Mary Stuart

Picking up on page 14...

Gardiner gives short shrift to Mary Queen of Scots. He mentions a few important facts—that she came into England looking for a way back to her throne; that her story generated Catholic buzz; and that the inevitable result of the decision to imprison her in England was that England must kill her.

Of the popular histories of Mary, I prefer the one by Antonia Fraser, which you can find on Amazon or in almost any used-book shop. Frasier is sympathetic but realistic and cuts neither Mary nor Elizabeth any slack. A far more romanticized story, but a very popular one, is the History of Mary Queen of Scots by Jacob Abbot, which you can read online.

I think the circumstance that strikes most modern readers is that Mary was the mother of James VI, the reigning king of Scotland at the time of her death, and who will be king of England, as James I, when we get to the start of our tour. As we will learn in Chapter 2, James did not lightly pass over the murder of his mother, but he didn't let it become a political issue, either. What does that say about James and about Mary and about their relationship?

If you want more about Mary Stuart, refer to the colorful EnglishHistory.net site, which has plenty of links and pictures.

What we should learn from the brief discission on pages 14 and 15 is that—to the English government—Mary Stuart's life was less important than her religion, and her religion important only for its political implications. She had to go, and that was just the way things worked in late Tudor England.