Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary Stuart became Queen of Scots at six days old, on her father James V's death in 1542, and was sent as a child to be raised at the French court, where she was brought up Catholic and married the French dauphin, briefly becoming queen consort of France as well until his early death in 1560. She returned to Scotland in 1561 to find the country transformed in her absence: the Scottish Parliament had established Protestantism as the kingdom's religion the previous year, driven substantially by the preaching of John Knox, and Mary's open Catholic worship at court, though tolerated as a personal accommodation, sat uneasily against a Reformed political and religious establishment that had already broken with Rome.

Mary's personal life supplied fuel for a reign that could not settle: her marriage to Lord Darnley, his involvement in the murder of her secretary David Rizzio, Darnley's own murder shortly afterward, and Mary's hasty marriage to the chief suspect in that murder, the Earl of Bothwell, combined to alienate much of the Scottish nobility, Protestant and Catholic alike, and led to her forced abdication in 1567 in favor of her infant son, who was raised Protestant and became James VI, later James I of England.

Mary fled to England in 1568 seeking her cousin Elizabeth I's protection, but her Catholic faith and her own genealogical claim to the English throne, which some English Catholics regarded as stronger than Elizabeth's own, made her far too dangerous a guest to release; Elizabeth kept her in a shifting series of English castles and manor houses under guard for nineteen years, a captivity that became the fixed point around which a succession of Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth's life and rule organized themselves, each one aiming to replace the Protestant queen with her Catholic cousin.

The Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot and finally the Babington Plot each drew Mary in as the intended beneficiary, and it was the Babington Plot, uncovered through intercepted and deciphered correspondence in which Mary appeared to approve Elizabeth's assassination, that gave Elizabeth's government the legal pretext to try her for treason and, in 1587, to execute her at Fotheringhay Castle. Mary's death did not end the association between her cause and Catholic restoration; if anything it sharpened it, and her son James's own accession to the English throne in 1603, uniting the two crowns, occurred only because Elizabeth died childless, leaving the Stuart line, Catholic in Mary's own person though Protestant in her son's upbringing, as the only viable succession left standing.