Mary Queen Of Scots (My Heart Is My Own)

John Guy ↗

Some highlights

“Princes,” she confided, “at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.”

Throughout all your life show that you value truth so highly that your word is more to be trusted than other people’s oaths. – For Elizabeth, it was a lifelong moral axiom. She claimed time and time again

‘En ma fin est mon commencement’—‘In my end is my beginning’:

Up to now, Mary’s own impresa, chosen while she was in France, had been the marigold turning to face the sun. Her motto was “Its virtue draws me.”

At dinner, normally served between 11 A.M. and noon, there would be soup, veal, beef, mutton, pork, capon, goose, duck and rabbit for the first course, followed by pheasant, partridge, kid lamb, quail, pigeon, tart and frittered apples or pears for the second.

… with the motto “Virescit vulnere virtus” (“Virtue grows strong by wounding”). The motto could have referred to Mary’s moral outrage at her treatment by Elizabeth, but may well have signaled her determination to survive Elizabeth by whatever means. Most likely the ambiguity was malicious.

“yet my long adversity has taught me to hope for consolation for all my afflictions in a better life.”

“Search your consciences,” Mary said. “Look to your honor! May God reward you and yours for your judgment against me.”

“I am of no good and of no use to anyone,” she concluded.”

“The Catholic faith and the defense of my God-given right to the English throne are the two reasons for which I am condemned, and yet they will not allow me to say that it is for the Catholic faith that I die . . .”

The rest, whatever view is taken of the extent to which she truly ranks as a martyr for the Catholic faith and for the ideal of monarchy, forever settles her place in the pantheon of history as a fully realized tragic heroine.

The odds were stacked against her from the beginning.

In choosing the phoenix as her last emblem, she had written her own epitaph: “In my end is my beginning.”