After all the thousands of letters that she had written, after all the plots she had woven, despite her training and being so well warned, she was finally careless, or else she was entrapped. She signed her own name to the plan to murder Queen Elizabeth and that was her death warrant.

Or they forged it.

Who knows?

Between a prisoner as determined on freedom as she, and jailers as unscrupulous as Cecil and Walsingham, who will ever know the truth of it?

But in a way today, despite them all, the Scots queen has won the battle. She always said that she was not a tragic figure, not a queen from a legend, but she saw in the end that the only way she would defeat Elizabeth—fully and finally defeat her—was to be the heroine that Elizabeth could not be: a tragic heroine, the queen of suffering, cut down in her beauty and her youth. Elizabeth could name herself the Virgin Queen and claim great beauty, surrounded by admirers, but Mary Queen of Scots will be the one that everyone remembers as the beautiful martyr from this reign, whose lovers willingly died for her. Her death is Elizabeth’s crime. Her betrayal is Elizabeth’s single greatest shame. So she has won that crown. She lost in their constant rivalry for the throne of England, but she will win when the histories are written. The historians, mostly men, will fall in love with her and make up excuses for her, all over again.

They tell me that my husband watched her execution with the tears pouring down his face, speechless with grief. I believe it. I know he loved her with a passion that cost him everything. He was a prosaic man to be overwhelmed by love—and yet it was so. I was there and I saw it happen. I believe no man could have resisted her. She was a tidal queen, a force of the moon, irresistible. He fell in love with her and she broke his fortune, his pride, and his heart.

And she? Who knows with her? Ask anyone who has loved a beautiful princess. You never know what she may be thinking. The nature of a princess is enigmatic, contrary, just like the sea. But it is my honest opinion that she never loved anyone at all.