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Cargando... Mary Queen of Scots (1969)por Antonia Fraser
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This is an interesting biography of the life of Mary Queen of Scots and a really good read. I have one criticism, hence only 4 stars there isn’t consistent translation of the French and Latin and I appreciate that the book was originally written in 1969 and both were probably taught at school back then. I was born in 1969 and went to a comprehensive school and did not do Latin and the foreign language I did study was German. So it was at times frustrating. I would like to read another biography on her life so that I can compare
Lady Antonia Fraser is young, beautiful, and rich, an earl’s daughter married to a busy and successful politician, the mother of a large family; yet she has surmounted all these handicaps to authorship to produce a first-rate historical biography. Pertenece a las series editorialesContenido enContieneAparece abreviada enPremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas. Wikipedia en inglés (15)Mary Queen of Scots passed 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 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 to free her, and her execution at the age of forty-four. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)941.105092History and Geography Europe British Isles Scotland 1542-1603 Reformation period BiographyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Fraser presents Mary as an attractive personality. She had barely been born when her father died, making her queen of Scotland. Her actual reign was brief, though, starting when she returned, still a teenager, as the widowed dowager queen of France. It did not go well, but what are you to do if you are destined by birth to rule an ungovernable country?
Perhaps Mary’s worst blunder was when she escaped her Scottish imprisonment and fled to England rather than France. This presented her cousin Elizabeth with an intractable problem whose solution seems inevitable in retrospect. For Many was, in addition to being the deposed queen of Scotland and the dowager queen of France, the next in line to the throne of England. A fatal complication was that Mary was Catholic. Thus, in the eyes of all the English who clung to the old faith, she—and not the excommunicated Elizabeth— already was the legitimate queen. As long as Mary remained alive, she was thus a factor in every plot to assassinate Elizabeth.
This led to framing a law that made not only assassins but also those in whose name they concocted their plots guilty of treason. Clearly, the law was meant to bring the downfall of only one person, leading to a trial that Fraser calls “one of the strangest judicial proceedings in the history of the British Isles.”
In a chapter entitled “The Uses of Adversity,” Fraser describes how Mary’s character was deepened by the long years of captivity in ways typical of the long line of imprisoned philosopher-monarchs. She also shows how Mary ensured that the death she knew she could not escape would fit the pattern of “the classic Christian manner of martyrdom and triumph.”
To that extent, Mary won. Her execution remains a blot on Elizabeth’s reputation. Meanwhile, as Fraser points out, all subsequent British monarchs, beginning with Mary’s son James, have descended from her, not Elizabeth.
My only reservation about Fraser’s portrayal of this remarkable person is that Mary comes off as more modern than the times in which she lived. She is clearly Fraser’s kind of Catholic — tolerant, discrete, yet unwavering. Fraser’s sympathy for Mary makes not only Elizabeth but even more so Scottish reformer John Knox inimical to her. Perhaps Fraser has accurately depicted Mary (she presents her case convincingly). But it’s also true that biographies inform us not only about their subjects but also about their authors. ( )