Mary Queen of Scots was my first love: the character, that is. She was my heroine from when I was eight years old, as a result of a book which I borrowed recurringly from the Oxford Public Library. I particularly fancied the idea of her child attendants, the Four Maries, and I rather think that I included myself as the Fifth Marie in my first version of her story, or even the little Mary herself, since there were no limits to my historical fantasy.
Later the idea of the child queen seemed less interesting than that of the femme fatale, as I poured over Margaret Irwin’s sexy version of the Bothwell abduction scene in The Gay Galliard. Still later, I became interested in the way one woman’s story could be traced like a kingfisher, flashing through the political history of France and Scotland: until the bright bird was caught and made captive in England.
In quite a different way Mary Queen of Scots, the biography, first published forty years ago, was also my first love. I certainly felt all the insecurity, as well as the passion, traditionally associated with that state when I was working on it in the 1960s. The circumstances were these: I was quite unknown as a historian. I was working and writing without any knowledge that there were or would ever be any readers. I imagined the academic world to be populated by a host of angry thistles: although in fact the few academics I did meet – notably Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, Keeper of the Records of Scotland – were courteous and helpful. (It is true that Sir James did try to persuade me to write instead about Mary’s counsellor, Maitland of Lethington, on the grounds that he was a far more interesting character; shaking his head sadly when I explained that as a child I had not exactly identified myself with him…)
Furthermore, I was the mother of six young children, the youngest of whom was born in the middle of the task. I experienced the working mother’s paradox: although I never seemed to be alone long enough to study, I nevertheless felt very lonely. At times I even felt quite desperate. With hindsight, perhaps some of this desperation aided me to write with the urgency such an extraordinary tale needed: murder, sex, scandal, imprisonment – all the way to execution on an English block – and to recreate it with the vividness it deserved.
Of course there were happy times. I particularly enjoyed what I came to term ‘optical research’, that is to say, visiting every conceivable castle, mire, byre or whatever associated with the queen in three countries. There was, for example, the trip to Château d’Anet, home of the legendary beauty Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Mary’s father-in-law, Henri II. I wished to see for myself the elegant memorial chapel in the black and white colours she made her own; I wished to admire the architecture of Philibert de l’Orme, who designed it for her with its many crescent moons, symbol of the goddess Diana, which this sixteenth-century goddess took as her own symbol. The Château d’Anet was actually in private hands, but I secured an introduction to the owner (a South American whom I will call Don Luis). I did so via Gaston Palewski, an extremely worldly and sophisticated French ambassador, who kindly fixed it for me.
On the appointed day, I set forth confidently for Anet, arrived, was duly received, and asked for a full tour. Don Luis proved to be both chivalrous and knowledgeable: and, as I remember it, he did not even allow the fact that I had interrupted an enormous lunch party on the terrace to deter him from showing me every black-and-white nook and cranny that I demanded. A very long time later, Don Luis was interrupted by a servant telling him he was wanted on the telephone. When he came back, he was as courteous as ever. ‘So you are Madame Fraser,’ he said. ‘That was a call from my friend Gaston Palewski arranging for your visit. How happy I am to know your name! And yet a little sad that you are not just some stranger come out of the blue to visit me, some goddess sent perhaps by the immortal Diana herself …’ My opinion of South American gallantry and good manners soared even as my rating of French diplomatic efficiency fell.
Less satisfying for me in terms of gallantry was my visit to Stirling Castle. At that time, visitors to the castle were supposed to employ the services of a (paid) guide. However, I was by now under the impression that I knew more about the history of Stirling Castle than any guide; I also wanted to drink in the atmosphere alone, since Stirling, as the traditional nursery of Scottish royal princes, had housed Mary’s infant son James. Under the circumstances, I hit upon an expedient which I considered to be brilliant. I decided to pay for a guide, book a solo tour, but suggest that my guide did not actually accompany me, instead he should sit out his allocated time in silence.
It did not work out. Perhaps it did not deserve to. I duly paid my money, but ‘my’ guide did not choose to sit out his allotted time in silence. Instead, he took on another complete tour and trailed around just behind me. This enabled him to give his own version of events – well within earshot. Every now and then, however, he indulged in a theatrical pause. Then he would proceed: Whisht! But not too loud! There’s a very clever young lady here from England and she knows all there is to be known about our poor wee castle. We wouldn’t want to disturb the very clever young lady…’ My feelings of impotent fury may be compared to those of Hilaire Belloc’s Lord Canton, who collapsed suddenly:
The insolence of an Italian guide
Appears to be the reason that he died.
Yet for all the adventures, occasionally ludicrous, which ‘optical research’ produced, I still believe in its value. To take only one example, I would never have understood the pattern of events following the murder of Riccio at Holyrood, had I not been able to go and investigate the layout of the palace for myself. It was the tiny cramped size of Mary’s room, where the crime took place, which explained to me more vividly than any document how the events of that tragic occasion must have fallen out; just as the correspondingly enormous size of the fireplace – virtually half one wall – showed me that the dashing-out of all the candles would still have left a very well-lit room.
Publication day came at last. Or rather, it didn’t come. A press strike meant that publication had to be postponed at the last minute from May Day – which seemed an especially appropriate day for Mary Queen of Scots – to two weeks later. By this time I was of course in a state of full-blown author’s paranoia. James Joyce famously regarded World War II as a conspiracy to blight the publication of Finnegans Wake. Rather less famously, I interpreted a review which mistakenly appeared on the original date – by V.G. Kiernan in The Listener – as some kind of plot. The fact that it was favourable (‘Exquisite Princess’ – I can still see the headline) only increased my paranoia. Other reviewers, incensed by Kiernan’s innocent jumping of the gun, might take the opportunity to band together and do me down.
They didn’t do that. Or rather there was no conspiracy. I have also learned from first-hand experience of reviewers that they have neither the time nor the desire to band together. But, as it happens, the very first review I read on the actual day of publication was also by far my worst review. It was by Elizabeth Jenkins, in the Daily Telegraph, and you didn’t have to be paranoid – although I was – to find it extremely critical. Looking at it again all these years later, I half expected to find my memory had exaggerated the sting: not so. At the very start I am described as presenting ‘a beautiful and very dangerous leopard as if it were an endearing Persian cat…’, and the review goes on from there. It was my mother, Elizabeth Longford, ever a stalwart in this kind of situation, who made it all right. She asked cautiously: ‘Did you put her books (on Elizabeth I and Leicester) in your bibliography?’ ‘No.’ I added that I admired the work of Elizabeth Jenkins but had not included it in my bibliography since I hadn’t drawn upon it for the book. ‘Ah,’ said my mother.
After that it all got better because the next lesson learned was that reviews, like reviewers, fade away but readers remain – and remain and remain. A voluminous correspondence came my way, all of it welcome. That goes for the distinguished retired diplomatSir Reader Bullard, who seemed to while away his leisure hours correcting my grammar; or even for the equally distinguished Jesuit priest in Rome whose energetic criticisms of my Latin only came to an end when I decided to eliminate it from future texts.
And when the book became a surprise success in the United States (despite a damning reader’s report beginning ‘this and scholarly book…’), the volume only increased. My favourite letter went as follows:
Dear Ms Fraser,
I am on duty tonight on top of a railroad drawbridge over the Betaluma River in North California. I brought your book Mary Queen of Scots with me to pass the hours and I think it is a really keen book but contains many phrases in French. There is no one in all northern California who reads French. Nor does the Northwestern Pacific railroad supply its drawbridge tenders with a French–English dictionary so these phrases are not intelligible to me.
Even more succinct was the letter of one irate gentleman from Chicago:
Madam, when you wrote Mary Queen of Scots, did you ever think of the problems of an ex-Polish miner from the Ukraine now living in Chicago? You really ought to translate your French phrases.
The answer is, no, I did not think of these problems … but I certainly would have if I had known that my book would enjoy these amazing peregrinations: Egypt, Poland, Iraq, Italy, Argentina, Japan, to name only a few of the eighteen countries where it has been published.
Then there were the correspondents – a surprising number of them – who believed in reincarnation and, having existed as Mary Queen of Scots in a previous life (no question about it), were able to put me right about sundry details, which I, from the inferior vantage point of historical research, had got absolutely wrong. There was even the gentleman whose letter began: ‘Madam, you have dared to write about my wife, Mary Queen of Scots…’ although the signature at the end of the letter appeared to read Genghis Khan, rather than Francois II, Darnley or Bothwell. I have since learned from the experience of other books that the Reincarnation Lobby is a strong if slightly bizarre one as no one has ever been a maid and many people have been a mistress: ‘I fear I was that saucy wench Nell Gwynn…’, began a delightful letter from a self-proclaimed vicar’s wife.
But I do not mean to mock. Nor would I mock the numerous owners of that particular prayer book which Mary Queen of Scots carried to her execution (enough of them to make a library) nor those who treasure relics of the authentic white veil she wore on the same occasion (if put together, they would drape the whole of Fotheringhay Castle). To all of these fans of Mary Queen of Scots, as to me, she lives. And it is we, all of us, who give her life.
Forty years later I don’t know whether I would write my book differently. I return to my original analogy of first love. I cannot be that person again, and many other historical loves have followed. Researching Marie Antoinette – another childhood passion – in the late nineties in the state archives in Vienna, I had the odd experience of returning at night to the hotel and finding my husband Harold Pinter reading Mary Queen of Scots for the first time. He was eager to talk about that earlier Queen of France, Mary Stuart, even as I burned to share my discoveries about Marie Antoinette, the equally ill-fated eighteenth-century queen.
Now that I am working at last on Mary Queen of Scots’ rival and kinswoman, Elizabeth I – a project I originally planned to follow my first book directly before turning to the challenge of Oliver Cromwell – I sometimes fancy that pictures of Queen Mary in my study are eyeing me reproachfully. They need not do so. I remain grateful for ever for the passion I once felt: and grateful to the brave, romantic, doomed queen, dead over four hundred years ago, whose existence changed my life.
ANTONIA FRASER, 2009
‘A King is history’s slave.
History, that is the unconscious general swarm-life
of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings,
as a tool for its own purposes.’
Tolstoy