Dj has some slight edge wear and is slightly faed on the spine.Has several small, quarter to half inch tears, but is otherwise sound. Price clipped. Scotland in those days was a man's country. And for the girl who had briefly been Queen of France, the young Catholic widow brought up to the elegance and sophistication of the French Court, this return to feuding, warlike Scotland of the Covenant was a bitter and lonely homecoming. Scottish politics was a web of deceit and intrigue, for the Dcottish chieftains were proud and jealous men and they resented every threat to their independence. They resented., too, the authority of a woman. But for all her foreign upbrining Mary also was a Scot, and she would not play the puppet for any man. All the world, it seemed, would marry her off and run her kingdom for her, for while Scotland was a hotbed of scheming and violence her future would be critical to the great clash that was brewing between England and Spain; and her own warring chieftains saw each in the accession to the throne of this young girl an opportunity to seize the reins of power and harness them to the chariot of his own ambition. But Mary would have none of it. The crown was hers by right, and her Scottish pride rose in anger at the insulting contempt in which her authority was held. In a world of calculation and treachery and greed she stood out like an eagle in a flock of vultures. With her quick, blazing anger and impulsive generosity her courage, her loneliness, and her determination she seems to rise and fall in the pulse of tragedy, caught inexorably in a rhythm of disaster from which her own character made escape impossible.

Scotland Mary Historical