subsequently the Catholic league, strove ceaselessly, with the help of
Mary Stuart, to free Scotland from English influence. The marriage
juggle of Elizabeth was largely inspired by her Scottish aims, and if
the fortuitous adjustment of her qualities kept England Protestant, and
France wavering for all those critical years, if she secured the
inactivity of Spain, the resistance of Protestant Holland, and the
freedom of navigation by her skilful statecraft, her rival Mary Stuart
was a hardly less powerful factor in the final triumph of England by
reason of certain defects in her character, the consequences of which
are dealt with in this book.

Mary possessed a 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