I was Mary Queen of Scots

Colm Tóibín

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Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:

I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time . . . I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on).

So too in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in the late 1960s, during certain times of the day and night, I was sure that I actually was Mary Queen of Scots, and as I made my way around our small, semi-detached house, I had no difficulty imagining that I was imprisoned with my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.

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From the LRB letters page: [ 4 November 2004 ] Gillian Hughes.

Colm Tóibín is Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University. His essay in this issue is based on a lecture he gave at the University of Genoa’s Ford Madox Ford conference.

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I was Mary Queen of Scots

Colm Tóibín

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