He gathered as much material as he could from archives in France, where Mary was raised, in Scotland where she returned to rule at the age of 19, and in England, where her life ended, as well as resources in the United States. “I suddenly realized that you’ve got to start all again, so that’s just what I did,” said Guy, who would go on to write his discoveries into his award-winning book “Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart.” “Partly genuine, partly forgeries, with bits added on – in one case actually doctored, with words crossed out, by William Cecil himself, to make it much more incriminating to Mary.” “So I get interested and I just latch onto this - all the furniture moves around, and you have a different pattern.”Īmong the archival materials he found were correspondences credited to Mary, including letters that became ammunition for the assassination of her character, and worse. “I go to the archives, I look at these documents - and I realize that I’m not seeing the story that’s come down,” said Guy, joining Willimon for a chat on a recent day in Beverly Hills. The British scholar and historian describes his approach as somewhat scientific, his method “forensic.” He speaks of the past in the present tense, a habit that tends to lend historic happenings a rush of immediacy, whether they occurred 15 years or five centuries ago, and which also makes events of long ago feel like they only just happened yesterday. “They were determined not just to write it down for the time in which they lived, but for posterity.”

“Mary was as much the victim of the pen as the executioner’s axe her enemies stole her story,” said Guy. While researching a BBC series on Mary years ago, Guy, an expert on Tudor England, discovered documents that shifted his perspective on how history remembered Mary Stuart - and the evidence implicating her in the plot against frenemy queen Elizabeth that led to her execution. Willimon sought to contextualize not only the religious and political forces hovering around Mary and Elizabeth, but also the personal challenges both queens might have faced as female leaders in a time of systemic misogyny. Willimon, in turn, looked to a leading expert on the era: John Guy, whose acclaimed 2004 book on Mary provided a valuable blueprint for telling a previously untold version of her life.

Mary queen of scots john guy