Today's class was about my favourite queen of the 16th century; Mary, Queen of Scots and the reformation Scotland went through in that same century.
We all know this queen, who married the Dauphin of France, became queen dowager at the age of eighteen, returned to a country she was the head of state of, but never been there after she left at the age of five. If you don't know about her, I highly recommend reading about her. drop me a message if you want my favourite readings on her.
The on-going discussion in the class was eventually about Mary being a failure as queen, we were split up in groups and some had to agree with it and others disagree.. I ended up in the group that had to agree with this statement. Now, all of my group went a bit "Not really though", but since we had to find arguments... we went with her choice of men and that got a bit into a nice discussion/argument. I won't drop down all the comments made because that's too much, but we all agreed on the fact that marrying Darnley was a mistake, but marrying Bothwell was just ... straight up failure and that we actually never really know why she did this.
For 90% of the lecture I was buzzing and sitting there all hyped up and wanting to drop my immense mind on Mary in chat, but I had to keep myself from that because well... 2 hours isn't enough, I love her so much.
Mary, Queen of Scots is the reason I fell in love with Scottish history and the Stewart/Stuart dynasty. I've always loved the Tudors and their dynasty, but never really looked into the Scottish side of the family (Margaret Tudor (brother of Henry VIII) was Queen of Scots from 1503 till 1513 (and 1515 by being regent of her son James V of Scotland)), this is also where Mary and her descendants got their Tudor link from. I absolutely love it that we're looking at James VI next week, even though this means that the module is almost over....
Who is your favourite Scottish monarch?
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