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
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Illustrative of English History, Second Series, vol. 3 (London: Harding and Lepard, 1827), 112–18.
Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 34.
George Ferguson points out, “Red is the Church’s color for martyred saints, because many of the early Christians suffered martyrdom in the Roman persecutions, or at the hands of the barbarians, rather than deny their faith in Christ.” Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 91.
James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 147–55.
Arthur A. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 69.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26, (spring 1989), 12, 19.
Lionel Cust, Notes on the Authentic Portraits of Mary Queen of Scots (London: John Murray, 1903)
Rosalind K. Marshall, “Mary, Queen of Scots: A Flemish Connection,” in The Flemish-Scottish Connections, ed. Tom Hubbard (Brussels: Flanders-Scotland Foundation, 2002), 42–47.
Mark Dilworth, “The Curle-Mowbray Family and the Scots College Douai,” The Innes Review 56, no.1 (spring 2005), 9–13, 12.
L. Antheunis, “Le Sécretaire de Marie Stuart: Gilbert Curle (1549–1609) et sa Famille,” Revue des Questions Historiques 133 ( 1939), 58–85;
Jos E. Vercruysse, “A Scottish Jesuit from Antwerp: Hippolytus Curle,” The Innes Review 61, no.2 (2010), 137–49.
Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen Mary’s Women: Female Relatives, Servants, Friends, and Enemies of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), 185.
Johan Francken’s Execution Oder Todt Marien Stuarts Königinnen aus Schotlandt (Magdeburg, 1588),
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119.
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 126.
Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003).
Rayne Allinson, “The Queen’s Three Bodies: Gender, Criminality, and Sovereignty in the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” in Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Megan Cassidy—Welch and Peter Sherlock (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2008), 99–116.
William Turnbull, Letters of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland (London: Charles Dolman, 1845), 378.
Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), 370.
A. G. Petti, “Richard Verstegan and Catholic Martyrologies of the Later Elizabethan Period,” Recusant History 5 (1959), 64–90.
Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis (Antwerp: Adrianum Huberti, 1592), L3r.
Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomson, The Queen’s Image: A Celebration of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 58.
John Daniel Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in Captivity: A Narrative of Events (Sheffield: Leader & Sons; London: George Bell and Sons, 1880), 42.
Peter Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart: King James and the Manipulation of Memory,” Journal of British Studies 46, no.2 (April, 2007), 288.
David Howarth, Images of Rule: Artand Politics in the English Renaissance; 1485–1649 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 170.
John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, England and New York: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), 103, 90.
Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 63–65.
Prince Alexandre Labanoff, Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Marie Stuart, Reine d’Écosse, vol. 6 (London: Charles Dolman, 1844), 309–11, 457–61.
Elizabeth Alice Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1998);
David Freedberg, “Painting and the Counter Reformation in the Age of Rubens,” in The Age of Rubens, ed. Peter C. Sutton and Marjorie E. Wieseman, et. al. (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Ludion Press, Ghent, 1993), 131–45;
Bert Timmermans, “Family, Agency and Networks of Patronage: Towards a Mapping of the Revival of the Family Chapel in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp,” in Family Ties: Art Production and Kinship Patterns in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Koenraad Brosens, Leen Kelchtermans, and Katlijne Van der Stighelen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2012), 189–217.
Constant Philippe Serrure, Notice sur le Mausolée de Barbe Moubray et Elisabeth Curle (Ghent, 1835).
Francis X. Martin, Friar Nugent: A Study of Francis Lavalin Nugent (1569–1635); Agent of the Counter-Reformation (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1962), 12.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Debra Barrett-Graves
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tassi, M.A. (2013). Martyrdom and Memory: Elizabeth Curle’s Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots. In: Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) The Emblematic Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303103_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45408-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30310-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)