Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (210 page)

AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

It has been said that "the Age of Kings" Henry VIII, Francis I, and the
Emperor Charles V was followed by "the Age of Queens": Elizabeth I the
Virgin Queen, Catherine de Medicis of France and Mary Queen of Scots.
Certainly the second half of the sixteenth century saw an unusual
number of female rulers, if one remembers that before Elizabeth I there
reigned Mary I ("Bloody Mary") and before Mary Queen of Scots, her
mother Marie de Guise served as Regent of Scotland. John Knox, in his
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,
argued that it was unnatural to have a female as head of a realm. He
was a sworn enemy of Mary Stuart, queen of his own country, seeming to
dislike her personally as well as on principle.

Of these rulers, it is Mary Queen of Scots who seems most elusive
today. Opinions of her varied violently in her own day, and four
centuries have done very little to reconcile the opposing views. Was
she the depraved Jezebel of Knox's imagination, steeped in lust and
folly? Or was she the long-suffering, tolerant goddess of her
partisans?

In order to try to answer these questions, I have had to build up a
composite picture of Mary as a person, much as modern reconnaissance
missions use computer-enhanced and overlapping photographs to map
surfaces. I have not felt it necessary to exclude any material, for
some things cancel each other out. Gradually a coherent picture does
begin to emerge, of a woman who is warmhearted, loyal, brave, generous,
and spirited, but also unable to read character, volatile, impulsive,
and better at quick action than at sustained strategy. She was clever
but not intellectually brilliant, had marked artistic and poetic
talent, and evidently had a great deal of charm and the ability to fit
into any setting, whether opulent as in France or simple, as in a
merchant's house in St. Andrews. She was not especially fond of
elaborate fashions and jewels, and had a boyish or warrior side to her.
Later in life, a mystical side emerged.

No book about Mary Queen of Scots can escape the controversial
questions of her life: 1. Was she really in love with James Hepburn,
the Earl of Bothwell, her third husband? 2. Who wrote the Casket
Letters? 3. Who planned Darnley's death? 4. Did Mary wish Elizabeth
to be assassinated?

On the answers to these four questions hang one's verdict of her
character.

It is my opinion that she indeed loved the Earl of Bothwell and married
him of her own free will. Her actions toward that end are too
determined for the truth to be otherwise, and I tend to believe that
she made the famous declaration that she "would go to the end of the
earth with him in a white petticoat." It is almost impossible to
believe that their liaison did not begin before Darnley's death but it
may just be that I wish to grant her some happiness, however brief.

As for the Casket Letters, when all the texts have been analysed and
re-analysed, the famous Second Casket Letter sounds so exactly like
what a distracted women, deeply in love but tormented about her
situation, would write, that I accept Mary as its author. That does
not rule out the possibility that other letters, from other women (we
know Bothwell had a romantic history), were added to Mary's, and even
some outright forgery may have taken place. The tone of the letters
varies widely, and some of them do not sound like Mary. Even in love,
Mary was never petty (although she may have been jealous or angry), and
certain of the letters sound catty and mean-spirited, which is out of
character. None of the originals remains, and thus we can never know
what tampering took place.

As for who killed Darnley, I have taken the position that although Mary
longed to be free of him, she did not actually authorize the murder.
There are different levels of knowing and at the deepest level she must
have "known" in some way what had happened, but she was not a conscious
murderess.

The question of Elizabeth is a thorny one. We know that Mary was
involved in four major plots during her imprisonment in England, and
although only the last one specifically called for Elizabeth's
assassination, it must have been implicit in all the others. How else
was Mary to become Queen, as her rescuers wished, unless Elizabeth were
dead? But the question of whether someone who is wrongfully imprisoned
has a moral right to attempt to escape by any means is one best left to
the theologians and ethical and legal scholars. In real life, someone
of Mary's impulsive and fiery spirit would have been untrue to her own
character had she not tried to extricate herself. She had a history of
spectacular escapes: from Holyrood Palace after the Riccio murder, from
Borthwick Castle, from Lochleven. Old habits especially successful
ones die hard. It was probably just this history that gave her hope
and kept her from seeing that her situation was fundamentally different
in England. She was never able to convert any of her gaolers into
accomplices as she had in Scotland. They were all loyal to Elizabeth.
I believe she focused on the "escape" aspect rather than the fate of
Elizabeth, because it was her nature to look to physical action and not
give deep thought to long-range consequences. By the time of the
Babington Plot, she was probably too demoralized to think very
clearly.

A few final notes: I took the liberty of blending a few characters to
avoid confusion. There were actually two French physicians, Monsieur
Lusgerie and Monsieur Bourgoing. But since Bourgoing was present at
her execution and wrote an account of it, I simply made him her
physician all the way through. There were also two Messieurs Naus, the
brothers Jacques and Claud, both of whom served as her secretaries in
sequence. And there were two Melville brothers, James and Robert, who
served as Mary's ambassadors.

I have used Antonia Eraser's distinction between the Scottish Stewarts
and the French branch of that family, the Stuarts. So when Mary
marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the spelling changes. Also, when
she lived in France, her name was spelled Stuart.

There are over two hundred characters in this novel mentioned by name,
and all of them are historic, with the exception of two minor
characters in the Scots Guard of archers in the French court, Patrick
Scott and Rob MacDonald. Likewise, there are over sixty poems, songs,
and letters quoted in the novel. All are geniune except Ronsard's Hymn
to the Moon, Darnley's poem about Hadrian's Wall, Mary and BothwelFs
letters to each other from gaol (although it is known that they wrote
to each other, no letters have survived), the letter from the dying
Lady Bothwell to Mary, and the specific wording of notes, from the
French ambassador in regards to Gifford, from Sir Christopher Hatton to
Elizabeth, and from Thomas Morgan to Mary. (Again, we know the notes
existed.)

I could not help making a few affectionate comments about my ancestors,
the Scott clan. (My father's first name is derived from his mother's
maiden name.) I was gratified to find that they indeed stayed loyal to
Mary to the end and so I am just following in the family tradition.

If you would like to read more, and form your own composite picture of
Mary, I can recommend the following biographies of Mary: the account in
Agnes Strickland's The Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English
Princesses, 8 volumes (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons,
1858), is invaluable for presenting the minutiae of Mary's life. This
Victorian account holds Mary blameless and near-perfect. Moving into
later times, T. F. Henderson in Mary Queen of Scots, Her Environment
and Tragedy, 2 volumes (New York, Haskell House: 1969 [reprint of 1905
edition]), has a more balanced and critical view. However, the period
of her stay in England is not well represented here; it is very short.
The leading modern biography, Antonia Eraser's Mary Queen of Scots (New
York: Delacorte, 1969), has been invaluable, and it covers every aspect
of her life.

In addition, there is a new biography written for the four-hundred-year
observance of her death, by Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen of Scots
(London: HMSO, 1987). Mary Stewart, Queen in Three Kingdoms, edited by
Michael Lynch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd." 1988), includes detailed
scholarly essays on such subjects as Mary's library and her dowager
estate income. There is a "psychobiography" by Stefan Zweig, The Queen
of Scots (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd." 1935). Martin Hume wrote
The Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Eveleigh Nash &
Grayson, Ltd.). For an analysis of the different schools of thought
about Mary's character, see Alastair Cherry, Princes, Poets, and
Patrons: The Stuarts of Scotland (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1987).

If you are curious to know what Mary looked like, the Scottish National
Portrait Gallery had an exhibition of authentic portraits and
engravings, as well as the later historical paintings. The catalogue,
The Queen's Image, by Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomson (Edinburgh:
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), reproduces these and
analyses them.

Another book put out in honour of the quadricentenary is David J.
Breeze, The Queen's Progress, (London: HMSO, 1987), which depicts all
the buildings associated with Mary. Also, David and Judy Steele's Mary
Stuart's Scotland (New York: Harmony Books, 1987), shows the landscapes
and people of Mary's environment.

Books about the Casket Letters and the Darnley murder abound. The
earliest, Walter Good all, An Examination of the Letters said to be
written by Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl ofBothwell, also, an
Inquiry into the Murder of King Henry (Edinburgh: T.&W. Ruddimans,
1754), painstakingly tries to construct a case absolving Mary. T. F.
Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Adam
and Charles Black, 1890), is more even-handed. R. H. Mahon constructed
a model of Kirk O'Field in an attempt to discover exactly what
happened. It was he who first proposed the theory that Darnley himself
had put the powder there. For every known detail of the event, Mahon's
The Tragedy of Kirk O'Field (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1930), is required reading.

Other books important for understanding her years in Scotland are:
Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London: Collins, 1937); Frank A.
Mumby, The Fall of Mary Stuart (London: Constable and Co." 1921);
Jasper Ridley, John Knox (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,
1968); John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland (New York:
Philosophical Library, Inc." 1950); Martin A. Breslow, The Political
Writings of John Knox (Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, 1985); Gordon
Donaldson, All the Queen's Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart's
Scotland (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd." 1983);
George MacDonald Eraser, The Steel Bonnets (London: Collins Harvill,
1989).

Once Mary gets to England, the cast of characters changes. See Conyers
Read's Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape,
1955); Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (Jonathan Cape, 1960); Mr.
Secretary Walsingham, 3 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Archon
Books, 1967 [reprint of 1925 edition]) to understand Mary's political
adversaries. Read Alison Plowden's Danger to Elizabeth (London:
Macmillan, 1973), and Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stewart, Two Queens in
One Isle (Barnes &. Noble, 1984), to understand the stage upon which
Mary and Elizabeth were placed by fate. Gordon Donaldson's The First
Trial of Mary Queen of Scots (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd." 1969)
examines the forerunner of the final trial eighteen years later. For a
succinct and elegant biography of the Virgin Queen, see J. E. Neale,
Queen Elizabeth I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), still the definitive
one.