GREAT casks of French claret and brandy were regularly landed at Leith. The best were taken to Holyroodhouse for the royal court. So, the arrival of two large French vessels and a flotilla of smaller, accompanying boats on 19th August 1561, 460 years ago today, raised few eyebrows. Heads turned, however, when a tall, flame-haired, strikingly handsome young woman and her entourage, made their way down the gangplank at the ‘Queen’s Landing’.
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, had returned to her homeland after thirteen tumultuous years in France. The nineteen-year-old queen had arrived earlier than expected and no-one was there to greet her. Word was quickly conveyed to the royal palace at Holyroodhouse, while Mary, her three uncles of the house of Guise, the son of the Constable of France and her ladies-in-waiting, were escorted to the house of Andrew Lamb in Water Street. Lamb was a rich merchant and his home in Leith was the only one deemed suitable for such a prestigious, albeit brief, royal visit.
Born in Linlithgow, Princess Mary was the only surviving legitimate child of King James V. She acceded to the throne on his death, when she was only six days old and spent the main part of her childhood in France, while Scotland was ruled by regents, most notably her mother, Mary of Guise, who had died in Edinburgh Castle the previous June.
Her death sparked great rejoicing by the firebrand Presbyterian Minister John Knox, who had described Mary of Guise’s coronation in his usual acid terms when he wrote: “A crown was put upon her head, as seemly a sight as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.’
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At the age of 16, Princess Mary had married the French dauphin, Francis II, becoming queen of both France and Scotland when he assumed the throne a year after his marriage. But, Francis II’s reign lasted only 17 months. He died, aged 16, of an ear infection, although some claimed he had been poisoned by Protestant assassins.
As she stepped onto the quayside in Leith, Mary must have struggled to conceal her anxiety. She was a Catholic queen in a Protestant country. Her native language was French, although she was fluent in English, Latin, Greek, Italian and Spanish and still remembered the Scots tongue of her early youth.
Mary and her lifelong friends and attendants, the four Maries, were still dressed in black mourning for King Francis, who had been dead for less than a year. Alerted to her presence, a grand escort of Scottish nobles soon arrived in Leith to convey their queen on the short journey to the Palace of Holyroodhouse on the outskirts of Edinburgh. The regal procession attracted crowds of curious onlookers who were excited to witness ‘the beauty, youth and stately carriage’ of their queen.
Although the Palace of Holyroodhouse was a magnificent towered and turreted edifice, in the shadow of the looming Arthur’s Seat, her new surroundings must have come as a shock to Mary. Accustomed to the beauty and grandeur of the French countryside and great châteaux, her native Scotland must have presented an entirely different impression.
Edinburgh was a much colder and windier place than Paris. The population of Scotland, decimated by wars, was only around six hundred thousand, compared to France, which was around fifteen million. Scotland’s roads and transport system were rudimentary and sometimes non-existent.
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But Mary was clearly a courageous woman. Her five-day voyage to Leith had been a risky venture from the outset, with many courtiers warning that she might face capture by the English fleet, on the orders of Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland, who feared her cousin’s claim to the English throne. In fact, Elizabeth had decided not to impede Mary’s passage to Scotland and when the English ships encountered the Scottish queen’s galleys, they simply saluted and allowed her to pass.
Two weeks after her arrival in Edinburgh, the Town Council organised a major parade down the Royal Mile. The people turned out in force to see this spectacle. Led by the nobility of Scotland, Mary rode down the main thoroughfare linking the castle and Holyrood, past St Giles Cathedral, with a purple canopy over her head. At the Netherbow, a papier-mâché dragon, probably meant to represent the Pope, was ceremoniously burned, as a pointed message to the new Catholic queen. It was a portentous omen of things to come.
In the years ahead, Mary’s disastrous marriage to Lord Darnley, who tried to take over the role of king, led ultimately to the brutal assassination of Rizzio, Mary’s private secretary and to Darnley’s death by strangulation on the night his house at Kirk o’Fields was blown apart in an apparent gunpowder plot.
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Mary gave birth to Darnley’s son, the future James VI, at Edinburgh Castle and months later controversially married the Earl of Bothwell. The marriage led to a rebellion with the Earl of Moray, Mary’s illegitimate brother, declaring himself regent of Scotland and imprisoning Mary in the island fortress of Lochleven.
Mary escaped from Lochleven in May 1568 and fled to England, posing a major problem to her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. If Elizabeth restored Mary to the Scottish throne by force, she would disaffect Scottish Protestantism. If she handed Mary back to the Earl of Moray, she would be seen to be condoning the rebellion. And if she allowed Mary to return to France where she would raise an invasion force to retake Edinburgh, she would be effectively restoring the old French ascendency in Scotland. None of these options were attractive, so Elizabeth decided to imprison her cousin. Mary lived under house arrest for the next 18 years before Elizabeth, concerned at repeated treasonous plots by Mary, ordered her execution in 1587.
Mary’s dream of ultimate dominion, which may have flashed through her mind when she landed in Leith back in 1561, was realised by her son James Charles Stuart, who became King James VI of Scotland in July 1567 following his mother’s abdication and King of England and Ireland as James I, following the union of the crowns in March 1603.
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