Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, by Alison Weir. Published by Ballantine Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10036; www.randomhouse.com/BB. 608 pages. $27.95 hardcover.
BRITISH HISTORY IS REPLETE with unsolved mysteries. Few of these historical puzzles have captured the imagination of writers like the murder of Henry Stuart, known better as Lord Darnley.
In the early hours of 10th February 1567 the Old Provost’s Lodging at Kirk O’Field, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was blown into rubble in an explosion that reverberated across the Scottish capital. The young consort of Queen Mary had been convalescing from illness there and intended to join Mary in Edinburgh the next day. His lifeless but unmarred body was discovered in the orchard, yards away from the blast. For 400 years historians have sought to answer the question of who murdered Darnley.
Well-known historian Alison Weir ’sets out to unravel this celebrated mystery. She has undertaken no small task. The investigations following the King’s death were virtually all designed to confound the question, not answer it. Not only did too many powerful people in Scotland have a vested interest in keeping the truth hidden, but the international interests of England, France, Spain, and the Vatican were involved as well. The contemporary evidence was manipulated, suppressed, manufactured, and forged.
Darnley himself was an obnoxious and arrogant man, whose scheming and lust for power alienated almost all of the Scottish nobility as well as his own wife. His dynastic ambitions not only for the Scottish throne but for England’s as well added political and religious overtones to the cauldron of personal motives many in Scotland had for his removal from the scene.
Sixteenth-century Scotland was a focal point of the era’s conflicts between Catholic and Protestant causes. Queen Mary reigned as a Catholic monarch in a vehemently Protestant country flamed by the preaching of John Knox at St. Giles, just a few hundred yards from Holyrood Palace. Not only was Mary the presumptive heir to Elizabeth’s English throne, as far as Catholic Europe was concerned, she was the legitimate claimant. The unresolved question of Mary’s own involvement in the death of her husband consequently charged both Scotland and England until her execution by Elizabeth 20 years after Darnley’s murder.
Weir painstakingly and exhaustively reconstructs the events at Kirk O’Field and their aftermath. Her prose is fluid and well reasoned, although she pursues a few tangents of more interest to serious historians’than to general readers. There can be little doubt that she correctly identifies the cabal of Scottish Lords who were ultimately responsible for the murder. In the process, she paints a picture of the Queen of Scots as a young woman of bad judgment and little practical savvy who was innocent of the crime and became. one of its victims instead.
However comprehensive and persuasive Weir’s account may be, the last word on Lord Darnley’s death has certainly not been written. Historians can always find new twists and bits of evidence that lead them to reassess such a high-profile historical quandary. In the meantime, Alison Weir’s narrative must stand as a comprehensive and plausible account of Scotland’s greatest mystery.
—DANA HUNTLEY
DEARLY DEPARTED
Learn more about Lord Darnley’s mysterious death on British History Online at BritishHeritage.com.
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, by Andrew Birkin, reissued in 2003 by Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 800-405-1619, www.yale.edu/yupl. 344 pages. $18.95 paperback.
ANDREW BIRKIN’S 1979 BIOGRAPHY OF playwright James Matthew Barrie is a strange one, mixed with devotion, obsession, and heart-breaking love. In it Birkin relates the co-dependent relationship Barrie developed with the Llewelyn Davies family and how this association helped form the character Peter Pan in the childhood staple, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Though the unfolding story tends to disconcert, Birkin’s heavy use of quotations from Barrie’s prolific writings and correspondence between Barrie, the Davies family, and their acquaintances, as well as interviews with surviving family members, weaves an admirably thorough account. The narrative begins with Barrie’s own troubled childhood and ends with the death of Michael, one of the five Davies children and, it would seem, Barrie’s platonic soul mate. In addition, the book is peppered with family photographs of the Davies family and Barrie.
Birkin reveals through excerpts of Barrie’s writing that, like his most beloved fictional character Peter Pan, Barrie never wanted to grow up. “The horror of my boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not: I felt I must continue to play in secret,” wrote Barrie in Margaret Ogilvy. Consequently, he got on quite well with children and preferred their company to adults . He would mesmerize wee ones with the waggling of his shaggy eyebrows and enchant older children with tales of fairies and pirates.
These antics beguiled the two eldest Davies boys, aged five and four, when they one day met Barrie while playing in Kensington Gardens. A lifelong relationship with the family sprang from that initial encounter and a later coincidental meeting with their mother, Sylvia, with whom a married Barrie became enamoured. Years later, Barrie even became the boys’ guardian after both of their parents died.
Peter Pan soon emerged as an amalgam of the five Davies boys; “my boys,” as Barrie came to refer to them. Barrie dedicated the play to the boys: “I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. I am sometimes asked who and what Peter is, but that is all he is, the spark I got from you.”
Not all of the boys returned Barrie’s devotion, especially middle son Peter, who later wrote that, although he received “innumerable benefits and kindnesses” from the “strange little creature [Barrie], …[yet] in the end, his connection with our family brought so much more sorrow than happiness.” Peter bore the brunt of schoolboy teasing as “the real Peter Pan.” He came to loathe the work and later referred to it as “that terrible masterpiece.”
ONE ACQUAINTANCE OBSERVED, “it is extraordinary to see how [the boys] fill [Barrie’s] life & supply all his human interest.” As a result, Barrie suffered his own sorrows through his association with the Llewelyn Davies family when four of the family members died—including his favourites among the boys, George and Michael. Michael drowned in 1921 at age 20 and was the last to precede Barrie in death. “All the world is different to me now,” Barrie wrote a friend, “Michael was pretty much my world.” To another he wrote that Michael “had been the one great thing in my life for many years….”
Though incredibly complex, Birkin manages to convey the staggering depth of feeling Barrie had for the boys, a relationship that has caused some to label the Scottish author a paedophile. Yet as Birkin relates the somewhat troubling story, he strives to always give Barrie the benefit of the doubt. As does Nico Llewelyn Davies, the youngest of the boys, who told Birkin in the late 1970s, “Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest, and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex. He was a darling man. He was innocent; which is why he could write Peter Pan.”
For those who hold the tale of Peter Pan dear to their heart, perhaps it is best to give J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys a miss. Instead, cherish your memories of an impish boy who refused to grow up. For the rest, prepare yourself for a thoroughly engrossing tale that is well researched, well written, and an astounding tale.
—LARUE SCOTT
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook, published by Viking Press, 40 W. 23rd St., New York, N.Y. 10010.212-807-7300. 288 pages. $25.95 hardcover.
ENGLAND NAMED TED HUGHES its Poet Laureate in 1984. By the time of his death in 1998, when his reputation was at its zenith, critics were writing glowingly about Hughes’ work—poetry rich with animal-of-prey imagery. Birthday Letters, his last collection of verse, made the bestseller lists in England and the U.S. In the minds of many, however, his impressive curriculum vitae was irrevocably tainted; to them, Ted Hughes was simply the monster who impelled his first wife, American-born poet Sylvia Plath, to commit suicide. The circumstances of her death in 1963, just as the fledgling Feminist Movement began questioning the male sense of entitlement, resonated poignantly with British and American women.
In her insightful biography based in part on letters that were unavailable before Hughes’ death, Diane Middle-brook convincingly contends that although the Hughes-Plath marriage lasted only six years, that relationship informed Hughes’ lifetime body of work. As Middlebrook so aptly puts it in her book’s final paragraph, “Under Hughes’s signature, Plath’s words to Hughes became his words to us.”
THE MARRIAGE BEGAN AUSPICIOUSLY. The two met at Cambridge University (where Sylvia was a Fulbright Scholar), fell immediately and passionately in love, and married less than three months later. Significantly, before the wedding Plath confided to her brother that she worried about Ted’s reputation for “loving and leaving,” and to her mother that he sometimes showed “cruel streaks.” Yet at the same time her journals documented the “brilliance of his mind and the virility of his imagination.”
Conflict coloured their relationship from its outset. For years neither had private space in which to work. In a succession of tiny flats they worked elbow to elbow, a proximity prompting complaints from Sylvia about her lack of inspiration, which in turn infuriated Ted. Increasingly Hughes felt stifled by domesticity and Plath’S extreme possessiveness. Accustomed to roaming the Yorkshire hills, where he grew up hunting and fishing, he claimed he needed similar freedom, away from Plath’s watchfulness, in order to create poetry.
Amazingly, given the state of her marriage, during a brief six-week period in 1961 Sylvia wrote The Bell Jar, whose main character, Esther Greenwood, serves as Plath’s surrogate. It chronicles in a direct and unsentimental style the major depression Plath had suffered when she was 18. With electro-convulsive shock treatments as the plot’s centrepiece, the novel is deeply affecting.
By autumn of that year the couple had scraped together enough money to buy Court Green, a 10-room, run-down rectory deep in Devon. During the early months there, Ted and Sylvia apparently reached a degree of compatibility. Their babies, Frieda and Nicholas, were a source of joy, and parenting came easily to both Hughes and Plath. The countryside was invigorating, and domestic chores were scrupulously divided so that neither had to sacrifice more writing time than the other.
Yet as Middlebrook comments, “a dance through the minefield of their differences characterized the partnership even at its best.” While living at Court Green Sylvia felt uneasy about Ted’s fidelity. For his part Ted wrote to his brother saying that the marriage had been “marvelously creative,” but had now become destructive. Rebelling against Plath’s “take-charge personality,” Hughes took frequent business trips to London. He began a very public affair with a married woman who was at one time a friend to both of them. When Ted deserted Sylvia and the two children, ages two and a half and 10 months, just over a year after the family had moved to Court Green, the news raged through London’s gossipy literary circles.
Before Christmas Sylvia and the babies moved to London to a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (the building where Yeats had lived as a child). On the morning of 11th February 1963 she killed herself while Frieda and Nicholas lay sleeping. Middlebrook attributes the suicide to depression, adding dispassionately, “Some people blame Hughes’s infidelity; others infer from the timing of her actions that Plath expected to be rescued and miscalculated the danger.”
After Plath’s death, Hughes progressed from one lover to another, the length and intensity of each relationship varying. Among the women were a Devon farm wife, a glamorous publicity agent, and a well-known, aristocratic novelist.
Assigning culpability in the Plath tragedy serves no purpose. It is, however, unsettling to learn that the woman for whom Hughes left Plath, Assia Weville, not only committed suicide but also murdered the four-year-old daughter she had with Hughes.
—KATHERINE BAILEY