The Guise family
Mary, Queen of Scots had the misfortune to ascend the Scottish throne at the very moment when the kings of England and France were eyeing her nation greedily – seeing in it the opportunity to extend their own power. And so, from the moment she was born (on 8 December 1542), Mary was exploited by two powerful kings – and also her own family.
Mary was proclaimed queen at the tender age of six days, on the death of her father, King James V. No sooner had James gone to his grave than Henry VIII of England was declaring his intention to marry Mary to his son, Edward, as a means of gaining control of Scotland. This prospect was unpalatable to Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise – who was acting as queen regent – and so she had her five-year-old daughter packed off to France to be brought up as the future wife of the dauphin, Francis, son of the French king, Henry II. The Guise family hoped to attain more influence at the French court through Mary.
Everything about Mary’s union with Francis was about Scotland being subsumed into France – much like the baby sucking on the mother’s breast, as one poet put it. Worse still, Henry II encouraged Mary to proclaim that she and her husband were king and queen of England – this announcement would have fateful consequences, as it infuriated Elizabeth I.
Henry II’s plan for Scotland to be absorbed into France broke apart when Francis died, aged 16, in 1560. Mary was now a widow, unwanted at the French court. And so she returned to Scotland. Unlike Elizabeth I, who grew up on the outskirts of her country’s court and developed a firm group of loyal men around her, Mary returned to be queen of a country she had not seen since she was five. It was a case of out of the French frying pan, into the fire.