1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Mary’s first and last trip to England got off to an inauspicious start – she crossed into Cumbria by water and stumbled while coming ashore, falling to her knees just as William the Conqueror and Henry V had done. Mary’s entourage seem to have been well aware that royals are genetically incapable of getting out of boats, because they knew that it was customary to comment on the omen, and declared it a good sign, indicating that Mary was coming to get her hands on England.

  However, this was not the right kind of thing to be saying on English soil, even if it was spoken in Scots or French, because Elizabeth I was very nervous of Mary’s claim to her throne. So instead of being taken to see her cousin, Mary was immediately incarcerated while a law was passed making it treasonable not only to plot against Elizabeth but also to be the unknowing beneficiary of such a plot.

  Mary acknowledged this law, and promised to relinquish her claims on the English Crown. She even swore never to seek a new Franco-Scottish alliance, and to make the saying of Catholic Mass illegal in Scotland. But none of these concessions secured her freedom.

  Worse still, Elizabeth seemed to believe the lies being spread about Mary in Scotland by the Earl of Moray, especially since new ‘evidence’ had been conveniently found in Edinburgh implicating Mary in the murder of Henry Darnley. This was in the form of the so-called Casket Letters, which had supposedly been written by Mary to Bothwell (the man who abducted and raped her), and, if real, suggested that Mary had known about the plot to kill her husband, and had already been having an adulterous fling with Bothwell. The fact that some of the letters were signed ‘Mary’, a spelling she never used, and that one letter in French was full of grammatical mistakes which fluent Mary would not have made, did not seem to worry anyone.

  Mary sent out a stream of letters to Elizabeth pleading for just one meeting – cousin to cousin, woman to woman – where they could cut through all the lies and the politics. One of these pleas was a poem in which Mary likened herself to a poor ship cast adrift on the stormy seas of fate. (It was, of course, written in French.)

  Mary also wrote to King Charles IX of France, a younger brother of her first husband, King François, asking him for help for old times’ sake. No luck. Au contraire, under the influence of Catherine de’ Medici, Charles withheld the pension due to Mary as an ex-Queen of France, and even confiscated her lands in Touraine.

  So Mary was forced to accept her imprisonment, and made the best of things by setting up her own mini-France again, with thirty servants, including a French secretary to write her letters and, of course, a French doctor and apothecary (pharmacist). She managed to obtain permission to go on French-style spa treatments at the thermal baths in Buxton, near Tutbury, and – like any French girl staying with an English family – she also took English lessons, or at least managed to perfect her English, which until now had apparently been decidedly wonky.

  But Mary wasn’t just any old French expat. While she was having thermal bubble baths and practising English conversation, the Pope was urging Spain to invade England, rescue Mary and marry her off to Philip of Spain’s brother, who would then take over the English throne and convert everyone back to Catholicism. Meanwhile, France was actually considering an alliance with England by marrying another brother of King Charles IX, Duke Hercule-François of Anjou, to Elizabeth. In terms of English politics, Mary was becoming at best expendable, and at worst a threat.

  It was therefore logical that her final downfall would be engineered by the English secret services, with the French Embassy in London taking an apparently unwitting part in the plot. Secret letters intended for Mary had been accumulating at the embassy, awaiting the day when she might be able to receive them. Some of these were treasonable, but Mary could only be convicted if she actually read them and, better still, replied. So a potential postman, an English Catholic called Gilbert Gifford,* went to the embassy and offered to smuggle the letters into Tutbury, and the French handed them over to him.

  And so it was that a correspondence began between Mary and her French sympathizers, all of them blissfully unaware that every letter was being read by the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, head of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service. Walsingham was waiting for one word that could be used as evidence of high treason, and he couldn’t believe his luck when a new penpal stepped in, an English gentleman called Anthony Babington who saw Mary as a kind of Catholic saint and had decided to mount a swashbuckling bid to rescue her.

  In July 1586, Babington sent a letter announcing his intention to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. Fatefully, Mary replied saying that if she were to become Queen of England, French aid would be necessary. In her biography, Antonia Fraser seems to hint that Mary might not have approved of killing Elizabeth, and that this reply was merely a theoretical ‘what if …’ supposition, a sort of French inability to stay out of a philosophical discussion. But it was enough for Walsingham. Mary had countenanced Elizabeth’s death, and was therefore guilty of high treason.

  Mary tried in vain to claim that, as a foreign head of state, she could not be tried by an English court. And this would normally have been true, but Elizabeth’s law making anyone liable to prosecution for plotting her downfall extended even to foreign queens.

  Realizing that she was in mortal danger, Mary played her I’ve-got-important-friends card, and made one of her most famous pronouncements, a veiled threat of French and Spanish intervention if she were harmed: ‘Remember,’ she warned the commissioners at an initial hearing, ‘that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’ This sounds as if it was translated from the French, and was probably enough in itself to ensure that Mary would be having a tête-à-tête with the axeman. What? Suggest that there was something bigger out there than Elizabethan England? Off with her head!

  Catherine de’ Medici wasn’t exactly fond of Mary, but she couldn’t let an ex-Queen of France be executed like a common criminal, especially not by the Anglais. So the French King, now Henri III, another of Mary’s ex-brothers-in-law, made a promise that he would not support any future plots against Elizabeth, if only Mary were spared. Unfortunately, though, the English didn’t need, or trust, French promises, and Henri was quite simply ignored.

  Scotland, meanwhile, was silent – which was not surprising, given that Mary’s son, King James, who was now an independent-minded twenty-year-old, had signed an alliance with Elizabeth. And when English ambassadors asked James whether he would break the alliance if his mother was beheaded, he said no.

  Poor Mary was doomed.

  Two strikes and out

  Mary seems to have been very sanguine about her imminent demise, and accepted that the game was up. She declared that she was happy to become a martyr to her religion – ‘with God’s help I shall die in the Catholic faith’ – and even went as far as to say that Philip of Spain should take the English throne and put an end to Protestantism.

  Despite this last defiant piece of politicking on Mary’s part, Elizabeth I was still reluctant to sign the death warrant. She seems to have been unwilling to create a martyr, and fearful of reprisals from Catholic nations. She even tried to persuade Mary’s jailers to kill her on the quiet – as we have seen before, there have been many examples of royals meeting with unfortunate accidents while in custody, inadvertently impaling themselves on red-hot pokers, for example. When the jailers refused (Mary’s charms were still effective), Elizabeth deliberately engineered things so that she could sign the warrant ‘innocently’. She got her secretary to hide it in a pile of other papers, and claimed that she ‘didn’t notice’ what she was signing. Once the deed was done, she made a great show of not wanting to part with the document, but did little to stop her aides having it delivered to Mary’s final place of incarceration, Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire.

  On the evening of 7 February 1587, the 44-year-old Mary was visited at Fotheringhay and told by the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury that she was to be executed next morning. Mary had been prepared for th
is, but swore on a bible that she was innocent of any plot to kill Elizabeth. The Earl of Kent objected that her vow meant nothing, because it was a Catholic bible. Mary replied with piercing French logic: ‘If I swear on the book which I believe to be the true version, will your lordship not believe my oath more than if I were to swear on a translation in which I do not believe?’ The poor earl was probably still trying to work that one out when she was executed.

  Mary spent her last night making her will and writing letters. She asked for Masses to be said in France, and made a bequest to the monks of Reims. She also put in a formal plea to be buried in France, in one of the royal cathedrals of Saint-Denis or Reims.*

  Next morning, she walked to the block courageously, and instructed her servants to ‘tell my friends that I died a true woman to my religion and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman’. When her servants started wailing, she asked them, in French of course, to be quiet.

  After the deed was done (with, it is said, two blows of a bloody butcher’s axe), the executioner lifted Mary’s head by her famous auburn hair, and a wig came away in his hand. The head fell to the ground, its real hair turned prematurely grey by the stress of the long imprisonment.

  France mourned, in the best tradition of political hypocrisy, with a Requiem Mass at Notre-Dame attended by Henri III and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, who, it is hoped, refrained from wearing any of the jewels she had confiscated from Mary. An archbishop gave a sermon, spitting with fury that ‘the axe of a vulgar executioner disfigured that body which had graced the bed of a King of France’. In French eyes, it was of course doubly wrong to execute a beautiful woman.

  When Mary Queen of Scots’ head was removed in 1587, so were France’s hopes of grabbing the crown of England from Queen Elizabeth I.

  Up in Scotland, Mary’s son, King James, reacted to the news of her death with a stoicism that some might call indifference. He was unmoved, except to say, ‘now I am sole King.’ Later, he declared that her execution was ‘a preposterous and strange procedure’. Not what you could call filial or patriotic outrage.

  All of which begs the question: Mary Queen of Scots?

  Well, strictly speaking, yes, although, given that she was betrayed by almost every Scotsman who had enough power to do so, it is not surprising that, at her death, she clearly saw herself as French. It was in France that she wanted to be buried, and the very last thing Mary wrote was a letter to King Henri III, saying that she was being killed because she posed a French threat to the English throne. She seems to have forgotten that her maternal relations, the Guises, had risked her life by implicating her in their religious power games, and that Catherine de’ Medici, who was Queen or Queen Mother for Mary’s whole life, had been – excuse my French – such a bitch to her.

  And in political terms, it was the French, not the Scots, who lost out when Mary lost her head. With her death, France was deprived of the only person in Europe who could realistically have sat on the English throne without being nasty to the French ambassador. Mary’s son, King James of Scotland, was much too chummy with Elizabeth for France’s liking, but even at forty-four years old, Mary could in theory have been married off to a Frenchman, inherited the English crown on Elizabeth’s death (from either natural or unnatural causes) and brought her errant son, King James of Scotland, to heel. It could have been a fantasy outcome for France: with Mary on the throne of England, and James in power in Scotland, the whole of Britain could have been ruled from the French side of the Channel again, just as it had been in William the Conqueror’s day.

  But with one or, more exactly, two blows of an English axe, this French dream had been shattered. France had lost a potential colony, and all because of its dismal failure to throw its full weight behind the person who best represented its interests. It was a trend that was about to be repeated right across the globe …

  * This shouldn’t be taken as an insult, because every language except French does.

  * I will be using the term ‘Protestant’ as shorthand to describe Anglicans and other groups, simply to distinguish them from Catholics. For the purposes of this book, the most important distinction is between people who felt they owed allegiance to the Pope, and those who didn’t.

  * It also seems a shame that none of Mary’s letters to Elizabeth contain a pun on her French name – something along the lines of ‘would that this Marie could become your mary’.

  * Tutbury was originally built by one Henri de Ferrières, who fought in William the Conqueror’s army at Hastings, and whose descendants include that other tragic royal, Diana, Princess of Wales.

  * Gifford was granted an English pension for his part in the plot against Mary. After her conviction, he went to France, became a priest, was arrested having a bisexual threesome in a brothel and died in the Bastille.

  * This was refused, and her coffin was left unburied for a year in Fotheringhay and then buried in Peterborough. It was eventually moved to Westminster Abbey by her son when he became King James I of England, and is still there – on the opposite side of the abbey’s Lady chapel to Elizabeth I.

  7

  French Canada, or How to Lose a Colony

  The French think that their cousins in Canada are quaint historical throwbacks. The Québécois speak with an accent that most French people find primitive, comical even, a sort of seventeenth-century peasant patois. They use amusing words like char (cart) for car, and blonde for girlfriend, and their swearwords are old religious terms like sacrament! and tabernacle! When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in ‘normal’ French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won’t be able to understand it. In a word, the French think of Quebeckers rather like New Yorkers see Alabamians. There’s just a little knuckle-on-floor-scraping involved.

  But at the same time, any mention of the history of Quebec rouses burning anti-British and anti-American outrage in a French person’s heart, as if someone was talking about a favourite café of theirs that had been turned into a Starbucks. Canada was stolen from France, they will allege, and if the word ‘Acadie’ comes into the conversation, the outrage can turn to a blazing condemnation of British genocide. (As long, that is, as the person has heard of Acadie. Many French people have no idea what it is – a pop singer, maybe, or a pet name for the Académie Française?)

  Acadie (in English, Acadia) was the French name for what is now Nova Scotia, a peninsula in northeastern Canada that in 1713, after more than a century of brinkmanship, was finally ceded to Britain by treaty and, rather unkindly one has to admit, ethnically cleansed in the 1750s when the French colonists refused to swear allegiance to the British Crown. Some 12,600 Acadiens (Acadians) were forcibly sailed out of Canada, most of them ending up as refugees in New England, Britain, France and Louisiana (the word ‘Cajun’ is a corruption of ‘Acadien’).

  If you go to the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, just off the coast of Brittany, you can see a permanent exhibition in the capital, Le Palais, dedicated to the Acadiens who settled there. The island’s official website has a heart-rending page on these refugees, which talks about the ‘diaspora of this humble, peace-loving people whose whole civilization was based on faith in God, respect for their ancestors and the honour of work’. In short, Acadie is one of those names, like Joan of Arc, that conjure up images of dastardly British treachery and heartless Francophobia.

  However, just as they did with Joan of Arc, the French seem to be forgetting their own none-too-glorious role in the affair …

  No room for France in the New World

  As soon as Columbus returned from his first transatlantic outing, the Kings of Spain and Portugal got the Pope to grant them ownership of the newly discovered territories. This the Holy Father did, allowing them to draw a line down the known map of the western world, stretching from pole to pole and slicing the Atlantic in two. Everything to the east of the line – the coast of Africa, the vast tracts of ocean and the jutti
ng-out bit of Brazil – went to Portugal. Anything discovered lying to the west was to belong to Spain. Roughly speaking, on 7 June 1494, almost the whole of North and South America became, by divine command, Spanish.

  France was mightily peeved, although it was probably not surprised, because the Pope in question, Alexander VI, aka Rodrigo Borgia (yes, one of those Borgias*), had recently been appointed after an election campaign that had involved political lobbying, vested interests, lofty promises and – it is alleged – a certain amount of backhanders. And France had backed Borgia’s rival, giving him 200,000 gold ducats (in modern money, a helluva lot). Not surprising, then, that France was left off the papally approved map of the New World.

  The French thought that this was all the more unfair because they claimed that they had, in fact, discovered the New World long before Columbus. (No one accepted that the Native Americans might have discovered the place rather than sprouting up there like plants, and no one knew about the Viking expeditions in the eleventh century. They were mentioned in the Icelandic Sagas, but the Groenlendinga Saga wasn’t in many French public libraries. Probably because in the fifteenth century France didn’t have any public libraries.)

  A 1940 history of French colonization by Henri Blet alleges that a church in Dieppe was decorated as early as 1440 with mosaics depicting Native Americans, and that the town’s archives contained reports written by sailors who had been to South America at least fifty years before Columbus. Tragically, Monsieur Blet writes, this evidence was all destroyed during a 1694 bombardment of Dieppe by the Anglais. Our fault, as usual.