[1][2] Her father, originally a page of honour and later Master of the Household, came from a family with a long tradition of royal service in different ways.

[1] His father had been steward and chamberlain of the county of Fife and keeper of the royal castle of Falkland, and his grandfather had been Lord High Treasurer of Scotland.

At the celebrations for Twelfth Night in 1565, he took the floor with her to open the dancing and later at Stirling Castle the two took on the queen and Lord Darnley, who were shortly to be married, at a game of bowls.

[8] One of Randolph's Scottish contacts, Alexander Clark sent him a jocular letter teasing him about their relationship using nonsense words; "And as to your mistress Marie Beton, she is both darimpus and sclenbrunit, and you in like manner without contrebaxion or kylteperante, so you are both worth little money.

It defines the lands and rents that are to pass to Mary beforehand in pre-nuptial agreement and those that she is to hold jointly with him once married, subject to protections for the rights of his mother.

After listing as guarantors of this settlement a number of peers, including James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was to marry the queen next year, it stipulates the dowry that Mary's father was to provide.

[11][12] Although now married, she remained close to the queen,[1] and was with her in Edinburgh Castle during the birth of Darnley's child, the future King James VI.

[23][24] In Edinburgh in 1802, Sir Walter Scott published Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a highly influential collection of folk songs in ballad form.

His collaborator Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe thought however that the song more likely referred to the Mary Hamilton who was a Scottish lady-in-waiting at the court of Peter the Great, Tsar of all Russia, and was beheaded in 1719.