Mary Queen of Scots: An Illustrated Life, and: Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion (review)

Mary, queen of Scots has almost become an honorary Englishwoman. At any rate, it is historians of Tudor England who seem most interested in writing about her. We have had biographies by John Guy (2004) and Retha Warnicke (2006); here are two more. Susan Doran's book is a brief overview of Mary's life, aimed mainly at the general reader but taking account of the latest scholarship; Kristen Walton attempts a thematic treatment of her varied career.

Doran's book is a straightforward, balanced, and largely successful narrative. As such, it is rather like Warnicke's book, although with only one-third of the length. It concentrates on international relations, highlighting Mary's importance as a queen of France and prospective queen of England—even, in some Catholic eyes, rightful queen after Elizabeth's accession in 1558. It was then that Mary quartered the English arms with her own—a challenge that Elizabeth never forgave; Doran expertly disentangles the complexities of the issue. By contrast, there is little on military affairs. At the battle of Pinkie in 1547, 10,000 Scots are slaughtered in two sentences (p. 23). There is much about gowns, jewels, and other trappings of monarchy, as well as on pageants and aspects of court culture that are of increasing academic interest.

The book is weaker on the internal history of Scotland. Mary's reign was important here, not just for attempts at religious compromise but also for the financial settlement of the Protestant church and for governmental developments like the establishment of commissary courts. Rather than study this, Doran relies on Jenny Wormald's polemical book-length essay that argued that Mary's reign achieved nothing and that she herself was uninterested in governing Scotland. Doran reproduces one of Wormald's key criticisms of Mary by writing, "Unusually for a Scottish monarch, she rarely attended council meetings" (p. 76). However, Wormald's criticisms have not been accepted in full by any significant Scottish historian and have been comprehensively rebutted by Michael Lynch. What was "unusual" about Mary here was that she had a privy council at all; previously, a privy council had been something for a regency, an alternative to the individual power of decision-making exercised most recently by Mary's father, James V. Mary's councillors evidently wanted to deprive her of that power; was this because she was a Catholic, or because she was a woman? It is one of the weaknesses of Walton's book (on which more in a moment) that, although religion and gender are supposed to be her central topics, she barely mentions the privy council. Doran's own occasional unfamiliarity with Scotland is illustrated in her statement that Mary "ratified the acts of the 1560 Reformation Parliament" in April 1567 (p. 114); the relevant act of the April 1567 Parliament did no such thing. Fortunately, Doran makes few such serious errors.

Doran steers clear of Darnley's unsolved murder in 1567 and the Casket Letters that allegedly proved Mary's complicity in it, merely placing herself briefly in the mainstream of scholarship: the Casket Letters are forgeries and there is thus no evidence that Mary was involved in the murder plot, but she was not too sorry to be rid of him. This may disappoint readers keen on the murder mystery; they should read Guy's book, which focuses intensively on the issue.

The title of Doran's book draws attention to its illustrations. There are many portraits, not only of Mary but also of people connected with her career. There are surprisingly few artifacts and buildings (no French châteaux, for instance), but many manuscripts, illustrating the rich holdings of the...