Tag Archives: Elizabeth I

Rival Queens by Kate Williams – The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

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Rival Queens which is subtitled The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots by Kate Williams was published in 2018. I borrowed this one from the library, and I swithered about taking it as I’ve read quite a few books about Mary, Q of S – what more could there be to say? Well it turned out that there’s quite a lot in this book that was new to me about Mary and Elizabeth. I had thought that Antonia Fraser’s Mary, Queen of Scots couldn’t be topped, but the author seems to have far more insights into both personalities, although it’s Mary and her predicaments which are to the fore in this book. The writing style is very relaxed somehow,  it flows so clearly and is never heavy going, and Kate Williams is just like her readers would be – enthralled and sometimes almost amazed by the fact that she has access to historic  letters and documents that she has been able to study during her research for the book. Other historians have been a bit reticent on the reasons that Mary ended up marrying Bothwell, but Williams seems in no doubt that she had been raped by Bothwell, and was pressured into marrying him.

I hadn’t quite realised how much Mary had been used by her various relatives, with them seeing her as just a way for  them to grab more power and kingdoms in the future. I don’t remember reading that the four wee Marys who sailed to France with Mary Stuart to be her playmates had been separated from her almost immediately. The Scottish side of Mary was going to be stamped out so that she would be a completely French queen when the time came.

Both queens suffered from a lack of the respect which would have been automatic for any young king, simply because they were male. With both women having so much in common it’s a tragedy that they never actually met, but Elizabeth couldn’t be persuaded.

I’ve always thought that Mary was at a disadvantage where men were concerned as her father died when she was just days old, it meant that she never had a man in her life that she could judge any possible husband against – for good or bad. I’m sure that’s a disadvantage.

As it happens I’ve visited almost all of the places that are mentioned in the book, some of which she escaped from.

Anyway I enjoyed this book so much that I’m going to track down anything else that Kate Williams has written, both non-fiction and fiction.

Elizabeth and Mary edited by Susan Doran

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Elizabeth and Mary – Royal Cousins, Rival Queens – which is edited by Susan Doran is a lovely book and I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of it by British Library for review. Among many things the book contains contributions in the shape of essays by 14 academics, mainly historians, as you would expect.

This is a really sumptuous book with beautiful photographs of historic portraits, jewels and religious works, maps and drawings of castles, but by far most of the photographs are of letters sent by and to Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots to each other and to many of the prominent people of the times.
It’s not all letters though, there are also poems and speeches written by Elizabeth and Mary and even John Knox makes an appearance.

My only gripe is that most of the documents are not big enough to be able to read, but as many are in French or Latin possibly it was thought that readers wouldn’t want to read them for themselves. I must admit that it’s quite some time since I was sent this one for review, but it isn’t really the sort of book that you sit down and read quickly from cover to cover, it’s the sort that you dip in and out of and savour over quite some time.

This book was produced by British Library to accompany an Elizabeth and Mary exhibition, which I so wish I had been able to go to, but this book is the next best thing I suppose.

Thank you to British Library for sending me a copy of the book.

Elizabeth, Captive Princess by Margaret Irwin

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Elizabeth, Captive Princess cover

Elizabeth, Captive Princess by Margaret Irwin was first published in 1948 and it’s the second book in the author’s Queen Elizabeth I trilogy. I really enjoyed the first book Young Bess and although I didn’t like this one quite as much, I’ll definitely be reading the third book Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain.

The book begins at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where the Lady Elizabeth is living. A messenger had arrived from Duke Dudley an hour or so ago and everyone had guessed why he was there. The young and ailing King Edward must have died so Elizabeth must ride to London, but the messenger has apparently come with a plea from Edward for his sister Elizabeth to visit him. At first Elizabeth is keen to go, but then she thinks better of it. Both Elizabeth and her elder half-sister have been proclaimed to be illegitimate by their father Henry VIII which leads to the possibility of Lady Jane Grey being next in line to the throne.

As Duke Dudley has recently married his son Guildford off to Lady Jane Grey Elizabeth smells a rat. If she goes to London will she end up being taken to the Tower, never to be seen again like the two young princes in the past? Unknown to Elizabeth her half-sister Mary is having much the same suspicion, but as the elder of the two women she begins to travel around to rally support for her claim to the throne.

This is possibly one of the saddest eras in English history with the young Lady Jane being used and abused by her own parents, something she had grown used to over the years, but she could never have expected them to go to the lengths that they did to gain power through her.

I felt that Mary was given quite an easy time of it in this book as she really became a monster when she did attain the throne and you don’t get much idea of her cruelty and nastiness – all in the name of the Roman Catholic faith. Maybe that will be spelled out in the next volume.

The nursery rhyme
Mary, Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row

is thought by some to be written about Bloody Mary as she came to be known, due to her enthusiasm for executing non Catholics, usually having them burnt at the stake. The silver bells being part of the mass and cockle shells standing for martyrdom – I think. But others say that they were instruments of torture, something else that Mary was keen on.

Mary Queen of Scots – the film

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In recent years we’ve been lucky if there is one film on at the flicks within the whole year but this year already we’ve been to see two films – two weeks ago we went to see The Favourite and last week we saw Mary Queen of Scots and I enjoyed it although it is a bit cavalier with the historic details. The Irish actress Saoirse Ronan plays Mary Stuart and she did a good job of it although she must have put a lot of effort into learning a Scots accent, for no good reason as Mary had lived at the French court since the age of five and her mother was French so she would have had a French accent as she lived in France for well over ten years waiting to marry the Dauphin. It was never expected she would return to Scotland but after her husband died the French wanted rid of her.

The film is beautifully shot and I’m glad to say that all the locations are in Scotland. I was puzzled as to why the Scottish castles looked so grim, I swear that at the beginning one of them looked like a cave on the inside with really rough walls that looked like you could have climbed up them. I’ve never seen anything but smooth stone walls inside and outside of castles and of course the walls would have been covered with tapestries.

The murder of Rizzio was much more dramatic than I had ever imagined it to be. Darnley is portrayed as being gay, I’m a bit cynical and so assume that that’s a bid for the pink pound/dollar. And of course Mary and Elizabeth meet despite all of the historians agreeing that they never did meet. Elizabeth’s skin is skillfully made up to show how badly her skin was damaged by pockmarks. I doubt if she ever let anyone see those, hence the thick and poisonous lead based make-up that she wore.

There’s also no sense of all the years that Mary was kept in captivity by Elizabeth – or of her many escape attempts.

Thankfully the film stops short of her actual execution as that was famously very nasty, who knows whether the axeman was deliberately incompetent when he hacked at her neck or if it was just nerves or bad luck.

David Tennant being cast as John Knox was a great touch, I thought he was brilliant in the role.

If ever anyone was in need of good advisors it was Mary Stuart, but either she didn’t have anyone to advise her or she chose to ignore them. She would have been better emulating her royal cousin Elizabeth and eschewing men and marriage, but then we would never have had King James V of Scotland / I of England. I wonder what would have happened if he had never been born.

Macbeth A True Story by Fiona Watson

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I saw this book at my library and as I only knew Macbeth via Shakespeare I thought it would be interesting to find out about the real story. I enjoyed the book but I do have one wee gripe about it and that is that Macbeth doesn’t make an appearance until you are more than half way through the book.

The title of the book is something of a misnomer but I have to admit that it was the title which grabbed my attention. There’s an awful lot of history to read through before you get to Macbeth who reigned from 1040 to 1057. The beginnings of Christianity in Scotland, the Romans, Viking raids and ‘kings’ who murdered each other constantly.

Those so called kings would nowadays be called gangland leaders or warlords, grabbing the top slot by violence and it was only a matter of time before someone else had a go at them.

Macbeth managed to hold onto power for 17 years and was apparently popular but has just about been written out of history because as always, the history is written by the winners and the winners were the Mac Alpins.

Macbeth’s reputation was comprehensively trashed over the centuries and it was a history by Ralph Holinshed of Macbeth which gave Shakespeare the idea for writing his play. So there is no truth in the play at all, but it served its purpose.

Shakespeare had been writing and performing for Elizabeth 1, when the company of actors had been known as The Queen’s Men. On Elizabeth’s death things must have been somewhat disconcerting for them to say the least. They were basically redundant. What was this unknown quantity King James VI (I of England) going to be like? Would he want a company of actors or not?

So Shakespeare set to buttering the King up and wrote Macbeth as the bad guy because King James was descended from the Mac Alpins who had succeeded to the throne after Macbeth. It worked, and it wasn’t long before Shakespeare’s company became The King’s Men.

There were times when ‘ma heid wis fairly birlin’ whilst reading this book, because there were so many kings and murders and strange names, and it seemed a very long time before Macbeth’s story was told, but I did enjoy it.

If you are interested in Shakespeare you might like to read this article In Search of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, which appeared in last Saturday’s Guardian review.