Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary Stuart inherited the Scottish crown as a baby in December 1542, briefly became queen of France, and lost her own throne in 1567 after a string of scandals and revolts. Her claim to the English succession made her the focus of Catholic plotting for two decades, and she ended her life on the block in England in 1587. Her son James later united the Scottish and English crowns.

Mary was born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, the only legitimate child of James V to survive him, and her father died six days later. While regents governed the Kingdom of Scotland, first the Earl of Arran and from 1554 her French mother, Mary of Guise, rival powers fought over her marriage. In 1543 Henry VIII of England secured a treaty promising her to his son Edward, but the Scottish Parliament rejected it that December, and English armies invaded in the years of raiding known as the Rough Wooing.

To keep her out of English hands, Mary was promised instead to the Dauphin Francis and shipped to France in August 1548, aged five. She grew up at the French court, learning several languages, music and riding. She married Francis in Paris in April 1558, and when Henry II died in July 1559 the couple became king and queen of the Kingdom of France. Because many Catholics thought Elizabeth illegitimate, Mary, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was also hailed in France as rightful queen of England. Francis died in December 1560, leaving her a widow at eighteen.

Mary landed at Leith in August 1561 to rule a country transformed by the Protestant Reformation. A Catholic herself, she accepted the new religious settlement, kept Protestant advisers such as her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, and endured the preaching of John Knox against her. In July 1565 she married her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, provoking a short rebellion by Moray. The marriage quickly failed. In March 1566 Darnley joined conspirators who stabbed her secretary, David Rizzio, to death in front of her at Holyrood, and in June she gave birth to their son James.

In February 1567 an explosion wrecked the house at Kirk o' Field where Darnley was staying, and he was found dead in the garden. The Earl of Bothwell, widely blamed, was acquitted after a brief trial, carried Mary off to Dunbar Castle and married her in May. A coalition of nobles raised an army against them; Mary's forces melted away at Carberry Hill in June, and she was held at Lochleven Castle. On 24 July 1567 she was forced to give up the crown to her infant son.

Mary escaped in May 1568, was defeated at Langside and crossed the Solway into the Kingdom of England, hoping for help from Elizabeth I. Instead she was kept in custody for more than eighteen years. An inquiry examined the disputed "casket letters" that seemed to link her to Darnley's death, but concluded that nothing was proven against her; historians still disagree about whether they were forged. Plots to put her on the English throne, such as the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, kept her under suspicion.

In 1586 Francis Walsingham's agents intercepted her coded letters about the Babington Plot, which showed her approving a plan to kill Elizabeth. A court of noblemen convicted her in October. Elizabeth signed the warrant on 1 February 1587, and Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February. Her son, by then James VI, later moved her body to Westminster Abbey. Writers have judged her very differently ever since, from Protestant critics who painted her as an adulteress and murderer to admirers who saw her as a victim of ambitious nobles.

Our 1530 map shows the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England as separate realms shortly before her birth, and the 1600 map shows them late in Elizabeth's reign, shortly before her son James inherited the English throne as well.