Narrative of the Execution of the Queen of Scots

The text I started to read today is the excerpted long letter sent by Robert Wingfield to his uncle, Robert Cecil, the equivalent of the prime minister in Queen Elizabeth’s time. The young man was sent to Fotheringay for the express purpose of witnessing the execution and describing it to his uncle, and also presumably the Queen. I guess that is the reason why he takes such pains to note down absolutely everything, including Mary’s dress and appearance on the last day of her life. He even describes her garters and stockings, which I presume he didn’t have the opportunity to see while she was alive, in which case… creepy. Mary’s attire is rich but sombre, mostly in black. She is no longer the beauty admired by the French court – she is still very tall (she was probably nearly 6 foot tall, unusual especially for a woman in these times), but also quite stout, double-chinned and has to wear a wig because she’s lost her hair. She was 45, so hardly an old woman yet, but she had a lot of health problems (some people suspect porphyria, a genetic disease supposedly haunting the Stuarts) and I guess she had not had enough exercise for the last twenty years, taking into account that the only .exercise for the woman of her social standing would be horse-riding.

Mary accepts the news about the day of her execution with Christian resignation, although she cries a lot. As I wrote earlier, she apparently did retain her fashion sense even on the day of her execution. She also wears many religious emblems, including the medallion “Agnus Dei” (Lamb of God), which is printed in the NAEL as “Angus Dei”. I wonder if it’s a misprint of the NAEL’s typesetter or Wingfield’s mistake. Her servant Andrew Melville (again, mistakenly called by Wingfield Melvin), falls down on his knees and cries, saying he is going to be the bearer of the worst news ever. Mary also crying, comforts him, saying that she welcomes death as the end of her troubles and that the good news he is going to bear is that she died like a true queen and Catholic. She says she always dreamt about uniting England and Scotland and asks to tell her son James (who never saw her, I mean consciously, since she left him as an infant) that she never did anything to hurt Scotland’s interests. Then she addresses the gentlemen around her, asking them to settle the accounts with her servants and to treat them well, to which they agree. She also asks them to allow her servants to witness her execution, but the earl of Kent protests, saying that he’s afraid they are going to get hysterical and give her even more pain, or they are going to indulge in superstitious practices like dipping their handkerchiefs in her blood. The English are apparently very afraid of creating relics and making Mary a martyr.