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 a poem written by her afterwards, the waste of her youth in widowhood, the loss of her great position as Queen of France, and her powerlessness any longer to enforce her rule in Scotland by French power, are the main burden of her complaints against Providence, not pity for the husband she had lost.
The Guises were loath to surrender power without a struggle, and as soon as Francis died they sought to sell their niece in marriage again. Their first idea was for her to marry her child-brother-in-law, the new King Charles IX., but Catharine de Medici at once stopped that plan, though the boy himself was anxious for it and Mary was not averse. That failing, Cardinal Lorraine turned to the heir of Spain, Don Carlos, as a husband for her. This would have been a death-blow to Elizabeth, and Philip feigned to listen to it; but all the strength and cunning of Huguenots and Protestants, joined by those of Catharine and Elizabeth, were brought into play against this threatening move, and Mary went to Scotland with a sinking, sad, and angry heart in 1561, fearing her uncouth subjects, foreign to her now, vexed with the Protestant party for standing in the way of her ambitious marriage, and determined to oppose Elizabeth to the utmost in her designs against the independence of Scotland.
With these views, gay and winsome though she was, it was not long before Mary was at issue with her dour Protestant subjects and their spokesman, John Knox. It was hoped by her brother, James Stuart (Murray), and Secretary Lethington that a modus vivendi might be found by persuading Elizabeth to secure to Mary the English succession in case she herself died childless, on the undertaking of Mary that her marriage and policy should be dictated by England; but it was not Elizabeth's plan to pledge the future of England, and her nimble evasiveness drove the Scottish statesmen to despair.
Brawls and bitterness grew in Mary's court around the Catholicism of the queen, and English money and intrigue were freely lavished to set Scotland by the ears. Half the nobles were disaffected, and Murray and Lethington, having failed to secure Scottish interests by moderate counsels and the conciliation of Elizabeth, were forced to take a strong course. Of foreign suitors Mary had many, some promoted by the Protestants, some by the Pope and the Guises, while the Catholics of England were secretly intriguing to force Elizabeth's hand by arranging Mary's marriage with young Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, eldest son of Margaret, Countess of Lennox, niece of Henry VIII., who lived at Elizabeth's court. Cecil's spies were everywhere, and the plot was soon known and stopped by Elizabeth, violently angry with her kinswoman for listening to such a scheme.
But Murray and Lethington, in desperation, were aiming at higher game even than this. They were Protestant, they had tried their best to win Elizabeth's recognition; but they were Scotsmen first, and if their country was to be independent it must have a great ally behind it. France was out of the question while the Guises were in the shade and Catharine was queen-mother. So the ministers of Mary turned their eyes to the Protestant heir of the Catholic king. Elizabeth soon heard of this, too, and suddenly pretended to be in favour of the Darnley match for Mary, while she developed the most cordial friendship for Mary herself; for the Guises had again become paramount in France, and Elizabeth could not afford to flout all the Catholic interests at once.
That danger soon passed, for the Huguenots flew to arms, and Guise was murdered, Mary losing thus her principal prop abroad. And Lethington now pushed vigorously what seemed to be Scotland's only chance of safety--the marriage of Mary with the semi-idiot heir of Spain.
The English Catholics were drawn into the plot. "Only let Mary marry the heir of Spain, and we will salute her as our leader," said they. But Elizabeth soon gained wind of it, as usual, and was ready with her antidote--a most extraordinary one--the proposal that Mary should wed her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley, with the assurance of the English succession after Elizabeth's death without issue. It was a mere feint, of course, but it divided Scotland, and unsettled Mary herself.