Margaret part 2

["Spirit One Email" <laurel@spiritone.com>]

I have been bothered all day by the statement I sent you. " Nevertheless one
of his (King Henry III) pursuits was to build memorials , the greatest of
which was the new Westminster Abbey to house the shrine of his favourite
saint, Edward the Confessor.
   It stuck in my mind that Edward the Confessor had built that Abbey.  The
encyclopedia says "Edward the Confessor built a church on the site of the
Abbey between about 1042 and 1065. But the main part of the Abbey was begun
in 1245 by Henry III.  He made the Abbey one of the best examples of French
Gothic architecture in England....In the 1500's, Henry VII added the chapel
that bears his name.  The towers were completed in 1740."   Probably all you
world travelers knew that all ready.

  ==========
The country had been offically Protestant for one year.   John was a
principal leader of the movement.  He was also married to a Sinclair woman,
I believe Niven said.
On Mary Queen of Scots first Sunday ( August 24, 1561)  in Scotland, a crowd
of Protestants gathered outside her prive royal chapel at Holyrood and
shouted threats of murder against her priest, terrorized the servant
carrying the altar candles and took some of the altar ornaments.  They
didn't actually get into the chapel but the Mass was conducted in a state of
tension and mortal fear.  Mary had been assured that she could practice her
religeon in a quiet, private manner without any problems but that was not to
be the case.

If Mary Queen of Scots took possession of Margaret's head, it must have been
because she feared descecration of her body by the Reformationists.  In
earlier pre-reformationist times she could have visited the shrine any time
but now most likely it was threatened with distruction.   If she took the
head to protect Margaret's memory, I would have expected the people to have
destroyed the rest of Margaret and the shrine anyway.   It seems to me
improbable that given the explosive and fanatic atmosphere that Knox whipped
up, that the rest of her would have escaped????  But who knows, maybe it did
and was sent to Douai, France then was destroyed in the French Revolution???

    We are told that the rest of her body and that of Malcolm's were
acquired by Philip II of Spain (1556-1621) whose second wife was Queen Mary
I of England (1553-1558)   She was the Catholic half sister of the future
Queen Elizabeth I.  So Queen Mary of England had died 3 years before Mary of
Scotland returned to rule Scotland.  During her reign in England many
Protestents were burned at the stake for heresies, such was the religious
fervor there also.  England and Spain went to war against France but ended
up loosing Calais, England's very last French possession.   Note:  when Mary
died her heart and bowels were buried but her corpse was put in Westminster
Abby.   Another example of the dividing of the royal corpses.  Philippe
would have been open to aiding Mary of Scotland's desire to protect Margaret
and Malcolm's remains.  At one point there was talk of the widowed Mary of
Scotland marrying some relative of  Philippe's.

I was thinking now of our William and John St. Clair, and James Douglas who
died in Spain, so far from home.   Their bodies were boiled so the flesh
fell off.  That part of them was buried in Spain.  The bones then were taken
back for burial in Scotland.   This train of thought must be post-Halloween
goulishness.

>From all of this we can only conclude that there were enough motives and
opportunity for these events to have happened plus plenty of examples of how
parts of bodies were moved around.
Laurel









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