Mary of Guise
Mary of Guise was a French duke's daughter married to the king of Scots as the price of the old alliance, was widowed within four years with a six-day-old queen for a daughter, kept Scotland French and Catholic for eighteen years against the English and then against her own Protestant nobles, and died in Edinburgh castle in June 1560 as the French and English armies negotiated over her head the treaty that ended the alliance she had lived for. She was born at Bar-le-Duc in 1515 into the house that would run France's Catholic party for the rest of the century, was widowed young, refused Henry VIII, who had heard she was tall, and married James V in 1538. Two sons died in infancy, the daughter Mary was born in December 1542 and the king died six days later, and the widow spent the next decade keeping the child out of English hands. Henry VIII's rough wooing burned the Lowlands to force a marriage to his son, and in 1548 she sent the girl to France to be the dauphin's bride. She took the regency from the Earl of Arran in 1554 and governed with French officers and French money, tolerantly at first, since she needed the Protestant lords' consent to the French marriage, which came in 1558. When it was secured she turned, summoned the preachers, and the Lords of the Congregation answered with Knox's sermon at Perth and the sack of the friaries in May 1559. She brought French troops into Leith and Fife, and the lords deposed her as regent in October by their own authority. Elizabeth sent a fleet and an army to besiege Leith in the spring of 1560. She was dying of dropsy in the castle through the siege, received the Protestant lords with courtesy and asked them to keep the French alliance, and died on 11 June. The Treaty of Edinburgh a month later sent both foreign armies home, and the parliament of August made Scotland Protestant. Her body lay in the castle for nine months before it could be shipped to Reims. Her daughter came home the next year to a country the mother had lost.
- Lived: 1515 CE – 1560 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: queen, regent
