Mary Queen Of Scots

Mary Queen of Scots passed her childhood in France and married the Dauphin to become Queen of France at the age of sixteen. Widowed less than two years later, she returned to Scotland as Queen after an absence of thirteen years. 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 forty-four.

Media reviews

New York Review of Books

Lady Antonia Fraser is young, beautiful, and rich, an earl’s daughter married to a busy and successful politician, the mother of a large family; yet she has surmounted all these handicaps to authorship to produce a first-rate historical biography.

User reviews

LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

Fraser hit a gold mine when she wrote this book. She managed to produce a work that is scholarly enough to gain and retain academic respect and yet readable and popular to the reader outside of academia. No doubt some of this is attributable to the subject herself.

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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

LibraryThing member antiquary

A successful popular biography. Perhaps more synmpathetic to Mary than I am.

LibraryThing member woollymammoth

An excellent and detailed historical biography,

LibraryThing member Schmerguls

1044 Mary Queen of Scots, by Antonia Fraser (read 7 Mar 1970) This is an excellent biography. I in 1960 read a biography of Mary by Maurice Baring, but it was undocumented and I did not particularly like it. But this book reads so easily, is pleasingly pro-Mary, and really was a joy to read. Mary

was born Dec 8, 1542, at Linlithgow in Scotland, daughter of James V of Scotland and his wife Mary of Guise. On Dec 14, 1542, James V died and Mary became sovereign queen of Scotland. On April 24, 1558, Mary was married to the dauphin of France. On July 10, 1559, King Henry II of France died and Mary's husband, Francis II, became king of France. On Dec 5, 1560, Francis II died. On Aug 19, 1561, Mary returned to Scotland, after an absence of 13 years. On July 29, 1565, she married Henry Darnley (grandson of Margaret Tudor, who was a sister of Henry VIII). He was murdered at Kirk's Field on Feb 10, 1567. Before that, on June 19, 1566, the future James I had been born of her marriage. On May 15, 1567.Mary married Bothwell. On May 16, 1568, she entered England, where she was imprisoned till Feb 8, 1587, when she was executed. At a funeral service on Mar 12, 1588, in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Renaud de Beaune, archbishop of Bourges, gave an oration which so impressed me so much I copied part of it in my post-reading note.

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LibraryThing member natumi.s

At sixteen, Mary wasQueen of France and Scotland.
She was tall and beautiful, with red-gold hair.
I think her life was a stormy life.
Becausepeople is rich and high rank, people is not always happy.
At the end, she was executed.
I was very surprised.
When Mary was married to her husband, Mary was only

14!!

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LibraryThing member Elysianfield

This was the first book about Mary Queen of Scots that wasn't boring. I still think Mary was an idiot but the book was good.

LibraryThing member japaul22

Fraser's biography of Mary Queen of Scots is both exhaustive and entertaining to read. She details the life of Mary chronologically, starting with her birth (including some background on her father and mother) through her childhood in France, her brief reign as Queen of France, and her departure

for Scotland where she had technically been Queen since the age of 9 months.

In Scotland Fraser studies the dynamics of a staunchly Catholic Queen trying to rule a newly Protestant country. Mary asked to be able to worship in private but never tried to make alliances to overthrow the Protestants and accepted their counsel. Her reign in Scotland is full of turmoil, especially after she marries Henry, Lord Darnley. His murder and the subsequent events (her marriage to Bothwell and imprisonment in Scotland) are gone through in detail to dispel the rumors that have abounded since this happened in the 1500s.

The third half of Mary's life is her imprisonment in England. Fraser examines the various plots, real or imagined, to free Mary and her adoption by Catholics as a martyr. Of course, Mary ends up being beheaded at Queen Elizabeth's order after a sham of a trial which is also explored at length.

I thought this was an excellent biography. I found it highly readable but scholarly at the same time. Recommended to anyone who like historical biographies and/or British history.

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