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.

Petticoat Martyr. Antonia Fraser sees Mary's execution for her involvement in a plot against Elizabeth as the moment at which Mary, self-consciously casting herself as a woman dying for her religion, altered the balance of her whole life and won her revenge over Elizabeth by capturing the imagination of posterity. The narration--grave, fluent, never intrusive--lets the details speak for themselves: Mary's composed half-smile as she approached the scaffold, the histrionic moment when she stripped to a petticoat that was the liturgical crimson of martyrdom. Even the sudden lurch of her severed head as it fell from the executioner's hand because she had been wearing a wig, seemed elaborately staged. Such scenes are a reminder that biography, even popularized biography, is not only history. It can also be good literature.

Antonia Fraser recently filled out a form that asked what she did in life. She considered classifying herself as "writer," but finally settled for "biographer." Away from the typewriter, she is Lady Antonia Fraser, the wife of Sir Hugh Fraser, a prominent Conservative M.P. The mother of six, she runs a country place on the Scottish island of Eilean Aigas and a nine-bedroom town house in London's Kensington.

She is also, at 37, a striking blonde whose ten-years-younger looks are a staple of London's social columns and glossy magazines, where she is referred to in such treacly terms as "Lady Madonna of the Tennis Courts."* She insists that she spends less time living it up than trying to live down her swinging reputation--a difficult task for a woman who has been known to produce an opera in her backyard, appear on television as an actress, and take a well-publicized muleback expedition to a "lost" city in the Ethiopian highlands.

Still, she was born into the Pakenham family, where writer's ink seems thicker than blood. Her father, the Earl of Longford, a former Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Lords, has produced six volumes on such topics as banking, politics and philosophy. One out this year is called On Humility. Her mother, writing under the name of Elizabeth Longford, is the author of two biographies, including the highly regarded Queen Victoria, and another on Wellington due out next month. A brother, Thomas Pakenham, expects to finish a new book on the Irish Rebellion of 1798 by Christmas. A sister, Mrs. Judith Kanzantzis, writes textbooks. Another sister, Lady Rachel Billington, is a novelist.

This literary eruption, however, is relatively recent. "My childhood was more political than literary," says Lady Antonia. Her father was lecturing on politics and economics at Oxford, and her mother often joined him in active campaigning. "Books were considered the thing in our family even then, but everybody went off and made speeches about them instead of writing them." Except for Antonia. She wrote poems and plays ("At the age of eight, I thought it was perfectly easy to do anything that Shakespeare had done") and developed a lifelong passion for history and biography. "I had a childhood identification with Mary Queen of Scots," she says. "I would get some of my seven brothers and sisters to act out the execution scene, with me playing Mary and saying very dramatically, 'Don't cry, good people.' '

Dislocated Neck. Turning such fantasies into real history had to wait until Antonia had finished secondary school at the rather precocious age of 15, spent two years dabbling at novel writing and then read history at Oxford. After her marriage at 23--in a replica of Mary Stuart's first bridal headdress --she warmed up with some children's books and A History of Toys.

Finally, in 1965, she started three years of research on Mary, digging through libraries in England, France and Scotland and revisiting most of the sites of Mary's life. During the third year, pregnant with her sixth child, she sometimes toppled over when lifting heavy index files in libraries, and once fainted in the British Museum. Six weeks after the birth of the child, she sat down in a little study partitioned off from her bedroom and in seven months wrote the 250,000-word manuscript. Drafts in progress were pinned to her husband's pillow at night with a note: "Mark an X where you get bored." Her neck became dislocated from the constant typing, but she remained so emotionally involved that she could weep while writing the execution scene. "I know it sounds affected, but after we had been together three years it seemed terrible that she had to go through all that."

* A poem in a recent issue of the New Statesman contains the quatrain: Death shares the news with Franc,oise Hardy's/ Sex life, Lady Antonio's parties,/ Mr. Wilson's thousand days,/ Plots of the world's most famous plays.

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