James V. had not a happy reign. His boyhood had been one of restraint under the tyranny of nobles; and, after eight years of putting his kingdom into order and subduing the troublesome Douglases, his journey to France to seek a bride had thus ended tragically in her death. The vagaries of his mother, Margaret Tudor, who, after her husband’s fall at Flodden, had emulated her brother Henry VIII. in her marriages and divorcings and remarryings, must have made her a domestic trouble to her son; and abroad, constant wars with England broke his spirit. Four years after his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, had landed at Crail to become Queen of Scotland, James V., though not yet thirty years old, was a miserable, half demented, sorely stricken man, dragging himself home on the tidings of the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, first to Edinburgh, and then to the greater seclusion of Falkland. There, hearing of the last trouble of all, that the child to whom Mary of Lorraine had given birth at Linlithgow was a daughter, he, like Ahab of old, turned his face to the wall. “It cam’ wi’ a lass, and it’ll gang wi’ a lass,--and the deil gang wi’ it!” he cried: and so the Red Tod died. The next scene at Holyrood is twenty years after, and the palace in the plain, and the Castle on the height, and the city between, are all covered with a thick, heavy white mist, like that which shrouded Malcolm Canmore’s children as they escaped from the Castle with their mother’s coffin. The “haar” has crept up from the Firth of Forth, and the Firth of Forth is lost in impenetrable fog; but this time it is not a ferry-boat bearing a dead Queen across to Dunfermline, but a State galley bringing a living Queen home from France. Mary Stuart, surrounded by her Scottish and French retinue, and with three of her French Guise and Lorraine uncles on board, and her four Scottish Marys in attendance, sailed up the Firth of Forth on Tuesday, 19th of August 1561, in so dense a mist that none could see from the stern of the vessel to her prow. “Si grand brouillard,” the horrified Sieur de Brantôme called it. Truly, if Queen Margaret’s haar was miraculous, Queen Mary’s haar was prophetic; for little indeed did the Stuart Princess see of what lay before her in Scotland. The people of Leith and Edinburgh were taken by surprise, not having expected their Queen for another week, and nothing was ready for her reception,--except the haar. She rode in state to Holyrood next day. The “grand brouillard” would have prevented her from seeing anything except a vista of mist and drizzle, and no doubt she was glad to dismount and find herself in the light and warmth of the palace, with her four Marys and her French-speaking courtiers gazing curiously about them at their new surroundings.