Rosalind K. Marshall’s (http://www.debretts.com/people/biographies/browse/m/20165/Rosalind%20Kay+MARSHALL.aspx) Queen of Scots, first published in 1986, quickly established itself as a popular account of Mary, the most romantic and tragic of all Scotland’s monarchs. Her dramatic tale owes its immediacy and power to the fact that it is closely based throughout on the original sixteenth-century sources, and tells the story using, wherever possible, the actual words spoken and written by the Queen herself. Now it is available again in a new, revised edition.
The life of Mary, Queen of Scots, was full of incidents and personalities which at the time and ever since have captured the imagination and divided the opinion of the public. After her sensational imprisonment and shocking death in 1597 so many questions were left unanswered. Was Mary a promiscuous murderer, or the innocent, misunderstood victim of evil men? Did she love David Riccio, or merely use him as a pawn in her intrigues? Was she party to the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley? Why did she then marry the Earl of Bothwell, the man everyone believed was guilty of the crime? Was she a dangerous enemy of Elizabeth constantly plotting her downfall, or an unjustly accused kinswoman desperately fighting for her own survival?
Some of these questions may never be resolved, but in this compellingly readable book a wealth of evidence is presented which will enable readers to make up their own minds. The narrative is complemented by some two hundred illustrations, most of them in colour, of the people, places and objects associated with Scotland’s most enigmatic monarch. Whatever mysteries remain, one thing comes across unmistakably: the sense of a passionate and individual woman, as real in her emotions and responses as if she were a contemporary of our own. What Dr. Marshall achieves in this portrait is to make Mary, Queen of Scots, live again for the modern reader.
207 pages in Mercat Press paperback edition
ISBN 978-1873644959
Dr. Rosalind K. Marshall