Queen of Scots Quotes

“As the common people say, Only harlots marry in May.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Huntly was also taken, but died of a stroke while still mounted on his horse. His corpse was embalmed and sent to Edinburgh, where it was kept until the following May, when it was put on trial in Parliament. As the clerk’s report put it, “The coffin was set upright, as if the earl stood on his feet.” He was then found guilty of treason, and the family estates were declared forfeit.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“to see her not merely as a bundle of stereotypes or as a convenient and tenuously linked series of myths, but as a whole woman whose choices added up and whose decisions made sense.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Mary was not blamed by Elizabeth for causing this, the most serious rebellion of her reign—at least not yet.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“James’s first letter to his mother appears to have been written as late as March 1585, when he was eighteen.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“She was not allowed to write to him,”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“She especially yearned for her son. She could glean little news of him”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Like Elizabeth, she enjoyed two “courses” at both dinner and supper,”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“But if Mary sometimes lapsed into pessimism, she never forgot she was a queen.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“In my end is my beginning”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“unsurpassing beauty or quality, for hope and for ultimate triumph.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“the mythical bird that set fire to itself and rose anew from the ashes every five hundred years;”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Mary of Guise, whose emblem, or impresa, was the phoenix.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“had been the marigold turning to face the sun.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Up to now, Mary’s own impresa, chosen while she was in France,”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“In late January 1569, she was taken on a long journey south to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire,”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Philip II and the papacy, and therefore posed a greater threat to Elizabeth’s “safety”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“A seismic shift was about to occur, one that discounted her kinship bonds to Elizabeth”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Mary found this insulting. It implied that she was Elizabeth’s inferior.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“By Christmas 1568, Mary had not been found innocent, but neither had she been convicted.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“And what exactly was it that had been “collated”? Had all eight Casket Letters been scrupulously checked”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“At most, a certain resemblance might have been observed.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Moreover, we have already seen that letters 7 and 8 were forgeries on the evidence of their contents.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Cecil’s minute is too good to be true. It is almost certainly misleading.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“Elizabeth’s practice to draw hatch marks in pen across the blank spaces of her sensitive and important letters”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“As soon as he had trawled through the confession, he must have realized how flimsy”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“He denied everything he had said about carrying the two Glasgow letters from Mary to Bothwell.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“On the scaffold, he shouted out the truth to the assembled crowd.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“No sooner had Moray received a transcript of this confession than poor Paris was silenced forever.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

“On the second day he was tortured, and confessed to everything.”
― John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart