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 her puny boy husband, but she nursed him night and day
in his long sickness and his death so affected her that "she would not
receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant
tears and passionate, doleful lamentations, she universally inspired
deep pity." She had, indeed, lost much besides her royal husband; and in