Many English correspondents, I found, had a delightful preoccupation with reincarnation. “In this life, I am a happily married vicar’s wife,” began one letter, following the publication of King Charles II, “but in the last life, I fear I was that naughty wench Nell Gwyn.” No one, it seemed, was ever anything so commonplace as a maid or a farmer in a previous existence. The palm in this case went to the man who wrote to me accusing me of daring to write about “Her Majesty, my wife Mary Queen of Scots” without consulting him: the letter was signed DARNLEY. But who was I to mock? Was this not just another wistful attempt at possession, exactly what I was trying to do with my own work?
Certainly the thrill of possession—for there is definitely something possessive about biography—has never left me. I was grateful then for the opportunity to fulfil my ambition, and have never stopped feeling grateful for my good fortune ever since. I am also aware that my real good fortune had occurred thirty-three years earlier when I discovered History for myself: my History.
After the book was published, I went back to treating the marble tomb in Westminster Abbey as a site of pilgrimage. It was also a source of inspiration. In fact I chose to end my biography as sonorously as possible on that very theme of Queen Mary’s significant interment. This was thanks to a spontaneous visit on my way back from listening to a debate in the House of Commons—something impenetrable about current defence policy—when I needed the comfort of the past. “She who never reigned in England,” I wrote down immediately I reached home, “who was born a queen of Scotland, and who died at the orders of an English queen, lies now in Westminster Abbey where every sovereign of Britain since her death has been crowned; from her every sovereign of Britain since her death has been directly descended, down to the present Queen, who is in the thirteenth generation.”
As time passed, I would come to see the Queen’s motto In my End is my Beginning which she herself had embroidered at Sheffield on the royal cloth of state over her head, as particularly moving and deserving my grateful acknowledgement: in her end after all was my beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
During the writing of this book I received encouragement and information, as well as suggested corrections, from a number of people, most prominently the following: I am most grateful to John Allison, Opera; Sir Christopher Bland; Mark Bostridge; I. M. Caws, Bursar, Dragon School; Lady Dunsany; Victoria Humble-White, Dragon School Alumni Officer and Gay Sturt, Dragon School Archivist; O. J. A. Gilmore MS, FRCS; Victoria Gray; Sir Ronald Harwood; Linda Kelly; Eric McGraw, former Director, New Bridge; Oliver Mahoney, Lady Margaret Hall Archivist; Miriam Owen; Allen Packwood, The Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust and Jonathan Aitken; Kevin Pakenham; Valerie Pakenham; Jim Palma, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Archivist; Georgia Powell; Professor Munro Price; Michael Rudman; Sally (Bentlif ) Sampson; Anna Sander, Balliol College Archivist; Dr. Ruth Scurr; Sister Ann Stafford C.J., The Bar Convent, York; Sir Roy Strong; Lord Waldegrave of North Hill.
I wish to thank Robert Sawyer, of Water Eaton Manor, for his kindness in providing the image of his historic house which confirmed my happy memories.
My first book was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson sixty years ago. It is a pleasure to thank the latest team with renewed gratitude: Alan Samson, who like my agent Jonathan Lloyd supported this project from the beginning, and Lucinda McNeile, as well as Linda Peskin at home.
Antonia Fraser
Feast of St. Anthony
13 June 2014
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally best-selling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV; Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola; The Wives of Henry VIII; Mary Queen of Scots; Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot; and Must You Go?, a memoir of her relationship with and marriage to the playwright and actor Harold Pinter. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the 2000 Norton Medlicott Medal of Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize. She has been president of English PEN, chairman of the Society of Authors, and chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to Literature in 2011.
Antonia, age three: Later I graduated to swimming in the River Cherwell.
On our bikes: Antonia and Thomas.
Bodiam Castle, East Sussex: the scene of my earliest historical imaginings.
Water Eaton Manor, near Oxford: the Elizabethan house where we spent an exciting year at the beginning of the war. Robert Sawyer
With Edmund Carr-Saunders doing lessons at Water Eaton: The Carr-Saunders family owned the house and were our hosts.
The growing Oxford family: Antonia, Rachel, Paddy, Judith, Thomas; Christmas 1942.
On the rocks in Cornwall, where we spent our annual holiday in wartime.
A view of Magdalen College Tower, Oxford, and the bridge over the River Cherwell: The tower was my first conscious historic sight. Apic/Getty Images
Age twelve, by Henry Lamb, who was married to Frank’s sister, Pansy. I spent a great deal of time at their house at Coombe Bissett near Salisbury with my cousin Henrietta Lamb. Henry Lamb Estate
Chadlington Road, North Oxford, by John Betjeman, dedicated to my mother as “Eliza.” It shows the edge of the School House on the right and the house of the headmaster of the Dragon School on the left (we lived next door). The Dragon playing fields are ahead.
The symbolic dragon was omnipresent at the Dragon School, seen here in the crest on my blazer, on my hat, on the title page of the school magazine, and on the weathervane above the boys’ changing room. Dragon School, Oxford
Myself age nearly twelve as Lady Macbeth, the peak of my acting career; the thick auburn plaits of my wig were all I had ever wanted. Dragon School, Oxford
Frank as a don at Christ Church: He prided himself on his athleticism and is seen leading the pack round Christ Church Meadows.
Family holiday in the west of Ireland, 1947: Paddy, Thomas, Antonia, and Judith on a Skellig Island, with another one visible in the distance.
On the beach near Bude, Cornwall, in characteristic pose.
At school, age fifteen: the bookworm.
My “nice Catholic friends” at St. Mary’s Convent, Ascot, in 1948: l to r: Lucy Pollen, Jennifer Seward, Buffy Rowell, Cynthia Hume, Antonia.
My sixteenth birthday, 27 August 1948, which I spent as an “exchange” with a French family near Bordeaux. Ungratefully, I wrote in my album that the grapes in this picture were the only nice thing about the visit.
My parents’ political life: Frank among German civilians after he was made Minister in Charge of Germany in late 1946.
The two portraits of my parents were those that I took to boarding school.
My mother on the hustings, wearing a red hat to show her Socialist allegiance; Frank looks rather abstracted behind her.
Pakenham Hall, Westmeath (now known as Tullynally, its original Irish name), photographed by Thomas. Thomas Pakenham
Great-Uncle Eddie, as the magnificent eccentric Irish writer Lord Dunsany was known to us. Dunsany Estate
A poem written to me by Great-Uncle Eddie with his characteristic quill pen; it was subsequently published in Punch to my great pride.
Our uncle, Edward Longford, painted by Henry Lamb, his brother-in-law. Henry Lamb Estate
Christine Longford by Henry Lamb. Henry Lamb Estate
A visit to Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, arranged by Patrick Lindsay; l to r: Vanessa Jebb, B.B., Antonia; August 1950.
Engagement photo taken by Thomas in the back garden of Cheyne Gardens, August 1956. Thomas Pakenham
Wedding photograph, the gift of Cecil Beaton for whom I worked, taken outside our reception at the Fishmongers Hall, 25 September 1956. My headdress, a childhood dream, was inspired by Mary Queen of Scots. Cecil Beaton Archive/Sotheby’s
George Weidenfeld, for whom I worked immediately after Oxford University. He then be
came (and remains sixty years later) my publisher: We are at a party to celebrate my book A History of Toys, 1966.
The cover of the first Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition of Mary Queen of Scots, published in 1969. Weidenfeld & Nicolson
The monument to Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey erected by her son, King James I. I ended my biography of her with this powerful image. Roger Joy
The illustration from Our Island Story, which first drew me into the story of Mary Queen of Scots when I read it as a child.
Antonia Fraser, My History: A Memoir of Growing Up
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