Mary, Queen of Scots

11 Key excerpts on "Mary, Queen of Scots"

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  Scottish Queens, 1034–1714

  The Queens and Consorts Who Shaped a Nation

  • Rosalind K. Marshall(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Birlinn

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mary, Queen of Scots

  ‘Q ueen of Scots’ was the title used by female monarchs and consorts of Scotland before 1603, but for most of us these words mean only one person, Mary Smart, the daughter of James V and Mary of Guise.1 Thousands of people who have no particular interest in history can recount the general outlines of Mary’s career and are ready to argue about her character, her motives and whether or not she deserved her ultimate fate. Short of the discovery of the missing Casket Letters, for instance, it seems unlikely that we will ever have the definitive answer to our questions about her guilt or innocence, but it is useful to set her in the context of the other Scottish queens regnant and consort, since the problems she confronted were not exclusively hers but were theirs too.

  One of the most extraordinary features of Mary’s extraordinary life is that she was recognised as Queen at six days old by Scottish nobles who regarded any female ruler as being not merely undesirable but unnatural. The Bible said that women should be subservient to men, and that was what everyone believed. So why did the Scots so readily accept a female infant as their monarch?2 There was a precedent, of course, for the Maid of Norway had inherited Alexander III’s throne. She had not lived long enough to rule, but everyone knew how her untimely death had plunged the country into chaos and led to Edward I’s dangerous threat to Scotland’s independence. Even a woman’s rule was preferable to that sort of situation, and the nobles no doubt looked forward to profiting yet again from a royal minority. Indeed, some ambitious lord had only to marry his son to the little Queen and not only would the happy bridegroom receive the title of king but all his relatives would stand to enjoy an amazing increase of power, wealth and status.

  In December 1542, however, all thoughts of self-interest for once had to be set aside, for this was a time of great crisis. The English were poised to invade the country after the disaster at Solway Moss and James V’s tiny daughter was the symbol of Scotland’s continuing independence. No one knew better than Mary of Guise how vulnerable her child’s position was. James, 2nd Earl of Arran, now ruling as Lord Governor, was a weak and vacillating young man, but he was also a slippery expert in the art of self-preservation and he was heir to the throne. If anything happened to Mary, Queen of Scots, he would be king. Mary of Guise was terrified that he would either have her daughter killed or sent to England. He had surrounded Linlithgow Palace with his men, ostensibly to guard the little Queen, but Mary of Guise felt like a prisoner and was determined to move to the greater safety of Stirling.3 For his part, Henry VIII was busily putting it about that the infant Mary, Queen of Scots was unlikely to live.4 Had she died, he would have stepped in as king-maker, just as Edward I of England had done after the death of the Maid. Actually, the baby was thriving, and when Henry’s envoy, Sir Ralph Sadler, saw her in March 1543, he had to admit that she was ‘as goodly a child as I have seen, of her age’. Mary of Guise remarked to him that her daughter would be as tall as she was herself and she, Sadler said, was ‘of the largest size of women’.5

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  Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy

  Mary Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion

  • K. Walton(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  When Mary landed on the Scottish coast in 1561, Scotland was not fully stable. The Scots queen began her personal rule with three strikes against her: her gender, her religion, and her lack of knowledge and understanding of Scotland. In addition, she also had to face a group of men who had become used to holding the reins of government since the death of Mary of Guise over a year earlier. These strikes against her inspired many debates over her role in the kingdom. The debates, though not always directed specifically at Mary or her situation, influ- enced the manner in which the Scots treated and respected their queen and resulted in theoretical contributions to the mid-sixteenth-century discussions about gender and religion within the political sphere. From treatises and pamphlets with international readership to broadsheets in Scotland and letters seen only by the addressee, Mary inspired the growth of a new branch of ideas in theoretical literature. Through hindsight, we know that Mary Queen of Scots failed as a queen. In 1561, though, the door to her success was open. With the exception of a small number of men such as John Knox, the Scottish people did welcome home their queen, and upon her arrival in Edinburgh, they greeted her with great celebrations. Her lonely arrival in Scotland only days before did not guarantee her solitary departure The State of Scotland, 1558–1562 15 seven years later. Ideas against the female Catholic monarch might have been written down, but the ideas were not acted upon as reality in 1561. In addition, the international impact of this literature meant that many of the ideas associated with Mary would survive after her imprisonment and death. To understand Mary’s reign and the reactions to her position as a major political figure, it is necessary to first understand the mindset of the Scots in August 1561, when Mary returned to her native land.

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  Mary Queen of Scots in History

  • C. A. Campbell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  No tale of romance possesses a more lasting charm than does the simple history of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots. Since the day on which Sir Ralph Sadler, Ambassador of Queen Elizabeth, was privileged to see her in the nursery at Linlithgow, and pronounced her a "right fair and goodly child," every fresh contribution to her history has been welcomed with unparalleled eagerness. Nor is there any indication that her life-story will lose its fascination with the lapse of time. Scarcely a year passes away that does not see a considerable addition made to the already ponderous store of Mary-Stewart literature. Nevertheless, very many even of her admirers have, to say the least, an inadequate knowledge of her life. They know her only as a heroine of romance, or as a pious widow, kneeling in devotion with the Rosary hanging at her girdle, or as a cheerful martyr resigning her head to the block; and they forget that for seven years she reigned over the most turbulent nation of Europe, that she opened and closed parliament, deliberated in the Council Chamber, led armies to the field, that, in a word, she lived a most real and stirring life.

  I confess it is no easy task to present a complete and, at the same time, correct picture of her career. The difficulty is owing to the large amount of matter, written in different and contradictory spirits, with which some of the most important events of her life have been obscured. Religion, politics, patriotism, avarice, personal friendships and hatreds, either conjointly or individually, determined the actions of those who had part in framing the history of the period. It becomes necessary, therefore, to learn how far the men on whose testimony, or from whose conduct, we have to pass judgment on certain incidents in Mary's life, were influenced by one or other of these motives.

  Mary Queen of Scots was born in Linlithgow Palace, in Scotland, on the 8th of December, 1542. The condition of Scotland at the time was sad and evil-boding. Her father, the well-beloved James V., was at Falkland, dying of a broken heart, in consequence of the humiliating conduct of the disaffected Scottish nobles at Solway Moss. When told that a daughter had been born to him at Linlithgow, he gave no sign of pleasure, but sadly said, "God's will be done." Then, his memory reverting to the person through whom the Stewarts had ascended the throne of Scotland, he added, "It (the crown) came with a lass and it will go with a lass." He died shortly after, in the thirty-first year of his age, leaving to his distracted country an infant queen, only six days old.

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  Mary Queen of Scots

  Romance and Nation

  • Jayne Lewis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It would seem that the excesses of “sorrow” Mary both endured and provoked not only undermine sorrow’s socializing function: sympathetic investment in the Queen of Scots is apt to evolve into a form of “forget[ting].” And what is forgotten is not only the queen’s “frailties” but also our own as self-congratulating moral judges of the modern age. This in turn leads us to falsely value our tears, in a way that disarranges the economy of meaning in which they properly belong. It also induces us to take as the object of emotion someone (“a person who had attained much nearer to pure virtue”) who does not exist. Mary, in other words, equals both excess and privation—an excess of suffering and hence a privation of being, both of the subject and of the object. Just as she did in the other avenues of sensibility we have explored, she here uncovers the void at the heart of the sentimental method so crucial to eighteenth-century historiography. The most useful tool in the campaign to gain a common sensible view of the past, the Queen of Scots also threatens to overturn the stabilizing rhetorical techniques that had replaced the freewheeling and tirelessly inquisitive voices of the Stuart historians. Partly by provoking the treason of pity that had infiltrated so much of the literature about her in her own day, she could now turn modern versions of history into a romance of identification.

  When in 1791 a teenage Jane Austen wrote her parody of eighteenthcentury historiography, the diminutive History of England, she quite logically made that “bewitching princess” Mary Queen of Scots the heroine of the piece. Illustrated by her sister Cassandra with wry cameos of both Mary and Elizabeth, Austen’s History miniaturizes and domesticates English history, abbreviating the life of every monarch it depicts and expressing far more interest in Henry VIII’s “riding through the Streets of London with Anna Bullen” than in the broad canvas of political and religious upheaval that characterized his reign.52

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  Scotland Re-formed, 1488-1587

  • Jane Dawson(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

    ‘The Empire of a Woman’: Mary, Queen of Scots (  –  ) T o manage the unusual situation of an adult monarch returning to rule the kingdom in person, Scots turned instinctively to the famil-iar precedent of the end of a royal minority. In common with other minor-ity regimes, what had been done in the ruler’s name bore little resemblance to the wishes of the reigning monarch. In  , this mis-match assumed the gigantic proportions of a diplomatic and religious revolution and the violent overthrow of the queen’s mother and her regime: the question was how much of the  settlement would survive Queen Mary’s return. In addition, there was the separate problem of a female ruler. Although from  Scots had been content that Mary should reign, having an adult woman rule in person, being a king as well as a queen, was a new departure. Despite Mary of Guise having gained respect for her proficiency as regent, ‘the empire of a woman’ was far from ideal. Many agreed with John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women that it ran counter to the natural order, though very few endorsed his radical remedy of replacing every queen regnant. With their accustomed pragmatism, the Scottish political elite treated Mary as they did male rulers and judged her personality and performance. Mary’s dynastic and female duty to marry and produce an heir was plain, but she was surrounded at the French and Scottish courts by con-flicting and contradictory messages concerning sexual love found in con-temporary love poetry. In a man’s world where women were expected to be subordinate to their husbands, being a married queen regnant placed a severe constitutional and personal strain upon the couple: even the dutiful Philip II of Spain had found it exceptionally di ffi cult to reign in England alongside Queen Mary Tudor. Neither Darnley nor Bothwell was remotely suitable material for a royal consort. The choice of a husband was

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  Elizabeth I

  • Judith M. Richards(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 On the other hand, it might be noted that she had come to the throne at a time when religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant believers were increasingly a major factor in wars, both civil and international, across Europe; to most modern eyes, one of the more remarkable achievements of her regime was that the same pattern was not established in her England despite recurrent threats, and a major factor in this relative peace was precisely the degree of accommodation that she offered. It must, however, be noted that probably few devout contemporaries shared that modern admiration for her moderate stance.

  The fall and flight of Mary Queen of Scots

  Meanwhile, back in Scotland, although after the christening of their son relations between Mary and her husband seemed to have improved, this soon proved to be illusory. There followed a sequence of extraordinary events, beginning with the violent death of Darnley; about the responsibility for that historians still argue, and disagree on where culpability for the several crimes within the royal circle lay.

  In outline, relations worsened again between the Scottish queen and her husband – a man, it might be noted, universally agreed to be of deplorable character (excepting only, perhaps, by his immediate family). Darnley, who had been ill, was apparently reconciled with his wife, but murdered in her absence, and almost immediately the queen married Bothwell, the man most widely believed to have been responsible for her husband's death. The marriage had been preceded by Bothwell's sudden divorce of his wife, and perhaps by Bothwell's rape of the widowed queen. Many have doubted the rape, but Robert Melville, who was once again near the heart of events, always thought it had indeed occurred. Whatever the reason for the marriage having taken place, it also set off a series of battles within Mary's realm that culminated in the defeat of Mary and Bothwell, with the latter soon fleeing Scotland and Mary being taken prisoner and placed in a castle in the middle of Loch Leven. It was from such events that two feuding groups emerged: the queen's men (for Mary) and the king's men (soon promoting the abdication of Mary and the installation of her infant son as nominal king, with Mary's illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, as regent).

  For the purposes of this study, the significance of those events lies primarily in the response of Elizabeth to them, above all to the imprisonment of another monarch. In general, the English councillors were delighted at Mary's disgrace, particularly by her quick remarriage to the likely murderer of her previous husband. Those who shared Cecil's views that her claim to be Elizabeth's heir apparent made Mary a potent threat to English security were particularly pleased at what was seen as her destruction of her own reputation. As one English observer contentedly remarked, Mary's fall was another example of the inevitable fate of ‘such as live not in the fear of God’.

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  Queenship in Early Modern Europe

  • Charles Beem(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  By 1554, Mary assumed the regency of Scotland. With vigor and determination, Mary imposed a king-like authority upon her daughter’s kingdom, enforcing the laws, going on progress, and financing her government through the profits of her industrial enterprises. At the same time, Mary governed, as her Guise relatives had advised, with “conciliation, gentleness, and moderation,” much in the manner of her neighbor, Mary I of England, who, as we have seen, also brought a queenly approach to her female kingship. But despite Mary’s political skill and acumen, the outbreak of the Scottish Reformation, a more grassroots movement than that which emerged in England, stymied her ability to create political consensus. While the first three years of Mary’s formal regency witnessed a stabilization of royal control, the events of 1558–1560 spiraled out of control, necessitating her continued presence in Scotland, at the expense of missing her daughter’s wedding to the dauphin in France. Even before this, in 1557, Mary induced the Scottish parliament to enter the Habsburg-Valois war of 1557, in which England had entered on the side of Spain, resulting in a series of border skirmishes. But it was a pyrrhic victory; Mary I of England died in November 1558 and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, whom the Lords of the Congregation swiftly viewed as their natural ally.

  Mary was initially successful in military operations against the Protestants as English troops were repulsed, but the promised French convoy from Calais never arrived after an English fleet showed up in the straits of Fife. Mary’s health slowly deteriorated, with the kind of swelling in her legs and resulting lameness that her daughter would also suffer from. In the spring of 1560, Mary met with the Lords of the Congregation, desirous of peace, and begged them to maintain the French alliance as well as her daughter’s queenship. She died in June, fearful for the future of her daughter’s crown in a Protestant Scotland.

  Within the larger context of Early Modern European queenship, Mary of Guise set a standard for queenly achievement. She had married James V swiftly after the death of her first husband, leaving her young son in France to become Scotland’s queen, quickly bearing a series of children for her husband before his untimely demise, four years into her queenship. As a still youthful and eligible widow, Mary put her daughter’s interests before her own, remaining unmarried and in Scotland, securing a future king for her daughter while negotiating as best she could the dynamic vagaries of the Scottish Reformation with skill, confidence, and determination. Mary of Guise’s dowager queenship was a powerful model for Catherine de Medici, who in 1560 began her own tumultuous career as both regent and powerful player in French politics.

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  Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542-1600

  • A. Wilkinson(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  She continued to cultivate this attachment, born from her years as the golden child at Henri II’s court, after her return to Scotland in 1561, surrounding herself with Frenchmen and news from France.Politi- cally, Mary’s relations with France took rather more surprising turns. From 1561 to her execution in 1587, Mary presented persistent and thorny problems for France, largely of her own making. The French response to these problems was, effectively, to cast the Queen of Scots and Dowager Queen of France into the political wilderness. The French Mary Queen of Scots: A French Life 35 could ill afford to too closely associate themselves with Mary, for to do so would complicate even further their relationship with the Scots and more importantly exacerbate tensions with the English at a time when the Spanish threat demanded the need for a powerful ally, albeit an unfamiliar one. The demands of international politics short-circuited the call of international Catholicism. 36 Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion

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  SCOTLAND EB

  • Magnus Magnusson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins

    (Publisher)

  Despite the strident enmity of Knox and some of the other Reformer preachers, Mary embarked on her personal rule with much energy and common-sense. She made several royal progresses – to Fife, to Aberdeen, to Inverness, to Argyll, to Ayrshire, to the Borders – overcoming all the difficulties of travel and terrain with tireless gaiety. Everywhere she went, the people were enchanted by her vivacious charm – merchants and farm-workers, Highland lairds and Lowland washerwomen alike. Tall, athletic, graceful and dazzlingly beautiful with her almond-shaped hazel eyes and auburn hair, she looked every inch a queen.

  In these early years, ably advised by her half-brother Lord James Stewart (whom she made Earl of Moray in 1562) and her secretary of state, Maitland of Lethington, Mary governed with great circumspection and intelligence. She did not ratify the Reformation Acts of 1560 (which made them, technically, illegal), but she made no attempt to revoke them. She was scrupulous in showing no favouritism to her fellow-Catholics. She continued to practise her Catholic religion in private, but she sanctioned the prosecution and imprisonment of several priests who had publicly celebrated Mass. She endorsed a decision by her Privy Council that a third of the revenues from the old benefices would be divided between the Kirk and the crown, and some of it was to be devoted to hospitals and schools. Former opponents, like Lord Lindsay of the Byres, were reconciled and became her fervent supporters.

  In the summer of 1562 Mary went with Lord James Stewart on a campaign against the most powerful Catholic family in Scotland, the Gordons of Huntly; George Gordon, the fourth Earl of Huntly (the ‘Cock of the North’, as he was called) and one-time Chancellor of Scotland, died of apoplexy after being captured at a skirmish at Corrichie in October.1 His embalmed corpse was solemnly convicted of treason, and later Mary had to witness the bungled beheading of one of Gordon’s sons, who had tried to abduct her. The scene reduced her to hysterical tears.

  At home, however, the royal court was once again a focus for the cultural life of the kingdom, a glittering, cosmopolitan Renaissance court in the style of Mary’s father and grandfather and her French in-laws. It was crowded with scholars, poets, artists and musicians. There was much dancing and merry-making, much playing of billiards and cards and dice late into the night, and much riding and hunting during the day. But it was not all frivolity. Mary’s personal library of three hundred books contained volumes in many languages, histories of many countries, poetry in Scots, Italian and French, the classics, books on chess and music and a number of theological tracts. She read Latin a great deal, often with the humanist scholar George Buchanan, who wrote Latin masques for the entertainment of the court.2

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  The Birth of a Queen

  Essays on the Quincentenary of Mary I

  • Sarah Duncan, Valerie Schutte, Sarah Duncan, Valerie Schutte(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  18

  Mary’s marriage was also used as a vehicle through which to focus attention on her unnatural desires. Although in sixteenth-century society it was considered natural for a woman to marry and place herself under the headship of a husband, critics manipulated Mary’s motives for marriage, arguing it was a consequence of her unnatural and excessive lust. For example, Knox considered the marriage and consequent betrayal of the realm to be a result of what he deemed Mary’s “inordinate appetites.”

  19

  This notion of excessive lust was also picked up by Ponet who drew a parallel between the queen and the fourteenth-century Joan of Naples, whom he described as “a woman of much lust.” Notoriously, Joan was implicated in the murder of her husband and then proceeded to indulge her lusts in a series of “private marriages.” Ponet reminded his readers that the Neapolitan queen had paid the price for such ungodly behavior as she was later found hanged, murdered in a similar manner to her husband.

  20

  In addition, Mary’s desires were portrayed as abnormal: Hales, for example, referred to the queen’s “mad Affections.”

  21

  For Goodman, Mary’s desires were not only unnatural, they were ungodly and threatened the commonwealth by perverting men who should be godly advisers. Forced to “satisfie the ungodly lusts of their ungodly and unlawful Governesse, wicked Jezabel” her councilors betrayed both the realm and Christ.

  22

  Drawing upon anxieties about female rule, and implying that Mary was irrepressible, Goodman argued that they had willingly become “bondmen to the lustes of a most impotent and unbrydled woman.”

  23

  Knox took the notion of lust a step further. By constructing Mary as Jezebel he had portrayed her as an ungodly tyrant, but he also used the image of Jezebel to draw attention to the queen’s unnatural lusts and her capacity for sinful behavior, as Knox’s Jezebel was guilty of both “fornication and hoordome.”

  24

  Thus by implication, Mary can be viewed as certainly capable of, if not already guilty of, similar behavior. The focus on Mary’s supposed unnatural and excessive desires was to a great extent enabled by commonly held beliefs about women’s weaker, naturally sinful, and lustful nature.

  25

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  The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime

  Elizabethan Politics, 1558-1572

  • Wallace T. MacCaffrey(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Queen of Scots had to be satisfied with protecting her own person and independence without much hope of exacting effective obedience from her sub- jects. Nevertheless it was by her own volition that Mary plunged into the wildest adventure of her life when she proposed to marry her husband's murderer. Politically it was madness and spelled utter ruin to her Scottish career. When it became apparent what her intentions were, her most cool-headed councillor, Moray, departed for Italy. 216 "DOWNFALL OF JVlARY STUART The more supple Maitland found himself dragged, re- luctant but powerless, in the wake of her passionate de- termination to marry Bothwell. Her alliance with the most feared and hated figure in Scottish politics crystal- lized an effective opposition as no other move could have done. The result was a bouleversement which had plenty of precedents in Scottish history but which took contem- porary observers by surprise. The English court watched with mingled feelings the rapid course of events from the murder at Kirk o'Fields in February to the deposition of Mary and the coronation of James VI in July. The opening act, Darnley's murder, immediately shifted the balance in relations between the sovereigns in Elizabeth's favor. Since Mary's marriage the initiative had lain with her; Elizabeth could do little but grumblingly protest at the marriage and at Moray's ex- pulsion; the Rizzio plot had had English approval but had done little to reestablish English influence at the Scot- tish court. Elizabeth's last proposals, in November 1566, had gone as far to conciliate Mary as the English sovereign could go. But now, with the appalling suspicions which hung over the Queen of Scots' head, it was easy for Eliza- beth to seize the advantage. The Queen assumed an air of cold and condescending sympathy and urged Mary to solve the mystery of the murder and to vindicate her own honor.

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