The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots Read Free

to preserve some sort of harmony and peace among them. How I missed her! I had not seen her in so long, not since her last visit to France when I was seven years old. If I closed my eyes I could see her dear face, hear her voice.
    She was a Frenchwoman, she belonged among us. Like Grandmamma Antoinette, she had the royal blood of the Bourbons in her veins.
    The spectators were stirring loudly to life once again as a fresh challenger came riding against the king. Once again there came a thunder of hooves, a clashing of lances, and although the king took a blow to his shoulder, his opponent was unhorsed and fell heavily.
    On through the afternoon the king continued to be victorious, tiring four mounts and shattering many lances. He seemed invincible. Only the challenger, a tall, burly knight who smashed his lance into the king’s chest and a second one into his helmet, appeared to offer real opposition. But in the end the king struck a disabling blow and the man went down.
    Francis, sitting quietly beside me, began to sniff and wipe his nose on his sleeve. His attention wandered from the tiltyard.
    “Only a few minutes more,” I said to him. “Then the banquet will begin.”
    “I’m not hungry,” he whispered. “I want to leave.”
    “We can’t leave. Not until the prize of arms is awarded.”
    At last twilight began to descend and the king, triumphant, cameforward to receive the prize, to the applause and cheers of the onlookers. Francis and I stood, paying him homage as the undefeated champion of the joust, but Francis was yawning, and we had no sooner returned to the palace than he went to bed, without even waiting for his servant to take off his boots.
    I found him there, alone in the immense bed we were expected to share for the first time that night as husband and wife. He was sound asleep under a layer of down, a weary boy at the end of a long and tiring day.
    I kissed his cheek and went back to my own apartments, eager to have my attendants dress me in the lovely gown of pale blue satin that my grandmamma had chosen for me to wear that night. I did not want to miss the banquet—or the dancing that would follow it. I loved to dance and besides, it was my wedding day. I would simply explain that Francis had felt ill and needed to take some physick. Everyone would understand. And even if they didn’t, they would not dare to complain. For was I not Queen of Scotland and, as of today, dauphine of France?



TWO
    While I was becoming accustomed to being a wife and hoping to become a mother, I had many letters from my own dear mother in Scotland. A courier arrived nearly every month with a new bag of documents for me to sign and messages, often hastily scrawled and heavily blotted, signed “from the queen,” or simply “Marie,” with my mother’s special insignia, the silver eaglets of Lorraine, added at the bottom of each page.
    She was in trouble.
    The great and quarrelsome Scots lords, the most powerful of them as mighty as kings in their own lands, were fighting, and though they often changed allegiances, and clashed fiercely with one another, there were always many of them who were fighting against the crown. I was queen, but my mother was regent, holding authority on my behalf, and try as she might to hold it, that authority was rapidly slipping away.
    It did not help that she was ill, and that her illness was slowly growing worse. Her legs and feet swelled until she could barely walk, and her face, she wrote, looked like a sheep’s bladder that someone had blown up and forgotten to deflate.
    “The doctors shake their heads, and soak my blankets in limejuice, which is supposed to take away the swelling. But all the lime juice in the world can’t make my belly flat again,” she told me in one letter. “They really don’t know what to think, or what to do. Young Jamie—that’s the young heir to the earldom of Bothwell—thinks it’s witchcraft, and he’s brought me a charm stone to keep in my