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The Saga of Mary Queen of Scots, Part II

© Ellen McDaniel-Weissler

Not a long voyage, surely, but a hazardous one. The young Scottish queen met storm at sea with apparent courage, and suffered neither from sea-sickness nor from boredom, though her attendants fell ill and moaned inconsolably in their bunks. But she, child of six, separated from her mother, facing an unknown future in the kingdom of her mother's birth, took each day as it came, made game of it, and anticipated the great day of landing when she would be made known to the royalty of France as the darling of the French court.

To the tiny fishing village of Roscoff, near Brest, history awards the honor of Mary's first steps on French soil. (It is ironic that two hundred years later Mary's descendant, the tragic Bonnie Prince Charlie, would find his refuge on the French coast at the same welcoming gates - this time as a broken refugee from his epic defeat at Culloden. And thus would die the hopes of restoring to the Scottish throne the great house of Stuart.)

As the intended bride of the young Dauphin, a reigning queen in her own right, and the future queen of France, Mary positively glowed with royal favor, grace and the aura which surrounds royalty in the minds of less exalted persons. But it was not only the common peoples who were charmed. Her incipient father-in-law, Henry II, by the Grace of God King of France, declared that "the little Queen of Scots is the most perfect child that I have ever seen!" This opinion, so it appeared, was shared by all who knew her - except, evidently, for that notoriously jealous and spiteful woman, Catherine de Medicis, Mary's soon-to-be mother-in-law, wife of Henry II and mother of Mary's betrothed, Francis.

The romantic French took her to their hearts, this little sprig of heather plucked from the wild Scottish countryside to be set down safely in their caressing hands. She was courted, praised, lauded and extolled from her first moments in the French court. King Henry decreed that, as the intended of his heir and a reigning queen of an independent country, Mary should take precedence in the kingdom even over his own daughters.

Once a sickly child, lamented by Scots as the root of their problems in the world, hunted by the English and shunted from castle to drafty castle, wielded as a pawn in Europe's eternal dynastic struggles and making a catch-as-catch-can childhood for herself between flights, Mary was now cosseted, lavished with money, jewels, toys, and attention - till it must have seemed almost a Cinderella story, though the young heroine began her life almost from day one not as a peasant, but as a queen.

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