The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots [antikvár]

Preface The better-known trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, took place at the end of 1586 and led to her condemnation and to her execution at Fotheringhay in February 1587. The crime for which she was then tried and found guilty was complicity in plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth. But Mary had been tried before, shortly after she arrived in England as a refugee in 1568. The crime of which she had been accused was complicity in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. The verdict was, in effect, 'Not proven', and no sentence was pronounced, but the punishment she incurred was life imprisonment. It could not be said that any phase or aspect of Queen Mary's life has been neglected, but what can be called her first trial has received less attention than most parts of her career. The evidence produced at the investigation has, indeed, been much used in discussions of the authenticity of the Casket Letters and the responsibility for the murder of Darnley, but the proceedings have been little studied for their own sake. They fall, of course, at something of a watershed in Mary's biography. The girl in France, the romantic young Queen in Scotland, on one side: on the other, the prematurely ageing captive, the royal martyr - even if only a martyr to rheumatism, as Josephine Tey suggested - these are all too familiar. But the Mary of 1568-9 - a fugitive from justice as a suspected adulteress and murderess, her life in peril from her own subjects, yet bent on vengeance, ready to abandon Bothwell for whom she had given up so much, ready too to enter on a flirtation with Anglicanism as a condition of her restoration - this is in some ways a less attractive figure. But it is not less fascinating, for there could be much debate on the question whether Mary's behaviour at this stage is consistent or inconsistent with her conduct earlier and later. The investigations which dragged on for months, first at York, then at Westminster and finally at Hampton Court, made a show 9