Understand me: I do not have time with things that have no soul.
Buying the allegiance of a secret army behind the king’s back is not loyalty. It’s treachery.
“Your Majesty, it’s customary for the Queen of France to ride in the first carriage.”
“I am no longer the Queen of France.”
Since Mary, Queen of Scotland, was a child, the English have wanted her country and her crown. She is sent to France to wed its next king, to save herself and her people, a bond that should protect her. But there are forces that conspire, forces of darkness, forces of the heart. Long may she reign.
one gifset per episode - No Exit (1.18)
♥ If Scotland falls, I will never forgive you! You will lose my country, and you will lose me! I warned you, Francis we are one and the same.
I can’t help thinking that every man, even a king, should have some kind of skill. One that I didn’t inherit, wasn’t given to me and can’t be taken away.
[Francis] alternated between fevers and violent crises, followed by bouts of speechlessness. In addition to the natural sufferings of his condition, he also endured purgations and bleedings. On 28th November, a massive dose of rhubarb brought him some relief, but two days later the headaches and sickness redoubled. The watch in his bedroom was maintained ceaselessly by Mary and Catherine, whose joint role in his agony was to act endlessly as nurse and comforters. On 3rd December, it was reported to Venice by their ambassador that Queen Mary, Queen Catherine and the king’s brothers were taking part in processions to the churches of Orléans, to solicit divine aid for the king’s health. Otherwise Mary spend the last weeks of her husband’s life in patient, silent nursing in his darkened chamber…Neither Mary’s patient nursing, nor that of Catherine, nor the rages of the Guises, nor their manifold remedies, affected in any way the ineluctable process of the king’s illness. The inflammation was now spreading upwards into the lobe of the brain, above the middle ear: on Monday 2nd December, the was an apparent improvement in his condition due to the temporary release of tension when the tumour was pierced. But the inflammation, having now reached the brain, formed an abcess within it. With the formation of the abcess, nothing could save the French king from death. By the evening of 3rd December, Francis was in extremis. On Thursday 5th December, he fell into a swoon. At some point in his agonies, he is said to have murmured a prayer taught to him by the cardinal: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my ministers have committed in my name and in my authority.’ But on the Thursday, at a time variously report to be five, eleven or ten by La Planche, Throckmorton and Chantonay, the king’s ordeal was at an end. A month off his seventeenth birthday, Francis II was dead.[…]Mary abandoned herself to passionate grief at the death of the king, a grief founded on deep affection which she had felt for him, rather than the possible upset of her political plans. She had lost the companion of her childhood, the boy-husband who had loved her, and who had shared with her the happy intimacies of their charmed upbringing at the French court. Elisabeth had departed for Spain, Claude for Lorraine. Alone of her close royal companions of her youth, Francis had remained part of her life, and to their childhood intimacy had been added the natural intimacy of husband and wife. Since the first moment of their meeting at St Germain in October 1548, when the five-year-old Scottish Queen had been solemnly presented to the four-year-old Dauphin of France, and King Henry II had rejoiced over the immediate love which the children felt for each other, Mary and Francis had never been apart for longer than a few months at a time. They had thus been united by over twelve years of continuous friendship and companionship, and all that happy childhood memories can signify in the mind of a romantic and affectionate young girl.The sincerity of her feelings was not doubted at the time. Throckmorton commented that Francis had left ‘as heavy and dolorous a wife as of right she had good cause to be, who, by long watching during his sickness, and painful diligence about him’ had worn herself out and made herself ill. The stanzas which Mary wrote on the death of Francis, which struck a chord in the heard of Ronsard, bear witness to the eloquent simplicity of her grief for the lost love of her childhood.“Wherever I may be
In the woods or in the fields
Whatever the hour of day
Be it dawn or the eventide
My heart still feels it yet
The eternal regret…
As I sink into my sleep
The abset one is near
Alone upon my couch
I feel his beloved touch
In work or in repose
We are forever close…”Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots
As he drew near to the close of his life, he was more and more deeply impressed with a sense of Mary’s kindness and love. He mourned very much his approaching separation from her. He sent for his mother, Queen Catherine, to come to his bedside, and begged that she would treat Mary kindly, for his sake, after he was gone.Mary mourned her husband’s death with deep and unaffected grief. She invented a device and motto for a seal, appropriate to the occasion: it was a figure of the liquorice-tree, every part of which is useless except the root, which, of course, lies beneath the surface of the earth. Underneath was the inscription, in Latin, Dulce meum terra tegit, which translates into “The earth covers my sweet one” or “The earth hides my treasure”.Jacob Abbott, Mary Queen of Scotland (Makers of History #2)