Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
Lady Antonia Fraser’s masterful biography
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
“Mary Stuart now at last has a biography as lustrous as its subject…. Fraser brings to this immense biography a vivid sense of the mores of the sixteenth century, so lucid a manner of presenting history that she succeeds in almost completely clarifying the muddied maelstrom in which Europe and the British Isles were thrashing and trumpeting.”
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Book World
“A first-rate job … beautifully written.”
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The New York Review of Books
“Here is Mary, the precious child, growing up in the court of France, wife and widow at seventeen. The tall, regal Mary, Catholic queen of Protestant Scotland. Mary, the woman, shamelessly in love with the prideful and posturing Bothwell. The captive Mary, discovering the uses of adversity. Mary, at the execution, adjusting the balance of history, achieving a lasting triumph over Elizabeth.”
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The Cleveland Press
“A tragic romance … rare and poignant … masterly and radiant.”
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The Chicago Daily News
“Antonia Fraser has diligently compiled and sifted everything known to her, trying to reach the truth behind contemporary slanders and later legends.”
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The New York Times
A Delta Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
To Hugh, with love and thanks
First published in England by Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Copyright © 1969 by Antonia Fraser
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York.
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ISBN: 0-385-31129-X
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5258-7
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press
Delta edition published October 1993
v3.1
Contents
Author’s NoteI had two principal aims when I began to write this biography. First, being possessed since childhood by a passion for the subject of Mary Queen of Scots, I wished to test for myself the truth or falsehood of the many legends which surround her name. In order to tear away these cobwebs – or in certain cases reverently replace them – I delved into as many published and unpublished sources as I could discover, taking as my starting-point Mary’s own letters and the calendars of state papers (although of course there may well be some sources of which I was unhappily ignorant). Secondly, for the sake of the general reader, I hoped to set Mary anew in the context of the age in which she lived. In the course of my own inquiries I was surprised to discover that despite the enormous quantity of research on the sixteenth century published during the last fifty years, radically changing our attitudes to certain of its aspects, no general life of Mary has yet appeared, taking it all into account. There have been detailed treatments of certain episodes in her life – notably that of the Kirk o’Field murder and the Casket Letters, and later the Babington Plot – and Stefan Zweig’s fascinating psychological interpretation, written in the thirties. But the last full-length biography, giving documentation, was that of T. F. Henderson in 1905. So in the end my two aims converged, and I found myself with the single objective of showing, with as much accuracy as is possible in the light of modern research, what Mary Queen of Scots must have been like as a person.