Humphrey Drummond

James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell and third and final husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, has had horrible press. Probably, just in the interests of making people think, he deserves a sympathetic biography. If so, he definitely got it in this volume from Humphrey Drummond.

However, this is a book without any scholarly apparatus at all except for a thin bibliography. Not only are there no footnotes or other source references, there isn't even an index. Books such as that have to prove their value by demonstrating both good insight and good knowledge of the facts.

This one fails emphatically on the latter, and in a very sloppy way. I'll offer just two example of many: on page 47 it refers to "the death of her [Mary's] nineteen-year-old husband, Francis II, King of France." But he was not 19; he was 16 when he died on December 5, 1560; he would have turned 17 in about six weeks. This is fairly important, because it means that Francis never really reigned, and Mary, although slightly older, had no experience of governing either. So she went back to Scotland and... had constant troubles.

You might, I suppose, consider that a minor error. But there are whoppers, too. On page 83 it claims that Queen Elizabeth I encouraged Henry, Lord Darnley to court Mary, Queen of Scots, and even supplied money for the purpose. (He was born and raised in England, so he needed permission to go to Scotland.) In fact, although Elizabeth (after long and desperate appeals) let Darnley leave England, she flatly blew her top when Mary took him as a husband. Mary had thought Elizabeth would like the idea; Mary thought wrong.

I'll repeat that these aren't the only errors; it's just that they're mistakes that you can easily check to see that I'm right. And too much of Drummond's attempt to rehabilitate Bothwell depends on errors like that. Bottom line: Bothwell needs biographers, and he probably needs a sympathetic biographer just to stimulate new ideas. But this is not the book to do it.

[Edited February 5 to clarify and amplify the magnitude of the errors in this bit of un-historical fiction.]… (more)