harrytheheid
A Fixture
BACKGROUND
Only six days old when her father, James V, died on 14 December 1542, Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most fascinating individuals in the history of the British Isles.For her safety she was sent to France where in 1558 she married the Dauphin, Francis. He succeeded to the throne the following year but their brief reign as King and Queen of France ended when Francis died in 1560.
A widow at eighteen, Mary Stuart decided to return to Scotland. Arriving in Edinburgh on 19 August 1561, Mary was immediately embroiled in tangled politics and religious divisions. The country was now (certainly in the Lowlands) mainly Protestant - and she was a Roman Catholic; an unfortunate combination that would be a significant factor in the turmoil of her reign.
Pressured to choose a husband, she wed Lord Henry Darnley, on 29 July 1565.
The marriage was calamitous.
Denied the crown matrimonial, Darnley embarked on a life of debauchery and participated in the savage murder of Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, during which a pistol was discharged next to the heavily pregnant Queen. Presumably in the hope she would miscarry the child.
Despite the subsequent birth of their son James, relations between Mary and Darnley were now irreconcilable. Amid increasing tensions and no doubt, diseased, he took up residence in his townhouse at Kirk O’Field on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
On the night of 9 February 1567 a tremendous explosion was heard across the city and Darnley’s strangled body was found in the grounds of the blazing building. Whether he was murdered before or after the blast remains a mystery.
Given the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that fingers of suspicion were pointed at the Queen. But what began as whispers escalated to full-scale public outrage only five weeks later when Mary Stuart lit the fuse to her very own explosion and married James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had set aside his lawful wife, Lady Jean Gordon; but even more significantly, he was the conspirator widely believed to have planned and carried out Darnley’s murder!
This utterly bizarre situation was the final excuse for widespread Protestant revolt. Led by the the Queen's illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart the Earl of Moray, the rebels faced off against Bothwell’s troops at Carbury Hill a few miles east of Edinburgh on 15 June 1567, but as battles go it turned to high farce as the hastily-raised and unenthusiastic Royalist army quietly melted away throughout the long hot summer’s day.
The ill-fated Bothwell took to his heels and eventually washed up in Scandinavia.
Meanwhile, the Queen of Scots was taken into custody and held at the island castle of Lochleven where she was persuaded to abdicate in favor of her infant son who was crowned James VI, while Moray was appointed as Regent to rule Scotland on behalf of the child.
On the night of 2 May 1568 Mary escaped from her prison on Lochleven and in a last daring adventure, began raising an army from among her remaining supporters.
The decisive battle took place on 13 May 1568 at the village of Langside, near Glasgow. The Queen’s army was destroyed in less than an hour. With all hope of overthrowing Regent Moray now gone she was escorted from the battlefield by the Lords Claude Hamilton and Maxwell Herries, who counselled her to return to France.
DIORAMA
This small diorama represents the closing stages of the battle at Langside.
Royalist forces have been pushed out of the narrow village streets and back to a small river called The White Cart. With the remnants of Mary’s army on the point of a full-scale route, the Queen is told that all is lost.
Mary Stuart, who was still only twenty-six, ignored the advice of her Lords to go into exile in France, (which was never a realistic option anyway). Along with a small group of adherents she slipped across the Solway Firth and into England on 16 May 1568.
The Queen of Scots was never to see Scotland or her son James again.
The bridge is a resin kit from “Reality in Scale”.
I couldn’t find a suitable figure to represent the Scottish Queen, so I made my own with bits and pieces from my spares box....
....and a lot of filler.
The horse was part of a Napoleonic set I bought years ago during a business trip to Budapest.
Once she was finished, the diorama kind of just fell into place. Some farm animals were included to indicate widespread looting by the Royalist Army.
EPILOGUE
Mary had fled into England intending to petition her cousin Queen Elizabeth I for money to raise a new army; financial aid that unknown to the Scottish Queen, Elizabeth had no intention of granting.
With Elizabeth seen by many of her Catholic subjects as illegitimate – thus Mary being the true heir to the English throne – she was taken into “protective confinement” and would endure increasingly arduous imprisonment for the rest of her days.
Nineteen years later, Mary Stuart was put on trial for complicity in the Babington plot; a bungled affair that might well have been a clever “sting operation” planned by Sir Francis Walsingham – Elizabeth’s spymaster. The verdict was never in any doubt and she was executed at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, on 8 February 1587.
James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, was shot dead in 1570 by a member of the Hamilton family. It was the first recorded assassination of a Head of State by use of a firearm. He was succeeded by a string of fairly ineffectual Regents, who pretty much without exception also came to a sticky end.
Due to a previous affair with the Norwegian noblewoman, Anna Throndsen, whom he had deserted when she was carrying his child; James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, was imprisoned in Denmark by the lady’s offended family and kept in a dungeon under unspeakable conditions for ten years. He was still in chains, and most probably completely insane, by the time he died in 1578.
Elizabeth died in 1603 and was succeeded by Mary Stuart’s son, James VI of Scots, and now James I, Monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1612 he had his mother’s remains exhumed and re-interred in Westminster Abbey. Her final resting place lies at the opposite end of the aisle to Elizabeth’s tomb.
IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING
