Mary, Queen of Scots and Glasgow

Mary, Queen of Scots lived one of the most dramatic and tragic lives in European history — a queen when six days old, dowager queen of France at eighteen, a prisoner for nineteen years, and beheaded at forty-four. Beautiful, charming and fatally unlucky in the men around her, she was a Catholic monarch in a country turning fiercely Protestant, and her reign dissolved into murder, rebellion and flight. And Glasgow, of all cities, stands at the very centre of its final act: it was Darnley’s country, the scene of the fateful winter visit that preceded his murder, and the place where, on a hill on the city’s southern edge, her cause in Scotland was lost forever.

This page tells her whole story, with the Glasgow chapters set in their place: the queen from birth, the return to a divided Scotland, the disastrous marriage to Darnley, the murder that Glasgow sits at the heart of, the ruin that followed, the Battle of Langside, and the long captivity that ended at Fotheringhay.

A queen from birth

Mary Stuart was born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, and became Queen of Scots when she was just six days old, on the death of her father, King James V. Her infancy fell in a violent time: the English king Henry VIII tried to force a marriage between the baby queen and his son Edward, and when the Scots refused, he pressed the case with fire and sword in the war remembered as the ‘Rough Wooing’. To keep her safe and to seal the ancient ‘Auld Alliance’ with France, Mary was sent across the sea in 1548, aged five, to be raised at the French court and betrothed to the heir to the French throne. She married the Dauphin Francis in 1558, and when he became King Francis II the following year she was, for a brief season, Queen of France as well as of Scotland. But Francis died young, at the end of 1560, and at eighteen the widowed queen turned her face back towards a homeland she barely remembered.

The Catholic queen returns

The Scotland to which Mary returned in August 1561 was not the Catholic kingdom her mother, Mary of Guise, had governed as regent. In her absence the country had passed through the Reformation, and was now officially Protestant, its most powerful preacher the fiery John Knox, who thundered against the very idea of a Catholic queen. Mary, personally devout but politically shrewd, trod carefully: she was allowed her private Mass while promising not to overturn the new religion, and for a few years she governed with real skill and won a surprising measure of affection. It was in these hopeful early years, on a royal progress through the west in the summer of 1563, that she first came to Glasgow, where the burgh and its university made their loyal show for the young queen. That first visit was all ceremony and welcome. Her next would be remembered very differently.

Darnley, Rizzio & a son

In July 1565 Mary married her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley — a tall, handsome and spectacularly unsuitable young man whose family, the Lennox Stewarts, held sway over Glasgow and the west. The match was a love-match that curdled almost at once into disaster. Vain, weak and jealous, Darnley fell in with a group of Protestant lords, and in March 1566 they burst into the pregnant queen’s supper room at Holyrood and murdered her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, before her eyes — a killing meant as the first move in a coup against Mary herself. She kept her nerve, detached Darnley from the plotters, and escaped; and in June 1566 she gave birth to a son, the future James VI of Scotland and I of England. But the marriage was beyond saving, and the queen and her despised husband were now locked together in mutual fear.

Glasgow & the murder of Darnley

Here Glasgow enters the story at its darkest. In January 1567 Darnley lay ill in his father’s city of Glasgow — disfigured by a sickness given out as smallpox and widely whispered to be worse — and Mary travelled from Edinburgh to his bedside. She was reconciled with him, and coaxed him back towards Edinburgh to recover, to a house on its edge called Kirk o’ Field. There, on the night of 9–10 February 1567, an explosion tore the house apart, and Darnley’s strangled body was found in the garden. Whether Mary lured her husband to his death is the central riddle of her reign, and it turns on Glasgow: among the notorious Casket Letters later produced by her enemies was a long, incriminating letter she was said to have written from Glasgow during that very visit — a document she denounced as a forgery, and whose authenticity historians still dispute. Glasgow tradition, for its part, long held that the queen lodged those winter nights at Provand’s Lordship, the old house beside the cathedral; the claim cannot be proven, but the house has always worn it with pride.

Ruin: Bothwell & abdication

What followed destroyed her. The chief suspect in Darnley’s murder was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a powerful and ruthless border lord; and when, only three months after the killing, Mary married Bothwell — whether by consent or coercion — the scandal was fatal. Scotland recoiled. The Protestant lords rose in arms, and in June 1567 the two sides faced each other at Carberry Hill, where Mary’s support melted away; she surrendered, Bothwell fled abroad never to return, and the queen was carried off to be imprisoned on an island in Loch Leven. There she miscarried twins, and there, in July 1567, she was forced to abdicate the throne in favour of her infant son, now to be raised a Protestant as King James VI, with her half-brother the Earl of Moray governing as regent. She was still only twenty-four.

Langside & the flight to England

Mary was not finished yet. In May 1568 she made a daring escape from Loch Leven, and within days an army had rallied to her — enough to make one last bid for her throne. Her plan was to reach the great royal fortress of Dumbarton, held for her on the Clyde, and the road ran past Glasgow. It was there that Moray’s forces caught her. On 13 May 1568, on a hill on the southern edge of the city, the Battle of Langside was fought and lost in under an hour; Mary watched her cause collapse from a rise nearby, and fled south with a small band of followers. Then she made the fatal decision of her life. Against all advice, rather than sail for France, she crossed the border into England to throw herself on the mercy of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I — a fellow queen who saw in Mary not a guest to be sheltered but a rival claimant to the English throne, and a mortal threat.

Nineteen years & the axe

Elizabeth neither restored Mary nor set her free. Instead the Scottish queen spent the next nineteen years a prisoner in a succession of English castles, an ageing captive around whom Catholic hopes and Catholic plots gathered like moths to a flame. As long as she lived she was a rallying point for every scheme to depose Elizabeth and set a Catholic on the English throne, and in the end one such conspiracy — the Babington Plot, exposed through her own intercepted letters — gave her enemies what they needed. Tried for treason and condemned, Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587, meeting her death, by every account, with courage and dignity. Yet hers was the last laugh of history: sixteen years later, in 1603, the son she had last seen as a baby succeeded Elizabeth as King James I of England, uniting the crowns of the two kingdoms, and had his mother’s body reburied in splendour in Westminster Abbey. The queen who lost everything founded a line of kings.

A life in dates