Mary, Queen of Scots, the Mother of Kings

Every British monarch since 1603 descends from a woman who lost her throne and her head. Her son was born in a stone room eight feet across, high in Edinburgh Castle, and that birth changed the map of Britain.

The Infant Queen

Mary was not a king's wife. She was a queen in her own right, crowned Queen of Scotland at six days old. Raised in the French court, she returned to Edinburgh at eighteen, and the timing could not have been worse. In 1560, the year before her return, Scotland had turned Protestant. Mary came home a Catholic queen to a Protestant land of plots and daggers.

She married her cousin Lord Darnley, partly for love and partly for politics. He carried his own claim to the English throne, and their child would carry both. What followed was the most dramatic decade in Scottish history. Her secretary David Rizzio, a low born Italian Catholic with the queen's ear, was dragged from her supper table and stabbed to death before her eyes, murdered out of her husband's jealousy and the nobles' hatred. Darnley himself was found strangled in a garden months later, after gunpowder blew his house apart. The chief suspect was the Earl of Bothwell. Mary married him that May, and Scotland rose against her.

The Fall

In 1567, thirteen months after giving birth, Mary was forced to abdicate in favor of her one year old son. She escaped from Loch Leven Castle, raised an army, lost, and fled south into England, begging her cousin Elizabeth I for help. Elizabeth could not send her back to her enemies, would not restore her to the throne, and dared not set her free. So she locked Mary up, and kept her locked up for nineteen years.

The Twist

Prison made Mary more dangerous, not less. She became the figurehead of every Catholic plot against Elizabeth, until the Babington Plot of 1586, when her own coded letters approving Elizabeth's assassination were intercepted. That gave Elizabeth the evidence she needed. Mary was beheaded in 1587.

But Mary had the last word. Her son James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, uniting the two crowns that had fought for centuries. Elizabeth died childless. Her cousin took Mary's throne and her head, yet it is Mary's descendants who have reigned ever since.

The Castle

It all began in that tiny room in Edinburgh Castle. On June 19, 1566, after a long and difficult labour, Mary gave birth clutching a holy relic of St Margaret for protection. Five hundred bonfires lit up the Edinburgh night. You can still stand in the birth room today, see St Margaret's Chapel, the oldest building in Edinburgh, and the Honours of Scotland in the Crown Room, the very crown placed on Mary's head when she was crowned as a nine month old baby. Follow her trail to Holyroodhouse, where Rizzio was murdered, and to Loch Leven, the island castle she escaped by boat. In a single day in Edinburgh, her whole story unfolds, from birth room to downfall.

Would you want to experience any of these someday? Make them part of your World →