Mary, Queen of Scots, was 'adulteress, liar and murderer'

InticWeb ^ | February 8, 2018 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was a lying adulteress who plotted with her lover to murder her husband, an intriguing new study claims.

The analysis by Lesley Smith, a medical historian, claims that Mary lied about being raped to explain her pregnancy and justify her third marriage after her second husband, Lord Darnley, was strangled in Edinburgh...

Her beauty and sexual attractiveness -- at 5ft 11in, Mary was about a foot taller than the average woman -- gave her cousin Elizabeth I all the more reason to eventually execute her for treason in 1587, Ms Smith said.

"All in all, Mary Queen of Scots was a very dangerous creature to the unmarried Protestant Elizabeth, and her physical presence made her positively intoxicating to anyone who met her."

The researcher analysed a report by Claude Nau, Mary's adviser and secretary, that she miscarried twins on July 24, 1567, at Loch Levan Castle, Kinross.

The Scottish queen was held prisoner by her own people at the castle after she married James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, just 12 weeks after Darnley's murder.

She justified the marriage to Bothwell, a Protestant, by saying that she had to preserve her honour after he abducted and "ravished" her at Dunbar Castle. Bothwell was the prime suspect in the murder, but was acquitted in what is now widely regarded as a sham trial...

The miscarriage took place seven weeks after the wedding. However, it would have required modern microscopes and knowledge of foetal development to identify the babies as twins such an early stage of pregnancy, said Ms Smith.

[lizma2]

Yes. In a parking lot.
He had scoliosis....So do I. I can assure you, I am not a hunchback!

Estimates on prevalence of scoliosis is 2.5% to 25%.

I read several articles at the time (probably here.) that stated it wasn’t that curved.

[scrabblehack]

So women in those days were only 4’11”?
I wonder if this is one of those cases where the inch was the length of the king’s thumb and then they got a new queen (so possibly Mary was 71 of her own thumb-lengths tall?)

[SunkenCiv]

There’s a page for nearly everything now, it seems.

Henry VIII reigned 13,796 days. The 60K figure works out to 4.34 executions per day; it is a shallow attempt by someone to equate every single *alleged* death in the kingdom — including deaths in combat during uprisings, which are not executions anyway — to what Bloody Mary was doing, which was burning Protestants at the stake, until the public backlash frightened her (the execution method changed). Even by Tudor standards, she was a sick bitch.

The old treason punishment included having the condemned’s entrails cut while still living and shown to them (that was actually mentioned in “National Treasure”). About a century after Henry VIII died there was the English Civil War; during the Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell, then Richard his son as hereditary Protector) the already-underused penalty for treason fell into disuse, and when it was imposed for the first time in living memory, during the tail end of the Jacobean dynasty, it was so appalling to the spectators I believe it was never used again (AFAIK it remains on the books though). That’s why we have that “cruel and unusual” thing in our Constitution — it doesn’t refer to execution, it refers to showing someone their entrails just before they’re quartered.

[SunkenCiv]

That’s gotta be a rhetorical question. ;^)

[Elsie]

That might be true - if she were not illegitimate.

HMMMmmm...

Matthew 5:5
Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,