Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/403

Mary of Guise in the church of the nunnery of St. Peter, of which her sister Renée was abbess (Diurnal, p. 282;, De Rebus Gestis Scot. p. 569; , vi. 398). Her monument, with a full-length figure of the queen in bronze, was destroyed at the revolution (, Histoire Généalogique de la Maison Royale de France, iii. 492).

Mary of Guise was ‘of the largest stature of women,’ and considered handsome in her youth (Hamilton Papers, i. 630). There are portraits of her at Hampton Court, and in the collections of the Earl of Elgin at Broomhall in Fife, the Duke of Devonshire at Hardwicke Hall, and Earl Beauchamp at Madresfield Court. Four other portraits are enumerated in Way's ‘Catalogue of the Meeting of the Archæological Institute at Edinburgh in 1856’ (pp. 162, 200). Granger mentions several engraved portraits (Biog. Hist. i. 84).

Mary had her full share of the Guise gifts. Friends and foes alike bear testimony to her ability and her force of mind and will. Knox's venomous language reflects the fear in which the protestants stood of her, and Throckmorton could not withhold his admiration of ‘her queenly mind, in that she mislikes all such compositions but such as shall render the realm of Scotland subject absolutely to the queen her daughter’ (, iii. 116). Committed to a French policy, with which, however, she may not have always agreed in every point, she sometimes showed real sympathy with her Scottish subjects.

The one relaxation from the cares of state which Mary seems to have allowed herself was to play ‘at the cartes,’ at which on one occasion she lost six thousand crowns to D'Essé, and then inducing him to risk it against her credit for a similar sum succeeded in winning it back (, ii. 65, 115, 210). She wrote French legibly, but spelt so badly that M. Teulet thought it necessary to translate her letters into modern French. She spoke Scots fluently but ungrammatically, using ‘me’ for ‘I.’

A little-known incident in her life is the government by France in her name of the principality of Orange for some years after the revolt there against William of Nassau (William the Silent) about 1548. Her cousin Anne, daughter of Antoine, duke of Lorraine, had been wife of the previous prince of Orange, René of Nassau (, Hist. Essays, iv. 92).  MARY (1496–1533), queen of Louis XII, king of France, third daughter of Henry VII by Elizabeth of York [q. v.], was born most probably in March 1496. A privy seal bill at Midsummer in that year authorises a payment of fifty shillings to her nurse, Anne Skeron, for a quarter's salary, and Erasmus describes her as four years old when he visited the royal nursery in the winter of 1499-1600 (Letter to Botzheim in Catalogue Erasmi Lucubrationum, Basle, 1523). Of the four daughters born to Henry V r II she and her elder sister Margaret, queen of Scots, alone grew to maturity, and after the death of Prince Arthur, when she was a child of five, she had but one brother, Henry, afterwards Henry VIII. At about six years of age she had a stall' of gentlewomen assigned to wait upon her, with a schoolmaster and a physician. She was carefully taught French and Latin, music, dancing, and embroidery. At seven she lost her mother, and from the frequent payments to her apothecary between 1504 and 1509 she appears to have been a delicate child.

In 1505, when she was nine years old, her father seems to have spread a report that she was sought in marriage by Emmanuel, king of Portugal, for his son, but this must have been mere diplomacy. At the reception given to Philip, King of Castile, at Windsor, in 1506, she danced and played the lute and clavicord. Next year, when Philip was dead, a match was proposed between her and his son Charles, prince of Castile (afterwards the Emperor Charles V), grandson of the Emperor Maximilian. Another match, proposed at the same time, was between Henry VII and Margaret of Savoy, regent of the Netherlands, Maximi- 