Mary Queen of Scots

Antonia Fraser’s first major biography, which heralded the beginning of a glittering career as a historian, was of one of the most romantic and controversial figures in British history, Mary Queen of Scots.

Mary Queen of Scots passed the majority of her childhood in France and married the Dauphin to become Queen of France at the age of sixteen. Widowed less than two years later, she returned to Scotland as Queen after an absence of thirteen years.

Her life then entered its best known phase: the early struggles with John Knox, and the unruly Scottish nobility; the fatal marriage to Darnley and his mysterious death; her marriage to Bothwell, the chief suspect, that led her directly to her long English captivity at the hands of Queen Elizabeth; the poignant and extraordinary story of her long imprisonment that ended with the labyrinthine Babington plot, and her execution at Fotheringhay in 1587 at the age of forty-four.

First published on 15 May 1969, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS received outstanding reviews, won the James Tait Black Memorial prize and became an international bestseller.

Now, to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Phoenix paperbacks are reissuing the biography with a new foreword by the author.

'Mary Queen of Scots was my first love: the character that is. She was my heroine from when I was eight years old, as a result of a book which I borrowed recurringly from the Oxford Public Library......... In quite a different way, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, the biography, first published forty years ago, was also my first love. I certainly felt all the insecurity, as well as the passion, traditionally associated with that state when I was working on it in 1960s....... I remain grateful forever for the passion I once felt: and grateful to the brave, romantic, doomed Queen, dead over four hundred years ago, whose existence changed my life.' Antonia Fraser