Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary was born on December 8, 1542 at Linlithgow Palace in West Lothian, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise ^[1]. Her father died six days later at Falkland Palace, reportedly after learning of the Scottish defeat at Solway Moss, and the infant became queen regnant of Scotland before she could hold up her own head. She was crowned at Stirling Castle on September 9, 1543, at nine months old ^[1].

Her minority immediately became a prize in international politics. Henry VIII of England pressed for her betrothal to his son Edward under the Treaty of Greenwich of 1543, and when the Scots repudiated the agreement he launched the punitive invasions later nicknamed the Rough Wooing ^[2]. After English forces crushed a Scottish army at Pinkie in 1547, the Scottish government turned to France. In 1548 the five year old queen was betrothed to the Dauphin Francis and shipped from Dumbarton to the French court, where she would spend the next thirteen years ^[2].

In France Mary received the education of a Renaissance princess. She learned French, Latin, Italian, and some Greek, wrote verse, danced, hunted, and grew unusually tall for the age, close to six feet by adulthood ^[3]. Contemporaries at the Valois court, including the poets Ronsard and du Bellay, praised her charm and accomplishment. French remained her first language for the rest of her life, and she habitually signed herself Marie Stuart, the French spelling that her descendants kept.

Mary married the Dauphin Francis at Notre Dame in Paris on April 24, 1558, a match that bound Scotland to French interests ^[1]. Weeks before the wedding she secretly signed documents that would have conveyed Scotland to the French crown if she died childless, an arrangement kept from the Scottish parliament ^[2]. When Henry II of France died in a jousting accident in July 1559, Mary became queen consort of France at sixteen, and her Guise uncles dominated the government of the sickly young Francis II.

Her position in France collapsed as quickly as it had risen. Francis died of an ear infection in December 1560, leaving Mary a widow at eighteen with no formal role at a court now controlled by her mother in law, Catherine de' Medici ^[3]. In the same period her mother, who had governed Scotland as regent, died, and the Scottish parliament, driven by the reformer John Knox and Protestant lords, abolished papal authority and adopted a reformed confession of faith ^[4].

Mary sailed home and landed at Leith on August 19, 1561, a nineteen year old Catholic queen taking charge of an officially Protestant realm she barely remembered ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Mary, Queen of Scots at that moment would have found a ruler in an almost impossible position, yet her opening years went better than many expected. She accepted the Protestant settlement in public life while hearing Mass privately, relied on her capable half brother James Stewart, whom she made Earl of Moray, and on the secretary William Maitland of Lethington, and toured her kingdom extensively ^[4].

The central question of Mary's reign was the English succession. As the senior descendant of Henry VII through her grandmother Margaret Tudor, she had a strong claim to follow the childless Elizabeth I, and much of her diplomacy aimed at being recognized as heir ^[5]. Elizabeth never granted that recognition, and the two queens, despite years of correspondence, never met.

Mary's choice of second husband proved disastrous. In July 1565 she married her half cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a great grandson of Henry VII whose blood strengthened her dynastic claim ^[1]. Darnley quickly showed himself vain, unstable, and hungry for power that Mary refused to grant. In March 1566 he joined a band of conspirators who dragged her Italian secretary David Rizzio from her supper chamber at Holyrood and stabbed him to death while the queen, six months pregnant, was held at gunpoint ^[5]. Mary gave birth to her son James at Edinburgh Castle on June 19, 1566, an heir who secured her line but did nothing to repair the marriage.

Early on February 10, 1567, the house at Kirk o' Field in Edinburgh where Darnley was recovering from illness was destroyed by gunpowder, and he was found strangled or smothered in the garden ^[4]. Suspicion fastened on James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was acquitted in a trial widely seen as rigged. In April Bothwell intercepted Mary near Edinburgh and carried her to Dunbar, and on May 15, 1567 she married him under Protestant rites ^[1]. Whether she acted under coercion or by consent is still debated, and the authenticity of the Casket Letters later produced to prove her complicity in the murder remains contested among historians ^[5]. The marriage united the Scottish nobility against her. Confronted at Carberry Hill in June 1567, she surrendered, was imprisoned in the island castle of Lochleven, miscarried twins, and on July 24, 1567 was forced to abdicate in favor of her one year old son ^[4].

Mary escaped from Lochleven in May 1568 and raised an army, but her supporters were beaten at Langside near Glasgow within a fortnight. Rather than sail for France, she crossed the Solway Firth into England on May 16, 1568, expecting help from Elizabeth as a fellow sovereign ^[1]. It was the greatest miscalculation of her life. Elizabeth's government, unwilling either to restore a Catholic claimant or to hand her to Scotland's regents, convened an inquiry at York and Westminster into Darnley's murder that reached no verdict and left Mary in indefinite custody ^[5].

For almost nineteen years she was moved among English castles and manor houses, including Tutbury, Sheffield, and Chatsworth, for much of that time under the guard of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury ^[3]. She kept a small court, embroidered extensively (many panels worked with Bess of Hardwick survive), suffered increasingly from rheumatic illness, and wrote streams of letters. She never saw her son again; James VI grew up a Protestant king tutored to regard his mother with suspicion.

Her existence made her the natural focus of every Catholic scheme against Elizabeth. The Rising of the North in 1569, the Ridolfi plot of 1571, and the Throckmorton plot of 1583 all envisaged placing Mary on the English throne ^[6]. Parliament and Elizabeth's ministers, above all Sir Francis Walsingham, pressed for her elimination. The Bond of Association of 1584 and the Act for the Queen's Safety of 1585 created the legal machinery under which anyone benefiting from a plot against Elizabeth could be tried and executed ^[6].

The end came through the Babington plot of 1586. Walsingham's agents controlled a secret channel of correspondence smuggled in beer barrels into Chartley, where Mary was then held, and deciphered her letters ^[6]. When Anthony Babington wrote outlining a plan for foreign invasion and the assassination of Elizabeth, Mary's reply endorsing the scheme gave Walsingham the evidence he had long sought, though scholars still argue over how far the incriminating passages were shaped by his forger, Thomas Phelippes ^[6].

In October 1586 Mary was tried at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire before a commission of nobles and judges. She defended herself alone, denied the commission's jurisdiction over an anointed foreign queen, and insisted she had sought only her own liberty, but the verdict was never in doubt ^[5]. Parliament demanded her death, and after months of hesitation Elizabeth signed the warrant on February 1, 1587, later claiming it had been dispatched without her final consent.

Mary was beheaded in the great hall at Fotheringhay on the morning of February 8, 1587, aged forty four ^[1]. Witnesses recorded that she went to the block with striking composure, dressed in a dark gown over a red petticoat, red being the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom, and prayed aloud in Latin. It took more than one stroke of the axe. Her body was first buried at Peterborough Cathedral; in 1612 her son, by then James I of England, had her reburied in a grand marble tomb in Westminster Abbey, close to that of Elizabeth ^[7].

The clearest of Mary, Queen of Scots achievements was dynastic. Her son James VI inherited the English throne in 1603, so every British monarch since descends from her rather than from Elizabeth, and the union of the crowns that shaped modern Britain runs directly through her line ^[7]. In that sense the claim she pursued all her life was vindicated a generation after her death.

Her reputation split immediately and has never healed. Catholic Europe honored her as a martyr for the faith, while Protestant polemicists, following George Buchanan's hostile account, painted her as an adulteress complicit in her husband's murder ^[5]. Modern biographers remain divided: Antonia Fraser's 1969 life presented a sympathetic queen undone by circumstance and treacherous nobles, while John Guy's 2004 study, based on fresh archival work, argued she was a shrewder politician than her legend allows, brought down partly by Elizabeth's ministers ^[3][5].

Beyond the scholarship, Mary became a cultural fixture. Schiller's play Maria Stuart, Donizetti's opera, and a long line of films, most recently the 2018 feature with Saoirse Ronan, keep reworking her story of thrones lost and rivalry with Elizabeth ^[8]. Basic Mary, Queen of Scots facts, the six day old queen, the three marriages, the nineteen year imprisonment, the execution at Fotheringhay, are familiar far beyond Scotland, and sites from Linlithgow to Lochleven draw visitors on the strength of her name. Any serious Mary, Queen of Scots biography must weigh both the errors of judgment that cost her two kingdoms and the courage with which she met their loss.