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Mary Queen Of Scots Quotes

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Mary Queen Of Scots Quotes

“It is often said that a secure childhood makes the best foundation for a happy life. In marked contrast to her cousin Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart enjoyed an exceptionally cosseted youth. It is left to the judgement of history to decide whether it did, in fact, adequately prepare her for the extreme stresses with which the course of her later life confronted her.”

“Mary Stuart and Elizabeth both aimed at toleration in an intolerant age, in the same ways that Catherine de’ Medici, the mother-in-law of one and the almost mother-in-law of another English queen, labored her whole life to heal the rift between Catholic and Protestant in France. All three of these queens worked as diligently and as astutely as they might to restrain the fratricidal wars of Christian against Christian. What they had to hold up against that violent seismic shift in human sensibility was the orderly traditions of monarchy. If they did not ultimately succeed, they slowed and tempered the disorder and violence.”

“Because [Michel de Castelnau] had been charged with making peace between [Mary Stuart] and her barons, he ignored Mary’s adamant insistence on how anti-monarchal she considered the rebel lords to be; he decided that hers was a profoundly immature political analysis. Yet Elizabeth’s own moral outrage at these same rebels’ affronts to monarchal principles, when, two years later, they refused to obey her commands to release their anointed queen from prison, suggests that Mary was simply being clear-sighted rather than naïve and saw earlier what Elizabeth learned only later. Mary was neither stupid nor ill-educated. She knew what she was talking about.”

“So Elizabeth behaved cautiously as usual and put Mary [Queen of Scots] in prison - nice prison, but she wasn't allowed out. And that's where she stayed for nineteen years. . . . She immediately became the focus of plots and rebellions. In 1569, there was a major Catholic rising in the north which aimed to free Mary, marry her to the Duke of Norfolk and put her on the throne. When it was defeated, Elizabeth had 600 rebels executed (so it wasn't just her sister who could be bloody).”

“In their fragmentary and miscellaneous way, the Hawthornden manuscripts provide information about the re-shaping of a British Marian myth after 1603, a complex process that involved re-negotiating older national narratives and that drew together the factious material written in the 1580s with more sombre recollections fit for the commemoration of a national figure. In a narrower sense, Fowler's papers offer material evidence of the nature and extent of circulation of Marian 'literary curiousities' among the London Jacobean elites in the first decade of Stuart rule; the loosely defined circles within which this material can be detected include people from different backgrounds, nationalities and social extractions, as a testament to the permeability of both Marian material and early seventeenth-century literary networks. By the end of the first decade of James's English reign, when much of Fowler's material was arguably collected, Mary's problematic memory had been finally tamed and the Queen of Scots had become a figure of misfortune rather than dissent.”