Fotheringhay recalls death of last Scottish queen

Press, 23 February 1987, Page 6

Fotheringhay recalls death of last Scottish queen

By

MICHAEL WISE

through NZPA Fotheringhay Apart from a simple metal plaque marking the spot where Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded 400 years ago, there is little sign that the village of Fotheringhay was the scene of one of the most traumatic events in British history. The River Nene flows placidly past the remainder of the castle keep where Scotland’s Catholic ruler met death at the order of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth of England, on February 8, 1587. The 400th anniversary is being marked throughout Britain with ceremonies, exhibitions and lectures, and the Catholic Archbishop of Northampton will celebrate a Mass in Fotheringhay’s Protestant parish church for the repose of Mary’s soul. The Mass in the Anglican sanctuary is a sign that the political and religious antagonism the execution inspired is fading.

For years at the start of this century, one Scotsman made a pilgrimage here to lay a wreath on the anniversary of Mary’s death but eventually had to be barred from the site because of his violent language about the reigning British Royal Family.

“Things have cooled down a great deal,” said Gordon Donaldson, Queen Elizabeth’s honorary historiographer for Scotland. “Few people treat her (Mary) as a plaster saint any more. Not many would denounce her as a ruthless criminal.” Father David Woodard, a Catholic priest whose church is near Fotheringhay, south of Peterborough in central England, believes a tragic atmosphere lingers over the meadow that now covers the place where Mary was killed.

“I’ve always found it the gloomiest place ever,” he said. “A shadow hangs over it.”

Legend has it that Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland (who also became James I of England), razed the castle out of vengeance after the unification of the English and Scottish crowns, although villagers say its stones were gradually dragged away to construct new buildings.

An inn in the next town boasts that its oak staircase is the one Mary descended as she went to the block. The outline of a crown on the balustrade was reputedly scratched into it by Mary in her final hours.

A lump of masonry, watched over by grazing

sheep, is all that is left where Mary ended a 44-year-long life of romance, complex intrigue and dignified captivity after Elizabeth resolved to get rid of her rival for the English throne.

Mary’s beauty and regal demeanour made her a sixteenth-century femme fatale who has captivated popular as well as scholarly interest until the present day.

Born to James V of Scotland and France’s Mary of Guise in 1542, Mary Queen of Scots had the misfortune to be crowned while only a week old in the midst of great religious and political uncertainty. Scotland was undergoing the shock of the Protestant Reformation and English Catholics were to hail her as the rightful heir to her uncle, Henry VIII. She had three husbands — becoming a widow at 18 after going to France for a dynastic marriage to the heir to the French throne, marrying for passion the second time with a handsome nobleman who was later murdered, and then unwisely choosing the chief suspect in the crime as her third consort.

Mary often clashed with the Scottish nobility and the fiery Calvinist

preacher John Knox. Outrage over the last marriage resulted in her being deposed in favour of her infant son.

Nineteen years of imprisonment in England followed, until Elizabeth at last signed her death warrant when a Catholic plot to overthrow her with Mary’s assent was uncovered. “Suffer or strike, strike or be struck,” the English queen concluded. Mary was first buried in Peterborough Cathedral. Her son, who succeeded Elizabeth to the English throne, moved the body to Westminster Abbey in London in 1612 and erected an imposing tomb which became a shrine for Catholics deeming her a martyr.

Many Scottish historians today contend that the religious aspect of Mary’s plight has been overplayed. “Mary only became attached to the Catholic Church when all else failed," said historiographer, Mr Donaldson. “The idea that Mary was an ultra-Papist was rubbish.”

Mr Donaldson and others have argued that during the later years of her life, kinship and sovereign allegiance were the prime motivating factor for most Scots rather than religion. “What is more import-

ant to most people was a loyalty to the Crown, never mind that she's Catholic,” said Dr Michael Lynch of the University of Edinburgh. Dr Lynch said that historical work about Mary in recent years had tended to focus on the day-to-day relations between i Mary’s Royal household and her governing Privy Council. “The spotlight is no longer on Mary as ‘Mary the tragic queen’ but on Mary as a ruler ... although there are all sorts of things that are cropping up.” Last month, the keeper of Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery identified a sixteenth-century French court painting of a half-naked woman, entitled “Dame a sa Toilette,” as the queen who several years later held a rosary in her hand and whispered “Sweet Jesus” as her neck Aras struck three times with an axe. The author of a recent book about Mary, an historian, Dr Rosalind Marshall, swiftly sought to rebut this as a case of mistaken identity. “It is extremely unlikely that Mary," Dr Marshall said, “with her great sense of her own majesty, would have allowed herself to be shown in this particular context.”