Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Stuart. The one was to become known as Gloriana, Good Queen Bess; the other was to metamorphise into the stuff of legend and ballads and bittersweet folk-memory. Elizabeth's name became synonomous with an age-the age of Shakespeare and Burbage, Raleigh and Drake; the defeat of Philip II's Armada. The ill-omened Stuart name is forever linked to regicide, a Pretender in exile; the white rose of the Jacobites-a lost cause for which romantic young men threw away their lives at Aughrim, the Boyne, Culloden Moor.
While Jane Dunn places her two protagonists against the historical backdrop of the sixteenth century, she does so by way of contrasting the characters of the two queens. And it becomes very apparent early on in her book that the author belongs to the hanging-judge variety of biographers, specifically as she views what she considers to be the fault-lines in Mary's personality.
In the clash between the rival dynasties and the religious ideologies of the day, Mary was from the outset a pawn, although a very difficult and active one. If, like her cousin Elizabeth, she was descended from Henry VII, she was also the daughter of the ambitious Mary of Guise who had married James V of Scotland. When the Scots princess was only five she was sent to France to be looked after by the powerful Guise family who were determined that she would marry the French Dauphin, the future Francis II. In one stroke, the Franco-Scottish alliance (the "auld alliance") would be ratified and Mary and Frances would have a claim on the thrones of Scotland, France, and fatally for she who was to become known as Mary Queen of Scots, England as well. It was Mary's misfortune to become queen of a country torn apart by rival warlords, civil war, and political assassinations; where the Reformed Kirk was in the ascendancy. If many Scots admired the young queen's beauty and spirit, there were many like John Knox and the Lords of the Congregation who saw her as a Catholic usurper.
When she was fifteen Mary was injudicious enough to sign a document which stated that if she had no heirs, her claim to the English throne would pass to the French line; that France could draw on a limitless mortgage on the Scottish treasury to re-pay French expenditures for France's defence of Scotland. "The Queen of Scots' political naivety and lack of judgment," writes Dunn, "did not bode well for her political deftness in the future." Elizabeth, on the other hand, exercised a canny strategy of survival before she was queen, when her legitimacy was in question and when powerful men like Lord Admiral Seymour tried to use her as a means to power. Not for the first time, Elizabeth's life was in danger, and she might have joined Seymour in the Tower had she not kept her head and outfoxed her interrogator who wrote of her, "She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her by great policy."
The author never wavers from her conclusion that Mary was the architect of her own downfall; that in comparison to her English cousin, she was headstrong, reckless, impulsive; that the inherent flaw in her character as both woman and queen was that she had no political acumen whatsoever and that she became a hostage to her impulses. That "fatal charm," as John Prebble puts it, not only drove men to death and exile, it led to the downfall of Mary herself. Elizabeth also attracted men, in particular Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. But the English queen-"the bastard child of a whore," as she was referred to by Catholic Europe-was too sensible of her own precarious position to seriously consider marriage. After all, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had been executed by Henry VIII primarily because she had failed to produce a male heir. And even if she had followed the advice of her Privy Council and did marry and become pregnant, she knew very well the fate of Catherine Parr and Jane Seymour, both of whom died giving birth.
Clearly Dunn takes a dim view of Mary, who "put the personal.before the political" while Elizabeth sacrificed "the personal and placed her responsibilities as queen at the centre of her life." With a Grundyish sniff of disapproval, the author leaves the reader in no doubt that Mary more or less signed her own death warrant by marrying her prince (that is, the dissolute Lord Darnley) instead of following her cousin's example and marrying "her people."
While the author provides a great deal of convincing evidence that Elizabeth "learnt that her fate largely lay in her own hands," and that her decision to choose her subjects over a husband was a matter of expediency and survival more than it was a question of principle, she cannot resist reconstructing Good Queen Bess as a proto-feminist. This of the woman who looked to her mother's executioner as the model of regal probity! Elizabeth was a quick study; a woman of considerable wit and political savvy who also happened to speak Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, and who was much influenced by her reading of Plutarch, Cicero, and Livy. What she learned above all was the "game of kings"; what she grasped early on was the nature of power, how to retain it, and how to dissimulate with those who would have used her as a means of getting within reach of the throne.
How curious then that Dunn sees Mary Stuart as the more conventional of the two cousins. She concedes that Mary was not lacking in "strength of character, energy, the capacity to govern." but those virtues were nullified by her wilfulness. "But it was wilfulness," writes Dunn, "within a larger pattern of emotional dependence and conformity, which was to seal the destiny of the Scottish queen." A queen who in person led her troops into battle; who preferred the company of her Italian secretary to her consort, and who married the Border ruffian the Earl of Bothwell-the suspected murderer of her husband-might be described as suicidally reckless but surely not conformist.
Unlike Elizabeth of England, Mary Stuart was not only "cavalier with her own power," she had the misfortune to fall in "with weak or self-serving specimens like Moray, Riccio and Darnley." However, Dunn's charge that Mary was lacking in "self-awareness" is contradicted by a sonnet the Queen of Scots wrote to Bothwell from her English exile after her defeat at the Battle of Langside. "For him since I haif despised honour,/ The thing only that bringeth felicitie./ For him I have hazardit greatness and conscience./For him I have forsaken all kin and frendes,/ And set aside all other respectes" Even supposing that Mary had played the game of kings with the same tenacity as her cousin, it seems unlikely that she would have triumphed.. Whether she wished it or not, she was seen by Catholic Europe as their champion set among the heretical Scots and English. There's no question that her character played a part in her fate, but it was not the whole reason for her downfall, despite Jane Dunn's assertion to the contrary. For the destiny of Mary Queen of Scots had much more to do with the unleashed juggernaut of the times-Counter Reformation, revolution, schism-which crushed her and thousands of others beneath its weight.
According to Dunn, Elizabeth of England is clearly the deserving hero of her epoch-the one who danced the elaborate Gavotte of dynastic polity, and never put a foot wrong. And feckless Mary Queen of Scots? After nineteen years of imprisonment she paid for her sins under the headman's axe at Fortheringay Castle. Yet if posterity has granted Elizabeth the official status of greatness, it has conferred tragedy upon the life and legend of the Queen of Scots. Tragic figures and lost causes, no matter what the history books might say, have a way of mutating; of assuming different meanings for different generations. Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, written in another era of regicide, Divine Rights, and revolution, cut to the centre of the elaborate charade of Mary's imprisonment, even if it did take liberties with the known facts. MARY: I know it! I am weak, and she is strong./Let her use force then, let her kill me,/Build on my sacrifice her safety-/But let her then confess that she employs/ Force, only force/Murder me, she may, she cannot judge me.
Even if Jane Dunn appears to be obtuse about Tudor realpolitik, there's no reason to doubt that Mary Queen of Scots, Schiller's version or the historical one, had any illusions about what happens when you make the wrong move in the game of kings. She gambled, she lost, but played the deadly game to the end. As for Elizabeth, she was her father's daughter to the fingertips, even if it suited her to have her enemies believe otherwise.