Mary was fifteen and Francis fourteen when they were married with spectacular pageantry and magnificence in the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, by the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, in the presence of Henry II, Queen Catherine de’ Medici, the princes and princesses of the blood and a glittering throng of cardinals and nobles. There were also secret agreements, which the youthful and inexperienced Mary signed, that would have made Scotland a mere adjunct of France. A marriage treaty was signed with the Scots, which provided that Scotland and France should eventually be united under Mary and Francis as one kingdom. She grew up delightfully charming, graceful and attractive, the French fell in love with her and Henry II of France resolved to marry her to his son and heir, the sickly dauphin Francis. French became her first language, she always called herself Marie Stuart and she loved dancing and hunting. It was not a prospect Mary of Guise could tolerate and in 1548 the five-year-old Mary was sent to her grandmother Antoinette of Guise in France, where her Scottish entourage was considered appallingly barbarous and swiftly got rid of, and she was brought up as a Catholic Frenchwoman.
A Roman Catholic and regent from 1554, she had to contend with both the rising tide of Protestantism in Scotland and the machinations of the English who had tried to force a marriage between the baby queen and Edward Tudor, the young heir to the English throne. Crowned at nine months, she was in the charge first of the Earl of Arran and then of her redoubtable mother, Mary of Guise, who was from one of the most powerful aristocratic families in France. Mary became Queen of Scots when she was less than a week old, on the death of her father, James in December 1542.
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