After a careful close-reading of the Casket Letters, he concludes that they exonerate her from the charge of having her second husband murdered. If anything, Guy is rather partial to Mary. According to Knox, she was not fit to be a Queen. Mary, however, was seen by Knox as a Catholic Jezebel, a lewd seductress who was governed by her emotions. Elizabeth, the good Protestant Queen in Knox’s view, was God’s exception to the rule of women and ruled with the use of here reason. Guy does much to fight the stereotype (established by John Knox) that Mary ruled from the heart and not from the head. Unlike Neil Oliver in BBC’s Rise of the Clans, Guy portrays Mary’s marriage to Darnley’s as a political move, made in order to bolster her claim to the English throne (Darnley was Mary’s cousin). Soon, Mary faced the challenge of ruling a split country with Protestants terrified of the Catholic Queen clinging to the English for help, and Catholics trying to re-establish their position. A widow at twenty-one, she returned to her native land as an almost complete stranger. Her beloved father-in-law, Henry II, died, and her husband soon followed him.

She was known as a beauty: tall (five foot eleven inches) and pale, with auburn hair But not long after a fairytale wedding at Notre Dame, Mary’s fortune turned. Crowned the Queen of Scots as a baby, she was brought up in France to marry the Dauphin. “My heart is my own”, which was the original title of the book, refers to a letter in which Mary writes of her choice of a potential husband to her cousin Elizabeth. He uses original documents extensively and often quotes Mary’s letters and other archival material. John Guy’s well-written biography is very easy to read- at times, I would find myself beginning the next chapter when I had told myself I would stop at the end of a previous one. I knew she was beheaded, and I knew her son eventually became King of England. I had read David Starkey’s biography of the young Elizabeth when I was in my early teens, but my knowledge of Mary Queen of Scots was restricted to the Horrible History books.

The book was published originally as “My Heart is My Own” and won the Whitbread Biography Award in 2004. I picked up this copy of John Guy’s “Mary Queen of Scots” at Sainsbury’s for 4 pounds, with a film tie-in cover, and I do not regret it.

Mary queen of scots john guy