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Marie de Guise

Marie de Guise (in English, Mary of Guise) (November 22, 1515 – June 11, 1560) was the Queen Consort of James V of Scotland and the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Regent, or Governor, of Scotland 1554–1560.

The eldest daughter of Claude, Duke of Guise, head of the French House of Guise, and his wife Antoinette of Bourbon, Marie was born at Bar-le-Duc, Lorraine. On August 4, 1534, at the age of 18, she was married to Louis II of Orleans, Duke of Longueville (born 1510), at the Louvre. Their union was a happy one and on October 30, 1535 her first son François was born. In the winter of 1536, she attended the wedding of her future husband, James V of Scotland, and the French King's eldest daughter, Madeleine de Valois, known as Princess Madeleine at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

On June 9, 1537, Louis died at Rouen and left her a widow at the age of 21. On August 4, Marie gave birth to her second son, Louis. Later that year, James V, having lost his first bride Madeleine de Valois in July to tuberculosis, was intent on procuring himself another French bride to further the interests of the Franco-Scottish alliance against England. Marie now became the focus of his marriage negotiations. His uncle Henry VIII of England tried to prevent this dangerous union by asking for Marie's hand for himself. Henry recently lost his third wife Jane Seymour to illness. Given Henry's marital history – banishing one wife and beheading the next – Marie disdained the offer. She was said to have replied, "I may be a big woman, but I have very little neck." Francis I of France accepted James's proposals over Henry's and conveyed his wishes to Marie's father. Marie received the news with shock and alarm. She did not rejoice at the prospect of leaving family and country, especially at a time when she had just lost her son, Louis, aged only four months. Her father was caught in a diplomatic wrangle. He tried to delay matters as much as he could until James, perhaps sensing her reluctance, wrote her a letter in which he appealed to her for advice and support. Marie accepted the offer and hurried plans for departure.

On May 18, 1538, at Notre-Dame de Paris, James V and Marie de Guise were married through Robert, Lord Maxwell acting as proxy. Accompanied by a fleet of ships sent by James, Marie departed from France in June, forced to leave little François behind. She landed in Fife on June 10 and was formally received by James. They were married in person a few days later at St Andrews. She was crowned as Queen Consort at Holyrood Abbey on February 22, 1540. James and Marie had two sons: James Stewart, Duke of Rothesay and Robert. Their son James lived less than a year, and Robert only two days. A daughter, Mary, was born on December 8, 1542. King James died six days later, making young Mary queen regnant.

James V, King of Scots and his second wife Marie de Guise

From 1554, in succession to James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, Marie ruled Scotland as Regent for her daughter Queen Mary, who had been sent to France some years before to be raised with her husband-to-be, the son of the French king Henry II. Marie always consulted with her two powerful brothers in France – Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, and Francis, Duke of Guise, both of whom held government positions – so that Scotland and France worked as allies in dealing with other nations.

Marie's regency was threatened, however, by the growing influence of the Scottish Protestants, (namely the Protestant Lords of the Congregation), supported secretly by Elizabeth I of England. The Lords of the Congregation deeply distrusted Marie which led to a breakdown in authority. Mary called on her French family for help, which in the eyes of the Scottish Protestants questioned her loyalties to Scotland (at this time Scotland was worried about being dominated by either England or France). In 1559 the Lords of the Congregation had Marie deposed. When Marie died of dropsy on June 11, 1560 at Edinburgh Castle, her body was taken back to France and interred at the church in the Convent of Saint-Pierre in Reims, where Marie's sister Renée was the abbess. At her death, only her daughter Queen Mary was still living. Marie's son Francis having died as a teenager in 1551.

In modern times, for example in the film Elizabeth and in Philippa Gregory's novel The Virgin's Lover, it has been suggested that Queen Elizabeth I of England ordered Mary's assassination by poisoning her. However, there is a lack of evidence to prove such an allegation. In the usually paranoid 16th century political climate, many royal deaths were suspected of having been the result of poisoning; such as Catherine of Aragon, Henry Fitzroy or Jeanne d'Albret. However, Marie's death was evidently of natural causes and it was, in fact, one of the very few which her contemporaries felt bore no signs of "foul play".

• Mary de Guise appears in volumes 1, 2, 3 and 5 of The The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. Most notably, the events around her visit to her daughter in France in 1550 are portrayed in the second volume, Queens' Play.
• In the film "Elizabeth", Marie was played by the French actress Fanny Ardant.

• Rosalind K. Marshall - Mary of Guise (1977)
• Pamela E. Ritchie - Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548-1560: A Political Study (2002)
• Undiscovered Scotland