THOUGH THIS BOOK enjoys the freedom of fiction, my purpose is to evoke a real person in her time. Who was Mary Queen of Scots? That question has perplexed me since childhood, and I am not alone. So I ask forgiveness if
I have unwittingly trod on anyone else’s holy ground.
However, through researching and writing, I have come to distrust the conventional readings of Mary as either a deceitful adulteress or a pious martyr. Both are based on propaganda and deliberate distortions which have remained insidiously influential for centuries.
I acknowledge my debt to many historians and biographers while exculpating each and all from my end result. Of the older books
T.F. Henderson’s Mary Queen of Scots: Her Environment and Tragedy is exemplary in its commitment to primary sources, though I do not follow his judgements. Antonia Fraser’s biography, Mary Queen of Scots remains a good psychological guide. More recently John Guy’s My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots returns to the sources, particularly the English ones, to shed valuable new light on the evidence against Mary. Rosalind Marshall is one of the few biographers to take a serious look at the four Marys in her Mary Queen of Scots and her Women.
I also owe a debt in formative years to Fionn MacColla’s historical fiction. MacColla’s work is sadly an unfinished and still largely unrecognised project. To Robert Crawford, I owe an apology for quoting from his fine translations of George Buchanan’s Latin poetry and misattributing them to the Marys.
I hope he will take that as a roundabout compliment. The full translation of George Buchanan’s ‘Epithalamium’ can be read in Apollos of the North (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2006) edited by Robert Crawford. To Stewart Conn, I owe a huge thank you for much patient listening and acute observation.
I could not have tackled this work without my wife Alison’s generosity.
I apologise for organising a trip to modern day Reims before discovering that that the Abbey of St Pierre, along with Marie de Guise’s tomb, had been destroyed during the French Revolution. History goes on happening.