Chasing the ghost of Mary

Standing in the rain atop Calton Hill, I could see the icy blue Firth of Forth. When the wind tried to grab my coat, I spun around and found the tapestry of Edinburgh at my feet.

Built up solidly now between city and bay, it isn’t the town I dreamed of as a girl. But when I looked through my mind’s eye, I could see the capital of the wild, green kingdom that 17-year-old Mary Stuart inherited from her father, King James V of Scotland.

Everyone who comes here, it seems, knows about the hapless Scottish queen whose execution for treason in 1587 at the behest of her cousin Elizabeth I of England has inspired books, plays, movies and continuing debate. When Elizabeth died childless in 1603, Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, was summoned to the English throne, uniting two incessantly warring realms into the nation we now know as Great Britain.

Once upon a time, I read every book about Mary in the library, most of them fictionalized accounts of her life that filled in the blanks left by history with sword fights and stolen kisses. To me, she was a brave and beautiful 16th century Princess Diana, ruled by her heart, ensnarled in events she couldn’t control.

Historians have been equally fascinated by Mary, though their assessments have varied dramatically over time. In the immediate aftermath of her death, fellow Catholics thought of her as a martyr, while tracts appeared in Protestant Scotland that called her a traitor and libertine.

More recent considerations, including Antonia Fraser’s 1969 biography, have sought to balance the quotients of scoundrel and saint, without finally determining what kind of woman she was. So I came to Scotland in August, trusting in travel to resolve the mystery or, at least, to help me remember why she once starred in my dreams.

By the time Mary landed at Leith just north of Edinburgh in 1561, she had been through more sorrows and joys than most people know in a lifetime. Her father, James V, died just days after she was born, lamenting that he had not been able to give the kingdom a male heir.

Crowned queen of Scotland as a wee babe, she had enough royal blood to sit on the throne of England as well (were Henry VIII not already occupying it). She was stalked by English armies and then taken to France for safekeeping; she eventually married Francis, the dauphin, who ascended the French throne a year later. Together, they ruled France for 13 months before he died of an ear infection in 1560, leaving Mary a young widow with one crown left -- a crown she had to return to Scotland to claim.

That is why I started my pilgrimage looking toward Leith, wondering how Mary, reared in the cultivated French court, felt when she set foot in Scotland. By all accounts, it was a cold, wet, poor, perpetually war-torn country on the fringe of European civilization, governed in her absence by a group of lords who, unlike devoutly Catholic Mary, had embraced the Protestant Reformation.

According to Brantome, a French courtier who accompanied Mary to Scotland, the horses provided to take her party from Leith to the Palace of Holyroodhouse were pitiful nags compared with the steeds she had ridden in France. Mary was an accomplished equestrian, statuesque, her mantle flying behind her. She spoke perfect French but hadn’t forgotten the language of her people, which endeared her to commoners who lined the roads hoping for a glimpse of the goddess.

On landing, she immediately would have spied dour, gray Edinburgh Castle, but the royal party headed instead to Holyroodhouse on the eastern side of town, beneath the volcanic crag known as Arthur’s Seat. Built around a medieval abbey, Holyroodhouse was Scotland’s finest royal residence, turreted and towered in the manner of a Loire Valley chateau.

Today, the graceful palace faces the Scottish Parliament, a contemporary nightmare of a building opened in 2004. I pretended it wasn’t there, went to the palace gate and bought a ticket, which includes an audio guide. The forecourt was the first stop, where, the guide said, Queen Elizabeth II approved the 1998 act hat gave Scotland home rule for the first time in almost 300 years.

Sovereignty was also the question when Mary first saw Holyroodhouse Palace. In the political chess game played by France and England, Scotland, and, more specifically, Mary were the prizes.

When the Scots annulled a treaty betrothing her to Henry VIII’s son, Edward, the English king sent troops across the border into battles known as the Rough Wooing. Her marriage to the French dauphin made the English apoplectic, and she was an incessant nettle in the flesh of Henry’s daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, whom Catholics considered an illegitimately born usurper to the throne.

Mary settled into apartments in the northwestern tower at Holyroodhouse, the backdrop for many of the most dramatic events in her life. Shortly after she arrived, she sparred over theology with John Knox in her audience chamber. The Protestant Moses of 16th century Scotland and founder of the Presbyterian faith, he was a virulent misogynist who likened Mary to Nero.

But after their meeting, he gave the young queen a left-handed compliment: “If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth me.”

Knox’s house is just down the Royal Mile from Holyroodhouse, as is his church, St. Giles’ Cathedral, where he still stands in sculpted stone ranting against “the monstrous regiment of women.”

Alas, Mary didn’t disappoint him, though she got off to a promising start in Scotland by laboring to reconcile her incessantly feuding nobles and vowing to respect the Protestant status quo as long as she could practice her Catholic faith in private.

But four years after she arrived, she made the first of many missteps by marrying her handsome cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in the now-ruined Holyroodhouse chapel. Mary, it seems, had fallen in love and meant to indulge her passion.

But her choice was disastrous. By all accounts, Darnley was a wastrel who drank to excess, contracted syphilis and plotted the slaying of Mary’s secretary, Italian musician David Rizzio.

On March 9, 1566, Mary and a few attendants, including Rizzio, were dining in a small room adjoining her bedchamber at Holyroodhouse when Darnley burst in, followed by a clutch of armed noblemen who tore Rizzio from Mary’s arms. Pregnant at the time, she watched in horror as they stabbed him repeatedly.

The chamber where Rizzio died is now a gallery with such treasures as a small French portrait of Mary from 1559 and a sample of the Scottish queen’s baby-fine needlework.

For a sheer historical jolt, nothing tops Holyroodhouse, though the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street has a copy of the marble sarcophagus beneath which she was buried in London’s Westminster Abbey.

The atmospheric ruins of Linlithgow Palace, Mary’s birthplace, and Stirling Castle, where the infant queen was crowned in 1543, are an easy drive west of the capital. A small museum is devoted to Mary in the market town of Jedburgh, about 50 miles southeast of the Scottish capital, and pilgrims can find no better place for a picnic than Lochleven Castle on an island in a lake about 26 miles north of Edinburgh, where rebel lords imprisoned her in 1567.

But tucked in some of her erstwhile kingdom’s most beguiling corners are other less touristy Queen of Scots sites, most of them stately homes she visited, including Traquair House in the Tweed River Valley about an hour’s drive south of Edinburgh. The white gabled house with a row of chimneys on its steeply pitched roof dates from the 12th century and has been in the same Scottish Catholic noble family since 1491. Catherine Maxwell Stuart, the 21st Lady of Traquair, still lives there with her family, except in the high season, when she makes the house available to bed-and-breakfast guests.

I got the lovely Rose Room on the second floor overlooking a maze. Just down the hall is the chamber where Mary stayed in 1566, furnished with family heirlooms including the cradle used for the queen’s new baby, James, born shortly after Rizzio’s death. Overnight guests can wander through the museum, libraries, chapel and salons as if they were their own.

It’s hard to think of unpleasantness at Traquair House, but at the time of their visit, Mary and Darnley were hopelessly alienated because of the role he had played in Rizzio’s killing, though she tried to keep up a felicitous front. One day, she excused herself from the hunt on the pretext that she might be pregnant again. Drunk as usual, Darnley protested, “Ought we not work a mare well when she is in foal?”

At Traquair House, I wandered along sodden paths by the Tweed, hoping Mary had found consolation in the green meadows and gorse-covered moors that enfold the valley. I also elicited opinions from Lady Maxwell Stuart, whose sympathy lies solidly with the queen, and from Ronald Morrison, a member of the Marie Stuart Society, a group of British history devotees.

“It’s fair to say that Mary was wronged, but she made mistakes,” he told me over lunch at the Traquair House cafe. Among them he cited her choice of husbands, her pretensions to the English crown and whatever role she may have played in Darnley’s demise.

Darnley was killed less than a year after Rizzio at Kirk o’ Field house in Edinburgh, where he was recovering from syphilis while the queen was lodged at Holyroodhouse. Historians agree that a group of plotters, led by swashbuckling James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, set off an explosion at Kirk o’ Field intended to rid Scotland of Darnley, though his body was found in the garden. He had been strangled.

The rest of the facts are murky. Did Mary know of the plot or even participate in it? By that time had she fallen in love with Bothwell, whom she wed three months later. Or did the ambitious earl rape and strong-arm her into marriage, as some historians claim?

Even now, I hate to think the worst of Mary, and when I was a girl I never entertained a thought that might besmirch her legacy. My heart told me that she and Bothwell were true lovers, fighting for their lives against the Scottish lords who rallied against them. With a rebel army at their heels, they fled to Borthwick Castle, on a hill overlooking the River Esk about 15 miles south of Edinburgh.

Owned by an ally of Bothwell, stout, twin-towered Borthwick Castle, built in 1430, is now a hotel with 10 baronial chambers linked by spiral staircases hard enough to climb in my old sneakers, let alone in Mary’s heavy skirts and dainty satin heels.

I had dinner next to a set of armor in the castle’s vaulted Great Hall, finished with a tot of single malt Scotch from one of the bottles lining the window through which, dressed as a boy, Mary escaped besieging rebels.

From there she rode through Curry Woods to nearby Crichton Castle, now an evocative ruin where sparrows nest, into battle with insurgents and, when that was lost, across the border to England, where she hoped for help from her cousin Elizabeth.

She never again saw Bothwell, who fled to Denmark. She spent the next 18 years and nine months a captive in England, where she was apparently framed for treason by William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s trusted secretary of state. Elizabeth signed Mary’s 1587 death warrant, the queen’s hands tied by law even though she may have wanted to spare Mary -- another question left hanging.

After dinner, I retired to my room, which is where the queen had stayed 400 years earlier. For a Mary fan, there could be no greater bliss than watching darkness steal into the slit-windowed nooks beneath the gables and reading in the massive red canopied bed.

I had Fraser’s excellent biography. But there must have been some stars left in my eyes because I wished for one of the historical novels I had devoured as a girl and dreamed about the beautiful, passionate and tragic queen.

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susan.spano@latimes.com

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If you go

THE BEST WAY TO EDINBURGH

From LAX, connecting service (change of planes) is offered on Lufthansa, British or KLM or on United, Virgin Atlantic or Air New Zealand connecting to British Midland. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $425.

TELEPHONES

To call the numbers listed below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 44 (country code for Britain) and the local number.

WHERE TO STAY

Arden Country House, Belsyde, West Lothian, 1506-670172, www.ardencountryhouse.com, is a meticulously maintained three-room bed-and-breakfast inn a few miles southwest of Linlithgow; doubles start at $128, including breakfast.

Borthwick Castle, North Middleton, Midlothian, 1875-820514, www.borthwickcastle.com, is a twin-towered castle keep about 15 miles south of Edinburgh from which Queen Mary escaped by climbing out a window dressed as a page when surrounded by rebel nobles on June 11, 1567. There are 10 rooms, including the Mary Queen of Scots chamber, with a red canopy bed; rates for doubles start about $170, including breakfast.

Champany, Linlithgow, West Lothian, 1506-834532, www.champany.com, is a country inn with two distinguished restaurants and 20 comfortable rooms; doubles $192, including breakfast.

Traquair House, Interleithen, Peeblesshire, 1896-830323, www.traquair.co.uk, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh, is a beautiful, historic country house that was visited by Queen Mary and is still occupied by a branch of the Stuart clan. Bed-and-breakfast accommodations are available in three elegant rooms for $256, including breakfast.

The Witchery by the Castle, Castlehill, the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, 131-2255613, www.thewitchery.com, has seven sumptuous suites in a collection of historic buildings --including one thought to have been Lord Bothwell’s townhouse -- at the threshold of Edinburgh Castle; rates start around $420.

WHERE TO EAT

Beecraigs Restaurant, Beecraigs Country Park, West Lothian, 1506-670099, in farming country a few miles south of Linlithgow, has terrific views over the Bathgate Hills and hearty steak and chicken entrees, served with salad and potatoes for about $20 per person, not including drinks.

Borthwick Castle (as above) serves dinner in the candle-lighted Great Hall; $50 for the three-course prix-fixe meal, not including wine.

Champany (above) and the adjacent Chop and Ale House, set in a cluster of 16th century buildings just outside Linlithgow, are known for Aberdeen Angus beef and their wine cellar; $56 to $71 for two courses at Champany and $36 at the less formal Chop and Ale House.

Marynka, 57 High St., Linlithgow, West Lothian, 1506-840123, is a small, stylish spot in the town’s historic center that serves contemporary Scottish fare; about $36 for two courses.

1745 Cottage Restaurant at Traquair House (above) is a delightful place for lunch or tea, served in a walled garden; about $14 per person.

Simply Scottish, 6-8 High St., Jedburgh, 1835-864696; is a good spot for homemade Scottish breakfasts and lunches; about $10.

The Outsider, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, 131-2263131, is a bright, contemporary eatery with good views of Edinburgh Castle and sustaining grilled fish and meat; entrees $14 to $21.

The Witchery by the Castle (above) serves gourmet Continental fare in elegant and historic surroundings. Reservations are necessary and this place is often booked months in advance. About $57 for a three-course dinner for one, not including beverages; from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., at lunch and after 10:30 p.m., a two-course menu is offered for $18, not including beverages.

TO LEARN MORE

Historic Scotland, www.historic-scotland.gov.uk, offers Explorer Passes to 77 sites, including Edinburgh and Stirling castles and Linlithgow Palace. Passes can be purchased at most major sites.

The Marie Stuart Society, www.marie-stuart.co.uk, is a U.K.-based group of people interested in Mary, Queen of Scots. It holds lectures and publishes a journal three times a year.

Scottish Tourist Board, www.visitscotland.com.

latimes.com/mary

More about Mary

Go online for a list of movies and books about Mary Queen of Scots and more photos of her legacy.

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The cast of characters

Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587): daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise; ruled Scotland from 1561 to 1568.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell (circa 1534-1578): Mary’s third husband and one of Scotland’s greatest enigmas; he died insane and in chains in Denmark.

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (1545-1567): Mary’s disastrous choice for a second husband; handsome and weak, he had English royal blood through his maternal grandmother.

William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598): Schemer, spymaster trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and Mary’s most dangerous enemy.

Elizabeth I (1533-1603): England’s Virgin Queen, who ruled during its Golden Age, a cousin of Mary’s through Henry VII.

Francis II (1544-1560): married to Mary in 1558 and briefly king of France before he died of an ear infection.

James VI (also James I) (1566-1625): Mary’s son by Darnley; he was separated from his mother when he was 10 months old and never saw her again; he claimed the English throne after Elizabeth died childless in 1603.

John Knox (circa 1514-1572): the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, virulently misogynistic and anti-Catholic.

The Four Maries: the Scottish queen’s maids of honor, all noblewomen who went to France with her: Mary Fleming (dates unknown), Mary Beaton (1543-1598), Mary Livingstone (1541-1579) and Mary Seton (1549-1615). Seton was the only one of the four who never married and remained with the queen during most of her incarceration in England.

James Stewart, Earl of Moray (1531-1570): Mary’s illegitimate half brother and counselor; a canny man who turned against her after her marriage to Darnley.

David Rizzio (1531 or 1533-1566): an Italian courtier and accomplished musician who became Mary’s private secretary; distrusted by the Scottish lords, he was slain in Mary’s chambers at Holyroodhouse.

-- Susan Spano

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The life of a queen

1542: Mary Stuart is born at Linlithgow Palace in Scotland; her father, James V, dies six days later.

1543: A treaty is drawn up betrothing the Scottish princess to the heir to the English throne, Henry VIII’s short-lived son, the future Edward VI, but the Scottish Parliament soon repudiates the agreement, preferring a French alliance; 9-month-old Mary is crowned Queen of Scots at Stirling Castle.

1544: The English wooing of Mary (and through her, Scotland) turns rough as Henry VIII sends troops across the border.

1548: The Scots Parliament agrees to a marriage between Mary and the French dauphin, later Francis II; the little princess is taken to France for her own safety.

1558: Mary and Francis wed at Notre-Dame in Paris.

1559: Henry II dies in a jousting contest and Francis succeeds him, making 17-year-old Mary queen of France as well as Scotland.

1560: Francis II dies of an ear infection. Negotiations over a remarriage for the young widow are inconclusive.

1561: Mary returns to Scotland after an absence of 13 years and meets a bitter adversary, Calvinist minister John Knox; she proclaims that Protestantism should remain the religion of the realm, while practicing her Catholicism in private.

1565: Mary takes a second husband, her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; the choice, which bolsters her claim to the English throne, infuriates Queen Elizabeth I.

1566: David Rizzio, the queen’s private secretary, is killed in her presence by conspirators, including a jealous Darnley; Mary gives birth to a son, the future James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, but her relationship with Darnley fails and in the fall she nearly dies of a fever.

1567: Scottish lords, including Mary’s advisor James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell, kill Darnley at Kirk o’ Field house in Edinburgh. Mary stuns the court by marrying Bothwell three months after Darnley’s death, thereby prompting her enemies to take up arms against her. She is captured by rebel nobles at the Battle of Carberry Hill, then incarcerated at Lochleven Castle, where she miscarries a child thought to have been Bothwell’s.

1568: Mary escapes, fights one last losing battle with rebels at Langside near Glasgow and then escapes to England, where she is imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth for the next 21 years.

1586: Mary is found guilty of treason against the English crown.

1587: Mary is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, England.

1603: Elizabeth dies and is succeeded by Mary’s son, James, uniting the realms of England and Scotland.

-- Susan Spano