Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley not together in early 1545 and a letter of March 1566, from Mary Queen of Scots, indicates Darnley was then nineteen years old. Therefore the date 1546 would seem probable. A descendant of both James II of Scotland and Henry VII of England, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was heir to two royal houses, the House of Stuart and the House of Tudor, thus he had claim to both the Scottish and English thrones, a claim that may have cost him his life. In 1545, his father, Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox was found guilty of treason in Scotland for
House of Stuart usually rendering "w" as /v/. The spelling "Stuart" was also used by her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; he was the father of James VI and I, so the official spelling "Stuart" for the British royal family derives from him. The ancestral origins of the Stuart family are obscure—their probable ancestry is traced back to Alan FitzFlaad, a Breton who came over to Great Britain not long after the Norman conquest. Alan had been the hereditary steward of the Bishop of Dol in the Duchy of Brittany; Alan had a good relationship with the ruling Norman monarch Henry I