In My End Is My Beginning

Mary Queen of Scots ascended to her country's throne one week after her birth, in 1542. Until she reached adulthood, Mary played pawn in the deadly power struggles dividing Scotland's nobility, and its Catholics and Protestants. When she came of age, Mary found herself ill-equipped to prevail over the destructive conflicts gripping her dominion or to ward off the encroachments of her calculating cousin, Queen Elizabeth of England.In 1568, her marriage and her life in tatters, Mary became Elizabeth's prisoner; she would spend the last 20 years of her life in captivity. Conspiracies and counterconspiracies, real and imagined, hovered about the imprisoned monarch: a hostage to fortune, she represented a rallying point for English Catholics. Elizabeth's executioners ended the queen's tragic life in 1587, but her son, as James I, would grow up to unite the two kingdoms that -- each in its own way -- destroyed his mother.James MacKay, one of the only Scottish historians to have tackled this legendary queen's biography, brings refresing perspective to a centuries-old debate.