The Featured Researcher for May 2025 was Emily Hay with a project titled, The ‘Quenis awne hand’: Self-presentation in the Poetry and Correspondence of Mary Queen of Scots, 1567-1587.
HEIs: University of Glasgow, School of Critical Studies
Supervisors: Dr Theo Van Heijnsbergen, Professor Rhona Brown, and Professor Steven Reid.
In 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was removed from her throne following the murder of her second husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley and her ensuing marriage to the chief suspect, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. In the aftermath of her deposition she escaped to England, where she would remain imprisoned for the rest of her life. During this time, a host of texts were printed which described Mary, contrastingly, as a misunderstood martyr or a murderous whore through the characters of classical myth and biblical parable. But have you ever wondered what she wrote about herself?
My PhD explores Mary’s self-presentation in poetry and correspondence from Darnley’s death in 1567 to her execution in 1587, and how it compares to what other people – usually men – wrote about her in the same period. In doing so, I offer a feminist intervention in a well-wrought history, allowing Mary’s own literary voice to take precedence, and revealing for the first time the extent to which she ardently desired to consciously craft her own literary and cultural identity.
One oft-repeated myth about Mary that my thesis seeks to explode is the idea that her writing functioned as an immediate, highly emotional and uninhibited reaction to the situations in which she found herself. Such ideas find their roots partly in the misogyny of the sixteenth century, which saw women like Mary as overly passionate (and thus unfit to rule), and partly in the romantic notions of her as a tragic victim which came to the fore in her historical afterlife. Though it can indeed be said that Mary openly displays emotion in her writing, her use of it actually betrays a deft ability in rhetoric, diplomacy and manipulation, all of which were instilled upon her during her royal education and remained potent tools in her arsenal during her English imprisonment. Mary clearly understood the deeply public nature of both her actions and her words, as evident in a letter written to the Spanish ambassador soon after she had heard the pronouncement of her death sentence in 1586:
« Ils travaillent en ma salle ; je pense que c’est pour faire un échafaud pour me faire jouer le dernier acte de la tragédie. »
[They are working in my hall; I think it is to make a scaffold to have me play out the final act of the tragedy.] (23 November 1586. Translation my own).
Such utterances work to dispel the continued narrative that Mary’s writings can offer us a glimpse into ‘what she was really like’, as Robin Bell, the most recent editor of Mary’s poetry in English claimed (Bell, 1992:9). Mary was very clearly aware of the power of her writing as a performative medium, and within this she displays a clear desire to control the public narrative which had been turned against her.
Much of my thesis also seeks to emphasise the ways in which our cultural image of Mary today remains highly mediated through outdated sixteenth century ideals of gender. Whilst her cousin, the English Queen Elizabeth I, has become famous for her declaration that she had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, Mary Queen of Scots is often derided for her conformity to a more traditional royal femininity and the role it played in her downfall. However, here again Mary’s writings bear witness to an altogether different narrative, in which she too preferred to align herself with biblical kings like Solomon and David than the female figures male commentators projected onto her. Moreover, as a woman whose likely experience of sexual assault remains an open topic of debate in modern criticism, returning to Mary’s own words, which vehemently deny the malicious narrative that she was ‘ravyssit by hir will,’ offers an eerily prescient intervention into continued debates surrounding rape, victim blaming and survivor speech.
Whilst Mary remains a famous, and some would argue overstudied, figure of Scottish and British history, my thesis demonstrates that returning to her own words has the power to transform her cultural legacy and highlights how pertinent an interrogation of the longstanding debates of the Marian propaganda remains today.
CONNECT WITH EMILY (she/her)
Email: Emily Hay
Twitter: @emilyhay2
Bluesky: @emilyhay.bsky.social