The Gay Galliard by Margaret Irwin

The Gay Galliard

The Love Story of Mary Queen of Scots

by Margaret Irwin

Chatto and Windus, 1943, illustrated frontispiece, colour tipped top edge (blue), hardcover

Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, some discoloration and general wear to covers and spine, cracked hinge at front endpaper, envelope attached to back endpaper with date card (see photographs)

“Foreword: This book was planned before I read Robert Gore-Browne’s vivid and forcible biography of Lord Bothwell, but owes a great deal to it, although some of the conclusions I have drawn are directly opposite to his.
This does not lessen my gratitude to him for the first historical work I have seen on Bothwell that does not faithfully follow the view of him set down in his enemies’ propaganda, however inconsistent.
The facts and incidents in this book are drawn from contemporary records, and so are much of the conversations.  Practically everything John Knox says is in his own words, as he himself recorded them.
The names of the four Maries were Beton, Seton, Fleming and Livingstone, not Hamilton and Carmichael as mentioned in the Ballad of Mary Hamilton – who was, in actual fact, executed in Russia at the Court of Peter the Great, at a much later date.
There was never any Mary Hamilton at the Court of Queen Mary, nor any such execution.”