Vance Christiaanse’s Reviews > Mary Queen of Scots: The Fair Devil of Scotland > Status Update

Sigh. That's over. So the guy the KJV is named after was that baby boy Mary had. Small world.

"Going to England" turned out to be much more complicated than I expected. Mary moves from one near-prison situation to another. Her relationship with Queen Elisabeth is probably too complicated for any human to understand.

I sure don't want to be reading this book in 2022 because the content is so relentlessly disgusting. All these machinations are too much like life at work or at church. But I've read as much as I can stand for now. Mary decided to marry the worst possible guy and then, one day, the guy woke up dead. And so on.

Does anyone have anything good to say about John Knox? I'll have to look it up. Anyway, Mary is back in Scotland and, based on a few YouTube videos, nothing positive is going to happen to her for the rest of her life.

I'm reading about this period of history because it helps me understand the Protestant Reformation better. What I'm learning in this book suggests that neither "side" has much to be proud of.

So today, Mary gets married. Oh, and by the way, she has signed away Scotland to France for some reason.

So we back up for the story, full of sex and violence, of how the French Court came to be the way it was when Mary arrived. (The year we're working on here is 1548.)

In my study of the history of the Reformation (mostly due to Brad Gregory) I kept hearing about the Guise family and the Valois family so I'm glad to have another chance to get them straight. So apparently it's important that Mary is half Guise.

Mary is now five years old and has just arrived in France. As far as I can tell, these people are all crazy. John Knox has been mentioned; I'm interested in him--also crazy.