Mary isn't innocent she loved Bothwell obsessively and with a blind madness, refusing to divorce him even with her kingdom and her life both at stake. Not one of these correspondents' letters are even mentioned. Instead, Mary is treated as a wide-eyed, helpless ingénue with no one to advise her, despite the fact that EVERYONE from Elizabeth to Catherine de Medici to the influential French bishops to the pope himself ALL instructed Mary repeatedly in stern or beseeching letters that she must try Bothwell and then put her husband's killer far from her, and then, failing this, ALL then warning her not to marry the murderer of her husband. I was hoping to get an intimate window into what exactly may have led Mary to her portion of culpability. Her life then entered its best known phase: the early struggles with John Knox and the unruly Scottish nobility the fatal marriage to Darnley and his mysterious death her marriage to Bothwell, the chief suspect, that led directly to her long English captivity at the hands of Queen Elizabeth the poignant and extraordinary story of her long imprisonment that ended with the labyrinthine Babington plot to free her, and her execution at the age of 44.Īntonia Fraser's biography, four years in the writing, enters fully into the life of an historical figure who continues to capture the popular imagination.Presents only extremely limited contemporaneous writings in order to give a disingenuous perspective exonerating Mary of every single motivation and action both before and after the murder of her husband Darnley.
Widowed less than two years later, she returned to Scotland as Queen after an absence of 13 years.
Mary passed her childhood in France and married the Dauphin to become Queen of France at the age of 16. It became an international best-seller and was translated into nine languages.
Antonia Fraser's classic biography of her won the James Tait Prize when it was first published in 1969. More than 400 years after her death, Mary Queen of Scots remains one of the most romantic and controversial figures in British history.
0 kommentar(er)
