FROM THE BOOK
The room where Mary Stuart was probably born lies open to the sky. In the north- west corner of Linlithgow Palace, it has no floor, and its deeply recessed window, looking north across the loch, appears to hover in the middle of a wall.
Visitors can stand in what was once the king’s sumptuous bedroom suite and, craning their necks, try to picture the lying-in chamber two storeys overhead, in the small room above the queen’s bedchamber. It was here that, on either Thursday 7 or Friday 8 December, 1542, the infant who was to become one of the most famous – and infamous – European rulers made her first appearance.
Outside, the country was in the grip of a ferocious winter. Inside, fires blazed, sending plumes of smoke over the market town of Linlithgow below. Even though today Linlithgow Palace is in ruins, verdigrised by moss and damp, its scale and grandeur are striking. Sandstone walls glow pink and rose depending on the light. Had Mary spent her childhood here, she would have soaked up a sense of entitlement and privilege.
Set above a loch on which swans regally glide, and surrounded by grass and trees, for a small, impoverished and, in some minds, primitive country, it was a magnificently sophisticated royal dwelling.
Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, brought up close to the wealth and splendour of the French court, considered it as fine as any French chateau. As the backdrop for the opening act of Mary’s life, it could not have been better designed. The timing, was dreadful.
Since the baby princess arrived with greater haste than expected, Marie de Guise was unprepared. It is thought that the stress of her husband’s illness contributed
to Mary’s sudden birth, and it’s little wonder if this was the case. James V was perilously ill when Marie went into labour.
After a shocking military defeat by the English at the Battle of Solway Moss two weeks earlier, he had made a fleeting visit to see his heavily pregnant wife in Linlithgow. James then retreated to the royal hunting lodge of Falkland Palace, where he took to his bed. What should have been a happy, hopeful time for the king and queen, whose first two children had died in infancy, was instead fraught with worry and fear. Informed of his daughter’s birth – messages travelled slowly across ice- and snow-bound roads – James is said to have turned his face to the wall in despair, saying, “It came with a lass and it will go with a lass.” Six days of delirium followed, and then he died. It is not impossible that the cause of his death was a broken heart, as some contemporaries believed, but it is more likely he had contracted a disease during the campaign, perhaps dysentery from contaminated water, or cholera.
His cryptic words about lasses referred to the House of Stewart. The throne had passed to the Stewarts when Marjorie Bruce, ill-fated daughter of Robert the Bruce, married Walter Stewart, the High Steward of Scotland in 1314. James doubtless presumed the family name would pass to another dynasty on his daughter’s own marriage in years to come. Like everyone else, he could not have predicted Mary’s tumultuous career, nor the eventual triumph of his grandson James VI who, in 1603, took the throne of England as well as Scotland. In so doing he perpetuated the Stuart hold on power and united both countries in a manner unthinkable a century earlier.