Her prayers being ended, the executioners, kneeling, desired her Grace to
forgive them her death: who answered, 'I forgive you with all my heart, for
now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.' Then they, with her
two women, helping her up, began to disrobe her of her apparel: then she,
laying her crucifix upon the stool, one of the executioners took from her
neck the Agnus Dei, which she, laying hands off it, gave to one of her
women, and told the executioner he should be answered money for it. Then
she suffered them, with her two women, to disrobe her of her chain of
pomander beads and all other her apparel most willingly, and with joy
rather than sorrow, helped to make unready herself, putting on a pair of
sleeves with her own hands which they had pulled off, and that with some
haste, as if she had longed to be gone.
All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her
countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words, 'that she
never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her
clothes before such a company'.
Then she, being stripped of all her apparel saving her petticoat and
kirtle, her two women beholding her made great lamentation, and crying and
crossing themselves prayed in Latin. She, turning herself to them,
embracing them, said these words in French, 'Ne crie vous, j'ay prome pour
vous', and so crossing and kissing them, bad them pray for her and rejoice
and not weep, for that now they should see an end of all their mistress's
troubles.
Then she, with a smiling countenance, turning to her men servants, as
Melvin and the rest, standing upon a bench nigh the scaffold, who sometime
weeping, sometime crying out aloud, and continually crossing themselves,
prayed in Latin, crossing them with her hand bade them farewell, and
wishing them to pray for her even until the last hour.
This done, one of the women having a Corpus Christi cloth lapped up
three-corner-ways, kissing it, put it over the Queen of Scots' face, and
pinned it fast to the caule of her head. Then the two women departed from
her, and she kneeling down upon the cushion most resolutely, and without
any token or fear of death, she spake aloud this Psalm in Latin, In Te
Domine confido, non confundar in eternam, etc. Then, groping for the block,
she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both her
hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been
espied. Then lying upon the block most quietly, and stretching out her arms
cried, In manus tuas, Domine, etc., three or four times. Then she, lying
very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly
with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner
with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring
any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut
off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift
up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade God save the Queen.
Then, her dress of lawn falling from off her head, it appeared as grey as
one of threescore and ten years old, polled very short, her face in a
moment being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as
few could remember her by her dead face. Her lips stirred up and down a
quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
Then Mr Dean [Dr. Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough] said with a loud voice,
'So perish all the Queen's enemies', and afterwards the Earl of Kent came
to the dead body, and standing over it, with a loud voice said, 'Such end
of all the Queen's and the Gospel's enemies.' Then one of the executioners,
pulling off her garters, espied her little dog which was crept under her
clothes, which could not be gotten forth but by force, yet afterward would
not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay between her head and her
shoulders, which being imbrued with her blood was carried away and washed,
as all things else were that had any blood was either burned or washed
clean, and the executioners sent away with money for their fees, not having
any one thing that belonged unto her. And so, every man being commanded out
of the hall, except the sheriff and his men, she was carried by them up
into a great chamber lying ready for the surgeons to embalm her.