It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and exclaiming again and again, “_Adieu, ma chère France! je ne vous verray jamais plus!_” He tells us how, when at length they did lose sight of France, and were on the open sea northward with a fair wind, there was some anxiety lest they should be intercepted, and the Queen taken prisoner by an English fleet. In the peculiar state of the relations between England and Scotland at the time, this was not an impossibility, and would hardly have been against the law of nations. There had been some angry correspondence between Elizabeth and Mary respecting the non-ratification by Mary of a certain “Treaty of Edinburgh” of the previous year, stipulating that she would desist from her claim to Elizabeth’s throne of England. Elizabeth had consequently refused Mary’s application for a safeguard for her homeward journey; and there was actually an English squadron in the North Sea available for the capture of Mary if Elizabeth had chosen to give the word. But, though the English squadron does seem to have waylaid the French galleys, and one of the transports following the galleys was taken and detained for some reason or other, the galleys themselves, by rapid sailing or by English sufferance, threw that danger behind, and approached the Scottish coast in perfect safety. What then astonished Brantôme, and what he seems to have remembered all his life with a kind of horror in association with his first introduction to Queen Mary’s native climate and kingdom, was the extraordinary fog, the _si grand brouillard_, in which they suddenly found themselves. “On a Sunday morning, the day before we came to Scotland,” he says, “there rose so great a fog that we could not see from the stern to the prow, much to the discomfiture of the pilots and crews, so that we were obliged to let go the anchor in the open sea, and take soundings to know where we were.” Brantôme’s measure of time becomes a little incoherent at this point; and we hardly know from his language whether it was outside the Firth of Forth altogether, or inside of the Firth about Berwick Law, that the fog caught them, if indeed he remembered that there was such a thing as an estuary at all between the open sea and Leith. He distinctly says, however, that they were a whole day and night in the fog, and that he and the other Frenchmen were blaspheming Scotland a good deal on account of it before they did reach Leith. That, as other authorities inform us, was about ten o’clock in the morning of Tuesday the 19th.