Everything about Marie De Guise totally explained
Mary of Guise (;
November 22,
1515 –
June 11 1560) was the
Queen Consort of
James V of Scotland and the mother of
Mary, Queen of Scots. She was
Regent, or Governor, of
Scotland 1554–
1560.
The eldest daughter of
Claude, Duke of Guise, head of the
French House of Guise, and his wife
Antoinette of Bourbon-Vendôme, Mary was born at
Bar-le-Duc,
Lorraine. On
August 4 1534, at the age of 18, she was married to
Louis II of Orleans,
Duke of Longueville (born 1510), at the
Louvre. Their union was a happy one and on
October 30 1535 her first son François was born. In the winter of
1536, she attended the wedding of her future husband,
James V of Scotland, and the French King's eldest daughter,
Madeleine de Valois, known as Princess Madeleine at
Notre Dame Cathedral in
Paris.
On
June 9 1537, Louis died at
Rouen and left her a widow at the age of 21. On
August 4, Mary gave birth to her second son, Louis. Later that year, James V, having lost his first bride
Madeleine de Valois in July to tuberculosis, was intent on procuring himself another French bride to further the interests of the
Franco-Scottish alliance against
England. Mary now became the focus of his marriage negotiations. His uncle
Henry VIII of England tried to prevent this dangerous union by asking for Mary's hand for himself. Henry recently lost his third wife
Jane Seymour in childbirth. Given Henry's marital history – banishing one wife and beheading the next – Mary disdained the offer. She was said to have replied, "I may be a big woman, but I've very little neck."
Francis I of France accepted James's proposals over Henry's and conveyed his wishes to Mary's father. Mary received the news with shock and alarm. She didn't rejoice at the prospect of leaving family and country, especially at a time when she'd just lost her son, Louis, aged only four months. Her father was caught in a diplomatic wrangle. He tried to delay matters as much as he could until James, perhaps sensing her reluctance, wrote her a letter in which he appealed to her for advice and support. Mary accepted the offer and hurried plans for departure.
On
May 18 1538, at
Notre-Dame de Paris, James V and Mary of Guise were married through
Robert, Lord Maxwell acting as
proxy. Accompanied by a fleet of ships sent by James, Mary departed from France in June, forced to leave little François behind. She landed in
Fife on
June 10 and was formally received by James. They were married in person a few days later at
St Andrews. She was crowned as Queen Consort at
Holyrood Abbey on
February 22 1540. James and Mary had two sons:
James Stewart, Duke of Rothesay (b.
22 May 1540) and Robert (b.
1541). Both sons died in
April 1541: James with less than a year of life, and Robert a few days after his older brother, and only eight days after his baptism. The third and last child of the union was a daughter,
Mary, who was born on
December 8,
1542. King James died six days later, making young Mary
queen regnant.
From 1554, in succession to
James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, Mary ruled
Scotland as
Regent for her daughter Queen Mary I, who had been sent to France some years before to be raised with her husband-to-be, the son of the French king
Henry II. Mary always consulted with her two powerful brothers in France –
Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, and
Francis, Duke of Guise, both of whom held government positions – so that Scotland and France worked as allies in dealing with other nations.
Mary's regency was threatened, however, by the growing influence of the Scottish
Protestants, (namely the Protestant Lords of the Congregation), supported secretly by
Elizabeth I of England. The Lords of the Congregation deeply distrusted Mary which led to a breakdown in authority. Mary called on her French family for help, which in the eyes of the Scottish Protestants questioned her loyalties to Scotland (at this time Scotland was worried about being dominated by either England or France). In 1559 the Lords of the Congregation had Mary deposed. When Mary died of
dropsy on
June 11,
1560 at
Edinburgh Castle, her body was taken back to France and interred at the church in the
Convent of Saint-Pierre in
Reims, where Mary's sister Renée was the
abbess. At her death, only her daughter Queen Mary was still living, Mary's son Francis having died as a teenager in 1551.
In modern times, for example in the film
Elizabeth and in
Philippa Gregory's novel
The Virgin's Lover, it has been suggested that Queen
Elizabeth I of England ordered Mary's assassination by
poisoning her. However, there's a lack of evidence to prove such an allegation. In the usually paranoid 16th century political climate, many royal deaths were suspected of having been the result of poisoning; such as
Catherine of Aragon,
Henry Fitzroy or
Jeanne d'Albret. However, Mary's death was evidently of natural causes and it was, in fact, one of the very few which her contemporaries felt bore no signs of "foul play".
Portrayal in fiction
- Mary de Guise appears in volumes 1, 2, 3 and 5 of The The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. Most notably, the events around her visit to her daughter in France in 1550 are portrayed in the second volume, Queens' Play.
- In the film "Elizabeth", Mary was played by the French actress Fanny Ardant.
Ancestors
Further Information
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