If Mary, Queen of Scots Lived in a Game

If only our historical characters could choose their own endings

It’s been just about three weeks since Young Queens launched in the UK on May 11, and I have yet to see a copy of it myself in bookstores. Not because the book isn’t in UK stores – it most certainly is. But rather because while the book is there, I am here in DC. But I will be in London in a few weeks’ time and hope to catch sight of it then.

Luckily, I have some wonderful colleagues and readers who have sent me pictures of books on shelves, either directly or through social media. My storytelling pal Surekha Davies – Substack author, brilliant historian, monster expert, marathon traveler, and former curator with the keenest eye for detail – has proven nothing less than stalwart in sending me pics from her various travels in the UK, which she has also been posting, accompanied with the lovely hashtag #youngqueensinthewild.

Where's Waldo? I mean, where are the queens? These are just a few of the pictures the lovely Surekha Davies has sent me from the UK. These are in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

I love the hashtag. If you do catch Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary somewhere in the wild, please feel free to send me a picture! In the meantime, I am so grateful to Surekha and all the others who have already done so – you’ve helped make this launch feel real to me. I have also been touched by the many readers, reviewers, bloggers, and podcasters who have helped push this book into the world with whatever means they have, from interviews to write ups, or even a simple re-tweet and a “like.” To all of you, thank you.

One of my favorite parts of launching this book in the UK has been the media assets. Bloomsbury put together beautiful Amazon banners and produced a stellar book trailer. Thirty seconds of drama, so movie-like that I hope viewers aren’t disappointed at the end when they realize that Young Queens is actually a book (“wait, you mean I have to read?”).

Perhaps my favorite perk comes courtesy of historians Alex Churchill and Charlotte White who invited me to speak with them on the podcast History Hack about Young Queens. Every guest gets a cartoon, created by the artist Steven Smith. And so Charlotte, Alex, and I became three queens. When given the choice, Charlotte goes for goth all-black and so she opted to be Catherine de’ Medici. I took on the part of Elisabeth de Valois. Alex wanted to hold her own head, so she got to be Mary Stuart. Don’t we look like a combination between Renaissance queens and superheroes?

Or maybe we look like characters in some sort of videogame about queens beating down the patriarchy. I’m not a gamer, and until reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I hadn’t perceived the similarities between gaming and storytelling. Gaming is like writing: you control your own universe. There are few consequences for dying in a game. You click ‘reset’, your character is magically resurrected, and you try the level again. Your character gets a new life, new choices. Maybe you get to move to the next level. Maybe you even win.

I can’t help but think about this kind of immortal life – a life on repeat – when looking at the cartoon of Alex Churchill-as-the beheaded Mary, Queen of Scots. Alex-Mary looks like she could just pop that head right back on and try her life all over again, this time making better and smarter choices. An editor at Bloomsbury who has been a huge Mary Stuart fan since childhood once told me that each time she reads about Mary, at each important juncture, she hopes Mary will make a different decision that will alter her life path. Unfortunately, she never does.

In a way, Mary lives again in every biography and history written about her. In the space of a book, she gets to become a flesh-and-blood being, if only in the minds of the writer and the reader. And yet isn’t that the tragedy of writing and rewriting her life? Something about Mary keeps us coming back to her story. And each time, it happens all over again: we fall in love with the coddled child in France, we feel the anxiety of the eighteen-year-old sent to rule over a kingdom with almost no help; we share Mary’s despair when, at the age of twenty-five, she gropes in the dark, unable to find her way. And yet, we know how this story ends. And although we might wish otherwise, we cannot help her.

That is the difference between a game and real life, between fiction and history, fantasy and reality. No matter how many times Mary’s biography is written, there will always be only one ending, every detail of her life marching toward the inevitable scaffold and the axe.

No ‘reset’ button for Mary. No redemption.

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On that note, perhaps I should turn to something brighter. A shoutout to the brilliant Ilsa Brink for the gorgeous redesign of my new website. I love how the image on the landing page captures my interest in early modern women’s history and my love of early printed books. The sixteenth-century book in the picture even has a tab to mark the page. Reading hasn’t changed all that much in 500 years.

The UK launch of Young Queens has passed but now I’m gearing up for the US launch on August 15. I’ve had a sneak peek of the full cover and it’s even more beautiful than I had thought. Think glistening pearls on rich, black velvet. I’m looking forward to holding it in my hands. You can pre-order the American edition from the usual places, including your independent bookstore, or through the links on my website.

I’ll be appearing at the Chalke Valley Festival in the UK at the end of June, in conversation with the novelist Kate Mosse. Kate has published a tremendous compilation of over 1000 long-forgotten women in her Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries. I’ve also been lucky to get a sneak peek of her latest historical novel, out this July. As one might expect of Kate Mosse, The Ghost Ship is a tremendous read, deeply researched, vividly told. Her story features 17^th-century French religious refugees, female pirates, financially independent women, and a wonderful treatment of queer identity and love. Enjoy!

I hope that, eventually, every month with be Pride month. But for now, Happy Pride! And happy early summer.