Scottish Queen: Mary Stuart I

MARY I OF SCOTLAND
Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary briefly became queen consort of France, until his death in December 1560.

Mary I, Queen of Scots

Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, but their union was unhappy. In February 1567, his residence was destroyed by an explosion, and Darnley was found murdered in the garden. Mary was born on 7 or 8 December 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland, to King James V and his French second wife, Mary of Guise. She was said to have been born prematurely and was the only legitimate child of James to survive him.

She was the great-niece of King Henry VIII of England, as her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was Henry VIII's sister. On 14 December, six days after her birth, she became Queen of Scots when her father died, perhaps from the effects of a nervous collapse following the Battle of Solway Moss, or from drinking contaminated water while on campaign.

Henry VIII of England

 A popular legend, first recorded by John Knox, states that James, hearing on his deathbed that his wife had given birth to a daughter, ruefully exclaimed,
"It cam wi' a lass and it will gang wi' a lass!" His House of Stewart had gained the throne of Scotland by the marriage of Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, to Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward of Scotland. The crown had come to his family through a woman, and would be lost from his family through a woman. This legendary statement came true much later—not through Mary, but through her descendant Queen Anne.

Mary was baptised at the nearby Church of St Michael shortly after she was born. Rumours spread that she was weak and frail, but an English diplomat, Ralph Sadler, saw the infant at Linlithgow Palace in March 1543, unwrapped by her nurse, and wrote, "it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live." As Mary was an infant when she inherited the throne, Scotland was ruled by regents until she became an adult.

King Francis II and Mary

From the outset, there were two claims to the Regency: one from Catholic Cardinal Beaton, and the other from the Protestant Earl of Arran, who was next in line to the throne.

Beaton's claim was based on a version of the late king's will that his opponents dismissed as a forgery. Arran, with the support of his friends and relations, became the regent until 1554 when Mary's mother managed to remove and succeed him.

King Henry VIII of England took the opportunity of the regency to propose marriage between Mary and his own son, Prince Edward, hoping for a union of Scotland and England.

On 1 July 1543, when Mary was six months old, the Treaty of Greenwich was signed, which promised that at the age of ten Mary would marry Edward and move to England, where Henry could oversee her upbringing. The treaty provided that the two countries would remain legally separate and that if the couple should fail to have children the temporary union would dissolve. Shortly before Mary's coronation, Scottish merchants headed for France were arrested by Henry, and their goods impounded. The arrests caused anger in Scotland, and Arran joined Beaton and became a Catholic.

The Treaty of Greenwich was rejected by the Parliament of Scotland in December. The rejection of the marriage treaty and the renewal of the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland prompted Henry's "Rough Wooing", a military campaign designed to impose the marriage of Mary to his son. English forces mounted a series of raids on Scottish and French territory. In May 1544, the English Earl of Hertford (later Duke of Somerset) raided Edinburgh, and the Scots took Mary to Dunkeld for safety.

Francis II and Mary Stuart

The French king, Henry II, proposed to unite France and Scotland by marrying the young queen to his three-year-old son, the Dauphin Francis. On the promise of French military help, and a French dukedom for himself, Arran agreed to the marriage.

In February 1548, Mary was moved, again for her safety, to Dumbarton Castle. The English left a trail of devastation behind once more and seized the strategic town of Haddington. In June, the much awaited French help arrived at Leith to besiege and ultimately take Haddington. On 7 July 1548, a Scottish Parliament held at a nunnery near the town agreed to a French marriage treaty. In November 1558, Henry VIII's elder daughter, Queen Mary I of England, was succeeded by her only surviving sibling, Elizabeth I.

Henry Lord Darnley, Mary's second husband

Under the Third Succession Act, passed in 1543 by the Parliament of England, Elizabeth was recognised as her sister's heir, and Henry VIII's last will and testament had excluded the Stuarts from succeeding to the English throne.

Yet, in the eyes of many Catholics, Elizabeth was illegitimate, and Mary Stuart, as the senior descendant of Henry VIII's elder sister, was the rightful queen of England. Henry II of France proclaimed his eldest son and daughter-in-law king and queen of England, and in France the royal arms of England were quartered with those of Francis and Mary.

Mary's claim to the English throne was a perennial sticking point between her and Elizabeth I. When Henry II died on 10 July 1559 from injuries sustained in a joust, fifteen-year-old Francis became King of France, with Mary, aged sixteen, as his queen consort. Two of Mary's uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, were now dominant in French politics, enjoying an ascendancy called by some historians la tyrannie Guisienne.

In Scotland, the power of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation was rising at the expense of Mary's mother, Mary of Guise, who maintained effective control only through the use of French troops. The Protestant Lords invited English troops into Scotland in an attempt to secure Protestantism, and a Huguenot rising in France, called the Tumult of Amboise, in March 1560 made it impossible for the French to send further support.

Armour of Henry II of France, Vest

Instead, the Guise brothers sent ambassadors to negotiate a settlement. On 11 June 1560, their sister Mary of Guise died, and so the question of future Franco-Scots relations was a pressing one. Under the terms of the Treaty of Edinburgh, signed by Mary's representatives on 6 July 1560, France and England undertook to withdraw troops from Scotland and France recognised Elizabeth's right to rule England.

However, the seventeen-year-old Mary, still in France and grieving for her mother, refused to ratify the treaty. King Francis II died on 5 December 1560, of a middle ear infection which led to an abscess in his brain. Mary was grief-stricken. Her mother-in-law, Catherine de' Medici, became regent for the late king's ten-year-old brother Charles IX, who inherited the French throne.

Armour of Henry II of France, Helmet front-view

Mary returned to Scotland nine months after her husband's death, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Having lived in France since the age of five, Mary had little direct experience of the dangerous and complex political situation in Scotland.

As a devout Catholic, she was regarded with suspicion by many of her subjects, as well as by Elizabeth, her father's cousin.

Scotland was torn between Catholic and Protestant factions, and Mary's illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, was a leader of the Protestants. The Protestant reformer John Knox preached against Mary, condemning her for hearing Mass, dancing, and dressing too elaborately.

She summoned him to her presence to remonstrate with him unsuccessfully, and later charged him with treason, but he was acquitted and released. Mary had briefly met her English-born first cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in February 1561 when she was in mourning for Francis. Darnley's parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, who were Scottish aristocrats as well as English landowners, had sent him to France ostensibly to extend their condolences while hoping for a potential match between their son and Mary.

Both Mary and Darnley were grandchildren of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII of England, and patrilineal descendants of the High Stewards of Scotland. Darnley shared a more recent Stewart lineage with the Hamilton family as a descendant of Mary Stewart, Countess of Arran, a daughter of James II of Scotland.

Armour of Henry II of France, Helmet. side-view

 They next met on Saturday 17 February 1565 at Wemyss Castle in Scotland, after which Mary fell in love with the "long lad" (as Queen Elizabeth called him—he was over six feet tall). They married at Holyrood Palace on 29 July 1565, even though both were Catholic and a papal dispensation for the marriage of first cousins had not been obtained.

English statesmen William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester had worked to obtain Darnley's licence to travel to Scotland from his home in England. Although her advisors had thus brought the couple together, Elizabeth felt threatened by the marriage, because as descendants of her aunt, both Mary and Darnley were claimants to the English throne and their children, if any, would inherit an even stronger, combined claim. However, Mary's insistence on the marriage seems to have stemmed from passion rather than calculation.

The English ambassador Nicholas Throckmorton stated "the saying is that surely she [Queen Mary] is bewitched", adding that the marriage could only be averted "by violence".

Boy King Edward VI, son of Henry VIII

 The union infuriated Elizabeth, who felt the marriage should not have gone ahead without her permission, as Darnley was both her cousin and an English subject. Mary's son by Darnley, James, was born on 19 June 1566 in Edinburgh Castle, but the murder of Rizzio led inevitably to the breakdown of her marriage.

In October 1566, while staying at Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, Mary made a journey on horseback of at least four hours each way to visit the Earl of Bothwell at Hermitage Castle, where he lay ill from wounds sustained in a skirmish with border reivers.

The ride was later used as evidence by Mary's enemies that the two were lovers, though no suspicions were voiced at the time and Mary had been accompanied by her councillors and guards.

Immediately after her return to Jedburgh, she suffered a serious illness that included frequent vomiting, loss of sight, loss of speech, convulsions and periods of unconsciousness.

She was thought to be near death or dying. Her recovery from 25 October onwards was credited to the skill of her French physicians. The cause of her illness is unknown; diagnoses include physical exhaustion and mental stress, haemorrhage of a gastric ulcer, and porphyria. Mary was convicted on 25 October and sentenced to death with only one commissioner, Lord Zouche, expressing any form of dissent.

Despite this, Elizabeth hesitated to order her execution, even in the face of pressure from the English Parliament to carry out the sentence.

Elizabeth I

She was concerned that the killing of a queen set a discreditable precedent, and was fearful of the consequences, especially if, in retaliation, Mary's son James formed an alliance with the Catholic powers and invaded England.

Elizabeth asked Paulet, Mary's final custodian, if he would contrive a clandestine way to "shorten the life" of Mary, which he refused to do on the grounds that he would not make "a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot on my poor posterity". On 1 February 1587, Elizabeth signed the death warrant, and entrusted it to William Davison, a privy councillor.

On the 3rd, ten members of the Privy Council of England, having been summoned by Cecil without Elizabeth's knowledge, decided to carry out the sentence at once.

At Fotheringhay on the evening of 7 February 1587, Mary was told that she was to be executed the next morning. She spent the last hours of her life in prayer, distributing her belongings to her household, and writing her will and a letter to the King of France.