‘handsomely rugged’ ?
If you join any tudor mailing list, it won't be long before you are being regaled by a list of the failings of Mary Queen of Scots, shortly followed by a eulogy to that perfect sovereign, Elizabeth I. Should you dare to ask for the reasoning behind such claims, you will be told to refer to this book, as though it were some kind of tudorphile Bible. Let me spare you some time at library loans - don't bother.
Now don't get me wrong, this book is a cracking good read if you want a first insight into Elizabeth I and the political goings-on in her reign. It's great if you are a youngster and it's your first look at the time. It is sure to stimulate you to want to read more. But it's rubbish as a definitive guide, or to use as a valid source for argument.
The first reason for this is that it is written purely from secondary sources. The bibliography does list Hume's Calendar of State Papers, but I must have missed the reference to them in the text. Otherwise it is supremely frustrating to read a highly contentious quote, such as that stating "that Lord Robert [Dudley] had slept with the Queen on New Year's night," only to find that the source is a a secondary one, and thus it is unclear whether the quote itself came from the author of that secondary source or was a direct quote included in the secondary source. Plus it makes chasing the statements that bit harder. But then, many quotes in this book go completely unreferenced.
The second problem with the book is the way in which Luke doesn't give any reasoning behind either her character pen portraits or her assumtions regarding emotions. Many characters in the tale suffer from unsubstantiated character assassinations. John Knox is 'coarse and violent', Katherine Grey 'a thin, whey-faced girl with her mother's lack of charm and her father's narrow-minded arrogance', the Earl of Pembroke is 'a monstrously cruel and selfish man', and Bess of Hardwick 'a loud, arrogant, imperious woman, selfish and unfeeling, continually demanding'. It's not that she's necessarily wrong, but I'd like some evidence before believing her. Sometimes she's definitely wrong; Darnley may well have been 'handsome in a peurile way', but Bothwell was certainly not, as Luke would have us believe, a 'rapist, Border brigand and murderer', and Kirkaldy of Grange, far from being 'a particularly bitter antagonist of the Queen [of Scots]' went on to switch sides to support her pretty quickly when he realised the error of his ways.
She also writes about the emotions characters were feeling with no apparent evidence outside of her own imagination. She gives Elizabeth feelings she can't *know*, without making it clear that this is conjecture. As an example, when discussing her attitude to virginity, Luke writes, 'Her only mistake, however, was in thinking that principle which she found so desitable might be shared by her most intimate companions, her maids of honour and ladies-in-waiting.' Another interpretation might have been that she was simply jealous of them.
This wouldn't be so bad if she were even-handed, but she isn't. If she can paint Elizabeth well and Mary Queen of Scots badly then she will. For instance she makes out that Mary was reluctantly forced to accept religious toleration as necessary, whereas Elizabeth inclined that way naturally. Luke then decides that Dudley was innocent of his wife's murder because Elizabeth allowed him to return to court, and allowed their relationship to blossom. Bothwell obviously doesn't get afforded the same benefit of the doubt!
Not that Luke is particularly generous in her portrayal of Elizabeth. She suffers from a bad attack of '(GR) Elton-itis', and hates it that Elizabeth is a woman, feminism obviously not having reached the shores of Luke-land by the 1970s. '[Elizabeth] was also easily aroused to petty response, complaining of imagined faults and slights and exhibiting all too many unattractive feminine traits formerly lacking in the more regal monarch.'
Mary M Luke has already decided on her version of history, and is unable to see any other interpretation as possible even when it is slapping her in the face with a day-old cod. The biggest example, of many, is the way she writes about Elizabeth and her sexual liaisons. There is Robert Dudley, whose relationship with the Queen was the talk of the taverns, the gossip of the ambassadors and the despair of her advisors. Did she behave with perfect propriety? Well, she certainly put paid to the rumours of her having slept with him, by giving him an apartment adjoining hers. Later dalliances with the likes of Jean de Simier and Robert Devereux are happily detailed, scurrulous rumours included. Yet Luke never once doubts the famous virginity, or points the finger at Elizabeth's lack of judgement in behaving so as to incite rumour and gossip. On the other hand, in the case of Mary Stuart, there were NO rumours about her and Bothwell, but, according to this book, she was a whore who thought with her heart anyway.
Similarly we see Elizabeth stuttering and prevaricating her way though history, indecisive, unsure, and completely reliant on her advisors. Meanwhile Mary Queen of Scots purposefully governs her realm, outwitting Elizabeth in the marriage palaver, making her own decisions and successfully avoiding the constant attempts at her throne from a devious and disloyal nobility. But who gets the praise?
She shares the common failing of historians of the Tudor age, in that she is utterly Anglo-centric, and what knowledge she has of Scottish affairs is coloured by a pro-English bias. Thus we hear that 'hotheaded charges by the Catholic partisans resulted in retaliation; inevitably, outright rebellion by the Scottish Lords followed.' This isn't merely an inadequate explanation of how the Lords of the Congregation came into being, it is a dishonest one that ignores both the unscrupulousness of James Stewart and the interference of England in Scottish affairs.
Other assumptions are just ludicrous. We hear that when Mary decided to return to Scotland, 'one emmissary, John Leslie bore the fealty of powerful peers such as Huntly, Atholl, Bothwell, Seaton, Crawford and Caithness - strange, unfamiliar names to Mary.' We are supposed to follow Luke in her assumption that Mary knew nothing of Scotland and cared less (and even if this were true, this really is a case of the pot and the kettle). Yet Mary had only recently met with Bothwell, and her mother wrote regularly informing her of the state of the realm and the political machinations there. Or was it to discuss knitting patterns?
Then there's her description of James Stewart (I think you'll find that is how he spelled it, rather than 'Stuart' as Luke calls him) as 'a tall, black-haired, handsomely rugged Scotsman.' One can only assume she has her portraits confused.
Of course, if the English ambassador, Throckmorton, is impressed by Mary and what she had to say, then this can only be because of Mary's gift 'to induce in men a compassion for her distress'. Couldn't possibly be because she was a far more skilled diplomat than Elizabeth. Oh, and Randolph, the 'ambassador' (read 'spy') sent to Scotland by Elizabeth, is supposed to have liked her. Yeah, right.
We are then supposed to believe that Mary risked civil war in Scotland by marrying another Catholic, Lord Darnley. Well, only because James Stewart (by now Earl of Moray) was inciting it, at England's request. Though Luke totally ignores the Chaseabout Raid, describing instead how 'Murray' and Maitland 'were banished from the Council and their estates confiscated. Murray was later outlawed as a rebel. They had gone into exile with the other Protestant leaders of the Congregation who could not sanction their Queen's Catholic marriage.' Talk about understatement! And calling Darnley a Catholic is like calling Elton John heterosexual - he was once........
Of course, Mary had very poor judgement, not to be able to see what a useless waste of space Darnley was, unlike Elizabeth, who'd had him pegged from the start. So that'll be why it was rumoured that she was going to name him her heir then, won't it?
If only Mary had learned, 'as Elizabeth learned early in life - that small delegations of authority, of impartial favouritism, paid large dividends.' Ignoring the oxymoron of 'impartial favouritism', I think Mary well knew that Moray was never going to be happy with a 'small delegation of authority'. And the whole sentence might have made more sense had it not come immediately after an account of the rise and rise of Robert Dudley.
Luke's portrayal of Bothwell gradually falling under the spell of Mary's coquetry is as ludicrous as it is fanciful. She depicts them as lovers when there is no contemporaneous evidence, whereas she asserts that 'Rizzio had never been Mary's lover' even though there had been rumours at the time. The description of Bothwell raping Mary in the 'Checker House in the Cow Gate' is as imaginative as a Barbara Cartland novel and written in much the same style. She then follows the progress of 'the affair' as it continued at the Castle of Drummond and Tullibardine. She cites Hume's 'Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots' for this but it is actually a straight quote from Buchanan; a quote widely known to be a lie, since Bothwell wasn't even there!
Luke decides that Mary was pregnant by the end of November 1566. The only reason she gives for this certainty, whilst admitting that there are virtually no sources for the pregnancy, is that 'there is no other explanation for all her subsequent behaviour.' This is the first evidence we have of a lack of imagination in our author. The spirit of George Buchanan lives on....
This kind of historical inaccuracy and mish-mash continues through the whole of her version of Scottish history of the time. When Mary goes to Glasgow to bring her convalescent husband back to Edinburgh, Luke says that Darnley was startled, even though his father had somehow managed to send a retainer to greet Mary as she entered the city. She accepts the Casket letters as true and falls for the 'corroborated by servants' line (or were the letters made up after reading the servants' accounts?). She says the Provost's House at Kirk o' Field was 'semi-ruinous' and 'an Edinburgh slum' but doesn't say it was Darnley's abode of choice, or mention that Archbishop Hamilton lived there. She repeats the lie about the good bed being changed for an old one on 9th Feb despite Mary's Inventories proving otherwise. Finally, she fails to grasp that if Mary had been expecting her husband's assassination, she would have been better prepared and able to govern after it. A bit like the way Elizabeth managed after Amy Robsart's death, maybe?
The rest of Mary's story as told by Luke is a regurgitation of the usual Buchanan-inspired lies, and since Luke couldn't be bothered to research them properly, I can't be bothered to enumerate them. This is another problem with her referencing - by referencing secondary sources, she hides the fact that all of them are citing one primary source - usually Buchanan. Her final howler is to say that Bothwell's 'abduction' of Mary was to legitimise her pregnancy. She doesn't explain how Mary was supposed to pass off a live-born child in August as a three month old foetus.
Her lack of understanding of the political situation in Scotland means that she is unable to see why Mary really married Bothwell, and in another of her outstanding examples of blindness to the truth, she quoted Elizabeth on her fears about Bothwell affiliating Scotland with France rather than England, but doesn't see that *this* (rather than her moral scruples) is the reason why Elizabeth was opposed to the Bothwell marriage.
Oh, and Luke falsely accuses Bothwell's men of being pirates - but the accusation rings especially hollow given Elizabeth's later consorting with REAL pirates like Sir Francis Drake.
In contrast to Mary, Elizabeth is a woman dedicated to her people. It is never clear just where this idea comes from, and no evidence is given aside from a few pretty speeches and some impressive portraits.
Not that we are spared the cod-psychology beloved of women's magazines and sloppy journalism. Elizabeth's 'childhood trauma' 'had resulted in an introspective melancholy, which, especially as she grew older, manifested in severe nervous reactions' and 'spates of hysteria'. Elizabeth's 'foolish and vain foibles' can't possibly be just that, they have to be down to apprehansion and anxiety following her childhood and adolescence, and her inability to confide in anyone. Elizabeth can't be unwilling to accept that she is wrong, she has to be unable to reconcile the woman and the Queen.
Rather than delving into the realms of psychiatry, Luke would have done better consulting a dictionary. There she would have found that 'perquisites' and 'prerequisites' are not the same, and that it was thus impossible for Robert Dudley to sell 'the prerequisites of his position for his own personal gain' in allowing himself to be bribed when making appointments to academic office. Consulting a French dictionary would have meant she could have given an accurate rendition of Mary Stuart's motto too.
I really want to believe her version of Elizabeth's gynaecological examination which Luke gives as described in Neale's biography:
"She was a person of pure complexion, of the largest and goodliest stature of well-shaped women, with all limbs set and proportioned in the best sort, and one in whom in the sight of all men, nature cannot amend her shape in any part to make her more likely to conceive and bear children without peril."
Luke points out that Elizabeth was almost 46 and had a scanty menstrual flow. This fills me with glee only because another tudor-list theme is how Elizabeth couldn't have had anything gynaecologically wrong with her because she had been ‘examined’ by doctors. But Luke goes much further than your usual unsuspecting list newbie, 'It was well known that the English Queen, because of a physical deformity which denied complete sexual union, must satisfy her lusts in different ways.'
I have to say I enjoyed this book in the same way I would enjoy a copy of ‘Heat’ magazine. It’s always great to read some lewd gossip, and have a hero or two cut down to size, but you have to take it all with a pinch of salt and check the facts afterwards. What does mystify me is how all those readers came away from it with such a good impression of Elizabeth. It’s obvious where they get their ‘second-hand Buchanan’ view of Mary Queen of Scots, but the Elizabeth that Mary M Luke gives us is a woman barely capable of governing, more concerned with her boyfriends and ladies than her country, more interested in her looks and accomplishments than her people. It makes me wonder what the cod-psychologists would have to say about a historian who dislikes all her female subjects so intensely.