Queen of Scotland (1542–67), the daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. She was betrothed to the future Edward VI of England in 1543 but Cardinal Beaton’s veto of the marriage led to war with the English, and the Scottish defeat at Pinkie (1547). Mary was then sent to the French court, where she received a Catholic upbringing under the supervision of her Guise uncles. She married the dauphin Francis (1558), who succeeded to the French throne in 1559 and died in 1560. By 1561 she had returned to Scotland, and had also proclaimed herself the rightful queen of England, as granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor.

She had to adapt to the anti-monarchical, anti-Catholic, anti-French atmosphere of Reformation Scotland. Her unpopular romantic marriage to Darnley (1565), although it produced a son, the future James VI (James I), was disastrous. Darnley murdered Mary’s secretary Rizzio and was then murdered himself. Soon after she married Bothwell despite having been abducted by him. The subsequent rising of the Scottish lords resulted in her military defeat and flight to England. There she threw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth I, who kept her confined in various strongholds until her death. Wittingly or not, she was involved in a number of Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth, figuring in the scheming behind the Northern Rising as well as the Ridolfi and Throckmorton Plots. Her implication in the Babington Plot (1586) provided enough damaging evidence for a commission to find her guilty of treason. For years Elizabeth had turned a deaf ear to Protestant pleas to execute this fellow monarch. Even now she delayed signing the death warrant, and then disclaimed responsibility for the execution of Mary at Fotheringhay.