Mary Queen of Scots [antikvár]

Author's NoteI had two principal aims when I began to write this biography. First, being possessed since childhood by a passión for the subject of Mary Queen of Scots,1 wished to test for myself the truth or falsehood of the many legends which surround her name. In order to tear away these cobwebsor in certain cases reverently replace themI delved into as many published and unpublished sources as I could discover, taking at my starting-point Mary's own letters and the calendars of state papers (although of course there may well be somé sources of which I was unhappily ignorant). Secondly, for the sake of the generál reader, I hoped to set Mary anew in the context of the age in which she lived. In the course of my own inquiries I was surprised to discover that despite the enormous quantity of research on the sixteenth century published during the last fifty years, radically changing our attitudes to certain of its aspects, no generál life of Mary has yet appeared, taking it all into account. There have been detailed treatments of certain episodes in her life notably that of the Kirk o'Field murder and the Casket Letters, and later the Babington Plotand Stefan Zweig's fascinating psychological interpretation, written in the thirties. But the last full-length biography, giving documentation, was that of T. F. Henderson in 1905. So in the end my two aims converged, and I found myself with the single objective of showing, with as much accuracy as is possible in the light of modern research, what Mary Queen of Scots must have been like as a person.In the interests of clarity, I have not entered into the various complications of dating in the sixteenth century, i.e. I have ignored the fact that the calendar year was held to start on 25 March during this period, and have used the modern style of dates starting on 1 January throughout. I have alsó ignored the ten days' difference between English and European dates in the period of the Babington Plot, due to the fact that the adjustment to the Gregorián calendar