 Tantal Audio, a division of recorded books, presents Mary, Queen of Scots, The True Life of Mary Stuart by John Guy, narrated by Lucy Rayner. Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart, being my own, is immutable. Three to Thomas Randolph, English ambassador to Scotland. March the 8th, 1564. Prologue. Around eight o'clock in the morning, on Wednesday, February the 8th, 1587, when it was light enough to see without candles, Sir Thomas Andrews, sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, knocked on a door. The place was fathering Gay Castle, about seventy-five miles from London. All that remains there now, beneath the weeds, is the raised earthen rampart of the inner Bailey, and a truncated mound, or mott, on the side of the keep, a few hundred yards from the village, beside a sluggish stretch of the River Neen. But in the sixteenth century the place was bustling with life. Fathering Gay was a royal manor. Richard III had been born at the castle in 1452. Henry VII, the first of the Tudor Kings, who had slain Richard at the Battle of Bosworth, gave the estate as a dowry to his wife, Elizabeth of York, and Henry VIII granted it to his first bride, Catherine of Aragon, who extensively refurbished the castle. In 1558 Elizabeth I inherited the property when she succeeded to the throne on the death of her elder sister, Mary Tudor. Despite its royal associations nothing had prepared Fathering Gay, or indeed the British Isles, for what was about to happen there. Andrews was in attendance on two of England's highest-ranking noblemen, George Tolbert, Earl of Shrewsbury, and Henry Gray, Earl of Kent. The door on which he knocked was the entrance to the privy chamber of Mary Queen of Scots, Dowager Queen of France, and for almost nineteen years Elizabeth's prisoner in England. The door opened to reveal Mary on her knees, praying with her bed-chamber servants. Andrews informed her that the time was at hand, and she looked up and said she was ready. She rose, and her gentle-women stood aside. She was only forty-four. Born and brought up to be a queen, she walked confidently through the doorway, as if she were once more. Sample complete. Ready to continue?