PANALBA

Mary Queen of Scots

Scotland Magazine 08/12/2010 06:58 AM

THE House of Stewart provided fourteen monarchs for its country. Beginning as "stewards" to the rulers of Scotland, they became rulers of the four nations of the British Isles. The last of the line died a Cardinal in Rome. Two were executed, two were assassinated, one died in battle, one died accidentally, and seven died of natural causes - although two of those, who may have suffered from hereditary porphyria, died of grief and nervous exhaustion.

Romance surrounds much of the dynasty, but one member stands out in this regard - Mary. She was born in 1542. Her father James V had just lost the Battle of Solway Moss to the English and retired to Linlithgow Palace in a state of collapse. Six days after his daughter's birth, he turned his face to the wall and died; Mary became Queen of Scots.

Two factors had complicated the lives of her predecessors. The first of the dynasty won the Crown when Robert the Steward married King Robert Bruce's daughter. Others amongst the Scottish nobility considered that the Crown could easily have been their own. They considered the king to be a debatable first among equals rather than an elevated being anointed by God. And like Mary herself, four out of the run of five Jameses had succeeded to the throne as minors which allowed the aristocracy to brawl with each other about the regency. Perhaps a third problem should be added. To a man, the Scots nobles were untrustworthy, mendacious, grasping, incapable of vision, and never looked beyond their own interests to those of Scotland.

Mary was born on the eve of the Reformation in Scotland. The country was divided into Catholic and Protestant factions. She was betrothed at a year old to the heir of Henry VIII of England but this was repudiated when the Catholic faction under her half-brother, the Earl of Arran, gained the ascendancy. In retaliation, Henry launched an invasion known as the 'Royal Wooing', which culminated in a devastating defeat for the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in 1547.

The Scots appealed to the French for help and Mary was taken to France. French troops came to Scotland to assist the Regent, Mary's mother, Mary of Guise.

So for the next thirteen years Mary lived with the French royal family in France, at the most sophisticated and powerful court in Europe. She was respected as a queen in her own right but the queen of a small barbaric state on the edge of civilisation. When Mary went to fancy dress balls, she donned her native costume - animal skins sewn to her gown. Aged sixteen, she married the Dauphin and, a year later, became Queen of France. A year after that, she was widowed leaving her isolated and irrelevant. At the age of nineteen, she decided to return to Scotland to re-claim her realm.

She landed in Leith, as inappropriate a queen as there could be for such a turbulent country. Young, beautiful, widowed, inexperienced, she was a staunch Roman Catholic in a country which had outlawed that religion and was under the influence of John Knox, a fundamentalist Protestant. Through her grandmother, sister of Henry VIII, Mary was also heir to the throne of England until such time as its occupant, Elizabeth I, should marry and produce a Protestant heir. The English queen was surrounded by a coterie of loyal and able counsellors. Mary had no one she could trust.

Almost immediately she clashed with Knox. Mary was unusual in that she was prepared to allow religious toleration. Knox was not, and was scandalised by the Masses held by the Queen and her attendants. However, her priority was marriage, to produce an heir for both the thrones. Mary tried to obtain Elizabeth's agreement for various candidates for a spouse, but the English monarch, famously a virgin all of her life, prevaricated and eventually suggested the scandal-ridden Earl of Leiicester, a cast-off suitor of her own.

In 1565, Mary fell in love - perhaps fell in lust - and married her handsome cousin Henry, Lord Darnley, who stood next in line to herself to the English throne. Elizabeth was furious and Darnley's enemies raised a rebellion which Mary crushed. Within a couple of months, she was both pregnant and alienated from her worthless husband. A matter of weeks later, Darnley and other nobles burst into her bedchamber in Holyrood Palace to drag out her Italian secretary and counsellor David Rizzio and stab him to death within her earshot. Her son James was born in June 1566.

In early 1567, Edinburgh was shaken by a massive explosion which flattened the house in which Lord Darnley was staying. His body was found strangled in the garden. The Queen was suspected of conniving in the crime but the culprit was almost certainly her new advisor, the Earl of Bothwell, who was, in all likelihood, acting upon his own initiative. He was given a show trial and acquitted. Six weeks after the murder, Bothwell abducted Mary and married her.

The nobility, most of them Bothwell's enemies, were scandalised, and Mary surrendered to them rather than face a battle. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her baby son and was imprisoned on an island in Loch Leven.

In May 1568, Mary escaped. Her supporters were defeated at the Battle of Langside, and Mary fled to England to seek protection from Queen Elizabeth. The two women never met, but each loomed large in the mind of the other. But Mary was too dangerous. She was the Catholic heir to the Protestant English throne and regarded as the legitimate ruler by most of Catholic Europe and many Englishmen. Elizabeth's advisers wanted Mary dead, but there was no legal basis for her execution and killing a queen would set a dangerous precedent.

For the next twenty years, Mary languished in an increasingly grim series of castles, the focus for Catholic plots often initially encouraged by English agents determined to implicate her and force Elizabeth to sign her death warrant. Finally they succeeded.

With May's correspondence being secretly monitored, she put her signature to a letter implicating herself in a plot by Francis Babington to assassinate Elizabeth. She was tried and condemned to death. Still the English queen hesitated, but four months later, on 8th February 1587, Mary was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle.

And her son James, a strange, haunted figure, famously described as "the wisest fool in Christendom", made only a faint protest at his mother's decapitation and succeeded to the English throne on Elizabeth's death in 1603.

As ruler of England, Ireland and Wales, as well as Scotland, James was probably the most successful monarch of his dynasty, but after his death his son was to be executed by the English parliament. That, however, is another story.