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CR-010 Deposed monarch · Scotland 1587

Mary, Queen of Scots — a deposed queen beheaded after nineteen years a prisoner

forced-abdicationtreason-trialexecuted1500-1799
Ruled
1542–1567
Realm
Kingdom of Scotland
Fell
1567
Status
Executed

Summary

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was queen of Scotland from the age of six days until her forced abdication at twenty-four; she then spent nineteen years a prisoner in England before her cousin Elizabeth I had her beheaded for treason at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587. She fell twice over — first deposed from the Scottish throne in 1567 by rebellious nobles who held her infant son as a more pliable monarch, and then, in 1587, executed by the English crown that had given her not refuge but captivity. Her death was the first judicial killing of an anointed queen by another anointed sovereign, and it haunted the monarchs of Europe.

Mary's tragedy was lodged in her birth. Crowned queen of Scots before she could speak, raised in France, and married at fifteen to the French dauphin, she was for two years also queen consort of France. Widowed at eighteen, she returned in 1561 to govern a Scotland that had turned Protestant in her absence, a Catholic queen ruling a Calvinist realm of turbulent, factious nobles. Her own claim — through her grandmother, a sister of Henry VIII — also made her the leading Catholic heir to the English throne, and so a permanent threat in the eyes of Elizabeth I and a permanent magnet for Catholic plots.

It was her marriages, not her religion alone, that destroyed her Scottish rule. Her second husband, Lord Darnley, was complicit in the murder of her secretary David Rizzio before his own murder in 1567 — an explosion at Kirk o' Field, after which Darnley was found strangled. When Mary then married the Earl of Bothwell, the man widely suspected of killing Darnley, her nobles rose against her, her forces melted away at Carberry Hill, and at Lochleven she was forced on 24 July 1567 to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI.

She escaped, lost the Battle of Langside in 1568, and fled across the border into England — a fatal misjudgment. Elizabeth could neither restore a queen accused of murder, release a rival claimant, nor in conscience execute an anointed cousin, and so held her for nineteen years. The deadlock broke when Mary's letters endorsing the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth were intercepted by Elizabeth's spymaster. Tried under a special statute, condemned, and finally signed away by a reluctant Elizabeth, Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay. Sixteen years later her son inherited the English throne she had been killed for coveting, uniting the crowns she could not.

Timeline

8 Dec 1542
A queen at six days old
Mary is born at Linlithgow Palace; her father, James V, dies six days later, leaving the infant queen of Scots.
24 Apr 1558
Marriage to Francis
Sent to France as a child to shield her from English seizure, Mary marries the dauphin; on his accession in 1559 she becomes queen consort of France as well as queen of Scots.
5 Dec 1560
Widowed
Francis II dies; Mary, eighteen and without a future at the French court, prepares to return to her own kingdom.
19 Aug 1561
Return to Scotland
Mary lands at Leith to rule a realm now officially Protestant, governing at first with her half-brother, the Earl of Moray.
29 Jul 1565
Marriage to Darnley
Mary marries her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; the union quickly sours and strengthens her enemies.
9 Mar 1566
Rizzio murdered
Darnley and a group of nobles murder Mary's secretary David Rizzio in front of the pregnant queen at Holyrood.
9–10 Feb 1567
Darnley killed
An explosion destroys Kirk o' Field; Darnley is found dead in the grounds, apparently strangled, and suspicion falls on Bothwell — and on Mary.
15 May 1567
Marriage to Bothwell
Mary marries the Earl of Bothwell, the chief suspect in Darnley's murder, alienating almost all her remaining support.
15 Jun – 24 Jul 1567
Carberry Hill and abdication
Her army deserts at Carberry Hill; imprisoned at Lochleven, Mary is forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James VI.
13–16 May 1568
Langside and flight
Mary escapes, is defeated at the Battle of Langside, and flees into England seeking Elizabeth's help — and is taken into custody.
Aug–Oct 1586
The Babington Plot
Mary's letters endorsing a plot to assassinate Elizabeth are intercepted; she is arrested and tried for treason and condemned.
1 / 8 Feb 1587
Warrant and execution
Elizabeth signs the death warrant on 1 February; Mary is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587.

A Catholic queen in a Protestant realm

Mary's reign began in weakness and was governed by forces larger than her abilities. As the infant heir of James V she was, from birth, a piece in the contest between England and France for control of Scotland. The English crown's attempt to force her betrothal to Edward VI — the "Rough Wooing" of war and raids — drove the Scots to ship the child to France, where she was raised a Frenchwoman and a Catholic and married into the royal house of Valois. For a brief moment she stood near the summit of European power, queen of Scotland and France at once. Her young husband's death in 1560 ended that, and at eighteen she returned to a country she barely knew.

The Scotland that received her in 1561 had undergone a Reformation in her absence; its official church was now Calvinist, its leading reformer John Knox a fierce opponent of a Catholic and female sovereign. Her nobility was a fractious, armed, self-interested aristocracy accustomed to weak central rule. For her first years she navigated this with some skill, tolerating the Protestant settlement, leaning on her capable half-brother Moray, and keeping her own religion private. But two structural facts undermined her from the start. She was a Catholic monarch in a Protestant land, distrusted by the church and a foreign power to her own nobles; and her descent from Margaret Tudor made her the strongest Catholic claimant to the English throne — a standing danger, in Elizabeth's eyes and her own ambitions, that could never be neutralized while she lived and reigned.

The marriages that broke her throne

What destroyed Mary's rule in Scotland was a sequence of catastrophic marriages. In 1565 she married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a cousin who shared her Tudor descent and thus strengthened her English claim. The marriage was a disaster. Darnley was weak, jealous, and ambitious for the crown matrimonial Mary would not grant him, and in March 1566, in league with disaffected Protestant lords, he took part in the murder of her Italian secretary David Rizzio, stabbed to death before the eyes of the pregnant queen in her own apartments at Holyrood. Mary's son — the future James VI and I — was born three months later, but the marriage was beyond repair.

Darnley's own end was the turning point. In February 1567 the house at Kirk o' Field where he was lodging was destroyed by an explosion; his body was found in the garden, apparently strangled, having seemingly escaped the blast only to be killed. The chief suspect was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell — and how much Mary knew has divided historians ever since. Whatever the truth, her conduct sealed her ruin: within three months, in May 1567, she married Bothwell, the very man accused of murdering her husband. It was a step her remaining supporters could not defend, and the Protestant lords rose against her in arms. At Carberry Hill in June her army, unwilling to fight for Bothwell, dissolved without a battle, and Mary surrendered. Imprisoned on an island in Loch Leven, she was forced on 24 July 1567 to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, crowned James VI with Moray as regent. Mary had been queen of Scots her whole life and now, at twenty-four, was a prisoner of her own subjects. The throne had passed to a baby precisely because a baby could be ruled by the men who held him.

Nineteen years and the headsman

In May 1568 Mary escaped from Lochleven and rallied an army, but it was beaten at the Battle of Langside near Glasgow. With Scotland closed to her, she made the decision that determined the rest of her life: she crossed the Solway Firth into England and threw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth I. She expected help from a fellow queen and cousin. She received instead an open-ended captivity that would last nearly nineteen years, moved between Tutbury, Sheffield, and other strongholds under the keeping of the Earl of Shrewsbury.

For Elizabeth, Mary was an insoluble problem. To restore her to Scotland was to reward a queen accused of her husband's murder and undo a Protestant regime friendly to England. To free her was to release the figurehead of every Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth's own throne and life. To kill her was to set the appalling precedent of one anointed sovereign executing another — a precedent that menaced all monarchs, Elizabeth included. So Elizabeth did none of these things and held her, year after year, while Mary became the inevitable centre of Catholic plotting, from the Ridolfi and Throckmorton plots to the one that finally destroyed her.

In 1586 Elizabeth's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, allowed Mary a seemingly secret channel of correspondence smuggled in beer barrels — a channel he controlled and read. Through it Mary received Anthony Babington's proposals for a Catholic rising and the assassination of Elizabeth, and her replies endorsed the plot. It was the proof Walsingham needed. Mary was arrested and, in October 1586, tried at Fotheringhay before a commission of some thirty-six peers and councillors under the Act for the Queen's Safety, a statute drafted with her in mind. She was condemned. Elizabeth, agonizing over the precedent and the outrage it would provoke in Catholic Europe, hesitated for months before signing the death warrant on 1 February 1587 — and then sought to disclaim responsibility for its dispatch.

On 8 February 1587, in the great hall at Fotheringhay, Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded. She went to the block in red, the colour of Catholic martyrdom, having spent her last hours in prayer and in writing — including a final letter to the king of France. The execution was botched: it took more than one stroke of the axe to sever her head. She was forty-four. The first execution of a crowned and anointed queen by order of another sent a shock through every court in Europe.

The Five Factors

01
A throne held in trust from infancy
Mary was queen before she had any capacity to rule, the perpetual ward of whichever faction or power controlled her person. A crown worn from the cradle is governed by regents and guardians whose interests are their own; the sovereign inherits not power but a contest over power, and may never truly hold it.
02
A queen at odds with her realm's religion
A Catholic monarch ruling a newly Protestant Scotland began with the distrust of her church, her reformers, and many of her nobles. When a ruler's faith divides her from her own subjects and aligns her, in their fears, with foreign enemies, she lacks the reservoir of loyalty that survives a crisis — and Mary's crises were many.
03
The fatal third marriage
Mary's rule did not fall to invasion or doctrine but to her marriage to Bothwell, the suspected murderer of her previous husband — an act that forfeited the loyalty of nearly every faction at once. A ruler's private choices are public acts; a union that scandalizes the entire political nation can collapse a throne faster than any army.
04
The dynastic claim that could not be put down
Mary's descent made her the natural Catholic heir to England and therefore the permanent figurehead of plots against Elizabeth. A rival claimant who cannot be restored, freed, or ignored becomes a problem that ends only in death; her very existence was a standing threat that nineteen years of captivity merely postponed.
05
Captivity entrusted to the rival crown
By fleeing to Elizabeth, Mary placed her fate in the hands of the one sovereign for whom her death was the cleanest solution. Surrender to a rival who has every interest in your disappearance is rarely refuge; the prisoner of a frightened crown is a hostage awaiting only the pretext that justifies the axe.

Aftermath

The execution did not bring the European war some feared, but it left a long shadow. Philip II of Spain, citing Mary among his grievances, launched the Armada against England the following year, 1588, and its defeat became the founding triumph of Protestant England. Elizabeth, who had tried to evade the responsibility of the warrant, disgraced the secretary who dispatched it and performed a public grief that few believed. Mary became, for Catholic Europe, a martyr — a queen judicially murdered for her faith — and that image, more than the murky record of her reign, has shaped her memory ever since.

The deepest irony lay in the succession. The English throne Mary had claimed, plotted for, and died over passed, on Elizabeth's death in 1603, to Mary's own son. James VI of Scotland became James I of England, uniting the two crowns in a single Stuart line and achieving by inheritance what his mother could not by ambition. In 1612 James had her body removed from Peterborough and reinterred in Westminster Abbey, in a tomb grander than Elizabeth's and not far from it — placing the executed queen, at last, among the sovereigns of the realm that had killed her. Mary, Queen of Scots, is remembered now less for how she governed Scotland, which she governed badly, than for how she fell: a sovereign deposed by her own nobles and then, almost two decades later, beheaded by a fellow queen who could find no safe way to let her live.

Lessons

  1. A crown inherited in infancy confers no real power, only a long wardship in which others rule in the sovereign's name and for their own ends.
  2. A ruler divided from the religion of the realm starts with a deficit of loyalty that ordinary politics can manage but a crisis will expose.
  3. A monarch's marriage is a public act of state; a union that offends the entire political nation can topple a throne where no foreign enemy could.
  4. A rival claimant who cannot be safely restored, freed, or ignored is a problem that tends to be resolved only by death — captivity merely defers it.
  5. Surrender to a rival sovereign is not sanctuary; to place your life in the hands of the one person who most benefits from your end is to await the pretext, not escape it.

References