How high was Mary?
From Lady Antonia Fraser
Sir: We cannot know for sure the height of Mary Queen of Scots unless her skeleton were to be exhumed from its wonderful white marble tomb in Westminster Abbey (Letters, 25 March). God forbid! This has already happened to her once: Mary Queen of Scots was first interred in Peterborough Cathedral in 1587 some months after her execution. In 1612 her son James VI and I was shamed into providing a more central monument by his cryptoCatholic courtier Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton.
Mary Queen of Scots was certainly very tall, as everyone commented at the time (although the only person to remark that she was ‘too high’ was Queen Elizabeth I, who never met her). The figure on the tomb, modelled from details taken immediately after her death, is 5ft 11in. Pamela Hill is quite right to conjecture that her height came from her mother, Mary of Guise, since James V was only ‘of midway stature’. The former was once propositioned by Henry VIII, who said he liked a big woman — only to reply that while she might be tall, her neck was small. As for Mary Queen of Scots, Darnley’s height certainly appealed to her (so convenient while dancing). On first sight, she exclaimed to the English ambassador Sir James Melville that ‘he was the properest and best proportioned long man that ever she had seen’. Alas, time was to show that length is not everything.
Antonia Fraser
London W8
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