"Mary, you have been chosen to accompany the Queen on her journey to France."

It was 1548, and I was five years old and about to leave Scotland, where I had been born and had lived up until that moment. Because my mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Queen, Marie de Guise, I had been chosen as a companion for her daughter. There were four of us altogether who had been selected to accompany the young Queen on her journey to France, where she would be brought up at the royal court and one day marry the Dauphin. The three other girls and I would be brought up in France too; we would be educated there and learn how to be good ladies-in-waiting. 

Although I was too young to understand much of what had happened in Scotland since the Queen's birth, I had hear...

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