Mary Stuart Read Free Page B

and eight months old) was shipped from Dumbarton for a French port. Once more she had been sold to an unknown bridegroom, and committed to a marriage which might have lasted for decades. Again, and not for the last time, alien hands were moulding her destiny.
    Trustfulness is a distinctive quality of childhood. What does a toddler of two, three, or even four years old know of war and of peace, of battles and of treaties? What can such words as England or France, Edward or Francis, mean to it? A fair-haired girl ran gleefully in and out of the dark or the brightly lit rooms of a palace, with four other girls of the same age at her heels. A charming thought had been allowed to blossom in the bleak atmosphere of a barbaric age. From the earliest days of her life Mary Stuart had been given four companions, all of them born at the same time as herself, chosen from among the most distinguished Scottish families, the lucky cloverleaf of the four Marys: Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingstone and Mary Seton. In early years these namesakes of the Queen were her gay playmates; later they were her classmates in a foreign land so that she did not feel her novel surroundings to be unbearably strange; still later they were to become her maids of honour. In a moment of unusual affection, they took a vow not to enter the married state before Mary herself had found a spouse. Even after three of them had forsaken the Queen in the days when misfortune befell her, the fourth of the Marys followed her mistress, clave to her in adversity, shared in her exile and her prisons, waited upon her when she died on the scaffold, and never left her until her body had been consigned to the grave. Thus, to the very end of her life, Mary was accompanied by a touch of childhood. But at the time she sailed for France as a small child, these sad and darkened days lay far ahead.
    At Holyrood or at Stirling, the palace and the castle rang with peals of laughter and the patter of small feet, as the five Marys ran from room to room, untiringly, from morning till nightfall. Little did they care for high estate, for dignities, for kingdoms; nothing did they know of the pride and danger encompassing a crown. One night, Mary the Queen was roused from her baby sleep, lifted from her crib; a boat was waiting in readiness on a lake that was hardly bigger than a pond; someone rowed her across, and they landed on an island. How quiet and pleasant the place! Inchmahome, the isle of peace. Strange men stooped to welcome her; some of these men were robed more like women, and had peaked hoods to their black gowns. They were gentle and kind, they sang beautifully in a high-ceilinged hall with stained-glass windows. Mary soon grew accustomed to her new home. But all too soon another evening came when once more she was taken in a boat across the waters. Fate had decreed that Mary Stuart was constantly to be making such night flittings from one destiny to another. On this occasion she awoke to find herself on a ship with high masts and milk-white sails, surrounded by unknown, rugged soldiers and hirsute sailors. What need was there for Mary to be frightened? Everyone aboard was kind and friendly to her; her seventeen-year-old half-brother James was gently stroking her silky hair. This youngster was one of her father’s innumerable bastards, born in the decade before he married Mary of Guise. There, too, were the four Marys, her beloved playfellows. Delighted and happy in their novel environment, the five little girls frolicked about the vessel, dodging in and out among the cannons of the French man-of-war, laughing madly and joyously. Above these innocents, at the mast-head, was a man whose vigilance never relaxed. Anxiously he spied in every direction, for he knew that the English fleet was cruising about in those waters and only awaited an auspicious moment to pounce upon the precious freight and make her England’s Queen before she had been given a chance to become