Mary, Queen of Scots

• 1. Introduction

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  Mary, Queen of Scots was six days old when she became queen. Her father, King James V of Scotland, died on the 14th of December 1542 before he ever truly knew his daughter. A popular tale, first recorded by the Protestant reformer John Knox, says James received the news of her birth on his deathbed with a lament: "It cam wi' a lass and it will gang wi' a lass." He meant that the House of Stuart had come to the Scottish throne through a woman and would lose it through one. He was right about the throne, though history would take a far stranger and more violent course than even that prophecy suggested.

  Mary would go on to be queen of three kingdoms in title if not always in fact, Scotland, France, and the long-contested prize of England. She would marry three times. She would be imprisoned, forced to abdicate, and held captive for eighteen and a half years in a foreign land. She would be beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on the 8th of February 1587, at the order of a queen who was her own first cousin once removed.

  Her story raises questions that historians still argue over today. Was she a skilled ruler undermined by ruthless men, or a woman whose judgment failed her at every critical turn? Did she share guilt for the murder of her second husband? Were the letters used to convict her genuine, or were they forgeries? And why, four centuries after her death, does she still command such fascination?

• 2. A Queen in Exile

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  Five-year-old Mary sailed from Dumbarton on the 7th of August 1548, bound for France, and would not see Scotland again for thirteen years. The French fleet commanded by Nicolas de Villegagnon carried her to Brittany, arriving at Roscoff or Saint-Pol-de-Leon. She brought with her a miniature court of her own, including two illegitimate half-brothers and four companions known as the "four Marys," girls her own age all bearing the same name, daughters of the noble Scottish families Beaton, Seton, Fleming, and Livingston.

  At the French court, she flourished. Contemporary accounts describe her as vivacious, beautiful, and clever. She learned to play lute and virginals, mastered French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Greek in addition to her native Scots, and studied prose, poetry, horsemanship, falconry, and needlework. A balladin named Jehan Paulle taught her to dance. Portraits show auburn hair, hazel-brown eyes under heavy lowered eyelids, and an adult height of 5 feet 11 inches, which was considered remarkably tall by 16th-century standards.

  She caught smallpox at some point in infancy or childhood, but it left no mark on her features. Her future sister-in-law, Elisabeth of Valois, became a close friend, one Mary retained nostalgic memories of in later life. Her maternal grandmother, Antoinette de Bourbon, served as another strong influence and one of her principal advisors. Not everyone at court warmed to her. Henry II's wife, Catherine de' Medici, was a notable exception.

  On the 4th of April 1558, Mary signed a secret agreement bequeathing Scotland and her claim to England to the French crown if she died without an heir. Twenty days later, she married the Dauphin Francis at Notre Dame de Paris.

• 3. The English Claim

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  Through her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of Henry VIII, Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England. That bloodline made her, in the eyes of many Catholics, the rightful queen of England, not Elizabeth. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in November 1558, Henry II of France went so far as to proclaim his son and daughter-in-law king and queen of England, and the royal arms of England were quartered with those of Francis and Mary at the French court.

  Elizabeth's legitimacy was contested by English Catholics, who considered her the illegitimate child of Anne Boleyn. Parliament had already excluded the Stuarts from the English succession under the Third Succession Act of 1543, and Henry VIII's own will had reinforced that exclusion. Mary's claim was therefore both legally void and politically explosive.

  When Henry II died on the 10th of July 1559 from injuries he sustained in a joust, Francis and Mary became king and queen of France. Mary was fifteen years old. Power in France largely passed to her two uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, whose dominance some historians called la tyrannie Guisienne. Then Francis II died on the 5th of December 1560 from a middle-ear infection that led to a brain abscess. Mary was a widow at eighteen, and France no longer had any use for her.

  When she returned to Scotland in August 1561 and began sending ambassadors to press her case as heir presumptive to England, Elizabeth refused to name a successor, fearing that doing so would invite conspiracies to replace her. She assured Mary's ambassador William Maitland of Lethington that she knew of no one with a better claim than Mary, but she gave no formal recognition. The English throne would become the subtext of almost everything that followed.

• 4. Governing a Divided Kingdom

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  John Knox greeted Mary's return to Scotland by preaching against her for hearing Mass, dancing, and dressing too elaborately. Mary summoned him to her presence to challenge him and failed to silence him. She later charged him with treason, but he was acquitted.

  Knox represented the new reality Mary faced. Scotland had undergone a Protestant Reformation while she spent her girlhood in Catholic France. She returned to a kingdom her own faith had lost, and her privy council of 16 men, appointed on the 6th of September 1561, reflected that. The council was dominated by Protestant leaders from the reformation crisis of 1559-1560: the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn, and Moray. Only four of the 16 councillors were Catholic.

  Modern historian Jenny Wormald found this remarkable. She suggested that Mary's failure to stack the council with Catholic and French sympathizers revealed that her real focus was always the English throne, not the internal problems of Scotland. Mary issued a proclamation accepting the religious settlement as she had found it, retained her Protestant half-brother James Stewart, Earl of Moray, as chief advisor, and governed as a Catholic monarch presiding over a Protestant kingdom.

  She even joined with Moray in the destruction of Scotland's leading Catholic magnate, Lord Huntly, in 1562, after Huntly led a rebellion against her in the Highlands. It was a calculated display of pragmatism. One significant later addition to the council, Lord Ruthven appointed in December 1563, was yet another Protestant and one Mary personally disliked. She appointed him anyway, acknowledging her lack of effective military power against the Protestant lords while working to strengthen her ties with England.

• 5. Three Marriages, Three Disasters

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  Mary briefly met Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in February 1561, when she was still in mourning for Francis. He came to France ostensibly to offer condolences, though his parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, were hoping for a match. Both Mary and Darnley were grandchildren of Margaret Tudor, making them half-cousins. They met again on Saturday the 17th of February 1565 at Wemyss Castle in Scotland. Queen Elizabeth had called Darnley "the long lad" because he stood over six feet tall, and Mary fell in love with him quickly. They married at Holyrood Palace on the 29th of July 1565, without waiting for a papal dispensation for the marriage of first cousins.

  The English ambassador Nicholas Throckmorton wrote that the marriage could only be averted "by violence," describing Mary as apparently bewitched. Elizabeth was furious, since both Mary and Darnley held claims to her throne and their children would inherit an even stronger combined claim. Mary's half-brother Moray led an open rebellion in response. Mary rode out from Edinburgh on the 26th of August 1565 carrying a pistol, known as a "dagg," on her saddle. In what became called the Chaseabout Raid, the two armies roamed Scotland without ever coming to direct battle, and Moray eventually fled to England.

  Darnley grew arrogant. He demanded the Crown Matrimonial, which would have made him co-sovereign of Scotland with the right to keep the throne even if Mary died before him. She refused. He grew jealous of her Italian private secretary and close friend David Rizzio. On the 9th of March 1566, a group of conspirators including Darnley stabbed Rizzio to death in front of Mary at a dinner party in Holyrood Palace. Mary was six months pregnant at the time.

  Mary's son James was born on the 19th of June 1566 in Edinburgh Castle. Darnley's residence at Kirk o' Field was destroyed by an explosion in the early hours of the 10th of February 1567. Darnley was found dead in the garden, apparently smothered. There were no visible marks of strangulation or violence on his body. Suspicion fell on James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, among others. In April 1567, Bothwell was acquitted after a seven-hour trial held without his chief accuser, Darnley's own father. Bothwell then produced the Ainslie Tavern Bond, signed by more than two dozen lords and bishops, supporting his aim to marry the queen.

  On the 24th of April 1567, on her way back from visiting her son at Stirling, Mary was abducted by Bothwell and taken to Dunbar Castle, where he may have raped her. She married him on the 15th of May according to Protestant rites, a marriage that Catholics considered unlawful and that shocked Protestants and Catholics alike.

• 6. Captive and Convicted

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  Mary spent eighteen and a half years as a prisoner in England. From the 26th of January 1569, she was held in the custody of George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife Bess of Hardwick, and moved between Tutbury Castle, Sheffield Castle, Sheffield Manor Lodge, Wingfield Manor, and Chatsworth House. Her own domestic staff never numbered fewer than 16, and she needed 30 carts to transport her belongings between houses.

  She kept a cloth of state embroidered with a French phrase, En ma fin est mon commencement, which translates as "In my end lies my beginning." Her bed linen was changed daily. Her chefs prepared meals with a choice of 32 dishes served on silver plates. She spent seven summers at the spa town of Buxton. By the 1580s, she had severe rheumatism that left her lame.

  The plots that swirled around her were real enough. Elizabeth's secretary Francis Walsingham uncovered the Ridolfi Plot in 1571, which aimed to replace Elizabeth with Mary using Spanish troops and the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk was executed. Mary sent letters in cipher to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador to England; scores of those letters were discovered and decrypted in 2022-2023. After the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, Walsingham introduced the Bond of Association and the Act for the Queen's Safety, which sanctioned the killing of anyone who plotted against Elizabeth.

  In 1584, Mary proposed an "association" with her son James, offering to abandon her pretensions to the English Crown and accept no change in religion, asking only for relief from her captivity. James eventually rejected the idea and signed an alliance with Elizabeth, abandoning his mother entirely.

  On the 11th of August 1586, Mary was arrested while out riding, having been implicated in the Babington Plot. Walsingham had deliberately allowed her letters to be smuggled out of Chartley while secretly reading them. From those letters, it was clear she had sanctioned the assassination of Elizabeth. In October, she was tried before a court of 36 noblemen at Fotheringhay Castle. She told her triers: "Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England." She was convicted on the 25th of October, with only one commissioner, Lord Zouche, expressing dissent.

• 7. The Execution at Fotheringhay

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  On the evening of the 7th of February 1587, Mary was told she had one night left to live. She spent it in prayer, distributing her belongings to her household, writing her will, and composing a letter to the King of France. The scaffold erected in the Great Hall was draped in black cloth, reached by two or three steps, and furnished with a block, a cushion, and three stools for Mary and the earls of Shrewsbury and Kent.

  The executioner, named Bull, knelt before her to ask forgiveness in the customary way. Mary replied: "I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles." Her servants Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curle helped her remove her outer garments. Beneath them she wore a velvet petticoat and sleeves in crimson brown, the liturgical colour of martyrdom in the Catholic Church, with a black satin bodice. Kennedy blindfolded her with a white veil embroidered in gold. Her last words were in Latin: In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit."

  She was not killed with a single blow. The first strike missed her neck and hit the back of her head. The second severed the neck except for a small piece of sinew, which Bull cut through with the axe. When he held her head aloft, the auburn tresses fell to the ground. They were a wig. Mary had very short, grey hair underneath. Cecil's nephew, who witnessed the execution, reported that after her death her lips stirred up and down for a quarter of an hour and that a small dog emerged from hiding among her skirts, though at least one contemporary account does not include those details.

  Elizabeth responded to the news with fury, claiming Davison had disobeyed her instructions and that the Privy Council had acted without her authority. Davison was thrown into the Tower of London. He was released nineteen months later after Cecil and Walsingham interceded. Elizabeth's request had never received a direct refusal she could act on: she had previously asked Mary's final custodian Amias Paulet to contrive a clandestine way to "shorten the life" of Mary, and Paulet had refused, saying he would not "make a shipwreck of my conscience."

  Mary's body was held in a lead coffin until burial in a Protestant service at Peterborough Cathedral in late July 1587. Her son James ordered her reinterred in Westminster Abbey in 1612, in a chapel opposite the tomb of Elizabeth. In 1867, her tomb was opened in an attempt to find the remains of James I; he was ultimately found with Henry VII.

• 8. A Contested Legacy

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  George Buchanan and John Knox vilified Mary mercilessly in the 16th century. Adam Blackwood, writing from the Catholic side, praised and eulogised her. After James I came to the English throne, historian William Camden wrote an officially sanctioned biography drawing from original documents, which condemned Buchanan's work as an invention and "emphasized Mary's evil fortunes rather than her evil character."

  In the 18th century, William Robertson and David Hume argued that the casket letters were genuine and that Mary was guilty of adultery and murder. William Tytler argued the reverse. In the latter half of the 20th century, the work of Antonia Fraser was described as "more objective... free from the excesses of adulation or attack" that had characterised older biographies.

  The casket letters, the primary evidence against her, remain unresolved. The originals, written in French, were possibly destroyed in 1584 by Mary's son. The surviving copies, in French or translated into English, do not form a complete set. Biographers including Antonia Fraser, Alison Weir, and John Guy concluded that either the documents were complete forgeries, or incriminating passages were inserted into genuine letters, or the letters were written by a different person entirely. Guy pointed out that the French language and grammar in the sonnets are too poor for a writer with Mary's education, though certain phrases and some stylistic characteristics are compatible with her known writings.

  Historian Jenny Wormald concluded that Mary was a tragic failure who could not cope with the demands placed on her. That remained a rare dissenting voice in the post-Fraser tradition, which tends to view Mary as a pawn manipulated by scheming noblemen. The prophecy James V supposedly uttered at her birth, that the House of Stuart would lose the crown through a woman, was not actually fulfilled through Mary: it was fulfilled through her great-great-granddaughter Anne, Queen of Great Britain, the last Stuart monarch.