forgive me all my sins."
_SMILING CHEER_
Her prayer 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 of her up, began to disrobe her of 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 criez vous; j'ay promis
pour vous;" and so crossing and kissing them, bade 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.
"_INTO THY HANDS_"
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 caul 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 eternum," &c. {Ps. xxv.}. 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," &c, three or
four times. Then she lying very still on the block, one of the
executioners holding of 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 grisle, which being cut asunder, he lifted up her head to the
view of all the assembly, and bade "God save the Queen." Then her
dressing of lawn falling off from 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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