Into thine hand

from Biblical Scripture and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (L-E)

On the morning of the 8th February, 1587, following her long imprisonment in England, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was beheaded in the courtyard of Fotheringhay Castle. The event was overseen by Richard Fletcher, Dean of nearby Peterborough, whose Anglican prayers and calls on Mary to repent were soon drowned out by the Latin intonements of the devoutly Catholic Mary and her accompanying ladies-in-waiting.

Among other verses, they recited “In manus tuas, Domine” while assisting their queen to remove her robe, revealing a shocking blood-red undergarment. This was the theatre Mary had planned for in order to become a Catholic martyr for all time. She then laid her head on the block.

This highly dramatic scene, with its standoff of linguistic and religious mores, is the accompanying unseen staging behind “Into thine hand”, my choral work for 18 voices, commissioned by Suzi Digby and the ORA Singers. Initially referencing Thomas Tallis’s 1575 setting of “In manus tuas”, this piece adds a further temporal layer through the inclusion of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s touching 1889 poem of salvation, Crossing the Bar.
Brett Dean, 2026