Martyrdom and Memory: Elizabeth Curle’s Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots

Abstract

On the morning of February 8, 1587, in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, England, an audience of a few hundred gathered around a scaffold to witness a rare event. The criminal to be executed was an anointed queen who had claimed rights to four thrones in her lifetime, those of France, Scotland, Ireland, and England. She was accused of high treason by the English Privy Council and found guilty of conspiring with a group of Catholics against the life of Queen Elizabeth I (known as the Babington Plot). When she entered the hall, accompanied by a small entourage of servants, the audience set eyes upon one of the most politically controversial individuals of their time. The (in) famous person was the exiled Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, who had been forced to abdicate her throne in Scotland nearly 20 years prior, and thereafter had been held captive in England. The queen’s request that her “poor distressed servants” be witnesses to her death reflected her intention to impress upon a sympathetic audience the image of herself not as a criminal, but rather as “a true constant Catholic.”⁴

“Trouble not yourself, Mr Dean,… for know that I am settled in the ancient Catholic and Roman religion, and in defence thereof by God’s grace I mean to spend my blood.”

—Mary Stuart, from Sir Robert Wingfield, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots¹

And then, she said, there rested yet one request which she would make unto the Lords and that was this—that it would please them to permit her poor distressed servants to be present about her at her death, that their eyes might behold and their hearts be witnesses how patiently their Queen and mistress should endure her execution that, thereby, they might be able to relate, when they come into their countries, that she died a true constant Catholic to her religion.

—Sir Robert Wingfield, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots²

Martyrdom is not simply an action. Martyrdom requires audience (whether real or fictive), retelling, interpretation, and world- and meaning-making activity. Suffering violence in and of itself is not enough. In order for martyrdom to emerge, both the violence and its suffering must be infused with particular meanings… Martyrdom always implies a broader narrative that invokes notions of justice and the right ordering of the cosmos. By turning the chaos and meaninglessness of violence into martyrdom, one reasserts the priority and superiority of an imagined or longed-for order and a privileged and idealized system of meaning.

—Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making³