Mary Queen of Scots; Her Life Story (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LIFE IN FRANCE Welcome, sweet Maudlin, from the sea, Where bitter storms and tempests do arise. The Merchants Daughter of Bristowe. It might have seemed needful, as a matter of courtesy, that Henri II. should have met his prospective daughter-in-law soon after she landed in his realm to conduct her in triumph to Paris; but affairs of State, hindered him, and Mary was conducted from Roscoff to Morlaix, the nearest town of importance, where she took up her temporary abode. Her position at this time might well have awakened sympathy. She was barely six years old. Bereft of her father's protecting care almost at her birth, and estranged by fate from the mother to whom she had clung in infancy, she was now in a manner expatriated, and thrust forth in a clandestine fashion from the land over which it was her right to rule, and was on her way to link her life with one whom she had never seen, and of whom the most meagre accounts had reached her. If the evidence of those who saw her at this time be credible she must have exercised, even at this early period, that personal magnetism which brought friends to her even in her direst straits. Her free and affable manner, inherited from her father and developed by her mother, when combined with the grace of her person and the elegance of her attire, might well charm every beholder. "The young Queen," wrote one who saw her, " was at that time one of the most perfect creatures that the God of Nature ever formed, for that her equal was nowhere to be found, nor had the world another child of her fortune and hope." And as she trod the rudely-paved streets of Morlaix the people might well throng to gaze upon this wondrous child, who had come from her northern kingdom to wed the heir-apparent of the French throne. The n...