A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed for her suspected role in the Babington Plot, which planned the assassination of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I.
“Scotland’s aristocrats did not want too strong a monarch, but an ineffective one was just as useless. Mary did reasonably well fending off the strident warnings of Protestant leader John Knox (c. 1514–72) and containing factions until she made an unwise marriage in 1565. Subsequently her rule fell apart and the nobility forced her out. Exiled and imprisoned in England, she was decapitated there as a traitor in 1587, all her possessions burned. Mary was a woman of extraordinary political talents and immense personal courage, a lover of life as much as a conscientious and charismatic queen, who should be judged not by her failure to bring stability to her fatally unstable country, but by her many successful attempts to do so. She was defeated not because she could not match her enemies, but because they were so numerous and the problems so intractable.”
[P.12- Scotland: A Very Short Introduction by Rab Houston.]
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Image credit: Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587) by François Clouet. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
