by John Guy
By the end of 1551, Mary was growing up. She was only nine years old, but her aunt Anne d’Este, Duchess of Guise, one of the most cosmopolitan and trendsetting women at Henry II’s court, pointed out that “she can no longer be treated as a child.” She did not look like a child; her conversation was not that of a child. Every day “she grows in charm and good manners” and “becomes more suited” to the “place” to which she was called and which she was never allowed to forget. Already she had a vast wardrobe stuffed with fine clothes and a collection of jewelry so large it needed three brass coffers and several additional boxes to contain it.
Since her arrival in France, Mary had learned a new language, a formal and sophisticated court etiquette and new tastes. So far, her Guise family had succeeded in protecting her birthright. But in the process, its significance had been redefined. In particular, Mary’s future had acquired a compelling Franco-British dimension. More than just the heir to the Stuart succession, she had become the key to the entire Valois dynastic enterprise. As the processions and tableaux passed before her eyes at Rouen, they must, in their glamour and pageantry, have reinforced one driving idea in her mind. As well as being queen of Scotland and the next queen of France, she must also aspire to be a future queen of England.
4
Adolescence
AFTER MARY’S MOTHER had returned to Scotland, her uncle Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, the boldest and most experienced politician at Henry II’s court, took over as her mentor. Within a few years, he was exercising more authority over her household and upbringing than anyone else. The reorientation was gradual, but it had begun even as Charles disarmed his sister by urging her to allow “no one except yourself, or those to whom you delegate your authority, to have control over your daughter.” The member of the Guise family most constantly by Henry II’s side as the royal court traveled on its regular circuits from palace to hunting lodge to palace through the Loire Valley and then to and from Paris and its hinterland, Charles was ideally placed to exert influence. It was an arrangement designed to work to everyone’s advantage, and he kept his sister informed in regular reports about his niece’s health, education and finances.
In the 1550s, the Guise family had an unparalleled ascendancy. At a strategic level they were the champions of French dynastic claims in the British Isles and of war against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. They worked indefatigably together and built up their networks at court and in the provinces. After the Rouen fête, they turned their attention to monopolizing power at court, seeking to ingratiate themselves with Catherine de Medici, whose dislike of Constable Montmorency, the premier nobleman and chief officeholder of France, was unmistakable.
The constable was appointed for life. His duties were almost exclusively military, and in wartime he commanded the army in the king’s absence and the vanguard in his presence. On ceremonial occasions, he walked in front of the king carrying his sword of state. In the early stages of their rise to power, the Guises had been Montmorency’s close allies, but this started to change after the fête. As their confidence and ambition grew, the Guises sought to oust and replace him. In attaining their goal, their trump card was the betrothal of Mary, their niece, to the dauphin.
Francis Duke of Guise, Charles’s brother, was well positioned to lead the family to victory. He was a brilliant military commander who had distinguished himself in battle and was idolized by his troops. He saw himself more as a man of action than as a courtier, and when not on the battlefield was usually at Joinville or at the château of Meudon, one of the numerous properties the family were busily acquiring near Paris. He invited Mary there, and treated her as if she were his own daughter. He became a surrogate father to her, and she would always love him.
But it was her uncle Charles who advised her about protocol, about the letters she should write, to whom she should send them, and what she should say. If, however, Charles was unavailable, away on royal business or in retreat during Lent at a monastery, she consulted the duke. She deferred without question to their opinions, and after the scandal of Lady Fleming’s affair with the king it became Charles’s habit to make unannounced monthly inspections of Mary’s household, “so as to find out in detail all that is going on.” From then on, his grip was secure: Mary could be allowed to grow up, to pursue her studies and her pleasures almost as she chose, but within the limits of his advice.
Mary was fast approaching adolescence. She was outgrowing her household, but the reorganization of the royal children’s living arrangements sprang in the event from Fleming’s disgrace and Henry II’s decision to create an independent household for the dauphin. Mary’s new governess was Françoise d’Estamville, Lady Parois, an older woman incapable of threatening Catherine de Medici or Diane de Poitiers. She was sexually safe and correspondingly dull. To the young Mary she must have seemed stultifyingly boring. Her appearance was unremarkable, her morals irreproachable. She was known to be devout, an attribute mentioned by Charles in one of his reports. “I mustn’t forget to tell you,” he told Mary’s mother in a postscript, “that Lady Parois is doing so well, she could hardly be expected to do better, and you may be sure that God is well served according to the old fashion.”
With this remark, the cardinal gibed at Fleming, whose sympathy for the Huguenots, as the French Calvinists were called, was notorious. It was an isolated comment, often since misunderstood to mean that Mary was to be educated according to the most rigorous principles of the Catholic faith, to prepare her to rule as a Catholic icon. More generally, it is said that the Guise family were “ultra-Catholics” who aspired to win control of the politics of France and Scotland in order to save the Valois and Stuart monarchies from the threat of Protestant subversion.
This is a misapprehension. In the 1550s and for most of the 1560s, the Guises put their own interests above the cause of religion. It was only after 1567, when Charles V’s son and heir, Philip II, ordered Spanish troops into the Netherlands to crush a militant Protestant revolt and when a crusading Catholic League against the Huguenots began to take shape in France, that the family became synonymous with the absolute defense of Catholicism. By then, it was clear to them that their interests could be preserved only with Philip II’s support, and since he was a loyal Catholic with an unshakable vision of his divine mission to reunite Christendom under the papal banner, it was essential for them to do all they could to crush the Protestants.
This metamorphosis influenced Mary after her flight into exile in England. She would reinvent herself in the 1580s as a good Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. But in the 1550s, the Guises were politiques, or moderates, equally opposed to Protestant and Catholic extremism. Where religion mattered most to them was in relation to their dynastic project, because only the pope could make a definitive pronouncement of Elizabeth Tudor’s illegitimacy, and so of Mary’s claim to the English throne.
As the dauphin approached his ninth birthday, Henry II decided that his son should leave the consolidated household created for the royal children and live in his own establishment. This made little difference to his movements, as the new household, like that of the other children, continued to follow the court. It did, however, have a sudden and dramatic impact on the personnel and finances of the other children’s household, because not only were the dauphin’s officers and ancillary staff hived off, but their budgets were also transferred. In particular, it raised the question of whether Mary, herself a crowned queen and already almost ten, should have her own separate quarters.
The dauphin’s new household came into effect in March 1553. It had been much discussed over the previous winter, and on February 25 was the main item of a report from the Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother. He began with good news of Mary, whom he had just seen at Amboise. She “has grown so much and continues every day to grow in height, goodness, beauty, wisdom and virtues that she is as perfect and accomplished . . . as is possible.” No one could be found in France to match her qualities. The king now li
ked her so much, “he spends much of his time in chatting with her, sometimes for the space of an hour.” She “is as well able to entertain him with pleasant and sensible talk as if she were a woman of twenty-five.” Anne d’Este, the cardinal’s sister-in-law, had made a similar observation a few months earlier. As Mary was herself beginning to discover, her charm and conversational skills would be among her greatest assets.
Charles’s letter then turned to the business at hand. Catherine de Medici had chosen not to give her daughters, Elizabeth and Claude, separate households. The lack of staff meant they would sleep temporarily in her own dressing room with Lady Humières in attendance. It was a mean decision. And it was embarrassing for Mary, who was about to leave the Loire and travel to St.-Germain, where the court had preceded her. She was bringing her usual attendants, but the matter of what “state” she ought to maintain, with the dauphin gone from the children’s household, and which rooms she should occupy within the court had urgently to be resolved.
Charles did not simply have the interests of his niece in mind. His own reputation and that of his family would be adversely affected if Mary’s “state” was to be diminished. As always, protocol was of the highest importance. He also had a political plan, one fully visible in August, when Henri Cleutin, Seigneur d’Oysel, the first resident French ambassador in Scotland and Henry II’s lieutenant-general there, filed a report on English affairs. Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, had died of pulmonary tuberculosis on July 6 at the age of fifteen. Despite an attempt by his leading Protestant adviser, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to exclude the Catholic Mary Tudor from the throne and replace her with the Protestant Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor had triumphed. Jane was a queen for just a few days before Northumberland’s plot collapsed. On August 3, Mary Tudor processed into London to the cheers of a welcoming crowd.
This news was disturbing to France. Mary Tudor was the cousin of Spain’s Charles V, with whom Henry II had been at war for two years on the frontier of the Netherlands and in Italy. Moreover, she intended to marry Philip II, in whose favor his father intended to abdicate. At the age of fifty-three, Charles was white-haired and exhausted. The arthritis in his hands was so bad he could hardly open a letter; the pain was so great that he prayed for death. His son, Philip, was young and energetic and keen to continue the war with France, where it was feared that he would use England as a military and naval base. Such alarm was justified, because when he married Mary Tudor in 1554 and assumed his role as king, he was heard to boast that for every fort built by the French in Scotland, he would construct three on the English side of the border.
The cardinal’s plan was simple but audacious. He proposed that his niece should be declared fully of age, able to rule her realm as Queen of Scots in person or through an appointed deputy. Whereas the usual age of majority for a royal minor was between fifteen and eighteen years, Mary should “take up her rights” as queen “at the age of eleven years and one day.” To this end, the existing regent, the Earl of Arran, now better known by his empty title of Duke of Châtelherault, should be dismissed. His self-serving duplicity and constant vacillation had worked against the French interest in Scotland, and with Mary Tudor on the English throne, no further risks could be taken.
It was quintessentially a Guise plan, because once Châtelherault had been removed, Mary of Guise was to be appointed sole regent to rule in her daughter’s name. At a stroke, the Guise family would extend their hegemony to Scotland, improve their status at the French court as the relatives of a reigning queen, and win the gratitude of Henry II, who was deeply skeptical of Châtelherault and his allies, suspecting perfidy and the imminence of an Anglo-Scottish rapprochement at their hands.
D’Oysel, who made the journey to France for the debate, opposed the plan at a three-hour meeting of the Conseil des Affaires attended by the king and Mary’s uncles. He suspected the motives of the Guise brothers. But the king overruled him and the plan was put into effect. Mary’s mother was declared the sole regent, her appointment confirmed in April 1554 by a Parliament summoned to Edinburgh. One of Mary’s earliest official acts was to write to congratulate her mother. As a reigning queen, Mary also had the right to choose her own guardians, and she squared the circle by naming Henry II and her uncles to the posts, thereby binding the Guise family even closer to the Valois monarchy.
Mary now wrote her first letter to a foreign ruler. Addressed to Mary Tudor, it recommended d’Oysel to her on his return journey and offered reassurances of friendship and “amity.” “May it please God,” penned the young Queen of Scots in her very best handwriting, “there shall be a perpetual memory that there were two queens in this isle at the same time, as united in inviolate amity as they are in blood and near lineage.” Mary Tudor was addressed as “Madam, my good sister,” and the letter ended with the standard valediction used in correspondence between sovereigns, “Your good sister and cousin, Marie.” Her letter, written in French, is neatly copied out between lines scribed into the paper with a stylus, which can still be detected in the original document.
None of this resolved the question of Mary’s “state” at St.-Germain, Amboise, Fontainebleau and elsewhere, where the court had gone in its circuit and where confusion increasingly prevailed. Part of the problem was caused by illness. Claude d’Urfe, the officer in charge of the children’s households, was genuinely sick. Lady Parois was unsympathetic, suggesting to Mary of Guise that he was merely overwhelmed by “feebleness.” She could get nothing done as a result. The cardinal, meanwhile, chivvied his sister, reminding her that as soon as the dauphin’s budgets were transferred, someone else would have to pay the salaries of Mary’s staff. “I have had a list drawn up,” he observed in a faux gesture of aid. It detailed everyone in Mary’s service together with the estimated yearly expenses. “I think that in this list as it stands, there is nothing either superfluous or catchpenny.”
What Charles never volunteered was money. Mary’s mother was expected to foot the bills, which Henry II refused to share because his Scottish expenses were already very high. Mary was herself a complication. She was beginning to assert herself through lavish spending, partly on clothes and ponies, but mainly through her generosity, never more evident than in dealings with her servants, for whom she sought promotions, improved working conditions and pay increases. Janet Sinclair, her old nurse, was an early beneficiary, obtaining a recommendation for her son and a promotion for her husband. Money and gifts were showered on the small army of actors, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, balladeers and clowns who kept Mary and her companions entertained, and she maintained a steady stream of rewards for the keepers of her dogs and ponies and the keepers of the royal bears.
Despite the escalating estimates, Mary’s uncles continued to press their case. Their niece, said the cardinal, was a queen “already possessed of a high and noble spirit that lets her annoyance be very plainly seen if she is unworthily treated.” Her “grandeur” had to be respected. She wished to be grown up and “to exercise her independent authority.” On the basis of her current spending, she would need around 24,000 livres tournois, or between 50,000 and 60,000 francs, a year to maintain her “state.” True, this excluded the stables, themselves by far the biggest single expense; but economies might be found.
It was a substantial sum, less so by French than Scottish standards; in Scotland it was equivalent to half the regular annual income of the crown. It was possible for Mary’s mother to contemplate such a huge commitment only because she had independent assets left over from her first and second marriages.
The negotiations dragged on for nine months, a delay that severely tested the morale of Mary’s existing staff. Many were not paid in the interim, and most were owed money from the previous year. Tempers were rising, exacerbated by the insensitivity of Lady Parois, a jealous and greedy woman whose tactless demands and bad attitude led to friction. Her feud with Madame de Curel, one of Mary’s most senior ladies-in-waiting and the candidate whom Antoinette of
Bourbon had originally backed in preference to Lady Fleming as Mary’s governess, ended with Curel’s resignation. She walked out after a fight, shockingly conducted in Mary’s presence. Others showed their frustration through straightforward absenteeism. Writing to Mary’s mother, Parois grumbled that there were very few attendants left above stairs and no one to do Mary’s hair except herself.
At last Mary secured her household. It was inaugurated on January 1, 1554, when her officers, attendants and domestic staff were put onto the roster. They included most of her previous servants, reinforced by some new faces to reflect her more exalted status. That evening, her uncle Charles was her first guest. As she wrote rapturously to her mother: “Madam, I’m thrilled . . . to tell you that today I entered into the household that you’ve been pleased to create for me; and this evening my uncle, the cardinal, comes to sup with me. I hope through your careful planning, everything will be well conducted.”
But fresh quarrels and money problems quickly arose, especially in the stables, where corners had been cut. Since the court migrated so often from place to place, horses, mules, coaches, carts and litters were essential. Three baggage mules were needed to carry Mary’s bed alone, and others were required for wall hangings, plate, kitchen utensils, bottles of wine and so on. Mary’s establishment could not afford its transport costs, for which the cardinal sought to compensate by curtailing the number of “removes” that it made. Instead of shadowing the royal court at every stage, he wished Mary to make fewer journeys and have longer stops at each one, omitting certain of the intermediate châteaux visited by the king and the dauphin to limit costs. On this the young Mary asserted herself, adamantly refusing to be detached from the main body of the court for very long.