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 Born in 1542, Mary Stuart, or Mary Queen of Scots as she is also known was the daughter of James V of Scotland and his French wife
Mary of Guise, and granddaughter of Henry VII of England. Her father died just a week after her birth leaving his country racked by political intrigue and religious turmoil and threatened by English pretensions to
power. As a result Mary was hastily crowned queen of Scotland in Stirling castle at the tender age of nine months. At the age of five she was sent to the French court and was brought up in the manner of a
French princess. Married at sixteen to Francis II of France, on his death only two years later she returned to a by now Protestant Scotland governed by a
suspicious nobility and in ferment of Calvinist zeal inspired by the reformed John Knox. To many of her subjects she was an unwelcome Catholic stranger while her cousin Elizabeth I
she was her most serious rival for the English throne, being next in the line and favoured by those in England who regarded Elizabeth as the illegitimate offspring of Henry VIII.
Mary incurred more heartache as a result of her marriage to her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a handsome but depraved ne'er do well. Barely a year had gone before passion
turned to hatred when in 1566 Darnley murdered her confidant David Rizzio in front of the pregnant queen. Following the birth of her son James, Mary tried to obtain a separation from
her husband, finding an ally in the commander of her troops, James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell. In 1567 the house in which Darnley was staying, called Kirk o'Field, was blown
up and Darnley himself was found strangled. Within three months Mary had married the principal suspect, Bothwell, so putting herself finally beyond the pale in her eyes of the
Scottish nobility. The young couple spent only three weeks together, in Dunbar Castle, a time described later by Mary as the best of her life. On July 24th 1567 she was forced to  abdicate and banished to an inaccessible island fortress in Loch Leven from whence,
two years later, she managed to escape to England. There, ostensibly for having been implicated in Darnley's murder but in truth because of the threat she represented to Elizabeth's throne, Mary was again
imprisoned. She remained incarcerated for the next eighteen years, a pawn in the struggle between Catholics and Protestants for the throne of England. The disclosure in
1586 of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth was the excuse for a charge of high treason against Mary. Sentenced to death she was beheaded at Fortheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire in 1587.
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