Mary Stuart in captivity at Sheffield and Tutbury, and a girl brought up in a Puritan household who may be the daughter the Queen of Scots lost - a question that draws her into Babington's plot and the trial at Fotheringhay. Yonge wrote from the sources and the state papers; this 1882 novel treats Mary neither as martyr nor as murderess, which in the nineteenth century was almost a political act.
