Archives lifts the lid on four centuries of debate

Using documents from The National Archives, Kew, West London, John Guy´s award winning biography of Mary Queen of Scots, My Heart is My Own, looks at the unparalleled drama and conflict that surrounded her life.

In the biography, Guy explodes the myths, corrects the inaccuracies and uncovers untold mysteries that surround this most fascinating monarch.

Guy explains how Mary would have consented to marry the Earl of Bothwell, only three months after he murdered her second husband, Lord Darnley. And, more astonishingly, he solves, through careful re-examination of the Casket Letters held at The National Archives, the secret behind Darnley´s spectacular assassination at Kirk O´Field.

Former assistant keeper of Public Records at The National Archives, Guy - who has said that archival research is a great source of ´inspiration´ - found, as he dug deeper into the records, that no historian had worked systematically through all the original handwritten documents relating to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots.

"I had no idea when I began that so much fresh material could be found in the archives about a woman who has been the daughter of debate for four centuries."

"When I steadily began to uncover this material, I felt a sense of elation. I simply could not stop working on the book until I got to the bottom and the end of the story."

"I learned to operate on the principle that you will find something until you´ve absolutely, definitively proved you can't."

Guy´s belief that answers to historical questions lie in the archives, led to three years of mining for historical treasures concerning Mary Queen of Scots.

My Heart is My Own, winner of the Whitbread biography 2004, demonstrates the value of the collection held by The National Archives and the scope for researchers to still lift the lid on four centuries of debate.

Catalogue reference: MPF 1/366

This narrative drawing, which features in the book, shows the murder of Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Kirk O'Field near Edinburgh, February 1567.

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