This isn’t a review as such, it’s been a couple of weeks since I saw the film and I don’t have the knowledge and passion about Mary Queen of Scots to write as detailed a piece as I did for Outlaw King. But I thought I’d hammer out a few general thoughts.
The thing everyone remembers about Mary is her death – even if you don’t know anything else about her, you’ll know that she was beheaded. That’s the earliest thing I can remember knowing, long before I studied history at school. So it’s an odd sort of story – everyone already knows the ending, and the task of the storyteller is to explain how we get there.
The film follows this pattern – in the trailers we hear Saoirse Ronan, the actress who plays Mary, repeatedly asking “how did it come to this?” And the film itself starts with her walking to the executioner’s block, before rewinding to tell the story.
The filmmakers choose to begin that story with her return to Scotland in 1561 – a logical place to start. But if we imagine her eventual fate as a jigsaw puzzle coming together, a lot of the pieces were already connected even then.
She had the misfortune to be born female, and have her father die when she was only six days old. An infant queen in an era of aggressive male monarchs – not least Henry VIII of England, who demanded she be betrothed to his son, Prince Edward. This was a naked attempt to absorb Scotland through marriage – national sovereignty would be the dowry.
When the Scots refused to surrender their young queen, Henry invaded Scotland in a campaign known as the “Rough Wooing” - a strange sort of name for a murderous rampage. Terrible damage was done to Edinburgh and southern Scotland as the English sought both to punish the Scots and to force their submission to Henry’s will.
Scotland was no longer safe for Mary. In 1548, at the age of six, Mary was sent to France to be betrothed to the heir to the French throne.
So right from the start, Mary’s life was one of turmoil and upheaval. Fate was dealing her a cruel hand. Ironically, one of the cruellest cards in that hand was Mary’s rising importance.
Elizabeth I became Queen of England in 1558. She was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who Henry VIII had broken with the Catholic Church in order to marry. As a result, she was considered illegitimate by Catholics throughout Europe. Meanwhile, Mary had a solid claim to the English throne because her grandfather James IV had married an English princess.
So Mary was now Queen of Scots, Queen Consort of France and, in the eyes of many, the rightful Queen of England. Dynastic dynamite.
Cruel fate struck again with two explosive events in 1560 – the Scottish Reformation, and the premature death of Mary’s husband, the young king of France. Mary was now a widow with no role at the French court, and faced the prospect of returning to a country that had just rejected her religion.
This is the Mary we meet in 1561 – a young lady whose name and connections give her claim, in theory, to immense power and authority. But also a young lady whose life has been chaotic and tragic even to this early point, who has been buffeted on the cruel tides of history and is suffering the second great upheaval and leap into the unknown of her short life.
The task she faces is daunting – to deal with a fractious pack of ambitious and aggressive nobles who are used to jostling and sparring for position in the absence of a monarch, and a church that is fanatically opposed to the faith she’s known all her life. And somehow, to rule Scotland while also furthering her own ambitions towards the English crown.
In a sense, this is the first time Mary has an opportunity to chart her own course. She can now make decisions for herself, but the odds are against her and the stakes incredibly high. A tall order indeed for an eighteen year-old.
Mary could have chosen to convert to Presbyterianism. It would have been the most sensible and pragmatic thing to do. But to do so would be to deny her whole understanding of the world and who she was. It’s not surprising, given the sudden plunge into the unknown, that she chose to cling to what little she could of the life she knew before.
But she also reassured the Scottish nobles and clergy that she would make no attempt to interfere with the Scottish church – she would keep her own faith in private, but her subjects could worship how they so chose. This is quite a modern and progressive attitude towards religion, and quite unusual for the 16th Century. To modern eyes, it should have been enough. But alas, the world she lived in was too suspicious and intolerant to let that stand.
John Knox, played in the film very well by David Tennant, raged against her from the pulpit. The tension was being steadily ratcheted up from the moment she stepped back onto Scottish soil.
One of the strange things about the film is its portrayal of Holyrood Palace. Mary is seen arriving at what looks more like a remote windswept castle, and holding court in a hall which has been partly carved out of a cliff. In reality, Holyrood would be recognisable to those who know it today – essentially half of what’s there now, an L-shape with one of its distinctive double towers – the other was added for symmetry in the 17th century.
Throughout the film, Scotland is depicted as rugged and remote. I have mixed feelings about this – it shows off Scotland’s breathtaking natural beauty very well, but it’s also a misrepresentation of what was an advanced and civilised European country of the day.
Now that Mary can make her own choices, she can also make her own mistakes – from now on the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle will be placed by her own hand.
First, she marries Lord Darnley. She appears to have genuinely loved him at first, but she very quickly regrets her choice. Darnley is a vain and arrogant young man who drinks heavily and is very unpopular with the Scottish lords.
Nevertheless, Darnley also has a claim to the English throne so Mary is strengthening her own ambitions in that direction. One of her faults was that she was constantly looking south, rather than over her own shoulder.
She and Darnley conceive an heir – something Elizabeth will never do. But one of the great ironies of Mary’s life is that each victory only ratchets up the tension and the danger even more. It’s another step towards the executioner’s block.
One source of tension was David Rizzio – Mary’s personal secretary, a handsome young Italian she’d brought with her from the French court. The two were very close and would spend a great deal of time together. Many modern historians reckon Rizzio might have been gay, but the “gay best friend” relationship was not one that was well understood at the time. Many of the Scottish nobles, including Darnley, suspected they were having an affair.
The reasons for Rizzio’s murder are portrayed slightly differently in the film, but the brutal deed itself did happen more or less as depicted. Darnley and several other lords burst into Mary’s chambers, dragged Rizzio away from Mary and stabbed him a reported 52 times.
Mary retreated to the safety of Edinburgh Castle, where she gave birth to her son – the future James VI of Scotland and I of England.
The next major event in Mary’s life is an ongoing point of controversy to this day. In February 1567, her estranged husband Lord Darnley was lying ill in bed at Kirk o’ Field, on the site where Old College is today. In the middle of the night, the house was rocked by a massive explosion. Darnley actually survived the blast and staggered outside, but there were assassins lying in wait. His strangled body was discovered outside the smoking ruins. This is portrayed accurately in the film.
The question is, how much did Mary know? What was the extent of her involvement in the murder? It’s almost certain that the Earl of Bothwell was the leading conspirator - but was he acting on Mary’s orders, or with her consent or knowledge? Historians argue at length about this.
The dramatic nature of the murder makes it clear someone was making a statement. With Darnley ill in bed, the simplest thing to do would be to poison him and say he’d succumbed to his illness. But to use gunpowder – that’s the tool of someone who wants to demonstrate his power and send a warning to his enemies. From what we know about Bothwell, it fits the bill.
Personally, I think it may have been a “who will rid me of this troublesome priest” moment. Mary may have expressed a wish that Darnley was dead, and Bothwell took that as his green light.
What Mary does next is probably her worst ever mistake – she marries Bothwell. Some accounts say she was abducted and/or raped by him, but all we know for certain is that she ended up marrying the man widely suspected of her late husband’s murder.
This was too much for Scotland’s nobles, who rose up and deposed her. The rising of the nobles and deposing of Mary are kind of fudged in the film, and her imprisonment in Loch Leven Castle is not shown - which is a shame.
Mary escaped and fled to England, hoping to enlist the support of Elizabeth. This is another massive gamble – Mary has spent her whole life talking up her claim to Elizabeth’s throne. She is throwing herself on the mercy of a woman whose crown she has always wanted.
What happens next in the film is something that has had chins wagging ever since the trailers were released – a face-to-face meeting between Mary and Elizabeth, which definitely never happened.
After all the anticipation, it feels like a bit of an anti-climax. But I did find one thing Elizabeth says very interesting – she says “I see now that your strengths have been your downfall”. I think this rings true. Mary was by all accounts more beautiful and more charismatic than Elizabeth. She married and produced an heir, which Elizabeth never did. Yet Mary ended up deposed and at Elizabeth’s mercy. The two monarchs are polar opposites of each other.
The next part of the story is the one we’re all familiar with. Kept a prisoner for nineteen years in England, Mary is sent a letter from an English Catholic called Babington informing her of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. What human being, after all those years in captivity, would pass up a chance to kill their captor and achieve their life’s ambition? Of course Mary gave her consent.
But her mail was being intercepted and read by Elizabeth’s spies. Mary has put the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place. Her fate is sealed.
The actual execution is not shown, and I suppose it would be out of step with the feel of the film. It was a botched beheading – it took three blows of the axe to sever her head. When the executioner held her head up, it was discovered she was wearing a wig and the head fell out and rolled away. More like Game of Thrones than a Hollywood romance.
The one-time Queen of Scots, Queen Consort of France and asserted Queen of England, who if the cards had fallen slightly differently could have ruled half of Northern Europe, gruesomely butchered to death in the final cruel twist of fate of her tragic life.
So was Mary a feminist hero, a strong woman in a time dominated by men? A helpless victim who was dealt a cruel hand and was ultimately doomed by forces beyond her control? A scheming and ambitious monarch who murdered her husband? Or a foolish young lady whose decisions were her own undoing?
