Author: Philippa Gregory
First Published: January 2008
Publisher: Harper
Series: The Tudors #6
452 pages (paperback)
I’m sad to say that I was rather disappointed by this book on Mary, Queen of Scots. I normally love Philippa Gregory’s books, and I happen to be a fan of Mary Queen of Scots as well. Whenever there is a story on Elizabeth vs. Mary, I’ve always been on Mary’s side. I felt let down by this book. It almost doesn’t feel like Philippa Gregory wrote it. I don’t know. Obviously, it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t finish it, but I feel like it’s the weakest Philippa Gregory book I’ve read so far.
This book is about Queen Mary of Scotland’s years as a captive of Queen Elizabeth of England. How did one queen end up as captive of another? There’s a few reasons, mainly that Mary sought Elizabeth’s help when she was ousted out of Scotland, but instead, Elizabeth had Mary imprisoned and investigated for the various scandals that Mary has been involved in. One such scandal was that she murdered her previous husband. Another reason she was held captive was because Elizabeth was led to believe that Mary wanted the throne of England and was plotting to take it. Mary and Elizabeth are cousins and thus, both have a claim to the throne — however, Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had Elizabeth declared a bastard and that was never revoked. Therefore, Mary has the truest claim, being Henry’s sister’s granddaughter.
The book is told from the perspectives of three characters — Queen Mary, George Shrewsbury and Elizabeth “Bess” Shrewsbury, the latter two being the earl and his wife who were ordered by Queen Elizabeth to hold Queen Mary in their home as their “honored guest”. I didn’t really like the way the story was told because 1) the chapters were very, very short and when they rotate between three first person speakers, it gets a bit confusing and abrupt. 2) None of the characters were likeable. Mary is portrayed as a beautiful but cunning and sly queen, who will do whatever needs to be done to free herself from Elizabeth’s captivity and go back to Scotland. George is, in Bess’ words, a fool. And Bess is portrayed as a gold digger who cared more about her house and money than anything else in the world. It was hard to feel sympathetic for any of them.
I also hoped to have an Elizabeth perspective in the story, since this book is part of Gregory’s Tudor series (and Mary is technically a Stuart), but Elizabeth was barely in it.
The ending was also really anti-climatic for me. If you know history, this shouldn’t be a spoiler, but hey, spoiler alert — Queen Mary dies. Specifically, she is ordered to be executed by her own cousin, Queen Elizabeth. Having been with this characterization of an arrogant Mary for 400 pages, I was rather let down when her death came around and I didn’t get to read anything about her thoughts on the issue! She’s said so many times throughout the book that there is no way she can be harmed, she is an ordained queen, and Elizabeth would never harm a fellow queen no matter what she did. I was eagerly looking forward to what Mary would say when the news was broke to her that Elizabeth was going to have her beheaded! But no, it was all through Bess’ perspective, and Bess never liked Mary much so she was just like, “Good riddance, she’s dead.” I felt kind of cheated!
On that note, the biggest issue I had with this book was that it was so, so, so repetitive. All Mary would talk about, over and over again, was how she was a queen, she was always meant to be queen, and Elizabeth can’t touch her. All George talked about was how he was so honorable and how beautiful Mary was. And gods, all Bess would talk about was how she was poor and now she’s rich. I am not joking, sometimes they would say the exact same thing three times in a paragraph, and again, in the next paragraph. Then, in the next chapter, they will remind you yet again. And on, and on.
Did I like anything at all? I did, actually. I liked how this book was about Queen Mary’s captive years because it’s something I hardly ever read about in novels about her. At first I inwardly groaned because in every book so far, it has been glazed over so I assumed it must be a horribly boring period compared to the rest of her life. This book showed me, however, that Mary’s captive years were still interesting and full of surprises and secret plots. So I did like that about it. However, I would not recommend this book to anyone unless you are like me, a Philippa Gregory fan, who is determined to read as many of her books as possible. She’s such a great storyteller, I am really surprised at how weak this novel turned out to be.
My Rating: 2/5
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