Then Mary fell back upon her bed, pale as death, murmuring yet once again--"Adieu, France! I shall see thee no more." Indeed, the happiest years of her life had just passed away in this France that she so much regretted.

Born amid the first religious troubles, near the bedside of her dying father, the cradle mourning was to stretch for her to the grave, and her stay in France had been a ray of sunshine in her night.

Slandered from her birth, the report was so generally spread abroad that she was malformed, and that she could not live to grow up, that one day her mother, Mary of Guise, tired of these false rumours, undressed her and showed her naked to the English ambassador, who had come, on the part of Henry VIII, to ask her in marriage for the Prince of Wales, himself only five years old.

Crowned at nine months by Cardinal Beaton, archbishop of St.Andrews, she was immediately hidden by her mother, who was afraid of treacherous dealing in the King of England, in Stirling Castle.

Two years later, not finding even this fortress safe enough, she removed her to an island in the middle of the Lake of Menteith, where a priory, the only building in the place, provided an asylum for the royal child and for four young girls born in the same year as herself, having like her the sweet name which is an anagram of the word "aimer," and who, quitting her neither in her good nor in her evil fortune, were called the "Queen's Marys".