Born to Be Wild: The Wild Queen--The Days and Nights of Mary Queen of Scots by Caroline Meyer

"I was the cause of my father's death.

My father had badly wanted a son who could be the next king. When he married my mother, a French duchess, he already had three illegitimate sons, but by law a bastard could not inherit the Scottish throne. My mother bore him two more sons; both infants died. I was my father’s last hope, and when the news reached him of the birth of a lass—a girl—that bitter disappointment was more than he could endure. Had I been a boy, he would still be alive.

From my earliest days I have too often found myself at the center of disastrous events. That was the first. My birth killed my father, and I became queen of Scotland."

This dramatic story, likely apocryphally attributed to the anti-feminist John Knox, embodies the perils of constructing historical accounts of early queens, about whom what is known must be regarded as questionable, written as it in the interests of enemies and succesors. Nevertheless, it is believable that this Queen Mary felt herself born under a dark star, but a woman with a mission to preserve her embattled realm.

Crowned Queen of Scotland as a nine-month's old babe, the only legal heir to the throne, Mary's French mother quickly had her betrothed to young Prince Edward, heir to the throne of Henry VIII in hopes of preventing an English invasion and takeover of Scotland. But when little Edward died, Mary's mother, a member of the powerful Guise family in France, then sought a new alliance, betrothing her to Francoise, Dauphin of France, two years her junior. While her mother remained in Scotland to rule as regent for the child queen, at the age of five, Mary was dispatched to the court of Henry II to be educated and prepared to be the queen of France. Mary became Marie, quickly learned French, became a favorite of the King of France, and enjoyed the support of her Guise grandparents and uncles, and she and the delicate Dauphin became close, more like big sister and little brother than future consorts.

Mary and the still immature Francois were married in 1558. Marie gloried in the role of queen of two countries, but when her frail child-husband died suddenly, young Mary found herself in the powerless role of the virgin dowager Queen of France. To escape the swirling and dangerous politics of the French court and rumors of a forced marriage to the various eligible royalty of Europe, Mary boldly took matters in her own hands and determined to return to Scotland to rule as Queen of Scots.

But Queen Mary found herself equally imperiled by the religious and power politics of Britain. As a devout Roman Catholic, she had a powerful enemy in both John Knox, the extreme Calvinist leader in her own country, and in her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, herself equally threatened by Catholic factions within the nobility of England. Realizing that she needed a powerful consort to help her control her own warring nobility, Mary finally married her twenty-year-old cousin, the bold and handsome Henry Stuart, who had the virtue, at over six feet, of being slightly taller than the regal Mary, and the vice of being already a notorious womanizer. The passionate marriage, which resulted in the birth of one son, James, soon turned into a battle royal, a miniature version of the state of the country itself.

When Henry Stuart's residence was blown up and he was found dead in the garden, the rumors flew that Mary had had him murdered. The country was split along lines of blood loyalty and religion, and unable to regain control, Mary first sought support in a hasty marriage with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, but was eventually forced to flee to England, petitioning the protection of her cousin Elizabeth. Feeling threatened by the loyalties to Mary of English Catholics and Mary's own claim to the throne of England as the legitimate great-granddaughter of England's Henry VIII, Elizabeth had her imprisoned and finally after eighteen years confined in the Tower of London, and, finally tried for the murder of her husband Henry Stuart, Mary was dramatically beheaded in 1587.

Carolyn Meyer's forthcoming The Wild Queen: The Days and Nights of Mary, Queen of Scots (Young Royals) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), is the latest in her notable and best-selling The Young Royals series, skillfully building a taut, engrossing piece of historical fiction out of the known and legendary events of this doomed queen's life. As in the lives of modern women leaders, young adult readers cannot help but come to a deeper understanding of the gender, marital, social, and religious politics which shaped the rule and fate of this early female ruler and the parallel story of her cousin and sometimes enemy Elizabeth I of England. Both red-haired, intelligent, and strong willed, these women played a pivotal roles in the beginnings of the modern era and all that came after, and Meyer's The Wild Queen, in its gripping style and historical veracity, (insofar as that is possible) sheds much light upon the forces that faced these young royals and shaped the western world.

Ironically, this Mary, as one of the two queens of this era of Britain, has the last word in history: Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, having died without issue, Mary's son, James, as the only legitimate heir, succeeded her as King James I of the now united kingdom, which ensured that Mary, Queen of Scots, became the direct progenitor of British monarchs to this day.

Carolyn Meyer's Young Royals books include the stories of Mary's cousin, Mary, Bloody Mary,of her French mother-in-law, Duchessina: A Novel of Catherine de' Medici (Young Royals), and of that other doomed French queen whose forced political marriage resulted in great historical changes, The Bad Queen: Rules and Instructions for Marie-Antoinette. Like these earlier works, Meyer includes an appendix with sources for further study on Mary, Queen of Scots.

Stowaway Princess: Beauty's Daughter: The Story of Hermione and Helen of Troy by Carolyn Meyer

"They will sail to Troy, and there will be much bloodshed," Zethus predicted. "Menelaus will certainly want to get Helen back. As for the goddesses Hera and Athena will be on the side of the Greeks, but Aphrodite will help Paris as much as she  can. The war is likely to last for a long time."

"Where is Queen Helen? Where is my brother?" I shouted.

The boatmen stared uneasily at their feet. "They're with the Trojan prince. They boarded the ship with the figure of Aphrodite and Eros on the prow. They sailed eastward."

Eleven-year-old Hermione has always known that her beautiful mother, Helen, Queen of Sparta, has little interest in her, but when  the queen falls in love with the visiting Prince Paris and flees to Troy, taking Hermione's beloved little brother with her, Hermione determines that she will stowaway on a ship in her father's fleet and follow King Menelaus and his Greek allies to war on the shores of the great walled city of Troy.

As her loyal friend and servant Zethus prophesied, the war drags on for ten years. Hermione and her cousin, Orestes, to whom she was betrothed by their grandfather, grow up in the Greek camp on the shores of Troy.  When at last Zethus designs the Wooden Horse, the Greeks  gain entrance to the Trojan city. Paris is killed by Achilles, Achilles is killed by an archer's arrow to his vulnerable heel, and Menelaus reclaims his Helen. But Orestes and Hermione are separated as the fleets depart for their homes, and Menalaus rewards Achilles' son Pyrrhus for his service by promising Hermione to him as his wife.

Longing for Orestes and unhappily married to the brutal Pyrrhus, Hermione is miserable in his long-abandoned and shabby palace at Pharsalos. She loves only Orestes, but when she fails to bear the son Pyrrhus demands of her, he spitefully takes her two handmaidens as concubines who give him a son and daughter.

But Hermione has good fortune in her bad fortune. The loyal Zethus finds her, and when Pyrrhus is killed by a rival, with the assistance of the god Hermes they escape to the coast where she learns that Orestes has arrived at home to discover that his unfaithful mother, Clytemnestra, has murdered his father Agamemnon.  In a rage Orestes kills his mother in retribution and, tortured by the Furies for the sin of  matricide, loses his mind and his memories and is imprisoned on a distant island.

Still, the resourceful Hermione believes that she can find her love and restore him to health, if the gods will it, and she sets forth on her own quest, in Carolyn Meyer's forthcoming Beauty's Daughter: The Story of Hermione and Helen of Troy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).  Meyer, the queen of queen fiction, has a talent for telling a compelling personal love story, while taking the reader deeply into early Hellenic history  in which the story is set.  The story of Helen of Troy is the world's first great romance tale, the story of the stunningly beautiful but unfaithful queen who claimed herself to be Aphrodite's pawn and whose face "launched a thousand ships" as chronicled in Homer's Iliad.  Meyer tells that epic story tangentially as she focuses on Helen's unloved, red-haired daughter Hermione, whose own romance, in the face of unfortunate history and the mischief of the gods, offers a counterpoint of devotion and resilience to her mother's fickle infidelities, making the self-reliant Hermione the center of the swirling events of the world's first great love story and first great war.

Middle readers who grew up with Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians adventure series and into young adult status will find some familiar Olympian characters but a different sort of historical fantasy in Carolyn Meyers forthcoming Olympian romance novel.

Other notable young royal novels by Carolyn Meyer include The Wild Queen: The Days and Nights of Mary, Queen of Scots (Young Royals) (see review here), Mary, Bloody Mary, The Bad Queen: Rules and Instructions for Marie-Antoinette (Young Royals), Doomed Queen Anne: A Young Royals Book, and The Royal Diaries: Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess, Russia, 1914.

It's in the Cards! Dangerous Deceptions (Palace of Spies) by Sarah Zettel

I could not tear my mind away from Sebastian Sandford and his abrupt return to my life.

Given the manner in which I'd left my uncle's house and all that had happened since, it never occurred to me that anyone would want to enforce the betrothal contract that existed between my uncle and Sebastian's father. I'd assumed the contract was broken by my uncle's failure to bring me to the church. But now the horrible possibility that I had been wrong descended upon me. As an underaged girl, I remained completely under the control of my nearest male relative. I could be given in marriage to a street sweeper or sold to an indenture to the Virginia Colony, as he saw fit.

I will admit, given that my other choice was Sebastian, street sweepers and colonies had a certain appeal.

Peggy had thought that as a newly favorite maid-in-waiting at the court of the Hanoverian Princess and Prince of Wales, she was safe from the betrothal in which her nefarious Uncle Pierpont had attempted to bind her. Peggy had barely fought off Sebastian's most improper assault, and when she refused the marriage, she had been literally thrown out of her uncle's house, leaving her orphaned and on the street at the tender age of sixteen. But her mysterious benefactor, Lord Tierney, manages to place her at the Court of St. James, not from kindness, but to serve as an impostor, a spy against the Jacobite conspiracy working to place James Stuart on the throne of England.

Peggy has begun to feel safe at court, having mastered a proper courtier's art of flirtation, the endless little dishonesties at cards, and the rivalrous intrigues of the maids-in-waiting Mary and Sophie, and welcomes the loyalty of her friend Molly Lepell and her cousin Olivia, her true love, Matthew, and the special favor of the six-year-old dog-loving Princess Anne. But she is thrown off-balance by the appearance of Sebastian, whose powerful uncle, Lord Lynnfield, threatens to enforce their marriage contract against her wishes. Peggy's intuition tells her that Sebastian's reappearance is some sort of blackmail to ensure the complicity of her banker uncle, and she has a suspicion that Jacobite loyalists are behind it somewhere. Politics aside, Peggy knows she cannot sacrifice her love for Matthew and marry the brutal Sebastian at any cost.

It all comes down to a wager at cards, in which Lord Lynnfield offers Peggy freedom from the betrothal and a wager of a small fortune only if she can beat his nephew at the gambling table, witnessed by the Princess Caroline, Prince George, and the full court.

My prologue was over. The stage was ready for me. "Mr. Sandford," I said cheerfully, "I believe you asked me for a game of piquet when we last met."

Her Royal Highness had risen. She moved forward to join my party. It was not to be missed that His Royal Highness remained at her side.

"This is most irregular, Lord Lynnfield," she remarked.

But despite her sovereign's offer of support, Peggy agrees that the game go forward. Her opponent is careful not to win too quickly. At long last the deadly game comes down to the last trick.

I pressed my hand to my bosom. Dear God, I must have counted right.

He lay his cards down. "This hand is mine, I believe." The whole of the crowd gasped.

"And there it is, Miss Fitzroy. You're mine."

But, as it turns out, Peggy Fitzroy has a final card up her sleeve, or rather, inexplicably resting on the floor under Lynnfield's own foot.

Peggy turns the tables most literally, but there are plenty of swashbuckling abductions, daring rescues, and quite a dunking in the dank and fetid waters of the Thames before our heroine emerges, high and dry in a surprisingly revealing but unsuspected conclusion, one which assures her rapt readers yet another courtly adventure in the delicious forthcoming Dangerous Deceptions (Palace of Spies) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).  Life at the court of the future King George I of England is anything but polite company, and author Sarah Zettel promises another historical fiction romp, a spy-in-the-salon page turner in this unique and riveting series, with its indomitable heroine Peggy Fitzroy overcoming cardsharpers, blackguards, murderous conspirators, and her cruelly confining corset stays to triumph over all.

To find out more about how Peggy Fitzroy finds herself in such a royal pickle, read my review of Book 1 in this series, Palace of Spies, here. And for those readers who just can't wait for another round of palace intrigues in the the third book in this trilogy, may I recommend Carolyn Meyer's The Wild Queen: The Days and Nights of Mary, Queen of Scots (Young Royals), reviewed here for  a lusty review of Jocobean conspiracies.

Slipping the Scaffold! Wild Rover No More (A Bloody Jack Adventure) by L. A. Meyer

THE BOSTON PATRIOT
Nov.10, 1809--Special Edition

NOTORIOUS PYRATE AND BRITISH SPY JACK FABER HANGED

THE CONDEMNED SHOWED NO REMORSE AT END OF LIFE.

Protesting her Innocence to the last, the Criminal Jacky Faber, also known as Bloody Jack, the Scourge of the Caribbean; La Belle Jeune Fille Sans Merci; the Lily of the West; and the Belle of Botany Bay was hanged today by the order of the State of Massachusetts, having been Convicted of High Treason against the United States. Incriminating Documents concerting detailed plans of the Fortifications at Fort McHenry had been found in her possession.

The beauteous and bold Jacky Faber, still only a lass of nineteen, has sailed both oceans as a privateer, amassed a fortune as head of Faber Shipping Enterprises, posed for a famous scantily-clad portrait painted by Goya, flatboated down the Mississippi, and undertaken various undercover espionage for assorted governments, seems to have come to the end of the road.

It  had seemed things were going well for the wily Jacky. Having vowed to have nothing further to do with men and live single, amassing an even larger fortune from legal merchant trade, Jacky is unexpectedly reconciled with her love, Jaimy Fletcher. But when jealous conspirators plant a map of Fort McHenry in a British diplomatic pouch with Jacky's name on it, she becomes a traitor hunted down by her state and country. But Jacky always takes care to know where the back door is, and, disguised in her well-worn midshipman's sailor's togs, makes an escape in her sailboat Morning Star and, leaving Boston Bay behind. makes for the port of Plymouth in a howling gale.

In Plymouth Jacky looks about for a job that will allow for deep cover and, as Annabelle Leigh, she takes employment as a governess. But a snoopy Plymouth postmaster reads her mail, and soon the federals on on her trail again. By chance, Jacky encounters a traveling circus troupe and hires on, using the skill she exhibited during her Paris sojourn, as Princess Natasha Annasova Romanoff, Aerialist. Garishly made up and costumed in spangled tights, high on the tightrope wire, she feels safe for the moment as the circus continues its travels toward Provincetown.

But Jacky's fabled luck seems to fail her this time, and she is discovered and returned to Boston, summarily tried as a British spy, and slated for hanging as soon as her scaffold is completed.

I sigh and look about me. All my thoughts of escape have been in vain. There is a lock on my shackle, a lock on the cell door. I have no metal to fashion a key. No, I am truly lost. This is one cage that Jacky Faber will not get out of... until, that is, they take me out for the final time.

"All right, boys, let's give 'er a try," I hear one of the carpenters say outside my window. There is the rasp of a lever being thrown and the sound of something falling with a whump.

They have completed the gallows and are testing the trap that will fall from beneath my feet.

I crawl into bed, my ankle chain rattling on the bedstead as I do it.

Oh, was I ever so bad as to deserve this?

But while Jacky Faber is bravely composing herself to meet her maker, she has friends hard at work to help her yet again cheat the hangman, in the rousing conclusion to L. A. Meyer's just published, series-concluding Wild Rover No More: Being the Last Recorded Account of the Life &Times of Jacky Faber (Bloody Jack Adventures) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

Meyer's characters are crisp and true to the times, the plotting is gripping but never improbable, and Jacky Faber herself is a wondrous heroine, fearless and intelligent, a strong woman born out of her time who does not scruple to use her beauty, quick wits, and endless energy to find adventure all of over the globe. A fine fictional character with the combined qualities of such historic femmes as Cleopatra of the Nile, Mary Queen of Scots, pirate queen Anney Bonney, spy Mata Hari, and exotic danseuse and World War II spy Josephine Baker, Jacky's rip-roaring escapades never fail in this twelfth book of the much lauded Bloody Jack Adventures series. Says Kirkus in their starred review, "Meyer offers an impressively accomplished heroine, suspense as taut as a hangman's rope and a satisfying conclusion. A solid and sentimental entry in an underrated series."

Fare ye well, and a fair wind to your back, Jacky Faber!