Quotes from John Guy

he misjudged the risks. The result was a disintegration of his forces.

Mary might return home as an independent queen.

Mary happily reunited with her mother, watching it all from a blue and gold viewing pavilion on the west bank of the Seine.

It was also the prelude

in 1513, at least the Scots had been scythed down in hand-to-hand combat during a set-piece battle.

The treaty of Greenwich was a dead letter from the start. Mary of Guise had no intention of honoring it;

one of the two most dramatic assassinations in Scottish and British history.

They died honorably rather than like rats in a trap.

more damaging loss to his reputation than that suffered thirty years before by his father, James IV

cut to pieces at Flodden Field by the father of the very same English commander.

She allied with the pro-French Beaton and Lennox, whose joint forces mustered at Linlithgow on July 24.

The Catholic lords intended to join with the Protestants to resist the forfeiture of the rebels

He went to pieces when told that his heir was not a boy.

the grounds that such action might become a precedent for noble forfeitures generally.

her own priority was Elizabeth's latest offer of a final dynastic accord.

She was negotiating with Elizabeth at the level of queen to queen through her ambassador

His two infant sons had died the previous year

she continued so relentlessly to set her sights on recognition as the heir to a woman who was only nine years older

The royal baptism took place a week later. Prince James was almost six months old

and perfectly capable of bearing children if only she chose to marry.

Arran and Lennox were rival claimants to the succession. Their families were old enemies;

She most of all needed Elizabeth's friendship to arm herself against the volatility of her lords

Virginia Woolf pointed out in her classic essay 'The Art of Biography' (1938)

and to bolster the legitimacy of her reign in her own country.