Scots reliving the life of a tragic queen

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 34

Scots reliving the life of a tragic queen

The 400th anniversary of the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, is being commemorated throughout this year by events and exhibitions, both in Scotland and England, where she spent 18 years in captivity before being beheaded on February 8, 1587. Mary died after a colourful life of plots and counter-plots, intrigue, murder, abduction, dramatic cross-country dashes, and night-time bids for freedom. There will be exhibitions at the castles, palaces, and houses she visited, and re-enactments of scenes from her adventures. Inclusive tours are available and visitors can stay at places linked to her life, such as Borthwick Castle near Edinburgh and the Talbot Hotel at Oundle — where her ghost is said to walk. SUE INNES, a contributor to the “Scotsman,** reports.

Four centuries is a long time, yet in this quartercentenary year of the death of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587) interest in her life, her world, and her death remains as intense as ever, both in Britain and beyond. Age, it seems, can neither wither her nor dim her allure. Perhaps the most romantic and enigmatic queen in history, she was born into violent, troubled times, and died a tragic death. Beautiful, courageous, and ill-, fated, Mary’s life needs no exaggeration to capture the imagination.

Special events are being held all over Scotland this year to mark the occasion.

Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, called her “daughter of debate”; the poet Pasternak, aptly describes her as "the talk of time.” She was a figure of fascination and controversy all her life. Queen of Scotland at six days old, Queen of France through her marriage to Francis the Dauphin, and a widow at 18, she laid claim to the English throne as well.

She was, as is evident from contemporary writings, a figure of striking beauty and charm, and both intelligent and sophisticated. And she still remains the subject of controversy. Biographers and historians still attempt to solve the many mysteries surrounding her life, and among academic historians the events of her personal reign —

the six significant years when she lived and reigned actually in Scotland and the civil war that followed — are the subject of lively debate. Mary is one of the few Scottish monarchs well known outside Scotland and she has been the subject of an astonishing range of writing — poetry, plays, and

novels as well as history and biography. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris lists over 2000 books on her, the National Library of Scotland many more. There are 19 operas about her, the best known by Donizetti and Musgrave, and several films. There is scarcely a contemporary Scottish poet of note who has not followed Ronsard, Spenser, Burns, Hogg, and Wordsworth in writing about Mary.

She has become as much a figure of literature and legend as of history and she has a very special place in the hearts of the Scottish people, who are Inclined to be excessively fond of the romantic and the tragic. That this fascination is undimmed

over four centuries is in itself fascinating. “Such a dramatic life, and so many mysteries,” says her most recent biographer, Rosalind Marshall, in explanation.

Mary was the only child of James V of Scotland, but also inherited Tudor blood through her grandmother, a sister of Henry VIII. Her father died only six days after her birth, leaving Mary as queen of Scotland in her own right. Great-uncle Henry VIII made a strong attempt to secure control of her, failed, and her mother was made regent. Mary was sent to France at the age of five and grew up as a French woman rather than a Scot. She was married to Francis, the young son of Henry and Catherine of France, in 1558 — a political match aimed at the union of France and Scotland, and probably never consummated.

The death of Henry the next year made Mary queen consort of France, but Francis’s premature death in 1560 left Mary a widow at the age of 18. Mary now returned home as Scotland’s queen and immediately ran into a host of problems. Her attempt to claim the English throne on the death of Henry VIII through her father-in-law, on the grounds of Elizabeth being illegitimate, had made her a bitter enemy of the English queen.

Her upbringing as a» Roman Catholic caused her to be considered as a “foreign queen of an alien religion” by the Protestants who followed the now official religion of Scotland. Also, the fractious and turbulent Scottish nobles cared nothing for her and only for their self-aggrandise-ment.

Additionally, her further marriages and their disastrous consequences provoked rebellions. Her second husband, Lord Darnley, is widely believed to have been murdered by the third, Earl of Bothwell, with Mary’s complicity, and with whom Mary was said to have had an adulterous relationship. The mystery of Darnley’s death has never been

solved and probably never will be. Her secretary and favourite, David Riccio, also met a violent death, in a conspiracy that was meant to harm the then pregnant Mary. In 1567, Bothwell, who had conspired to become ruler of Scotland, was exiled and imprisoned, and Mary was incarcerated on the tiny island of Loch Leven. After her supporters were defeated the next year, Mary narrowly escaped to England and sought the mercy of Elizabeth, her fellow sovereign. Instead she was to suffer imprisonment for the next 18 years in a series of castles and homes mainly in the north of England. Elizabeth and her advisers feared she would attempt to take over the English throne with the support of English Catholics. And when a “plot” was discovered in 1586 of a Catholic plan to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary was accused of complicity.

She was tried and sentenced to death; and when her son, James, who had set his sights on succeeding to the English throne, raised no objection, Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, near Peterborough, in 1587, at the age of 44. Ironically, her body was ultimately buried in Westminster Abbey under a magnificent monument erected by her son — after he ascended to the English throne.

Attitudes to the queen today are influenced still by sixteenth century political scandal-monger-ing and by the century of propaganda that followed her death. Catholic propaganda presented Mary as a martyr to her faith; Protestent propaganda showed her as an adulteress and murderess. Much that we now “know” about her can be traced to an extraordinary piece of character assassination by her former

secretary and supporter, George Buchanan, who wrote a thundering denunciation of her crimes while she was in prison in England, most of which has since been proved false. Among this year’s events marking the anniversary have been concerts, poetry readings, plays, masques, pageants, festivals, banquets, and bonfires, as well as three major exhibitions. It seems that every place with the slightest hint of a connection with the tragic queen will mark it — and there are many of those, for in her short reign Mary travelled a great deal.

The Scottish Tourist Board has published brochures on Mary’s life and times, helping visitors to explore Scotland and its history/ and playing host to television teams and journalists from all over the world.

At Jedburgh, in Scottish Border country, there is a sum-mer-long “Mary, Queen of Scots Festival”; at Kinross in Fife they will re-enact her dramatic escape from Loch Leven Castle; at her hunting place of Falkland they are featuring her hobbies of music, dance, archery, and falconry. The Scottish Record Office’s exhibition “The Queen and the Scots: the real world of Mary Stewart’s Scotland” will ignore the more glamorous and intriguing aspects of her reign in favour of her work as a queen. “She had to attend to business whatever else was going on,” says a spokesperson, Margaret Sanderson, referring to charters granted and papers signed by

Map' during the tumultuous period following Darnley’s murder. The exhibition will also show records from the lives of ‘ her subjects — people who have perhaps been overshadowed by. the degree of interest in Mary herself.

The National Library of Scotland will exhibit a great deal of its exclusive collection, showing how Mary and the other Stewarts were seen in poetry and prose. The political and religious issues that dominated writings about her during her life and for a century after her death were in turn overlaid by images from the later Romantic revival.

The nineteenth century Victorians, who did so much to create the contemporary image

of Scotland, were fascinated by Mary, and Sir Walter Scott, bestselling inventor of the history novel, told her story memorably in “The Abbott.”

An opportunity to compare myth with reality is presented at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where some 20 paintings of Mary accepted as authentic have been brought together with some of the hundreds of paintings of scenes from her life. Only a few likenesses were made of Mary during her lifetime and most of these will be on show. Drawings when she was young and the miniature painted of her in prison, and painfings made soon after her death at the request of James, who was concerned to rehabilitate her memory, will also appear. Depicting Mary dressed in black' and carrying a crucifix, they created the image of her that has been reproduced again and again to the present day, in prints, false portraits, and on whisky bpttle labels and the like. But rnhst moving \ among the texts and documents on show is Mary’s last letter. Written to her brother-in-law, Henry 111 of France, it was completed at two in the morning — six hours before she was to mount the scaffold.

Commending her servants to him, she asks that they be paid and says that through them “you will learn the truth, and how, thanks be to God, I scorn death and vow that I meet it innocent of any crime.” Copyright — London Press Service.

Monument at Westminster