On Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 7:19:34 PM UTC-7, samsloan wrote:
> Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles
> by Stefan Zweig
> Foreword by Sam Sloan
> She was born to be Queen of Scotland, she was briefly the Queen of
> France and she had a claim to being Queen of England, which resulted
> in her having her head chopped off.
> They chopped off her head after she was found guilty of conspiring to
> have Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603) assassinated so that she could take
> power. Had she not been executed she would eventually have become
> Queen of England when Elizabeth died.
> That was only one of the many controversies in which she was involved.
> Her first husband, who became the King of France, making her the
> Queen, died shortly thereafter and her second husband was found
> murdered, apparently strangled. Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587) was
> believed to have been complicit in that murder. Her Father, King James
> V of Scotland (1512-1542), had many, many mistresses and possibly as
> many as twenty illegitimate children. His father too, King James IV of
> Scotland (1473-1513), had a similar number of mistresses and a similar
> number of illegitimate children. This has left, to this day, the
> problem genealogists have in sorting out all of these bastard kids.
> I have this problem in my own family too. I have a presumed ancestor
> named Mary Stuart, born 1729 in Gabinheough, Tyrone, Ireland. She was
> said to have been descended from one of the bastard offspring of King
> James IV or King James V of Scotland, but nobody has found evidence
> for this relationship, and many have searched.
> When father of Mary Queen of Scots, King James V of Scotland
> (1512-1542), died just after a battle when Mary was only six days old,
> Mary became Queen, not by being the eldest child but by being the only
> legitimate child, as her mother Marie de Guise (1515-1560) was the
> only legal wife of the King. The bastard children of King James V,
> although older, did not get to rule.
> Later, her only son, who became King James I of England as well as
> King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625), thereby uniting England and
> Scotland into one kingdom, was taken away from her shortly after his
> birth and she never saw him again.
> This widely acclaimed biography by Stefan Zweig is regarded as the
> best of the many biographies of this famous woman.
> The great thing about the author, Stefan Zweig, is that his
> biographies are smooth and easy to read. By contrast, there is a
> weighty tome with exactly the same title but 880 pages long. Here in
> 356 easy to read pages you can learn everything about Mary Queen of
> Scots that you will probably ever want to know.
> The way I remember the confusing but important facts of this
> tumultuous period is that I remember that King James I was a
> Protestant, because under him the King James Version of the Bible was
> authorized and composed. The King James Version is a Protestant Bible.
> The Catholics have a different Bible. Therefore, King James I must
> have been a Protestant. I remember his era because Jamestown, the
> First Permanent Settlement in North America, was established during
> his rule.
> His mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was a Catholic. Since Catholics do
> not recognize divorce, she was the rightful Queen of England under the
> Catholic System of counting. Therefore, her rival, Queen Elizabeth,
> had to be Protestant if she wanted to remain Queen. The mother of
> Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn (1501-1536), had her head chopped off because
> her husband, King Henry VIII (1491-1547), wanted another wife.
> However, when he again tired of the next wife too, he decided that it
> would be bloody inconvenient to chop her head off too, so he changed
> the Religion of England, abolishing Catholicism and establishing the
> Church of England in its place. This change in religion enabled King
> Henry VIII simply to divorce his next wife. He did not have to kill
> that one.
> The author, Stefan Zweig (born November 28, 1881, Vienna, Austria –
> died February 22, 1942, Petrópolis, Brazil), was an Austrian novelist,
> playwright, journalist and biographer was one of the most successful
> and popular authors of the 20th Century. Although he wrote in German,
> his works were translated into English and several other languages.
> Zweig was a prolific writer. In the 1930s he was one of the most
> widely translated authors in the world. His extensive travels led him
> to India, Africa, North and Central America, and Russia.
> This book was first published in 1935 in Frankfurt, Germany in German
> as Maria Stuart.
> There is a tragedy associated with this book, because the author and
> his wife died by suicide. He left a suicide note stating that he and
> his wife were killing themselves because he was in despair because his
> native country, Austria, had been overrun by the Nazis.
> However, that was not a good reason for suicide, as he was safely in
> Brazil and Austria had been taken by the Nazis years earlier.
> Perhaps another reason for his suicide was he had lost his royalty
> income due to the “Trading with the Enemies Act”. His books were all
> first published in Germany. Under the Trading with the Enemies Act, it
> was illegal for any US company to pay money to any German company.
> Austria had by then been annexed by Germany and was therefore part of
> Germany. Therefore, the distributors of his books were prohibited from
> paying money to his publishers who, in turn, could not pay him.
> This seems monumentally unfair to Zweig, as Zweig was Jewish. Life is
> unfair.
> Although one can sort-of understand why Stefan Zweig might commit
> suicide, one cannot understand why he entered into a suicide pact with
> his new wife so that they would both die together. She was only 33
> years old and had everything to live for. He was 27 years older. They
> had a nice apartment and a good life in Brazil. They took poison
> together and dead bodies were found by a housekeeper with their arms
> wrapped around each other.
> Strangely, at the peak of his popularity and having just completed his
> autobiography while still working on four other books, Zweig committed
> suicide in Brazil with his new wife by them both taking poison. In
> 1939, he had married Charlotte Altmann, his secretary from 1933. She
> was twenty-seven years his junior.
> Zweig left a suicide note stating that he had done so because of the
> Nazi takeover of his country of Austria and because Europe was
> destroying itself with World War II that was taking place.
> This does not seem like a good reason for suicide and why did he take
> his new wife, aged only 33, with him?
> Sam Sloan
> New York NY
> May 21, 2010
> ISBN 4-87187-858-9
> 978-4-87187-858-6
> http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ISBN=4871878589
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/4871878589

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