At Elizabeth’s accession, in 1558, Mary was sixteen years of age. As the wife of the Dauphin of France, the French monarchy put forward her claims as the rightful sovereign of England, and even had a coinage struck with her effigy thus designated. So Elizabeth feared and hated Mary as her rival; hated her yet more, with a woman’s spite, for her beauty and accomplishments. Soon Mary, by his early death, lost her husband, then King of France, and at nineteen years of age, in the splendour of her queenly beauty, she—regretfully for the land of her youth—returned to her native Scotland. [Illustration: MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTLAND. (_From a painting by Zucchero._) ] By her sweet presence, her courtesy, and winning manners, Mary largely gained the hearts of her people; but murmurings soon arose about her foreign ways, her foreign favouritisms, and her fidelity to her Catholic faith. And a cloud gathered over her domestic life. She had married a young nobleman, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He was next to Mary in the hereditary line of succession to the English throne—as Mary was a grand- daughter of Margaret Tudor he was a grandson—by Margaret’s second marriage with the Earl of Angus. He was also a Catholic. Darnley seems to have been little other than a handsome, but petulant, ill-behaved, and ill-mannered boy, fitted, neither by intellect nor disposition, to be the husband and life-companion of such a proud, clever, and accomplished woman as Mary. Mary refused him the crown-matrimonial, and they very soon fell apart. Mary was not forbidden to have her private chapel; an Italian singer in this chapel, David Rizzio, became a favourite, he acted as her secretary, and was admitted into the inner circle of Holyrood. One evening the supper-party was broken in upon by Darnley and a number of his associates, and Rizzio was dragged out to the landing, and by several weapons barbarously stabbed to death. Mary’s fair countenance and gentle voice were mated with an iron will, persistent in carrying out her hatreds to the death. Darnley was murdered by a rude villain, Earl Bothwell, and Mary has never been satisfactorily cleared of complicity in the murder. Shortly afterwards she married this Bothwell—by force, her apologists say. We shall not even briefly go over the oft-told tale of Mary’s after- life. As the incidents loom out of the tangled web, we feel, even through the centuries, as if we would fain arrest them by a warning voice, fain save that fascinating woman from her doom. We feel a yearning pity, almost akin to love, although stern justice gives her blame as a woman, a wife, and a Queen. That pitiful winter’s morning in Fotheringay Castle, in 1587, brought to Mary, by the headsman’s axe, a cruel death, but also a kind release from captivity and unrest.