Jenny Wormald
Historian who argued that Mary Queen of Scots was a monarch of ‘little wit and no judgment’
JENNY WORMALD, who has died aged 73, was an influential and combative historian of Scotland, particularly of what is known down south as the Tudor period, when, she argued, Scotland was in many ways better governed than England – with the notable exception of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Jenny Wormald influenced a generation of scholars, not least on the central question of the nature of Scottish kingship. She challenged the bloody and anarchic reputation of the late medieval and early modern Scottish nobility and argued that it is a mistake to see Scottish political life as dominated, as in medieval England, by a titanic struggle between the nobility and the Crown. The relationship was rather one that was based on cooperation, on ties of kinship and clan and an awareness on both sides that each depended on the other. The Crown needed the nobility in order for royal policy to be successful in the localities, while the nobles respected the ultimate authority of the monarchy. There may have been localised rebellions against individual monarchs, but at a time when England experienced a number of violent changes of dynasty, the authority of Scottish kingship, in particular the house of Stewart, was not seriously challenged.
In a much-cited article, Bloodfeud, Kindred and Government in Early Modern Scotland (1980), Jenny Wormald argued that a central factor in this stable state of affairs was the relationship between 15th and 16thcentury Scotland’s kin-based mechanisms for pacifying feuding, and the public legal system. Essentially, the crown would grant a remission to the perpetrator of illegal violence, including killing, on condition that “assythment” (compensation) was given to the victim or his kin. Feud, therefore, though violent, provided the framework for its own resolution. Indeed she saw it as a “force for peace” whose resolution was in the hands of the participants, while the crown only sporadically intervened.
Jenny Wormald, however, became more widely known for a polemical book-length essay entitled Mary Queen
of Scots: A Study in Failure (1988), which she wrote in response to celebrations marking the fourth centenary of Mary’s execution in 1587. “It is frankly inconceivable,” she wrote in her preface, “that any centenary of any English ruler would be so swamped with tours, plays, conferences, exhibitions, books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, radio and television programmes, which have been such a prolific feature of the Marian centenary”. The public enthusiasm, she continued, “has far less to do with the historical Mary than with that particular tendency of the Scots to follow the lead given by Sir Walter Scott and turn their history into tartan romance, making folk-heroes of failures and thugs, be they Mary Queen of Scots, Rob Roy or Bonnie Prince Charlie. No amount of scholarly history… will ever combat it completely; that is the frustration of being a historian of Scotland, aware that the reality which was the kingdom of Scotland is so much more fascinating than the romantics could ever make it.”
In putting the case for the prosecution Jenny Wormald did not mince words. Mary, she argued, was a monarch of “little wit and no judgment”, and a disastrous exception to the long line of gifted and ruthlesssly effective Stewart monarchs. “Profoundly irresponsible”, “dismal”, “unfit” and avaricious, she was indifferent to the business of government and her own honour. She neglected her privy council, ruthlessly pursuing French political objectives and her claim to the English throne at the expense of Scotland and her own position as Queen. She also failed to follow the Stewart model of effective rule involving regular contact with and careful management of the nobility and the localities.
The book unleashed an academic storm, with the case for the defence led by Professor Michael Lynch of the University of Edinburgh. But Jenny Wormald refused to change her opinion of Mary and when in 2008 the SNP MSP Christine Grahame called for the bones of this “iconic historical figure” to be repatriated to Scotland, she argued that such a “dreadful” woman should be left in Westminster Abbey.
Jennifer was born in Glasgow on January 18 1942 and adopted by Dr Thomas Tannahill, a GP, and his wife, Margaret. She attended Glasgow High School for Girls and Glasgow
University, where, after graduation in 1963 she began a PhD on the Scottish nobility under the medieval historian AL (Alfred) Brown, whom she married in 1964 and with whom she had a son. They later divorced.
Her PhD research would eventually culminate in the publication of Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent
1442-1603 (1985), in which she analysed 800 or so extant examples of a type of written agreement whereby lesser nobles bound themselves to serve greater nobles in return for improved security, throwing light on the local, kin-based bonds which underpinned the development of a remarkably stable society.
For 20 years from 1968 she taught at Glasgow University, where she gained a reputation for her enthusiasm and pugnacity in debate and published Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470-1625 (1981), James VI and I: Two Kings or One? (1983) and Gunpowder, Treason and Scots (1985).
In 1986 she was appointed to a fellowship in Modern History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she served as Fellow Librarian and Senior Tutor, published her study of Mary, and contributed to Scotland: a History for the Oxford University Press.
In 2005 she retired to Edinburgh where she became an honorary fellow of Edinburgh University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology and taught courses on Scottish history and literature.
Jenny Wormald was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. As chairman of the Scottish Medievalists from 2011, she led a vigorous challenge to the hierarchy of the Scottish Catholic church over its “appalling” plans to relocate two priceless collections of manuscripts, books and letters to Aberdeen University from Edinburgh.
After her divorce from her first husband, she married the Anglo-Saxon historian Patrick Wormald. That marriage too ended in divorce. She is survived by the son from her first marriage and by two sons from her second.
Jenny Wormald, born January 18 1942, died December 9 2015