My Heart Is My Own

Despite being an absolute chonker, John Guy's biography of Mary Queen of Scots never feels like a slog. This book thoroughly re-examines the original sources and presents them in such a way that humanises oor Mary, revealing her personality quirks, putting her lowland Scots accent back in her mouth, and portraying her as a canny and astute wumman that tried her best to hold her country together. There's no doubt that this is an absolutely brilliant book, I only wish Guy had trusted his readers a bit more. We don't need the same snippet of information repeated over and over again. By the time I got to the end of the book, the mere mention of ‘Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, who levelled his pistol at Mary' was absolutely cracking me up. Sorry Andrew.

To say this was a sympathetic biography of Mary Queen of Scots would do an injustice to the word sympathetic. I hate to use the word hagiography but this is as close as it gets.

The author is a specialist in Tudor history and is to be respected but I have come away from this very readable book, and I mean very readable, profoundly confused. He has, in my opinion, let his deep research into the subject cloud his judgement in the presentation of the biography. His sympathy spoils the entire narrative.

Yes he is occasionally critical of Mary's decisions but then there seems to be excuses. Lets be honest, her decision to marry Bothwell must rank as one of the most ludicrous acts by a reigning monarch in British history. Yes the author says as much but makes excuses. I was almost waiting for Stockholm Syndrome to be evoked after she was raped by Bothwell!

The superlatives used to describe Mary are constant throughout:- intelligent, ingenious, razor sharp. And in the end when things have gone disastrously wrong we get told she was “unlucky”.

Well yes, maybe, but her bad luck is apparently just a constant throughout her life. The author works hard to make it all very unlucky that way via some very sympathetic eulogising. I tended to want him to tell the story and let me decide, not editorialise.

My other major criticism is the use of the sources. I have to be critical of the notes, sources and the bibliography used in the research for the fact they are not mapped by footnotes. The book is a revisionist opinion and that is fair enough, but with that, if the author going to make statements as to it being a “cold day”, one of the protagonists feeling “happy”, “sad”` or indifferent at least map the source via a footnote. I mean if Mary was born in the coldest winter (first page of the first chapter) what was the source? This was constant throughout and a distraction from a very good history to tell.

So with all that in mind would I recommend this to others who are interested in the life of Mary Queen of Scots? Yes as at its best this is an an extremely interesting book. I just wish the author had been a bit more circumspect in his delivery.