with that power except with the consent of France. The alliance was but further confirmed by the disasters of Crécy and Poitiers, and the captivity of the two kings of France and Scotland, John the Good and David Bruce. Charles V. (of France) turned the alliance to good account. In 1371, at the accession of the Stuarts to the throne of Scotland, he signed a treaty with Robert, the first monarch of that dynasty. He knew, says old Froissart, "that the whole realm of Scotland mortally hated the English; for never could these two kingdoms love one another"-and Yvain de Galles had taught him, as the same chronicler reports, that of all countries in the world Scotland afforded the best means of doing England a mischief. Accordingly, Charles V. lost no opportunity of cultivating a good feeling with the Scotch. The disastrous reigns of Charles VI. and Charles VII. sorely tried the alliance; but it survived the trial. The Scotch had their share in the French reverses at Verneuil and Rouvray. In vain did the English, in order to break up the alliance, impose on their royal prisoner, James I., as the chief condition of being set at liberty, a promise to put an end to all relations with France. So great was his country's sympathy with France, so great the community of interest of the two kingdoms, that James was not slow to rid himself of this "burden too heavy to bear." In 1428 he concluded a new treaty with Charles VII., which stipulated the marriage of the dauphin Louis, then an infant in his cradle-for even that wizened tyrant, that holloweyed iniquity, the Louis of Plessis-les-Tours, was a cradled innocent once -with a daughter of James I., namely, the spirituelle Margaret, so well known for her enthusiasm for the poet Alain Chartier. The War of the Roses, which, during the latter half of the fifteenth century, divided England against herself, and annulled her influence abroad, diminished the importance of the Scotch alliance, so far as France was concerned. Charles VIII. and Louis XII., taken up with their Italian expeditions, were comparatively careless of the union their predecessors had been scrupulous to maintain. England took advantage of this, to negotiate a marriage between James IV. and a daughter of Henry VII. (1500)—a marriage which was one day to put the Stuarts in possession of the English throne. More than a century elapsed, however, before James VI. succeeded Elizabeth; and during this interval an unceasing struggle went on in France, not unfrequently with success, against English influence beyond the Tweed. Thus, in 1513, the misfortunes of Louis XII. excited the sympathy of the Scotch for their ancient allies; and James IV., touched by the confidence of Anne of Brittany, who had sent him her ring, declared war against England, and laid waste its northern frontiers. The rash though brilliant valour of the Scotch king cost him his life on Flodden field. The English party then prevailed in the north. The young king James V. was a minor, and the regency was conferred on his mother, Margaret of England, sister of Henry VIII. But the majority of Scotch lords preferred the "old and loyal" alliance with France to a new and suspected friendship; nor was a woman's hand strong enough to curb the violent passions of the native nobility. Francis I. profited by the good will of the philo-French agitators, and sent over to Scotland an uncle of James V., John Duke of Albany, who had been brought up in France, and was wholly devoted to the interests of that country. The Duke of Albany took away the regency from Margaret of England, and after establishing order in Scotland, returned to France, to confirm the alliance between the two realms by a solemn treaty. The conferences took place at Rouen between Albany and Charles Duke of Alençon, as plenipotentiary of Francis I., and ended in the treaty of Rouen, which was signed August 17, 1517-a treaty often appealed to by subsequent negotiators, and which M. Chéruel publishes for the first time. Useful and disinterested as was the aid furnished by the Scotch to Francis I., that monarch seemed to forget his allies in the treaty of London signed by him in 1526, with Henry VIII. The latter was checked, however, in his designs against Scotland in subsequent years, by the intervention of France; and French influence was by this means fortified anew in the north. In 1534, when the marriage of James V. was under consideration, it was in vain that Charles V. and Henry VIII. endeavoured to win over the Scottish prince by getting him to wed a Spanish or English princess; he preferred a French one. He "demanded" the second daughter of Francis I., and after some difficulties arising from the state of her health, the demand was granted, and James came to France to be married to her, in 1537. Her premature death was not prejudicial to the alliance. She was replaced anon by another Frenchwoman, Mary of Guise, who, towards the close of the year 1542, gave birth to Mary Stuart. Six days later occurred the death of James V.-a victim rather to chagrin than mortal sickness. The continual revolts "fomented," says M. Chéruel, by Henry VIII., the English invasion of Scotland, and the ravages wrought thereby, had crushed his spirit and hastened his death. The French alliance had indeed prevailed during his reign, but the English party had become an organised body, of formidable powers, and was now about to increase its strength, thanks to a long minority and the turmoil of religious feuds. The marriage of Mary Stuart with Prince Edward of England was a main object in the tactics of the anti-French minority, who made a dead set against the Queen Mother and Cardinal Beatoun. The majority were indignant at the thought of handing over their young queen to their ancient and implacable foes, the detested "Southrons." The troubles of the land were enlarged: who should bring her out of her distresses? Religious discords worse confounded the confusion. Mary of Guise and Beatoun damaged their cause by blindly identifying the French alliance with Catholic ascendancy in Scotland. In 1546 the cardinal was assassinated, and with him perished one of the principal supports of the alliance, though its partisans still continued far more numerous than the Anglicising opposition; and once again, when propositions of marriage between Edward and la jeune Marie were renewed by the Protector Somerset, after the death of both Henry VIII. and Francis I., they were rejected by the nation. The English then (1548) tried the effect of yet another invasion, the only result of which was, to draw closer the bond of union between Scotland and France. The Scottish "estates" assembled at Stirling, made an offer to Henry II. of the protectorate of their realm, and of the hand of their young queen for the dauphin Francis. Henry eagerly accepted a proposition which gave fresh authority to French influence in Scotland; his ships conveyed Mary Stuart to France (15 August, 1550), and in the following year he caused Scotland to be included in the treaty of peace arranged between his own country and England. Accordingly, Mary Stuart was educated in France, and in due time married to the French heir-apparent. George Buchanan as well as Ronsard, canny Scot as well as courtly Gaul, celebrated in classic numbers the "auspicious event." But the demands made by Henry II., that his son Francis should be acknowledged by Mary's subjects as king of France, and the consent he won from Mary herself, to transfer all her rights over Scotland and England to the House of Valois, in case she died without heirs, were irritating to most Scotchmen, intolerable to many. John Knox was up and doing. The accession of Elizabeth was not favourable to the Guise party. War broke out, and ended in a treaty by which England was the real gainer, for by the terms of it France was deprived of the protectorate she had exercised over Scotland from time immemorial. This treaty of Edinburgh (5 July, 1560) is regarded by M. Chéruel as "le premier signe du déclin de l'influence française en Écosse." On the plea that the king, Francis II., had not ratified the treaty, France refused, dans la suite, to carry it out, and to submit to the passive part it imposed on her. Such was the state of international relations between the three kingdoms, when Mary Stuart was forced to quit her adopted for her native country. The hardest heart softens somewhat towards her, remembering what she was in those bygone days, A widow, yet a child, Within the fields of sunny France, All that is beautiful and bright That young and spotless Queen!* In M. Chéruel's words, "Marie Stuart, souveraine de deux royaumes, et aspirant au trône d'Angleterre, avait brillé quelque temps, à la cour de France, du triple éclat de l'esprit, de la beauté et de la puissance.' But the death of Francis II. completely reversed her fortunes. She had mortified the pride of Catherine de Medicis, whom she described, and treated, as a mere fille de marchand, and who never forgave, never forgot the insult. The Guises were bent on marrying their niece to Don Carlos, son of Philip II. of Spain, and thus to secure for their faction the support of the leading power in Europe. The plan was agreeable to Philip's "implacable et minutieuse" diplomacy. He already had at his command the Guise party in France, and the still numerous Catholic party in England; nor had Sweden and Poland escaped his influence. The marriage of Mary Stuart and Don Carlos would have linked Scotland to his ranks, Aytoun's "Bothwell." VOL. XLIV. E and was too important a scheme not to be pushed with some eagerness by those mainly concerned. But it was a scheme against which Catherine de Medicis set her face, which she confronted with every frown in her forehead of brass. The carrying out of that scheme would augment the power of Philip II., and would strengthen the hands of the Lorraine princes; neither of which results could Catherine bear to think of. The nuptial negotiations were going on in January, 1561; and on the 1st of April she wrote to the Bishop of Limoges, her ambassador in Spain, desiring him to put a spoke in the wheel of the wedding-carriage, and intimating her entire resolve to do all and dare all rather than let the wedding come off. Her letter betrays the antipathy she cherished against Mary Stuart and the house of Guise. In vain the Cardinal de Lorraine pretended to confine himself to the exercise of his religious duties, and to devote his entire existence to the office of preaching. Catherine had quite a different opinion of this prelate from that held by his confiding panegyrists, ancient and modern. She knew that his religious duties were not so all-absorbing as to prevent his endeavours to bring about the Spanish marriage. She omitted nothing that might spoil his endeavours; she left no stone unturned that might be a stone of stumbling in his way. She demanded an interview with Philip II. She proposed a marriage between Margaret of Valois and Don Carlos. She plied her other daughter, the Queen of Spain, with urgent solicitations. Another long letter to the Bishop of Limoges, dated three weeks later, which M. Chéruel quotes at length, affords curious evidence of Catherine's habit of using her daughters as the agents of her politique, and illustrates that intriguing spirit of hers, which assumed every disguise in turn, and addressed itself successively if not simultaneously to interest, and religion, and sensibility of heart-in short, the epistle shows, in a highly characteristic way, how prolific and versatile were her diplomatic resources, Though the interview she solicited did not "come off" at present, neither did the marriage scheme it was intended to frustrate. That obnoxious scheme was, if not abandoned, at least adjourned sine die. Philip saw that the advantages it might afford would hardly compensate him for a formidable war with France and England together. For Elizabeth sided with Catherine in opposition to a scheme by which she, as Queen of England, was likely to suffer more directly than the dowager of France. Bess bridled up, in her best Tudor style, and sent word to Mary Stuart, that if the Guise family persisted in this project of alliance with Don Carlos, she would take part with the King of Navarre and the French Protestants to mar their match-making. A note-worthy picture they form, these three royal dames, "les souverains qui dominent l'Europe," at cross purposes together. The three queens are rivals in power, and opposites in character. Catherine is depicted by our author as a woman bred in the refinements of Italian statecraft, indifferent to the distinctions between good and evil, destitute of religious principle, and inspired by the genius of intrigue alone. Elizabeth, as a woman of energetic will, consummate prudence, and a high ambition too often sullied by acts of perfidy and cruelty-not without the foibles of her sex, but careful not to let those foibles prove a detriment to her authority as queen. Mary, on the other hand, "was carried away by the violence of her passions; it is not with the features of a resigned victim that her contemporaries portray her, but as an ardent, haughty woman, with the true Guise blood in her veins." Catherine duped one party after another, and was hated and contemned by them all; she left the crown without support, and France without allies. Elizabeth, adored by the Protestants, enlisted in dependence on her own fortunes the reformed populations of England, of Scotland, of the Scandinavian states, of Germany, and of Switzerland. Mary, urged on by the League and by Spain, exchanged the throne for the scaffold. To the first belongs the shame of France's degradation, and of crimes dictated by ambition and executed by fanaticism; to the second, the glory of the Protestant coalition, of Spain's defeat, and of creating a marine force that ere long should rule the waves; to the last, "the martyr's crown.' It was on the renewal of negotiations for a match between Mary and Don Carlos-still (in 1563) the darling project of the Guises-that Catherine sent Michel de Castelnau to Scotland, to oppose any such arrangement. Michel is one of the most prominent diplomatists of the age. Nearly all the negotiations between France and Scotland passed through his hands. He was now in the prime of life. He had served with the army in Italy, and then taken to the profession adorned by a Jean de Montluc, a Paul de Foix, and a La Mothe-Fénelon. When the wars of religion broke out, he took his place by the side of the throne, and soon displayed a surprising activity as military man and statesman both, not, however, without deeply lamenting the miseries of civil discord-agriculture neglected, commerce ruined, religion disgraced, the sepulchres of the kings violated, and what it had taken seven hundred years to build up, destroyed in a single day. His heart bled as he looked on the foreigners summoned by either party into his native land. Great was his relief when peace was restored in 1563. His vivacity, his accomplishments, and his extraordinary powers of memory, made him a brilliant name at court. Ronsard addressed a sonnet to him, and he was called upon to figure prominently in the royal theatricals. He was sent across the Channel with a double project of marriage-to England, with a proposal to couple Elizabeth with Charles IX., and to Scotland, with an offer of the Duke of Anjou for Mary Stuart. Elizabeth was civil to the messenger, but elusory as to the message. Mary was chagrined at the Medicean opposition to her match with Don Carlos. If she could not have him, at any rate she would not have Catherine's nominee. Her heart was now set on Henry Darnley, and vain were Michel's objections to that handsome fribble, especially as the King of Spain, disappointed in his family arrangements, encouraged Mary's new passion. The nuptials took place. Elizabeth feigned extreme wrath when the news came. The nobility in Scotland were disaffected. Civil war broke out, and the conspirators whom Mary drove from the north found an asylum in the south. Catherine interposed as mediatrix between the two queens, and again employed Castelnau as her agent. He had a hard time of it, and, as far as Scotland was concerned, was sent empty away. Soon afterwards occurred the Rizzio affair, and it was by the intervention of France, and the mission for the third time of Michel de Castelnau, that Mary and her unruly seigneurs were reconciled for a while. "He returned to • Chéruel, pp. 17-28, passim. |
