finer and nobler nature than Elizabeth; she was a woman
of higher courage and greater conviction, more generous, magnanimous,
and confiding, and, apart from her incomparably greater beauty and
fascination, she possessed mental endowments fully equal to those of the
English queen. But, whilst caution and love of mastery in Elizabeth
always saved her from her weakness at the critical moment, Mary Stuart
possessed no such safeguards, and was periodically swept along
helplessly by the irresistible rush of her amorous passion.

French intrigue and money, aided by the queen-regent of Scotland, Mary
of Guise, succeeded, after Henry's death and Somerset's invasion of
Scotland, in gaining firm hold upon Scotland, and Mary, as the betrothed
wife of the dauphin Francis, was carried to France in 1548, at the age
of six, to be reared by her cunning kinsmen of Lorraine, and made, as it
was hoped, a future powerful instrument to aid Catholic French objects
against England, and the reformation in France and elsewhere. As she
grew towards womanhood in the bravest and most amorous court in Europe,
the queen-dauphiness became a paragon of beauty, charm, accomplishments,
the theme of poets, the despair of lovers innumerable worshipping her
from afar.

The boy Francis de Valois, to whom she was affianced, was a poor,
bilious, degenerate weakling, stunted in figure, uncomely of face. He
was shy and timid, shunning active exercises, and though at the time of
his marriage (1558) he was too young to have been actively engaged in
the vices of the outwardly devout court, he appears to have been fully
alive to the desirability of his bride. Mary was precocious and
ambitious; she was surrounded by profligates, male and female, and,
though she can hardly have been in love with her young husband, she
appears to have been fully reconciled to the union.

With unsurpassed magnificence the wedding of Mary and Francis took place
in Paris, but it signified to the world much more than the wedding of a
boy and girl. So far as men could see, it meant the triumph of the papal
Guises in France, and a death-blow to Protestant hopes of ranging
Scotland on the side of the reformation.

_II.--Intrigue, Plot, and Intrigue_

Francis died after sixteen months reign, and Mary Stuart and her Guisan
uncles, hated jealously by the queen-mother, Catharine de Medici, and by
the reforming Bourbons, fell, for a time, into the background. Mary can
hardly have loved he