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1567 Mary Queen of Scots deposed
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During her imprisonment at
Lochleven Castle in Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart)
is forced to abdicate in favor of her one-year-old son, later
crowned as King James VI of Scotland. In June, Mary had been
arrested by Scottish nobility outraged by her marriage to
the earl of Bothwell, the alleged murderer of her second
husband.Lord Darnley (they had been hostile to that second
marriage too).
On 14 December 1542, when
just six days old, Mary became queen upon the death of her
father, King James V. James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran (1515-75)
was next in line to the throne, and he acted as regent and
tutor to the young queen until 1554 when her French mother,
Mary of Guise (1515-1560, James V's second wife) became regent.
Hamilton promised Mary in marriage
to Prince Edward of England (1537-53), son of Henry VIII
(1491-1547), but the promise was revoked by the Scottish
parliament, leading to war with England. The Scots were defeated
at the Battle of Pinkie (1547), and Mary, when she was 6,
was sent to be raised in safety at the French court. In 1558
she married the French dauphin, who became king François
II (1544-60) of France in 1559 and died in the following
year.
François II's short
reign, with his mother Catherine de Médicis (1519-89)
as queen regent, was dominated by the struggle between the
Guise family and the Protestants; a struggle which was also
taking place in Scotland, where the Protestant nobles were
in revolt against Mary of Guise. When François died
in 1560, Catherine de Médicis remained queen regent
during the minority of her second son Charles IX (1550-74).
Catherine would in fact dominate Charles throughout his reign,
persuading him to carry out the notorious St Bartholomew's
Day Massacre of Huguenots on 24 August 1572.
The widowed Mary remained in
France as dowager queen for a few months until the death
of her mother forced her to return to Scotland in 1561. There,
the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, unhappy with Mary
of Guise's regency, had effectively taken power, holding
an illegal parliament in 1560 — the "year of Reformation"
— which negated the authority of the Pope.
Upon arriving in Scotland,
Mary immediately met with protests and opposition from the
Protestants, and this conflict characterised her troubled
reign. Chief among the reformers was John Knox (1513-72),
who had already expressed his disapproval of female monarchs
in his charmingly titled 1558 tract, The
First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment
Of Women. In 1561 George Buchanan was appointed as
Mary's tutor. Buchanan was one of the most distinguished
Latin stylists of the day, and was admired as such by Montaigne,
who had studied under him in Bordeaux. However, Buchanan
would ultimately prove to be one of Mary's most implacable
enemies.
Her chief minister was her
half brother James Stuart, whom she soon afterward created
earl of Moray. In a Catholic ceremony on 29 July 1565,
Mary married her Catholic cousin Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley
(1545-67), whom she proclaimed Henry, King of Scots. The
marriage aroused Protestant antagonism and was the signal
for an insurrection by Moray and a Scottish noble family
who hoped to be joined by the whole Protestant party. Their
hope was disappointed, however, and the queen, taking the
field in person, at once quelled the revolt.
Her triumph was scarcely over
when misunderstandings began to arise between her and Darnley.
Not content with the title of king, he now demanded that
the crown be secured to him for life and that, if the queen
died without children, it should go to his heirs. Before
Moray's rebellion Mary's secretary and adviser had been David
Rizzio (also spelled Riccio; 1533-66), an Italian-born court
favorite and a Roman Catholic. The king was now persuaded
that Rizzio was the obstacle to his designs upon the crown.
Acting on this belief, he entered into a formal compact with
Moray; Lord Patrick Ruthven; James Douglas, 4th earl of Morton;
and other leaders of the Protestant party.
The result of this conspiracy
was that in 1566, while pregnant by Darnley, Mary witnessed
the brutal murder in her antechamber at Holyroodhouse of
David Rizzio, who had in fact negotiated the terms of her
marriage to Darnley. It has been suggested that it was Darnley's
hope that by witnessing the crime, Mary would lose the child
who prevented Darnley from reigning as absolute king in the
event of Mary's own death. John Knox gave tacit support for
Rizzio's murder in the hope that Mary would be overthrown,
but when she remained in power he temporarily removed himself
to England, returning to Edinburgh only after Mary's abdication.
The child, the future James
VI (of Scotland) and I (of England) , was born in 1566, and
Darnley refused to attend the Catholic baptism at Stirling
Castle. Divorce from the queen was openly discussed, but
while Darnley was recovering from a bout of smallpox in early
1567, the house where he was sleeping was blown up with gunpowder,
and Darnley was discovered strangled close by the scene of
the explosion.. Blame fell upon Mary's new favorite, James
Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell (1535-78), and upon Mary herself
(though her involvement has never been established).
Bothwell was tried by a sham
court which acquitted him; he then kidnapped Mary (meeting
with no apparent resistance) and took her to Dunbar. She
pardoned him, then married him in a Protestant ceremony after
he had divorced his wife. The outraged Scottish nobles rose
against her. Mary was able to lead an army against them,
and although it was equal in number to the confederate army,
it was visibly inferior in discipline. On 15 June 1567, Mary's
forces were defeated at Carberry Hill, and she was forced
to abandon Bothwell and surrender herself to the confederate
lords.
On 24 July imprisoned at
Lochleven, she is prevailed upon to sign an act of abdication
in favor of her one-year-old son, who would be crowned as
James VI five days afterward at Stirling. On the same day,
Mary miscarried the twins she bore by Bothwel.
Escaping from her island-prison
at Lochleven on 02 May 1568, Mary was able within a few days
to assemble an army of 6000 men. On 12 May her army was defeated
by the regent Moray at Langside, near Glasgow. Four days
afterward, in spite of the entreaties of her best friends,
Mary crossed Solway Firth and sought refuge at the court
of Elizabeth I, queen of England, only to find herself a
prisoner of Elizabeth for life.
Bothwell, who had escaped
to Norway, was captured and imprisoned in various parts of
Scandinavia; the marriage was annulled in 1570 and Bothwell
died insane in 1573 in a Danish prison. Mary escaped her
own captivity, but was again defeated and turned for aid
to the English Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Since Mary
was a Catholic with a legitimate claim to the English throne
she posed a problem for Elizabeth, and she was to stay as
"guest" or rather prisoner in a number of places
in England during the next twenty years.
From 1570 Mary's son James
VI was under the tutelage of her own former tutor George
Buchanan. Buchanan had been outraged by Darnley's murder,
and his appointment as moderator of the newly-founded General
Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1567) had placed him
in direct political opposition to the deposed Catholic queen.
Buchanan produced pamphlets
against her, culminating in 1571 with De Maria Scotorum
Regina, translated into Scots as Ane Detectioun of
the Duings of Mary Quene. Among its scurrilous accusations,
the Detectioun alleged that Mary's affair with Bothwell
prior to Darnley's death, and her complicity in his murder,
where proved by eleven sonnets and a sextain avowit to
be writtin by the Quene of Scottis, and found in ane
small gilt cofer nat fully ane foote long, beyng garnisht
in sondry places with the Romaine letter F under ane kyngis
crowne, quhairin were certaine letters and writynges well
knawin. These poems by Mary, quoted in the Detectioun
(and therefore constituting the first publication in Scotland
of work by a female author) were the basis of Buchanan's
accusation of mad loue, infamous adulterie, and vile passione.
Before publishing his attack
(which contains many allegations Buchanan must have known
to be false), he had already travelled to London in order
to deliver it personally to Queen Elizabeth. Mary was rumored
to be implicated in various plots against Elizabeth, including
the Ridolfi plot of 1571, but no evidence was produced against
her.
While in captivity, Mary
became the focus of various English Catholic and Spanish
plots to overthrow Elizabeth. Her final downfall came in
1586, when she was implicated in a plot against Elizabeth
led by her page Anthony Babington. Coded messages in which
Mary approved the plot were intercepted by Sir Francis Walsingham
(1530-90), whose espionage activities also included the interception
of plans for the Spanish Armada (1587). Walsingham was among
those who tried Mary at Fotheringay in October 1586 for complicity
in the treasonous conspiracy, and she shared the fate of
the other conspirators. She was beheaded at Fotheringhay
Castle in Peterborough on 8 February 1587, and in 1612 her
body was moved to the chapel of her great-grandfather Henry
VII at Westminster, where she still lies. Her motto, embroidered
on her clothing, was En ma fin git mon commencement:.
Mary's son, King James VI of Scotland, calmly accepted his
mother's execution, and upon Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603,
became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Mary Stuart's extant literary
output (all of it in French) includes: A 66-line elegy; two
poems to Queen Elizabeth; sixteen sonnets; a sextain; a 100-line
Méditation; a poem of two quatrains addressed
to Ronsard; a poem of two quatrains addressed to the Bishop
of Ross; a quatrain preserved in Anne of Lorraine's Mass Book;
quatrains and fragments in a Book of Hours; a prose essay. Couplets
inscribed on glass at Buxton Wells and at Fotheringay are also
attributed to her, and a Tetrasticha, ou Quatrains a Son
Fils is recorded as having been in the library of William
Drummond of Hawthornden.
Mary spoke six languages but her
first was French, which had long been widely spoken among the
Scottish nobility, quite apart from the fact that Mary was herself
half-French. She remained in France between the ages of five
and eighteen, and the thorough education she received there
acquainted her with the literature which she used as models
in her own writing. Her library would eventually contain more
than 300 books, and would constitute the largest collection
of French and Italian poetry in Scotland.
Charles IX of France, who succeeded
François II, Mary's first husband, was a weak politician,
but a scholarly man who formed around him a group of poets called
the Pléiade, which included Pierre de Ronsard
(1524-85), who had spent three years in Scotland at the court
of James V. Mary and Ronsard were good friends, and in 1583
Mary gave a casket filled with 2000 écus to the writer
whom she called "L'Apollon de la Source des Muses". Charles's
group would later be emulated by Mary's son James VI with his
Castalian Band, which was intended to do for Scots literature
what the Pléiade did for French.
Mary's own reign was a period
which saw a revival of vernacular literature, as exemplified
by the Maitland Manuscript. Among poets in Mary's circle was
Mary Beaton (c1543-c1597), one of the Queen's "Four Mairies"
who accompanied her to France.
During the last decade of Mary's
life, she wrote a number of sacred poems, including the Méditation
which was published in 1574, along with her sonnet L'ire
de Dieu par le sang n'apaise, in an anthology edited by
her friend and adviser John Leslie, Bishop of Ross (1527-96).
Apart from the love sonnets in the Detectioun (whose
authorship has been doubted), this was the only other work by
Mary which was published during her lifetime. Various isolated
works appeared during the next three centuries, but it was not
until 1873 that the Poems of Mary Queen of Scots were
published. The first critical edition was Queen Mary's Book
(1907). A modern selection is Bittersweet Within My Heart.
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On
a 24 July: 
