Daughter of Debate

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS by Antonia Fraser. 613 pages. Delacorte. $10.

The beautiful woman who serenely lay down on the executioner's block one morning in 1587 seemed to be leaving behind a life of failure. She had spent nearly half of her 44 years in captivity, and was now condemned to be beheaded as a traitor. During the seven years that she had actively reigned over a small and backward nation, she had achieved nothing of note in foreign or domestic policy and had gradually yielded her power to a swarm of savagely contending noblemen. Most decisions in her life had turned out wrong. The last —to seek refuge in England—had literally proved fatal.

Far from fading into historical limbo, however, Mary Queen of Scots projected herself dramatically into the royal and religious tumult of the 16th century. In death as in life, she was sometimes reviled as a scheming whore, sometimes revered as a misunderstood martyr to her Roman Catholic faith. But she was invariably regarded as fascinating. Antonia Fraser's overlong but richly readable biography demonstrates that Mary's great fascination continues unabated.

A Gambler's Courage. Part of the lady's appeal was sheerly feminine. Tall (5 ft. 11 in.) and graceful, she had a slightly hoydenish charm that could beguile even her English jailers long after she had lost her looks. She grew up in the cultivated, opulent court of France and French was the language she ordinarily spoke and wrote throughout her life. Pampered and adored there, she was the bride of the sickly Dauphin at 15, Queen of France at 16, a widow—and very possibly still a virgin—at 17.

Later, when she ventured to Scotland for her hereditary throne as the daughter of James V, she displayed a gambler's courage. Her young life revolved around theatrical plots, murders, captures and daring escapes from gloomy castles that would have been all too improbable for fiction. What romancer, for instance, would dare to have his heroine develop the one sexual passion of her life for a vain and vicious 17-year-old popinjay, then, three months after his violent death, marry the man who had not only plotted his murder but abducted and raped her, only to end up in prison a month later, abandoned and temporarily deranged? Yet that is the actual history of Mary and her last two husbands, Lord Henry Darnley and the Earl of Bothwell.

Antonia Fraser's approach to such goings-on is the one advocated by 19th Century Historian James Froude: "To look wherever we can through the eyes of contemporaries, from whom the future was concealed." With such handling, events achieve a fresh plausibility; Mary's behavior with Darnley and Bothwell, for example, becomes humanly understandable. Historic perspectives are foreshortened—a most notable defect in Miss Fraser's acerbic portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Nonetheless, the author marshals her evidence generously enough to allow for differing interpretations and briskly clears away the "cobwebs of fantasy" that have attached themselves to Mary's character over the centuries. Her Mary emerges neither as a Jezebel nor as a saint, but as a high-spirited woman who was brave, rather romantic, and not very bright.