Young Edward has already met and fallen in love with Philippa of Hainault and, to prevent him enquiring into the details of his father's death, Isabella allows the marriage to take place.Ī son is born who goes on to become the famous Black Prince. Read MoreĮdward the Second has been barbarously murdered in Berkeley Castle on the orders of his wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover Roger de Mortimer, and fifteen-year-old Edward the Third is now king. But Mary’s flight from Scotland led not to safety, but to Fotheringhay Castle. When her nobles rose against her, the disgraced Queen of Scots fled to England, hoping to be taken in by her cousin Elizabeth I. In haste, she married Lord Bothwell, the prime suspect in her husband’s murder, a move that outraged all of Scotland. When he died mysteriously, suspicion fell on Mary. But Darnley proved violent and untrustworthy. Mary eventually remarried, hoping to find a loving ally in the Scottish Lord Darnley. Her nation was controlled by a quarrelsome group of lords, including her illegitimate half brother, the Earl of Moray, and by John Knox, a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist preacher, who denounced the young queen as a Papist and a whore. She spoke only French and was a devout Catholic in a land of stern Presbyterians. Once home, the Queen of Scots discovered she was a stranger in her own country. At the age of twenty, she returned to Scotland, a place she barely knew. Her husband, always sickly, died after only two years on the throne, and there was no place for Mary in the court of the new king. Married in her teens to the Dauphin François, she would become not only Queen of Scotland but Queen of France as well.īut Mary’s happiness was short-lived. Unusually tall and slim, a writer of music and poetry, Mary was celebrated throughout Europe for her beauty and intellect. So Mary was sent away from the land of her birth and raised in the sophisticated and glittering court of France. Her French-born mother, the Queen Regent, knew immediately that the infant queen would be a vulnerable pawn in the power struggle between Scotland’s clans and nobles. The haunting story of the beautiful-and tragic-Mary, Queen of Scots, as only legendary novelist Jean Plaidy could write it Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland at the tender age of six days old.

The King of the Castle by Victoria Holt