Book review: Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots by Rosemary Goring

Together they have claim to be not only the most complete account of Mary’s life, but also the fairest and most intelligent. She has, one should add, an advantage over the host of previous biographers. She has been able to draw on the coded letters which Mary wrote from prison that a team of cryptographers has recently deciphered. More of them later.

Goring has no doubt that the flight to England was Mary’s greatest blunder. She should have made for France where she had been married to her first husband, now eight years dead.

But she was in fear for her life and she believed that her cousin Queen Elizabeth would restore her to the throne in Scotland. But Elizabeth was wary of her, understandably.

Her Protestant regime was insecure. Many English Catholics, especially in the north, regarded Mary as their rightful queen. Meanwhile the Scots Protestant lords, though a bunch of repulsive cutthroats, were allied to England.

Then there was the question of the murder of Mary’s second husband Darnley. The Protestant lords, led by Mary’s half-brother Murray, insisted Mary was party to that murder (they knew very well she wasn’t).

So Elizabeth kept Mary at a distance and under house arrest, light in the early years, more stringent as time passed. Three hundred years later Queen Victoria said she couldn’t forgive Elizabeth for her “cruelty to poor Mary”. My grandmother, who first aroused my interest in history, said the same thing. But I think they were wrong.

She was a threat to the Queen and the Protestant religion. Moreover, her English ministers feared and hated Mary.

After the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, this encouraged English Catholics to deny her right to the throne, and after a Catholic rising in the north was defeated (and its leaders executed), the English Parliament called for the Scottish queen to suffer the same fate. But Elizabeth refused.

Mary’s imprisonment would last 17 years. She was still treated as a queen. She had her own household of more than 20 and her meals were lavish. She was shuffled from castle to castle, all well guarded. Goring has explored them all or what remains of them.

Meanwhile, Mary wrote letters, some complaining of the restrictions put on her. All this is dealt with in fascinating detail. There were proposals that she might return to Scotland to share the throne with her son James VI, whom she hadn’t seen since he was a baby. But they came to nothing. There was no enthusiasm in Scotland and James, who had been educated by the brilliant and repulsive George Buchanan, had been taught that she had been guilty of his father Darnley’s murder.

In truth there was more support for Mary in England than in Scotland and Mary’s hopes, disappointed by the inaction of the Catholic powers France and Spain, turned to these enthusiastic conspirators.

An inveterate letter-writer, Mary engaged with these young zealots, ignorant of the fact that Elizabeth’s spymaster, Walsingham, had penetrated the network, even encouraging plotters. For years I persuaded myself that, not knowing the final form of her letters, for she wrote in French and her secretaries translated and encoded them, she might not have consented to the planned assassination of Elizabeth. But, alas, she was guilty.

Her end was magnificent, though appalling. Devout in her Catholicism now, she saw herself as a martyr. Goring’s treatment of her last months ending in the horror of Fotheringhay is magnificent, worthy of the queen’s superb performance. I can’t think it could have been written better.

Reluctantly I have to say Victoria and my grandmother were wrong. If Elizabeth has been like her appalling father Henry VIII, Mary would have gone to the block at least a dozen years earlier.

Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots by Rosemary Goring, Berlinn, £20