Mary, Queen of Scots was a worthless prize. Dominated by men, she careened from pillar to post who, once her character was known, only had contempt for an object too easily won. To this day she is treated way too sympathetically, her failure was not the fault of those around her and their desire not to be ruled by a woman but instead was due to her severe lack of character. Which modern person would want to be ruled by this selfish creature?
A modern justice system would have found her guilty of conspiracy to murder her half-brother, murder of her husband’s probable lover, murder of her husband, and conspiracy to murder Queen Elizabeth. Unable to inspire loyalty or respect and having run through her patsies, she instead decided she would marry an already married adventurer whose first task was to make her a widow. Lest we forget the Earl of Bothwell was already married to Jean Gordon when the Ainslie Tavern Bond was signed showing his intention of marrying Mary Stuart after he had completed the task of murdering Lord Darnley. He divorced Jean having only been married a little over a year and married the Queen. Mary didn’t have an impossible task ahead of her, Queen Elizabeth of England, her peer, with a much more chequered antecedents managed to accomplish a very successful reign during the exact same period.
Mary is of particular interest to us today because she was born with an Aquarius Pluto-Aries Neptune. The archetype that we are currently about to start next year. Pluto has already been flirting with Aquarius the last two years and in spring 2025, Neptune will transit into Aries. This particular blend left her vulnerable. Her ideal was a warrior. Aries Neptune. Those warriors were represented by her Aquarius Mars – Pluto – north node conjunction. She was way to attracted to violent men and didn’t see them clearly which is why she failed. She didn’t actually understand their weaknesses.
The Plot to Kill David Rizzio
The Aquarius Mars-Pluto-north node conjunction already speaks to a particular need to take in new experiences related to men. Mary’s Aries Neptune in the twelfth suggests she had very thick rose colored glasses for warrior types. Into this stew strode Lord Darnley, “the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had seen”. For an almost six foot tall woman, a tall, athletic man, trained in weapons and hunting who wanted to be a soldier really fit her ideal image. She was so taken with him she proclaimed, prior to their marriage, that he would be King once they married. She had met him for the first time on February 17. A week later he returned to her court and they were inseparable. She married him on July 29 of the same year.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Darnley’s desire to be a soldier was motivated by a love of violence. The problems started immediately. They had a clash of wills and he wanted something but so did she. Eight months after their marriage and while she was heavily pregnant, Darnley led men into her rooms and the conspirators dragged her private secretary into the Audience Chamber and murdered him by stabbing him dozens of times. Two days later, Mary and Darnley were back to being friends and escaped the palace together. This is where her lack of character begins to really show itself.
She had contracted this marriage but now she wanted out. Darnley wanted the Crown Matrimonial so he would be the actual King. She wanted his lover dead. Rizzio had been his favorite, they had often lain in bed together, but somehow the man ended up dead as Mary’s favorite. Likely, Darnley murdered his former bedmate as the price he paid to get what he really wanted; the crown. However, the Crown Matrimonial for Darnley wasn’t part of Mary’s plan. Instead of divorcing him, imprisoning him, exiling him, or executing him for murder she decided to conspire against him in an attempt to make herself seem innocent.
The murder of Rizzio is an interesting chart. As a Libra Ascendant chart, the motivation of this event is described by Libra’s ruler; the Taurus Venus in the eighth house. This Venus is connected to the stabbing, the Gemini Mars. Queen Mary’s Chiron lies at 14° Taurus. Taurus Chiron is the wound of abandonment. Mary never knew her father and was sent away from her mother when she was very young. She had been raised in France but lost her husband and that country to return to a land she barely knew. Her jealousy over Rizzio likely stemed from her fear that her husband would abandon her. Darnley is directly connected to the Taurus Ceres. This is the kingdom.
Mary’s Chiron in the first house is also tightly square her own Aquarius Pluto. Her wounds are driving her to plot and manipulate to survive. It is this wound that lies behind her malice. Abandoned by anyone who might have truly loved her, she is just a possession. This deep psychological pathology turned her into a serial killer. The asteroid Darnley shows he is standing in her bedroom conjunct her Mars. In her chart, she is right beside him as Pluto. Darnley is her weapon. In the Murder chart, he is the retrograde Leo Saturn standing beside the retrograde Virgo Juno, the actual men who killed him, who oppose Rizzio as the Pisces Mercury in the fifth house. Rizzio is the victim in the Audience Chamber where Mary sits on her throne under her cloth of state to receive visitors.
Mary’s Quest for Love
Mary had a Libra Jupiter. The quest for love. Mary’s love quest was astrologically restated in her Sagittarius Venus in the seventh house. The ninth house opens in Sagittarius ruled by her Libra Jupiter. When she was engaged in a love quest, it appeared to her that she was manifesting a love affair but it quickly turned to Capricorn, ruled by the Scorpio Saturn in the seventh. Her dashing lover quickly turns to controlling tyrant. Mary, a Capricorn Moon, found that as a wife and mother she wouldn’t rule her husband but be ruled by him as the Scorpio Saturn. Saturn’s presence in her seventh house meant her husbands weren’t the prize at the end of her quest she thought they were. Her crown was the real prize. She wasn’t wanted, her crown was. They didn’t love her. This was her astrological penalty.
Darnley had been the first husband she had selected after initiating her love quest. Now, she wanted him dead and began looking around for a new love affair. She found the married Earl of Bothwell. A scoundrel who had already ruined one marriage and was well on his way to ruining a second when Mary once again set her sights on him. He was lying partially dead when she rode out to see him ostensibly under the guise of needing to see him about matters of state. Bothwell was at best an adventurer who only was being seen about matters of state because Mary had elevated his status in her court. He didn’t love her but she might have been fooled into believing he did. Although we can speculate he was just a new chess piece she needed.
Then, in December, she had her son baptized. Lord Darnley, the King, came back to Edinburgh upon her behest and was housed in lodging other than the royal lodgings in a small two story building. She began a pattern of visiting him at night. On the night he was murdered, she had gone but left to celebrate a wedding. The Bothwell conspirators had almost run into her leaving carrying their kegs of gunpowder.
That night the building was destroyed in an explosion and Darnley was found half naked and dead in the nearby orchard. The next morning, a servant of Mary, came in to change her bed curtains to mourning colors and saw her speaking to the Earl of Bothwell behind a curtain in her rooms. Mary wasn’t innocent in this, she had played the role of making sure the victim was at the murder scene. As she went to visit him, she knew what fate awaited him. She planned to have him strangled and blown up. This here is real malice. Murdering your husband in cold blood and probably making an attempt to destroy the evidence less than two years after you met him and fell in love.
One hardly needs to comment. Two peas in a pod. Mary is hardly innocent. All murderers. She is as vile as Darnley and Bothwell.
Lady MacBeth, Sun in the Eighth House
An apt inspiration of Shakespeare’s character Lady MacBeth, one wonders if she had once been Gruoch, Lady MacBeth reincarnated as Mary Stuart. After her failed second marriage to Bothwell, who being more show than substance couldn’t seem to win any battles, she miscarried his twins. Aborted most likely. Married on May 15, on June 15, Bothwell fled the kingdom after his defeat and one last embrace with Mary. Mary intended to continue her game and being saddled with Bothwell wasn’t part of the next play. Prince James Stuart, Darnley’s son, has something to offer as the carrier of the Stuart bloodlines with paternal and maternal claims to England’s throne and his father’s lands. By July 23 the twins were gone, Bothwell’s bairns would just be a reminder of Mary’s complicity in murder so they had to go.
There had been a veneer that comes down to us that Mary was innocent and just tossed and turned by her fate but she was an eighth house Sun. Don’t believe a word of the innocence bit. She was at her creative best when in the underworld. The eighth house is the house of plots, the underworld, secrets and manipulations. This is the privy whether a pit privy or the privy chamber. She was the Sun, she led the plots. She was the center of it all while everyone else orbited her. That was Darnley’s mistake, he thought he would be the Sun in that court. That wasn’t going to happen.
Lady MacBeth’s real story was based on a woman who married the Earl of Moray and, after his likely murder, married his cousin who was also the most likely culprit who then inherited the title. Gruoch, Lady MacBeth then becomes Queen of Alba (Scotland). Her son by MacBeth became the murderers’ heir and succeeded as King of Alba.
In 1562, Queen Mary made her illegtimate half-brother the Earl of Moray. He opposed her 1565 marriage to Lord Darnley but, in the end, didn’t directly fight her and later went to France to avoid her machinations with Bothwell. Prior to her marrying Darnley, she had formulated a plot to kill her half-brother. She invited him to come visit her where Darnley would incite a fight with him and Rizzio her private secretary would strike and then Darnley, Rizzio and others with them would kill Moray. Moray didn’t fall for it, he never went.
Moray seems to have understood his sister. He left the country before the Bothwell debacle but returned right after Queen Mary’s abdication and was appointed the Regent in August 1567. When Mary attempted to retake the crown, Moray defeated her forces. He spent the rest of his life defeating her supporters until he was assassinated by one of them in 1570.
The June 1565 plot involved Mary, Darnley, and Rizzio plotting the murder of her half-brother Moray. On the eve of her wedding, she was scheming to kill her brother. The basic plot is Mary invites the target to see her, her male intimates begin a fight, the target is killed by those male intimates with backup from others. Mary makes out that she is innocent. Sound familiar. There is a malevolent presence here. It is like there is a poltergeist, but who is it? Rizzio was stabbed to death in March 1566 after Mary invited him to supper, Darnley was smothered or blown up in February 1567 after Mary invited him back to court but made sure he was living in a small expendable house located close by the important buildings. Moray was assassinated in 1570. Mary plotted to murder all of them including Rizzio besides adding the Queen of England after she had run through her first victims. Her son, James, was wise to stay away from her.
The nobles of Scotland had had enough. She had her way from her return in 1561 until her abdication in July 1567. In the spring, she escaped on May 2 and fielded an army that was defeated by Moray on May 13. She escaped to England on May 16, 1568 who had the good sense to imprison her far away from the sources she might tap to continue her intriguing. Still she continued plotting. In England, she tried to lure the Duke of Norfolk to marry her and wrote letters seeking the death of Queen Elizabeth. The intrigue and plotting, the supreme lack of good judgement had all finally led to Mary abdicating and fleeing the country where she would continue her schemes until the English got tired of it and executed her in February 1587.
Mary’s Mars-Pluto-north node conjunction tells the tale. She was Pluto, seeking to control the men in her life, making them believe that she was besotted with them. That was just her manipulation.
Playing the role of Pluto in her Mars-Pluto-north node conjunction and having a Sun in the eighth house, Mary was subject to laws of karma that are bigger than earthly queens. The archetype of Scorpio includes strong aspects to Pluto and strong eighth house signatures such as Mary Stuart had besides strong Scorpio influence by planet. Scorpios who misuse their power attract other bigger and better Scorpios. Continue to misuse the power of Scorpio and you will find yourself overtaken by a greater Scorpio. This would be Mary’s ultimate fate, her plots caused her to fall into the clutches of England’s premiere spymaster William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He had been watching her for some time. Lord Burghley exposed her lies and plots and sat in judgement of her with other peers and together they convicted her of treason. When Queen Elizabeth wrote but faltered at carrying out an order of execution, Burghley summoned the Privy Council of England and carried out the order. It took three chops of the axe to cut the malevolent bitch’s head off. Having seen these people in action albeit without the murderous ability, don’t be fooled by the histrionics of her attempt to be branded a martyr.
Mary was the worst queen, England never had. The unfortunate Scots were haunted by Lady MacBeth twice.