URN THIS INTO A SONG: Persistent problem for queen elizabeth i was Mary Queen of Scots. her father James V died in 1542, she was only 6 days old. She travelled to France as a young child and at 16 married the Dauphin (thereby enduring the mother in law from hell in the form of Catherine de Medici). Aged 17 she became the queen of France. By the age of 18, about your age, she was a widow. Remember, at this time France was still at war with England. Following her French husband’s death, she went back to Scotland and assumed the throne there as well as a new husband. But she was a Catholic in a now Protestant country and when she got involved in her husband’s murder, the Scottish nobles rebelled and she had to flee to England (1568). This created a huge thorn in Elizabeth’s side: Mary had proclaimed her claim to the English throne, and was thus a rival. She was also Catholic and friendly with France, so she was arrested and put under home arrest. But all that this meant was that now there was a focus for Catholic enemies of the regime to conspire around, within England. John Guy lays much of the blame for Mary’s downfall at the feet of Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil. “More than anyone else”, he says, Cecil “was her great nemesis. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary was a Catholic, and Cecil’s overriding ambition was to remould the whole of the British Isles into a single Protestant community”. Retha Warnicke’s 2006 book portrays Mary as a victim of gender expectations – her problems stemmed from not taking advice from her (male) counsellors and in marrying men who expected to share power in a way she was not prepared to concede. Mary’s fate “was a tragedy largely rooted in the gender relations of early modern Europe through which she was forced as queen to negotiate her rule”. Jenny Wormald’s much criticised book ‘Mary Queen of Scots, A Study in Failure’, nevertheless correctly pointed out that ‘she was, in her life and in her death, a figure of European significance. No one in the sixteenth century made the mistake which was to become such a feature of later writings about her, of seeing her crimes or her innocence as a little domestic matter, locking her into a Scottish bedroom debate” Darnley was, like Mary herself, a descendent of Margaret Tudor, so any children the couple produced would have a rock-solid claim to the English throne, but he was also an English Protestant. Massive threat to Elizabeth accused of conspiring to murder her second husband, Lord Darnley, Mary claimed that she had had no prior knowledge of the events at Kirk o’Field in Edinburgh. In 1570, the Bishop of Ross, John Lesley, wrote an impassioned defence of his queen’s innocence of this crime, only for it to be countered by an equally forceful attack on her honour by George Buchanan. That murder, we was never properly avenged, not least because the men who plotted were the same men who were responsible for investigating it and of course, among them was Bothwell . The Bothwell marriage was the final blow to Mary’s reputation, coming as it did hard on the heels of accusations of adultery with the ill-fated David Rizzio and complicity in the assassination of Darnley. . So to modern eyes, Mary was, to say the least, ill-advised in marrying the man whom many thought to be responsible for Darnley’s murder. We will probably never know whether Mary consented to and helped to plan her abduction by Bothwell in April 1567, or whether she was indeed ‘ravished’ at Dunbar as a contemporary, James Melville, claimed. And banish from your minds any romantic notions about being ravished – it was a violent act that implied abduction and often, rape. What we can say is that even if she had been raped by Bothwell, it’s quite possible that she would have felt obliged to marry him. [any child would be illegitimate if she didn’t]. What worried both Cecil and Elizabeth was that Mary was a focus for rebellion. What worried both Cecil and Elizabeth was that Mary was a focus for rebellion. Mary’s claim to the English throne was through her grandmother, Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret, who had married James IV, and Mary was unwavering in her belief that she or her children should inherit the English crown if Elizabeth died without children of her own. While Elizabeth had no husband and no children, there was a very real danger that a civil war would break out over the succession when she died. To Catholics, Elizabeth was Henry’s illegitimate daughter. The Roman Catholic church had never recognised Henry’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry had married Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, while Catherine was still alive, meaning that for Catholics, the marriage was unlawful so she was a bastard
