The Queen Of Scots'

9 Pages 2278 Words

d and France. It is the view of MacNalty that ‘the infant queen had barely seen the light of day before she was the subject of men’s ambitions and political intrigue’ (1960:14) and this is confirmed as almost immediately an important decision on who the Queen would marry would now have to be made and so followed another debate in Mary’s life. Mary’s hand was firstly betrothed to King Henry VIII’s son Edward and Henry had hoped this would unite England and Scotland together. However in 1944 the King of France and his wife Catherine de Medicis gave birth to a son, the future King of France and this opened up ‘the prospect of a very different education and marriage’ (Fraser 1970:44). This was because the Queen would be brought up in France where it was acknowledged that the French consort was highly sophisticated (Lewis 1999:10(A) and it also furthered potential of Mary being queen not only in Scotland but also France and possibly England. The next few years have been dubbed ‘The Rough Wooing’ in which Henry VIII attempted to win the hand of Mary for his son by puzzlingly invading Scotland. Mary was sent to France when she was five years old where she was educated in preparation of her being Queen of France. She married the Dauphin François at the age of fifteen and on the death of her father in law in 1559 became Queen of France. Tragically her husband died the following year and Mary later returned to her realm in Scotland.
Elizabeth Tudor was the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn; she became Queen in 1558 at the age of twenty-five on the death of her elder sister Mary Tudor. Many claimed that Elizabeth was illegitimate as her father Henry VIII had upon the Pope refusing to grant him a divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon, rejected the Roman Catholic Church and set up the Church of England in its place. Henry grew tired of Anne when she did not produce a male heir and had her executed...