Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was executed in 1587 because she was viewed as presenting a threat to Queen Elizabeth 1, her cousin once-removed.  She was also accused of being a traitor who had schemed to get Elizabeth assassinated. Mary had fled to England after failing to suppress a rebellion of her own subjects which arose in reaction to the murder of her former husband (for which she was accused) and her elopement with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell (thought to be the actual murderer). When her efforts to suppress the rebellion against her failed, she fled to England. She had been forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland, and her baby son (James VI) had become King of Scotland. 

Mary’s presence in England posed an enormous problem for Queen Elizabeth—she was a Catholic with a claim to the throne herself, and had many ties across Europe including with the Pope. She was also a woman, a Queen, in a time when many if not most men (especially male leaders) believed that Queens should not be sovereigns. It is important to remember that Mary was raised at the French court, and her first husband, François II, was the crown-prince or dauphin of France. Mary, who considered her name to be “Marie,” preferred to speak and write in French, which was her native language.  So her foreignness was also an issue for Elizabeth.  Elizabeth imprisoned Mary after she arrived in England under the euphemism of saying that she was “a guest of the crown,” and for 19 years Mary lived in house arrest, always requesting unsuccessfully a personal audience with Queen Elizabeth, until finally she was brought to trial.

In the trial Mary famously presented two serious challenges to Elizabeth and the justice of the crown. First, she claimed that she could not be tried in a court in England as she was not a subject of Queen Elizabeth but was herself a queen. This was partly because she was not English but mostly because as a queen she was not a subject.  She could not be (and was not) judged by a jury of her peers, as her only peer was Elizabeth, who did not attend the trial.   The Sovereign could not be a subject and so could not be judged, she argued. The second problem was that as a queen Elizabeth could not condemn her without seeming to create a precedent that queens could be tried, judged and even executed, a precedent which could undermine her own claim to sovereignty and to stand above all others. Elizabeth wanted Mary dealt with, but did not want to have to agree to the trial or execution of Mary. 

Elizabeth could pardon Mary if a sentence of death was brought, and if Mary was to be executed, Elizabeth would in theory have had to be the one to decide this, so she was really on the spot.  In fact, Elizabeth was anxious to avoid this decision, and first she stalled for time, giving first a speech to Parliament described as “a masterpiece of sinuous equivocation.”  After even more pressure from parliamentary leaders, to agree to the execution of Mary, she gave her famous speech with an “answer answerless,” making it clear that she wanted something like what we might call plausible deniability today.  But she finally was forced to give the sentence of execution, and Mary was executed in 1587.  As is evident when one remembers the Spanish Armada’s attempt to invade England in 1588, Elizabeth was right to be concerned about the Hapsburg, French and Spanish anger at the execution of Mary, among her other concerns about sovereignty and the danger of undermining a woman’s claim to rule.

There are several accounts from protestant and catholic writers of Mary’s execution. In the protestant account, a crucial issue was how to avoid any relics being created by people taking away bits of her gown or veil or anything that had touched her body. Mary enacted a fine and dignified role, seeing her death in the context of an imitation of Christ. She prayed in Latin, kissed her crucifix, held on to a small necklace with a lamb engraved (her Agnus Dei), and then prayed in English and forgave her executioners. She placed her neck calmly on block, reciting in Latin the words of Jesus on the cross: “in manus tuus, Domine, commendo spiritum meum” three or four times. After she died, all things that had any blood on them were washed, including her little dog which had somehow crept under her feet; all of her clothing and any items she had touched were burned.  These details come from the famous account of her execution by Robert Wyngfield, from a protestant point of view. The catholic account by Adam Blackwood describes her as a martyr, and gives a gory account of the cruelty of the “butchers,” specifically describing their care to prevent her ladies in waiting carrying away her crucifix or any item of her clothing that would enable the creation of relics or items of devotion that would have allowed her power (and her threat to Elizabeth) to be carried on after her death. Nonetheless, the story of her execution did just that.

Mary’s trial was allegorized by Edmund Spenser in 1596 when he included an account of it in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, the book of Justice. Famously, Elizabeth had refused to attend Mary’s trial and in a contemporary engraving of the trial, an empty canopied chair is placed at the top of the trial scene to represent Queen Elizabeth. Spenser, in contrast, presents the queen, here named “Mercilla,” as present at the trial, and as weeping her tears at the sorrow of the action of justice. Scholars debate whether this was intended as a criticism of Elizabeth for not having attended the trial, or as an ironic comment on the queen’s evasiveness about Mary.  To represent Mary, Spenser chose Duessa, a figure who in earlier books represented duplicity, apocalyptic evil and even the Whore of Babylon. Needless to say, James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son, did not appreciate his mother being called Duessa and associated with hypocrisy, sexual corruption, duplicity and the Whore of Babylon, and so James was not a fan of Spenser’s allegorical epic! Luckily for Spenser, in one way of seeing it, he died in 1599 before James came to the throne of England.

When Elizabeth died, James VI of Scotland did become James I of England, uniting the two kingdoms for the first time. Mary’s body was dug up and moved to Westminster Abbey where she now lies not far from the tomb of her cousin Elizabeth I.  Of course, Mary’s grandson, Charles I, would also lose his head at the time of the English revolution, and the Stuarts were driven from the throne. Mary’s story may thus presage in a sense the ongoing unpopularity of the Stuarts, as Jayne Lewis suggests, and the undermining of the monarchy itself. Indeed, Elizabeth may have been right to think that her failure to support Mary’s claim of the right of a monarch to stand above the laws would ultimately undermine the claims of absolute sovereignty that a monarch could depend on. This question also became central in the American colonies and to the writers of the US Constitution as they developed the political ideal that all leaders are subject to the rule of law and not exempt from it.

Many of the details in this brief account come from the excellent account by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St Martins, 1999), which includes both Wyngfield’s and Blackwood’s accounts of her execution as well as Elizabeth’s speeches to Parliament and the accounts of Mary’s trials, as well as other documents about Mary.

Susanne Wofford (NYU Gallatin) is a distinguished scholar of epic poetry and of Renaissance and early modern literature.