Mary, Queen of Scots – an accidental tragedy
19 Mar
Mary, Queen of Scots, after Clouet, c1560. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London.
I really don’t know what I think about Mary, Queen of Scots as on one hand, I deeply appreciate the desperate and tragic romance of her life but on the other, well, I just can’t help thinking of her as a ridiculous and weak minded incompetent who wasted every opportunity given to her. However, to be fair to poor old Mary Stuart, it’s pretty hard to live up to all the obvious comparisons to her cousin, Elizabeth I and I think we’d all flounder if we were expected to measure up to Gloriana herself.
Crikey, just imagine it. Let’s face it, it’d be pretty darn hard NOT to look somewhat intellectually challenged if your nearest peer is Elizabeth Tudor so perhaps we should cut Mary, Queen of Scots SOME slack here as I’m sure most of us would cope just as badly with the obstacles that cruel fate (and it does seem to have bestowed with one hand and taken away with the other) put in her silk shod way.
That aside, most contemporary books that deal with Mary Stuart give themselves over to barely disguised panegyrics, emphasising her feminine charms and minimising the essential incompetence and stubborn minded foggy thinking that led to her downfall. Erm, okay, I’m really not that much of a fan am I? Which is probably why I was so pleased to recently read two books that also view Mary in a rather negative light and make no attempt to cover up her antics with a rosy tinted cloud of romance and girlish exuberance.
The first was Roderick Graham’s biography An Accidental Tragedy: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots
Whereas Antonia Fraser clearly had a whopping great girl crush on Mary when she was writing her biography about her, Roderick Graham appears entirely impervious to her charms and instead gives the reader a warts and all portrayal of a woman who was capable of both inspiring intense loyalty from those close to her and also carelessly creating huge rifts between herself and people she should have been trying to get on side. While Fraser focusses on the ways that Mary, with all of her famed beauty and charm, fit into the glittering pantheon of strong and rather glamorous mid sixteenth century women rulers (both official and unofficial), Graham instead constantly reiterates all the ways that she didn’t live up to their standards, even going so far at various times as to point out just how Elizabeth I, Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’ Medici would have behaved in the exact same situation that Mary managed to royally mess up, mainly by placing too much reliance on her looks and personal charms rather than the essential ruthlessness and cold, hard headed logic that her contemporaries were so skilled in utilising. He notes that ‘When cornered in debate she always referred to her parentage and royal descent. No political or theological lessons had been learned from her Guise uncles, the careful tutelage of Diane de Poitiers in female guile was forgotten and the court diplomacy of Catherine de Medici was ignored.‘
The ultimate result is an extremely readable and fascinating biography that lays Mary Stuart bare as both a woman and a queen with all of her flaws, foibles and fascinations and also the victim of her own passive inability to effectively cope with events that swiftly moved out of her control.
However, as Roderick Graham points out at the end of his book, Mary had a huge fan in her descendant Queen Victoria, who was completely in love with her romantic and tragic Stuart ancestry and who even unsuccessfully petitioned Pope Leo XIII in 1887 to have Mary canonised, noting at the time that she was glad to be descended from Mary and ‘thankful she had no connection with Queen Elizabeth‘.
The other book was the novel The Flower Reader
The Flower Reader is set in the early years of Mary Queen of Scots’ return to Scotland as the widowed Queen of France and is a breathless and genuinely gripping account of a young half French heiress’ (who is Mary’s cousin and sometime childhood nemesis albeit in a wrong side of blanket way) attempt to get justice for her murdered husband, protect the silver casket which is the final legacy of Marie de Guise for her daughter and also navigate the distinctly brutal and choppy seas of the young Queen’s court. As usual I don’t want to give anything away, especially as this is something of a whodunit, but Loupas handles it with incredible skill while at the same time creating an unforgettable and vibrant world redolent of both luxury and terrible danger.
The brilliant depiction of Mary, Queen of Scots in The Flower Reader is really interesting as Loupas veers completely clear of the more usual skittish, charming girl queen trope and instead creates a wilful, spoiled, malicious little monster with a careless disregard for everyone and everything but her own whims and desires and very few redeeming qualities. I must admit that I revelled in this spiteful, shrewish, heartless but dazzlingly beauteous version of Mary, lounging pouting and petulant on her throne like Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland and giving her formidable cousin Elizabeth a definite run for her money in the ‘getting jealous of male courtiers giving attention to anyone other than herself’ stakes. It was quite astounding and also rather glorious.
I wouldn’t recommend The Flower Reader to the more hardcore Mary, Queen of Scots fan girls out there as they almost certainly wouldn’t enjoy the way their heroine is depicted but if you fancy a refreshing and highly entertaining look at a much covered theme then this may very well be your cup of whisky.
"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is." - Anne of Green Gables.
I grew up with Antonia Fraser’s chunky biography of Mary, so was completely biased in her favour, not giving any credit to Elizabeth. Later on, however, I did begin to see what a weak, vain, foolish woman she was. Her great tragedy was, as you describe it: that she wasted every opportunity given to her. And was too willing to believe all those around her who had their own hidden agendas, their own thirst for power etc. Look forward to reading this biography, which seems to present a more complex, rounded picture of the woman and the monarch.
Same here – I grew up with the Fraser book as well as my grandmother was a HUGE fan of it and believed the whole Mary as Sainted Gentle Martyr schtick for quite a long time until I wised up.
You can imagine my joy when one of the questions in my History A Level exam was along the lines of ‘How did Mary Queen of Scots personal life affect her ability to rule?’ Brilliant. I set to work on that one with a VENGEANCE.
THIS!
I’m glad to see someone else who’s a bit skeptical of Mary. Although I imagine I’m more biased than most, as I remember being shunned by my peers in my Scottish school for wanting to learn about Elizabeth and not only Mary Queen of Scots. At the risk of sounding a bit too unkind, Mary couldn’t rule herself out of a paper bag – she would’ve had to wait for Lord Somebody to come and get her.
I liked your little bit about Queen Victoria and I’m interested in finding out more about how the romantic Victorian view of Mary became the norm.
Oh I totally appreciate that – I went to primary school in Scotland and was shunned and horribly bullied for being ‘too English’. The history lessons we had were LAUGHABLE in their bias and wilful ignorance of actual facts. It was dreadful.
I have a fascinating book in my collection about the myths that have grown around Mary, Queen of Scots:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mary-Queen-Scots-Romance-Nation/dp/0415114810/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1363699446&sr=8-2.
Sometimes I do feel some pity for Mary. Yes, she made some horrible decisions when it came to men, but she was also more or less played by the Catholic Church. The Church had basically taken a hit out on Elizabeth and was feeding Mary a whole cock-and-bull story about how she was the true Queen of England because she was part of the true Church, and Elizabeth had to go because she was a heathen and all that. I think she honestly believed all this, and they found the letters planning the overthrow of Elizabeth in her quarters, and judging by her past behavior, she would be thoughtless enough not to burn them.
I’m also inclined to believe that she may have also been a victim of abuse of some kind at least by Darnley, if not also by Bothwell, and that may explain some of her behavior in the days leading to and after Darnley’s murder. I just find the differences between Mary and Elizabeth to be very striking: Elizabeth was ready to take authority and understood that it was a serious thing, while Mary wasn’t so ready for it and thought it was going to be a joyride in which she got final say in everything. Which of course wasn’t the case.
I had a history teacher in high school, Sister Mary Elizabeth, who used to tell us that Mary, Queen of Scots would have been better off as a housewife than a Queen. I admit that I was a tad offended back then because I bought into the whole romantic image of Mary. However, I wonder if any woman would have been a successful Queen of Scotland. Margaret Tudor seems to have had all kinds of problems when she was regent for James V.
Thanks for these reviews. I have “The Flower Reader” but have not gotten to it yet; noteworthy that the UK cover is so different from the US cover, which I see in your Goodreads list. As a Mary fan, I’m glad to go into it forwarned! I think the comments here about Fraser’s treatment of Mary are interesting, though, and I must admit that her biography WAS my first encounter with Mary!
Complicating matters for my pro-Mary stance is that, while I really respect Elizabeth’s intellectual capacity and even can see how Mary’s execution was NOT merely a heartless woman’s whim…I came by English history after Irish history, and Elizabeth’s actions towards Ireland still makes me queasy (although, again, in her place, I see WHY Elizabeth did what she did). Mary is unstained by all that baggage; ditto Anne Boleyn. (Though, had Anne not fallen from favor, and had she lived longer, one wonders how SHE would have felt about Catholic Ireland!)
Not to mention the fact that, I think I like Mary because I could have easily made the mistakes she made. I’d be a crap ruler, even today. So I am sympathetic to Mary. At least she got the fame of heroic martyrdom in the end. It appeals to the/my Celtic imagination.
INTERESTING details on Victoria too. I think I will get the Graham book as well. I have Weir’s book on the Darnley murder but have not taken on a Mary biography since John Guy’s “The True Life of Mary Stuart.”
FYI I just purchased the Mary Queen of Scots bio by Graham. Thanks for the recommendation!