pointed general in defiance
of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following, the ceremony of
coronation was duly performed on the infant. A scheme for her betrothal
to Edward, Prince of Wales, was defeated by the grasping greed of his
father, whose obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scotland at once to
that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation
of Scottish patriotism. In 1548 the Queen of six years old was betrothed
to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived
August 15th.

The society in which the child was thenceforward reared is known to
readers of Brantome as well as that of Imperial Rome at its worst is
known to readers of Suetonius or Petronius--as well as that of papal
Rome at its worst is known to readers of the diary kept by the domestic
chaplain of Pope Alexander VI. Only in their pages can a parallel be
found to the gay and easy record which reveals, without sign of shame or
suspicion of offence, the daily life of a court compared to which the
court of King Charles II is as the court of Queen Victoria to the
society described by Grammont.

Debauchery of all kinds, murder in all forms, were the daily matter of
excitement or of jest to the brilliant circle which revolved around
Queen Catherine de' Medici. After ten years' training under the tutelage
of the woman whose main instrument of policy was the corruption of her
own children, the Queen of Scots, aged fifteen years and five months,
was married to the eldest and feeblest of the brood on April 24, 1558.
On November 17th, Elizabeth became Queen of England, and the princes of
Lorraine--Francis the great Duke of Guise, and his brother the
Cardinal--induced their niece and her husband to assume, in addition to
the arms of France and Scotland, the arms of a country over which they
asserted the right of Mary Stuart to reign as legitimate heiress of Mary
Tudor. Civil strife broke out in Scotland between John Knox and the
Queen Dowager--between the self-styled "Congregation of the Lord" and
the adherents of the Regent, whose French troops repelled the combined
forces of the Scotch and their English allies from the beleaguered walls
of Leith, little more than a month before the death of their mistress in
the castle of Edinburgh, on June 10, 1560.

On August 25th Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed
in Scotland by a convention of states assembled without the assent of
the absent Queen.