Series 3 > Foreign correspondence with Marie de Lorraine, Queen of Scotland, from the originals in the Balcarres papers > Volume 7

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BALCARRES PAPERS
wife, until you have left this place ’—London, whence he
wrote. It surely did not occur to the writer that it was
only a month since the death of the Queen’s son.
Little attention seems to be paid to the affairs of Scot¬
land before 1551, for the battle of Pinkie, the siege of
Haddington, and the destruction done by the English troops
are scarcely mentioned. The arrival of D’Esse with troops
is chronicled, but the operations of his army and the French
galleys in and around the Firth of Forth, told by De Beaugue,
receive little notice, and, while the arrival of Paul de la
Barthe, Seigneur de Termes, to take over the command of
the French troops is noted, little is said of any subsequent
operations. Much news may have been taken by mes¬
sengers in Villegaignon’s fleet, which took Mary Stuart to
France, and some may have been carried on the four
galleys of Baccio Martelz, which returned to France in
1549, but of that there is no record, and the correspondence
has only rare mentions of the events of the war, and none
of the treaty which concluded the hostilities, until certain
letters of 1551 and 1552, which contain accounts of the
settlement of the difficulties on the frontier.
The galleys which were to convey Mary to France, and
commanded by Villegaignon, had brought D’Esse and his
army to the help of the Scots. A certain time elapsed
between the disembarkation at Leith on the 10th June
1548 and the arrival of the ships at Dumbarton, after a
voyage round the North of Scotland. De Breze,1 who
accompanied the young Queen to France, found time before
the sailing of the galleys to join in the attack on Hadding¬
ton, begun on the 30th June, a fortnight after the landing
of the French forces. He thanked Marie de Lorraine for
the loan of horses, and expressed his opinion of what was
to be a lengthy task : ‘ I consider the town easy to take.’
But of the subsequent operations there is little word.
1 Letter III.