Year: Day to Day Men: January 23
In a White Room
The twenty-third of January in 1570 marks the assassination of James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray. He was the regent of Scotland under his half-nephew, the infant King James VI. This was the first assassination of a head of government by the use of a firearm.
Born in 1531, James Stewart was the illegitimate child of King James V of Scotland and his mistress Lady Margaret Erskine, daughter of John Erskine, 5th Lord Erskine, and the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. On August 31st of 1536, Stewart received a royal charter that granted him the lands of Tantallon and its surrounding district. He later received an appointment in 1538 as Prior of St. Andrews, Fife, which supplied him with an annual income.
In 1558, Stewart attended the Paris wedding of his half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin of France, who became King Francis II of France. Stewart was a supporter of the Scottish Reformation, in which Scotland broke with the Papacy and became a predominantly Calvanist church; he was also a leader of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, a group strongly in favor of a Scottish-English alliance. Despite differences in both politics and religion, Stewart became one of the chief advisors to his half-sister Mary after her return from France in 1561.
In 1562, Mary, Queen of Scots, made Stewart Earl of Moray, a new earldom for the kingdom. Included in the wealthy Earl of Moray title was Darnaway Castle with a large medieval hall; a smaller house often used by his father near Leuchars in Fife was also in Stewart’s possession. Now the Earl of Moray, he led Mary’s army and defeated a rebellion by George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly, at the Battle of Corrichie.
In July of 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married by Roman Catholic rites Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who became king consort of Scotland. Lord Darnley was the second but eldest surviving son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, and his wife Lady Margaret Douglas. Mary and Darnley’s son James, the future King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England, was born on the nineteenth day of June in 1566 at Edinburgh Castle. In August, Moray was appointed Regent of Scotland for the infant King James; this was confirmed by Parliament in December.
By 1658, Scotland was in a state of civil war. Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced by Parliamental decree to abdicate the throne and Moray, as Regent of Scotland. was leading his army against supporters of Mary. From 1668 to the end of 1659, Moray challenged and defeated almost all the northern Lords who were supporting Mary. On the 21st of January in 1570 while at Stirling Castle, he sent letters to summon Alexander Home, 5th Lord Home, and James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, to a meeting in Edinburgh.
In the midst of his travel to Edinburgh, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated at the town of Linlithgow on the 23rd of January in 1570. James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, a supporter of the abdicated Mary, fatally wounded him with a carbine shot from the window of his uncle Archbishop Hamilton’s house as Moray was passing in the main street below. Moray’s body was shipped to Leith and then taken to Holyrood Abbey. He was buried in St. Anthony’s aisle at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. Moray was succeeded by his oldest daughter and heir, Elizabeth Stewart, 2nd Countess of Moray.