Philippa Gregory: The other queen

Williams, Neville.A Tudor Tragedy: Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk , Barrie and Jenkins, 1964.

Youings, Joyce.Sixteenth-Century England , Penguin, 1991.

Mary, Queen of Scots, is one of the great iconic characters of English history, and the research for this book has been a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to the reader. Recent work on the queen suggests a very different picture of her from the romantic and foolish woman of the traditional version. I believe she was a woman of courage and determination who could have been an effective queen even of a country as unruly as Scotland. The principal difference between her and her successful cousin Elizabeth was good advisors and good luck, not—as the traditional history suggests—one woman who ruled with her head and the other who was dominated by her heart.

Of course, a character who lives as long and in such dramatically contrasting circumstances as Queen Mary experienced will be interpreted in different ways by different writers. As in my version she suggests: “A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore.”

My version of Queen Mary’s story focuses on her years in captivity, when she was held by one of the most fascinating women of the Elizabethan era: Bess of Hardwick. Interestingly, Bess is another woman whom popular history has defined in terms of her husbands. The new biography by Mary S. Lovell shows Bess laying the foundation of her fortune less as a gold digger and more as a businesswoman and developer with an eye for good investment and management. Her last husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is not a man who features much in the history books, but there is strong evidence to suggest that he was in love with Mary, with whom he lived as her host and jailer for sixteen years and whose death he did indeed oversee with tears pouring down his cheeks.

The story of these three is a tragedy at the very heart of dramatic times. Their hopes and disappointments in one another is set against the great rising of the North that aimed to free Mary, restore her to her throne in Scotland, guarantee her inheritance of the throne of England, and provide freedom of religion for Roman Catholics. If they had triumphed—as they looked certain to do—then Elizabethan England would have been a very different place.

The Northern rebelllion has been portrayed as the greatest challenge to the reign of Elizabeth, and yet it hardly features in the history books and fades into insignificance beside the excited descriptions of the less threatening Armada. Indeed, the Northern army amassed a fighting force strong enough to take the kingdom, far greater than that of Henry VII at Bosworth, and their defeat was, as I relate here, a failure of conviction rather than military strength.

The defeat of the Northern army proved to be the final blow in the decline of the North, which was always feared and hated by the Tudors and which still bears the scars today.

I am indebted, as always, to the fine historians whose works are listed in the bibliography, and the novel is heavily built on the historical record. But, also as always, when matters of fact are in dispute, I make up my own mind based on the evidence as I understand it; and when there is a gap in the historical record, I invent, as a novelist should, a fiction that accounts for the known facts.

For more background on this and all my other novels, for discussion with readers, and for many other features, please visit my website, www.philippagregory.com.