From a Guise family perspective, these may have been the correct initial steps to claiming what they believed to be their rightful patrimony, but their behavior toward Mary was cynical. They treated her like a puppet and made important decisions behind her back. As to Francis, they encouraged him to play the man by going hunting. Not a single major initiative can be traced back to Mary or her husband while they were king and queen. The result was that their reign, an interlude of no more than five hundred days, turned into a Greek tragedy in which the main events were played out offstage by
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