Mary Stuart was the one and only child of King James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise.
The death of her father six days after her birth left Mary as Queen of Scotland in her own right.
Although Mary's great-uncle King Henry VIII of England made an unsuccessful effort to secure control of her, the regency of the kingdom was settled in favour of her mother.

Her mother saw to it that Mary was sent to France at the age of five. There she was brought up at the court of King Henry II and his Queen Catherine de Medicis with their own large family, assisted by relations on her mother's side, the powerful Guises. Despite a charmed childhood of much luxury, including frequent hunting and dancing, Mary's education was not neglected, and she was taught Latin, Italian and some Spanish, French became her first language, and indeed in every other way Mary grew into a Frenchwoman rather than a Scot.

By her remarkable beauty, with her tall, slender figure, her red-gold hair and amber-coloured eyes, and her taste for music and poetry, Mary summed up the contemporary ideal of the Renaissance princess at the time of her marriage in April 1558 to Francis, eldest son of King Henry and Catherine. Although it was a political match aimed at the union of France and Scotland, Mary was sincerely fond of her boy husband.

The accession of Elizabeth Tudor to the throne of England in November 1558 meant that Mary was, by virtue of her Tudor blood, next in line to the English throne. Those Catholics who considered Elizabeth illegitimate because they regarded Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn invalid even looked upon Mary as the lawful queen.
Mary's father-in-law, Henry II of France, thus claimed the English throne on her behalf. The death of Henry in 1559 brought Francis to the French throne and made Mary a glittering queen consort of France, until Francis' premature death in December 1560 made her a widow.

Returning to Scotland in August 1561, Mary discovered that her sheltered French upbringing had made her ill-equipped to cope with the series of problems now facing her. Mary's former pretensions to the English throne had incurred Elizabeth's hostility. She refused to acknowledge Mary as her heiress, however much Mary, nothing if not royal by temperament, prized her English rights.
While Mary herself was a Roman Catholic, the official religion of Scotland had been reformed to Protestantism in her absence, and she thus represented to many, including the leading Calvinist preacher John Knox, a foreign queen of an alien religion.

Most difficult of all were the Scottish nobles; factious and turbulent after a series of royal minorities, they cared more for private feuds than support of the crown. Nevertheless, for the first years of her rule, Mary managed well, with the aid of her half-brother James, Earl of Moray, and helped in particular by her policy of religious tolerance. Nor were all the Scots averse to the spectacle of a pretty young Queen creating a graceful court life and enjoying her progresses round the country.

It was Mary's second marriage in July 1565 to her cousin Henry Stewart (Stuart), Earl of Darnley, son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, that started the fatal train of events culminating in her destruction. Mary married the handsome Darnley recklessly for love. It was a disastrous choice because by her marriage she antagonized all the elements interested in the power structure of Scotland, including Elizabeth, who disapproved of Mary marrying another Tudor, and her half brother James, who, jealous of the Lennox family's rise to power, promptly rebelled. Neither did Darnley's character measure up to the promise of his appearance, he was weak and very vicious, and yet ambitious. The callous murder and butchery of her secretary and confidant, David Riccio or (Rizzio), in front of her very own eyes, in 1566, by Darnley and a group of noblemen, convinced Mary that her husband had aimed at her own life. The birth of their son James did nothing to reconcile the couple, and Mary, armed now with the heir she had craved, looked for some means to relieve an intolerable situation.

The next eight months constitute the most tangled and controversial period of Mary's career.
According to Mary's detractors, it was during this period that she developed an adulterous liaison with James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell, and planned with him the death of Lord Darnley and their own following marriage. There is, however, no contemporary evidence of this love affair, beforeDarnley's death, except the dubious so-calledCasket Letters, poems and letters supposedly written by Mary to Bothwell but now generally considered to be inadmissible evidence by historians.

But Mary did undoubtedly consider the question of a divorce from Darnley, after a serious illness in October 1566, which left her health wrecked and her spirits low. On the night of Feb. 9, 1567, the house at Kirk o' Field on the outskirts of Edinburgh where Darnley lay recovering from illness was blown up, and Darnley himself was strangled while trying to escape. Many theories have been put forward to explain conflicting accounts of the crime, including the possibility that Darnley, plotting to blow up Mary, was caught in his own trap. Nevertheless, the most obvious explanation that those responsible were the nobles who hated Darnley.
Whatever Mary's knowledge of the crime, her conduct thereafter was fatally unwise and showed how much she lacked the wise counsellors in Scotland. After three months, she allowed herself to be married off to James Hepburn Earl of Bothwell, the chief suspect, after he abducted and ravished her. If passion is rejected as the motive, Mary's behaviour can be ascribed to her increasing despair, exacerbated by ill health, at her inability to manage the affairs of tempestuous Scotland without a strong arm to support her. But in fact Bothwell as a consort proved no more acceptable to the jealous Scottish nobility than Darnley had been.
Mary and Bothwell were parted forever at Carberry Hill on June 15, 1567, Bothwell to exile and imprisonment where he died in 1578, and Mary to incarceration on the tiny island of Loch Leven, where she was formally deposed in favour of her one-year-old son James.
After a brief fling of liberty the following year, defeat of her supporters at a battle at Langside put her once more to flight. Impulsively, Mary sought refuge in England with her cousin Elizabeth, but Elizabeth, with all the political cunning Mary lacked, employed a series of excuses connected with the murder of Darnley to hold Mary in English captivity in a series of prisons for the next 18 years of her life. In the meantime, Mary's brother Moray flourished as regent of Scotland.