the latest books about Britain
Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens, by Jane Dunn, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 453 pages, hardcover $30, www.aaknopf.com.
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AUTHOR JANE DUNN approaches her book about these prominent figures in British history as biography rather than history. In Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens she focuses on the tumultuous relationship between the two queens who shared a bloodline and an island, but never met. By concentrating on their personalities rather than events—though events are certainly included—Dunn brings Elizabeth and Mary into sharp focus.
Elizabeth, born into the maelstrom of her father’s relentless and bloody pursuit of a male heir, grew up cautious and understandably leery of marriage. Declared illegitimate when Henry VIII had her mother, Anne Boleyn, beheaded so that he could marry Jane Seymour, Elizabeth lived quietly on the periphery of Henry’s court. She devoted her youthful years to developing her mind, turning to books to prepare herself for the possibility of becoming England’s queen.
Mary was also bright and well educated, but impulsive. She became queen of Scotland when she was six days old and at age 15 married Françoise, Dauphin of France. She soon became queen consort of that country as well. From the age of 5 she grew up in France, enjoying a pampered life and the certainty of entitlement to two crowns. And there was the possibility of becoming queen of England as well; her claim to the English throne could be said to be as strong as Elizabeth’s, given Elizabeth’s illegitimacy according to Catholic doctrine. Mary was Henry VII’s great-granddaughter and Elizabeth was his granddaughter. The right to the English throne was central to the cousins’relationship and eventual clash.
When Françoise died, Mary found herself in what was for her a novel and distressing situation—the kind of peripheral status that was so familiar to Elizabeth. The crown of Scotland, a country of which she knew very little, seemed a meager consolation prize to the young widow. Her return to Scotland distressed Elizabeth, as the English queen perceived an increased threat to her crown by virtue of Mary’s proximity.
What could have been a mutually supportive relationship between these two female heads of state in a world politically dominated by men would fall victim to their personalities, with cautious Elizabeth seeing danger in Mary’s very existence. When Mary was accused of involvement in a plot to seize the English throne, Elizabeth had her imprisoned for nearly 19 years. The Scottish queen was found guilty of treason, but Elizabeth resisted signing Mary’s death warrant and then delayed carrying it out until her courtiers finally did so without her knowledge.
The once-pampered Scottish queen dramatically orchestrated her final day, choosing to see herself as a martyr to her Catholicism, though it’s impossible to tell if she truly believed that Catholicism rather than treason was the reason for her execution. When word reached Elizabeth that Mary had been beheaded, she wept. Had she never truly intended for Mary to be executed? Again, it’s impossible to tell. Her kinswoman, the one person who could understand her rare position as a woman and a queen, was dead.
We, of course, know all along that Mary’s going to lose her head, but Dunn’s narrative makes it clear that the cousins’personalities made their clash and Mary’s death all but inevitable. The author does a masterful job of moving the story along to its tragic conclusion and letting the facts—drawn from many documentary sources—speak instead of interjecting her opinion.
JUDY P. SOPRONYI
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, by John Guy, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 592 pages, hardcover $28, www.houghton mifflinbooks.com.
To CREATE THIS thoroughgoing biography of Mary Stuart, historian John Guy examined primary sources in the archives of France, England and Scotland, reading them in the original Renaissance English, French and Scottish. This in-depth research uncovered facts that bring new light to his subject.
Guy sees Elizabeth’s principal adviser, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as Mary’s greatest enemy, not Elizabeth. If not for Cecil’s lobbying against Mary, the two queens might have had the meeting that Mary so ardently desired and managed to amicably rule their respective British lands. Cecil’s spy, Sir Francis Walsingham, intercepted the coded letters Mary wrote during her imprisonment, which were effectively used against her at her trial. And Guy makes the case that Cecil—not Mary—was behind the murder of Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband.
Her French uncles, the Guises, are to blame for Mary’s downfall as well, for styling Mary and her first husband, Françoise, as king and queen of France, Scotland, England and Ireland. Their dynastic ambitions ensured that Elizabeth and Cecil would see Mary as a threat to Elizabeth’s reign.
Add Catholic–Protestant dissension and the perceived unsuitability of women as sovereigns, and Mary’s chances for ruling well and long were doomed. She nevertheless performed brilliantly. Mary showed tolerance for Protestants and even took on John Knox, and she gave as good as she got. She married her second husband, Lord Darnley, to ensure the succession—something Elizabeth was never able to do. And she decisively dealt with renegade lords, dashingly leading her loyalists into battle against them.
Guy opens his book with Mary’s day of execution, in an account of such shocking immediacy that it leaves the reader shaken. Mary staged this day as much as she was able, with her choice of dress, her crucifix, her defiant words and her dignity intact. The grisly vision of the first fall of the executioner’s ax upon her head rather than her neck, the appalling sight of her balding severed head rolling across the floor, her lips still moving, belongs to the spectators who were on hand for that awful event—not to Mary and her thrill-seeking and eventful life.
Having secured our rapt attention, Guy then follows Mary’s story from her birth through her three ill-starred marriages, her flight to England, her years of captivity and finally the day when she steps across the threshold of her rooms at Fotheringay Castle to go to her execution. It’s quite a tale.
Along the way, it becomes obvious that Guy admires this woman, especially her intelligence, decisiveness and ability to think quickly under duress. We thrill along with him as Mary gallops determinedly off at the head of her lords in the Chase-About Raids. She was a woman of passion, and that, along with not knowing whom to trust, was her ultimate downfall.
In fact, there was almost no one Mary could trust, aside from the “Four Maries,” childhood friends who first accompanied her to France and mostly remained her closest associates. They, unfortunately, were in no position to be much help to her when the likes of the powerful Cecil was out to get her. And he did.
But as Guy points out in the epilogue, it was Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland—James I of England—who inherited the crown of England after Elizabeth’s death, and it is from Mary’s Stuart line that all of England’s sovereigns have descended ever since.
—JUDY P. SOPRONYI
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, by Caroline Alexander, published by Penguin Books, New York, 491 pages, paperback $15.
WILLIAM BLIGH‘S Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty, published in 1790, was the first extensive account of the famous mutiny made available to a fascinated public, but hardly the last. And while it was arguably written by the most well-informed author, it was not necessarily the least biased. So the addition of the many subsequent accounts of maritime history’s most intriguing and controversial voyage has been as welcome as it was inevitable.
Equally inevitable has been the pendulum swing of popular perception that first placed the burden of guilt for the dramatic mutiny on Fletcher Christian, the ringleader of the mutineers, and then on Bligh himself, who has often been depicted as a harsh tyrant who drove his crew to desperation. New authors and new generations have put their own spin on the mutiny and drawn their own moral lessons from it.
While Alexander does the same in this latest addition to the corpus, this is much more than just a tired rehash of a familiar old story. The first thing readers will notice is that the author delves into episodes of the drama that previous authors touched on only lightly. Alexander’s principal intent is not to describe the dramatic climax of the voyage in vivid detail—indeed her narrative of the events on the fatal night abruptly ends with Bligh being awakened by the mutineers.
The drama in this account lies not so much in reconstructing what led to the mutiny on the Bounty, but in how the various crew members, in addition to a handful of influential friends and family members, tailored their accounts of the voyage in order to cast themselves in the best possible light, and to save their careers or even their lives—powerful enough motivation to cause them to bend the truth a bit. Almost without fail, the conscious goal of these “spin doctors” was to blacken Bligh’s reputation in order to excuse their own criminal actions. On the whole, these efforts proved so effective that much of what we assume we know about the mutiny, Alexander shows, is false.
This new look at the mutiny and its aftermath provides detailed profiles of all of the key players and reveals the forgotten roles played by the likes of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in shaping public opinion. The account of the court-martial of several of the mutineers, an episode not typically given its due in Bounty books, provides an eye-opening record of contradictory testimony and apparent half-truths that Bligh, away on another voyage at that juncture, was not on hand to refute.
All this makes for a fascinating psychodrama and a must-read book. I confess I initially turned to this volume with reluctance, fearing—thanks to the book jacket’s description of influence-peddling and coverups—a paranoid conspiracy theory. Far from it. Alexander does her job brilliantly, with sober judgment, and rests her conclusions on a solid foundation of evidence.
The days are long gone when William Bligh was almost universally depicted as a bogeyman deserving of his fate. Alexander now makes a strong case that he was, in fact, the victim of a smear campaign, and worthy of our sympathy.
—BRUCE HEYDT
JANE DUNN TALKS ABOUT ELIZABETH AND MARY
British Heritage: What surprised you when you were researching your book?
Dunn: Like many people coming to these queens, one has a lot of preconceptions. I was very struck by how much more complex and interesting they were as characters. Elizabeth was so much more than this rather controlled, uptight virgin queen. It struck me so much how emotional she was in circumstances; there’s no sense that she was freakishly manlike or lacking a heart, which is part of the caricature of her. Particularly striking to me was how she genuinely seemed to care about the people, which is quite a rarity in somebody of her status at this period in history. She certainly had seen the terrible depredations that war had brought to the people and the country during the time of her father, Henry VIII, and his wars in France. And then of course, the continuing war that Mary I, her sister, involved England in because of her marriage to Philip II of Spain. I think she determined very early that she was going to avoid spilling English blood at all costs. That sort of tenderness toward her people very much struck me. This awareness that she rules with the support of her people, even though she’s an autocratic ruler with more power than any president or prime minister or monarch today, but she understands, she has no standing army, she rules with the grace of her people. That’s extremely intuitively wise and modern. It is truly revolutionary that she decides she’s going to do it on her own, for whatever reasons. She decides so young that she’s not going to marry, though everything she has ever learned makes her realize that you have to marry, particularly if you’re a queen and particularly to secure the succession. That is so independent-minded of her.
BH: And Mary?
Dunn: Mary’s so often been seen as a sort of vapid romantic heroine who’s got a rather poor taste in men, but she was surprisingly intelligent and forceful and adventurous, and ruthless actually, when it came to important decisions in her life. She was a woman of terrific physical energy. Being confined was extremely difficult for her. Mary had a very strong sense of herself as an important queen. And being just queen of Scotland was not nearly as important as being queen of France—which of course she was fleetingly for a year—or queen of England. She agitated like mad to be named as Elizabeth’s successor, which of course Elizabeth resisted just as strongly. Mary was much more a woman of adventure and extrovert energy. BH: What reactions are you getting to Elizabeth & Mary?
Dunn: What has interested me so much in doing the book and also in going around talking to various groups in America is what modern resonances there are. It’s the whole debate of how we deal with different approaches to leadership, the different aspects of women and power. It’s really interesting in an election year, for me as an outsider, looking at American women who to European women like me always seem to be leading the field as far as breaking through the glass ceilings of business and industry and media, and yet the total absence of them as possible presidential candidates or even running mates is really very, very interesting. You begin to wonder whether there aren’t as many prejudices in some ways against women getting the absolute top job and presiding over men; it’s as difficult for women now, as it was for Elizabeth and Mary 450 years ago. J.S.
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