Mary, Queen of Scots: The Farewell to France
Artist: Robert Herdman (Scottish, 1829 -1888)
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland
Mary Queen of Scots left Calais for Scotland on August 14th, 1561, aged 18 years old.
When her fleet of galleys and cargo ships left Calais the 18-year-old Queen of Scots and Dowager Queen of France burst into floods of tears as she said farewell to ma chère France and sailed on a journey to what for her was virtually an unknown country. Mary had been Queen of Scots since she was a baby, only a week old. At the age of five she was sent to France to keep her out of the clutches of the English. At 15 in 1558 she was married to the future Francis II, who was 14. It is thought that she was probably still a virgin when he died two years later. Catherine de Medici, the French queen mother, no longer wanted her in France and Mary decided that her future lay in Scotland.
Mary was popular with many of her subjects, but she faced serious problems. She was a Roman Catholic and, although she attended Mass only in private and announced that she had no intention of interfering with Scotland’s official Protestantism (while confidentially telling the pope the contrary), she aroused Protestant suspicions. Though she had the support of Lord James Stewart and others, the Scottish nobility was prone to lawlessness, violence, feuds and rapacity and was far from easy to deal with. Also she was by right of birth not only Queen of Scots but the nearest heir to the throne of England. Indeed the French maintained that Mary had a better claim to the throne than Elizabeth I. Mary’s refusal to renounce that claim earned her the hostility of Elizabeth, who would prove by far Mary’s superior in statecraft.
Even so things went well enough for Mary’s first few years in Scotland, until in 1565 she became passionately infatuated with one of her cousins, Henry Stewart, Earl of Darnley. She said he was ‘the best proportioned long man she ever saw’ and she made the fatal mistake of marrying him. Not only did she discover that Darnley was power-hungry, vicious and totally unreliable, but the preferment the marriage gave him and his branch of the Stewarts infuriated many of the Scottish nobles, especially Mary’s right-hand man, Lord James Stewart, who led a rebellion against her. To what extent Lord James secretly wanted the throne for himself has been debated ever since, but the Darnley marriage was the first step on the long path to Mary’s eventual overthrow and expulsion from Scotland, her years of imprisonment in England and her execution by the English in 1587.
