Mary Quite Contrary

...that she wished to get rid of Darnley through the legitimate channels of annullment...

...since certain questions will never be resolved, the historian is free to make his own reconstruction based on existing evidence...

...Indeed, her former brother-in-law, Charles IX of France, predicted in 1572, "Ah, the poor fool will never cease until she loses her head...

...Before her death she told her captors, "Remember that the theater of the world is wider than the realm of England...

...How anyone regards Mary is largely a matter of temperament...

...In addition, the biographer occasionally abandons the firm ground of historical evidence for the quicksands of literary speculation...

...Donaldson does not analyze the Casket controversy, on the grounds that if this material had been considered reliable it would have been given first importance at the trial...

...Their reconstructions do much to rehabilitate Mary's reputation, without making her any less compelling than she was when it was the fashion to designate her a scarlet woman...

...While Donaldson's Queen of Scots is not so romantic and innocent as Lady Fraser's, the two historians agree on essentials...

...It is possible, of course, that her first marriage was never consummated, and Darnley, in any case, was infinitely more attractive than the sickly Francis...

...Thus, husband and wife began plotting against each other...

...Indeed, the subject has the perfect ingredients of a thriller: mystery, murder, illicit passions, political intrigue, and religious conflict—all involving the royalty of four countries, and culminating in the execution of one queen by another...

...It concentrates only on Mary's English trial for the murder of Darnley...

...Most Protestant countries, on the other hand, were more inclined to consider her an adulteress and murderer, involved in popish schemes to unseat Elizabeth of England...

...In order to assure her position in Scotland, it was necessary for her to secure a husband and produce an heir...

...But the union proved unwise in other respects...

...In recent months, two books on Mary have been published, and one of them, by Antonia Fraser, shows every sign of being firmly established high on the best-seller list...

...Soon, however, she resigned herself and returned to a land which, though hers, was alien in religion and ruled by a regent, her illegitimate half-brother James, Earl of Moray...

...Others claim that she was the Earl's friend, but not his mistress at least until after the murder, and did not know of his involvement in the plot...

...Six years later, she left her native country for France, where she was raised by her maternal relatives, the powerful Guise family, and groomed for her future role as queen of two, and perhaps three, kingdoms...

...Gordon Donaldson's The First Trial of Mary Queen of Scots is as narrow in scope as Lady Fraser's book is wide...

...But he is inclined to believe in the Queen's adultery with Bothwell, and feels she brought about her second trial, for the Babington Plot, through her senseless intriguing...

...One night, Kirk O' Field, the house where Darnley was recovering from an illness, exploded and the king was found strangled in the garden...

...When Mary's ambassador, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, accused his mistress of poisoning her first husband, killing her second, and plotting the murder of her third, an Englishman commented, "Lord, what people are these, what a queen and what an ambassador...

...The ac-cusor was Moray, once again Scotland's regent, and Elizabeth was trying to decide between an alliance with either the Protestant government of Scotland or her royal cousin...

...biography to take into account recent historical opinion...

...The marriage, it has generally been assumed, was based on political expediency...

...Recent scholarship, according to Lady Fraser, regards the collection as a pastiche of letters, some by Mary to a variety of correspondents, some by other women to Bothwell, together with forgeries, all arranged to serve as evidence against the Queen...

...There is a tendency to rationalize and absolve Mary of her mistakes, which somewhat weakens the general portrait...

...To this day, the circumstances of the incident are mysterious, and since the Earl of Bothwell (who was certainly Mary's confidant, and perhaps her lover) was one of the major conspirators, the question of the Queen's own guilt is raised...

...and that she herself may have been an intended victim of the explosion, because she had earlier planned to spend the night in the house with her husband...

...Of all her prophecies it proved most true, since her tragedy is still played today...

...Nevertheless, she admits that innocent or not, Mary's subsequent marriage to Bothwell confirmed her guilt in the eyes of much of the world...

...Donaldson agrees with Lady Fraser that Mary was innocent of Darnley's murder, and further suspects Moray of being the prime instigator of the explosion...

...Mary Queen of Scots is not a flawless book...

...In her own day, she was first a heroine, then a martyr in the eyes of Catholic Europe and the Scottish kinsmen who supported her cause...

...Protestants rejoiced at the punishment of the papist whore...

...In the following centuries, opinion has shifted violently back and forth, from one position to the other...

...Mary was such a figure, and her own mistakes resulted not in the royal friendship and support she sought, but in imprisonment in a foreign country and the headsman's ax...

...Yet Lady Fraser, in a radical and ultimately convincing reevaluation, argues that Mary was genuinely in love with the handsome and charming Darnley, and was certainly not acting in her own best interests when she married him without waiting for either Elizabeth's approval or a papal dispensation, or when she had him proclaimed King Henry against the wishes of the Scottish nobles...

...But these faults are far outweighed by considerable virtues, and the combination of sound historical research and original ideas have made Lady Fraser's study deservedly popular...

...Mary's choice of her cousin Henry, Lord Darnley, helped solidify her English claim, because both of them were next in line to the throne should Elizabeth die or be deposed...

...The question was a political one?should she or should she not be restored to her throne...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Almost 400 years have passed since the death of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, sometime Queen of France, pretender to the throne of England, but the events surrounding her life continue to fascinate both professional and amateur historians...

...An epigraph from Tolstoy, "A king is history's slave," sets the tone for a portrait of a much-wronged woman, whose charm and generosity were no match for her own errors of judgment or the complex political circumstances with which she was faced...

...Neither Moray nor Mary was convicted, though, allowing the regent to return to Scotland while the Queen remained imprisoned...

...Lady Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots is a sympathetic treatment bordering on the reverential, as well as the first genera...

...The Queen had been only 20 when she returned from France, and was well under 30 when she fled from a Scottish prison to an English one, where she remained for the next 20 years until her execution in 1587 on the charge of treason against Elizabeth...

...In the author's words: "The question of punishing Mary as a criminal, should she be found guilty, was never seriously faced, and the possibility of setting her at liberty unconditionally should she be found innocent was, equally, never entertained...

...This seems to result from an empathy so great as to result at times in a personal identification (a suggestion borne out by Lady Fraser's recent appearance as Mary at the 200th Anniversary banquet at Madame Tussaud's...

...For, as Aristotle tells us, the best tragedies depict a hero, not wholly good or bad, who falls from a high station...

...The 16th century saw an abundance of child kings, and Mary became titular ruler of Scotland when she was six days old...

...For she was soon betrothed to the dauphin of France, Francis II, and was also in the English line of succession...

...Even after Francis' untimely death at 16, she tried to avoid going back to Scotland by seeking an alliance with another European prince...

...The sordid testimony against an anointed monarch made the English very uneasy, and Scottish duplicity disgusted them...

...The second view is Lady Fraser's, who is nothing if not charitable toward her subject...

...The principal evidence brought against Mary was contained in The Book of Articles, a series of charges spanning the time from her turning against Darnley to the alleged discovery of the Casket Letters?Mary's purported correspondence with Bothwell, confessing her complicity in the murder and her involvement with the Earl...

...Even Mary's son...

...He was also weak and treacherous, though, and when he and his friends murdered the Queen's secretary, David Riz-zio, in her presence, Mary believed that their intention had been to cause her to miscarry and die...

...Until the birth of Prince James, Darn-ley's presence was necessary to legitimize the child, but afterward it was known that Mary wanted to be free of him...

...She claims, for instance, that the mermaid on a dolphin's back mentioned in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a reference to the Scottish Queen's powers of enchantment...

...Opinion has ranged from complete complicity to relative innocence...

...Some historians assert that she was carrying Bothwell's child at the time, and having asked her lover to murder her husband, had lured Darnley to the house...

...James VI, was not much disturbed, certainly not enough to endanger his favorable relations with England and his position as Elizabeth's presumptive heir...