Misfortunes, it is said, never come singly. Whilst Mary was performing the part of an affectionate nurse to her husband, she sustained an irretrievable loss in the death of her mother, the Scottish Regent, in June 1560; and in the December following, her husband, Francis, died at Orleans, in the 17th year of his age, and the 17th month of his reign.[25] Feeling that his exhausted constitution was sinking rapidly, and that his death was at hand, almost the last words he spoke were to testify his affection for Mary, and his sense of her virtues. He earnestly beseeched his mother to treat her as her own daughter, and his brother to look upon her as a sister. He was a prince, says Conæus, in whom, had he lived, more merit would probably have been discovered than most people suspected.[26] The whole face of things in France was by this event instantly changed again. Francis the Little, as he was contemptuously termed by the French, in opposition to his father Francis the Great, was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles IX. He being still a minor, his mother, Catharine, contrived to get herself appointed his guardian, and thus became once more Queen of France, the nobility, as Chalmers remarks, being more inclined to relish a _real_ minority, than an imaginary _majority_. Catharine's jealousy of Mary Stuart, of course extended itself, with greater justice, to her uncles of Guise. It was now their turn to make way for Montmorency; and the Cardinal of Lorraine, one of the most intriguing statesmen of the age, retired, in no very charitable mood of mind, to his archbishopric at Rheims, where, in a fit of spleen, he declared he would devote himself entirely to religion.
There is something exceedingly naïve and amusing in Sir James Melville's account of this "gret changement." "The Queen-mother," says he, "was blyth of the death of King Francis, her son, because she had na guiding of him, but only the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal, his brother, by raisoun that the Queen, our maistress, was their sister's dochter. Sa, the Queen-mother was content to be quit of the government of the house of Guise; and for their cause (sake) she had a great mislyking of our Queen." Of Montmorency, who, as soon as he heard of the illness of Francis, commenced his journey towards the Court, he says,--"The Constable, also chargit to come to the court, looked for na less, and seamed to be seak, making little journees, caried in a horse-litter, drew time sae lang by the way, that the King, in the meantime, died. Then he lap on horsbak and cam freely to the Court and commandit, like a Constable, the men of war that gardit the Croun, by the Duke of Guise commandement, to pack them aff the toune. The Queen-mother was also very glaid of his coming, that by his autority and frendship with the King of Navarre, she mycht the better dryve the house of Guise to the door." Of Mary, who, it may well be supposed, felt this change more than any one, Melville says,--"Our Queen also, seeing her friends in disgrace, and knawing hirself no to be weil liked, left the Court, and was a sorrowful widow when I took my leave at hir, in a gentilman's house, four myle fra Orleans." To this "gentilman's house," or chateau, in the neighbourhood of Orleans, Mary had retired to shed in private those tears, which the death of her husband called forth. In losing Francis, she had lost the playmate of her childhood, the husband of her youth, and what, by many women, would be considered as serious a loss as either, the rank and title of Queen of France. It was here, probably, that she composed those verses to the memory of her deceased husband, which her biographers have so frequently copied, and which are so full of gentle and unaffected feeling.