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 Britain.
Once upon a time, I read every book about Mary in the library, most of them fictionalised accounts of her life that filled in the blanks left by history with swordfights and stolen kisses.
To me, she was a brave and beautiful 16th-century Princess Diana, ruled by her heart, ensnarled in events she could not control. Historians have been equally fascinated by Mary, although 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 towards 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 civilisation, governed in her absence by a group of lords who, unlike devoutly Catholic Mary, had embraced the Protestant Reformation. Mary 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, grey Edinburgh Castle, but the royal party headed instead to Holyroodhouse on the eastern side of town, beneath the volcanic crag known as Arthurs 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. Instead, I went to the palace gate and bought a ticket, which includes an audio guide.
The forecourt was the first stop, where Queen Elizabeth II approved the 1998 Act of Devolution at Holyroodhouse that gave Scotland home rule for the first time in almost 300 years.
Sovreignty 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 back-handed compliment: "If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgement 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 did not disappoint him, although she got off to a promising start in Scotland by labouring to reconcile her incessantly feuding nobles and vowing to respect the Protestant status quo as long as she could practice her own 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 into the room, 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 treasures including a small French portrait of Mary from 1559 and a sample of the Scottish queen's baby-fine needlework.
For sheer historical jolt, nothing tops Holyroodhouse, although the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers St 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 devoted to Mary is in the market town of Jedburgh, about 75km 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 30km north of Edinburgh, where rebel lords imprisoned her in 1567.
But tucked into 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 difficult to think of unpleasantness at Traquair House, but at the time of their visit, Mary and Darnley were hopelessly alienated because of Rizzio's killing, although 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?"
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, although 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?She and Bothwell fought 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 20km 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 armour 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 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.
After dinner, I retired to my room, where the queen stayed 400 years earlier. For a Mary fan, there could be no greater bliss than watching darkness steal into the nooks beneath the gables and reading in the massive red-canopied bed.- Susan Spano
The timeline of Mary, Queen of Scots
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, 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 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. 1561: Mary returns to Scotland after an absence of 13 years.
1565: Mary takes a second husband, her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
1566: David Rizzio, the queen's private secretary, is killed in her presence by conspirators; Mary gives birth to a son, the future James VI of Scotland, later James I of England.
1567: Scottish lords, including Mary's adviser 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.
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 almost 19 years.
1586: Mary is found guilty of treason against the English crown.
1587: Mary is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, England.
Where to stay:
Borthwick Castle, North Middleton, Midlothian, www.borthwickcastle.com, is a twin-towered castle keep about 20km south of Edinburgh from which Queen Mary escaped by climbing out a window dressed as a page when surrounded by rebel nobles.
There are 10 rooms, including the Mary Queen of Scots chamber, with a red canopy bed; rates for doubles start about $300, including breakfast.
Traquair House, Interleithen, Peeblesshire, www.traquair.co.uk, about 50km 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 $500.
The Witchery by the Castle, Castlehill, the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, www.thewitchery.com, has seven sumptuous suites in a collection of historic buildings - including one thought to have been Lord Bothwell's town house - at the threshold of Edinburgh Castle; rates start about $800.
Where to eat:
Borthwick Castle (as above) serves dinner in the candle-lighted Great Hall; $100 for the three-course prix-fixe meal, not including wine.
Champany 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; $100 to $140 for two courses at Champany and $70 at the less formal Chop and Ale House.
A cast of characters
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587): daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise; ruled Scotland from 1561-1568.
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 adviser 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.
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.
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 bought at most major sites.
The Marie Stuart Society, www.marie-stuart.co.uk, is a UK-based group of people interested in Mary, Queen of Scots.
It holds lectures and publishes a journal three times a year.
