Mary Queen of Scots

Mary Stuart was born in December 1542, and within a week her life had been decided for her. Her father, James V of Scotland, died days after her birth, and the infant at Linlithgow became Queen of Scots before she could focus her eyes. She was crowned in a Scotland no baby could govern, which meant her kingdom belonged from the first hour to whichever faction of noblemen could seize the child and the regency with her. An infant queen was above all a marriage prize. Henry VIII of England wanted her for his son, and when persuasion failed he sent armies north to insist — a brutal campaign the Scots later named the Rough Wooing. The alternative was France. In 1548, aged five, Mary was put on a ship and sent to the French court, to be raised as a French princess and betrothed to the heir to the French throne. She left a country she would not see again for thirteen years, and she left it in other people's hands. Everything that later looked like her failure to control Scotland began here, in a childhood spent somewhere else.

The French years were the happiest of her life and, arguably, the most damaging to it. She grew up at one of the most sophisticated courts in Europe — tall, charming, fluent in French, trained in the manners of a great monarchy rather than the hard factional politics of Scotland. In 1558 she married the Dauphin, Francis; the following year he became King Francis II, and Mary, at seventeen, was simultaneously Queen of Scots and queen consort of France. It was the summit of her fortunes and it lasted barely eighteen months. Francis, never strong, died in December 1560, and the eighteen-year-old first lady of France was suddenly a childless widow with no role there at all. Her mother, who had governed Scotland in her absence, had also died, and the country Mary owned had changed beyond recognition. Were it not for that double bereavement, she might have stayed in France for the rest of her life and never troubled English history at all.

She returned in 1561 to a kingdom that had officially become Protestant during her absence. A Catholic queen now ruled a Reformed country, and the preacher John Knox thundered against her from the pulpit of St Giles', treating her private Mass as a public scandal. Remarkably, Mary did not try to reverse the Reformation: she heard Mass in her own chapel and left the new Church alone, a compromise that satisfied nobody but kept the peace for years. The deeper problem lay south of the border. As a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, Mary had a strong claim to the English throne, and many Catholics regarded Elizabeth I as illegitimate and therefore regarded Mary as England's rightful queen. That claim was Mary's greatest asset and her death sentence: it made her the natural figurehead for every English Catholic who wanted a different monarch, and it tied Elizabeth's legitimacy to her own. Two queens, one island, one crown too few.

In 1565 Mary married her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. On paper it was shrewd: he too descended from Henry VII, so their children would carry a doubled claim to England. In practice it was the worst decision of her life. Darnley was vain, unstable and greedy for the crown matrimonial — royal power in his own right — which Mary refused him. Within months the marriage had curdled into open hostility, and Darnley let himself be recruited by a faction of Protestant lords who wanted to break her authority. In March 1566 they acted. Armed men burst into Mary's supper room at Holyrood and dragged out her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, stabbing him to death in the next chamber while the queen — six months pregnant — was held at gunpoint. Whatever else it was, the murder was a demonstration: the queen could be terrorised in her own palace. Three months later Mary bore a son, James — instantly the most important child in both kingdoms, an heir with a claim to two thrones.

Darnley did not live to see him grow. In February 1567, while Darnley lay recovering from illness, the house at Kirk o' Field on the edge of Edinburgh was destroyed by a gunpowder explosion in the small hours, an act requiring planning, money and accomplices. Darnley's body was found in the garden outside, apparently untouched by the blast — a detail that has kept historians arguing ever since. Suspicion fell at once on James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a hard, capable border lord close to the queen. He was tried and acquitted in proceedings so obviously managed that the verdict convinced nobody. Then, three months after the murder, Mary married him. It is the act that destroyed her. Whether the abduction that preceded it was staged or real, whether she was coerced, in love, or simply out of options — none of this has ever been settled. The effect is certain. To marry the chief suspect in her husband's killing was, to Scotland and Europe alike, to confess her own complicity.

Her support collapsed within weeks. The lords rose, her army melted away without a real battle, and she was imprisoned at Loch Leven and forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, crowned James VI. Her enemies then produced their evidence: the so-called casket letters, a bundle of letters and sonnets said to have been written by Mary to Bothwell and to implicate her directly in the plot against Darnley. They justified everything that had been done to her. Their authenticity is disputed and always has been. The originals vanished in the following century and nobody alive has examined them; the surviving copies may be edited, partly genuine, or forgeries built around real letters written to somebody else. Historians remain divided. Mary escaped from Loch Leven in 1568, raised one last army, and was beaten at Langside within an hour. Then she made her final mistake. Rather than take ship for France, where she had family, money and standing, she crossed into England and threw herself on the mercy of a cousin she had never met, whose throne she had once claimed as her own.

Mary arrived in England in 1568 as a fellow queen asking for hospitality and an army. She got neither. Elizabeth faced a problem with no clean answer: restoring Mary by force meant arming a Catholic rival; sending her back to Scotland meant handing her to her enemies; letting her sail to France or Spain meant releasing her to raise a Catholic invasion. So Elizabeth chose the option that solved nothing and postponed everything. Mary was held in honourable custody — moved between castles and manor houses, allowed servants, embroidery and correspondence, but never permitted to leave. It lasted nineteen years: she was twenty-five when it began and forty-four when it ended, and she spent those years writing to every Catholic power in Europe. Meanwhile English Catholics conspired repeatedly to free her and put her on Elizabeth's throne. Plot followed plot through the 1570s and 1580s, and each failure made the next harder to survive, because every conspiracy strengthened those at Elizabeth's council table who said the prisoner would have to die.

The end was engineered by Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary and the architect of a remarkably sophisticated intelligence network. Walsingham did not merely want to stop the next conspiracy; he wanted one that would implicate Mary in her own handwriting. He arranged a secret channel by which her letters were smuggled in and out of Chartley in a beer barrel — a channel his own agents controlled from end to end. Every message was intercepted, copied and decoded by his cipher expert Thomas Phelippes before going innocently on its way. In 1586 a young Catholic gentleman, Anthony Babington, wrote describing a plan to free her and assassinate Elizabeth. Mary replied, and her reply approved the enterprise; Phelippes, not content with that, added a forged postscript asking Babington to name his fellow conspirators. The plotters were arrested and executed; Mary was tried at Fotheringhay Castle, denied counsel, and convicted of treason. Elizabeth signed the death warrant in February 1587 and then, once it had been carried out, insisted furiously that she had never meant it used, disgracing the secretary who delivered it.

Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay in February 1587, before a small audience in the great hall. She died well, by every account, dressed in a red undergarment as she went to the block; the executioner did not manage the work in a single stroke. The long echo began at once. Elizabeth died childless in 1603, and the crown passed to the one person with the best hereditary claim: Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England and united the two crowns in a single sovereign — precisely the outcome Mary had pursued all her life and never come close to achieving alive. In 1612 James had his mother's body moved to Westminster Abbey, under a monument grander than Elizabeth's: dynastic theatre that made the Stuart line, not the Tudor one, the story England now told about itself. And the argument has never stopped. Was Mary a romantic victim, destroyed by the factional violence of the men around her and by a cousin who could not afford to let her live? Or a reckless politician whose own choices — Darnley, Bothwell, the letters, the plots — handed her enemies everything they needed? Both cases can be made honestly from the same evidence, which is why she has never been allowed to rest.