by G Lawrence
France had long desired to take its neighbour, Brittany, as part of its territories, and with the sudden death of Francois II, Duke of Brittany, his daughter, Anne, became the sole heiress to that state. At the age of just eleven years old, Anne showed courage beyond her age, and sought to marry Margaret’s own father, the widower Emperor Maximilian, as a way to ally herself with another neighbour, and protect her country from the French. Anne and the Emperor were married by proxy to unite their countries, but it was not a match to be consummated either, due to the youthful age of the bride.
Once Charles had broken his promise to Margaret, he waged war against Anne and her country. French troops invaded Brittany, taking the little Anne a prisoner and forcing her to repudiate her unconsummated union with the Emperor and marry Charles instead. It was a great scandal. There was even an investigation by the Pope to determine whether or not Charles had forced himself upon Anne to compel her into marriage. Anne capitulated to the demands of her new husband, seeing no other way to escape, and became his wife. Margaret, still a prisoner at the French Court, begged to be released, saying that she would even flee Paris in her nightgown if it would ensure her liberty from this place of her humiliation and disgrace. Eventually, Margaret was set free, at the age of just fourteen, she rode home to Mechelen.
Although I could not help thinking that Margaret had had a lucky escape from marriage such a brutal animal, I knew that she harboured deep feelings of bitterness towards the French because of this past rejection and shame. She would purse her lips slightly whenever France was spoken of, and her hard policies towards them throughout her later reign spoke of the hurt and humiliation she had felt as a girl of fourteen, riding slowly out of the land that she had grown up in and that she had thought she would eventually rule at the side of the King. Perhaps that was why her court sought to shine so brightly and why she was so proud that other courts sought to emulate hers; every word of praise that her court received was another loss that the French Court could have had, but rejected.
Charles did not last long on his throne; he died soon after becoming King of France. If she had married this man, she would not have been Queen for long. But even so, I burned with anger to hear her sad tale. How could anyone treat the wonderful Margaret so badly? At night, in my dreams, I sought to avenge her wrongs by the sword, but in the day I would say nothing about this sad tale. I would never do anything that would hurt this great lady.
Poor Margaret had seemed doomed in marriage. After being rejected by Charles of France, she had been married to Juan, Prince of Asturias and Infante of Spain, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. It was at this time too that the match between Margaret’s brother, Phillip the Fair, and Joanna of Castille was arranged; as the ships came to leave the Spanish Princess with Phillip, so they turned around and took Margaret to Spain. On the voyage there, the storms of the sea were so dangerous that Margaret and her maids wrote their own epitaphs. Margaret’s, writ by her own hand, was:
“Cy gist Margot la gentil’ Damoiselle,
Qu’ ha deux marys et encore est pucelle”
Or
“Here lies the gentle lady Margaret,
Who had two husbands and yet remained a virgin”
She landed at Santander, and Juan rode out to meet her. All who had seen the young couple agreed that they had never seen two people more in love. But it was not to last. After only six months of marriage, Juan fell ill. His illness was kept from Margaret by King Ferdinand, as Margaret was pregnant, and it was thought that this news might endanger her child. But as Juan grew worse, Margaret had to be told. They brought her to his chambers where he entreated her to love and care for their unborn child. Margaret was suffused by grief, crying at his side. When she lifted her head and put her lips to his, she found that they were already cold, and had to be carried from the room, screaming for sorrow at the death of her beloved young husband. She lost her child less than a month later. Now, the heir to the throne of Spain was dead, as was his unborn child.
The strange-minded and slippery Ferdinand sent word to his wife Isabella, telling her that he had died rather than their son, believing that to find her husband still alive after such awful news might mitigate the pain she felt in losing her only son. Ferdinand was much given to ideas of this sort. At first, the eldest sister of Juan was made heir to Spain, but when she and her infant son died, so Joanna of Castile and her husband Phillip the Fair, became heirs to the throne of Spain and the Empire of the Hapsburgs.
Margaret stayed for some time in Spain after the death of her child. The people loved her and she was popular at court, even teaching French to the young Princess Katherine of Aragon, for the time when she would be sent to England to marry Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII. Margaret returned home when she was twenty years old, and spent two years at her father’s court in the Low Countries before accepting another union of marriage. Despite offers from Poland, Scotland and even an enquiry from Henry VII of England on behalf of his son Arthur, who was supposed to be engaged to Margaret’s sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, Margaret chose to marry Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, who was known as “The Handsome”. They were married in the same year that I was born. He was tall, strong and exceptionally good-looking. Margaret’s grandmother, the English Princess, Margaret of York, accompanied her to Geneva where Margaret’s new husband met them and gave Margaret a heart made of diamonds and surmounted by five giant pearls; an ornament she would keep with her for the rest of her life.
But again, God seemed to have reserved only sorrow for sweet Margaret. After three years of marriage, Philibert was one day hunting boar with his men. He arrived at the fountain of Saint Vulbas in a fine mood, and ordered a feast to be served on the floor of the forest. Soon after eating, he fell into a sudden chill and then a fever, with great pains in his side. He was taken to Pont d’Ain, to their castle where Margaret tended him, even giving pearls from her personal jewellery to be ground into dust to make elixirs which the physicians thought might save him, but to no avail. He died one morning in September in 1504, he was but twenty-four years old. The sounds of Margaret’s sorrow could be heard echoing throughout the castle from the forest outside.
Margaret was sought as a bride many times after that. She was only about twenty-six when Philibert died, and was still a young and desirable woman, with a fabulous dowry. But she wanted no more matches which would steal her heart or her dignity only to grant her sorrow. When she left France she carried a device of a mountain with a hurricane about its summit, with the motto “Perflant altissima venti” meaning “the winds blow and change” which spoke of her treatment at the French court. When she lost Juan, her device changed to a tree laden with fruit, struck in half by lightening, and the motto “Spoliat mors munera nostra” or “death takes our gifts”. When Philibert died, she took on a new motto, which she kept until the end of her life, and was reproduced all over her palaces. It read: “Fortunate, Infortunate, Forte, Une” strictly translated, this meant “Fortune, Unfortunate, Strength, One” which made little sense, but it was understood that Margaret held the meaning of her obscure motto within herself. Some said that she meant that she was a plaything of Fate, or that she was unfortunate in Fate, but I believed that she meant it to be a message of the changing nature of the world. That one might be fortunate or unfortunate by turn as Fortune’s wheel rotated, but what we needed to face either fate, was the strength within ourselves. That was what I believed the “Forte” and the “Une” meant.
It seemed for a while that Margaret might spend the rest of her days in the lands of Philibert, hiding from the world, but in 1506, Margaret’s brother, Phillip, died. He had been King of Spain for just two months, and was only twenty-eight years old. The heir to the Hapsburg Empire and Spain, Charles, was but six years old, and with concerns rising about the sanity of his mother, Joanna, Margaret’s father, Maximilian appointed Margaret guardian of her nephew and nieces, and eventually made her regent for the young Charles. Margaret was brough
t back from Savoy and took on her new role as the guardian and guide of her young wards. She had missed out on being a queen twice, and had never held a child of her own, but now she had a nursery full of children. She took to her new role with a renewed happiness in a life which had dealt her so much sorrow. Margaret was twenty-seven when she became the governess of Austria, and from that time she refused any further offers for her hand, even from the most persistent candidate, Henry VII. When his wife died, Henry VII apparently tried for many years to get the beautiful Margaret to marry him, but she always refused, accepting instead a match between Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and her nephew Charles, an engagement which greatly terrified their French neighbours, perhaps to the satisfaction of Margaret.
And so she continued within her palace at Mechelen; this young widow of such sorrow and loss who had faced all that life had given her and taken away, and yet still remained a gracious and sweet lady. You might think that after so much loss in her young life, that Margaret would not be a bitter woman, marked and bowed by the ravages of grief. But she was not. All her sorrows had delivered her but to another position in life, she said, and they had brought her to become the guardian of her nephew and nieces, whom she loved above all things. She could not be a mother to children of her own, but she became a mother to her brother’s children, and to the countless hundreds of young women who passed through her service as filles d’honneur, as I did.
I admired her greatly. I don’t think I can tell you the effect that hearing her story had on my young heart. I thought of all that she had faced and I thought of her present kindness and sweet disposition. I wondered if I could ever be as great as she; for to face such trials in life and to yet retain hope and courage… that is a true test of the mettle of a soul.
It was her first experience of the frailty of men’s promises in France, which, I believed had cemented her ideals of the rules in the games of courtly love. All her painful experiences had contributed to her wisdom, but Charles had been the only one to discard her and that, she could never entirely forgive. She maintained a great deal of hostility to the French, even though Charles himself had long since died, and she made sure her court glittered all the more brilliantly to out-do the French Court.
Margaret, then, had real experience that men’s promises could be as empty as Charles’ had been, and she made sure her maids were aware of it too. Sometimes courtly love, of course, could lead to real love, but this was rare. The world of the court was not a place where true love and true feeling were easy to find. All was for show and for advancement. Margaret had advice for her maidens that she wrote in verse and made us all learn by heart:
Trust in those who offer you service,
And in the end, my maidens,
You will find yourselves in the ranks of those
Who have been deceived.
They, for their sweet speeches, choose
Words softer than the softest of virgins;
Trust in them?
In their hearts they nurture
Much cunning in order to deceive,
And once they have their way thus,
Everything is forgotten.
Trust in them?
Margaret also instructed her maidens in the method by which to play this game and to win at it. For the lady, victory in the game of courtly love was to be admired without ever being captured, and perhaps win a greater husband than her birth may have allowed, by being honoured by the gallants of the court. But a maid had to be careful, for to encourage some men too much was to entice danger to come near. Margaret taught us that there was protection against the advances of men in a maid having a ready tongue and a ready wit to defend herself with:
Fine words are the coin to pay back
Those presumptuous minions
Who ape the lover
By fine looks and such like.
Not for a moment but instantly
Give to them their pay-
Fine words!
So we, the ladies of the court, were taught to rebuff the advances of these gallants with our wit. They would protest their love, and we would protest their lies. They would sing our praises, and we would shake our heads and smile in mock-disbelief. We knew that most of their protestations of devotion were false, and they knew we would not surrender ourselves to them. And so the game was played. Although I was young, I too had my share of admirers amongst the young men. Under Margaret’s tutelage my tongue became well-trained. I learned well and quickly that the successful maid at court was adept at both encouraging and rebuffing suitors without injuring them. Some women were too cruel in their wit and the men would become angry and remove their praise. Some were too soft and the men would think they were easily won, losing interest in them swiftly. One thing I learnt quickly was that the more unattainable a woman was, the more desirable she would become. That was Margaret’s secret. She was beautiful and accomplished, but what made her more desirable was the simple fact that she was the Regent and could not be touched. Men fell for Margaret and they would never recover their footing. She was the Queen of the court, and the ruler of their hearts.
I burned to be so admired.
I was so busy at court that I did not think often of home, or of my mother, although I wrote to them as often as I could. I was learning so much and yet there was so much yet to learn. I had little time to wonder what George and Mary were learning, or if my father was doing well in the English Court. As a dutiful daughter, I should have thought more about them, but the truth was that I was so caught up in the wonder of the new world I was discovering that I could not spare them room in my head.
We maids were taught to shoot with a bow and to handle and train hawks. We were taught using little merlins in how to train and fly a bird in the hunt. Merlins were not big and not much use for hunting, but they were good enough for us to train with. I had a great fondness for birds of prey and found that I could train and look after my own hawks as well as any falconer in Margaret’s mews. The Master Falconer, Paulo of Castile, thought I had a natural flair for understanding those magnificent birds. Once I had trained with the tiny merlins, he allowed me also to fly the falcons and sakers that Margaret kept in her mews. The falcons were my favourites; such beautiful silvers and browns on their feathers and they were such clever birds. But the sakers, too, were interesting, for in them there seemed to be such an impulse for freedom that I could not help but admire them.
“The saker is a pest of a bird,” Paulo said ruefully to me as he held a beautiful female on his leather gauntlet. “For if she sees the sun in the sky then off to it she will fly, and once she is gone… poof!” He made a gesture with his free hand. “Then she is gone, and will never return to your hand again. With a saker you must always know that she is bound to the sun and he, he is her only master, the only one she will truly follow and obey.” He shook his head. “We have lost more good coin on the loyalty of sakers to the sun than on any other bird in this mew.”
I gazed in wonder at the bird on his glove. Although I understood why Paulo was pained by a bird for whom the risks of losing her was even greater than normal, I felt a great respect for a bird who obeyed the master of her own choosing. The saker was no slave. She had no master but the sun. She was wondrously free in a world where all men had many earthly masters. All common men were ruled by nobles, all nobles were ruled by dukes and earls. Even kings were the servants of the Pope. But the saker was not ruled by any man. She chose her master herself, and was ruled only by the sun in the skies.
There were also sparrow hawks in the mews, used to hunt smaller birds and gyrfalcons and lanners; huge birds that brought down herons and cranes. They could carry whole hares and rabbits in their sharp beaks. These beautiful hunters of the skies stared out from the mews with a lust for the freedom of the air; I understood them well.
Hunting birds with hawks was a sociable affair at court and one that ladies were often involved with, especially when we moved to Margaret’s residence at La Vure, or hunted in the
forests of Scheplaken, Groenendael or Boisfort. We would rise early and dress quickly. The sun would not yet be up as we quietly mounted our horses in the strange silver-blue light of the dawn, our birds and our sacks brought out by the huntsmen set to accompany us into the forests. Through the royal parks the company would move with our spaniels lolloping along by the sides of the horses, the feet of the falconers and valets pounding on the wet grasses. Drums sounded as we set out; the feet and the hooves and the drums beat out the rhythm of our excited hearts in the grey-blue light.
In the vast forests of Margaret’s lands we would wait for the sighting of the game by the huntsmen, whilst breaking our fast on bread, cold roasted meats, cheese and small ale. Then the signals would come and we would send up our birds; the most important noble of the party would try first and then by turn, the rest of us flew those great birds against the game of Margaret’s parks. The birds would find and hover over targets hiding in the bushes and marshes, or catch little birds from the skies as the beaters moved though the undergrowth with drums and whistles to flush out partridges and heron. The dogs would pounce upon the fat birds taken from the skies by the swift feathers and sharp talons of the hawks that flew under our command. Each dog brought a prize back to a rider and each new, fat dead bird was tucked with laughter back into our saddle-sacks to take home to the court. We were not quiet or silent hunters on these trips, for making noise only encouraged the wild birds to flee before us into the talons and claws of our waiting hawks and eager dogs. The spaniels were not much use for the stag hunt or the boar hunt, but they enjoyed this social hunt; bouncing and slobbering on us as we left the morning behind in the pursuit of our quarry.