Wormald Mary, Queen of Scots

NOW A MAJOR NEW FILM
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-85790-350-1
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
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E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, has long been portrayed as one of history's romantically tragic figures. Devious, naïve, beautiful and sexually voracious, often highly principled, she secured the Scottish throne and bolstered the position of the Catholic Church in Scotland. Her plotting, including probable involvement in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, led to her flight from Scotland and imprisonment by her equally ambitious cousin and fellow queen, Elizabeth of England. Yet when Elizabeth ordered Mary's execution in 1587 it was an act of exasperated frustration rather than political wrath. Unlike biographies of Mary predating this work, this masterly study set out to show Mary as she really was - not a romantic heroine, but the ruler of a European kingdom with far greater economic and political importance than its size or location would indicate. Wormald also showed that Mary's downfall was not simply because of the 'crisis years' of 1565-7, but because of her way of dealing, or failing to deal, with the problems facing her as a renaissance monarch. She was tragic because she was born to supreme power but was wholly incapable of coping with its responsibilities. Her extraordinary story has become one of the most colourful and emotionally searing tales of western history, and it is here fully reconsidered by a leading specialist of the period. Jenny Wormald's beautifully written biography will appeal to students and general readers alike.

Jenny Wormald was one of the most influential Scottish historians of her generation. She taught history at Glasgow University for 20 years, and was then appointed to a fellowship in Modern History at St Hilda's College, Oxford, for a further 20 years. After retirement to Edinburgh she became an Honorary Fellow in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. She wrote a number of significant books and articles, including Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470-1625 (1981), 'James VI and I: Two Kings or One?' (1983) and 'Gunpowder, Treason and Scots' (1985).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wormald, Jenny

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

1587–1987

Mary Queen of Scots was born in the palace of Linlithgow on 7 or 8 December 1542. It is perhaps appropriate that even the date of the birth of a personality who still eludes us despite the myriad of books written about her is uncertain. She herself claimed the 8th, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and in this, if in nothing else, that most powerful of Protestant reformers, John Knox, agreed with her, while one of her staunchest supporters, the Catholic John Leslie, bishop of Ross, believed it was the earlier date. It does not much matter. Far more important was the fact that this baby girl, born two weeks after the defeat of a Scottish army by the English at Solway Moss, and at a time when her remarkable father James V was lying burnt out at the age of thirty in his glorious hunting-lodge at Falkland, was to be within a week of her birth queen of the Scots. James’s comment, when the news of her birth was brought to him, that ‘it cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass’ (a reference to the way in which the house of Stewart had come to the throne, through the marriage of Walter the Steward to Robert Bruce’s daughter Marjorie) may be apocryphal and was, as it turned out, inaccurate; the ‘lass’ who was to bring Stewart rule to an end was not Queen Mary, but Queen Anne in 1714. But it may still be significant of at least part of contemporary reaction to Mary. For James’s saying was first recorded by John Knox, in the version ‘The devil go with it! It will end as it began: it came from a woman; and it will end in a woman’. This was in the mid 1560s, when Mary was still in power, so that it reads like Knox’s wishful thinking rather than anything else; and it was then recast into the famous phrase by the Protestant chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, writing in the 1570s, by which time the representative of the house of Stewart was the child James VI, and the lass had long gone – into English captivity.

Thus the words supposedly uttered by a despairing king, just before he turned his face to the wall to die, are an immediate symbol of the reaction of very many of those on whom Mary Queen of Scots was to make an impact, in her lifetime and thereafter. And there was nothing apocryphal about what her undutiful son was to say, half a century later, in his book , when he wrote of how his grandfather had been punished by God for his immorality, for his infant sons had predeceased him, and he died ‘leaving a double curse behind him to the land, both a Woman of sex, and a new borne babe of age to reign over them’. In the late 1520s and 1530s, Henry VIII had embarked on a spectacular, even murderous matrimonial career in an attempt to save his kingdom from the first part of that curse. For the Scots, Mary embodied both. From the very beginning of her own spectacular career, therefore, even before her own personality could make its distinctive mark, she was a person to create doubts, and even fear.

Four centuries later, doubts have not been dispelled. This is scarcely because she has been neglected. ‘Daughter of debate’ Elizabeth called her; and mother of a remarkably impassioned series of debates she subsequently became. Did she, or did she not, murder her second husband, Henry Stewart, lord Darnley? Was she the author of the Casket Letters, those letters which totally implicated her in the murder, or were they forgeries? Was she raped by James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, and forced to marry him, or did she connive at her own abduction? It may seem a little curious that these are the problems which have exercised the minds of so many of the writers on Mary Queen of Scots above all else. They relate to a brief two-year crisis period in her forty-four year life; and although they are by no means irrelevant to her political role, the approach to them has had such a predominantly personal – one might almost say tabloid – quality that the historiographical Mary is immediately marked out from all other historical monarchs, Scottish or otherwise.

Yet these questions have sustained a massive publishing industry, briefly and for good political and confessional reasons in the late sixteenth century, and then almost without interruption from the mid eighteenth. As the subject of historical studies, and the heroine of romantic fiction, Mary Queen of Scots has a massive lead over all other earthly Maries, only the Virgin scoring more heavily – as even the most cursory glance at the British Library Catalogue of Printed Books makes clear. Thus in the 1962 Catalogue, the Virgin Mary has 150 pages devoted to her; Mary Queen of Scots 455 books; the English queen Mary Tudor – ‘Bloody Mary’ – 73. And that other central figure in a great murder mystery, Richard III, has the pathetic total of 38. Nevertheless, I. B. Cowan could publish a book in 1971 justifiably entitled For much of what has been written about her does not elucidate; rather, it creates a barrier between us and the historical ruler of mid sixteenth-century Scotland.

The prolific contemporary literature about Mary, which has been extensively and effectively reviewed by J. E. Phillips, , was all understandable enough. For her earlier years, there are the famous Ronsard poems extolling her charm and beauty, along with those in similar vein by the man who was to become her most vicious detractor, the great Scottish scholar George Buchanan – exactly the kind of thing which would naturally be written about an attractive young queen. Her later career, from the time of her marriage to Darnley in the summer of 1565, inevitably gave rise to writing of a very different and much more partisan nature. The heights were to be reached with her execution in 1587, when accusers and defenders rushed into print, producing works with titles like ‘An excellent dyttye made as a generall rejoycinge for the cuttinge of the Scottishe queene’, or ‘Marie Stewarde late Quene of Scotland hath defiled her owne bodie with many adulteries . . .’, compared with ‘The Martyrdom of the Queen of Scotland . . .’ or ‘L’Histoire et Martyre de la Royne D’Escosse’. The attackers had far better titles than the supporters; but the scope for emotive, impassioned language was the same for both sides.

One of the most remarkable examples occurs in the set of poems known as , collected and contributed to by an exiled Catholic Scots lawyer and philosopher, Adam Blackwood, one of Mary’s earliest and most strenuous defenders. Jezebel, therefore, was Elizabeth of England, that she-wolf, monster of vice and cruelty, sprung of vicious and degenerate stock, for she was born of the incestuous relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who was not only his wife but also his illegitimate daughter. But the Jezebel poems went far beyond vilification of Elizabeth. The majority were written to arouse French opinion, and to push the French king, Henri III, into revenge. One depicts Mary’s first husband, Francis II, three times rushing to welcome her in heaven, and three times finding that he can only embrace a headless body, so that he curses his people; whereupon the poet exhorts them to forget their own troubles, and unite to destroy England and send its queen to a dreadful death. France failed to respond. But another European country, Spain, did seek to conquer England, in 1588; and it was encouraged by the dramatic ‘Address to the Captains and Men on the Armada’, which promised the sailors the aid of the saints of England, John Fisher, Thomas More and Edmund Campion, and above all ‘The blessed and innocent Mary queen of Scotland, who, still fresh from her sacrifice, bears copious and abounding witness to the cruelty and impiety of this Elizabeth and directs her shafts against her.’ And the future pope Urban VIII could write of Mary as the queen who died without honour due; yet the shadows of night were her funeral robes, the stars her tapers. It was all very stirring.

What is immediately notable, however, is that Mary’s own subjects, the Scots – that is, those in Scotland left to deal with the crisis created by her deposition in 1567 and flight to England in 1568, rather than Catholic exiles like Blackwood and the bishop of Ross, on whom there were no restraints – had the good sense to keep as quiet as possible. Initially, of course, those who drove her out had to justify their actions to Elizabeth and prevent the English queen making any serious attempt to restore her sister of Scotland; and they used that scholar of European distinction, George Buchanan, as their apologist, thus enabling the grave and learned humanist to display a remarkable talent for writing, as it were, copy for the in the style of , in his sensational But generally the arena for attack or defence was in England and Europe. Thus Mary had already passed into legend. But it was legend on a European scale. Her contemporaries were well aware – sometimes all too uncomfortably aware – that she was, in her life and in her death, a figure of European significance. No one in the sixteenth century made the mistake which was to become such a feature of later writings about her, of seeing her crimes or her innocence as a little domestic matter, locking her into a Scottish bedroom debate in which, as far as the outside world was concerned, only Elizabeth had an interest beyond the fleeting and casual.

The move from the international and political to the insular and personal was interrupted by something of a lull in the...