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Overview
In Fatal Majesty, critically acclaimed novelist Reay Tannahill immerses readers in the tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots-but this is not a conventional retelling of a fascinating yet familiar tale.
Eighteen-year-old Mary returns from the sophisticated French court to claim her throne in cold, backward Scotland. A gloomy reception proves least among the na've young monarch's challenges: her arrival provides the opportunity for smoldering vendettas to explode and for intricate conspiracies to form and then unravel-intrigue besets her on every side. Mary's self-righteous brother, James, seeks to rule in her place; her brilliant Secretary of State, Lethington, dedicates his energies to placing the Stuarts on the throne of England; and her cousin, Elizabeth I, dazzling and unscrupulous, fears Mary as a threat to her crown and to her life.
Mingling a poet's passion with an historian's insight, Tannahill chronicles an era of easy violence, desperate action, and grand conspiracy. In Fatal Majesty, masterful characterization combines with lightning pace and classic plotting to deliver a tragic romantic saga with all the complexity of a major political thriller.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250100641 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 618,465 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Reay Tannahill was born and brought up in Scotland and is a graduate of the University of Glasgow. She is the author of five other critically acclaimed novels. She lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
Fatal Majesty
A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots
By Reay Tannahill
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1998 Reay TannahillAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10064-1
CHAPTER 1
AUGUST 1561
1
Although it was high summer, there was a thick white sea mist shrouding the Firth of Forth on the day when Mary Queen of Scots sailed home from France to take up her throne.
She should have been welcomed by lords and ladies in velvet and jewels; heralds in scarlet and gold; loyal addresses, fanfares of trumpets, cheering throngs. But there were only a few open-mouthed bystanders.
Her subjects had not expected to see her so soon. In truth, many of them would have preferred not to see her at all.
2
Because of the mist, the first warning anyone had was the rhythmic chant of an invisible leadsman. In the port of Leith, where square-rigged merchant ships came and went almost daily throughout the sailing season, such a sound was familiar enough, but on this particular morning there were other sounds that were less familiar. The men working on the jetties stopped to listen, heads cocked, but only a handful of them, one a fisherman who had spent five terrible years as a galley slave in the Mediterranean, knew enough to interpret the meaning of the shrilling whistles and the whisper of many oars pulling as one.
The fleetest of the fisherman's sons, sent running for the provost, found him at the desk in his counting house, tranquilly sharpening a pen.
'Mercy me!' exclaimed the provost, when the boy had gasped out his message. 'Great galleys, ye say?'
'Aye, and my father says they're awful well drilled. He thinks they must be cerry ... uh ... ceremonial ones. Royal ones.'
The provost, who had been assured on the best authority that there was no truth in the rumour that Mary Stewart was about to abandon her life of lotus-eating luxury in France for one of porridge-eating austerity in Scotland, wasted no time on reviewing possible alternatives. 'Mercy on us!' he exclaimed. 'It'll be the queen! Where's my clerk? I'll need messengers. I'll need my steward. I'll need my chain of office. The queen! Mercy me!'
Hurrying down to the shore ten minutes later, he found a gathering crowd of Leith's population there ahead of him and a long, beautiful galley, its sails furled, its cannon firing the salute, gliding in over the grey satin waters towards the harbour entrance. From sails to oars – twenty-five a side, and each of them as long as the galley was wide – everything that was not carved and gilded was of a pure and spotless white, forming the most dramatic of backdrops for the dark-clad group of people assembled in the prow.
At their head stood a tall, graceful, black-gowned figure with a coquettish little black velvet cap perched on her red-gold head. There could be no mistaking Mary Stewart – queen of Scots since six days after she was born; educated in France to become the bride of its future king; queen of the French as well as the Scots for a few brief months; then, suddenly, a widow. And still only eighteen years old.
A voice shouted commands, the silvery whistles shrilled, the oars leapt from the water, and the galley flowed on under its own diminishing momentum to the smoothest of berthings inside the harbour wall. The people of Leith were not easily impressed, especially by French seamanship, but a ripple of approval passed through the crowd and, within minutes, the queen was stepping ashore from a gilded ramp that had appeared seemingly from nowhere.
By that time, Provost Lamb and four of his fellow merchants were ready to greet her, drawn up in a sturdy, bearded line, models of bourgeois respectability in their short cloaks, plain dark doublets and hose, narrow white ruffs, and neat small caps with corded trims. The provost's chain of office was the only indication of the wealth Leith's merchants were able to command but were much too wise to advertise – especially to royalty, which was always short of money.
Bending low, they swept off their caps with the aplomb of years of practice. They had done a good deal of bowing and scraping to the queen's late mother who, until just over a year before, had ruled and come near to ruining Scotland in her daughter's name.
His gaze resting deferentially on the cobbles at his feet, Provost Lamb said, 'Bonjour, votre majesté. Bienvenue en Écosse. Bienvenue chez vous.'
After which, raising his head in expectation of, at best, a nod of gracious condescension, at worst a flurry of French from some court functionary, he was astounded to meet, instead, a pair of large amber eyes sparkling with youthful and very feminine mischief.
'I thank ye, gude maister,' replied her majesty demurely. 'Whit a lichtsome walcome hame on sic a dreich day!' Then, tempted by his expression into something very near a giggle, 'I am still mindful, you see, of my native tongue.'
The provost, entranced, beamed back at her, forgetting the problems of protocol that beset him, forgetting the political and religious troubles her arrival foreshadowed, forgetting even the battered stones of Leith, the towerless kirk, the ruinous preceptory and the hundreds of cannonball scars that still remained as witness to the recent civil war and the siege its citizens had withstood on a diet of boiled horse and roasted rat.
He thought only, 'What a bonnie lassie!'
3
He had sent messengers off to Edinburgh, he told her – bowing again, just to be on the safe side – but if they found none of her great lords in residence, they might have to ride on to Niddry or Aberdour or Kinneil. It could take hours for an official welcoming party to turn up, so, in the meantime, would her majesty deign to honour his house with her presence?
Her majesty said that nothing would give her greater pleasure, on the understanding that it neither jibbed nor heeled nor plunged, but stood firmly on solid ground.
It was an education, as they walked along the jetty and up the slight incline to his house, to see how the people responded to her. Most were there out of vulgar curiosity rather than loyalty to a crown which they had little reason to love, but in no time at all she had beguiled them into something very near worship. It was only partly a matter of her looks and grace; far more, it was the enchantment of her smile and the readiness with which she paused to speak to anyone and everyone, wide-eyed children and blushing boys, stout washerwomen and floury bakers, weedy clerks and weatherbeaten sailors. The provost, in intervals of fretting over how he was entertain her until the lords arrived, supposed she must have inherited her magic from her father, who'd had a genius for charming folk, though not for much else.
When they reached his house at last, he heard himself saying, with a trace of desperation, 'Here we are, your grace. Ye'll be tired after your journey. Would ye maybe like a wee lie down on my best bed for an hour or two?'
There was an understanding twinkle in her eye as she replied, 'What an excellent idea.'
It freed him to threaten his steward with instant death if there wasn't a midday dinner fit for a queen on the table in two hours; to set his grooms scouring the town for some means of transporting the vast number of roped packs and banded chests being unloaded both from the white galley and another that had emerged from the mist, this one resplendent in scarlet and gold; and to distribute the lesser members of the queen's entourage among his fellow citizens. It was not a large entourage by royal standards, only about sixty in all, but its members ranged from a courteous handful of great noblemen by way of a dratted nuisance of a poet down to a pair of touchy professional embroiderers and three seasick upholsterers.
It was a slightly nervous Andrew Lamb who at midday sat himself down, by royal command, to dine with the queen, her three distinguished uncles, the four lovely young ladies-in-waiting known as the Four Maries, and two diminutive lapdogs, but it turned into one of the pleasantest meals he could remember. The Marquis d'Elboeuf admired the new French drawleaf table that was the provost's pride and joy, the Duc d'Aumale commended the silver plate on the sideboard, the queen said the barley pottage was the best she had ever tasted, and the Maries teased him into trying to guess what all the banded chests contained. They were still merrily at table when they heard the clatter of a large troop of horse approaching over the cobbles of the Kirkgait.
'That'll be your majesty's lords come to welcome you,' the provost said with honest regret. 'Your brother Lord James is maybe with them. I'd heard tell he was in Edinburgh.'
Before his eyes, all the queen's lightness of spirit vanished, although the smile remained. In the merest fraction of a second, Mary Stewart ceased to be a frivolous girl and became, graciously, a queen.
4
Without haste, Mary rose to her feet, held out her ringless white hands to be rinsed with rosewater, thanked the page who dried them, spoke a fewappreciative words to the steward, smiled at the table servants, and finally strolled out through the friendly doorway of the provost's friendly house into the far from friendly world that awaited her.
She had known what she was coming home to, and had no one to blame but herself.
The leaders of the riding party were already dismounted, one of them half-turned away giving orders to the train of men and led horses behind. Of the three well set up figures striding towards her, one was indeed her brother, the Lord James Stewart.
Or, more accurately, her eldest half-brother. Their father, King James V, had exercised his royal prerogative to such effect that Mary, his sole legitimate child, was possessed of no fewer than nine illegitimate brothers and sisters, each of them acknowledged by the king and, in the case of the seven sons, endowed by the Vatican – on a quid pro quo basis – with church benefices that guaranteed them a comfortable existence for life at no cost to the Crown. Lord James, as a small boy, had been created commendator of St Andrews, but although he had subsequently renounced the Catholic faith, he showed no sign of renouncing the benefices that went with it.
He was now thirty, tall and muscular, dressed with expensive restraint in the black of fashion rather than of mourning, with twinned gold buttons on his doublet, gold embroidery edging the fine white linen of his ruff and shirt cuffs, a double gold chain round his neck and a plume in his flat velvet cap. His features were more striking than handsome, with strong bones, a wide forehead, brown eyes that gave little away, a sharp chin, and the long Stewart nose carried to ridiculous extremes.
It was an excellent nose for looking down but, with deliberation, Mary denied him the opportunity by extending her hand for him to kiss, so that he was forced, instead of embracing her, to bend the knee to her in full view of the crowds that had been flocking into Leith in the hours since she had landed. She had read somewhere that the Ottoman Turks had a law requiring whoever gained power to execute all his brothers in order to eliminate any possibility of a war of succession. It had not previously occurred to her what a sensible idea it was. Because there was no doubt in her mind that James envied her the throne. Nor any doubt that, during the years of her absence, he had taken every opportunity to show people what a good king he would have made.
And yet, and yet ... He had visited her twice in France, and she thought he was mildly fond of her, as she was of him. Certainly, she would make little progress in Scotland without his advice and experience. So, having made her point, she smiled into his harassed face, and raised him up, and drew him forward to embrace him. The crowd cheered.
Lord James was not a man to whom smiling came naturally, but he did his best. 'Welcome home, sister. I'm blithe to see you.' He waved a hand towards his companions. 'Ye'll remember Argyll and Erskine?'
She smiled warmly at Lord Erskine, the elder of the two, deducing from the faint ripple of movement in his immensely long and fatly spiralling beard that he must be smiling back. But the Earl of Argyll was another matter. He was about James's age, a big man with deepset eyes and a Roman nose, whose marriage to Mary's and James's half-sister Jean was so famously incompatible as to be a subject of gossip even in France. His gaze was unresponsive as he bent the knee to her and said, with a soft Highland sibilance that came oddly from such a hard-looking man, 'It iss an unexpected honour to haff your machesty home at last.'
'Thank you,' she replied. He was one of the most powerful of her lords and one who clearly stood in need of being charmed.
James rubbed his hands. 'Well, we'd better get started back. We left them cleaning up Holyroodhouse for you. Lighting the fires and sweeping out the spiders and cobwebs. That kind of thing.'
Since he was obviously trying to be humorous – or she hoped he was – she smiled again, cooperatively, and turned her eyes towards the train of broken-down nags that appeared to pass for horses. There was not a palfrey or jennet among them, and not a side saddle to be seen.
James, correctly interpreting the faint lift of her brows, said, 'Ladies in Scotland always ride pillion. Ye'll come with me, of course.' He gestured towards his big Flemish mare, so long in the back that he could have taken not only his sister but all four of her Maries up behind.
She stared at him. He could not, surely, believe that she would be prepared to make her first appearance before her subjects in the rôle of her brother's passenger, sitting perched on his mare's rump, holding on with her arms round his waist ...
No. She would ride alone, on a horse gilded and tasselled, saddled, bridled and plumed as befitted a queen.
'I think not,' she said, and sensed rather than saw Fleming, the most beloved and easily the quickest-witted of her Four Maries, raise a daintily gloved hand towards two servants lurking in the shadows. Suppressing the bubble of amusement rising in her throat, she went on, 'Although the ship carrying my stable seems to have been delayed on the voyage, my side saddle and trappings came with us in the galley.'
The servants stepped forward, carrying between them the banded chest with the royal cipher surmounting the figure 63, and, as Fleming produced the key from its hiding place in her gauntlet, Mary gestured towards a bay gelding that might, just possibly, have had a hint of Arab in his very mixed ancestry. 'He will do.'
Was James disappointed? Mary could not tell.
But she turned towards him, and smiled at him again, and said with the optimism that so often overrode her intelligence and was, in the end, to be the ruin of her, 'My dear James. The die is cast, the suspense over. I am here – and I depend on you to tell me what I must do.'
5
The three-mile ride to the royal palace of Holyroodhouse, on the fringes of Edinburgh, was a triumph. The sun was struggling to come out but Mary did not see it. Neither did she see the buildings or the landscape of the Scotland she had left as a small child thirteen years before. All she saw was the people running from the fields and houses to the roadside as she passed.
She might have come, as her uncle, the Duc de Guise, had advised, with a troop of French halberdiers and arquebusiers to protect her, but instead she had brought only a small retinue of friends and servants. It had been a gamble, but elatedly she knew that it had succeeded.
There was no dour or sullen face to be seen, nothing but animation as, rumour scampering ahead, the crowds thickened into throngs, waving and cheering, smiling, bowing, curtseying, ready and willing to be enchanted by the laughing, vivacious young woman who, as far as looks and charm went, was just the kind of queen they would have chosen if anyone had asked them. A stranger she might be, and an idolatrous Catholic in a dourly Protestant land, but she was tall and regal, graceful and beautiful, and Lord James would put her right.
And if he didn't, John Knox would.
6
By the evening, Mary might reasonably have welcomed a wee lie down on Provost Lamb's best bed if it had not been for the excitement that had possessed her since dawn and grown ever more intense as the hours passed. Now, with the iron drawbridge of Holyroodhouse threatening to collapse under the weight of the lords and lairds hastening over it to pay their respects, she had decided to change out of her widow's black, well though it became her, into something different. Long ago she had learned – with delight, since she loved clothes and jewels – that a display of splendour was an essential adjunct of royal power. Tonight seemed the perfect opportunity for putting the principle into practice.
To Fleming, she said, 'The pearl-embroidered white satin, I think,' and Fleming's eyes danced responsively.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fatal Majesty by Reay Tannahill. Copyright © 1998 Reay Tannahill. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Family trees:,Royal Relations,
The English Succession,
PART ONE: Scotland 1561 – 1565,
Chapter One: AUGUST 1561,
Chapter Two: 1542–1561,
Chapter Three: AUGUST 1561,
Chapter Four: SEPTEMBER 1561,
Chapter Five: 1561 – 1562,
Chapter Six: 1562 – 1563,
Chapter Seven: 1563 – 1565,
PART TWO: Scotland 1565 – 1568,
Chapter Eight: FEBRUARY-APRIL 1565,
Chapter Nine: MAY-JULY 1565,
Chapter Ten: AUGUST-DECEMBER 1565,
Chapter Eleven: DECEMBER 1565-MARCH 1566,
Chapter Twelve: MARCH 1566-JANUARY 1567,
Chapter Thirteen: FEBRUARY-APRIL 1567,
Chapter Fourteen: APRIL-JUNE 1567,
Chapter Fifteen: JUNE 1567-MAY 1568,
PART THREE: England 1568 – 1603,
Chapter Sixteen: MAY 1568-JANUARY 1570,
Chapter Seventeen: 1570 – 1573,
Chapter Eighteen: 1573 – 1586,
Chapter Nineteen: 1586 – 1587,
Chapter Twenty: 1603,
Historical endnote,