and cried “God save the Queen.” In that moment, the hair came away in his hand: it was a wig. Underneath, Mary’s real hair was thin, cropped very short, and “as grey as if she had been threescore and ten years old.” The head dropped to the floor.

Wingfield wrote that her lips “stirred up and down almost a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.” Later writers have repeated that detail ever since.

When the executioners began to strip the body, one of them discovered a tiny dog hiding inside her clothes. Wingfield again: “One of the executioners, plucking off part of her dress, espied her little dog which was under her clothes, which would not be gotten forth but with force; and afterwards would not depart from the dead corps, but came and lay between her head and shoulders.” The dog, soaked in blood, was washed — like everything else that had touched it — and removed. It refused food and, according to later tradition, died shortly afterwards.

Mary was the first anointed European monarch to be formally tried and executed by legal process. Anything that might become a relic — her clothes, the block, anything stained with blood — was burned or carefully washed so that nothing could be venerated.

The Modern Relic

Fotheringhay Castle is now just a grassy mound and a fragment of wall in a Northamptonshire field; the great hall where she died is gone. Her body lay at Fotheringhay for months before being buried at Peterborough Cathedral in 1587. In 1612 her son James VI and I had her remains exhumed and brought to Westminster Abbey, where they were placed in an elaborate marble tomb in Henry VII’s Chapel, directly opposite the tomb of Elizabeth I. The two cousins who destroyed each other’s lives now lie about thirty feet apart. The little dog is not remembered anywhere.

← Back to the archive