Contributions
Queen of Scots at six days old, raised at the Valois court and briefly queen of France through her marriage to Francis II, Mary Stuart is the most romantic figure of the island Renaissance. French in taste, refined, she brought back to Scotland in 1561 the love of poetry, music and embroidery of an Italo-French court. Granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, she claimed the English throne, which made her, in the eyes of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth's legitimate heir — and a mortal threat. Her brief, stormy personal reign in Scotland ended in abdication (1567) in favour of her son James VI, the future king of England. A refugee and then Elizabeth's captive for nineteen years, she became the centre of Catholic plots; the Babington conspiracy precipitated her trial and her execution at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587.
Significance
Mary Stuart is the tragic knot of the British Renaissance. Through her claim to the English throne she crystallised, for a quarter of a century, the rivalry between England, Scotland and Spain and the burning question of Elizabeth's succession; her very death hastened the Armada. Her fate bound the two crowns forever: it was her son James who, in 1603, achieved the union his mother could only embody. Nuance tempers the myth: her Scottish reign was marked by disastrous marriages — the murder of her second husband, Darnley, then her marriage to Bothwell, suspected of the killing — which provoked her subjects' revolt and her abdication. Her political judgement, often ruled by the heart, was contested in her lifetime and after. But the grandeur of her end, faced with the dignity of a martyr, imposed the image of a betrayed queen that posterity, from Schiller to Donizetti, has never ceased to celebrate.
Influence
She founded a tenacious legend — a Catholic martyr for some, a fatal schemer for others — and became the matrix of the Stuart dynasty that would rule England and Scotland. Her story has lastingly inspired literature, opera and painting. Her upbringing at the Valois court, under Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, passed on the refinement of the French Renaissance and a militant Catholicism, while her mother, Mary of Guise, and the powerful Guise clan shaped her convictions and ambitions.
Anecdote
Through her long years of captivity, Mary embroidered. On her cloth of estate she had a motto inscribed that became the emblem of her destiny: "En ma fin gît mon commencement" — in my end is my beginning. Reported by William Drummond of Hawthornden, the phrase, a Christian meditation on death and resurrection, foretold her own end. At Fotheringhay, on 8 February 1587, she climbed the scaffold with sovereign calm and revealed, beneath her black veils, a crimson gown — the colour of the Church's martyrs.