Beautiful in person, attractive in manner, able, acute, brilliant even, in intellect, Mary Stuart had many qualities which might have been turned to good account for the welfare of her country. But, brought up in a French court, her moral code was neither of the highest nor the purest; educated under the supervision of her uncles of Lorraine, she was taught to believe that the one great object of her life was to advance the interests of the Roman Catholic Church; and sister-in-law to him whose name is for ever blackened by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, she was not likely to be over scrupulous as to the means which she would employ to gain her end. So far as she had shaped a policy to herself, when she came to Scotland, it would seem to have been to temporize with the Protestants, until she had time either to fascinate them by the spell of her personal magnetism or to crush them by her power; then to make the throne of Scotland a stepping-stone to that of England, to which she claimed to be the lawful heir, and so to bring that realm also back {158} to its allegiance to the Pope. This made her and Elizabeth implacable enemies. They were neighbours; they were cousins; they were queens, these two, and the struggle between them was to the death. One or other must go down. Each played a deep and deceitful game, but Elizabeth was moved by ambition for herself, while Mary was devoted to a cause, and so it is that as she lays her head upon the block at Fotheringay it is encircled with the halo of a kind of martyrdom, and the eye of the sternest judge is for the moment blinded to the guilt of her life by the tear of pity which dims it as he looks upon the manner of its close.