All these proceedings led to a treaty of
peace at Edinburgh, under which the French consented to depart from the
kingdom. By a separate treaty, Mary and her young husband engaged to
renounce their assumed title of King and Queen of England. But this
treaty they never fulfilled.
It happened, soon after matters had got to this state, that the young
French King died, leaving Mary a young widow. She was then invited by
her Scottish subjects to return home and reign over them; and as she
was not now happy where she was, she, after a little time, complied.
Elizabeth had been Queen three years, when Mary Queen of Scots embarked
at Calais for her own rough, quarrelling country. As she came out of
the harbour, a vessel was lost before her eyes, and she said, ‘O! good
God! what an omen this is for such a voyage!’ She was very fond of
France, and sat on the deck, looking back at it and weeping, until it
was quite dark. When she went to bed, she directed to be called at
daybreak, if the French coast were still visible, that she might behold
it for the last time. As it proved to be a clear morning, this was
done, and she again wept for the country she was leaving, and said many
times, ‘Farewell, France! Farewell, France! I shall never see thee
again!’ All this was long remembered afterwards, as sorrowful and
interesting in a fair young princess of nineteen. Indeed, I am afraid
it gradually came, together with her other distresses, to surround her
with greater sympathy than she deserved.
When she came to Scotland, and took up her abode at the palace of
Holyrood in Edinburgh, she found herself among uncouth strangers and
wild uncomfortable customs very different from her experiences in the
court of France. The very people who were disposed to love her, made
her head ache when she was tired out by her voyage, with a serenade of
discordant music—a fearful concert of bagpipes, I suppose—and brought
her and her train home to her palace on miserable little Scotch horses
that appeared to be half starved. Among the people who were not
disposed to love her, she found the powerful leaders of the Reformed
Church, who were bitter upon her amusements, however innocent, and
denounced music and dancing as works of the devil. John Knox himself
often lectured her, violently and angrily, and did much to make her
life unhappy. All these reasons confirmed her old attachment to the
Romish religion, and caused her, there is no doubt, most imprudently
and dangerously both for herself and for England too, to give a solemn
pledge to the heads of the Romish Church that if she ever succeeded to
the English crown, she would set up that religion again. In reading her
unhappy history, you must always remember this; and also that during
her whole life she was constantly put forward against the Queen, in
some form or other, by the Romish party.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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