Lady Mary’s new chapter is book on Scotland’s Tudor Queen
The story of how 90-year-old historian Lady Mary McGrigor became a prolific writer of royal biographies and other literary works really is the stuff of fairytales.
Growing up in a mediaeval castle in Blanefield, near Glasgow, surrounded by antiques and paintings ignited a lifetime fascination in history that has taken her on many a penned journey into the eventful lives of royals and other less regal worthies – including a Scottish sheep thief who became doctor to a tsar.
Still living in the family home bought decades ago for a Swallows and Amazons-style adventure with her four children on the edge of magnificent Loch Awe, Lady Mary’s new offering, out in bookshops soon, will lift a lavish lid on Margaret, Scotland’s Tudor Queen.
Margaret was just 13 when she was brought from England to Scotland to marry James IV who already had a rabble of illegitimate children with a string of mistresses.
All the ins and outs and intrigues of Margaret Tudor’s rather racey life took the great-grandmother two years to put in the book that she wrote from her Port Sonachan home. It brings the grand total of her published works up to 18 – or thereabouts – although she admits she hasn’t had the time to ‘add it up lately’.
‘Margaret Tudor was a rather intriguing character. Very officious, very promiscuous – a lot like her brother Henry VIII. I can’t say I would have made a great friend of her. She was rather a difficult character, I think,’ said Lady Mary, a witty and wise woman, savvy with emails and a nifty user of Google.
Apparently one of Margaret Tudor’s many escapades involved getting a monk to dress up in a blue gown to appear before her husband as a ghostly-apparition in a bid to persuade him not to go into battle against the English. It did not stop him. He was later killed in the Battle of Flodden in 1513. She went on to re-marry – twice, before dying from a stroke in her early 50s.
Lady Mary’s first history book, in 2000, was Argyll – Land of Blood and Beauty which captured a vast magical past, took 10 years to write and is still being snapped up today on Amazon.
The one after that was an edit of James McGrigor’s autobiography. Not only was he Wellington’s surgeongeneral in Spain during the Peninsula campaign, surviving battle, typhoid and shipwreck, to become the founding father of the the Royal Army Medical Corps, he was also an ancestor of her late husband, Sir Charles McGrigor.
She went on to tell of spies, admirals and princesses but her favourite account is that of The Tsar’s Doctor – a remarkable true story of ‘a pretty hopeless tearaway’ called James Wylie born in Kincardine in 1767.
‘He was up for stealing sheep but managed to hide in a hay cart to get away, He went to Russia, lots of Scots did in those days. We were much better friends with Russia 200 years ago than we are now,’ she said.
Wylie became one of the most celebrated doctors in Europe, performing the first tracheotomy operation to be carried out in Russia on a favourite of Tsar Paul I who was so impressed he made him his personal doctor.
Taking a break from writing is out of the question for Lady Mary, whose first published work was a poem at the tender age of eight. She who wrote her first historical essay back in 1969 for a Scottish Women’s Rural Institute and went on to become a regular contributor to Scottish Field magazine.
Work has already started on her next project, a book about England’s King James I.
Never lost for words, Lady Mary said: ‘He’s called the Survivor because it took a number of attempts, including the Gunpowder Plot, to kill him. One of my ancestors was going to kidnap him at one stage but it never came off!’