The Rough Wooings

The ‘Rough Wooings’, fought by major figures of sixteenth-century Europe for the hand of the young Mary Queen of Scots, were wars as intense, wide-ranging and devastating as the wars of the three Edwards which ravaged fourteenth-century Scotland. But the Wooings were wars of independence as well. As the kings of England and France vied to control the bestowing of Mary’s hand in marriage, so Scotland itself strove to remain free of them. And Scotland won, although it was a close-run thing. The po