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

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.