The full title is “Mary Queen of Scots: And the Murder of Lord Darnley.”

This is a really interesting book for a number of reasons.

First, a bad reason: the first half of this book is very hard to read. Ms. Weir spends a lot of her time quoting various writings related to the issue, usually ending with some disclaimer as to why this quoted work should be disregarded. Pardon? Why quote it and then refute it?

Around about halfway through the book, though, Ms. Weir suddenly seems to change tack and the book got much more enticing. At this point, Ms. Weir had finished with all her laying out of timelines, events and innumerable quotes from discounted sources (mostly George Buchanan) and moved on to her conclusions and the reasons behind them.

In her Epilog, Ms. Weir freely admits entering into her research and writing with the conviction that Mary, Queen of Scots, was a bad person who had connived at the brutal murder of her loathed husband and would-be King, James, Lord Darnley but that, as she got more involved, she came to change her belief to the exact opposite — that Mary was innocent of the murder and was framed not only by the Scottish Lords but also by the Scottish Calvinist clergy, by Elizabeth I’s Prime Minister, Cecil, and by Elizabeth herself.

What makes this book interesting, particularly in our stressful times, is that it shows how easy it is for a even an absolute monarch to be controlled, punished, and ultimately dethroned by politics.

I recommend this book to all those who are trying to write Machiavellian characters as well as anyone who wants to understand how corrosive politics was in those times.

It’s also very interesting to note that Mary was the victim of a fairly simple smear campaign that worked so well that, even today, people still believe it. It says something about the power of smear campaigns and how hard they are to shake off.