Outside my window this summer there has been the sound of hillwalkers clumping up the street on their way to Lindisfarne, and holiday-makers gathering their broods for an outing. On the few warm days we’ve had, lawnmowers have leapt into action, and corkscrews too, as folk gather to toast the sight of the sun. And, when it’s been wet, cold or windy, most of the village has been indoors, enjoying the football, Wimbledon, the Olympics. Everyone is agreed it has been a great summer for sport.

Meanwhile, I’ve been at my desk. Not alone, I should say. As so often in recent years, I have been in the company of Mary, Queen of Scots. As I approach the deadline for my second book about her – the first was Homecoming, about her years in Scotland, and this latest, Exile, is about her time in prison in England – I calculate that I have spent more hours with her since Covid than with anyone except my husband. He certainly would agree there have been three of us in this marriage.

This past month has been particularly gruelling, not because of the ticking clock over my head as the delivery date looms, but because of that over Mary’s. Everyone knows the end of her story, when she gets her head chopped off; only a novelist could alter that conclusion and hope to get away with it. Yet it is one thing to know that she dies horribly and quite another to follow her daily in the months between the pronouncement of her death sentence, in December 1586, and the morning of 8 February, 1587, when the axe fell.

On that bright, cold winter’s day, she dressed herself in her few remaining decent clothes and, with remarkable composure, ascended the scaffold on the arm of her gaoler, since by then she could barely walk. Every time I think about it, a shiver runs up my spine. So, while most of us have been marvelling at the exploits of Team GB, I have been in the depths of Northamptonshire, near Peterborough, in bleak, forbidding Fotheringhay Castle, hovering as Mary writes her final letters, bestows gifts on her tearful servants and companions, and prepares herself for the block.

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After following her every step for so long, you might imagine I’ll be glad to be done with her. And in some ways, I will. Yet life will also feel strangely empty when she no longer occupies a large part of each day.

Writing biographies is a peculiar business, in which you willingly shackle yourself to a subject, unaware of what lies ahead. Sometimes an author takes on the job in the expectation of admiring the person they’ve chosen, only to discover that they loathe them. That must be grim, since by then there’s every chance they will have spent the publisher’s advance and have no alternative but to plough on. It must be like being aloft in a hot air balloon when it starts to deflate. All the energy with which the project was begun is punctured, and what is left is the sheer, hard grind of bringing the book home to earth without a crash landing.

It takes a brave biographer to tackle a figure who is universally reviled, such as Stalin or Hitler. Being cloistered, day after day, with someone malign and deluded, whose behaviour and decisions destroyed millions of lives, requires immense resilience, not to mention a certain sort of courage. To be immersed in such a person’s life is to be uncomfortably close to an individual you’d normally avoid at all costs. It is like breathing the same air.

When writing, it is not just their subject whom the biographer gets to know intimately. As I have discovered, after reading many other biographies of Mary, the outlook and personality of those who have written about her colour their work. So while I’ve been getting closely acquainted with one of history’s most tragic and most written about characters, I have also had an insight into those compelled to write about her. From Antonia Fraser and John Guy in our own times, to Victorian cheerleaders or Mary’s own contemporaries, such as the vituperative George Buchanan, every biographer comes with a unique take.

With Fraser, it is a generous, sympathetic understanding of what Mary went through; with Guy, it is scrupulous, ground-breaking research, showing Mary’s flaws as conscientiously as her strengths. It is interesting also that the biographer’s nationality can influence their stance, English writers often portraying her less flatteringly, in comparison with Elizabeth I, and Scots more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.

(Image: The murder of David Rizzio)

The Protestant scholar George Buchanan, on the other hand, was motivated by spite and the need to depict Mary as irredeemably corrupt. It is one of history’s great missed chances, that he knew Mary well in her happier years, and might have left an account of her that brought her fully to life. But because of his religious convictions, he preferred to produce scurrilous propaganda. That tells you a lot about what he, and Mary’s other detractors, were like.

The most fascinating aspect of writing about Mary has been stepping back in time, and trying to envisage what her world was like. Some days it has come as a jolt to look outside and see cars rather than horse-driven carts. The historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett once looked up from her desk when her husband came into the room, and asked, “Who are you?”

Fortunately for our relationship I’ve never been that far removed from reality, not least because my husband usually arrives bearing welcome top-ups of coffee. But I have wrapped my cardigan closer as Mary wrote to complain about the draughts and damp of Tutbury Castle, and learned a new appreciation for modern plumbing as she described the stench of privies and drains.

Being with Mary is the closest I’ll ever get to royalty, and the insight has been an eye-opener. Even more unexpected has been the discovery of how fascinating she was. Writing both books has had its difficult moments, but Mary herself has never been dull. In a way I could not have foreseen when I began, I have been kept enthralled by a woman who was intelligent, passionate, ruthless, proud, reckless, shrewd, kind, beguiling, conspiratorial and brave. Not such a bad way to spend the summer after all.