The End of the Saga
Queen Elizabeth I of England had good reason to be wary of her Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart. The queen of Scotland, who was also the dowager queen of France, had been claiming her right to the English throne and quartering the arms of England on her own heraldry ever since Mary Tudor had died and left the throne to her Protestant sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth, for her part, could not condone the treatment Mary was receiving at the hands of her nobles north of the English border - but nor could she in any small way fathom the insanity of Mary's actions - her apparent collusion in her own abduction and supposed rape; her marriage to Bothwell, the man who was considered by many to be the murderer of Mary's husband, Henry Lord Darnley; her raising of an army to go against the lairds who united against her - to Elizabeth this was the most reckless and inexplicably irrational sort of behavior.
But when Mary was forced to abdicate the throne in favor of her infant son James, and was imprisoned at Lochleven, Elizabeth gave up any attempts to influence the Scottish lairds to restore their sovereign to the throne. Outraged though she may have been that a fellow monarch could be so treated by her lawful subjects, yet Elizabeth was nothing if not a realist. She recognized that now she must deal with the Protestant government north of the border, where the infant James VI ruled only in name. In fact, the Protestant lairds of the Scottish kirke ruled for him. Elizabeth's suggestion that James might be brought up in England by his grandmother, Lady Lennox, met with no encouragement at all from the lairds. James was to remain in Scotland; the lairds had seen what came of sending a child-ruler to be raised in a foreign country.
Meanwhile, Mary was recovering her health after the sad loss by miscarriage of her twins. By the spring of 1568 word spread that Mary had, in fact, escaped from Lochleven, aided by members of the Douglas family who were supposed to be her warders. Once again, Mary's personal charm and charisma were casting their spell on the people - particularly the men - who surrounded her. She escaped dressed as a simple countrywoman and headed off to raise another army.
A surprising number of Scottish notables rallied around her. The Scots were extremely attached to the idea of the Crown and the loyalty required of them, and were eager to flock to Mary's side, despite their impressions of her as a ruler. But it was all for naught. On 13 May Mary's army was defeated at Langside by a much smaller one supporting her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, and commanded by a military expert, one Kirkcaldy of Grange. Mary fled south and into England, crossing the Solway on 16 May. Her arrival in England brought pandemonium and tension to the English court.
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