Robert Wynkfielde’s account of Mary Stuarts exEcution
Robert Wynkfielde’s account of Mary Stuarts exEcution
Mary Queen of Scots was executed on 8th February 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle, after a trial whose outcome forever troubled Queen Elizabeth I.
The truth of her demise was not so simple.
Mary did plot against Elizabeth’s life, and Elizabeth did consistently reject petitions to exEcute Mary over the 19-year course of her imprisonment.
Eventually, however, the Catholic threat was deemed too great, and Elizabeth reluctantly signed the warrant for exEcution.
The warrant was signed on 1st February 1587, and the exEcution was carried out a week later.
“Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,” Mary famously uttered in Latin, her last words before the exEcutioner’s axe hacked disastrously through her neck.
Her gruesome decapitation remains one of the most infamous incidents in the sordid annals of history.
This famous account of the exEcution was written by Robert Wynkfielde~
“Stripped of all her apparel saving her petticoat and kirtle, her two women beholding her made great lamentation, and crying and crossing themselves prayed in Latin.
She, turning herself to them, embracing them, said these words in French,
‘Ne crie vous, j’ay prome pour vous’,
Crossing and kissing them, she bade them pray for her and rejoice and not weep, for that now they should see an end of all their mistress’s troubles.
All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words,
‘that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company.’
This done, one of the women have a Corpus Christi cloth lapped up three-corner-ways, kissing it, put it over the Queen of Scots’ face, and pinned it fast to the caule of her head.
Then the two women departed from her, and she kneeling down upon the cushion most resolutely, and without any token or fear of death, she spake aloud this Psalm in Latin,
In Te Domine confido, non confundar in eternam.
Then, groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both her hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied.
Then lying upon the block most quietly, and stretching out her arms cried,
In manus tuas, Domine, three or four times.
Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the exEcutioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other exEcutioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay:
And so the exEcutioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade God save the Queen.
Then, her dress of lawn (wig) from off her head, it appeared as grey as one of threescore and ten years old, polled very short, her face in a moment being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face.
Her lips stirred up and a down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
Then Mr. Dean (the Dr. Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough) said with a loud voice, ‘So perish all the Queen’s enemies,’ and afterwards the Earl of Kent came to the dead body, and standing over it, with a loud voice said,
‘Such end of all the Queen’s and the Gospel’s enemies.
Wynkfeld then wrote in graphic detail of the moments that followed:
“One of the executioners, pulling off her garters, espied her little dog which was crept under her cloths, which could not be gotten forth by force, yet afterward would not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay between her head and her shoulders, which being imbrued with her blood was carried away and washed, as all things else were that had any blood was either burned or washed clean.”
Mary, Queen of Scots was buried in Peterborough Cathedral, but she was later exhumed and buried in Westminster Abbey on the orders of her son, James I of England.
Ironically, her splendid tomb is just a few metres away from the cousin that ordered her death…..
Engraving of ‘The exEcution of Mary Queen of Scots’
Unknown artist.
HultonArchives/Getty images