MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS' (1542-1587), daughter of King James V. and his wife Mary of Lorraine, was born at Linlithgow in Dec. 1542, a few days before the death of her father. In July 1543 a treaty for the betrothal of the infant to Edward, heir of Henry VIII. of England, was made by the regent Arran, but Henry's obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scot land at once to that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation of Scottish patriotism. The marriage treaty was denounced by the Scots at the end of the same year, Henry retaliated by invasions of Scotland, and the Scots renewed their ancient alliance with France. In 1548 the queen of five years old was betrothed to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived on Aug. 15. For the next ten years, the child was under the care of her mother's relatives, the Guises. In April 1558 she was married to the dauphin, and in November of the same year Elizabeth became queen of England. In the eyes of Roman Catholic Europe, Elizabeth's birth was illegitimate, and Mary was de jure queen of England. Henry II. of France ordered his son and daughter-in-law to challenge Elizabeth's claim by assuming the royal arms of England. Civil strife broke out in Scotland between John Knox and the queen-dowager between the self-styled "congregation of the Lord" and the ad herents of the regent—and Elizabeth retaliated by helping the insurgent Protestants against the queen-dowager and her French troops. The war ended with the death of Mary of Lorraine in June 156o. Francis and Mary, who had become king and queen of France, had no efficient representative in Scotland, and the Protestant leaders were in control of the situation. On Aug. 25 Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed in Scotland by a parliament which was assembled without the assent of the absent queen.
On Dec. 5 Francis II. died; in Aug. 1561 his widow left France for Scotland. The queen arrived in safety at Leith. On Aug. 21 she first met the only man able to withstand her; and their first passage of arms left, as he has recorded, upon the mind of John Knox an ineffaceable impression of her "proud mind, crafty wit and indurate heart against God and His truth." And yet her acts
of concession and conciliation were such as no fanatic on the opposite side could have approved. She assented, not only to the undisturbed maintenance of the new creed, but even to a scheme for the endowment of the Protestant ministry out of the con fiscated lands of the Church. Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and most liberal thinker in the country. By the influence of Lord James, in spite of the earnest opposition of Knox, permission was obtained for her to hear mass celebrated in her private chapel—a licence to which, said the reformer, he would have preferred the invasion of ten thousand Frenchmen.
'In a letter dated April 4, 1882, referring to the publication of his drama Mary Stuart, Swinburne wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman: "Mary Stuart has procured me two satisfactions which I prefer infinitely to six columns of adulation in The Times and any profit thence resulting. (I) A letter from Sir Henry Taylor . . . (2) An application from the editor of the Encyclopcedia might, I suppose, as in Macaulay's time, almost command the services of the most eminent scholars and historians of the country—to me, a mere poet, proposing that I should contribute to that great re pository of erudition the biography of Mary Queen of Scots. I doubt if the like compliment was ever paid before to one of our `idle trade.' " The present article is based on the biography con sequently written by the poet for the 9th edition, after revision by Prof. R. S. Rait.
Through all the first troubles of her reign the young queen steered her skilful and dauntless way with the tact of a woman and the courage of a man. An insurrection in the north, headed by the earl of Huntly, gave Lord James, whom she created earl of Murray, the opportunity of destroying the influence of the most powerful Catholic nobleman in Scotland (1562).