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1567 Mary Queen of Scots deposed
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was revoked by the Scottish parliament, leading to war with England.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. |
On
a 24 July: 
Deaths
2002
David Harris, 44, run over three times by his wife Clara Harris,
44, in her Mercedes Benz, in the evening, in the parking lot of a Houston
hotel in the lobby of which she had found him with his mistress, Gail Bridges,
39, after a private investigator hired by her confirmed her suspicions that
her husband was being unfaithful. Clara demanded that David choose between
her and Gail, and he chose Gail. Clara is a dentist, David was an orthodontist.
It was not his first marriage. Clara Harris would be convicted of murder
on 13 February 2003 and sentenced to 20 years in prison on 14 February 2003.
[in court, 12 Feb 2003 >].
