Queen & Straws

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE ISLES--Stefan Zweig--Viking ($3.50). Unlike most figures of her time, Mary Stuart has become a historical mystery, not because of a lack of information about her, but because of a superabundance of contradictory evidence. Centre of controversy all her life, subject of inquiries and investigations, her reputation was darkened and defended by contemporary partisans who did not hesitate to employ torture and forgery to establish her guilt or innocence. To the confusions bred by religious antagonisms, Scottish and English national rivalries added more contradictions, until the personality of Mary Stuart was obscured, even in her own day, in a haze of moral, religious and political disputes.

To Stefan Zweig the question of her guilt or innocence is largely irrelevant. Queen of Scotland when she was six days old, Queen of France at 16, Mary had known power, security, ease, without having struggled for them, had no experience in statecraft when, at the age of 18, she took up the task of governing Scotland. Unlike Elizabeth, whose wits had been developed by imprisonment and general adversity, Mary had been sheltered all her life. She was cultivated, gracious, unawakened, essentially immature, when she found herself pitted against the greatest queen on earth. A Catholic, she discovered the reality of Protestant influence around her in the first week of her reign, when she was insulted at Mass, defied by John Knox, whose fierce invectives were inflaming the people against her and Rome. The battle she fought was lost from the start.

In Stefan Zweig's analysis, Mary's greatness lay in her passionate surrender of her throne when love overwhelmed her. But his accounts of conditions in Scotland give the impression that she surrendered for love what had already been lost by politics. Far more convincing than his analysis of her emotional development is his picture of Mary entering Scotland when it had already been lost to Catholicism, groping wildly for support in the first years of her reign, marrying Darnley in a confused effort to satisfy Elizabeth, turning from Darnley when she found that the marriage meant only greater uncertainty and weakness. Marrying Bothwell, whether for political or amorous reasons, she allied herself with the strongest military leader of the kingdom, sank into despondency when his ineffectually became clear. She threw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth, who had her beheaded.

All her life Mary grasped at straws, and as her love affairs were tragedies of unfulfillment, so her ill-organized conspiracies and arid plots were the politics, not of passion, but of despair.

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