I have long has an interest in Mary, Queen of Scots. For any teachers tackling Mary in the classroom, I have created comprehensive teaching resources for The Boy, the Witch and the Queen of Scots, free to download HERE.
The tragic queen was born at Linlithgow Palace on the 8th of December 1542, barely three weeks after Scotland's defeat to the English at the Battle of Solway Moss. Below, I am pictured with her statue at Linlithgow. Sadly, her life was to get more complicated still.
When little Mary was six days old, her Father James V of Scots reportedly turned his face to the wall and died. Allegedly, he said:'It began with a lass and it will gang with a lass.', referring to his disappointment that his family line was not to carry on through a male heir. Aged 9 months, Mary was officially crowned at Stirling Castle, pictured below.
However, her life was to become even more challenging: King Henry VIII of England had insisted that his own son Edward and Mary should be wed, an arrangement ratified in the Treaty of Greenwich. However, the regent in Scotland, the Earl of Arran, renounced the treaty, ushering in the prologued period of violent confrontation known as the 'Rough Wooing'. Five-year-old Mary was whisked off to France and, as a teenager, married to the French Crown Prince, her childhood playmate. Hoever, that stability and happiness was soon to be at an end: her husband inherited the French crown but died soon thereafter, leaving Mary widowed and without a purpose at the French court. She was persuaded to return to Scotland.
However, Scotland was not the country she had left behind. The Catholic Mary was returning to a now Protestant Scotland. Influential preachers like John Knox had persuaded many influential noblemen to become Protestants, including Mary's half-brother and closest advisor James Stewart. From the very beginning of her reign, John Knox tried to stir up trouble for Mary.
As a writer, I was particularly interested in this newly arrived 18-year-old Queen Mary. She certainly didn't have her troubles to seek, but she appears to have had considerable charm and vivacity, travelling across Scotland on lengthy progress journeys and indulging in dancing, riding, hunting and hawking. I found myself particularly fascinated by Mary's love of falconry and decided to make my boy hero an apprentice falconer. This necessicated some research, both theoretical...
...and practical.
Particular mention is made of Mary's merlins for which she had a particular fondness. A merlin is Britain's smallest bird of prey, but more than capable of hunting and supplying the Palace kitchens with larks, for example.
I discovered that the Catholic Earl of Huntly became a formidable foe when Mary did not back his wishes for a counter-reformation to reinstate Catholicism. On her progress north in the summer of 1562, she snubbed the Ear's invitation to visit his castle at Huntly, then called Strathbogie. Here I am, visiting its ruin.
Mary was probably wise not to trust the Earl - rumour had it that he planned to kidnap the Queen and marry her forcibly to his son. Instead, Mary bypassed his castle and gathered support to finally defeat the Earl at the Battle of Corrichie, fought in Aberdeenshire in October 1562. Mary was victorious.
It is true that in the years to come, Mary made some very questionable choices, particularly when it came to the men she chose to trust. However, she also had more than her fair share of bad luck and unfair treatment at the hands of others. In The Boy, the Witch and the Queen of Scots, I hope that I can portray a different, more hopeful side of the tragic queen: a fun-loving, considerate, charismatic, thoughtful and energetic go-getter, a teenager who is all too often judged too harshly. Whatever the truth, Mary's iconic status and hold on the imagination is set to continue, as this recent exhibition on her cultural legacy shows.
Barbara Henderson is the award-winning author of eleven books. Her new title, The Boy, the Witch and the Queen of Scots, is out from Luath Press now. Find out more about Barbara at www.barbarahenderson.co.uk.
“Where do you get your ideas from?”
It’s a question I get asked all the time – and I’m sure all authors do. And every time I get asked my mind goes blank. But it’s a good question… if only I knew the answer, everybody’s answer.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I want to ask it of every author or movie maker. In fact, anyone who has created something that interests me. The scientist in their lab discovering, say, the Covid jag, the engineer who invented the jet engine. Where did you get your idea from Frank Whittle? What was the Eureka moment?
It was Archimedes, the ancient Greek scholar, who is supposed to have had the original Eureka moment – it’s a Greek word meaning ‘I’ve got it’. Legend has it he leapt from his bath and ran naked into the street shouting ‘Eureka’.
Legend is not always right.
I’ve made up a legend to tell the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Eureka moment; the moment that was to change his life forever, the moment that set him on the course to become one of the best known writers in the world, a fame that lasts to this day more than a century after he died aged only 44 in Samoa.
My ideas tend to begin as a muddle of thoughts. There is rarely a Eureka moment, although I did have one for my second book, Acrobats of Agra. They happen – and it feels fantastic when they do.
There was a great deal of chance involved too. I was in a bookshop with my daughter, she was taking ages to make her choice (she loves books), I wandered downstairs, saw the history section (I love history), saw an old book on the Indian Mutiny that interested me, bought it and while reading came across a single line about a French travelling circus being trapped in the siege of Agra. Eureka!
There’s a large serving of serendipidity in there too – several ‘What-ifs’. And that applies to Stevenson and his idea for Treasure Island.
Come back to 1881. Queen Victoria is on the throne, and staying near where my story is set. She’s on holiday at Balmoral, her Highland home (and makes a fleeting appearance in the book).
The presence of the Queen is why Braemar, the nearby village, became such a popular destination.
Stevenson arrived at Old Mrs McGregor’s Cottage in Braemar with his mother and father, his American wife Fanny and Sam, her teenage son, his old nanny, known as Cummy, Maggie, his parents’ maid, and a dog.
Stevenson was 30. He’d wanted to be a writer for as long as he could remember. And he was not a well man, had been sickly since childhood. Stevenson never thought he’d live a long life – so he really did worry time was running out.
He’d written well-received travel books but had never managed to finish a novel. He contemplated turning his back on fiction. Perhaps history was the way to go, perhaps a biography of the Duke of Wellington…
He needed something, anything, a spark…
And then it started to rain – of course it did, this was a Scottish summer holiday – and Stevenson had to stop worrying about himself and turn attention to his new stepson.
Sam Osbourne was 13 and something of a lost soul. He’d been dragged from place to place through his short life.
His father was an adventurer, a man always one break from making it big. And family seems to have come a poor second to his dreams of riches. The family shuffled around the wild west of the US and when his parents split, Sam, his younger brother and older sister, were taken off to Europe by Fanny, who fancied herself as an artist.
It was in France that Stevenson first leapt into their lives, jumping through a doorway into a hotel in Grez-sur-Long, a small town south of Paris that had become an artists’ colony.
By then Sam’s younger brother, Hervey, had died. His sister, Bel, was 10 years older. Sam felt alone.
From Paris, they went to London, returned to California then back across the Atlantic to Scotland. In this strange new land – how different to California – Sam clung to his new stepfather.
They developed a bond (much of the suggestion for this comes from Sam himself, but they do seem to have been close) and so one rainy afternoon in Braemar – imagine the rain smattering against the small windows of the cottage, the fire spitting and crackling – Stevenson reached for a piece of paper and drew a sketch to amuse a bored Sam.
It was a map. A map of an island that over the course of the afternoon grew ever more detailed until finally Stevenson wrote two words on the bottom and handed it to Sam.
‘Treasure Island,’ Stevenson had written and here was the spark. Eureka!
Treasure Island, a story that has sold millions of copies, been made into a movie time and time again and in a host of different languages. It’s a story that has defined the image of a pirate, a treasure hunt; it is the adventure story.
Stevenson later wrote an essay on how he came up with the story. But, rather like some of his characters, Stevenson is an unreliable narrator. His later account of how he came up with the idea for Jekyll and Hyde – in a dream – is barely believable, and differed to other versions he told friends and family.
It makes for a good story though – and that is what Stevenson is all about.
Perhaps it was freeing his mind of his worries just for one afternoon that helped Stevenson come up with Treasure Island; thinking about Sam rather than himself (what would have happened if it hadn’t rained?).
It wasn’t an original idea. Pirates had featured in plenty of other stories but then most ideas borrow something from other books, paintings, movies.
What Stevenson did was take his idea and make it into something unforgettable. In Finding Treasure Island I have tried to play with Stevenson’s idea and where it came from. Could it have come from Sam? Could Sam’s own adventures in the magical, mysterious glens, forests and hills around Braemar have foreshadowed Jim Hawkins’ trials and tribulations on Treasure Island?
It's Sam who tells us the story in Finding Treasure Island; this is his version of history. But is it true? Perhaps.
But what is undoubtedly true is that it all started with a map; a map and an ‘Eureka!’ moment.
Writing challenge – draw a map. It can be an island, a treasure island, a forest, a town, your own street and house – anywhere – but it must include an X because as every treasure seeker knows, X marks the spot. Once you’ve drawn your map, which can include dragons or castles or swamps or multi-storey car parks and shopping centres, write a short story about it.
Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t.
He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.
What a can-do bunch the Victorians were!
I decided to return to the Victorian age in my latest book
Rivet Boy for a whole lot of reasons. It was the age of reason, of invention,
of engineering, of science and arguably, the age of the novel, too. Imagine a
world without Dickens or Darwin, Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, Isambard
Kingdom Brunel, Gustave Eiffel, The Bronte sisters, Florence Nightingale, Ada
Lovelace, Alexander Graham Bell…. And that’s just off the top off my head.
I have been privileged to indulge my love of all things
Victorian in my latest book, Rivet Boy. As the daughter of an engineer, I have
been around machinery all my life. While my father never worked in
construction, I am well used to asking myself the questions: how does that work?
How did they do that? We visited the iconic Forth Bridge when I was a child in the early eighties.
Barbara with her sister, brother-in-law and mother, visiting the Forth Bridge as a child.
While browsing through a photography book of Victorian
Scotland, I came across a chapter on the building of the iconic Forth Bridge. I
was staggered by the images. How did that work? How did they do that? I was
interested in the architects and engineers who built the structure, yes – but I
was even more interested in the blurred faces of the people who worked on the
site, day in and day out. I looked for a book on the subject (my usual go-to
next step if something captures my interest) and bingo! The Briggers,
written by Elspeth Wills with a team of South Queensferry-based researchers
features details and often even images of the long-forgotten workers who helped
to achieve one of the greatest engineering feats in history. These jobs were
dangerous!
For many years the figure
of deaths quoted was 57 nameless casualties. However, more recent research has revealed
the figure to be considerably greater: 73 confirmed – with more than 30 other related
deaths. Not exactly a cheering basis for a children’s book. And then I struck
gold: A newspaper article:
Here was a 12-year-old boy who survived.
He was to form the basis for my main character. With the
help of local researchers I was able to find out where he lived – around the
corner of the brand-new Carnegie Library in Dunfermline – the very first in the
world. How could I not include it as a setting to contrast with the noise and
danger of the building site. In my book, John is a rivet boy, heating and
throwing rivets which his team will insert and hammer into place on the giant
steel structure. It was skilled and dangerous work, often at great height and
without much safety equipment.
A Forth Bridge rivet, with my hand for scale. It's HEAVY!
John may have been one of thousands of ‘Briggers’, but in my
book he takes centre stage, alongside his friend Cora, who longs to become an
engineer herself. John is at best ambivalent, and often terrified of the
structure, but when the Crown Prince’s life is in danger he does not hesitate:
knowing the structure like the back of his hand enables him to overcome his fear
at the very moment when courage is needed most.
The Victorians loved engineering, and they were exceedingly
good at it. William Arrol, in charge of the Forth Bridge construction, went on
to build Tower Bridge in London – as far as they were concerned, the sky was
the limit. In my opinion, there are not nearly enough books celebrating science
and engineering.
We’d do well to channel our inner Victorians, don’t you
think?
You can buy Rivet Boy at https://www.cranachanpublishing.co.uk/product/rivet-boy-by-barbara-henderson/
