Mary Queen of Scots was the daughter of James V. of Scotland by his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, daughter of Clande, Duke of Guise (q.v.), and widow of Louis of Orleans, Duke of Longueville. She was born at Linlithgow on the 8th of December 1542. Her misfortunes may be said to have begun with her birth. The tidings reached her father on his death-bed at Falkland, but brought him no consolation. 'The deil go with it!' he muttered, as his thoughts wandered back to the marriage with Bruce's daughter, which brought the crown of Scotland to the Stewarts—'it cam with ane lass, and it will pass with ane lass!' Mary became a queen before she was a week old. Within a year the Regent Arran had promised her in marriage to Prince Edward of England, and the Scottish parliament had declared the promise null. War with England followed, and at Pinkie Cleuch the Scots met a defeat only less disastrous than Flodden. But their aversion to an English match was unconquerable; they hastened to place the young queen beyond the reach of English arms, on the island of Inchmahome, in the Lake of Menteith, and to offer her in marriage to the eldest son of Henry II. of France and Catharine de' Medici. The offer was accepted; and in July 1548 a French fleet carried Mary from Dunbarton, on the Clyde, to Roscoff, in Brittany, whence she was at once conveyed to St Germain-en-Laye, and there affianced to the Dauphin.
Her next ten years were passed at the French court, where she was carefully educated along with the king's family, receiving instruction in the art of making verses from the famous Ronsard. On the 24th of April 1558 she was married to the Dauphin, who was six weeks younger than herself. It was agreed, on the part of Scotland, that her husband should have the title of King of Scots; but Mary was further betrayed into the signature of a secret deed, by which, if she died childless, both her Scottish realm and her right of succession to the English crown (she was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII.) were conveyed to France. On the 10th of July 1559 the death of the French king called her husband to the throne by the title of Francis II. The government passed into the hands of the queen's kinsfolks, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine; but their rule was short-lived. The feeble and sickly king died on the 5th of December 1560, when the reins of power were grasped by the queen-mother, Catharine de' Medici, as regent for her next son, Charles IX. Mary must have been prepared, under almost any circumstances, to quit a court which was now swayed by one whom, during her brief reign, she had taunted with being 'a merchant's daughter.' But there were other reasons for her departure from France. Her presence was urgently needed in Scotland, which the death of her mother, a few months before, had left without a government, at a moment when it was convulsed by the throes of the Reformation. Her kinsmen of Guise had ambitious projects for her marriage; great schemes were based on her nearness of succession to the English crown; and both these, it was thought, might be more successfully followed out when she was seated on her native throne.
She sailed from Calais on the 15th, and arrived at Leith on the 19th August 1561, having escaped the English ships of war which Elizabeth despatched to intercept her. Her government began auspiciously. The Reformation claimed to have received the sanction of the Scottish parliament, and if Mary did not formally acknowledge the claim, she was at least content to leave affairs as she found them, stipulating only for liberty to use her own religion—a liberty which Knox and a few of the more extreme Reformers denounced as a sin against the law of God. She is said to have rejected the violent counsels of the Roman Catholics; it is certain that she surrounded herself with Protestant advisers, her chief minister being her illegitimate brother, James Stuart, whom she soon afterwards created Earl of Moray. Under his guidance, in the autumn of 1562, she made a progress to the north, which, whatever was his design, ended in the defeat and death of the Earl of Huntly, the powerful chief of the Roman Catholic party in Scotland. For the Chastelard episode, see CHASTELARD.
Meanwhile the courts of Europe were busy with schemes for Mary's marriage. The king of Sweden, the king of Denmark, the king of France, the Archduke Charles of Austria, Don Carlos of Spain, the Duke of Ferrara, the Duke of Nemours, the Duke of Anjou, the Scottish Earl of Arran, and the English Earl of Leicester were proposed as candidates for her hand. Her own preference was for Don Carlos, the heir of what was then the greatest monarchy in Christendom; and it was not until all hopes of obtaining him were quenched that she thought seriously of any other. Her choice fell, somewhat suddenly, on her cousin, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, by his marriage with a granddaughter of King Henry VII. of England. He was thus among the nearest heirs to the English crown, and his claims to the succession were believed to have the support of the great body of English Roman Catholics. But except this and his good looks he had no other recommendation. He was weak, needy, insolent, and vicious; his religion, such as it was, was Roman Catholic; his house had few friends and many enemies in Scotland; and he was three years younger than Mary. Her best friends, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, warned her against him, but in vain. The marriage was celebrated at Holyrood on the 29th July 1565. It was the signal for an insurrection by Moray and the Hamiltons, who hoped to be joined by the whole Protestant party. But their hope was disappointed; and the queen, taking the field in person, at once quelled the revolt, and chased the rebels beyond the Tweed.
Her triumph was scarcely over when misunderstandings began to arise between her and her husband. Darnley's worthlessness and folly became only too apparent; she was disgusted by his debauchery, and alarmed by his arrogance and ambition. She had given him the title of king, but he now demanded that the crown should be secured to him for life, and that, if the queen died without issue, it should descend to his heirs. Mary hesitated to comply with a demand which would have set aside the settled order of succession; and what she refused to grant by favour the king prepared to extort by force.
Mary's chief minister prior to Moray's rebellion had been David Rizzio, a mean-looking Italian, of great astuteness and many accomplishments, but generally hated beyond the palace walls as a base-born foreigner, a court favourite, and a Roman Catholic. The king and Rizzio had been sworn friends, sharing the same table, and even sleeping in the same bed; but the king was now persuaded that it was Rizzio who was the real obstacle to his designs upon the crown. In this belief, he entered into a formal compact with Moray, Ruthven, Morton, and other chiefs of the Protestant party, undertaking, on his part, to prevent their attainder, or procure their pardon, and to support and advance the Protestant religion; while they, on the other part, bound themselves to procure the settlement of the crown upon him and his heirs, and to take and slay, if need were, even in the queen's palace and presence, every one who opposed it. The result of this conspiracy was the murder of Rizzio on the 9th of March 1566, the king leading the way into the queen's cabinet, and holding her in his grasp, while the murderers dragged the poor Italian into an ante-chamber, and, mangling his body with more than fifty wounds, completed what they deemed a justifiable act. When Mary learned what had been done she broke out in reproaches against the king as being the chief cause of the deed. 'I shall be your wife no longer,' she told him, 'and shall never like well till I cause you have as sorrowful a heart as I have at this present.' As had been agreed beforehand among the conspirators, Mary was kept prisoner in Holyrood; while the king, of his own authority, dismissed the parliament which was about to forfeit Moray and his associates in the late insurrection. The plot was thus far successful; but Mary no sooner perceived its objects than she set herself at work to defeat them. Dissembling her indignation at her husband's treachery and the savage outrage of which he had been the ringleader, she succeeded by her blandishments in detaching him from the conspirators, and in persuading him not only to escape with her from their power by a midnight flight to Dunbar, but to issue a proclamation in which he denied all complicity in their designs. The conspiracy was now at an end; Ruthven and Morton fled to England, while Moray was received by the queen; and the king, hated by both sides, because he had betrayed both sides, became an object of mingled abhorrence and contempt.
It was an aggravation of the murder of Rizzio that it was committed, if not in the queen's presence, at least within a few yards of her person, only three months before she gave birth (on the 19th June 1566) to the prince who became James VI. As that event drew near, the queen's affection for her husband seemed to revive; but the change was only momentary; and before the boy's baptism, in December, her estrangement from the king was greater than ever. Divorce was openly discussed in her presence, and darker designs were not obscurely hinted at among her friends. The king, on his part, spoke of leaving the country; but before his preparations were completed he fell ill of the smallpox at Glasgow. This was about the 9th of January 1567. On the 25th Mary went to see him, and, travelling by easy stages, brought him to Edinburgh on the 31st. He was lodged in a small mansion beside the Kirk of the Field, nearly on the spot where the south-east corner of the university now stands. There Mary visited him daily, and slept for two nights in a room below his bedchamber. She passed the evening of Sunday the 9th of February by his bedside, talking cheerfully and affectionately with him, although she is said to have dropped one remark which gave him uneasy forebodings—that it was much about that time twelvemonth that Rizzio was murdered. She left him between ten and eleven o'clock to take part in a masque at Holyrood, at the marriage of a favourite valet. The festivities had not long ceased in the palace, when, about two hours after midnight, the house in which the king slept was blown up by gunpowder; and his lifeless body was found in the neighbouring garden.
The chief actor in this tragedy was undoubtedly James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell (q.v.), an unscrupulous noble, who, since Moray's revolt, and still more since Rizzo's murder, had enjoyed a large share of the queen's favour. But there were suspicions that the queen herself was not wholly ignorant of the plot, and these suspicions could not but be strengthened by what followed. On the 12th of April Bothwell was brought to a mock-trial, and acquitted; on the 24th he intercepted the queen on her way from Linlithgow to Edinburgh, and carried her, with scarcely a show of resistance, to Dunbar. On the 7th of May he was divorced from the young and comely wife whom he had married little more than a twelvemonth before; on the 12th Mary publicly pardoned his seizure of her person, and created him Duke of Orkney; and on the 15th—only three months after her husband's murder—she married the man whom every one regarded as his murderer.
This fatal step at once arrayed her nobles in arms against her. She was able to lead an army against them, but it melted away without striking a blow on the field of Carberry (15th June), when nothing was left to her but to abandon Bothwell and surrender herself to the confederate lords. They led her to Edinburgh, where the insults of the rabble and grief at parting with Bothwell threw her into such a frenzy that she refused all nourishment, and, rushing to the window of the room in which she was kept prisoner, called for help, and showed herself to the people half-naked.
From Edinburgh she was hurried to Lochleven, where, on the 24th of July, she was prevailed upon to sign an act of abdication in favour of her son, who, five days afterwards, was crowned at Stirling. Escaping from her island-prison (where she was confined of still-born twins) on the 2d of May 1568, she found herself in a few days at the head of an army of 6000 men. On the 12th it was met and defeated by the Regent Moray at Langside, near Glasgow. Four days afterwards, in spite of the entreaties of her best friends, Mary crossed the Solway, and threw herself on the protection of Queen Elizabeth, only to find herself a prisoner for life. From Carlisle, her first place of captivity, she was taken, in July, to Bolton; from Bolton she was carried, in February 1569, to Tutbury; from Tutbury she passed in succession to Wingfield, Coventry, Chatsworth, Sheffield, Buxton, Chartley, and last of all to Fotheringhay. The presence of Mary in England was a constant source of uneasiness to Elizabeth and her advisers. A large minority in the country were still Catholic, and naturally looked to Mary as the likely restorer of the old faith. Plot followed plot, therefore, to effect her deliverance, and to place her on the throne of Elizabeth. Of these plots the most famous is that of Antony Babington, which had for its object the assassination of Elizabeth and the deliverance of Mary. The conspiracy was discovered; certain letters of Mary approving the death of Elizabeth fell into the hands of Walsingham; and, mainly on the evidence of copies of these letters, Mary was brought to trial in September 1586. Sentence of death was pronounced against her on the 25th of October; but it was not until the 1st of February 1587 that Elizabeth took courage to sign the warrant of execution. It was carried into effect on the 8th, when Mary laid her head upon the block with the dignity of a queen and the constancy and resignation of a martyr, evincing to the last her devotion to the church of her fathers. Five months afterwards her body was buried with great pomp at Peterborough, whence, in 1612, it was removed to King Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, where it still lies in a sumptuous tomb erected by James VI.
The character of Mary was long one of the most fiercely-vexed questions of history, and is still in debate, although the great preponderance of authority seems now to be on the side of those who believe in her criminal love for Bothwell and her guilty knowledge of his conspiracy against her husband's life. Her beauty and accomplishments have never been disputed. She was confessed by every one to be the most charming princess of her time. Her large sharp features might perhaps have been thought handsome rather than beautiful, but for the winning vivacity and high joyous spirit which animated them. It has been questioned whether her eyes were hazel or dark gray, but there is no question as to their star-like brightness. Her complexion, although fresh and clear, would seem to have been without the brilliance so common among our island beauties. Her hair appears to have changed with her years from a ruddy yellow to auburn, and from auburn to dark brown or black, turning gray long before its time. Her bust was full and finely shaped, and she carried her large stately figure with majesty and grace. She showed to advantage on horseback, and still more in the dance. The charm of her soft, sweet voice is described as irresistible; and she sang well, accompanying herself on the harp, the virginal, and still oftener on the lute, which set off the beauty of her long, delicate, white hand. The consciousness how that hand was admired may have made it more diligent in knitting and in embroidery, in both of which she excelled. Her manner was sprightly, affable, kindly, frank perhaps to excess, if judged by the somewhat austere rule already beginning to prevail among her Scottish subjects. She spoke three or four languages, was well and variously informed, talked admirably, and wrote both in prose and in verse, always with ease, and sometimes with grace or vigour. In the ring of which she was the centre were statesmen like Moray and Lethington, soldiers like Kirkcaldy of Grange, men of letters like Buchanan, Leslie, Sir Richard Maitland, and Sir James Melville. The first poet of France published verses deplored his absence from her brilliant court; Damville, the flower of French chivalry, repined at the fate which called him away from it so soon; Brantôme and the younger Scaliger delighted to speak, in old age, of the days which they passed beneath its roof.
Mary's prose-writings have been collected by the enthusiastic devotion of Prince Alexander Labanoff, in his Recueil des Lettres de Marie Stuart (7 vols. 1844). Setting aside the twelve so-called 'sonnets' which she is said to have written to Bothwell, and which survive only in a French version of an English translation, no more than six pieces of her poetry, containing in all less than 300 lines, are now known. They have no remarkable merit. The best is the poem of eleven stanzas on the death of her first husband, Francis II., printed by Brantôme. The longest is a Meditation of a hundred lines, written in 1572, and published two years afterwards by her ever faithful follower, Bishop Leslie of Ross. All are in French, except one sonnet, which is in Italian. The sweetly simple lines beginning 'Adieu, plaisant pays de France,' so often ascribed to her, are probably the work of A. G. Meusnier de Querlon, a French journalist, who died in 1780. A volume of French verse on the Institution of a Prince, which she wrote for the use of her son, has been lost since 1627, along with a Latin speech in vindication of learned women, which, when no more than thirteen, she delivered in the hall of the Louvre, in presence of the French court.
To enumerate all that has been written on Mary would fill a volume. Among the chief works are Jebb's De Vita et Rebus Gestis Marie Seotorum Regine (1725); J. Anderson's Collections Relating to the History of Mary, Queen of Scotland (1727-28); Bishop Keith's History of the Affairs of Church and State in Scotland (1734; new ed. 1844-50); W. Goodall's Examination of the Letters said to be written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to James, Earl of Bothwell (1754); Principal Robertson's History of Scotland; W. Tytler's Inquiry into the Evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots (1759, 1790); M. Laing's History of Scotland; G. Chalmers's Life of Mary, Queen of Scots (1818, 1822); P. F. Tytler's History of Scotland; Prince Labanoff's Recueil des Lettres de Marie Stuart (1844); David Laing's edition of John Knox's History of the Reformation (1846-64); the Life by Miss Strickland in her Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850-59; new ed. 1873); A. de Montaiglon's Latin Themes of Mary Stuart (1855); Prince Labanoff's Notice sur la Collection des Portraits de Marie Stuart (1856); Mignet's Histoire de Marie Stuart (1852); Teulet's Lettres de Marie Stuart (1859); Cheruel's Marie Stuart et Catherine de Medicis (1858); Joseph Robertson's Catalogues of the Jewels, Dresses, Furniture, Books, and Paintings of Mary, Queen of Scots (1863); Hosack's Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Accusers (1870-74; a popular ed. 1888); histories by Petit and De Flandre (1874), Chantelauze (1876), and the interesting document by Claude Nau, her secretary (ed. by Father Stevenson, 1883); Leader, Mary Stuart in Captivity (1881); Baron Alphonse de Ruble, La Première Jeunesse de Marie Stuart (1891); Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Mary Stuart (2 vols. 1889), dealing with only the two last years of her life; Henderson's Casket Letters (Edin. 1890), giving for the first time Morton's Declaration regarding the manner in which the Casket is said to have fallen into his hands; Philippon's Histoire du Règne de Marie Stuart (3 vols. 1891-92); Skelton's sumptuous Mary Stuart (1893), and D. Hay Fleming's Mary Queen of Scots (1897).
The best representations of Mary are the contemporary portraits by the French painter, Francis Clouet, more commonly called Jehannet or Janet, and the statue, by an unknown sculptor, on her tomb at Westminster. All portraits which cannot be reconciled with these types may safely be rejected as spurious.