The Reformation & Mary, Queen of Scots

1. Bridging context: the infant queen and the Rough Wooing (1542–1548)

Card #12 closed with the death of James V on 14 December 1542, days after the Scottish rout at Solway Moss and just six days after the birth of his only surviving legitimate child, Mary, at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542. The infant became queen at six days old and was crowned at Stirling Castle on 9 September 1543, with James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, as regent during the minority.

Mary's accession created an irresistible opportunity for Henry VIII of England to unite the two crowns by marrying the child queen to his son and heir, Prince Edward. The Treaty of Greenwich (1 July 1543) provided for the betrothal, but the Scottish Parliament rejected it in December 1543, preferring the traditional "Auld Alliance" with France. Henry responded with the punitive campaigns dubbed the "Rough Wooing," a brutal war fought from 1543 into the early 1550s. English armies burned Edinburgh (1544) and won a crushing victory at Pinkie Cleugh in September 1547, but the coercion backfired, driving the Scots deeper into the French embrace.

With French military help secured under the Treaty of Haddington (1548), the five-year-old Mary was betrothed to the Dauphin Francis and shipped to France in the summer of 1548 to be raised at the French court, safe from English arms. Her mother, Marie de Guise — a French noblewoman of the powerful House of Guise and James V's widow — remained in Scotland to protect her daughter's interests, initially working alongside Arran and finally displacing him to become formal regent on 12 April 1554. Mary married the Dauphin on 24 April 1558; when he became King Francis II in 1559, she was briefly queen consort of France as well as Queen of Scots.

2. The background to Reformation and the early martyrs

Protestant ideas — first Lutheran, then increasingly Calvinist — spread into Scotland through trade, universities and printed books across the earlier sixteenth century, in a country whose Catholic Church was widely criticised for wealth, absentee clergy and corruption. The movement produced its first celebrated martyr in Patrick Hamilton, a young, well-connected churchman influenced by Luther, who was burned at the stake outside St Salvator's College, St Andrews, in 1528 (most sources give 29 February) on the orders of Archbishop James Beaton. His protracted, courageous death made a deep impression; John Lindsay, an associate of Archbishop Beaton, is recorded (in Knox's History) as having advised that later heretics be burned in deep cellars, "for the reek [smoke] of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon" — a striking admission that public burnings were creating converts rather than deterring them.

Nearly two decades later, the preacher George Wishart — who had absorbed Reformed and Calvinist ideas abroad — was seized, tried for heresy and burned at St Andrews on 1 March 1546, under the authority of Cardinal David Beaton (nephew and successor of James Beaton), who is said to have watched from the castle windows. Wishart's death proved a turning point, not least because among his followers and bodyguards had been a notary-priest named John Knox.

3. Renaissance Scotland before the Reformation

The art historian Andrea Thomas, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), places the century between James IV's marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503 and Mary's deposition in 1567 at the height of the Scottish Renaissance. The Stewart kings built palaces for display rather than defence. The courtyard facades at Falkland, designed and built by French masons for James V, are the earliest wholly Renaissance architectural scheme in the British Isles. James V's palace at Stirling kept the carved oak ceiling roundels known as the Stirling Heads. James V founded the College of Justice in 1532, partly on an Italian model.

Scottish culture spread beyond the court in the 1540s and 1550s. Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis was first performed at Cupar in 1552 and revived for Mary of Guise in Edinburgh in 1554. In the 1550s Mary of Guise sponsored town lectureships in Edinburgh in law, Greek, Latin and philosophy, the kernel of the "Tounis College" that opened in 1583 and became the University of Edinburgh. Church music reached a high point in the Chapel Royal at Stirling, though almost all Scottish sacred music of the period was lost when reformers destroyed liturgical books; the Carver Choirbook is a rare survivor.

Thomas also notes an irony. James IV and James V controlled the Church's major appointments so tightly that it became "not so much a department of state as a sub-department of the royal household". Royal exploitation of church wealth undermined the Church's spiritual authority, and this hugely inflamed the reformers.

4. John Knox and the siege of St Andrews Castle, examined

John Knox was born around 1514 at Giffordgate in Haddington, East Lothian, the son of a farming family. He studied for the priesthood (probably at St Andrews, possibly under the scholar John Major), was ordained by about 1540, and worked as an apostolic notary and private tutor in East Lothian. By 1543–45 he had embraced the Reformed faith and became a close associate and armed bodyguard of George Wishart, reportedly bearing a two-handed sword before the preacher.

Here the historical record must be stated precisely, because popular myth often blurs it. Knox did not take part in the assassination of Cardinal Beaton. In late May 1546 a group of Fife Protestant lairds — motivated by revenge for Wishart and by political grievance — gained entry to St Andrews Castle and murdered Beaton, afterwards hanging his body from a window. Knox was not among them and only learned of the killing later. The assassins occupied the castle and were besieged there. Knox joined the Protestant garrison (the "Castilians") in April 1547, principally as a tutor to his pupils, and was then called to become the garrison's preacher, delivering his first public sermons at St Andrews.

When a French fleet under Leone Strozzi bombarded the castle into surrender in July 1547, Knox was taken prisoner and sentenced to the French galleys. He served 19 months as a galley slave (from the castle's capture on 30 July 1547 until his release early in 1549) before beginning years of exile — preaching in Edwardian England (where he became a royal chaplain), fleeing to the Continent after the accession of the Catholic Mary I of England, and coming under the direct influence of John Calvin in Geneva. He returned to Scotland in 1559 to lead the decisive phase of the Reformation. The mine and countermine dug through solid rock during the 1546–47 siege — rediscovered in the late nineteenth century — survive at St Andrews Castle today, among the best-preserved siege works in Europe, alongside the notorious "bottle dungeon" in which Beaton's corpse was kept.

Modern scholarship has softened the old caricature of Knox as a purely dour, misogynist zealot. Jane Dawson's authoritative John Knox (Yale, 2015), drawing on newly identified manuscripts, presents a more complex, even vulnerable figure — a man deeply embedded in the wider European Reformed community and reliant on networks of supporters — while leaving him, in Diarmaid MacCulloch's phrase, "the most significant Scotsman of his generation."

5. The Reformation Parliament of 1560 and its disputed legal authority

Knox's return in 1559 galvanised the Protestant cause. After armed struggle between the Protestant "Lords of the Congregation" and the French-backed Catholic regency, and after the death of Marie de Guise and the withdrawal of foreign troops (below), a Parliament assembled in Edinburgh in August 1560. In a matter of days it enacted the legal core of the Scottish Reformation: it adopted the Protestant Confession of Faith (the Scots Confession, drafted largely by Knox and the committee known as the "Six Johns"); it abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope (the Papal Jurisdiction Act, still technically in force today); and it forbade the celebration of the Mass, on escalating penalties up to death for repeated offences.

The crucial nuance — often glossed over — is that this Parliament's legal authority was contested at the time. It met without the sovereign's assent: Mary was in France, a Catholic, and refused to ratify its acts. A messenger sent to secure her approval in Paris was rebuffed. The reformers were, in strict constitutional terms, legislating in the absence and against the wishes of their crowned monarch, which is why critics regarded the settlement as revolutionary and legally vulnerable. The 1560 statutes were not formally ratified by the crown until 1567, after Mary's overthrow, when they were confirmed in the name of the infant James VI. Scholars have emphasised that the abrupt "abolition" of the old order masked a far more gradual and complex constitutional and religious transition.

6. The Lords of the Congregation and the Treaty of Edinburgh

The political engine of the Reformation was the Lords of the Congregation, a faction of Protestant nobles who from 1557 bound themselves to advance the Reformed cause and who came into open conflict with Marie de Guise's regency. Guise, sustained by French troops, faced the Lords across a see-sawing military campaign; the Protestants were close to defeat until an English fleet entered the Firth of Forth in January 1560, and the Lords secured English military intervention through the Treaty of Berwick (27 February 1560).

Full-scale civil war was averted by two developments. First, Marie de Guise died at Edinburgh Castle on 11 June 1560, removing the linchpin of the French Catholic party. Second, the exhausted English and French powers agreed the Treaty of Edinburgh (concluded 6 July 1560, negotiated from 5 July), under which both withdrew their forces from Scotland, effectively ending the Auld Alliance and leaving the Scots to govern themselves. Guise's death shortly before the treaty was decisive: with her gone and French troops departing, the Catholic cause in Scotland collapsed, clearing the way for the Reformation Parliament weeks later.

7. The establishment of the Kirk and the First Book of Discipline

The 1560 settlement founded the Protestant Church of Scotland — the Kirk — on Reformed, Calvinist lines, with worship centred on preaching and scripture in the vernacular, the sacraments reduced to two (baptism and communion), and church interiors stripped of imagery. The first General Assembly met in December 1560.

The reformers' blueprint was the First Book of Discipline (1560), drafted by Knox and the "Six Johns." It set out a Presbyterian system of ministers and elected elders, and — strikingly for its age — proposed an ambitious national programme of universal schooling (a school in every parish, leading up to the universities) and systematic poor relief, to be funded from the endowments of the old Church. This vision was largely aspirational rather than realised. The nobility, who had seized much former Church wealth, would not surrender it to fund the new schemes; Parliament shelved the financial provisions, and Knox was, in Britannica's words, "deeply embittered by the enforced abandonment of his schemes for education and poor relief." The Book of Discipline was never formally ratified as law. Its educational ideal nonetheless left a lasting imprint on Scottish culture, even though its full implementation lay generations in the future.

8. How godly was reformed Scotland?

The reformers saw 1560 as a completed event: the First Book of Discipline was originally titled The Buik of Reformatioun and Discipline of the Kirk. The historian Jenny Wormald, in the Oxford Handbook, argues that the idea of an exceptionally godly Scotland is largely a myth, built by Knox, the Melvilles and the Presbyterian historians Calderwood and Row and renewed after 1707. The Kirk's own records, she points out, tell a story of continuing resistance. In 1649, nearly a century after the Reformation, the General Assembly still found "the wholl Land polluted with sin".

The records of the Stirling presbytery are full of people who would not be made godly. In 1583 servants and boys struck a drum and held May plays on the Sabbath. Two schoolmasters were summoned for performing "clark plays" on Sundays; one, John Broun, was told to write a Latin thesis on whether this was lawful, delivered it in prose and verse, and ended up being allowed to keep teaching. In 1592 John White, a piper, played at a wedding on Sunday morning and threatened the minister; he later said he could not remember because he had been drunk. Wormald notes that sexual offences drew the heaviest punishments partly because they were the easiest to prosecute, often reported by jealous spouses, while the Kirk had to tread carefully over pastimes that neighbours did not object to.

Old habits proved very hard to break. People kept visiting Christ's Well near Stirling for healing despite repeated punishment and even guards posted around it. In 1595 Helen Jameson said she had washed her blind child's eyes there and the child could see again; she and her husband were made to repent barefoot in linen for three Sundays. The Kirk's ban on Christmas was widely ignored: in 1609 the Lords of Session went on strike for a Christmas holiday, and where the ban did bite, people celebrated Hogmanay instead. The Church of Scotland did not formally recognise Christmas until 1958.

Wormald also questions the Kirk's later image of itself. In 1957 it claimed in talks with the Church of England that it had never had bishops, which she calls historically outrageous. James VI's bishops were moderate men who worked alongside the church courts, and as late as 1637 the future Covenanting minister Robert Baillie could write "bishops I love". It was Charles I's very different, high-church bishops who ended episcopacy's chances in the Kirk.

9. A two-speed Reformation: myths and evidence

Michael Lynch argues that Reformation history has been left unusually to "religionists", writers with a denominational stake in the outcome. As a result, myths that historians have challenged in other periods of Scottish history survive here. His alternative is a two-speed Reformation. First came a rapid revolution from above in 1559–60, made by nobles and lairds. Then came a slow reformation of belief and behaviour, enforced through kirk sessions, baron courts and town councils over three or four generations. In the Highlands, where few kirk sessions existed before the second quarter of the 17th century, the work fell to chiefs, kindreds and the learned orders.

Several familiar claims do not survive his scrutiny. A 1998 schools pack stated that by 1500 many ordinary Scots had stopped going to church. The evidence usually cited is a church council of 1552, which complained of falling attendance "within these last few years", half a century later. Nor is there evidence that attendance rose dramatically after 1560. The one study to try to measure it, using collection-plate records at Monifeith near Dundee, suggests that weekly attendance averaged only about 10 per cent of the potential congregation in the 1570s, even in this Protestant heartland. The General Assembly's complaints of irreverent behaviour at communion in 1617 echo Catholic reformers' complaints before 1560. The Reformation was also less socially revolutionary than either side claimed: no one holding major office lost it as a result of 1560, and very few town councils experienced a coup.

The losses were real, though. Lynch notes that only two pre-Reformation altarpieces and two craft banners survive in Scotland. One banner is the Fetternear Banner of Edinburgh's Holy Blood fraternity, which was hidden away. The other is the glovers' banner of St Bartholomew from Perth, which survived because it was at the mender's when the riot that followed Knox's sermon swept through St John's Kirk in May 1559. The second-stage reformation of the 1570s–90s was driven as much by the state as the Kirk. It was an act of parliament in 1579, not the church, that first tried to make ownership of a Bible compulsory. In 1581 James VI had his whole court subscribe the King's Confession on their knees.

10. Mary's return and personal reign (1561–1567)

Widowed by the death of Francis II in December 1560, Mary returned to Scotland on 19 August 1561, aged eighteen — a Catholic monarch arriving in a kingdom that had, during her long absence, become officially Protestant and friendly to England. Historians note that the fourteen months between Marie de Guise's death and Mary's return were precisely the window in which the Protestant lords consolidated control.

Modern scholarship generally agrees that Mary's early religious policy was one of pragmatic tolerance rather than Catholic reaction. She did not attempt to reverse the Reformation; she accepted the religious settlement she found, reserving only the right to hear Mass privately in her own chapel, and she governed through a privy council dominated by Protestant leaders, chief among them her illegitimate half-brother James Stewart (later Earl of Moray). The bargain was struck with Lord James at St-Dizier in France in April 1561, before she sailed, and of the twelve members of her first Privy Council seven were Protestants. The one exception came early in 1566, when Darnley pushed a Catholic revival and the pregnant queen briefly promised freedom to hear Mass. Guy reads her as a pragmatic rather than ideological Catholic, who took on the role of Catholic martyr only in English captivity; that reading is widely shared for the 1560s but disputed for her later years. This is, however, where historians diverge sharply in their interpretation of Mary as a ruler. Jenny Wormald, in Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (1988), judged Mary strictly by the standards of her Stewart predecessors and found her a political failure — passive and disengaged, far more preoccupied with her claim to the English succession than with governing Scotland, and (Wormald argued) revealingly uninterested in building a Catholic or pro-French council. John Guy, in My Heart Is My Own (2004), returned to the archives to offer a markedly more sympathetic portrait of a politically shrewd and charismatic ruler undermined by faction at home and by Elizabeth's minister William Cecil abroad. Guy's Cecil is her nemesis from 1559 onwards, backing her rebel lords and pressing for her death, while Elizabeth herself repeatedly shrank from acting against an anointed queen; many historians of Elizabeth's government think this overstates Cecil's personal animus. These two poles — competence-failure versus shrewd-and-wronged — define the modern academic debate, distinct from the older popular caricature of martyr versus murderess. Knox, for his part, openly challenged Mary's right to rule and to worship as she chose, and the two clashed in a series of famous interviews.

11. Mary's court: spectacle with a political purpose

As dowager Queen of France, Mary had the money for grand entertainments, and Thomas argues that her balls, masques and ceremonies were political rather than frivolous. In February 1566 Darnley was admitted to the French Order of St Michael in a ceremony at Holyrood designed, unsuccessfully, to draw Scottish nobles back to the Mass. The baptism of Prince Charles James (the future James VI) at Stirling in December 1566 was the most spectacular Renaissance festival of the period. Modelled on the Valois festivities at Bayonne in 1565, it ran for days, with a banquet for foreign ambassadors, hunts, poetry, dance, theatre and a mock siege with costumed fighters and fireworks, all proclaiming that Mary's dynasty would bring peace and unity. It was the high point of her reign, and her rule collapsed only months later. In 1566 she also commissioned the first printed edition of all the Scottish Acts of Parliament.

12. Darnley, Rizzio and the birth of James VI

In July 1565 Mary married her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a match that strengthened her English dynastic claim (both were grandchildren of Margaret Tudor) but proved politically and personally disastrous. Contemporaries and historians alike describe Darnley as vain, unstable and grasping; John Guy characterises him as "a narcissist and a natural conspirator." The marriage alienated Moray and other Protestant nobles and quickly soured.

By early 1566 Darnley, resentful that Mary would not grant him the "crown matrimonial" (co-sovereign power), entered a bond with disaffected Protestant lords. On the evening of 9 March 1566, a group led by Lord Ruthven burst into Mary's supper chamber at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, dragged her Italian secretary David Rizzio from her side and stabbed him to death in the adjoining outer chamber; Mary's own account counted fifty-six wounds. Mary was about six months pregnant at the time, and one conspirator held a pistol on her. Darnley's complicity is documented: his dagger was reportedly left in the body, and he had signed a bond with the conspirators, though he afterwards issued a cowardly denial. Mary skilfully detached Darnley from his fellow plotters, and shortly after midnight on the third night the couple slipped out of Holyrood and rode to Dunbar. John Guy, in his biography of Mary (2004), adds that the English ambassadors at Berwick, and through them William Cecil, knew of the plot days in advance and did not warn her; how far Cecil encouraged it is a matter of interpretation. On 19 June 1566 she gave birth to the future James VI at Edinburgh Castle — the child who would ultimately unite the crowns.

13. Darnley's murder, examined with hedging

Relations between Mary and Darnley never recovered. In early 1567, Darnley — recuperating from illness (often said to be syphilis) — was lodged at the Old Provost's Lodging at Kirk o' Field, on the edge of Edinburgh. Mary had fetched him from Glasgow intending to lodge him at Craigmillar; John Guy cites a Lennox servant's testimony that Darnley refused and chose Kirk o' Field himself, though her accusers later said the choice was hers. At about two in the morning of 10 February 1567, a large charge of gunpowder packed into the house (Guy estimates a dozen or so barrels) destroyed it in a huge explosion heard across the city. But Darnley did not die in the blast: his body and that of his valet were found in an adjoining garden or orchard, dressed in their nightclothes, apparently strangled or smothered rather than killed by the explosion, with a chair, a rope and a dagger nearby. The most common reconstruction is that the two men were fleeing the house — perhaps having discovered the plot — and were intercepted and killed, the explosion serving either as the intended means of murder or as a cover-up. As one account bluntly concludes, "no hard evidence about precisely what occurred has ever been found."

Suspicion fell immediately on James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, and beyond him on a wide circle of nobles who had bonded to be rid of Darnley. Bothwell was put on trial in April 1567 and acquitted — in circumstances that critics regarded as intimidated and rigged — before six of his associates were later executed for the crime.

Mary's own knowledge of, or complicity in, the murder is the central disputed question of her life, and this article does not resolve it. The evidence and the scholarship pull in opposite directions. On one side, her failure to pursue the killers vigorously, her evident hatred of Darnley, and above all her marriage to the chief suspect within three months have long been read as signs of guilt; Jenny Wormald concluded that "the probability that she was involved in the murder of Darnley is very strong," and the traditional weight of scholarship has held she was likely at least an accomplice in Bothwell's designs. On the other side, John Guy argues she was largely innocent — that she was on the verge of a settlement with Elizabeth over the English succession that she would not have jeopardised, and that the case against her rests on tainted evidence. (Elizabeth had offered a new treaty recognising Mary as her heir late in 1566; Mary accepted on 3 January 1567 and two days before the murder ordered her envoy back to London to conclude it.) Guy's own reconstruction, drawn from the English border reports of Sir William Drury, makes Bothwell and the Earl of Morton joint ringleaders, with Maitland and Sir James Balfour assisting and Moray aware but absent; that too is an argument rather than a proven fact. Careful historians reach no definitive conclusion; several note that most of the murdering nobility had reason to point the finger at Bothwell to save themselves. The honest verdict is: Bothwell was almost certainly involved; a wider conspiracy of nobles was involved; and Mary's personal role remains unproven either way.

14. The Bothwell marriage and the disputed abduction

On 24 April 1567, Bothwell intercepted Mary on the road from Stirling to Edinburgh with a large armed force and took her to Dunbar Castle. There, according to contemporary claims, he raped her; they married in a Protestant ceremony at Holyrood on 15 May 1567, only weeks after Darnley's murder and after Bothwell's hurried divorce from Lady Jean Gordon.

Whether this was a genuine abduction and rape or a staged pretext with Mary's foreknowledge and consent is genuinely disputed, and was disputed at the time. Sympathetic accounts hold that the power-hungry Bothwell seized and violated an isolated, traumatised queen who then felt she had no honourable choice but to marry him — and note that Mary never publicly claimed rape, in an age when such a claim was socially ruinous. Hostile accounts, including several contemporaries close to events (such as Sir James Melville), took the view that the "abduction" was collusive — that Mary went willingly and that the drama was choreographed to make an otherwise scandalous marriage appear forced upon her. Serious modern historians remain divided; a careful formulation is that Bothwell "waylaid Mary... (whether with or without her connivance)," which captures the irreducible uncertainty. John Guy takes a middle position: he thinks the seizure at Almond Bridge was genuine, since Mary at once sent servants for help, but that over twelve days at Dunbar Bothwell persuaded rather than raped her, and that she then fell in love with him. Mary herself told the minister John Craig in writing that she had been neither raped nor held prisoner, yet admitted to her envoy to France that Bothwell had pressed her with force. As one summary honestly puts it, "the truth perhaps lies somewhere in between... We will never know for sure."

15. Rebellion, abdication and exile

The Bothwell marriage united Scotland against Mary. A coalition of "Confederate Lords" took up arms, ostensibly to avenge Darnley and protect the infant prince. The two sides confronted each other at Carberry Hill on 15 June 1567, where — without a real battle — Bothwell was allowed to flee (he eventually died a prisoner in Denmark in 1578) and Mary surrendered. She was imprisoned at Loch Leven Castle and, on 24 July 1567, forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, who was crowned James VI with Moray as regent.

In a celebrated escape aided by the Douglas family, Mary got out of Loch Leven on 2 May 1568 and rapidly gathered an army of some 6,000 men. On 13 May 1568 this force was defeated by Moray's smaller, better-disciplined army at the Battle of Langside, near Glasgow. Rather than flee to the safety of Dumbarton, Mary made the fateful choice to cross the Solway Firth into England on 16 May 1568, throwing herself on the protection of her cousin Elizabeth I — protection that would become nineteen years of captivity.

16. The Casket Letters, examined

Central to the case against Mary were the Casket Letters — eight letters and a series of sonnets, said to have been written by Mary to Bothwell between January and April 1567, allegedly found in a silver casket in Bothwell's possession and produced by her enemies (chiefly Moray) as evidence that she had colluded in Darnley's murder and in an adulterous affair. They were presented before English commissioners at conferences at York and Westminster in 1568–69.

Their authenticity has been disputed since the moment they appeared and remains unresolved. The problems are severe: the originals (in French) are lost, surviving only in copies and translations; they were produced by Mary's committed political enemies, who had every motive to fabricate or doctor them; they were unsigned, only one was dated, and none named its recipient; and their contents contain internal inconsistencies. John Guy's forensic re-examination concludes that the crucial material was a doctored composite — genuine letters (perhaps to Darnley, or later drafts) spliced together with interpolations to manufacture proof of guilt — and he points out that one "marriage contract" quotes a bond that did not yet exist on its purported date, making it a "blatant forgery." Guy goes letter by letter: he reads the three so-called love letters as genuine letters to Darnley from 1566, one of the abduction letters as a genuine letter to Bothwell written after the abduction rather than before it, and the last two as forgeries. He also shows that the dated short Glasgow letter cannot fit Bothwell's known movements, since Bothwell had left Edinburgh for the borders the evening before. These are persuasive readings, but they are his argument, and other historians still treat parts of the letters as genuine evidence against her. Even the 1568–69 commission declined to reach a definitive verdict. Some historians still argue portions may be genuine. The responsible conclusion, echoed by National Museums Scotland — which holds the casket — is that "the authenticity of the Casket Letters remains hotly debated," and they cannot safely be treated as reliable proof of Mary's guilt. (NMS itself cautions that "it cannot be categorically proven or unproven that the Mary, Queen of Scots Casket belonged to Mary, or that it was the 'Letters' Casket.")

17. Mary's English captivity and execution

Mary spent nearly nineteen years (1568–1587) in genteel but real captivity in England, moved between castles and houses (long in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick). As the Catholic great-granddaughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth's heir presumptive, she became the natural focus of Catholic hopes and conspiracies against the Protestant Elizabeth — a danger sharpened after Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570. Three major plots are usually named: the Ridolfi Plot (1571), which aimed to depose Elizabeth and marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk (executed for his part); the Throckmorton Plot (1583), which envisaged a French/Spanish-backed invasion; and the Babington Plot (1586), in which Anthony Babington and others plotted Elizabeth's assassination.

The Babington Plot was Mary's undoing. Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham had arranged for Mary's secret correspondence to be intercepted; a letter in which Mary appeared to consent to Elizabeth's assassination provided the evidence for treason. Her cipher reply of 17 July 1586 urged that "the six gentlemen" be set to work once foreign forces were ready; read with Babington's letter, which named their work as the "dispatch of the usurper", its meaning is plain, and even her most sympathetic modern biographer, John Guy, accepts her complicity. Mary was tried at Fotheringhay on 14–15 October 1586 under the Act for the Queen's Safety of 1585, without counsel or witnesses, and found guilty in her absence in Star Chamber on 25 October. Elizabeth hesitated for months before signing the death warrant on 1 February 1587; the Privy Council then sent it to Fotheringhay without telling her, and Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587 — the first legal execution of an anointed European monarch. Guy, drawing on the account of the council clerk Robert Beale, adds that Elizabeth had first sought to have Mary's keeper, Sir Amyas Paulet, kill her quietly under the Bond of Association, and that Paulet refused.

The well-known eyewitness details of the execution derive chiefly from the account of Robert Wynkfield and from near-contemporary reports later drawn on by biographers such as Antonia Fraser and John Guy; they are broadly credible but should be treated as vivid eyewitness testimony rather than forensic record. Mary reportedly went to the block in dark garments over a crimson (martyr's) bodice, forgave her executioner, and commended her spirit to God in Latin ("In manus tuas, Domine..."). The execution required more than one blow of the axe (accounts say two or three, the first striking the back of the head). When the executioner lifted the severed head, her auburn wig came away in his hand, revealing short grey hair. And afterwards, a small dog — said to be a Skye terrier — was found hidden beneath her skirts, which refused to leave the body and had to be taken away and washed of her blood. These details are consistently reported across the eyewitness tradition, though some elaborations (the dog's name, its pining death) are later embroidery.

Mary was buried at Peterborough Cathedral and later, in October 1612, reinterred at Westminster Abbey by her son, in a tomb that cost £2,000 against £765 for Elizabeth's. James VI continued as sole king of Scots; his succession to the English throne in 1603 — the Union of the Crowns — is the subject of Card #14.