Mary, Mary, quite contrary - Philippa Gregory interview

As her final Tudor novel hits the shelves, best-selling author Philippa Gregory defends her tantalising interpretation of the Queen of Scots myth to Chitra Ramaswamy

'IJUST don't like women like that in real life," says Philippa Gregory pointedly. We're in the drawing room of a Georgian hotel in County Durham, a shabby place sorely in need of some love and affection (and a better lunch menu) that was built a century after the woman Gregory is talking about was beheaded. That woman is Mary, Queen of Scots. "I was always put off by the popular image of her," continues the 54-year-old best-selling historical novelist, who, dressed head to toe in black and
high heels, cuts a rather regal figure herself in spite of her diminutive size. "Romantic,tragic, doomed, beautiful, stupid..." Gregory
pulls a face: the Scottish queen is clearly not her kind of heroine.

So how did she come to be The Other Queen of Gregory's latest novel? The sixth and final book in her Tudor series (she's moving on to the Plantagenets next) is not to be confused, by the way, with The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory's first Tudor novel adapted earlier this year into a Hollywood film starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Gregory "consulted energetically" on the film, she tells me with a laugh, though the producers did what they wanted. But she remains sanguine. "There was no way the author of the book was going to say how it would go." Another film of her last Tudor novel, The Boleyn Inheritance, has since been optioned, as has The Other Queen, which is set to be made into a four-part television series.

The first history book Gregory ever read was a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. She devoured it one summer when she was 10, lying in a hammock at the bottom of her garden in Bristol. Though instantly fascinated by Scotland's great tragic martyr, it took her decades to find a version of Mary she could respect.

"It has always been important to me to look at the images historians give us and then double check them," she says. "The difference between how Mary, Queen of Scots really was and how she has been presented ever since the Victorians started to tell her story is enormous. It's about a woman in power being regarded badly. Look at Katherine Howard (the subject of The Boleyn Inheritance]. She is universally regarded as stupid. In this day and age (historian David] Starkey calls her 'a stupid slut'. She was 14!" It is this passion for using a feminist perspective to fictionalise the histories of powerful women in a time when women had no power that has drawn millions – and not just female readers – to Gregory's books.

"We've got a US commander in Iraq who reads the Tudor novels," Gregory says proudly. "More and more men are reading the books. And Sarah Jessica Parker and Vera Wang are big fans." She likes keeping tabs on readers and spends time every day e-mailing them from her farmhouse on the North Yorkshire moors. Gregory is quite grandiose, in fact. She tells me about the "publishing phenomenon" she has become without so much as a blush and explains her plans to create a compendium of "people in extraordinary circumstances for whom the books mean a great deal". But she gets away with it because she is also direct and unpretentious. "I have been someone who would wake up in the night and think: 'How the hell are we going to manage?'" she says. "Now I don't. I still work hard because I like the work and when I wasn't getting paid for it I did it anyway."

In The Other Queen, Gregory steers clear of the more well-trodden aspects of Mary's history – her marriage to Lord Darnley, his murder, her kidnap by the Earl of Bothwell – to focus on the years 1568-72 when she was placed under Elizabeth I's 'protection' in England as the prisoner of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his indomitable wife, Bess of Hardwick. We hear less about these years of her imprisonment because of the curse of historical hindsight. After all, we know that it ends with the gallows.

Mary's 16 years in their care marked the longest stretch she spent anywhere. She was 26 when she arrived and would never see Scotland again. Almost bankrupting the earl and Bess, Mary arrived with her vast train of servants and expensive habits that would make most WAGs hang their heads in shame, such as washing her face with vintage white wine every day. The earl fell in love with the famously beautiful queen, leading to a court scandal that was the Diana, Charles and Camilla outrage of its day. "If you go to Chatsworth," Gregory says of one of the estates where Mary was held, "the tour guides don't even mention it. It still rankles that much."

When Gregory discovered the relationship between the queen and her jailers – particularly the enterprising, self-made Bess – she felt she could write about the Scottish queen after all, something readers had been begging her to do for years. "Discovering that Mary was imprisoned by Bess was like Christmas, just perfect," Gregory explains. "Bess's social rise and success was astounding. She was the wealthiest woman in England after Elizabeth I. It's an extraordinary collision that in this moment of time you have three incredible women – Elizabeth, Mary, Bess – so intimately involved in each others' lives."

Gregory argues that Mary was neither the femme fatale nor the romantic fool. Rather, she was a politically astute and determined woman who, had she been restored to her throne in Scotland, would have ruled long and well. "She fought every step of the way and it wasn't a world of men who beat her, it was powerful conspiracies," says Gregory, who is renowned for her meticulous research and has visited castles where Mary was imprisoned, walked routes that Bess of Hardwick rode between residences, and read upwards of 40 books while working on her 18th novel. "It's the comparison between the two queens that has prejudiced us against Mary. When it's two kings on the thrones of England and Scotland nobody judges them personally. But because it's two women, Elizabeth is the normal queen and Mary is the deviant. It's the sensible versus the romantic, the Protestant and the Catholic, the virgin and the whore."

Gregory has always approached great historical events from "the side of the stage", as she puts it, and this is Bess's story as much as it is Mary's. History has been unkind to her, too, painting her as a ruthless gold digger who was fortunate enough to marry well four times in succession. On the contrary, says Gregory, she was one of the world's first businesswomen. "In a sense my writing these books is about honouring our foremothers," she says. "It's absolutely right that those of us who are following in Bess's footsteps should acknowledge her struggle and not just say: 'Oh, she married well.' It's much more interesting than that."

The main action in The Other Queen – apart from Mary's heroic struggle for freedom – is the Northern Rebellion, a great uprising that has become little more than a footnote in history. Led by three northern lords who set out to bring Elizabeth's chief adviser William Cecil down and free Mary, it may have suffered a colossal failure of will at the last moment but it was the greatest threat to Elizabeth during her reign (greater than the Armada, Gregory contends). "Why isn't this history written?" she demands. "I came across it in a pamphlet, not even a book. It was incredibly destabilising for the country and quite against what we all fondly like to believe of Tudor peace."

Gregory is convinced her new, less romantic depiction of Mary – influenced by John Guy's biography – will change our perceptions of her. "Walter Scott's creation of the tartan myth absolutely fits around the romantic image of Mary," says Gregory. The author lived in Edinburgh in the Eighties, where she obtained a PhD in 18th-century literature at Edinburgh University, and would often visit Holyrood Palace, Mary Stuart's erstwhile residence. "That's why it's so interesting that at a time when Scotland is defining its presence independently of any nation, I've written a book redefining one of Scotland's most iconic monarchs – not as the doomed, tartan figure but as a pragmatic, incredibly forward-thinking woman. She really is an appropriate heroine for a modern Scotland."

• Philippa Gregory appears at Edinburgh International Book Festival, tomorrow, 8.30pm. The Other Queen, HarperCollins, £18.99