Misfortunes, it is said, never come singly. Whilst Mary was performing the part of an affectionate nurse to her husband, she sustained an irretrievable loss in the death of her mother, the Scottish Regent, in June 1560; and in the December following, her husband, Francis, died at Orleans, in the 17th year of his age, and the 17th month of his reign.[25] Feeling that his exhausted constitution was sinking rapidly, and that his death was at hand, almost the last words he spoke were to testify his affection for Mary, and his sense of her virtues. He earnestly beseeched his mother to treat her as her own daughter, and his brother to look upon her as a sister. He was a prince, says Conæus, in whom, had he lived, more merit would probably have been discovered than most people suspected.[26] The whole face of things in France was by this event instantly changed again. Francis the Little, as he was contemptuously termed by the French, in opposition to his father Francis the Great, was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles IX. He being still a minor, his mother, Catharine, contrived to get herself appointed his guardian, and thus became once more Queen of France, the nobility, as Chalmers remarks, being more inclined to relish a _real_ minority, than an imaginary _majority_. Catharine's jealousy of Mary Stuart, of course extended itself, with greater justice, to her uncles of Guise. It was now their turn to make way for Montmorency; and the Cardinal of Lorraine, one of the most intriguing statesmen of the age, retired, in no very charitable mood of mind, to his archbishopric at Rheims, where, in a fit of spleen, he declared he would devote himself entirely to religion.