The weeks fly past. Elizabeth will not sign the death-warrant, but has a letter written to Poulett in which she roundly complains of his want of love and zeal for not having found some way to shorten the life of the Scottish Queen. The letter reaches Sir Amyas at five in the evening, and before an hour has passed he has written the letter, which you may see to this day, to say in hot haste, “God forbid that I should make so fowle a shipwracke of my conscience or leave so great a blot to my poor posteritie to shed blood without law or warrant.” Sir Amyas had to put up with Elizabeth’s angry pacings to and fro, and her words that he was “a dainty and precise fellow who would promise much and perform nothing,” but her later letters to him suggest that in the end she was not sorry that the rough honest man had stood like a rock.
It must have shaken most men’s fortitude to witness the terrible scene when Queen Mary knelt in the hall at Fotheringay and recited the penitential psalms in Latin and English in deep tones that sounded above the Puritan prayers of the men who refused her the last sacraments of her church and met to see her die. When the last moment came, she knelt calmly by the block among her black-robed executioners, herself clothed in blood-red from head to foot, and never flinched when the blow swerved and fell a second time.
In any case Sir Amyas only lived eighteen months after the Queen’s execution, and died soon after his return from the negotiations at Ostend for peace with Spain. Perhaps he endured hardships in that devastated Netherland country, where partridges were plentiful because the tilled land had become a wilderness. In any case the negotiations did not avert the Spanish Armada, and Sir Amyas died in September, 1588, a month after it had perished. He must have breathed more freely when the waves closed over the Spanish galleons, for in Queen Mary’s last letter to the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, she had bidden him tell King Philip not to forget how she had been used by certain men, and among their names was that of Sir Amyas Poulett.
Beneath the recumbent figure there is a curious French epitaph to this quondam Governor of Jersey, in which are some touching lines—
“Non, non, je ne croy pas qu’un si petit de Terre
Couvre tant de Virtus, ait esteint tant d’Honneur,
Que ce preux Chavalier, ce renommé Seigneur,
Avoit acquis en Paix, avoit acquis en Guerre.”
His widow Margaret contributed a loving Latin epitaph, which may have been composed by herself in this age when Latin was no uncommon accomplishment for a lady. Queen Elizabeth puts her royal initials above a verse on the right hand of the figure—
“Never shall cease to spread wise Poulet’s fame,