Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens [Hardcover]

This is not so much a dual biography of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart as a cross-section of the royal cousins' lives as they intersect in fact and in theme. As a successful, ultimately beloved monarch, Elizabeth has been granted the upper hand by history, but here the mirror images of the two queens' experiences suggests how differently their stories could have ended. The opposing trajectories of their lives - Elizabeth rising from a politically and personally precarious childhood to become a powerful ruler and Mary descending from undisputed Scottish heir to prisoner and self-styled martyr for Catholicism - elucidate the problems of early modern queenship more fully than a single biography would. Opening accounts of Elizabeth's coronation and Mary's wedding serve as an emblematic introduction to their experiences of education, religion, family, marriage and leadership. Unfortunately, these accounts are clearly cut from chapter four, where their loss creates a jarring leap. The dual narrative also leads British biographer Dunn (Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley) to overdo her interpretation and to repeat incidents and reintroduce characters, seemingly not trusting her readers to keep them straight. However, she does Mary a service by digging more deeply into her childhood and evaluating her more rigorously than many authors have. Her emphasis on Elizabeth's insecurities heightens the comparison between the two queens and renders the decision to execute Mary the turning point in Elizabeth's reign. While this may slightly exaggerate the centrality of the rivalry to Elizabeth's thinking, it nicely captures the intertwined lives of these two women. 24 pages of color illus., not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Adult/High School-A compelling account of the rivalry between two of history's most fascinating monarchs. In covering the lives of cousins Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, Dunn focuses on describing their effects on one another, rather than cataloging all of the events in their lives. The two young queens, coping with troubled finances, religious strife, and belligerent nobles, could hardly have been more different in background and temperament. Protestant Elizabeth, disinherited, humiliated, and imprisoned in her youth, learned to be cautious and calculating. She placed her role as queen above all other considerations. Catholic Mary, her parents' only surviving heir, was always secure about her right to Scotland's throne. Raised indulgently in the luxurious French court as the future bride of the dauphin, she was headstrong, passionate, and impulsive. Only nine years apart in age, the two royals corresponded copiously, and constantly grilled spies and ambassadors about one another, but never met. Using a variety of contemporary documents, including letters, diaries, and court papers, Dunn shows readers the queens' surprisingly parallel lives. Both were charismatic leaders who inspired fanatic devotion and bitter enmity throughout their lives. This is not an easy book for students, but it's well worth the time it takes to read it. The pomp and pageantry of the 16th century, as well as its superstitions, hardships, and cruelty, are vividly described. Family trees, a detailed chronology, and 24 pages of color photographs of portraits of Elizabeth, Mary, and those most important to them are included.
Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

The long-running rivalry between Elizabeth I of England and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots contains the stuff of high drama. Elizabeth, a staunch, iron-willed ruler, turned England into a mighty power; while Mary, beautiful and passionate, was victimized by malignant forces she could not control and died a martyr to her Catholic faith. Dunn is a biographer who wholeheartedly buys into this attractive picture. In her parallel biographies, she portrays both queens as strong women who strive to make their way in a dangerous world dominated by males. Her description of the political and cultural milieus of Britain is striking and credible. This is not the sunny, shining Britain of Shakespeare; rather, it is an age of plots, counterplots, and paranoia. Dunn's admiration for Elizabeth seems well deserved. Unfortunately, she gives Mary far too much credit, perhaps because it serves dramatic purposes. Mary was an incredibly incompetent, destructive monarch, and she was equally inept as a conspirator. This is not a work of high scholarship, but it certainly works as a good story, and Dunn's vision of a "dangerous age" is compelling. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Stuart. The one was to become known as Gloriana, Good Queen Bess; the other was to metamorphise into the stuff of legend and ballads and bittersweet folk-memory. Elizabeth’s name became synonomous with an age-the age of Shakespeare and Burbage, Raleigh and Drake; the defeat of Philip II’s Armada. The ill-omened Stuart name is forever linked to regicide, a Pretender in exile; the white rose of the Jacobites-a lost cause for which romantic young men threw away their lives at Aughrim, the Boyne, Culloden Moor.
While Jane Dunn places her two protagonists against the historical backdrop of the sixteenth century, she does so by way of contrasting the characters of the two queens. And it becomes very apparent early on in her book that the author belongs to the hanging-judge variety of biographers, specifically as she views what she considers to be the fault-lines in Mary’s personality.
In the clash between the rival dynasties and the religious ideologies of the day, Mary was from the outset a pawn, although a very difficult and active one. If, like her cousin Elizabeth, she was descended from Henry VII, she was also the daughter of the ambitious Mary of Guise who had married James V of Scotland. When the Scots princess was only five she was sent to France to be looked after by the powerful Guise family who were determined that she would marry the French Dauphin, the future Francis II. In one stroke, the Franco-Scottish alliance (the “auld alliance”) would be ratified and Mary and Frances would have a claim on the thrones of Scotland, France, and fatally for she who was to become known as Mary Queen of Scots, England as well. It was Mary’s misfortune to become queen of a country torn apart by rival warlords, civil war, and political assassinations; where the Reformed Kirk was in the ascendancy. If many Scots admired the young queen’s beauty and spirit, there were many like John Knox and the Lords of the Congregation who saw her as a Catholic usurper.
When she was fifteen Mary was injudicious enough to sign a document which stated that if she had no heirs, her claim to the English throne would pass to the French line; that France could draw on a limitless mortgage on the Scottish treasury to re-pay French expenditures for France’s defence of Scotland. “The Queen of Scots’ political naivety and lack of judgment,” writes Dunn, “did not bode well for her political deftness in the future.” Elizabeth, on the other hand, exercised a canny strategy of survival before she was queen, when her legitimacy was in question and when powerful men like Lord Admiral Seymour tried to use her as a means to power. Not for the first time, Elizabeth’s life was in danger, and she might have joined Seymour in the Tower had she not kept her head and outfoxed her interrogator who wrote of her, “She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her by great policy.”
The author never wavers from her conclusion that Mary was the architect of her own downfall; that in comparison to her English cousin, she was headstrong, reckless, impulsive; that the inherent flaw in her character as both woman and queen was that she had no political acumen whatsoever and that she became a hostage to her impulses. That “fatal charm,” as John Prebble puts it, not only drove men to death and exile, it led to the downfall of Mary herself. Elizabeth also attracted men, in particular Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. But the English queen-“the bastard child of a whore,” as she was referred to by Catholic Europe-was too sensible of her own precarious position to seriously consider marriage. After all, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had been executed by Henry VIII primarily because she had failed to produce a male heir. And even if she had followed the advice of her Privy Council and did marry and become pregnant, she knew very well the fate of Catherine Parr and Jane Seymour, both of whom died giving birth.
Clearly Dunn takes a dim view of Mary, who “…put the personal….before the political…” while Elizabeth sacrificed “…the personal and placed… her responsibilities as queen at the centre of her life.” With a Grundyish sniff of disapproval, the author leaves the reader in no doubt that Mary more or less signed her own death warrant by marrying her prince (that is, the dissolute Lord Darnley) instead of following her cousin’s example and marrying “her people.”
While the author provides a great deal of convincing evidence that Elizabeth “…learnt that her fate largely lay in her own hands,” and that her decision to choose her subjects over a husband was a matter of expediency and survival more than it was a question of principle, she cannot resist reconstructing Good Queen Bess as a proto-feminist. This of the woman who looked to her mother’s executioner as the model of regal probity! Elizabeth was a quick study; a woman of considerable wit and political savvy who also happened to speak Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, and who was much influenced by her reading of Plutarch, Cicero, and Livy. What she learned above all was the “game of kings”; what she grasped early on was the nature of power, how to retain it, and how to dissimulate with those who would have used her as a means of getting within reach of the throne.
How curious then that Dunn sees Mary Stuart as the more conventional of the two cousins. She concedes that Mary was not lacking in “strength of character, energy, the capacity to govern….” but those virtues were nullified by her wilfulness. “But it was wilfulness,” writes Dunn, “within a larger pattern of emotional dependence and conformity, which was to seal the destiny of the Scottish queen.” A queen who in person led her troops into battle; who preferred the company of her Italian secretary to her consort, and who married the Border ruffian the Earl of Bothwell-the suspected murderer of her husband-might be described as suicidally reckless but surely not conformist.
Unlike Elizabeth of England, Mary Stuart was not only “cavalier with her own power,” she had the misfortune to fall in “with weak or self-serving specimens like Moray, Riccio and Darnley.” However, Dunn’s charge that Mary was lacking in “self-awareness” is contradicted by a sonnet the Queen of Scots wrote to Bothwell from her English exile after her defeat at the Battle of Langside. “…For him since I haif despised honour,/ The thing only that bringeth felicitie./ For him I have hazardit greatness and conscience./For him I have forsaken all kin and frendes,/ And set aside all other respectes…” Even supposing that Mary had played the game of kings with the same tenacity as her cousin, it seems unlikely that she would have triumphed.. Whether she wished it or not, she was seen by Catholic Europe as their champion set among the heretical Scots and English. There’s no question that her character played a part in her fate, but it was not the whole reason for her downfall, despite Jane Dunn’s assertion to the contrary. For the destiny of Mary Queen of Scots had much more to do with the unleashed juggernaut of the times-Counter Reformation, revolution, schism-which crushed her and thousands of others beneath its weight.
According to Dunn, Elizabeth of England is clearly the deserving hero of her epoch-the one who danced the elaborate Gavotte of dynastic polity, and never put a foot wrong. And feckless Mary Queen of Scots? After nineteen years of imprisonment she paid for her sins under the headman’s axe at Fortheringay Castle. Yet if posterity has granted Elizabeth the official status of greatness, it has conferred tragedy upon the life and legend of the Queen of Scots. Tragic figures and lost causes, no matter what the history books might say, have a way of mutating; of assuming different meanings for different generations. Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, written in another era of regicide, Divine Rights, and revolution, cut to the centre of the elaborate charade of Mary’s imprisonment, even if it did take liberties with the known facts. MARY: I know it! I am weak, and she is strong./Let her use force then, let her kill me,/Build on my sacrifice her safety-/But let her then confess that she employs/ Force, only force/…Murder me, she may, she cannot judge me.
Even if Jane Dunn appears to be obtuse about Tudor realpolitik, there’s no reason to doubt that Mary Queen of Scots, Schiller’s version or the historical one, had any illusions about what happens when you make the wrong move in the game of kings. She gambled, she lost, but played the deadly game to the end. As for Elizabeth, she was her father’s daughter to the fingertips, even if it suited her to have her enemies believe otherwise.
Fraser Bell (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Their enemies branded them both murderesses, whores and daughters of the devil. Elizabeth’s supporters anointed her a hero and savior, while Mary’s faithful invested her as a saint and martyr. Reigning side by side, but yet never meeting face-to-face, these queens were inexorably linked in a tumultuous relationship that, until now, has never fully been revealed and explored.

Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens is master biographer Jane Dunn’s richly textured portrait of two incredible women. A story of a relationship punctuated by reversals of fortune; murder mysteries; sexual intrigue; reckless behavior, heated battles and cold war, Elizabeth & Mary is staged against a past as dark and dangerous as it was vibrantly alive.

Dunn shows the indissoluble bond between the queens was forged by two opposing forces; their shared inheritance and rivalry for Elizabeth’s crown set against their natural solidarity as ruling females in an overwhelmingly masculine world. She delves behind Elizabeth’s reputation as steely virgin queen, using her celibacy as a weapon, valuing reason and duty above all. She looks at Mary as celebrity queen, femme fatale and flawed heroine, a woman who capped the theatre of her death in a brilliant cloak of redemption. And she corrects many misconceptions about her subjects, revealing Mary as a more serious contender for power than had been previously thought, and Elizabeth as far more vulnerable than her formidable reputation.

Intelligent and completely riveting, this beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated book masterfully juxtaposes the histories of two remarkable women, culminating in tragedy, as Elizabeth the victor—hesitantly—signed her cousin’s death warrant.

“A perceptive, suspenseful account of complex English history. . . . By the end of this satisfying book, one feels sympathy for both women, brave queens in an age when ‘no one considered that a woman could effectively rule alone.’ ” —The New York Times Book Review

“Elegant. . . . Dunn demythologizes Elizabeth and Mary. In humanizing their dynamic and shifting relationship, Dunn describes it as fueled by both rivalry and their natural solidarity as women in an overwhlemingly masculine world.” --Boston Herald

“A balanced, nuanced, and eminently clear account. . . . Brilliantly conceived, elegantly executed, and compellingly readable.” --Richmond Times-Dispatch

“A wholly engrossing and sumptuous retelling of a tale that entered legend even before its protagonists were dead.” --Newsday



From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Jane Dunn is the author of several biographies, including A Very Close Conspiracy: Virgina Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley and, most recently, Antonia White: A Life. Dunn is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Bath, England.

The Fateful Step

"I am already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England" ... Stretching out her hand she showed them the ring.
Queen Elizabeth's first speech before parliament,
10 February 1559

These were dangerous times. The second quarter of the sixteenth century had made Elizabeth Tudor and her generation of coming men watchful, insecure, fearful for their lives. Nothing could be taken for granted. Health and happiness were fleeting, reversals of fortune came with devastating speed. This was the generation raised in the last days of King Henry and come of age in a time of religious and political flux. The religious radicalism of Edward VI's reign had been quickly followed by reactionary extremism and bloodshed in Queen Mary's. During the political tumult of these years there was no better time for ambitious men to seize position, wealth and honours. No longer was power the exclusive prerogative of old aristocratic blood. When a Thomas Wolsey, son of a butcher, or a Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, could rise in Henry's reign to be the mightiest subject in the land, then what bar to ambition during the minority of Edward, the turmoil of Mary, and the unpromising advent of Elizabeth? But vaulting ambition and exorbitant rewards brought their own peril. The natural hierarchy of things mattered to the sixteenth-century mind. Men elevated beyond their due estate, women raised as rulers over men were unnatural events and boded ill. Those with the greatest aspirations could not expect to die peaceful in their beds.

God remained at the centre of this febrile and unpredictable world. His will was discerned in every random act. Death was everywhere. It came as sudden sweating sickness and struck down communities of healthy adults. It came as fire to purify heretic beliefs. It came through poison or the deadly thrust of steel to dispose of inconvenient obstacles in the machinery of power. The supernatural had a physical presence, and spirits and magic were natural companions to everyday life. They were part of the grand cosmic scheme which constituted God's hierarchical universe. Analogy, interconnectedness, fixity were deeply impressive to the Elizabethan mind, mutability and disorder a sign of man out of harmony with God's plan. Superstition and religion were ways to make sense of suffering, attempts at warding off the apparently random blows of fate. Yet the insecurity of life itself made the living intense, the wits sharper, the senses more acute. For sixteenth-century men and women there was a life after death, for the godly well-mapped and glorious, but life on earth was a precious and precarious thing to be seized and drained to the dregs.

At a time of augury and superstition, there was nothing to foretell the events of 1558: no sightings of whales in the Channel; no preternaturally high tide, nor monstrous births nor the mysterious, lingering trajectory of a comet across the northern sky. Even Nostradamus, whose prophecies were consulted by those in a fever of uncertainty, appeared unaware of its significance. The year opened without cosmic fanfare. Yet this was to become one of the momentous dates in every British schoolchild's history rote. Along with the battle of Hastings of 1066 and the great fire of London in 1666, 1558 was one of the markers of a seismic shift in English experience, to be chanted in schoolrooms through subsequent centuries. It was a year of grand transfers of power, as one reign came to an end and a new era began. It was a time of inexorable religious schism, when universal monopolistic Catholicism was permanently supplanted by the state religion, Protestantism.

Scotland's most recent history had been less convulsive. By the beginning of 1558 it was balanced in a certain equilibrium. A significant number of lords had proceeded informally down the road of religious reformation and the opposing factions had forged an uneasy coexistence. Clan loyalties and rivalries would always be the defining identity which cut across ideology, matters of faith or political allegiance. Rather than a religious cause, any growing unrest and sense of danger came more from Scottish resentment against the increasing presence of the French, garrisoned in various towns and awarded lucrative offices over the heads of the native Scots. As a child ten years previously, Mary Queen of Scots had escaped the clutches of the English and sailed for France. Her French mother Mary of Guise was courageous and just as regent but inevitably favoured her own country with whom Scotland was in alliance. This cosy relationship was about to be challenged when, in 1559, the Reformation turned militant and anti-French, and John Knox, the inspired Calvinist preacher, returned home after twelve years' exile to become its hectoring mouthpiece.

At the beginning of 1558, however, both Elizabeth and Mary were poised on the margin between apprenticeship and their public lives as female monarchs. By the end of that year both had embraced their fate. The defining moment for Mary came with a kiss-in effect a marriage. For Elizabeth it came with a death-and an exclusive contract with her people.

It was apparent that a woman in possession of a throne must marry, and do so without delay. All biblical and classical texts, in which the educated sixteenth-century mind was imbued, stressed the natural order of the male's dominion over the female. A female monarch was a rare and unnatural phenomenon which could only be regularised by speedy union with a prince who would rule over her in private and guide her in her public, God-given, role as queen. Only by restoring man's necessary dominion could the proper balance of the world be maintained.

Although her cousin Elizabeth was revolutionary in her lifelong resistance to this obligation, Mary Stuart was more conformable and fulfilled this expectation of her status and sex-not once but three times. In early 1558 she was fifteen and had been a queen since she was six days old. She had never known any other state. First as a queen of Scotland, the land of her birth and a country she did not know: secondly as queen of France, the country of her heart. Having lived from the age of five at the centre of the powerful French court, Mary had grown into a charming and accomplished French princess, destined to become the wife of the dauphin of France. Her spectacular dynastic marriage, reinforcing the "auld alliance" between Scotland and France, was set for the spring. Mary would marry her prince on 24 April 1558. François, the beloved companion of her childhood and King Henri II's eldest son, was just fourteen years old.

In England, Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-four years old and living quietly in the country at Hatfield some thirty miles north of London. Expectant, and fearful of losing the one thing she desired, she was fearful too of its fulfilment. She had already been bastardised, disinherited, often in danger and always waiting, never certain of the prize. Elizabeth had seen her two siblings (and a cousin, fleetingly) succeed to the throne before her. If any had had children then her position on the sidelines of power would have become permanent. But Edward VI died in 1553 unmarried and childless aged sixteen. He was followed not by either of his elder half-sisters but by their hapless teenage cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Sacrificed to further the ambitions of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, she was queen in name only and then barely for nine days. Immediately imprisoned she was executed seven months later. Now in 1558, Henry VIII's eldest child, Mary I, herself appeared to be ailing.

Elizabeth had survived much danger. She knew well how closely scrutinised her actions were and how much she was the focus of others' desire for power. The previous two decades had seen so many ambitions crumble to dust, so many noblemen and women imprisoned and beheaded, accused of heresy or treason, tortured, tried and burnt, or if a traitor, hung, drawn and quartered, in the terrific ways of judicial death.

At the beginning of 1558, Elizabeth and her supporters knew that some great change was in motion. But change brought disruption too and increased danger. Her half-sister Mary Tudor had been queen for nearly five years. Suspicious, suffering, devoutly Catholic and zealous to maintain the supremacy of the old faith, her reign had grown increasingly unhappy. Mary's worst mistake had been her insistence on marrying Philip II of Spain, for the English hated foreigners meddling in their affairs, and they hated the Spanish most of all.

The fanatical purges of heresy by her decree, and the torture and burnings of hundreds of martyrs, would earn Mary the epithet "Bloody Mary" from generations to come. The country grew ever more tired and repelled by the bloodshed. The dreadful spectacles had become counter-productive, alienating her subjects' affections for their queen and strengthening the reformers' support. In reaction to the mood of the country, the burnings in Smithfield were halted in June 1558. But nature seemed to be against Mary too, for the harvests also failed two years in succession. In 1556 people were scrabbling like pigs for acorns and dying of starvation. The following year they were ravaged by disease as various epidemics swept through the land. Famine and pestilence-people wondered, was this God's retribution for the sins of Mary's reign?

By the beginning of 1558, Mary was herself sick and in despair. Still longing for a child and heir, once more in desperation she had made herself believe she was pregnant again. But Philip had not bothered to hide his antipathy to his queen and anyway had been absent from her for too long. Her delusion and humiliation was evident even to her courtiers. Elizabeth, who had waited so long in an uneasy limbo, under constant suspicion, her sister refusing to name her as her heir, would have lost everything if this miraculous pregnancy turned out to bear fruit. No one could know, however, that the symptoms which Mary interpreted as the beginning of new life and... --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

This historical novel looks at the relationship between Queen Elizabeth of England and Mary Queen of Scots. The book explores the different views of both women in a time when men were the dominant sex. Elizabeth chooses to marry her country, and Mary chooses to marry men who could improve her position. With a queenly voice, Isla Blair reads letters between the two queens, historical quotes, and pertinent pieces of information. She creates excellent dialogue when necessary, although this is mainly narrative. Her best renditions are Scottish accents for some of the men in the story. An informative novel is presented in a way that everyone can enjoy. J.F.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.