Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots > Status Update

'the letter from Babington to which she was replying included the graphic passage, 'For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by the excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty's service will undertake that tragical execution.''

'White's report show how civilised and luxurious Mary's surroundings were. And yet they were still a prison. She despised the guards who patrolled outside her bedroom and who escorted her, often carrying pistols, on the rare instances when she rode out in the park or on the moors... But if Mary sometimes lapsed into pessimism, she never forgot she was a Queen. She stuck stubbornly to protocol'

'The Lords knew that they could not expect to get away with crude forgeries on any significant scale. To establish Mary's guilt, they needed to find pages of genuine letters that, once muddled up, and minimally doctored here and there, would clinch what they wanted to prove. This hypothesis would also explain the curious incongruities in the contents of Letter 2 as old and new pages were spliced together'

'The most hostly debated question about Mary is whether she was involved in Darnley's assassination. Only if she was already an adulteress and Bothwell was her lover is the case against her convincing. The subject is intimately bound up with the controversy surrounding the eight letters produced by Moray to justify the charges in Buchanan's dossier.'

'Wrong facts apart, the Confederate Lords' story would be clear and consistent. It set out the charges plainly. There were three counts directed at Mary:
(1) adultery with Bothwell, both before and after Darnley's murder;
(2) conspiracy to murder Darnley in January 1567;
(3) collusive abduction to enable Mary and Bothwell to justify their marriage.' - p395

'embarked on a fishing boat to cross the Solway Firth, landing in England at about seven o'clock... She asked to see her cousin, and to have her aid and support in recovering her throne and defeating her rebels. But her decision to cross the border was a catastrophic mistake. It precipitated a crisis in England, where it was feared that the northern and still overwhelming Catholic counties would rise in her support'

'Mary's account of her twelve-day stay at Dunbar is deeply disingenuous. She had been a fool for love. She knew she had done wrong in sleeping with a married man, and her excuse that no one had made the effort to rescue her can be countered by the fact that she made no attempt whatever to escape, even when Bothwell was away in Edinburgh encouraging his wife, Lady Jean Gordon, to file her divorce petition.'

'Moray intended to return to Scotland from his self-imposed exile in France to rule in one capacity or another. The Confederate Lords had justified their revolt as a moral crusade to avenge Darnley's murder and secure Mary's release from the 'captivity' and 'thraldom' of Bothwell. This was pure humbug. What they did after her surrender at Carberry Hill was to imprison her themselves.'

'Morton, the most villainous of the Lords, had allied with Darnley in a Faustian pact to murder Rizzio. When Darnley had betrayed him, he allied with Bothwell to take his revenge. Then, Bothwell became too powerful. When he threatened the interests of the other Lords, Morton broke with him, leading a revolt that was all the more deadly in that Bothwell had enough inside information to condemn all of his accomplices'

'Bothwell entertained his fellow Lords to a supper at Ainslie's Tavern in Edinburgh, where he produced the draft of a bond he wanted them to sign. They were asked to confirm his innocence of Darnley's murder, to declare their willingness to defend him from calumny, and finally to promise that if Mary should just 'happen' to choose 'James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell' as her future husband, they would support him.'