To find her you have to walk the whole length of Westminster Abbey. Do not linger over the baroque memorials to dead English soldiers, sailors and statesmen, but carry on to the high altar and beyond. Hidden behind it is a chapel added to the far end of the nave by King Henry VII of England once all the rest of the church had been completed, about the turn of the 16th century. And just inside there, on the right-hand side, is the tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Last week The Sunday Times revealed that nationalist MSP Christine Grahame was leading a campaign to have Mary dislodged from her final resting place and repatriated. In a motion to be put before the Scottish parliament, Grahame claims that the Catholic monarch’s remains should be buried in Scotland.

But why? She appears to me to be a singularly ill-chosen figure for the new Scotland to champion. During her life she was always a force for division and discord. When she arrived back in Scotland in 1561 after her exile in France there was genuine rejoicing in the streets of her capital. When she returned in 1567, a prisoner of rebellious nobles, the people called her a trollop and a whore.

Even in death she was a contentious figure. Her tomb is the most impressive monument in Westminster’s national gallery of funereal art — translucent marble under an ornate canopy. An effigy of Mary lies there wearing a close-fitting coif round her head and a laced ruff round the tough Stewart’s neck that it took the axeman three chops to get through on her scaffold in Fotheringhay Castle. The realism continues with a long mantle fastened by a brooch over her body but comes to a halt with the Scottish lion crowned at her feet.

Why did the English erect such a magnificent shrine to a Queen of Scots they killed? The answer starts to emerge if you look to the left-hand side of the chapel, to the tomb of Elizabeth, the Queen of England who ordered the judicial murder of her plotting cousin. Both tombs were erected on the orders of James VI of Scotland who became King James I of England at the Union of Crowns in 1603. He was the successor of Elizabeth but the son of Mary. Young James, 20 years old, would do nothing to annoy Elizabeth, aged 54 and not wearing well, whose throne he wanted to inherit. He bit his lip and settled for the sort of shifty Scottish compromise the English would learn to mock: he made an almighty fuss but did nothing else after his mother’s head rolled. Instead he waited till he was wearing the crowns of both kingdoms — and then he gave Mary a more sumptuous memorial than Elizabeth. The Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey is the product of a bad conscience.

“The past is a different country; they do things differently there,” LP Hartley wrote as the first line of The Go-Between. Today we travel to obscure countries where it would be hard to learn the language even if we wanted. But the natives can still make themselves understood, as a last resort through mime, gesture and goodwill.

We respond if we are courteous visitors, though the red-faced louts among us might bawl back in our own language. Courtesy is preferable, and the same courtesy might even help us to travel in time as well as space. Those few people in the past lucky enough to have left anything behind them were often trying to tell us something. The least we can do is seek to understand their messages, rather than shout them down with our own.

That is why we should leave Mary, Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey.

She hated her people as much as they grew to hate her. Spirited away to escape an English invasion while still a baby, she had been brought up in a French court that was the most brilliant in Europe — indeed she became Queen of France for a year or so before her imbecile husband the King died on her. Having no doubt looked forward to a life of ease and comfort, frivolous but enchanting, she was suddenly faced with return to a native country she knew not at all, except in its justified reputation for poverty and feud. And that had been before John Knox gave it its comforting religion.

Before leaving France, Mary tried desperately to find a new husband — Englishman, Spaniard, anybody — who could avert this horrible Scottish fate and carry her off somewhere else. But there were no takers for a 19-year-old widow. Forced home, she spent a good deal of effort over the next few years trying to get away again.

Mary should have just settled down and tried to be a good Queen of Scots, rather than taking on a far cleverer rival. But her dislike of the land of her fathers ran too deep. So she set off on the disastrous course that led to her own doom. At least she rests in the country where she most wanted to be, in England.

That is one of the messages of her being in Westminster Abbey. The Stewarts were in England to stay – or at least till the English chucked them out a century later.

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