My History

by Antonia Fraser

  In the interests of Optical Research, I had some bizarre experiences (although none of them of course half as exotic as the events of the Queen’s own life story). Visiting Stirling Castle, where the Queen gave birth to her only child, the future James VI and I, I noticed that the official guides were wont to give long-winded and wrong-headed—to my way of thinking—discourses to their victims. Since guides were mandatory, I decided to pay for one, but suggested that, as I knew all about the local history, my particular hired man could rest on his bench while I toured alone. Little did I know the bold spirit of the guides of Stirling Castle. Despite our agreement, my allotted guide quickly took on another lot of tourists and followed me round, giving out his usual spiel well within earshot, but pausing every now and then to lift up his hand and say dramatically: “But wheesht! We must not speak too loud. There’s a very clever young lady here from England who knows all about our poor wee castle. We must not disturb the very clever young lady…”

  France, the country in which Mary Queen of Scots lived from the age of six to eighteen when the death of her husband brought her back to Scotland, was a rich source of Optical Research. I made the most of it, determined to be able to contrast first-hand the gracious châteaux of the Loire in which she grew up with the rough Scottish castles of her future kingdom. A piece of luck, so I thought, put me in the way of visiting Anet, home of the legendary beauty Diane de Poitiers who had been the presiding mistress at the Court of King Henri II. I wished to see for myself the elegant memorial chapel in the black-and-white colours she made her own and the many crescent moons, her symbol, with which Philibert de l’Orme decorated the château. Anet now belonged to a South American but the suave, worldly Gaston Palewski, the diplomat who was the great love of Nancy Mitford, fixed up a visit for me.

  On the appointed day I set forth confidently for Anet, arrived as arranged, and asked for a full tour from the owner. Don Luis, as I will call him, proved to be both chivalrous and knowledgeable and did not even allow the fact that I had interrupted an enormous lunch party on the terrace to deter him from showing me every black-and-white nook and cranny. A very long time later, Don Luis was called away to a telephone call. He came back looking thoughtful.

  “So you are Madame Fraser,” he said. “That was a message from my friend Palewski arranging for your visit. How happy I am to know your name! And yet just a little sad, that you are not some beautiful stranger come out of the blue to visit me, some goddess perhaps sent by the immortal Diana herself…” I formed an immediate high opinion of Latin American gallantry (if less of French efficiency).

  In England the ruins of Fotheringhay, where the unfortunate Queen was executed in 1587, was an obvious site of pilgrimage; scrambling about the grassy mound, I managed to cull some seeds from the huge thistles growing there which I was moved to hear were known as Queen Mary’s Tears; I like to think that the thistles currently growing in my garden are descended from them. It was also due to a personal call on the local farmer that I got to hear about the eccentric Scot, a Jacobite sympathizer, who some decades earlier used to come down annually, wearing his kilt, to lay a wreath at Fotheringhay in memory of the Queen. Unfortunately in his enthusiasm for the cause of Mary Stuart, he used such violent language about the existing British royal family that his visits had to be discouraged by the then owners of the site. I even tried to track this loyal/disloyal man down: in vain. I was left wondering if his ghost paid nocturnal visits to Fotheringhay on 8 February, the anniversary of the execution.

  Westminster Abbey was another important location since it was here that the Queen was finally buried in 1612 (her body having spent the interim years in Peterborough Cathedral near Fotheringhay). Her son King James was persuaded by a courtier, Lord Northampton, a crypto-Catholic, to do the right thing and rebury her with the other kings and queens. Nowadays the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots lies on the right of the main altar; her white marble figure is stretched out, the face serene and peaceful under her peaked headdress.

  But this was not only a historic relic: important information could be derived from the actual measurements of the head. I knew this because my friend Roy Strong, then Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery and an expert on Tudor portraiture, told me that care was taken with the wax death masks, on which the image would be modelled, to keep the real-life proportions. I wanted to know everything and was particularly obsessed with calculating the proper height of the Queen. With that solipsism which only a true researcher can know, I thought it would be perfectly all right to climb up and take the exact measurement myself. In my ancient and voluminous black fur coat, which hopefully concealed the fact that I was heavily pregnant, I started to clamber.

  It was in this way that an alarmed member of the Abbey staff saw something that, for one horrified moment, he must have taken for an escaped bear, armed with a tape measure, assaulting one of the Abbey tombs…He challenged me where I clung in my slightly precarious position. Intent on my Optical Research, I was not at all abashed. I simply explained what I was doing: “I’m just measuring the face of Mary Queen of Scots, that’s all,” I said, and was rather surprised that this was not understood to be a perfectly normal occupation.

  These essays in Optical Research were only the beginning of what would be numerous most fruitful expeditions with subsequent books. I learnt to be grateful to tolerant, and even enthusiastic companions, such as Simone Warner who was my charioteer and drove me all round East Anglia in the tracks of Queen Boadicea for The Warrior Queens: we became amateur archaeologists, plunging in and out of what we hoped were historic holes. Going the rather shorter distance to the City of London was similarly illuminating: the famous red layer caused by this warrior Queen’s burning of Londinium in AD 60 was unexpectedly exposed by some building works. While I was standing gazing into the excavations, the man next to me suddenly exclaimed: “That’s the Romans for you! Four hundred years of occupying our country.” For me, on the other hand, it was the surprising virulence of the red which enabled me to envisage those fierce flames which had destroyed a city at a woman’s command. You can say that we each took our own message from this episode of Optical Research.

  Of course I could not expect my companions to subjugate their own interests entirely. Harold had a wistful tendency to spot interesting cricket matches from the car as we toured the countryside with History in (my) mind. On one occasion, when we were investigating Worcester with regard to the battle at which Cromwell conclusively defeated Charles II, a particularly seductive cricket match presented itself…I was compelled to stump off alone. I did allow myself to say on return: “Cromwell won my match: how about yours?”

  It would be only fair to add that Harold also gave my manuscripts the benefit of his editorial corrections, noted in his unmistakeable large black handwriting on the lined yellow legal pads he always used. Despite our very different style of writing—to put it mildly—and despite some fierce arguments, I have to say that Harold’s meticulous care for language meant that he was nearly always right. One exchange over The Six Wives of Henry VIII and the use of the word “courtier” would have astonished admirers of his plays.

  Research in libraries was not quite so picturesque. But it was never dull. For example, the moment when I arrived at the Register House in Edinburgh to be greeted by the Keeper of the Records himself, Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, was certainly a challenge.

  “Lady Antonia,” he said with great courtesy, “I am here to persuade you to abandon your project to write about Mary Queen of Scots without delay and write instead about Maitland of Lethington…” (the middle-aged man who had been Secretary of State to the Queen).

  I wanted to cry out: “But I’ve not been obsessed since childhood by some Scottish civil servant!” That did not seem very tactful. I muttered something obsequious about the sheer fascination of the character of Maitland. Sir James proceeded to show me the manuscript of a letter in which Queen Mary alludes to John Knox—with even greater courtesy under the circumstances. T
he original manuscripts continued to fascinate me: the declining handwriting of the Queen providing an interesting study in itself, as it went from the splendidly regular (and splendidly readable) Roman hand of her youth to the huge, frantic, sloping lines of her desperate appeals to Queen Elizabeth.

  I rank my first sight of the letters of the royal captive with a very different emotional experience: looking at the signatures of Guy Fawkes in the Public Record Office before and after torture; the final pathetic shaky Guido says more than I ever could about the destruction of a man. These were famous—or infamous—people. In time, too, I would come to appreciate the sheer excitement of finding a rare letter from someone at the other end of society, a woman driven to self-expression by desperation. This was when I was researching the seventeenth century, a time when female lower-class literacy was virtually non-existent. The letter of Susan Owen to her husband, serving in the Blue Regiment in 1643, was in its own way as moving as that of Mary Queen of Scots. She related how all the neighbours were mocking her for his departure—it showed he didn’t love her—and ended by asking pathetically why should everyone come home except her John. But John would never come home because by the time the letter arrived he was already dead.

  Working on Mary Queen of Scots, there were the small discoveries which enlivened the hours. Unconsciously, I had simply assumed that Queen Mary spoke English with a heavy French accent when she came into captivity at the age of twenty-five. It was part of my mental picture of her. During my study of the subject, I came across a letter by one of her early jailers; referring to her early efforts to speak English, he described very clearly her “pretty Scots accent.” Of course! It was logical. When she arrived in France as a child, she originally spoke only Scots, according to Brantôme. Subsequently French became her natural language, but when she returned to Scotland, Queen Mary was still able to converse fluently in Scots—when she met John Knox for example. The two languages, Scots and English, were distinct, but not nearly so far apart as French and English, and many people at the two Courts of Scotland and England were able to switch from one to the other.

  This issue of her (non-existent) heavy French accent plagued me thereafter, rather like the equally mythical story of Marie Antoinette and the cake. For all my efforts to right the record, I was left in a state of impotent fury when the French film star Isabelle Huppert played Mary Stuart in Schiller’s eponymous play at the National Theatre in an accent which was virtually impenetrable. One line, which sounded like “Ello, leetle cloud, say ello to Frrrance for me,” did get through. It was said by the actress sitting forlornly on the stage, which was supposed to represent Fotheringhay Park, and waving her hand upwards in the direction of the roof.

  Finally the time came to write all this down, to sort out what the historian Norman Hampson called “the rich anarchy of the evidence.” I started on 18 June, not noticing that it was Waterloo Day, but then felt rather depressed by the coincidence: was this going to be my Waterloo? It was my mother who firmly pointed out that this side of the Channel, Waterloo was of course seen as a victory. I don’t think anyone around me realized what a serious, scholarly book I was trying to write. Thomas’s learned friend Mark Girouard enquired: “Is it one of those so-she-gazed-into-the-sunset sort of books?” “Only if I have documentary proof that the sun did set that day,” I replied smartly.

  Thomas himself was on surer ground when, presented with the first chapter just after I had written it, he criticized the endless descriptions of Scottish clan relationships. Despite revisions, the beginning remained problematic as an easy read, as I learnt a few years later when speaking at Harrow School. A lordly boy informed me that he had been given Mary Queen of Scots as a prize: I waited complacently for the compliment.

  “I couldn’t get beyond the first chapter,” he said. “All those Scottish names.” In my anxiety to avoid the “sunset” trap, there may have been too much information, or else I had not yet learnt how to write it into the text with the fluency which the reader deserves. Certainly Hugh, who had cheered me on but not read any of the text, was visibly astonished when I presented him with a portion of the typescript. He quoted Oliver Goldsmith on the “gazing rustics” gathered in amazement round the village schoolmaster:

  And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew

  That one small head could carry all he knew.

  No one at all had read the full MSS before I presented Mary Queen of Scots to my agent Graham Watson in July 1968. Elizabeth’s many encouraging notes came later: they were interleaved with criticisms of my grammar (until I revolted with a sly question about who taught me grammar in the first place). I wrote on my little portable typewriter and had the manuscript redone professionally by an agency I picked out of the telephone directory near my old place of employment, where I had typed the accounts. At this point I did make some attempt to get a sense of how a reader would react. On picking up the parcel, I asked the middle-aged lady managing the agency: “Did the typist have any…er, comment?”

  “Certainly not,” she said sternly. “None of our girls would dream of doing something like that.” She made it sound as if, in suggesting the typist might have read the book, I had accused her of an indecent offence.

  Even the day of actual publication, 15 May 1969, was not devoid of problems. The first of May had actually been chosen: May Day seemed appropriate to the Queen. James Joyce famously regarded the outbreak of the Second World War as a plot against the publication of Finnegans Wake. This was a reaction I could now understand completely: when there was a press strike of some sort and publication of Mary Queen of Scots was postponed for two weeks, I did feel it was a kind of conspiracy. I had been very careful not to present myself in a spuriously glamorous light on the jacket. My parentage was not mentioned and my courtesy title of “Lady” correctly omitted. There was no jacket photograph of the author. I had a paranoid image of some misery of a History don in a small cold, stone house in the country looking at an artificially beautified photo and thinking: I’ll show her! (Vanity made the alternative of a plain photograph unacceptable, of course.)

  Unfortunately, none of this stopped the first review I read being a bad one. It was by Elizabeth Jenkins, a writer I admired intensely—The Hare and the Tortoise being one of my favourite contemporary novels. She told me that in the case of Mary Queen of Scots I had turned a leopard into a pussy cat. As so often, it was my mother who came to the rescue. She rang me immediately she read the review in the Telegraph and asked: “Did you put her books in your bibliography?” (Elizabeth Jenkins had written on Elizabeth I and Leicester.) “No,” I told her; although I knew these works, they were not the sort of thing that I had drawn on for my own book. “Ah,” said my mother. She added hopefully: “I suppose you could say that this kind of experience is helpful—”

  I broke in bitterly: “Yes, I shall definitely offer it up, as we used to say at St. Mary’s.” Then I crumpled up the newspaper and threw it away in a useless attempt to excise the words from my memory.

  After that, I’m glad to say, it all got better.

  The Jenkins review remained the only highly critical one. Mary Queen of Scots went on to be an astonishing success, that is to say, its success astonished my publishers and astonished me. As a young publicity lady said to me chattily on our way to a radio show: “I think it’s the subject, don’t you?” One might not give her full marks for tact and I had to resist the temptation to reply sweetly: “Yes, it’s certainly nothing to do with the author.” But actually she was right, if not entirely right. Mary Queen of Scots is a subject of eternal interest to readers, just as it had been to me. But the public, like me, had grown up: scholarly references and a bibliography plus the exciting narrative provided by the real-life story was the new desirable combination. The flowering of culture brought about by the Butler Education Act of 1944 may have had something to do with it. An appetite for properly researched biography had grown up and by a fortunate coincidence of timing, I was able to benefit from it.


  Among other things, I learnt to appreciate the pleasure of readers’ letters. Many of them came from the United States after the book was an equally surprising success there, not immediately as at home, but some months after it came out. My first promotional visit was a disaster, as I lurked dismally in studios, slated as the fourth person to be interviewed when only three ever made the cut. Then Mary Queen of Scots suddenly emerged on the bestseller list, inched upwards and spent weeks as number 2 to a book by David Reuben called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask). You may be sure that I made full use of this happy juxtaposition of titles (“Just a few things Dr. Reuben missed out…”) during my triumphant second visit, months after the original publication date. Now I was the first to be ushered into the studio, by exactly the same people who had watched me languish earlier as number 4: in all sincerity, they were surprised to hear we had met before.

  My favourites among these American letters—I found the United States to be a highly literate country in this respect—taught me a valuable lesson about the reader’s point of view. One came from a man who described himself as being “on duty tonight on top of a railroad drawbridge over the Petaluma River in North California.” While he found Mary Queen of Scots “a really keen book,” he criticized the frequent use of French words and phrases: “the Northwestern Pacific railroad does not supply its drawbridge tenders with a French–English dictionary so these phrases are not intelligible to me.” The second was even more succinct: “Madam, when you wrote Mary Queen of Scots, did you ever think of the problems of an ex-Polish miner from the Ukraine now living in Chicago? You really ought to translate your French phrases.” Henceforth I spent much time, especially with Marie Antoinette, devising translations which would not insult the sophisticated, but would be helpful in Northern California and Chicago.