164 SCOTLAND ILLUSTRATED. 



the banquets given in honour of his son, or in the sacred rite of baptism by 

 which they were to be followed. To aggravate his displeasure, — already great 

 by his previous dissensions with the queen's ministers, — Bedford and his suite, 

 it is said, had instructions to address him not as King, but as Henry Stuart, 

 the Queen of Scotland's husband ; for Elizabeth had not forgotten the 

 contempt which he had expressed for her authority at the time of his 

 marriage, and adopted the present as a fitting and conspicuous occasion to 

 show her resentment. But, in addition to these, other circumstances concurred 

 to throw gloom and disappointment over that hour which ought to have been 

 the happiest, and brightest, to a mother and a queen. The ceremony of 

 baptism was to be performed according to the ritual of the Catholic Church, 

 an announcement which alienated many of the principal nobility, who did not 

 venture to compromise their authority with the reformers by so public a 

 sanction of the opposite party. Denied the presence of her husband, and 

 unsupported by the nobility on whose loyalty she calculated, Mary was 

 doomed to encounter a trial of fortitude and forbearance to which, perhaps, 

 none of her sex and station was ever before subjected. Of the twelve earls 

 and numerous barons then present in the castle, only two of the former and 

 three of the latter had the resolution to appear in the chapel of a Catholic 

 sovereign. The clergy of the reformed church had denounced the ceremonial, and 

 entailed a severe penance upon those of their own congregations who, by their 

 presence, should countenance its celebration. During the ceremony, the Earl 

 of Bedford remained also at the door of the chapel ; and even the Countess of 

 Argyll, although a king's daughter, and the sister of their sovereign, had 

 afterwards to make spiritual compensation before the general assembly of the 

 church for the part she had undertaken at the desire of Queen Elizabeth. 

 The ceremony took place between five and six o'clock on the evening of the 

 19th of December, in presence of the Catholic nobility, and was performed by 

 the Archbishop of St. Andrews — afterwards so ignominiously put to death — 

 assisted by the Bishops of Dunkeld, Ross, and Dunblane. Mary gave her son the 

 name of Charles, in compliment to the French king, and that of James, because 

 her father, she said, and all the good kings of Scotland, his predecessors, had 

 borne that name. The compliment conveyed by Bedford was verified by the 

 experiment; and the gold font, it is said, was too small for an infant which, 

 the French ambassador Le Croc relates, made even his " gossips feel his weight," 

 as they carried him to the ceremony.* 



• Mary was very proutl of her son, and from his earliest infancy the establishment of his household was 

 on the most princely scale. The lady Mar was his governess ; Mistress Margaret Little, spouse of 



