Mary, Queen of Scots(1542–1587)

Mary Stuart was born at Linlithgow Palace on the eighth of December 1542, only surviving child of James the Fifth of Scotland and Marie of Guise. Her father died six days after her birth; she was crowned Queen of Scots at the Chapel Royal of Stirling on the ninth of September 1543, nine months old, the regalia held above her head. Through the years that followed she became the prize of the diplomacy of the Reformation, promised first to the future Edward the Sixth of England and then, after the wars of the Rough Wooing, to the dauphin François of France. In August 1548, in her sixth year, she was sent to the French court for her safety and her education, and grew up at the Valois palaces of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and the Louvre in the household of the dauphin.

She married François at Notre-Dame de Paris on the twenty-fourth of April 1558 in her sixteenth year. On the tenth of July 1559 her father-in-law Henri the Second of France died of jousting wounds and the seventeen-year-old François became François the Second; Mary was Queen Consort of France for the next sixteen months. She wore her crown at his coronation at Reims in September 1559 and held the court at Chenonceau through the summer of 1560. The French marriage made her, in 1559, the queen reigning over the largest combined territory of any monarch in western Europe except Habsburg Spain.

François the Second died in December 1560; Mary, eighteen years old, sailed home to Scotland in August 1561 and landed at Leith. She took up the personal rule of her own kingdom with the dignity, the linguistic facility (she spoke Scots, French, Latin, Italian and Spanish) and the political education of a queen raised at the most polished court in Europe. Through the next six years she held a court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse that became the cultural centre of Scotland: the great Scots makar Alexander Scott wrote for it, Pierre de Ronsard sent her sonnets from Paris, the masques and the music and the manuscript portraiture of her reign defined the high Renaissance moment of the Scottish court. She married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565 and bore at Edinburgh Castle on the nineteenth of June 1566 her only son, the future James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England.

Her personal rule of Scotland ended in 1567 amid the political crisis that followed Darnley's death and her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell. She abdicated in favour of her infant son on the twenty-fourth of July 1567, fled into England in May 1568, and was held under varying degrees of confinement for the next eighteen and a half years at Carlisle, Bolton, Tutbury, Sheffield and finally Fotheringhay. She held the dignity of her queenship through every one of those years, conducted a state correspondence with her Guise relatives in France and with Philip the Second of Spain, embroidered the Marian Hangings now held at Oxburgh Hall, and went to her execution at Fotheringhay on the morning of the eighth of February 1587 in a red kirtle, the colour of martyrdom, with the great composure that has carried her name through the next four hundred and forty years.

Her son James the Sixth, born at Edinburgh Castle in 1566 and crowned King of Scots in 1567, succeeded Elizabeth the First of England on the twenty-fourth of March 1603 and reigned as James the First of England and the Sixth of Scotland, the first monarch of the united British crowns. The Stuart dynasty Mary's marriage to Darnley founded sat on the throne of Great Britain for the next eleven decades. Every monarch of the United Kingdom from James the First to Elizabeth the Second of the twenty-first century descends from her, as do the kings of France through her cousins of Guise and the present royal house of the United Kingdom through her great-great-granddaughter Sophia of Hanover. The Stewart name on the British throne is, in plain descent, her name.