“A new and unexampled kindof tomb”

Separated from the Queen of Scots in infancy, Mary’s son James could not possibly have remembered his mother. Yet he often seemed haunted by her memory. The Venetian diplomat Giovanni Scaramelli observed that after his accession to the English throne James never “le[t] a day pass without lamenting that his mother’s head fell, at the third stroke, by a villainous deed, till those who, even by relationship, are stained with that blood grow fearful […] lest their end be a bloody one.” ¹ Scaramelli’s English contemporary Sir John Harington concurred that “the Queen his mother was not forgotten.” ² While such reports no doubt gratified their authors’ own desire for James’s mother to remain alive to him, the king certainly contributed to the impression that she had by ordering the most ostentatious representation of the Queen of Scots that survives from the seventeenth century—her monument at Westminster Abbey.