Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots [Paperback]

Reay Tannahill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

In Fatal Majesty, critically acclaimed novelist Reay Tannahill immerses readers in the tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots-but this is not a conventional retelling of a fascinating yet familiar tale. Eighteen-year-old Mary returns from the sophisticated French court to claim her throne in cold, backward Scotland. A gloomy reception proves least among the nave young monarch's challenges: her arrival provides the opportunity for smoldering vendettas to explode and for intricate conspiracies to form and then unravel-intrigue besets her on every side. Mary's self-righteous brother, James, seeks to rule in her place; her brilliant Secretary of State, Lethington, dedicates his energies to placing the Stuarts on the throne of England; and her cousin, Elizabeth I, dazzling and unscrupulous, fears Mary as a threat to her crown and to her life. Mingling a poet's passion with an historian's insight, Tannahill chronicles an era of easy violence, desperate action, and grand conspiracy. In Fatal Majesty, masterful characterization combines with lightning pace and classic plotting to deliver a tragic romantic saga with all the complexity of a major political thriller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The life of Mary Queen of Scots, from the age of 18 until her death at the hands of her cousin, Elizabeth I, provides the framework for Scottish author Tannahill's (A Dark and Distant Shore) latest novel. Instead of focusing on the personalities of the martyred queen and her formidable English rival, the author has chosen to document the complicated political machinations that led to Mary's downfall. The religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe at that time, the thorny issue of "divine right" and succession to the throne, and the myriad plots, counterplots and counter-counter plots are ponderously explicated here, undermining the vitality of the central character. The precarious motives and positions of those who critically figured in the schemes to maneuver the destiny of England and Scotland are compelling, but these tensions deflate in Tannahill's dense prose. The reader gets a broad sense of the way 16th-century monarchies operated: how Mary, pronounced queen at the age of six months, was a symbolic pawn in the hands of feuding powermongers, mostly men. The crux of the historical tale is that Elizabeth I becomes Mary's fatal nemesis, but there is a surprisingly dispassionate handling of the emotions and thoughts of these two powerful, vulnerable women and the people who loved and/or manipulated them. With the exception of Mary's secretary of state, Lethington, whose personal life and crucial role as a political adviser are well drawn, most of the characters are not persuasively rendered. Occasional glimpses of Mary's personality shine through: her naivete as a young woman when she first comes to rule Scotland, her thwarted romances and her attempts at self-determination. Elizabeth's defensive calculations are a fascinating counterpoint, but Tannahill withholds what a novelization of this famous drama should promise, and gives us instead a heavy load of densely woven facts that read more like a research text than a novel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Readers hoping for a fictionalized biography of Mary Queen of Scots on the level of Margaret George's Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles: A Novel (LJ 8/92) will be disappointed. Focusing primarily on the "political intrigues" surrounding Mary after her return to Scotland, this narrative lacks the complexity that made George's account so engrossing. The characters are wooden and unsympathetic, and there is little insight into Mary herself, who often seems peripheral to her own story. Although Tannahill (Return of the Stranger, LJ 4/1/96) does set the social and political scene, she pays more attention to Elizabeth I's motivations (seen through Scottish eyes) than to those of Mary or any of the Scottish nobles. Readers eager for anything about Mary and her times will probably want this; others want to look elsewhere.?Karen E. Sadowski, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 466 pages
• Publisher: Griffin; Reprint edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312253869
• ISBN-13: 978-0312253868
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,520,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A royal disappointment., January 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hardcover)

I've long been fascinated by the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, so I was looking forward to reading this new novel. I can't say I thought much of it, however. The style rather reminds me of those paperback romances you find at airport terminals and supermarket checkout lines, and the history, while accurate in spots, seems mostly taken from Antonia Fraser's silly biography of Mary. In other words, our heroine comes off as a brainless sap who seemingly deserved to be pitched off her throne. Having a protagonist you want to give a good slap to does not make for pleasant reading.

My main annoyance with the book, however, was Tannahill's cliched treatment of Mary's third husband, the Earl of Bothwell. Going against all the objective historical evidence, Tannahill gives us the tired old tale of Bothwell as Border ruffian who, after blowing Mary's previous husband up with gunpowder, then takes it into his head to kidnap, rape, and coerce Mary into an unwanted marriage with him. Spare me. I was hoping most reputable authors had gotten past that by now. In truth, Bothwell deserved to be the hero of Tannahill's work, and the fact that he wasn't leaves the book with a certain lack of credibility to me. (I'll admit, I'm prejudiced on that point. I feel about Bothwell rather the way Richard III Society members feel about that monarch.)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but frustrating, February 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hardcover)

The book started out fairly well I thought, although being an avid "fan" of Mary Queen of Scots I kept noticing little details here and there where I was thinking "That didn't really happen like that" or "This could really have been expanded on". I found this latter one particularly grating at the end, where Mary is imprisoned and years slide by so quickly one can hardly get a feel for the isolation she must have felt. And her death at the end I thought should have been more emotional...though I did like the one sequence of Elizabeth and the "scream". The one point on which I completely agree with the reader from Canoga Park is Tannahill's treatment of Bothwell. Initially I thought he was going to be characterized positively, but then he became the murderous, uncivilized lout that I also thought historians had done well to disprove now...and the "kidnapping and rape" was in actuality almost certainly done with Mary's collusion. Tannahill also takes Antonia Fraser's tremulous view that Mary had been five weeks pregnant at the time of her miscarriage, and not five months, which was initially reported and far more likely...because this would prove that she did indeed have an adulterous affair with Bothwell. Instead of putting in the entirely probable romance between Mary and Bothwell, Tannahill tacks on details about the relationship between Lethington and Mary Fleming, which I was only mildly interested in at best. I guess this was to substitute for the total lack of love she portrayed in Mary's life, but it didn't work for me and left me feeling really unsatisfied.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing, but distant, look at Mary, Queen of Scots, August 23, 2006

By 

Susan Higginbotham "boswellbaxter" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Paperback)

Reay Tannahill's Fatal Majesty is about Mary, Queen of Scots, and I liked it even better than The Seventh Son. It's written in a similar style, with a very dry, sardonic tone to the narration.

Fatal Majesty switches back and forth between the English court and the Scottish court, and has a very wide cast of characters--wide enough, in fact, to be rather confusing for someone who isn't intimately familiar with the main players of the time. Most of the characters act entirely in their own self-interest, like so many spiders spinning their webs, and it is the convergence of these webs that eventually engulfs and destroys Mary.

Though Tannahill is sympathetic toward Mary, one gets a sense of distance, especially in the latter half of the novel. Indeed, Tannahill's favorite character seems to be Mary's Secretary of State, Lethington, which gives rise to what I thought was the novel's major flaw: once Lethington makes his final exit, Tannahill becomes far less engaged with her material, making the last fifty pages a bit of chore to get through. Tannahill covers thirty years in those fifty pages, and although there's a lot of intrigue packed in those years and pages, I found myself skimming. Worse, Mary herself appears only occasionally in them. That may have been to drive home the point that she was little more than the pawn of others during that time, but I would have liked to have seen more of Mary nonetheless. Still, this is a 450-plus-page novel, and the pleasure of reading the first 400 pages, packed full of excellent characterizations and dry wit, more than makes up for the relative weakness of the last fifty pages.