Walk in the footsteps of Mary of Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots

Hers is the smallest painting on the walls, utterly dominated by the full-length portrait of her famous daughter that greets visitors. Small it may be, but Corneille de Lyon’s portrait of Mary of Guise is very likely the oldest painting on display in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. An oil-on-panel work from 1537, it was painted from life when the recently widowed Mary was 22 years old, no doubt as an aid to securing a second husband. The text beside the portrait claims that it captures her “wit and charm”, although her lips are small and pursed, her gaze appraising and determined, her eyes … wait a moment … her eyes … Perhaps it’s a trick of the light, but it seems to me that her right eye is blue and her left eye is brown. I peer more intently at a portrait I’ve seen several times. I’m still not 100 per cent certain but there’s definitely a difference between the two, a shadow at the very least that exists within the eye that’s angled closest to the viewer.

A tiny detail, perhaps, but an indication that there’s more to be discovered about Mary of Guise, particularly on this anniversary of her birth. I’m no historian but I do like to drag my family along to stately homes, ancient monuments and piles of prehistoric stones. So I set myself the challenge to walk for a day in Mary of Guise’s footsteps, to visit the key sites of her time in Scotland and to find out what I can along the way that goes deeper than the two or three sentences of biography that I hold in my head.

That biography goes something like this. Mary of Guise was born in the Lorraine region of France to a high-powered noble family in 1515. She married James V, King of Scotland, in 1538 and gave birth to a daughter, also called Mary, at Linlithgow Palace on December 8, 1542, six days before James V died. While young Mary was sent to France to be educated at the royal court and groomed to marry the Dauphin Francis, Mary of Guise ruled Scotland as a Catholic regent, eventually clashing with Protestant forces, before she died in 1560. As I said, I’m no historian, and so to give myself a bit of a helping hand, I get in touch with Dr Nicki Scott, cultural resources advisor at Historic Scotland.

“Mary of Guise is overshadowed by her daughter, who has become romanticised because of her tragic abdication and the miscarriage and her execution,” says Scott. “And yet Mary of Guise is such a fascinating woman. There’s so much that could have happened between James V dying and Mary, Queen of Scots returning from France to take up the throne. But Mary of Guise manages the politics and the religious situation really well, especially when you compare the – what’s a nicer way of saying it? – complete shambles that her daughter seems to make of it. She goes through such trauma and tragedy, has to leave her home and leave her children, but manages to govern a country that a king would have struggled to govern. And this is not a period when female rulers are readily accepted.”

MY FIRST port of call is Stirling Castle, where a small exhibition on Mary’s life has been running for a few months. Before I get to it, however, even on this most dreich of November days the strategic importance of Stirling is obvious: raised high above the town, dominating a relatively thin gateway to the north, the castle looms proudly over the site of the Battle of Bannockburn and the bloodied fields of the Wars of Independence. This was where Mary of Guise brought her new-born daughter for safety after James’s death, a stronghold that’s also impressively comfortable, as recent renovations to the castle’s Great Hall and Royal Palace have revealed.

I begin in the Great Hall, its yellow exterior still glowing against the weather-worn stone of its neighbours courtesy of a facelift in 1999. Inside it’s no less impressive: a massive banqueting hall whose hammerbeam roof arches high towards the heavens, it retains the imposing atmosphere that a royal court would want to impress upon friend and foe alike. It’s impossible to believe that this same space became a stables when the court moved to England with James VI and was used as a barracks during the Napoleonic Wars.

Castles & palaces: Where to visit to discover more

When Mary of Guise first arrived here, however, Stirling Castle was fresh in its splendour. James would have used money from both his French marriages – the first to Madeleine de Valois, daughter of King Francis I, who died in 1537; the second not to a princess but noblewoman Mary of Guise – to build, decorate and furnish the buildings with a nod to the French chateaux with which his wives would have been familiar.

Indeed, as I pass through a door at the top end of the Great Hall, taking the king and queen’s private passage to their lodgings, I’m struck by the vibrant colour of the rooms. Most historical sites have a museum-like faded quality that has come to represent what we understand as historically authentic. The £12 million renovation of the Palace within Stirling Castle makes every wall, every ceiling, every tapestry breathe with new life … and, surprisingly perhaps, this brings its own authenticity because it truly feels like I’m stepping back in time to share space with Mary of Guise.

There she is, gazing down as one of the so-called Stirling Heads, the beautiful replica carvings that adorn the ceiling of the King’s Inner Hall, where James would have received important guests. But her presence is felt much more keenly in her own lodgings, which run at right angles to the king’s. It’s her innermost sanctum that I reach first by this route, the Queen’s Bedchamber with its symbolic state bed (the queen would actually have slept in the intimate – and more easily heated – comfort of a smaller room nearby).

Purple tasselled velvet, slightly funereal in its richness, crowns the drapes that surround this four-poster but is brightened by gold carvings on red wooden bedposts. In the corner, two candles flicker on a desk in front of a chair that’s halfway to being a throne, all beneath a regal canopy. The Guise family’s heraldic design – three white birds shot by a single arrow forming a blood-red slash across a yellow circle – can be seen in five panels on the ceiling. A triptych featuring the Madonna and Child sits on a wooden chest, another Mary protecting her vulnerable royal infant. The room exudes power but it’s notably more welcoming than the king’s lodgings. I can already feel that Stirling is where Mary began to build both a household for herself and a power base for her daughter, a location where she could simultaneously be mother and politician.

The exhibition titled The Other Mary, situated beyond where James V kept his kennels, helps fill in some of the biographical gaps in my knowledge of this woman. It’s an admission of my own ignorance, but I had no idea of some of the twists and turns she lived through.

As a child, Mary was sent to a convent to be with her grandmother before arriving at the French royal court in 1530. She would have attended the wedding of James V and Madeleine de Valois in Notre Dame Cathedral on New Year’s Day 1537 as wife of Louis, the Duke of Longueville, whom she had married in 1534. The sickly Madeleine died in July only six months after becoming Queen of Scotland but by then Mary herself had been a widow for four weeks – and another four weeks later, gave birth to a second son, named Louis in honour of his late father. Young Louis died in infancy but her first son, Francis, lived until he was 16, although she rarely saw him after moving to Scotland. She did, however, treasure a piece of string he sent her once to show how tall he had grown.

As a widow with a sizeable dowry and close ties to the French king, Mary’s hand was sought by Henry VIII but she turned him down, perhaps preferring to keep her head on her shoulders. By marrying James, she strengthened the Auld Alliance: in their double wedding portrait, she is portrayed as being as tall as he is, and indeed is said to have been near six feet in height, like her daughter. (And her eyes in this portrait reproduction? Brown, I’d say. Although a text quoting a historian elsewhere in the exhibition describes her “rather small, tilted blue-grey eyes”. So still no closer on that particular point.) There were further traumas. Mary’s two Scottish sons, James and Robert, were born a year apart but died within hours of each other in infancy. When Henry VIII’s plans for political stability via the marriage between his son Edward and Mary, Queen of Scots were rejected, Mary of Guise had to rule through the Rough Wooing and war with England. By 1558, the rise of Protestantism in Scotland and the ascension of Elizabeth I to the English throne had seriously weakened Mary’s authority. When she died of dropsy in Edinburgh in 1560, her lead-lined coffin had to be smuggled out of the castle several months later for burial in Rheims.

ARRIVING AT Linlithgow Palace, I pass the French-style fountain, with its symbolic stone creatures – a unicorn, a winged stag, a mermaid – and climb the turnpike stairs of the highest tower to the stone bower where Queen Margaret supposedly waited in vain for the return of James IV from the Battle of Flodden. From here I look down through the missing ceilings of the West Range to the floor of the King’s Bedchamber: a panel suggests that Mary, Queen of Scots may have been born in the room directly above his. However, historians now lean towards the theory that Mary of Guise would have given birth in an adjoining room in the North Range, which was lost when it collapsed in 1607. In either case, the exact location of Mary, Queen of Scots’ birth hovers in space.

Although it’s a ruined skeleton of a building compared to the colourful flesh of Stirling Castle, I do get a sense of a relaxed atmosphere at Linlithgow Palace. I can imagine Mary of Guise looking over the "peel", past the loch to hunting estates beyond. Today the Scottish mist plays its part by shrouding the cars on the M9 to the north and the trains on the railway line to the south, enveloping the palace in a timeless pocket.

“Stirling Castle really is Mary’s place,” explains Nicki Scott. “She’s essentially the first queen to live and reside in the palace, and that probably makes it personal to her in a way that other royal castles are not. It’s the place she feels safest, where she’s happiest.

“Linlithgow, on the other hand, is traditionally the pleasure palace of the Stewart dynasty. It’s designed to be somewhere that can be more private. That’s not to say that ambassadors aren’t coming and being entertained, but it is perhaps a bit more domestic than Stirling or Edinburgh. There’s a natal connection too: James V was also born here, so it’s almost a kind of nursery.”

EDINBURGH Castle has none of those associations. I enter it beneath the black spikes of Portcullis Gate to see cannons pointing out at all angles and a Great Hall bristling with spears, swords and guns. This architectural patchwork acts like a fortification against the turbulent forces of history, and it would not have held many pleasant memories for Mary of Guise.

What would she have seen in the landscape that surrounds me? Happier times at Stirling in the hills to the west, the dip at Linlithgow where her daughter was born, the coastline of Fife where she arrived at Crail to join James V, the port of Leith where ships leave for her native France, Holyrood Abbey where her sons James and Robert are buried, St Giles’ Cathedral with its links to John Knox and her Protestant enemies. Mary of Guise’s entire Scottish life might have flashed before her elusive eyes as she gazed out from Edinburgh Castle.

It is, however, more difficult to sense her presence here: so many of the royal buildings are connected directly to James IV or James VI, on either side of her era. I find myself in the soulful centre of the castle, the intimate stone space of St Margaret’s Chapel, with its five narrow coloured glass windows. Built in 1130, this is where Mary’s body lay after she died on June 11, 1560, aged 44. “Then … began her belly and loathsome legs to swell, and so continued till that God did execute his judgement upon her,” wrote John Knox with a vicious misogyny that does him no favours.

Walk in Mary's footsteps: Seven to visit

Alone in the chapel, I take a moment to contemplate Mary’s life and achievements. She was a politician, a dowager queen who navigated her way through religious turmoil in the 1540s and 1550s with Protestant Scottish nobles on one side, Catholic relatives in France on the other. Mary of Guise stuck to her own agenda and protected her daughter’s dynastic rights, ensuring Mary could return to a country willing to accept her as Queen of Scots.

She was also a single mother who held on to precious letters from her children. She had ample opportunities in peacetime to leave Scotland for France and live with Mary and her first son, Francis, but chose to remain and act in her daughter’s interests. I indulge myself briefly with a what-if scenario. What if the young Mary hadn’t departed her mother’s presence for a French education that set her up to reign as consort to the King of France rather than rule as Queen of Scots in her own right? Would her mother’s influence have helped her choose the head over the heart, thus changing the course of Scottish history?

“The fact that Mary of Guise proved a woman could rule, and rule well, in such a male-dominated culture is fascinating,” insists Nicki Scott. “It forces us to rethink how we view queenly power, female power and authority in that medieval/renaissance period. This was not a woman who sat around playing cards and looking pretty; she was out there at the frontline doing the job of a king – and doing it damn well.”

Events marking the 500th anniversary of the birth of Mary of Guise take place in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle today and tomorrow. The Other Mary exhibition runs at Stirling Castle until November 30. For event details, and to download a Mary of Guise Family Trail, see historic-scotland.gov.uk and stirlingcastle.gov.uk