Lady Antonia Fraser laid a trap for any plagiarist in a book she wrote which, a London newspaper reports, seems to have caught another author some thirty years later. The Express columnist John McEntee writes: Lady Antonia Fraser may have provided formidable evidence that Scottish writer James Mackay did copy her seminal biography of Mary Queen of Scots. As the row raged in literary circles last night about whether Braveheart biographer Mackay had lifted substantial bits from Antonia's definitive life of Mary, it emerged that Lord Longford's eldest daughter had deliberately placed a red-herring in her scholarly work to confound future historians. Antonia revealed that on the advice of a friend, a distinguished historian, she had placed an unconfirmable detail in the book to alert her to any duplication. Having spent six years researching and writing, she included her carefully placed canard in the execution scene of Mary in 1567. 'I wrote that the face of Lord Shrewsbury was wet with tears', Antonia tells me. Shrewsbury was in fact Mary's jailer. Popular gossip at the time suggested they were lovers. Antonia does not believe this to be the case. 'Mr Mackay wrote that Shrewsbury greeted Mary's execution with floods of tears', she said last night. 'I know of absolutely no evidence for this'. We did not realise that this is how history was written. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 90 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com