MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. This beautiful and accomplished, but most unkappy princess was the daughter of king James V. of Scotland by his second wife, Mary of Lorraine. daughter of Claude, duke of Guise, and widow of Louis of Orleans, duke of Longueville. She was b. at Linlithgow, on Dec. 8, 1542. Her misfortunes may be said to have begun with her birth. Its tidings readied her.father on his death bed at Falkland, but brought Iiiin no consolation. " The devil go with it!" lie mut tered, as his thoights wanderCd back ,to the marriage with Bruce's ',daughter, which brought the crown of Scotland to the Stuarts—"it came from a woman, and it will end in a woman!" Mary became a queen before she was a week old. Before she was a twelvernonth old, the regent Arran had promised her in marriag,e to prince Edward of England, and the Scottish parliament had declaved the promise nulL War with Eng land followed, and at Pinkie Clench the Scots met a defeat' only less disastrous than Flodden. But their aversion to an English match was unconquerable; they hastened to place the young queen beyond the reach of English arms, in the island of Inchmahome, in the lake of Monteith, and to offer her in marriage to the eldest son of Henry II. of France, and Catharine de' Medi. The offer was accepted: and in July-, 1548, a French fleet carried Mary from Dumbarton, on the Clyde, to Roscoff, in Brittany, whence she was at once conveyed to St. Germain-en-Laye, and there affianced to the dauphin.
Her next/ten years were passed at the French court, where she was carefully educa ted along with the king's family, receiving instructions in the art of making verses from the famous Ronsard. At a somewhat later period, she bad the great Scottish scholar Buchanan for her Latin master. On Amil 24, 1538, her marriage with the dauphin, who was about two years younger than herself, was celebrated, with every circumstance of pomp and splendor, in the church of Notre-Dame, at Paris. It was agreed, on the part of Scotland, that her husband should have the title of king of Scots; but this was not enough for the grasping ambition of France, and Mary was betrayed into the signa ture of a secret deed, by which, if she died childless, both her Scottish realm and her right of succession to the English crown (she was the great-granddaughter of king Henry VII.) were conveyed to France. On July- 10, 1559, the death of the French king
called her husband to the throne by the title of Francis II. The government passed into the hands of the queen's kinsfolks, the duke of Guise and the cardinal of Lorraine; but their rule was short-lived. The feeble and sickly king died on Dec. 5, 1560, when the reins of power were grasped by- the queen-mother, Catharine de' Medici, as regent for her son, Charles IX. Mary must have been prepared, under almost any circumstances, to quit a, court which was now swayed by- one whom. during her brief reign, she bad taunted with being " a merchant's daughter." But there were other reasons for her departure from France. Her presence was urgently needed in Scotland, which the death of her mother, a few months before, had left without a government, at a moment when it was convulsed by the throes of the Reformation. Her kinsmen of Lorraine had ambi tious projects for her marriage; great schemes were based on her nearness of succession to the English crown; and both these, it was thought, might be more successfully fob lowed out when she was seated on her native throne.
She sailed from Calais on the 15th, and arrived at Leith on Aug. 19, 1561, having escaped the English ships-of-war which Elizabeth despatched to intercept her. She wept as the shores of France faded from her sight, and her tears flowed anew when she beheld the rudeness and poverty of Scotland. Her government began auspiciously. The Reformation claimed to have received the sanction of tbe Scottish parliament, and if Mary did not formally acknowledge the claim, she was at least content to leave affairs as she found them, stipulating only for liberty to use her own religion—a liberty which Knox and a few of the more extreme Reformers denounced as a sin against the law of God. She is said to have rejected the violent counsels of the Roman Catholics; it is certain that she surrounded herself with Protestant advisers, her chief minister being her illegitimate brother, James Stuart, an able if ambitious statesman, whom she soon after wards created earl of Murray. Under his guidance, in the autumn of 1562, she made a progress to the n., which, whatever was its design, ended in the defeat and death of the earl of Huntly, the powerful chief of the Roman Catholic party, in Scotland.