Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542-1600 (review)

This book attempts to fill a surprising gap in Marian literature: the extent and nature of public interest in France—official, Catholic and Huguenot—in the career and fate of Queen Mary. It emerged as an off-shoot of the Sixteenth-Century French Vernacular Book Project based in the Reformation Studies Institute at the University of St Andrews.

In many respects, there are few surprises in this careful study. The first chapter, dealing with Mary's early career in France, treads familiar ground, beginning with an account of the deliberate policy of Henri II to combine a regal image for the young queen with an ambitious foreign policy. Relatively little propaganda was disseminated outside the royal court before the marriage to the Dauphin in 1558, when a surge of printed works (provoking over sixty reference notes for six pages of text) hit French public opinion. Defenders of French Catholicism found in the rebellion of the Lords of the Congregation a ready text, aimed at politiques as well as hard-line domestic opinion, with which to beat the drum about the natural links between Protestantism and rebellion. Yet Mary was curiously ignored by Catholic propagandists after her return to Scotland in 1561 and even in the early stages of her imprisonment in England until well after the Ridolfi plot of 1571. In parallel, the French crown systematically censored attempts to criticise the Elizabethan regime over the same period. The beginnings of a French Catholic assault on the perpetrators of crimes against an exiled Catholic queen belonged to the period after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, with the anonymous tract L'Innocence, which cast as the chief villains Buchanan, a 'detestable atheist', and the 'abominable bastard' Moray, a co-conspirator of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, also removed by assassination. But the rest of the 1570s saw a further curious silence amongst Catholic propagandists until the Scottish Catholic exile David Chalmers of Ormond's (not Lord Ormont) three-volume history of 1579, although the first (and best known) of these, his Histoire abbrégée, had been composed as early as 1572. Despite its detailed chronicle of Scotland's mythical past and its extensive guide to the auld alliance, Chalmers' work had little impact on either royal policy or the French press. Interest revived in her, not as a prisoner but as a martyr after 1587.

If there are few surprises in the conclusion that the French Catholic press, save for the works of a few exiles, was generally muted about Mary, there is more that is fresh in Dr Wilkinson's analysis of Huguenot literature, which makes up chapter three of the book. Mary figured only incidentally in the barrage of Huguenot villification of Guise ambitions up to and beyond her personal reign, as a victim rather than an agent of her Guisard relations. One of two turning-points, it is argued, was the publication in 1572, probably in London though the imprint was given as Edinburgh, of a French translation of Buchanan's De Maria Scotorum (1571); like its other editions—in Latin, English and Scots—this work, the case for the prosecution in the 1568 trial of Mary at Westminster, reeked of English government connivance. The other was the delayed reaction to the St Bartholomew Massacre, when, after 1574, Mary became another female Guise tyrant in a push to promote a Calvinist international interest in the French wars of religion. Yet the Huguenot exploitation of the perfidious Catholic queen died away after 1579, when she found herself out of the propaganda limelight of both French confessional camps.

The final two chapters in the book are devoted to a close analysis of the huge outpouring of Catholic polemic after Mary's execution, much of it in anonymous editions of the Catholic League beyond the control of the government. Although the fact is unsurprising, the scale of the exploitation of Mary by the league is remarkable: over a fifth...