I’ve never quite understood why everyone gets so excited about Mary Queen of Scots. (Well I do – sex, murder, death all involving an attractive woman, but it is one of those stories explored and told so many times I find it hard to raise an interest.)

But in case she is your cup of tea – it is worth saying that the only known painting of her as Queen has gone on display today at the National Portrait Gallery.

(I might even pop in to visit her…)

Call me an unsophisticated lass from the colonies, but I still get a buzz from artistic crossing of the centuries, so I really enjoyed last night seeing a production The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham. Published in 1592, it closely follows the “true-life” crime of 1551.

I reviewed it over on My London Your London.

Of course the “true-life” angle is thought-provoking – I woke this morning thinking about poor Alice, the real-life one, who paid the ultimate price for “petty treason”, being burned alive.

And at least one modern writer, has exonerated her:

Thomas Ardern, Orlin shows, was a broker of dissolved monastic properties who learned the art from some of the age’s most rapacious courtier-officials, Sir Edward North (Alice Ardern’s stepfather) and Sir Thomas Cheyney. As Cheyney’s steward in Kent, and as a customs collector for the vicinity of Faversham, Arden was, much to his own advantage, deeply involved in the conveyance of church holdings into private and state hands. Memories were long in Kent: people knew whence Ardern’s wealth had come, and, perhaps more dangerously, Ardern knew whence had come the wealth of many others. I will not give away Orlin’s solution to Ardern’s murder; suffice it to say that among the possible motives for Ardern’s murder, those of his wile Alice were by no means the most urgent.

(From: Recent Studies in English Renaissance, Lawrence Manley; Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, 1996, referring to Lena Cowen Orlin’s Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England.)

Over the whole period “between 12 and 19 per cent [of those whose letters survive] wrote all their own letters …. the number of women for who there is evidence of their actually writing letters rose from 50 per cent in the 1540s to some 79 per cent by the end of the 16th century … the proportion of women for whom no holograph letters survive fell from 28 per cent in the first decade of the period to an estimated 17 per cent by the years 1600 to 1609.” (p. 96)

From Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England, James Daybell, OUP 2006 (found today on the “new books” shelf at the London Library – which can be a really treasure.)

An nice example, Elizabeth Bourne, “wife of Anthony, the son of John Bourne, Mary I’s principal secretary of state”. Some 70 of her letters survive, written in holograph in several different hands. She also wrote original poetry and sometimes used the pseudonyms Frances Wesley and Anne Hayes, which she called her “secrete syphers”.

A search of the web and electronic academic database returned nothing on her – one more for the literary collection.