Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary I of Scotland (December, 1542 - February 8, 1587), also known as Mary, Queen of Scots, or Mary Stuart, was born at the Palace of Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, on December 7 or 8, 1542. She was the daughter of King James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise. She is often confused with her cousin Mary I of England who lived at approximately the same time.
Her father died at the age of thirty and, although the kingdom was ruled by her mother as Regent, six-day old Mary became Queen of Scotland. On September 9, 1543, she was formally crowned in Stirling Castle.
Immediately, the powers in Scotland began the negotiations with the monarchs of Europe and in 1548 a formal agreement was reached with France for her marriage to the French dauphin.
Vivacious, pretty, and clever (according to contemporary accounts), Mary had an early life that reads like a royal soap opera. With her marriage agreement in place, she was sent to France in 1548, at the age of five, to be brought up for the next ten years at the French court. (She was accompanied by the "four Maries," four little girls her own age, all named Mary, and the daughters of the noblest families in Scotland: Beaton, Seton, Fleming, and Livingston.)
In 1558 she married the dauphin, the heir to the French throne, who became Francis II of France. Under the ordinary laws of succession, Mary Stuart was also next in line to the English throne after her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, who was childless. However, though the anti-Catholic Act of Settlement would not passed until 1701, there was one legal barrier to Mary succeeding Elizabeth. The Will of Henry VIII had excluded the Stuarts from succeeding to the English throne. It was through exploiting this will that the Duke of Northumberland placed Lady Jane Grey onto the English throne in 1558. The will was not formally revoked until 1603, when Elizabeth did so on her deathbed.
This was the high point in her life. However, it did not last long.
Francis died in 1560, and Mary's mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, became regent for his brother Charles IX. The young widow returned to Scotland. She was still only 19 and, despite her talents, her upbringing had in no way given her the judgment to cope with the dangerous and complex political situation in the Scotland of the time. Religion had divided the people, and Mary's illegitimate brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was a leader of the Protestant faction. Mary, being a devout Roman Catholic, was regarded with suspicion by many of her subjects as well as by Elizabeth I of England, her cousin and the monarch of the neighbouring Protestant country. The Protestant reformer John Knox preached against Mary, condemning her for hearing Mass, dancing, dressing too fancy, and many other things.
In 1565, Mary unexpectedly married Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, a descendant of King Henry VII of England and Mary's first-cousin. Before long, Mary became pregnant, but Darnley soon became arrogant, insisting on power to go with his courtesy title of "King". He was jealous of Mary's friendship with her private secretary, David Rizzio, and, in a conspiracy with other noblemen, murdered Rizzio while he was in conference with the queen at Holyrood Palace. This was the catalyst for the breakdown of their marriage. On one occasion, he attacked Mary and unsuccessfuly attempted to get her to miscarry their unborn child.
Following the birth of the heir - the future [[James I of England|James VI] - in June 1566, Mary began a liaison with James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, an adventurer who would become her third husband. A plot was hatched to remove Darnley, and he was found dead in suspicious circumstances in February, 1567. This event, which should have been Mary's salvation, only harmed her reputation, and her marriage to Bothwell sealed her fate.
Arrested by a confederacy of Scottish nobles, Mary was imprisoned on an island in the middle of Loch Leven, but escaped. After the defeat of her army, she fled to England where she was imprisoned in 1568 by Elizabeth. Nearly twenty years of confinement followed, much of it in the custody of George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, and his redoubtable wife Bess of Hardwick, whose daughter married Mary's second husband's brother and produced one child, Arbella Stuart. Bothwell was imprisoned in Denmark, became insane, and died in 1578, still in prison. Mary eventually became a liability Elizabeth could no longer tolerate because of numerous plots to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, and she was executed at Fotheringhay Castle on February 8, 1587, on suspicion of having been involved in a plot to murder Elizabeth. She had already been succeeded as monarch of Scotland by her son James VI who later became James I of England.
The two classic film biographies of Mary (neither of them so faithful to history as to get in the way of the story) are the 1936 Mary of Scotland starring Katharine Hepburn and Fredric March and the 1971 Mary, Queen of Scots starring Vanessa Redgrave (Oscar) and Nigel Davenport.
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