Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, is featured in not just one, but two of Montgomery’s novels – Anne of Windy Poplars (chapter five) and Emily of New Moon (chapter 28).
Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel adapted the part in Anne of Windy Poplars when Anne organizes a High School Dramatic Club and puts on the play Mary, Queen of Scots.
It seems that Montgomery had a fascination for the woman who has inspired an unending debate as to her innocence. The story of Mary is actually put forth by Henry Glassford Bell - a Scottish poet and lawyer, who also founded the Edinburgh Literary Journal. He was a staunch defender of Mary’s good name. While she was Queen of Scotland from the day she was born, Mary also had a claim on the throne of England. When she fled to England in 1567 after ruling in Scotland, she was imprisoned for twenty years by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, and then finally beheaded.
On Jan. 27, 1922, Montgomery wrote, “I’ve always been on Elizabeth’s side in that famous struggle…Mary Stuart has intrigued the world’s fancy by her charm, her passion, her tragedies, her misfortunes. Elizabeth, by contrast, seems sordid and shrewish. Yet in spite of all this I am glad she won. I think, though, she made a mistake in executing Mary.”
Here is an excerpt from Bell’s poem about the famous queen. In this stanza, she speaks from within the walls of her prison.
The scene was changed: it was a lake, with one
small lonely isle,
And there, within the prison walls of its baronial pile,
Stern men stood menacing their queen, till she
should stoop to sign
The traitorous scroll that snatched the crown
from her ancestral line;
“My lords, my lords,” the captive said, “were I but
once more free,
With ten good knights on yonder shore to aid my
cause and me,
This parchment would I scatter wide to every
breeze that blows,
And once more reign a Stuart queen o’er my
remorseless foes!”
A red spot burned upon her cheek, streamed her
rich tresses down,
She wrote the words, she stood erect, a queen
without a crown!
