1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  So there it was – the French could finally start spelling Calais correctly again, and France was completely free of English occupiers. The dashing King Henri II had finally achieved what every French monarch had been trying to do for more than two centuries. He must have been very pleased with himself for the slap in the face he had given the Anglais.

  Although, as we’ll see in the next chapter, a Brit was about to slap him back …

  * Actually, Saint-Tropez might be a lot more attractive if it was used for this purpose rather than as an exhibition space for oversized boats and failed facelifts.

  † A guard was judged to have been sleeping if a member of the search watch could sneak up and grab him by the nose.

  * Tournai is now in Belgium, making it the only Belgian town ever occupied by the British. Until the hen parties started invading Bruges in the early twenty-first century, that is.

  6

  Mary Queen of Scots: A French Head

  on Scottish Shoulders

  There is no disputing that Mary Queen of Scots was born in Scotland and that she was therefore, strictly speaking, Scottish. But even the most patriotic Highlander could not deny that Mary spent her formative years, between the ages of five and nineteen, in France. Her mother was French, and throughout her life Mary wrote most of her letters in French, even those to her English cousin Queen Elizabeth I. What’s more, she always signed her name ‘Marie’, no doubt preferring it to the English spelling because at the time mary was how the French spelt their word for husband (these days it’s mari). For a few years Mary was even Queen of France. To put it simply, the woman we know today as Mary Queen of Scots was a French creation. She was as Scottish as foie-gras-flavoured haggis.

  If, in her final years as a captive in England, you had asked Mary what she thought of Scotland, she would probably have given a perfectly diplomatic reply (in French) about her undying love for her native land. But behind the political façade, she would almost certainly have been thinking, Merde, don’t talk to me about bloody Écosse.

  And Mary’s bitterness would have been well founded, because during her few short adult years as a reigning monarch in Scotland, she was betrayed by pretty well all the Scottish nobles, nearly murdered by a gang of them, and kidnapped and raped by one. And when she was killed, a large faction of Scots didn’t really care at all, because she had long ceased to be of any use to them. In fact, by lopping her head off, the English weren’t trying to provoke Scotland at all – they were striking a blow against the French.

  Let’s have a closer look at the tragic life of Mary (or Marie), French Queen of Scots.

  For sale: one royal baby

  More recent British royals have complained about being thrust too early, or too often, into the limelight. But Mary knew nothing else, almost from birth.

  She was born on 8 December 1542, in the lakeside palace of Linlithgow, 30 kilometres from Edinburgh. The date was promising: it was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. The place was less so: people born in Linlithgow are often nicknamed ‘black bitches’ after the dog on the town’s coat of arms.

  Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, was the second wife of King James V of Scotland. His first wife, who died of tuberculosis, had also been French, and his marriage to Marie was arranged to re-cement the Franco-Scottish Auld Alliance. It was a union that annoyed the English intensely – Henry VIII, apparently feeling lonely after executing Anne Boleyn and losing Jane Seymour in childbirth, had also put in a bid for Marie de Guise’s hand.

  Marie was relieved when her family turned down Henry’s offer. Horrified by the beheading of Anne Boleyn, she is said to have quipped, ‘I may be a tall woman, but I have a small neck.’ It was a joke that would turn tragically sour when, fifty years later, Marie’s daughter Mary Queen of Scots had her own slender neck severed by an English axe on the orders of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I.

  So Marie de Guise married a Scot and moved to Edinburgh, taking a collection of French knick-knacks with her to ease the transition: things like pear trees, wild boars, tailors and, naturellement, doctors.

  In quick succession, she and King James had two sons who died in infancy, and then Princess Mary came along. But the King, in a state of nervous exhaustion over a war with England, was already on his deathbed, and gave up the fight for life six days later, aged only thirty. At less than a week old, the newborn Mary was Queen of Scotland, with her French mother as regent. The baby was also, as a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, next in line to the English throne after Princess Elizabeth. Quite a responsibility for one so young.

  As a result, before Mary’s eyes had even learned to focus, the gaze of every European head of state was fixed upon her. Aged eleven days, she received her first proposal, when Henry VIII tried to make up for losing Marie de Guise by betrothing baby Mary to his son Edward, who was then aged five (years, that is). The offer was refused, probably because of the age difference – Edward was, after all, about 150 times older than Mary.

  But as we all know, marriage was a touchy subject with Henry VIII, and he was so angry at being turned down a second time that he unleashed a series of punitive raids on Scotland, rather humorously dubbed the ‘Rough Wooing’ (which shows how tough courtship must have been in those days), and he finally bullied the Scots into signing a betrothal contract between Mary and Edward.

  Marie de Guise must have been relieved when Henry VIII died in 1547, before he could bring his plans to fruition, but this didn’t mean that the pressure was off, because practically every nobleman in Scotland was suggesting sons and cousins as potential bridegrooms. Marie knew enough about the Scots lairds to realize that these offers might well be accompanied by attempts to lock little Mary away in the family’s castle while the laird assumed the regency, so she turned to her homeland for help.

  As luck would have it, King Henri II of France was a childhood friend of the Guise family, as well as being virulently anti-English. He stepped in and betrothed the infant Scottish Queen to his own son, François, who was a year younger than Mary. To make sure that neither the English nor the Scots would keep the two royal children apart, Henri sent his own ship to fetch Mary – but not her mother, who stayed in Scotland with a French army to protect France’s hold on the Scottish Crown.

  It was July 1548, Mary was five, and she was already being treated like a tiny, but vital, piece in a big political jigsaw.

  The ‘wild’ Scots arrive in France

  The little Queen was apparently a good sailor, and amused herself during the long, storm-battered voyage to France by making fun of her seasick travelling companions – two or three of her half-brothers, a guardian, a governess and four young ladies-in-waiting (all called Mary) and their various servants. The ship suffered a broken rudder in the mountainous seas, but eventually Mary landed safely in the country that was to be her home for the rest of her childhood.

  At first, the Scottish party probably had a dizzy sense of déjà vu, because they went ashore in western Brittany, the rainy, granite-clad southern cousin of Scotland, where the locals spoke a language not unlike Scots Gaelic. Mary herself didn’t know any Gaelic – in Edinburgh, people spoke Lowland Scots, a dialect of English – but Brittany must have felt comfortingly familiar.

  Things became progressively more French, though, during a two-month trek eastwards to the royal chateau at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, where the courtiers were in a veritable frenzy of anticipation about their new princess-to-be, and poets were composing odes to Mary’s beauty before they’d even seen her.

  When she finally arrived there, the Parisians apparently got quite a shock. Little Mary herself they found exquisite, but they thought her Scottish servants and courtiers were farouches – meaning wild, in the animal rather than partying sense.

  Mary’s future in-laws and her grandparents decided that she was in dire need of a French upbringing so that she would be suitable for her role as Queen of France, which was considered much more important tha
n that of Queen of Scots. She was treated a bit like a youngster who arrives at Manchester United after being spotted scoring goals for Linlithgow Rovers. Yes, she’d been a star in the minor league, but now it was time for some serious training.

  Freed from the threat of war and kidnap, Mary began an idyllic French childhood as one of a gaggle of youngsters in King Henri II’s household. Amongst her new playmates was her future husband, the sickly, stuttering François, who seems to have suffered birth defects after his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, had taken fertility potions – in the sixteenth century, there were no health warnings on packaging (mainly because there wasn’t any packaging).

  The merry royal party moved from one luxurious chateau to the next – Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau, Blois – with Mary, a charming, lively girl, delighting everyone. As well as being a favourite of Henri, she was taken under the wing of his glamorous mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who is remembered in France today as a sort of sixteenth-century sex goddess. Diane was twenty years Henri’s senior but so alluring that Henri’s wife, Catherine de’ Medici, had holes bored in the ceiling of the King’s bedchamber so that she could watch her husband and Diane in full frolic and presumably pick up some tips.

  It has never been suggested that young Mary Queen of Scots received that kind of education from Diane, who was also a highly literate woman and a great conversationalist. But Mary spent some time at Diane’s love nest, the romantic chateau of Anet in Normandy, which is unjustly ignored by foreign tourists, probably because it is so far from the Loire. Its only recent claim to fame is that it features at the beginning of the James Bond film Thunderball, as the location for the first meeting of the evil SPECTRE agents. It is amusing to watch Bond’s enemies planning to destroy the world with atomic bombs and think that Mary Queen of Scots once played children’s games there for real.

  As she toured the royal households, Mary quickly acquired a French fashion sense, wearing brightly coloured dresses, stockings and shoes, and showing an apparent fondness for dogskin gloves. She was also schooled in more intellectual matters, of course. On her arrival in France, Mary spoke mainly Scots, which sounded horribly barbarous to French ears,* but her French was soon fluent, and she also learned Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek.

  A future queen had to master the courtly arts, and Mary practised French dances and sang French songs, and – one of her passions in later life – began to write French poems every time emotions welled up in her increasingly Gallic chest.

  Despite all this, Mary didn’t forget her origins, although her memories of Scotland seem to have become blurred, because when she amused the court by dressing up as a Scot one day, she donned a costume consisting mainly of loosely draped animal skins. She had apparently come to view her Scottish compatriots as Neanderthals.

  Mary was fifteen when she received the news in 1558 that the port of Calais had been captured from the English by one of her Guise uncles – a family success that made her an even more prestigious member of the French royal household. And as a consequence of the victory, her marriage to young Prince François became all the more urgent. It was to be the final Franco-Scottish nail in the English coffin.

  By now, Mary was every inch the ravishing French princess. And there were a lot of inches. She was very nearly six feet tall, with the slender neck that she had inherited from her mother, and fashionably pale skin despite her love of outdoor pursuits like hunting. Her hair was gradually turning from childhood blond to the rich auburn that it would become in adulthood, and her eyes were light, almost golden brown. She was charming and witty, and possessed a melodious voice (now that she had stopped speaking that raucous Scots).

  She was also self-confident enough to insist that her beauty would be best enhanced if she wore a white wedding dress. Not an unusual decision for a virgin bride, one might think, but at the time it was a daring, almost offensive, choice, because white was the colour that French queens traditionally wore in mourning. Given the subsequent fates of her three husbands, she might have agreed in hindsight that it was tempting fate just a little too much.

  Her request was granted, but only because she was losing out in so many other ways. The marriage contract between the French and Scottish royal houses was breathtakingly one-sided. For a start, Mary was to sign over her claim to the English throne to her French husband François. In addition, Scotland would have to pay for all aid it had received over the centuries – a fiendish French accounting trick to empty Scotland’s coffers into Henri II’s pockets. And to cap it all, France and Scotland would be united, with François as king. Yes, Scotland was to become a French colony. If all this had subsequently gone to plan, today Scotland might well be a spa resort for Parisians, and France would be claiming to have invented whisky. Worse still, the French would be annoyingly good at golf as well as all the other individual sports they win trophies for.

  Mary was only a teenager, but surely she knew the consequences when she scratched ‘Marie’ at the bottom of her marriage contract. It was, quite simply, a complete betrayal of her native land’s sovereignty.

  Cousin, cousine

  It was to be a very eventful period for Mary. After the capture of Calais and her wedding, Mary learned that her English first cousin once removed, also called Mary, had died. In those medically primitive times, it was not at all uncommon to lose a relative, but this other Mary was significant – she was Queen of England.

  Elizabeth I was immediately given the throne, but in Catholic eyes, including those of the French royal family, the true successor was Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth was the offspring of Henry VIII’s post-divorce second wife Anne Boleyn, and was therefore considered illegitimate, whereas Mary was the indisputably legitimate granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor.

  Henri II of France seized the opportunity to press Mary’s claim on her – and his son’s – behalf, and even had a provocative royal standard made, featuring the English and Scottish arms. (Attentive readers will recall that Edward III and Henry V of England had used exactly the same strategy for annoying France more than a century earlier – proof that the French never forget an insult.)

  Mary Queen of Scots was now a living symbol of Catholic opposition to the new, and highly sensitive, Queen Elizabeth of England. By extension, Mary was also a weapon in the religious conflicts that were erupting all over Europe. And, unfortunately for her, no sooner was she propelled into the front line than her protector was killed – ironically, by a Scotsman.

  Henri II, who had removed Mary from danger in Scotland when she was an infant and made sure that she spent a cotton-wool childhood in his chateaux, was just as much of an alpha male as his father, François I, had been (see Chapter 5 for François’s antics at the Field of the Cloth of Gold). Henri loved to joust, showing off his prowess as a knight by breaking lances on the shields of the best horsemen in Europe.

  On 30 June 1559, Henri was at a tournament in Paris, in the Château de Tournelles, on the site of what is now the picturesque place des Vosges. The games had been arranged to celebrate the marriage of Henri’s daughter Elisabeth to King Philip II of Spain, the recently widowed husband of Queen Mary of England. The wedding was another major anti-English coup, the perfect excuse for a party.

  Despite the fact that it was a family occasion, the King was jousting in the black-and-white colours of his mistress, Diane, under the nose of his wife Catherine. It was late in the day, and he had already broken several lances, but Henri fancied one last joust, and issued a challenge to a Norman-Scottish knight, the Count of Montgomery (an ancestor of the general of the same name who would lead the Normandy landings in 1944). The Count refused politely, but the King ordered him to mount up and charge.

  Apparently Catherine begged Henri to call it a day, because she had dreamt that he would be killed by a lance piercing his eye. (Though this doesn’t seem to have bothered her during his previous jousts, and may well have been a backdated prophecy, a sort of extreme ‘I told you so’ with which to
irritate him on his deathbed.) To make matters worse, the King was planning to ride a horse with the unfortunate name of Le Malheureux – Unlucky or Unhappy.

  Laughing off the superstitious warnings, Henri II charged at Montgomery. There was the usual clash of lance on shield, but this time Montgomery’s lance splintered and a shard of wood shot through the slit of Henri’s helmet and into his eye socket.

  He was carried into the chateau and took ten days of suffering and raving to die of an infection. His furious widow Catherine had the chateau demolished and, even though the fatal injury was sustained by accident during a joust instigated by the King, had Montgomery thrown in prison. She also banished Diane de Poitiers from court, and forced her to live in obscurity in Normandy. The fun was over, by royal decree.

  Two months later, still mourning for her lost protector, Mary, aged only sixteen, was crowned Queen of France in Reims cathedral, alongside her fifteen-year-old husband, King François II, a shy adolescent whom a contemporary chronicler described as having ‘constipated genitals’. It was not seen as a promising sign that that the new King was too frail to keep the crown on his head without the nobles holding it in place for him.

  Teenage kicks, and teenagers getting kicked

  Mary’s immediate reaction to becoming queen of a second country was to infuriate her French hosts. She demanded an inventory of the crown jewels, and ordered that anything belonging to a reigning queen should be sent to her by her mother-in-law, the ex-Queen, Catherine de’ Medici. But if this was meant to be a show of strength, it was a catastrophically self-destructive one. With a single request, Mary made a lifelong enemy of the most powerful – and vindictive – woman in France.