THE LAST KNIGHT and the Queen of Scots: The Adventures of William Kirkcaldy of Grange (The Queen of Scots Suite)

Marie Stuart's mother Marie de Guise called Kirkcaldy an assassin. Henry Tudor knew him as Corex, the code name Kirkcaldy used when he spied for England while in the service of Henri II, King of France. The French king called him a 'first soldier of Europe' and doffed his hat to him. He was an ardent lover and a notorious womanizer, yet the women in his life adored him. He honored Queen Catherine de' Medici by wearing her colors and charmed the king's mistress Diane with his manners. He first paid homage to the Queen of Scots when she was a child at the French court, and he continued in her service when the widowed former French consort returned to Scotland to begin her personal rule as Queen of Scots, a title she had held since she was six days old. He fought by her side against the powerful Gordons at the Battle of Corrichie Burn and against her in the rebellion that followed her marriage to her treacherous second husband Henry, Lord Darnley. The year after their son was born Darnley was assassinated in a bizarre crime that eventually cost the queen her crown, Kirkcaldy was among the innocents, but he couldnot stand idle when Marie married the principal suspect, the notorious Earl of Bothwell. He marched beneath the banner of the infant prince at Carberry Hill, and accepted his queen's surrender on behalf of the rebel force in exchange for Bothwell's safe conduct from the battlefield and the queen's continuing right to rule. When the lairds violated the terms and forced the queen to abdicate, Kirkcaldy's honor had been perverted by his friends. Yet, when Marie escaped from Loch Leven the following spring and garnered an impressive army, Kirkcaldy took up arms against her. His brilliant strategies and the military might of the earls of Moray and Morton sent the queen fleeing into England to seek aid from Elizabeth, a mistake that brought her ruin. In spite of a growing distrust of the men who ruled in the name of the child James VI, Kirkcaldy remained loyal to the Lairds of the Congregation until the queen's treacherous half brother Moray was assassinated. Within months of Moray's death, Kirkcaldy was flying the queen’s colors from the battlements of Edinburgh Castle and calling his former allies 'the hideous hounds of hell.' He held Edinburgh Castle in the name of the queen for three years of the 'Lang Siege' before Elizabeth sent her artillery to Scotland and demolished his wells. He surrendered to the English commander upon assurances that his life would be spared, but the same men who engineered the queen's downfall wanted Kirkcaldy's head on a pike. While awaiting execution, Kirkcaldy wrote poems to an anonymous lover and letters to Elizabeth. Shortly before his own death, Kirkcaldy's estranged friend Calvinist Reformer John Knox predicted that Kirkcaldy would be hanged facing into the sun. On August 3, 1573, Kirkcaldy was led to the gallows and the rope tied carefully to insure that the prophesy would not be fulfilled. In the last dramatic act of his controversial career, the knight pivoted on the rope, dying as Knox had predicted, facing into the sun. There was no viable Marian resistance in Scotland after his death. He was indeed Marie Stuart's last knight. But this is not just Kirkcaldy's story--it is the story of a nation struggling to find its own place in the sun, and the tragedy of a young woman who had been a queen since six days old, raised in France where she was briefly its queen consort, and always a bit more French than Scottish-- unsure of her identity until it was too late to save her crown. "The Last Knight and the Queen of Scots by Linda Root is very entertaining and informative. A page turner" says Iain Grimston. "I love details that Linda highlights such as 'At the age of ten, Marie Stuart was taller than most full grown women.'! Not a historical romance, but a romantic historical epic populated by giants.