Kristen Walton's masterful study of Mary Stewart's tenure as a regnant queen of Scotland is the kind of book that revitalizes scholarship and unsettles editors. Like her cousin Elizabeth I, Mary has inspired an endless succession of biographies recounting her tragic process from Fontainebleau to Fotheringhay. Readers never tire of wrestling over the old questions about her role in Darnley's murder; the nature of her relationship with her secretary, David Rizzio; the authorship of the casket letters; and her complicity in the plots against Elizabeth. For over four centuries, the spectacle of a queen caught up in the showdown between Protestants and Catholics has been the stuff of operas, stage plays, and best-selling romances.
The double antitheses in Walton's title—Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy—makes her book sound like yet another biography of Mary geared for a crossover audience. This is not the case. If an editor or marketing specialist recommended the title, it was a mistake that detracts from the important scholarly contribution that the book stands to make. Walton's focus is not Mary per se but the way controversialists responding to her reign generated political theories that transformed beliefs about sovereignty, citizenship, and the emerging nation-state in Scotland and England. The telos that haunts the book is not the final drama of Mary's execution but the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century and the uniquely British form of constitutionalism that emerged from them. Walton's study is one of the richest and most successful attempts I have seen yet to bring the pan-British perspective that has so enriched our understanding of those later developments to bear on the sixteenth century. This feat makes the book invaluable for any historian or literary scholar interested not only in Mary, Elizabeth, and the Reformation, but also in Anglo-Scottish relations, the later Stuarts, and the development of British political theory.
The book's value within a wide scholarly community results directly from its disciplined chronological focus on Mary's years as a regnant monarch, a period that Walton appropriately dates from her return to Scotland in 1558–73, when her supporters’ surrender of Edinburgh Castle decisively ended any realistic hope for her restoration. Throughout these years, Mary's self-presentation as a ruler shifted considerably, and so did the character and rhetoric of opposition to her reign. Again despite the title's suggestions of sharp opposition between a Catholic queen and a Protestant patriarchy, Walton shows just how far Mary was willing to go in her initial efforts to accommodate the laws against recusancy enacted by the 1560 Reformation Parliament. Throughout the book, Walton also complicates the sense of opposition to Mary's regime as an entirely Protestant matter. In a particularly fine discussion of the 1562 Huntley rebellion, for example, she demonstrates not only what little effect the rebels’ Catholicism had on Mary's response to the crisis, but also how the rebellion itself arose more from local grudges than from religious ideals (100–106).
Walton treats gender with the same subtlety and balance that she brings to her analysis of religion. Despite the early ruckus over John Knox's 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet, the question of a woman's general right to reign yielded to more practical and immediate questions about what kind of husband would best serve the interests of Mary's subjects. Walton argues persuasively that Mary's own gender performance shifted after her infatuation with Darnley wore off and she found herself married to a passive husband who forced her to adopt a more independent and stereotypically masculine course. Before that, Walton suggests that her years of training to be a French consort encouraged her to seek out male guidance, even to the extent of an initial close reliance on her Protestant half brother James Stewart, the earl of Moray, and the Confederate Lords who so ardently championed the Reformation.
From Walton's perspective, Mary's tricky position as the Catholic queen of a Protestant patriarchy did not necessarily predicate the disasters that seem to have become inevitable only after Darnley's murder. But Mary's anomalies did trigger some of the sixteenth-century's richest political commentary. While some of the works that Walton treats, like Knox's First Blast, John Aylmer's 1559 An harborowe for faithfull land trewe subiectes, and George Buchanan's 1579 De iure regni apud Scotos will be familiar to specialists, she offers important new insights into them by analyzing them in the context of less familiar treatises, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, polemic images, and important archival gleanings such as William Cecil's 1568 memo assessing different options for handling the deposed queen. Walton offers a superb survey of the range of Scottish and English writing on such topics as a woman's fundamental right to rule; a foreigner's rights to the English succession; the status of a heredity monarch within a mixed commonwealth; the sovereign's relationship to natural, positive, national, and international law; the possibility of Scotland's legal subordination to the English Crown; and the ability of one sovereign to intervene in another sovereign's internal affairs and, in the ultimate case, to prosecute another sovereign for treason. As Walton demonstrates throughout this powerful and provocative book, these questions contributed to an emerging discourse of citizenship that ultimately redefined sovereignty itself as the collective will of a people to whose laws everyone—both the ruler and the ruled—was equally accountable.
