Mary Queen of Scots

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

Mary Queen of Scots Carol Schaeffer Crossroad, $19.95, 208 pp.

Schaeffer begins her admiring biography of Mary Queen of Scots with a moving account of Mary's execution in 1587. It was done with almost liturgical ceremony. She entered the great hall of Fotheringay, which had been decked out in black velvet. Mounting a stage before a roaring fire, she spent her last moments in great dignity, only to die at the hands of an incompetent headsman who missed her neck with his first stroke. When, after her decapitation, the executioner reached under her skirt to claim her garter as his prize, Mary's little Skye terrier came out from beneath his hiding place under her voluminous skirts. What began with pomp ended in farce.

Born in 1542, she married the French Dauphin in 1558 and became the queen consort a year later. When he died two years later--a man she had truly loved, despite his weak body (and mind)--she returned to a Scotland filled with nationalist and anti-Catholic fervor, stoked all the more by the fanatical energies of the totally unlovable John Knox. In 1565, she married her cousin, Lord Darnley. They had a son, James VI of Scotland (later James I of England). Darnley collaborated in the murder of Mary's secretary, David Rizzio, of whom he was madly jealous. Darnley, in turn, was murdered by James Hepburn who, after a trial, was exonerated of the murder. Incredibly, Mary married him after he divorced his wife. They were joined in a Protestant rite (the pope was not amused), and the marriage was a source of scandal even in her own country. Her enemies taunted her for marrying her husband's killer. The Protestant lords rose in rebellion, Hepburn fled to Scandinavia, Mary abdicated in favor of her son and sought protection from her cousin, the redoubtable Elizabeth I. The Virgin Queen feared Mary as a rival, so Mary ended up under house arrest for fourteen years before she was implicated in a murder plot against Elizabeth. That suspicion led to her death.

Schaeffer tells this complex story--replete with coded messages, dark intrigues, counterfeit documents, Elizabethan spies, etc.--with a firm narrative grip. She interweaves the story of the beautiful queen against the background of the religious wars of the day. Mary, a devout Catholic, did little to impose her faith on Scotland, but had little support for this fidelity. She was faithful until the moment of her death, but had to struggle to be faithful to her religious duties in her own home. The Dauphin was a pious Catholic, but that was safe in France. Darnley, generally feckless in everything including his faith, managed to avoid going to his own nuptial Mass, but to even things out, he walked out on one of John Knox's more thunderous sermons and went hawking. Her third husband was a Protestant.

This brief biography does not measure up to the high standard set by Antonia Fraser's splendid 1993 biography, but few biographies do. Schaeffer has provided a readable account of the complex life of a woman who became most commendable in the way she died. As she knelt and put her head on the block, Mary prayed in Latin, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit."

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.