Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland in December 1542, when she was six days old, on the death of her father James V. Her mother, Mary of Guise, belonged to a powerful French noble family, and the infant queen was sent to France in 1548 under the terms of her betrothal to the Dauphin Francis. Through her grandmother Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England, Mary also held a strong claim to the English throne, a circumstance that shaped the whole of her later life.

She married Francis in 1558 and was briefly queen consort of France when he reigned as Francis II from 1559 until his early death in 1560. Widowed at eighteen, Mary returned in 1561 to a Scotland that had recently adopted a Protestant religious settlement, while she herself remained Catholic. In 1565 she married her half-cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who, like Mary, descended from Margaret Tudor; their son, the future James VI, was born in 1566.

Darnley was murdered at Kirk o' Field in February 1567 under circumstances never fully resolved. Mary's marriage three months later to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was widely suspected of involvement in the crime, destroyed her political position. Confederate lords confronted her at Carberry Hill, imprisoned her at Lochleven Castle, and in July 1567 compelled her to abdicate in favour of her infant son. After escaping in 1568 she was defeated at Langside and fled across the border into England.

There she became the prisoner of her cousin Elizabeth I for nearly nineteen years. As the leading Catholic claimant to the English succession, Mary was the focus of repeated conspiracies against Elizabeth. Evidence of her complicity in the Babington Plot of 1586 led to her trial and conviction, and she was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587. The English crown she never obtained passed in 1603 to her son James, uniting the Stuart and Tudor inheritances in a single line.