Biography: After the famous biography by Antonia Fraser, and the four lives by Jenny Wormald, James McKay, Alison Weir and Jane Dunn, it might seem there is nothing further to say about Mary Queen of Scots. In this magnificent volume, John Guy proves decisively otherwise.
In an act of dedicated and meticulous scholarship, he has gone back to the original documents, working his way (in a manner no previous scholar has done) line by line and page by page through the notorious minefield of the Casket Letters, said to prove that Mary had plotted the murder of her own husband, Henry, Earl Darnley.
Guy is essentially a defence lawyer of genius, Clio's version of Clarence Darrow, one might say. Readers interested in the details of Mary's 20-year captivity in England, or even in the Babington Plot which sealed her fate, will need to go elsewhere, but, as Guy implies, all this is icing on the cake. Mary is a controversial figure because of the murder of Darnley and her subsequent marriage to James, Earl Bothwell. If she is guilty as charged, she no doubt deserved the headman's axe that was prepared for her at Fotheringhay in February 1587; if she is innocent, she must go down in history as the most tragic and maligned of queens.
So the questions Guy poses are: who killed Darnley in Kirk o'Field in 1567? Where did he die? Why was his house blown up with gunpowder, even though he was found strangled in a nearby garden? Mary's detractors say the murder was her revenge for Darnley having masterminded the assassination of her Italian secretary, David Rizzio (absurdly alleged to be her lover), in the queen's apartments a year before. Guy shows with unimpeachable evidence that although Darnley was the figurehead in the Rizzio killing, the deeply sinister Earl of Morton was the evil genius behind both the Rizzio and the Darnley assassinations. Bothwell was forewarned of the murder attempt on Darnley but Mary was not, and it was mere chance that she left Kirk o'Field an hour and a half before the explosion to attend the wedding of her servant, Bastian. Mary was not then in an adulterous relationship with Bothwell but she handed her enemies a propaganda coup by throwing in her lot with Bothwell, partly out of infatuation but mainly because she thought he was the only one who could save her from a fate similar to her late husband's. Guy establishes that Mary was genuinely abducted, that Bothwell then won her over by cajolery, and that all their rows and collisions took place after the wedding, thus disproving the traditional canard that she married Bothwell in full knowledge of his moral turpitude.
The likelihood is that, in a row, Bothwell blurted out the truth about his role in the Darnley conspiracy, whereupon Mary realised to her horror that her so-called loving husband had lost her her claim to the English throne. One of Guy's strongest points is that Mary's planned dynastic accord with Elizabeth of England makes it inconceivable that she could have had any knowledge of the plot to kill Darnley.
On the Casket Letters Guy surpasses himself. Having established that Mary's overt enemies in Scotland were always the emetic trio of Morton, Moray and Maitland (the three evil "M"s to go with Mary's Four Maries), he shows that her deadliest enemy was Elizabeth I's adviser, William Cecil, who schemed for 20 years to bring about her execution. Working hand in glove with the Scottish rebel lords (the three "M"s), Cecil rewrote the history of the times as a black legend, casting Mary as the villainess. Guy's unimpeachable scholarship consigns this black legend to the dustbin of history. The Casket Letters are clear forgeries, cleverly wrought, but not so clever that Cecil and the Scots trio did not sometimes trip themselves up with internal inconsistencies. Largely interpolations from genuine (but later) epistles, but muddled up and minimally doctored so that the pages of genuine documents could survive a handwriting test, the Casket Letters appeared to provide the circumstantial evidence needed of Mary's guilt. But with meticulous sleuthing, Guy traces every stage of the minutely fabricated forgery, underlining Cecil's key role. On Cecil's doctoring of the notorious Letter Six, Guy concludes: "An innocent and fully comprehensible document was turned into something simultaneously incriminating and complete gibberish."
The dark villain of Guy's story is Cecil, a viper who grew fat on his own poisonous hatred. As Guy says: "For Cecil, Mary's flight to England was an almost providential finale to the reign of a woman he always regarded as his most sinister antagonist." Cecil knew that Elizabeth was a ditherer and therefore made his own policy, always cunningly obfuscating it; he even sent the warrant for the execution to Fotheringhay to force the issue, while Elizabeth still prevaricated. Elizabeth hated Mary but knew that deposing and executing queens was a risky business that could rebound on her. Also, to be fully legal, such an order would have to have parliamentary assent and, as a tyrant worthy of her father, she hated any challenge to her will, however constitutional. She encouraged her followers to do away with Mary clandestinely, so that she did not have to take responsibility for the execution. But the devious Cecil, master of the double-cross, even double-crossed his own sovereign.
His career bears its own moral. Maitland, Morton and Moray all died violent deaths but the devious, circling Cecil died in his own bed. Guy has written a great history about an innocent queen hounded by a fiend incarnate.
• Frank McLynn is an author and critic