The trial of Mary Queen of Scots took place in the Star Chamber, and was the first formal trial of a crowned and accredited Sovereign in historic times. The unfortunate Queen was not tried, as many people think, for any deeds or misdeeds done during her reign in Scotland, but on account of her alleged complicity in the Babington plot which designed to free her and kill Queen Elizabeth of England. This volume gives the State Trial, the legal processes which led up to it, the tortuous policy of the English lawyers, and a rare account of the Queen's last miseries borne with such dignity and bravery.

The Trial of 1568-9 is perhaps the most neglected period of Mary's life. Before it, she had been a girl in France, the romantic queen in Scotland: after it, she became the prematurely ageing captive, the royal martyr. During the crucial period of change, we see the Mary of flesh and blood, less attractive but no less fascinating: the figutive from justice, accused of adultery and murder; her life in peril from her own subjects, yet bent on vengeance; ready to abandon Bothwell for whom she had given up so much, ready also to accept Anglicanism as a condition of her restoration. Perhaps because she had so much to gain as well as so much to lose, Mary has fascinated readers as few other women in history have.

Presents a tale inspired by the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a work that follows the doomed monarch's long imprisonment in the household of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his spying wife, Bess.