Part of the letter’s appeal is the mere fact that it has survived, still legible, after 5268 months of tumult and trading after Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote it. Photo / Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
While eating dinner on February 7, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, was told her two decades in prison for alleged treason were finally over - but not in a good way. Her head would be chopped off the next morning.
Mary Stuart (she changed her surname from Stewart) thanked her hosts, went back to her chambers and penned, or quilled, a letter.
She signed it, folded it into a kind of origami padlock and sealed it with wax. Two hours later, she was executed. After that, her story gets interesting.
That letter, the last she ever wrote, was a big part of why the 44-year-old royal who spent half her life imprisoned, didn’t just fade away as a headless footnote.
Instead, four centuries on, she continues to command cultlike fascination, revered as a doomed ingenue, a Catholic martyr and a shape-shifting symbol of Scottish identity.
And now her followers have a once-in-a-generation chance to see that deathbed manuscript.
After surviving journeys by horseback and sailing ship, the French Revolution and nearly unbroken climate-controlled darkness for the last century, Mary’s last letter is on view to the public.
“It makes me feel very emotional, to be honest,” said Midge Williams, who travelled to Perth in southern Scotland last week from her home in northern England to see the manuscript.
She first heard of the letter from her late Scottish mother, who talked reverently about Mary her whole life.
“It’s wonderful to see something so personal of hers,” Williams said after staring at the inky swirls of cursive. “She held that paper in her hands. She wrote those words.”
The letter went on display in late January at the Perth Museum, a new cultural and heritage centre an hour’s train ride from Edinburgh.
It will be up until the end of April and has already attracted some of the museum’s biggest crowds.
Mary’s reputation has never stayed fixed long enough to be pinned down.
In the century after her execution, she was a Catholic martyr. During the Jacobite uprisings of the early 1700s, she became a symbol of the Stuart cause seeking to restore the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy.
The Enlightenment brought about new interest, and a more sceptical reassessment, of the woman who had assumed the Scottish throne at 6 days old, suffered a star-crossed love life (at one point marrying the man widely believed to have killed her first husband) and dying on the orders of her cousin.
Later, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith prompted a fresh look at the evidence against her - while the Victorians turned her into a romantic heroine, a queen who, in their telling, ruled with her heart rather than her head.
Much of the attention was sceptical of her claims of innocence, but her romantic image only grew.
William Wordsworth lamented her “weeping captivity”. Robert Burns, in his own lament, enshrined her as defiant in her final February hours (“Let winter round me rave!”).
Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play Mary Stuart gave her a huge literary boost. It cast Mary as a tragic, dignified figure on the world stage and cemented her reputation as an international literary subject - one that poets, novelists and filmmakers have been revisiting ever since.
“At this point she is an internationally known figure with this myth about her as a tragically doomed heroine,” said Chris Cassells, head of archives and manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland.
“Her last letter became a really significant relic hugely appealing to collectors of the time.”
The Scottish playwright Liz Lochhead in 1987 staged Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off - a darkly comic exploration of the two queens’ rivalry. More recently, the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, grossed over US$100 million.
The four-page manuscript, composed even as the grindstone was honing its deadly edge, is simple in its origins and staggering in its reach.
Written without access to her papers or legal counsel, Mary composed a swift final reckoning that has endured for centuries.
She addressed her debts, requested that her servants be paid and asked that her body be transported to France.
More critically, she constructed a deliberate narrative of her own death as a victim of anti-Catholic hysteria rather than cutthroat court intrigue. She had been accused of plotting the death of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England.
“Tonight, after dinner, I have been advised of my sentence: I am to be executed like a criminal at eight in the morning,” Mary wrote to her brother-in-law, King Henry III of France.
She refused to renounce her religion and complained that Elizabeth’s henchmen would not even allow a priest in to hear her final prayers. Denied last rites, she wrote a last letter.
“The Catholic faith and the assertion of my God-given right to the English crown are the two issues on which I am condemned,” she wrote. “And yet I am not allowed to say that it is for the Catholic religion that I die.”
Accounts of Mary’s courage at death - she reportedly wore a Catholic red pinafore to the scaffold and devoted her last words to forgiving the executioner - raced around Europe. The letter, when it finally became public, sealed her reputation as a gutsy martyr to the end.
“Mary, Queen of Scots is an iconic figure in Scottish history and the final letter reminds us that she deliberately and strategically directed her own memorialisation,” said Jade Scott, professor of Scottish history at the University of Glasgow.
“She was determined to be recognised as someone who died for her faith and her faith gave her agency even as her execution drew near.”
Part of the letter’s appeal is the mere fact that it has survived, still legible, after 5268 months of tumult and trading after Mary wrote it.
Her physician dispatched it by horseback to the English coast, then by boat to France. The letter passed from royal archives to a Catholic seminary and then disappeared for a time into the chaos of the French Revolution. When it reappeared, it had become highly collectible.
The letter eventually ended up in the hands of the English autograph connoisseur Alfred Morrison.
His widow, on his death, planned to include Mary’s missive in one of the lots to be auctioned by Sotheby’s. But a group of 26 wealthy Scots, fearing where this national treasure would land, banded together to purchase it directly.
“Frankly, there was a concern that a wealthy American was going to buy it and take it away,” Cassells said.
“Instead, it becomes one of the foundational items of the National Library of Scotland,” which opened in 1926.
The letter, getting its star turn as part of the library’s centenary year, is leaving the building for the first time in 100 years.
One of few other showings was a one-day pop-up display in the library’s own lobby to mark the 2018 movie. The lines were around the block.
Interest now is even higher for what is likely to be its last big show for years, maybe decades.
Curators say they are burning through much of the object’s carefully monitored tolerance for the sun by displaying it in the open for 13 weeks, even snug in a windowless room in a custom-built UV-filtering Plexiglas case.
“We’re basically using its whole light budget. It won’t be out again for a long time,” Ashleigh Hibbins, the Perth Museum’s head of audience, said as visitors crowded around the display.
After that, it will be back to the calibrated, low-humidity shadows for Mary’s last letter.
Mary herself, though, seems destined to stay in the public eye for a long time to come.
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