IN SPITE OF MARY’S understandable apprehension as she first set foot in France, she was far from alone. At least a dozen familiar faces surrounded her. Her mother had chosen a personal retinue to escort her, balancing Henry II’s representatives, the Sieur de Brézé and his companions, with a roughly equal number of Scots. Lords Erskine and Livingston came first: Parliament had made them Mary’s official guardians while she was away. Lady Fleming, an illegitimate daughter of James IV and one of her mother’s closest confidantes, was next. She was appointed to be Mary’s governess, taking charge of her female staff. Janet Sinclair, Mary’s old nurse, was still constantly at her side. In addition, Lord James Stuart, one of James V’s illegitimate sons and Mary’s half-brother, took his place in her party. Aged seventeen, he was on his way to Paris to attend university. This was perhaps the first time that Mary had met the sibling who would later come to play such a momentous role in her life. For the moment, however, he was criss-crossing between Paris and Edinburgh, ostensibly training for a career in the Church, but in reality just waiting for an opportunity to enter the limelight.
Mary’s maids of honour and official playmates were her four best friends: Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton, Mary Seton, and Mary Livingston, the socalled four Maries. All almost exactly her own age and the daughters of leading Scottish families, they had first appeared as Mary’s companions when she was taken by her mother to the island priory of Inchmahome. Mary Fleming, Lady Fleming’s daughter, enjoyed pre-eminence by virtue of their blood ties and Mary treated her as her cousin. She was famous for her quick wits and love of life. Mary Beaton’s beauty was second only to Mary’s, with whom she later shared a love of literature and poetry. Mary Seton, who stayed by Mary’s side for almost her entire life, was famous as a hairdresser, able to braid and crimp the always fashion-conscious Mary’s auburn hair into a new style every day. Lastly, Mary Livingston, Lord Livingston’s daughter, loved the outdoor life and dancing.
Their nickname was a joke. The ‘three Maries’ was the name given in France to a well-known Catholic devotional manual for noblewomen. The three saints were the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the wife of Clopas who stood by the Cross at the Crucifixion of Christ. Mary undoubtedly knew this book, probably found it tedious and her playmates a great deal more fun, and so invented the moniker. It reflected the wicked, even mildly blasphemous sense of humour for which she was later to be renowned. It did not pass unnoticed that during the long and gruelling crossing she had taunted those of her companions who, unlike herself, were sea-sick.
As soon as the galleys landed at St-Pol-de-Léon, advance word was sent to Paris that Mary was on her way. Henry II had already given orders that all the towns and villages near his palace at St-Germain be carefully checked to make sure that none of the stonemasons had been in contact with plague during the extensive rebuilding works. Mary was to be welcomed by her grandparents, Claude Duke of Guise and Antoinette of Bourbon, to whom an outrider was sent. Another messenger set out on the long journey across the Alps to Turin, where Henry II was visiting his north Italian garrisons, to inform him of Mary’s arrival. Such was the attention due to the princess pledged to the Dauphin of France.
After everyone felt sufficiently rested, their baggage was loaded onto carts and they set out across country for Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire, where they boarded a river-barge for Orléans. Illness, probably gastroenteritis, struck down some of the men. Lords Erskine and Livingston were violently sick, taking months to convalesce. Far worse, Mary Seton’s brother, ‘le petit Ceton’, died of a ‘flux of the stomach’ at Ancenis, some twenty miles from Nantes on the way to Angers. Mary and her female attendants did not succumb, possibly because they took more care than the men about what they were drinking. It was considered a normal precaution for royal and aristocratic women to carry bottled water in their luggage, whereas the men would have consumed local wine and beer.
Little Seton’s fate gave Mary her first close experience of mortality. After the funeral, the party returned to their barge to resume their journey through the lush, densely forested Loire valley. Somewhere along this part of the route, the Sieur de Brézé, the Guise retainer who was Mary’s official escort, received orders recalling him to Guyenne in the south of France, where a peasant revolt had broken out against the salt tax. He left Mary in the care of her grandmother, Antoinette of Bourbon, who had met the party and who now guided it home.
Antoinette recorded her first impressions of Mary in her letters. ‘I assure you’, she began, ‘she is the prettiest and best for her age that you ever saw.’ ‘She has auburn hair, with a fine complexion, and I think that when she comes of age she will be a beautiful girl, because her skin is delicate and white.’ Antoinette noted that her face was well formed, especially towards the chin, which was maybe a little long. In deportment ‘she is graceful and self-assured. When all is said and done, we may be well pleased with her.’ The Duchess added with barely concealed condescension that the rest of Mary’s retinue, Lady Fleming excepted, were less good-looking and ‘not even as clean as they might be’.
Mary was expected to join Henry II’s children at Carrières-sur-Seine, just a few miles outside St-Germain, where they were staying to escape the renovation being done at the chêteau. She reached Carrières on Sunday 14 October, and was received in style. By now there were already four children in the royal nursery: Francis the Dauphin, his two sisters Elizabeth and Claude, and a younger brother, Louis, who would shortly die of measles before his second birthday. Later, four more children were born: Charles, Henry, Marguerite, and one more son, also named Francis.
As Mary was to lodge with them, the issue of protocol arose. Who should enjoy precedence among them? It was settled that the Dauphin would take pre-eminence as he was male and the heir to the French throne. But would Mary, a Queen in her own right, enjoy precedence over the others, especially Princess Elizabeth, nicknamed Isabel, the King’s eldest daughter, who was three and a half years old?
Henry II gave careful thought to this. In reaching his decision, his mistress, the redoubtable Diane de Poitiers, played a greater role than did his wife, Catherine de Medici. The domestic arrangements of Henry II were unorthodox but curiously serene. Catherine was the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, and the niece of Pope Clement VII. Henry had been forced to marry her in 1533 by his father, Francis I, who needed Medici support for his Italian diplomacy. Both parties were just fourteen, and it was a mésalliance. Perhaps not least because Catherine was expected to consummate her marriage in front of her father-in-law – he joked that she had ‘shown valour in the joust’ – she disliked sex. She attained puberty at a late stage, and was infertile for almost seven years. There was even talk of repudiating her; in an age of dynastic monarchy, a barren Queen was disposable. Catherine was highly vulnerable to a mistress and an annulment until her first child, Francis, was born.
In the years of her ‘sterility’, Catherine was supported by Diane, who saw every advantage in maintaining the status quo and every disadvantage in being displaced by a new and less accommodating wife. Diane forced Henry to spend more time in Catherine’s bed. In return, Catherine allowed Diane the space to exert influence. By the time Mary arrived at St-Germain, Diane even had a role in bringing up the royal children. She had the full attention of Jean de Humières, the official who in 1546 was put in charge of the royal nursery. His wife, Françoise de Contay, Lady Humières, assisted him, and thanks to Diane was able to retain her position after her husband’s death in 1550, when he was succeeded by Claude d’Urfé, formerly ambassador to Rome.
A few weeks before Mary reached Carrières, Diane sent a memo to Humières specifying the King’s decision on protocol. It granted precedence over all except the Dauphin to Mary, who was to share the best room in the house with Princess Elizabeth. Moreover, she was to ‘walk ahead of my daughters because her marriage to my son is agreed, and on top of that she is a crowned Queen’.
Catherine de Medici saw Mary for the first time at St-Germain. She found her beautiful and vivacious: ‘our little Scottish Queen has but to smile to turn all the French heads’. Later in their relationship, Catherine was Mary’s keen antagonist, her motive not so much jealousy of her allure as a desire to protect the status of her own children and a growing fear and dislike of the powerful Guises. But such competition was absent while Henry II was alive. This ménage à trois worked extremely well.
Mary was fêted at court. Her half-brother, the young Duke of Longueville, who rushed excitedly to meet her at St-Germain, thought she was stunning. Likewise Jacques de Lorges, who had led the reinforcements to Scotland in 1545 that were paid in debased coin, wrote to Mary of Guise to say her daughter was so ‘charming and intelligent as to give everyone who sees her incomparable joy and satisfaction’. Hungry for news of her daughter, Mary of Guise was thrilled to receive this information.
On 9 December, Henry II returned to St-Germain. He had by then commissioned an artist to draw all the children’s portraits, which he received at Nevers in late October, and so was able to recognize Mary and greet her by name. When they finally met, he found her to be as flawless in manners as she was in looks. ‘She is the most perfect child that I have ever seen,’ he wrote joyously to Montmorency the Constable. From that moment onwards, she was, as he constantly said, ‘his very own daughter’.
Mary’s ‘coming out’ took place a few days later, when her uncle Francis married Anne d’Este, daughter of Hercules d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. It was a glittering event to which the diplomats of Europe were invited. At the reception, Henry II rose to make a speech. He drew everyone’s attention to ‘my daughter the Queen of Scotland’, whom he had arranged would dance with the Dauphin.
Already Mary loved dancing and knew many of the simpler courtly steps. When she and the Dauphin took to the floor, the entire audience stood still to watch them. It was Mary’s first serious test as a princess. She had to step forward in her stiff starched dress, with its ornate strapwork and jewelled embroidery and in her tight flat shoes, to perform a complex routine that she had learnt by rote over the past few weeks, counting out the steps by numbers in time to the music, and then practising with the Dauphin under the critical eye of Lady Fleming. Such courtly dancing was a vital precursor to a betrothal, as it displayed to the whole court that the ‘lovers’ were in good health and sound in all their limbs. At the end of the dance, the performers of whatever age were expected gently to kiss.
Since Mary had come to France for her betrothal, Henry was delighted by the Dauphin’s easy attachment to her. Francis was nearly five at Christmas 1548, while Mary was six. Henry persuaded himself that ‘from the very first day they met, my son and she got on as well together as if they had known each other for a long time’.
This was largely wishful thinking. Although the Dauphin was plucky and intelligent, he was physically weak. Even at this early age he must have looked incongruous beside Mary, because whereas she was unusually tall for her age, he was abnormally short. And while Mary was high spirited and fluent in both speech and gesture, Francis was a clumsy stutterer. If he and Mary appeared to make a successful couple, it was because Diane de Poitiers had been at work. For several months she had been prompting Lady Humières to school the Dauphin in the principles of elementary courtship. Lady Humières took the hint, and in reporting the news of her charge’s initial success back to her, Diane urged, ‘If you want to please the King, go on teaching him these pretty little ways.’
Mary picked up these signals and joined in on the act. She learnt intuitively that it was important to handle Francis in a way that pleased the King her new ‘father’, and that the best way to relate to him was to seek to be his friend, while at the same time exploiting the conventions of courtly love to pretend to be his ‘beloved’.
This worked like a charm. Both the Constable and the Venetian ambassador remarked on her elegant and demure behaviour. Encouraged by Lady Humières, the Dauphin, in turn, took up hunting and martial sports. He was given a specially made suit of children’s armour by Mary’s uncle Francis, and in his carefully copied-out letter of thanks depicted himself as the ‘gentle knight’ of medieval chivalry who sought ‘to win the heart of the beautiful and honest lady who is your niece’.
Shortly after Christmas, Antoinette of Bourbon briefed Mary’s mother on the King’s announcement that all the royal children would be educated together. This was a clear break with tradition, but Henry wished the children to ‘become used to each other’s company’.
In part, he really meant this. He wanted Mary and Elizabeth, his own eldest daughter, to be brought up as sisters and the Dauphin to meet Mary in a relaxed but supervised environment. The hidden agenda was that Mary’s Scottish retinue, or at least those who were male, were becoming a nuisance. The Scots were not popular, despite their high profile at the French court, where they formed the royal bodyguard or garde écossaise. By the standards of French court etiquette, they were seen as rude and uncouth. Now Henry wanted those officers who had entered Mary’s service in Scotland to be sent home.
Language was a key factor. As yet, Mary spoke Scots and almost no French. This had to change quickly. The question of cost also arose, since Mary’s mother had not provided salaries for her daughter’s staff and Henry was unwilling to fund individual households for all the royal children where one would better achieve his aims. Under the new arrangement, everyone would speak French and follow the correct protocol. Mary’s household would merge with the Dauphin’s. His sisters and their attendants would be placed in the same establishment, sharing a luxurious suite of apartments with Mary and her gentlewomen, and everyone would be subject overall to Humières and his wife.
Mary’s male attendants were shunted aside with very few exceptions, and even on the female side there were changes. At first the four Maries accompanied Mary everywhere, but when she had settled down and seemed more relaxed in her new surroundings, they were sent to a Dominican convent school at Poissy, about four miles from St-Germain, to learn French, obliging Mary to speak only French in their absence. Even Sinclair, her old nurse, found herself under threat. She was reinstated after Mary’s mother intervened in her favour, but her appeal against eating with Frenchwomen failed. Sinclair was tired of being patronized for her Scottish ways by the servants of the other royal children. Despite her pleas, she was forced to live and work alongside the staff whom Henry introduced to the roster of the household to attend to the needs of his own daughters.
Lady Fleming, in almost complete contrast, was secure. A fluent French speaker who had married a Scot, she was said to be ‘everything that could be desired’. Once more there was a hidden agenda. On the surface, it looked as if Mary could not dispense with her governess, whom it was not considered proper for the young Queen to share with the other children. Accordingly, Fleming was left in control of Mary’s female staff, despite the scope this created for disputes over expenditure with Humières and (later) d’Urfé.
But the truth was that the beautiful and voluptuous Fleming had become Henry II’s latest lover. The King even wrote to Mary’s mother to solicit favours for her. ‘I believe that you appreciate the care, trouble and great attention that my kinswoman the Lady Fleming shows from day to day about the person of our little daughter the Queen of Scots,’ he noted disingenuously. ‘I must continually remember her children and her family.’
One night the jealous Diane de Poitiers surprised the King as he left her rival’s embraces. She made a scene and accused Henry of dishonouring the Queen of Scots by carrying on his affair from within her own household. By creeping in and out of Mary’s apartments on his way to a rendezvous, Henry had brought the young Queen’s reputation into question.
Henry ignored Diane’s protests, but as ever she had the last word. In 1551, Lady Fleming became pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Henry of Angoulême, which was considered to be a fatal mistake. It brought the King’s affair out into the open, exciting ribald gossip. Diane acted promptly to protect the royal family’s good name, and the disgraced Fleming was immediately sent back to Scotland, leaving her daughter, the chief of the four Maries, behind.
So much was new and intoxicating, but Mary still missed her own mother very badly. In April 1550, after a separation of almost two years, she was overjoyed to hear that she was planning a visit to see her. Mary’s joy was tinged with sorrow, because her grandfather, Claude Duke of Guise, had recently died at Joinville, aged fifty-four, after an illness lasting two months. Mary’s first official letter was a formal diplomatic credence for the Sieur de Brézé, whom Henry II now wished to send to Scotland with this sad news.
Mary was judged to be too young to attend her grandfather’s funeral, and so was represented by a proxy. Her mother was also unable to attend, which caused her to weep. ‘I have lost the best father that any child lost,’ she told her brother Francis, who succeeded his father as Duke.
Mary of Guise decided to expedite her visit, and in selecting her travelling wardrobe she consulted Diane de Poitiers – always the arbiter of fashion rather than Catherine de Medici – about the protocol of mourning at St-Germain. Henry II took charge of her travel arrangements, obtaining a diplomatic passport from the English Privy Council since, unlike her daughter, Mary’s mother did not have a strong stomach and was easily prone to sea-sickness. She dreaded the prospect of the long sea crossing from Scotland and much preferred to take the slower route by land through England and from there sail the short distance across the Channel from the port of Dover.
Mary wrote animatedly to Antoinette of Bourbon about her mother’s plans. She simply had to write, she said, so that her grandmother could hear the ‘joyous news that I’ve just received from the Queen my mother’. In her haste to finish the letter, Mary lost her main verb in a cluster of subordinate clauses, but the sense is clear. Her mother’s arrival ‘will be to me the greatest happiness that I can desire in this world … I pray you, Madam, that to increase my joy, you may find it convenient to visit me soon, and in the meantime to arm yourself with all the patience you are able to muster in such a case.’ Mary had become fluent in French in under two years. Her style is breathless, but grammatically unblemished.
Her mother’s visit also had a political purpose. Henry II was planning a gala celebration of the final expulsion of the English armies from their forts and garrisons in Scotland and their fortifications at Boulogne. Henry’s whole court and extended family were to be present, and no expense was to be spared. Mary of Guise and her daughter, the Scottish Queen, would be at the heart of the fête.
Mary’s mother did not travel alone. She brought in her train almost the entire Scottish court, notably the pro-English Lords who had treated with Henry VIII and Somerset over the years. Her aims were clearly defined. She sought to promote her own claim to the sole regency of Scotland now that the other candidates, both pro-French and pro-English, had accepted the treaty of Haddington, and to bind the nobility to the ‘auld alliance’. Both goals were greatly assisted by Henry II’s lavish hospitality and his generous distribution of fresh pensions.
The main event took place at Rouen, the capital of Normandy, in October. An imitation of a Roman imperial triumph, the highlight was a royal entry into the city in front of cheering and enthusiastic crowds through specially constructed triumphal arches. This ritual, a classic expression of Renaissance symbolism but here implemented on a Homeric scale, was preceded by pageants in which soldiers and actors dressed as classical heroes or victorious generals marched past the King and court, with Mary happily reunited with her mother in the most honoured positions, as they watched from a blue and gold viewing pavilion on the west bank of the Seine.
The procession was led by a chariot laden with trophies, followed by tableaux staged on floats drawn by ‘unicorns’ – in fact they were white horses wearing head-dresses – illustrating the martial victories of the Valois dynasty. Banners and models of forts captured in Scotland or near Boulogne were vaunted aloft on poles. In one of these pageants, Henry II became Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who led his army across the Alps to defeat the Romans with the aid of elephants, which duly made their appearance before the crowds. Many people thought they were real animals from the royal menagerie in Paris, but they were actually made of wood and papier mâché, mounted on wheels and pushed along by men concealed inside.
Next came ‘prisoners’ captured at Boulogne, who were led through the streets in chains. Altogether the most richly ornate float was reserved for a tableau depicting Henry II and his children. The King was shown as a Roman emperor surrounded by his heirs, while Calliope, a daughter of Zeus and a Muse of the heroic age, held the ‘imperial’ crown of France above his head.
There followed fifty or so actors of both sexes made up as Brazilian ‘natives’, who paraded stark naked through the streets and then staged a ‘war’ between two indigenous tribes. The scene, set up as a tableau vivant before the viewing platform, was peppered with native huts, tents, palm trees, and wild animals. The tribes hunted, cooked on open fires, and traded with a French garrison. Finally, a great battle erupted, complete with bows and arrows, and ending with the burning to the ground of the huts of the defeated tribe. This was pure mass entertainment, upstaging the earlier tableaux, and the crowds roared with appreciation.
In a final spectacle, a mock sea-battle was staged on the Seine between rival ‘French’ and ‘Portuguese’ fleets in which real ships were packed with barrels of gunpowder. The sailors fired genuine cannon, most likely without shot. However, the inevitable happened and one of the barrels exploded, causing one ship to sink and its crew to lose their lives. Next day, the event was repeated with a substitute ship, but the same thing happened and more sailors were killed.
The fête was a dazzling visual manifesto. A central role was accorded to Scotland, which is why the Queen of Scots and her mother sat in glory. Henry II saw himself as the ‘protector’ of Scotland; his victories had liberated Scotland and Boulogne. The fête’s unifying theme was the Dauphin. He and not Henry II himself was the figure around whom the mise-en-scène was choreographed, because he was portrayed as the husband of the already crowned Queen of Scots. He was the future King of Scotland and France, and by virtue of Mary’s claim to the English throne as the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, could be the rightful King of England too. He was therefore heir to a triple monarchy. Through Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin, the Valois monarchy could realize its full potential, creating a Franco-British ‘empire’ that would subsume the British Isles and then cross the Atlantic to Brazil, where French merchants were already making inroads and starting to challenge Portugal’s commercial power.
Even Henry II’s choice of Normandy as the venue of his fête was significant. It was the closest province to England with the greatest historical connections to the British Isles. It also happened to be the region in which the Guise family was fast accumulating land and building retinues. Considered in this light, the ‘Franco-British’ project was simply the most audacious of their schemes. Claude Duke of Guise had begun to chart out a role for his family at the heart of the Valois state; now he was dead, his sons were the mainstay of the plan.
Mary was the cornerstone of the project. Henry II’s logic was dynastic. Henry VIII’s will had determined the order of succession to the English throne. If Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only surviving son, died without heirs, then the King’s will specified that the crown was to descend on the female side. Edward was to be succeeded by his elder sister Mary Tudor, and if she also died without children, by his younger sister Elizabeth Tudor.
But to the Catholics, Mary Queen of Scots was Mary Tudor’s rightful successor. To them, Elizabeth was illegitimate. She was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whom Henry VIII had married while his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was still alive. The Pope and the Catholic Church did not recognize Anne Boleyn as Henry’s lawful wife, nicknaming her ‘the concubine’. Henry had himself repudiated her, divorcing and then executing her in 1536, when Elizabeth was declared to be illegitimate by Act of Parliament in a clause that had never been repealed. This left the way wide open for the claim of Mary Queen of Scots, even though Henry VIII had tried expressly to block it.
Henry always held that through his will he could establish the order of the succession and eliminate the Stuart claim, and this he believed he had done. He had specified that, if all his children died without heirs, then the children of his younger sister, Mary Duchess of Suffolk, should inherit the throne. Henry was so angry with Scotland for the repudiation of the treaty of Greenwich, he vetoed the Stuart line. It was a calculated snub.
But Henry’s settlement, although approved by Parliament in the Third Act of Succession of 1544, was still based on a significant assumption. If a claim to the throne could pass by the female line, then the lineage of Margaret Tudor, Henry’s elder sister, also came into play. No one who followed the rules of dynastic succession could ignore Margaret’s first marriage to James IV of Scotland. Their son was James V, the father of Mary Queen of Scots, who was Margaret’s granddaughter and Henry VII’s great-granddaughter.
Mary’s claim to the English throne was no more than a speck on the horizon while Edward VI or Mary Tudor were still alive, because their legitimacy was never in question. But compared to Elizabeth Tudor’s claim, Mary’s was at least as strong, if not stronger. Only the Third Act of Succession was unqualified in its defence of Elizabeth’s claim, but Henry VIII had broken with the Pope a decade before it was passed, and the legislation of a schismatic Parliament was not recognized by Catholics, who still comprised the vast majority of the English population.
Following the triumph of the fête and the consolidation of the Guise family’s ambitions, Mary’s mother lingered in France for just over a year, returning with her daughter to Paris and St-Germain, Joinville, and Blois, and then taking her Scottish entourage on a tour of the country. Her tour was tantamount to a royal progress; her Scottish nobles must have been exhausted, but more importantly they were impressed. They were certainly a lot richer, because Henry II had never been more generous, disbursing five million livres tournois on his ‘Franco-British’ project between 1548 and 1551, five times more than Francis I spent on Scottish affairs during his entire reign.
The tour was interrupted by melodrama and ended tragically. In April 1551, a plot was uncovered at Amboise to murder the young Queen of Scots. One of the ex-‘Castilians’, captured by the French after the bombardment of St Andrews Castle, was determined to seek his revenge. He changed his name and joined the garde écossaise. He obtained access to the royal apartments, where he planned to assassinate Mary by suborning her cook to poison her favourite dessert: frittered pears. But somebody talked and the plot was discovered. The chief conspirator escaped, fleeing to Ireland and from there to Scotland, where he was captured and sent back to France for trial and execution. Mary was either unaware of or untroubled by what looks like a narrow escape, but her mother was so worried, she fell sick and took to her bed.
Her grief intensified in September, when the Duke of Longueville, her surviving son by her first marriage, fell victim to a mystery illness and died in her arms at Amiens. He was not quite sixteen. Once again, Mary was represented by a proxy at the funeral. Soon afterwards, Mary of Guise returned to England on her way back to Scotland. All four of her sons were dead and she was heartbroken. She considered staying permanently in France, retiring to a convent, or living with her family at Joinville. But she had committed herself to rule Scotland on behalf of her only remaining child, and to secure the country militarily and dynastically to Henry II and the French alliance. It was her duty to return there and therefore to leave her sole living child behind. She kissed Mary for what would be the last time, and said goodbye. They would never meet again.
By the end of 1551, Mary was growing up. She was still only nine years old, but her aunt, Anne d’Este, Duchess of Guise, herself one of the most cosmopolitan and trendsetting women at Henry II’s court, pointed out that ‘she can no longer be treated as a child’. She did not look like a child; her conversation was not that of a child. Every day ‘she grows in charm and good manners’ and ‘becomes more suited’ to the ‘place’ to which she was called and which she was never allowed to forget. Already she had a vast wardrobe stuffed with clothes of the finest and most opulent fabrics and a collection of jewellery so large it needed three brass coffers and several additional boxes to contain it.
Since her arrival in France, Mary had learnt a new language, a formal and sophisticated court etiquette, and new tastes. So far, her Guise family had succeeded in protecting her birthright. But in the process, its significance had been redefined. In particular, Mary’s future had acquired a compelling ‘Franco-British’ dimension. More than just the heir to the Stuart succession, she had become the key to the entire Valois dynastic enterprise. As the processions and tableaux passed before her eyes at Rouen, they must, in their glamour and pageantry, have reinforced one driving idea in her mind. As well as being Queen of Scotland and the next Queen of France, she must also aspire to be a future Queen of England.