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The House of Stuart: Mary, Queen of Scots and Two Funerals
This article is part of the Stuart Funerary History cluster. It focuses on the early House of Stuart burials at Holyrood Abbey, exploring how royal death, dynastic identity, and sacred space intersected in one of Scotland’s most important monastic sites. This standalone profile links directly back to the funerary pillar and to the Stuarts: Meta Hub, forming a dedicated entry point for readers and search engines into the burial history of the early Stuart monarchs.
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The Secondary Burial of Mary, Queen of Scots
An evocation of Scotland, the Crown, thistles, the Saltire and a castle
This article is part of the Stuart Funerary History cluster, a new sequence linked to the wider funerary pillar and the Stuarts: Meta Hub. The cluster examines how members of the House of Stuart were buried across Scotland, England, France, Italy, Portugal, and beyond, tracing how royal death, dynastic identity, and sacred space shaped the political and cultural memory of the dynasty. Each entry provides a focused study of a specific burial site or moment, creating a structured pathway for readers and search engines to understand the geography, symbolism, and historical significance of Stuart funerary practice.
Mary’s burial after her execution at Fotheringhay in February 1587 is one of the most revealing episodes in Stuart funerary history. Her body was embalmed and sealed in a lead coffin, left for months within the castle while Elizabeth’s government hesitated over how, and where, to bury a queen they had just beheaded. Even in death, Mary was treated as a problem to be managed, not a sovereign to be honoured.
When the decision was finally taken, the arrangements were carefully choreographed. On the Sunday night before Lammas Day, her coffin was brought in a coach from Fotheringhay to Peterborough, with around a hundred attendants. The Bishop of Peterborough, the Dean, the prebendaries and clergy met the cortege at the bridge outside the town and escorted it to the bishop’s palace, where the body lay until the funeral.
“Her bodie was brought in a Coutch (about 100 attending thereon) from Fotheringham castell vpon Sonday at night, the Bishop of Peterborough, the Deane, the Prebendes, and the rest meeting the same at the Bridge, being not far from the town, and so conueighed it to the Bishops Pallace.”
Pitcairne, Robert, ed. The Funeral of Mary, Queen of Scots: A Collection of Curious Tracts Relating to the Burial of This Unfortunate Princess. Privately printed for the editor. Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1890.
The hearse itself was a statement. Built “field‑bed wise”, it had a valance of black velvet edged with gold fringe, an imperial canopy covered in baize, and was surrounded by unicorn supporters and a forest of small pennons.
Around it hung ten mottoes, each bearing In my defence God me defend, and ten large and small scutcheons combining the red lion of Scotland with the arms of France and the Lennox line. The pillars supporting the canopy were wrapped in velvet and fixed with heraldic shields, some showing the lion alone, others quartered with French fleurs‑de‑lis or Lennox devices.
The church and chancel were dressed with bays and arms, turning the interior into a temporary royal space for a queen who had never reigned there.
The mourners’ order reveals the social and religious complexity of the event. First came a hundred “relievants”, poor old women, mostly widows, in black cloth gowns with an ell of white Holland over their heads. They were paid for their labour and stood in two ranks along the nave for the whole ceremony, a living wall of grief and charity.
At the door, the singing men and choristers met the procession with a psalm and led it into the chancel, organs sounding until the sermon began. Behind them walked bailiffs with black staves, then officers of Mary’s household in mourning cloaks, then Scottish and French servants who had served her in life and now accompanied her in death.
The religious tension was visible. Among her officers was a French Jesuit, her confessor, wearing a golden crucifix openly around his neck. When told the people murmured at it, he refused to remove it, saying he would wear it even if it cost him his life.
The funeral liturgy itself followed the English Protestant form, with sermon and psalmody, but the visual and emotional language of the ceremony—black velvet, bays, widows, crucifix, French and Scottish attendants—carried a strong Catholic charge. Mary had asked in her will to be buried in France, at Saint‑Denis, with full Catholic rites. Instead, she was buried in an English cathedral, under a Protestant service, surrounded by Catholic symbols and loyal servants trying to hold onto fragments of her faith.
Her burial place at Peterborough, on the south side of the hearse, was quiet and relatively modest. No great monument was raised at the time. The state wanted closure; her supporters wanted martyrdom. The funeral sat uneasily between the two, a compromise that satisfied no one fully.
Translation and Monument: James VI and I Rewrites the Memory
On the re-interment of Mary, in the Chapel of Henry VII, a very splendid monument was erected to her memory ; which Walpole informs us,* cost, together with the monument of Queen Elizabeth and King James’s daughters, the Princesses Mary and Sophia, Three Thousand Five Hundred pounds Of these, Queen Elizabeth’s Monument, alone, cost £965 besides the stone ; and it is presumed that Mary’s was not less, but rather more expensive. Pitcairne, Robert, ed. The Funeral of Mary, Queen of Scots: A Collection of Curious Tracts Relating to the Burial of This Unfortunate Princess. Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1890.
In 1603, James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Within a decade, he turned back to his mother’s burial. Pitcairne’s collection preserves the letters and records of the translation: James ordered Mary’s body to be taken up from Peterborough and moved to Westminster Abbey, into the Lady Chapel of Henry VII, where he had already honoured Elizabeth I.
James insisted that his mother’s body and monument shouldn’t be separated, and arranged for the rich pall that covered her hearse at Peterborough to be redeemed and reused.
The translation itself was a second funeral, a royal re‑staging of Mary’s memory. Her coffin was carried under episcopal supervision from Peterborough to London, then laid in a new vault in the Abbey. There, James commissioned a grand monument: Mary recumbent, crowned, robed, with Latin inscriptions proclaiming her royal descent, her constancy, and the injustice of her death.
The epitaphs emphasise her claim to the English crown, her triple identity as queen of Scots, queen of France, and rightful heir to England, and her endurance in faith. This wasn’t just filial piety. It was dynastic politics, the politics of the entire Guise family, written in stone.
The contrast with Peterborough is stark. In 1587, Mary was buried under Protestant oversight, with Catholic traces clinging to the ceremony. In 1612, she was re‑buried as a fully acknowledged queen, placed among England’s monarchs, her story reframed as one of royal suffering and eventual vindication.
The two burials together show how funerary ritual can be used first to contain a dangerous memory, then to reclaim it for a new political order.
The cost of the funeral was just over £320 or £152,000 in 2026
Lord Darnley: Quiet Vault, Loud Monument
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband and father of James VI and I, died violently in 1567. His burial at Holyrood Abbey was comparatively muted. He was laid in the royal vault, alongside James V and, according to some accounts, David Rizzio.
Holyrood’s vault, damaged and rediscovered over the centuries, is one of the most fragile sites of Stuart memory, where bones, rubble and restoration all sit together.
Darnley’s mother, Margaret Douglas, refused to let his death fade. She commissioned a monument in Westminster Abbey with a kneeling figure of Darnley in armour, crowned, hands raised in perpetual petition. It is a sculpted indictment, a dynastic protest against his murder and the political wrongs the Lennox family believed they had suffered. Where Mary’s Westminster monument seeks to reconcile and elevate, Darnley’s demands justice and remembrance.
Holyrood and Peterborough: Two Ends of Stuart Funerary Politics
Taken together, Mary’s two burials and Darnley’s vault show how deeply the Stuarts understood the political uses of death.
Peterborough’s torchlit funeral, with its widows, velvet, bays and uneasy mix of Catholic and Protestant elements, tried to close a chapter. Westminster’s monuments reopened it, rewriting both Mary and Darnley as central figures in a legitimised Stuart story. Holyrood’s damaged vault, meanwhile, reminds us how vulnerable royal memory can be when the material fabric of burial sites is left to ruin.
Last of the Stuarts; Cardinal; entombed with father and brother
Holyrood Abbey’s royal vault stands as one of the most fragile yet revealing sites of Stuart memory, a place where ceremony, destruction, rediscovery, and restoration converge.
Mes remerciements à Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) pour avoir mis ces images du domaine public à disposition. Leur engagement en faveur de la préservation et du partage des collections historiques enrichit un travail comme celui‑ci. – My thanks to Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) for making these public‑domain images available. Their commitment to preserving and sharing historical collections enriches work like this
