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Elizabeth always needs to be taken into account when fictionalizing
the life of Mary Queen of Scots.
Mary’s relationship with Scotland was, and remains, complicated
and paradoxical. Her reign there after returning from France was filled
with difficulties and the events that shocked her contemporaries at
home and abroad (the murders of Rizzio and Darnley and Mary’s sub-
sequent marriage to Bothwell) are seen by modern historians as both
a result of her own misguided actions and of the divisions and rivalry
endemic among the Scottish nobility of the time (e.g. Fraser 2002
[1969]; Graham 2008; Guy 2004; Weir 2003). Mary’s own Catholicism
complicated matters further, and her forced abdication was clearly
welcomed by Scottish Protestants. Repudiated by the Scots and thrown
on the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth, Mary’s religion and the threat it
invoked eventually determined English policy towards her affairs,
leading to her execution on 8 February 1587 after more than eighteen
years of imprisonment in England. Consequently, because of her Ca-
tholicism, Mary can be seen as a symbol for an old form of religion

ment on the troubled nature of this relationship. Jane Dunn sums it up as a rela-
tionship where kinship played a big part and where opposites attracted: “While
Mary lived, Elizabeth’s isolation as a regnant queen in a world of men was re-
lieved; there was a sympathy between them and […] they were among the clos-
est blood relations that either had left in the world. Although temperamentally
opposed and living their lives to different ideals, Mary had insisted on stressing
this familial female relationship: mother, daughter, sister, cousin; in every one of
her multitude of letters over the years she reminded Elizabeth of their blood
connection. There was an attraction too in opposites, a fascination with those
who lived out the unlived side of oneself. Mary had recklessly pursued her heart
in a way Elizabeth would never contemplate and Elizabeth had assumed auth-
ority in government that had won the world’s grudging respect. Elizabeth and
Mary had offered to each other a different way of seeing, a point of identity and
contrast. In their solitary queenship, the existence of the other, a cousin too,
meant each was not entirely alone” (Dunn 2004: 500). John Guy points out an
element of jealousy in Elizabeth’s feelings towards Mary, to the extent that it pre-
vented a meeting between the two queens simply because Elizabeth was afraid
that Mary would “overshadow or surpass her” (Guy 2004: 511). While agreeing to
a certain extent with the “well-entrenched interpretation” of the two women as
“rival” queens, Guy also argues that Mary and Elizabeth “had much more in
common than this reductionist model allows” (Guy 2004: 511). He moreover
points out that the common representation of Elizabeth as ruling from the head
and Mary from the heart, a notion clearly echoed in Dunn’s summary above, is
based on a Protestant stereotype derived from John Knox’s proclamation to this
effect, because in Knox’s eyes “a Protestant Queen was an ‘exceptional’ person-
ality able to overcome the frailty of her gender, whereas Catholic Queens were
not” (Guy 2004: 203).