Mary, Queen of Scots, inherited a throne at six days old
Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland six days after her birth in December 1542, when her father died. By sixteen she had married the heir to France; by eighteen she was a widowed former French queen. She then spent nearly nineteen years as the prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England.
Born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, Mary was the only legitimate child of James V to outlive him. A story first set down by John Knox has the dying king lamenting that the Stuart crown had come through a girl and would leave through one, though the line in fact ended with a much later descendant, Queen Anne. Through her grandmother Margaret Tudor, Mary was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, a fact that shaped her whole life. Henry VIII tried to marry her to his son Edward, and when Scotland rejected the deal he launched the military campaign known as the Rough Wooing.
For safety, the five-year-old queen was sent to France in 1548, accompanied by four noble girls of her own age, all called Mary. She grew up at the French court, learned French, Italian, Latin, Spanish and Greek, played the lute and rode and hunted with falcons. Unusually tall for her era at about 1.80 metres, she married the short, stammering Dauphin Francis at Notre Dame in April 1558. When Elizabeth I took the English throne that November, many Catholics regarded Elizabeth as illegitimate and Mary as the rightful queen of England, and the French royal family pointedly added English arms to their own. Francis became king in 1559 and died in December 1560.
Mary returned to Scotland in August 1561, a Catholic sovereign in a newly Protestant kingdom where preachers like Knox openly questioned whether subjects owed her obedience. She began pragmatically, accepting the religious settlement and keeping her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, as an adviser. Her 1565 marriage to her half-cousin Lord Darnley produced a son, James, but collapsed after Darnley arranged the killing of her secretary David Rizzio. In February 1567 Darnley himself died in suspicious circumstances; the Earl of Bothwell, widely blamed, was acquitted and married Mary within months.
A rebellion followed. Imprisoned at Lochleven, she was made to give up the crown to her infant son in July 1567, and after a failed attempt to recover it she fled to England. Elizabeth kept her confined for eighteen and a half years. Convicted in 1586 of plotting Elizabeth's assassination, Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle in February 1587, and her dramatic life has kept her a romantic figure ever since.
Source: Mary, Queen of Scots
