Update 12 - Scotland 1550-1600
The following is an excerpt from the book European Monarchs Vol. VII: 1550-1600
Scotland:
Mary I (b. 1542, m. 1553 Edward VI of England, r. 1542 – 1611)
Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland upon the death of her father while still an infant. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who was also the next in line to the Scottish throne, was appointed as her regent. Her early years were marked by the “War of the Queen's Marriage” - a dispute over whether Mary should be betrothed to (then Prince of Wales) Edward VI of England.[1] Scotland itself was divided into pro-English and pro-French factions, and both England and France fielded armies in Scotland in support of their allied faction. While, initially, it seemed that Mary would be wed to Edward according to the 1543 Treaty of Greenwich, the pro-French faction soon won out in the Scottish parliament, inciting the English invasion later that year. The pro-French faction enjoyed the support of the Scottish people for much of the early years of the war, while only a few Protestants supported the pro-English faction.
However, things changed in 1547 when English forces began to overrun Scotland. Until then, France, had been supporting the Scottish war effort without sending an army of their own to fight in France. However, with the English occupying much of Scotland, it became clear that sending a French army to Scotland would be necessary to win the war. However, the French needed something in return. Initially, a proposal was made to marry the young Queen Mary to the young Dauphin Francis, thus potentially bringing Scotland under the French crown. However, when the Dauphin died in October of 1547 [2], France began to make further demands of the Scots that, in the words of Regent Arran, would “turn Scotland into nothing more than a French vassal.” While the Queen's Mother Mary of Guise was busy working out an agreement with France, Regent Arran signed a treaty with England, which turned Mary over to the English occupying forces. In exchange for turning over the Queen, the English guaranteed that Mary would never be taken to England proper (she would remain in the occupied territories of Scotland, where Arran would continue to serve as her Regent) until she reached the age of majority. Additionally, the treaty stipulated that if Edward and Mary were to wed, Edward would be King Consort of Scotland but would never have right to hold power as King jure uxoris. [3]
Regent Arran's decision to switch sides and make peace with the English was supported by only a (mostly Protestant) minority of the Scottish Parliament. Parliament quickly voted to remove Arran as regent and replace him with Mary of Guise. Mary of Guise signed agreed to make the concessions to France that Regent Arran had found so distasteful, and soon a French army arrived in Scotland to fight against the English. However, much of the damage had already been done. Most of the Protestant population of Scotland supported Arran's decision, and the fact that the Queen was now in English hands turned the tide of the war. By the time of Edward's coronation in 1548, the English and allied (mostly Protestant Scots serving under Regent Arran) forces were in control of more than half of the country.
The marriage of Mary to Edward in 1553 brought the war to finally to an end. With no chance that Mary could be betrothed to the new Dauphin (born in 1548) Henry II of France withdrew his troops and made peace with the Edward VI of England and Mary I of Scotland. With the war over, Regent Arran turned his attention to restoring order in Scotland. While there were no French troops present in Scotland after the official end of the war in 1553, many of the pro-French Catholic forces continued to fight in a series of armed uprisings. The largest uprising was the “war of 1557” where a number of Catholic nobles briefly occupied Edinburgh. Arran was able to defeat the Catholic forces and put the down the rebellion, but was only able to do so with the support of an English army. The fact that many Catholic Bishops had been involved in the uprising led to the 1558 decision by Mary (as the Arran regency had ended in 1557) to confiscate Catholic Church property all over Scotland. Until this time, various forms of Protestant worship had coexisted with Catholicism in Scotland. 1558 marks a turning point after which Catholic worship was driven more and more underground.
Between the time when she starting ruling in her own right in 1557 and the birth of her son Henry in 1561, the Queen spent time in both London and Edinburgh. Usually, Mary would spent the summers ruling in Scotland and the winters with her husband in England. Her first child, a daughter Anne, was born in London in December of 1559. For the first few years of Anne's life, Mary and Anne would travel together, spending time in both Scotland and England. However, this changed when Mary discovered she was pregnant again in the spring of 1561. This time she was due to give birth in the fall, and she knew she couldn't survive the voyage back to London either just before or just after she was to give birth, so her son Henry was born in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.
King Edward's first peacetime visit to Scotland was made in 1561 to visit his newborn son. Mary had had a hard pregnancy and birth, so she was unable to return to England when Edward departed in the Spring. However, while Mary stayed in Edinburgh, the infant Henry and his older sister Anne was brought to London along with Edward. Mary had been sick in bed when the decision was made to take Henry to England, and she very much resented the loss of her baby. Mary would not see her son again for many years, and she would never forgive her husband for taking him away from her.
This distrust between Mary and her husband led to tension between England and Scotland throughout the 1560s. While Edward was already approaching Louis XIII of France for an alliance against Spain, Mary herself made a point of making a separate alliance between Scotland and France. She also approached other leaders such as King Frederick of Denmark in the hopes of having other allies in case of war between England and Scotland.
Tensions between England and Scotland also affected the development of the Church of Scotland. “The Kirk” as it is called in Scotland, was originally founded in 1558 to organize Protestant worship in Scotland and to take control of confiscated Catholic Church possessions. Doctrinally, the Church of Scotland followed closely the Calvinist ideals of the Church of England [4]. However, in the 1560s, during the time of tension between Mary and Edward, Mary took measures to prevent the Kirk from being subsumed by the Church of England. She forbid the use of English for liturgical use, permitting only the use of Scots or Gaelic[5]. She also differentiated the Church of Scotland from that of England by removing herself from the position of head of the Church and creating a council of Bishops to govern the Church independently of the monarch. [6]
In the 1570s, the tension between Mary and Edward began to die down. Mary began to travel to London again in the winter, to visit Edward and her children, and she even brought Henry and Anne up to visit Scotland a few times. However, Mary and Edward saw little of each other during these visits, and the two of them had no more children. The warming of relations meant that Mary was able to increase trade with England, which was experiencing its Late Edwardian economic boom at the time. [7]
While the English colonial presence in the New World eventually grew to dwarf that of Scotland, Scotland's colonies actually predate those of England. It was during the 1570s that Scotland established its first trading post in the land of Labrador that would eventually grow into the town we now know of as New Aberdeen [8]. It was Queen Mary's commitment to expanding Scotland's maritime capabilities that we have to thank for Frobisher's expedition [9] and the New Aberdeen colony.
It seems that Mary's interest in expanding Scotland's maritime trade network was originally inspired by conversations she had with sailors during her semiannual voyages between Edinburgh and London. She had heard stories of the wealth that the Spanish had found in the New World and the valuable trade the Portugese had established with India. Mary felt that Scotland was ideally placed to serve as a base for Northern routes to the Orient and she sponsored many expeditions searching for the fabled Northeast and Northwest passages.
Mary sponsored Andrew Keith's 1563 expedition in search of the Northeast Passage, which resulted in the discovery of the Northern sea route to Musocvy, and the establishment of the Scottish Northeastern Trade Company [10]. In 1569, after years of trying in vain to get his expedition in search of a Northwest Passages sponsored by King Edward, the English navigator Martin Frobisher came to Queen Mary asking for her support. Frobisher launched three expeditions on behalf of Scotland, the first two in search of a Northwest passage, and the third in 1574 to establish a colony on the coast of Labrador. [11] While the Labrador winters were too cold for the colony to survive year-round, New Aberdeen quickly became profitable as a summer trading post where Scottish merchants would trade with the natives for furs (which could be bought much more cheaply in Labrador than they could in Muscovy).
During Mary's reign, the port of Glasgow, in addition to being a centre for trade with Labrador, quickly grew into a base for pirates preying on the Spanish gold fleets. While these pirates were mostly English, King Edward, in an attempt to maintain peace with Spain, had decreed that anyone accused by the Spanish of piracy could not sell cargo in an English port. This drove many of these pirates, including the infamous Francis Drake [12], to Glasgow where they could operate with impunity.
Things changed significantly for Mary when her husband Edward was succeeded as King of England by her son Henry in 1581. While Mary got along better with Henry than she had with Edward, Henry was much more of a warmonger. When Henry asked his mother to support his war efforts with Scottish troops, Mary felt that she could not refuse. By 1586, Scottish troops were fighting alongside the English in the Netherlands, France and Ireland. [13] This proved to be quite a drain on Mary's treasury, and war with Spain meant that Scottish ships could no longer freely cross the Atlantic to trade in Labrador. The war years of the 1580s were not good for Scotland.
However, the other consequence of the death of Edward was that Mary was free to remarry in 1583. Her second husband was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell [14], who had long been a close advisor of the Queen. While Mary was over 40 and Bothwell was almost 50, the union proved to be fertile, and Mary gave birth to a daughter Jane in 1584 and a second son James in 1586. While Mary survived both pregnancies, Bothwell died in 1589.
While she had always been distant from her eldest son Henry, and less than close with Anne, Mary tried to make up for it by caring for Jane and James all the more. She kept both of them close, and saw to a good part of their education herself. While she spent time with her children, Scotland was largely governed by her councillors. Even Henry I of England, as heir apparent to the throne of Scotland, paid more attention to Scottish affairs than Mary did during this time. [15]
As Mary got older, the question of succession began to be raised. The existence of James (now Earl of Bothwell) meant that it was possible for Scotland to avoid personal union with England if James, rather than Henry, could be named as Mary's successor. Henry asked the Scottish Parliament to pass a bill confirming himself as heir to the throne, but they refused on the grounds that the question of succession could only be determined by Mary's will. [16] In the end, in 1597, Mary agreed on a compromise solution whereby Henry would be first in line for the throne, with James next in the line of succession followed by Henry's children. This solution would work for the time being, but would prove to cause problems two decades later.
Footnotes to Scotland:
[1] This is the same war known OTL as “the Rough Wooing”.
[2] Everything up to the death of the Dauphin in 1547 is OTL. The death of the Dauphin is supposed to be the first major butterfly. It made sense to me to have this first major butterfly happen in France since the POD was in France, but as you can see from the rest of this post, this butterfly had very important implications for Scotland.
[3] While in England in OTL, it was necessary for Elizabeth not to marry to prevent her husband from claiming jure uxoris rights, it seems that in OTL Scotland it was more acceptable for a King to simply be a King Consort with no power. For example Queen Mary's second OTL husband Lord Darnley, was only ever allowed to be a King Consort, even though he aspired to claim more power.
[4] Read the upcoming “England” update for details on the Church of England.
[5] I haven't planned far enough ahead to know if this will result in a surviving Scots language.
[6] Really, Mary is mainly interested in preventing any future King of England from exercising power over the Scottish Church even if that King of England is also King of Scotland.
[7] See the “England” update for more on this boom.
[8] New Aberdeen is located near the site of OTL Cartwright, Labrador
[9] Yes, this is the same Frobisher, he was born before the POD and his interested in finding a Northwest Passage dates back before significant butterfly occur in England.
[10] Similar events occurred OTL except for the fact that in OTL it was an English expedition which resulted in the founding of the English Muscovy Company. There is no English Muscovy Company in TTL.
[11] As in OTL, Frobisher fails to discover Hudson's Bay, but in TTL, he discovers Lake Melville leading to the Labrador interior, and recognizes the potential of the area for further trade and exploration.
[12] He will be a lot less important TTL than he was OTL. I just wanted to show where he ended up.
[13] You will discover the nature of these three conflicts that England and Scotland are involved in in future updates.
[14] He was Mary's 3rd husband OTL, and they had been friends for a long time at that point OTL, so I figured they'd get together TTL as well.
[15] Having her children taken away from her by her husband has taken its toll on Mary's mental health. She's not mad by any means, just a little obsessive.
[16] The Scottish Parliament is still anti-English, even in the 1590s.
Congrats on your marriage (mine's coming up soon too). And also very happy to hear this will continue.
