There's something about Mary

IT'S WEDNESDAY, AND somewhere near you, an "entirely new" assessment of Mary Queen of Scots is sure to be taking place.

For there are few Brits who have not formed an opinion about Mary Stuart. Tragic martyr or papist floosie; schemer, murderess or victim? Whatever one's viewpoint, the fact is that we remain intrigued, eternally unsatisfied that the last word has been said about this headstrong, dangerous and puzzling woman.

"She could have been a Shakespearean heroine. In some moods she was witty and as high-spirited as Beatrice; in others as mournful and melancholy as Hermione. She also had a touch of Lady Macbeth," historian Peter Ackroyd wrote last year. He, like John Guy whose recent biography of Mary My Heart is My Own opens with Mary's execution in 1587, believes that nothing "became her troubled and unhappy reign like the leaving of it".

Mary had asked that her servants might accompany her to the scaffold, but the request was denied for fear that they might dip their napkins in the Queen's blood. "The myth was already forming around her."

And we never grow tired of myths, especially when the facts surrounding them are hotly disputed, as so many aspects of Mary Stuart's life continue to be. The dramas of her early years are clear enough. She was born, the daughter of James V at the Palace of Linlithgow in 1542. Her father died just six days later, making her queen. Aged six, she was sent to France to be educated at Fontainebleau, the most sophisticated European court of its day. At 17, she married the Dauphin, who became Francis II a year later in 1559. A year after that, he was dead, and Mary was required to hand over her state jewels to her mother-in-law. She returned to Scotland, a beautiful 18-year-old widow, with French manners, tastes and - most dangerous of all - religion, as Scotland had undergone a Protestant revolution.

No-one could reasonably expect that her life thereafter would be smooth and incident-free.

The Mary Queen of Scots who inspired Guy's biography was a complex character, of defiant courage and immense talents. 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".

The contrasting image of a weak and sensuous woman, whose primary interests were dancing, music and flirtation, and who was complicit in the murder of her husband, Darnley, is not Mary, Guy insists. "That is her enemies' story, that comes down to us through history because the English found it terribly convenient."

But this was a powerful woman, he insists. Powerful or not, by the age of 24, Mary had lost three husbands and three kingdoms, which, as Lady Bracknell might say, does sound as though carelessness compounded misfortune.

"It is the turbulence of her life and the pathos of her ending which holds our fascination," says historian Allan Massie, "though, in her own lifetime, she was seen as a figure of romance in England rather more than in Scotland. On the whole, the Scots seemed glad to be rid of her. She made so many mistakes. Unlike Elizabeth, she let her heart rule her head, first by marrying Darnley - a dreadful blunder, but she was infatuated. Elizabeth also fell in love, but she kept her suitors at a distance. Mary did not. After Darnley's murder, she took up with Bothwell out of desperation."

But whether Mary is cast as villain or victim depends not so much on nationality or religion, but on chronology. Massie's new book The Thistle and the Rose which traces six centuries of thorny disputes between Scotland and England which have been central to British history, notes that by Victoria's reign, the cult of Mary Queen of Scots had become a "harmless expression of Scottishness" in the same way as Jacobite songs had steadily gained popularity.

"It was natural enough that the most romantic figure in Scottish history should appeal to the Romantic Age. Queen Victoria herself subscribed to the cult of Mary, who was her ancestress. So did Swinburne, though the poet belonged to the Northumberland family that had warred with the Scots across the Border for centuries.

"In Scotland the cult was tempered by Presbyterian historians, whose hero was John Knox and who followed George Buchanan in depicting her as a dangerous Roman Catholic reactionary. But even the Reverend John Cunningham, in his Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, while accusing Mary of plotting with "the greatest bigot and bloodiest persecutor of the time", Philip II of Spain, couldn't altogether deny her sympathy. "My grandmother, born in 1875 and reared in the Free Kirk, told me as a child that she could never forgive Elizabeth of England for her 'cruelty to poor Mary'."

To the young Jane Austen, Mary Queen of Scots was "this bewitching Princess abandoned by her son, confined by her cousin, Elizabeth, abused, reproached and vilified by all... firm in her mind and constant in her religion, and preparing herself to meet the cruel fate to which she was doomed with a magnanimity which could only proceed from conscious innocence."

The 19 years during which Mary was imprisoned in a variety of English castles by Elizabeth, ever procrastinating, and wary of decreeing her execution, are never the years which inspire the greatest verve in her biographers. But one detail is important. Mary was confined as a monarch, not a traitor in the tower. She was attended by 100 staff, including two physicians. No fewer than 32 dishes were served at dinner each day. So her suffering was emotional rather than physical. But however intolerable the frustration of spending almost half of one's life locked up may be, it is still not sufficient excuse for Mary's sternest critics, who include Glasgow-born historian Jenny Wormald.

Almost 20 years ago Wormald published a scathing indictment of Mary's short reign entitled Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure. She has not revised her opinion, and describes Mary as "a tedious creature", adding: "I can't particularly explain her fascination, except that the Scots seem to like terrific failures provided they are romantic, like Bonnie Prince Charlie."

Massie offered a rather more intriguing comparison in 1997 when he wrote: "Nevertheless, depriving her of her title put her again in the role of victim. And that of course was one of her attractions. She was a beauty in distress. She was the princess in the fairytale turned sour; the princess who was the victim of conspiracy, or who had been placed under an evil spell, the princess imprisoned in her lonely celebrity, whom every knight errant must wish to rescue."

The princess he describes here is not Mary, but Diana, and the parallels are obvious enough, Massie argues. "Mary also fascinated and puzzled her contemporaries, and has fascinated and puzzled historians. She divided Scotland: a civil war was fought between king's men and queen's men. She aroused devotion and hostility in equal measure. She had great charm and poor judgment. Her emotional life was confused. She had no luck in marriage, falling first in love with the worthless Darnley and then being subjected by the brutal Bothwell. To her enemies she was a monstrous, dangerous figure. She did nothing for Scotland, yet she is the best known figure in our history".

Put like that, one can see why the disputes about Mary - her life and her worth, are likely to rumble on for another four centuries.