John Guy
Fourth Estate, £20
I PICKED up this book 10 minutes before I was supposed to be at a meeting. My intention was to scan the table of contents and maybe get a feel for the writing style in the first few paragraphs before coming back to i
t properly later. By the bottom of the first page I was taken captive. I never made it to that meeting. Pardon the cliché but I couldn’t put this book down.
John Guy starts with a detailed account of Mary’s execution on February 8, 1587. The drama of that event is so perfectly evoked you can feel the fear in the room and hear bones crunch as the executioner’s axe strikes home.
The narrative weaves together various emotional strands: fear, reverence, sadness, trepidation - but ends in grotesque farce. When the executioner went to lift Mary’s severed head to display it to the onlookers, he was instead left holding a blood-drenched wig. "The head fell back to the floor, rolling like a misshapen football towards the spectators." Mary, once famed for her thick, auburn hair, had gone nearly bald during her years in captivity. In death, as in life, the Queen of Scots had a talent for surprise.
These events happened over 400 years ago, yet the author conveys them with such immediacy they seem like they occurred last week. For most people, Mary’s story is quite familiar. But never before has it been told with such detail, accuracy, insight and drama. Seldom does one encounter a book so perfect: a serious academic study written with the lyrical quality of a good novel.
Few people understand 16th century statecraft as well as Guy. Back then, foreign affairs and domestic politics were entangled with personal animosities and familial rivalry. Perhaps at no other time was politics so personal. To the lay observer, the affairs of state can seem bizarre and incomprehensible. Guy, however, manages to unravel them - in the process rendering the actions of Mary, her allies and her enemies perfectly understandable, if not always logical.
Mary has too often been used as a convenient myth by which to convey a particular political message. Scottish nationalists have made her into their version of Joan of Arc, a martyred hero who struggled against English oppression. Religious bigots have branded her an example of popish excess - a whore and perhaps a murderess. Misogynists have judged her a lesson in the folly of female rule, a silly queen who danced while Scotland burned.
John Guy’s Mary emerges as a much more complex character, a woman of extraordinary talents and immense courage. He describes her as "a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country... a whole woman whose choices added up and whose decisions made sense".
Her control of events after the assassination of her aide, David Rizzio, in which she demonstrated incredible bravery and guile, are a case in point. The murder was part of a complicated plot orchestrated by Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, who sought to usurp her power. Guy has no time for romantic notions that Mary was having an affair with Rizzio. As he demonstrates, the Italian had in fact been a frequent visitor to Darnley’s bed.
After the assassination, Mary manipulated her enemies in a manner which would have impressed any Machiavellian prince. She engineered an escape from Holyrood, linked up with her trusted confidants Bothwell and Huntly, and proceeded, by clever stage management, to turn the Darnley conspiracy in on itself. All this occurred when Mary, at 23, was in the latter stages of pregnancy. It is hard not to admire such a woman.
The book is not all complex statecraft and convoluted palace intrigue. Guy also shows us the delightfully playful Mary - a woman who enjoyed dressing up in men’s clothing for a night of anonymous carousing. While staying in St Andrews she would regularly disguise herself as a middle-class townswoman and go out shopping with her pals. Since there could not have been too many women 6ft tall residing in St Andrews at the time, one wonders who was fooling whom.
Mary was a lover of life who knew how to throw a great party. Guy’s description of these events makes you covet an invitation. The festivities lasted for days. Wine flowed in torrents and the food required a small army to prepare. The parties usually ended with the throwing of largesse - coins were tossed into crowds of curious onlookers, inevitably causing a stampede.
Ostentatious extravagance of this sort provoked allegations of hedonism from Mary’s enemies, among them John Knox. But, as Guy explains, opulence was a tool of power. A quiet, parsimonious queen would not have commanded the reverence of her people. The same held true for clothes - Mary had an intuitive understanding of the power of a pretty dress. One of the reasons Queen Elizabeth feared her Scottish cousin was precisely because Mary was so much more proficient at inspiring awe.
Everything fits together so neatly in this biography. Guy provides logical explanations for seemingly insignificant events, in the process elevating them to their deserved importance. For instance, on Palm Sunday, 1565, an Edinburgh priest was abducted by Calvinists, taken to the Market Cross and tied up. He was then pelted with eggs for three days. What seems a random act of religious bigotry is revealed as something much more sinister when Guy explains that eggs, the Catholic symbol of Easter, were deliberately chosen for what was meant to be a ritual humiliation.
The fact that 10,000 eggs were thrown suggests that ‘the attack must have been powerfully backed’, and that the missiles were aimed not just at the poor priest but symbolically at the Catholic queen.
Mary’s misfortune lay in the fact that her country was ungovernable. Sixteenth-century Scotland was torn by factional rivalry and had yet to find religious equilibrium. Guy suggests Mary should be judged not by her failure to bring stability to her fractious country but rather by her energetic attempts to do so. For most of her life she proved the equal of her detractors, and bettered a good many. She was defeated not because her enemies were more able but because they were so numerous. Like the country of which she was queen, she found a formidable spirit was not sufficient defence against opponents of greater power.
Rather like the artist who falls in love with the image he paints, Guy seems to have fallen under the spell of the character he has so painstakingly reconstructed. The reverence he lavishes on Mary is made all the more profound by the scorn he directs at her enemies. But Guy can be forgiven for losing his heart to Mary, since her attractions were legion. Thanks to this book, she gets the first invitation to my fantasy dinner party.
• Gerard DeGroot is professor of modern history at St Andrews University
The full article contains 1212 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
