by John Guy
Within a year, the cardinal’s estimates were shown to be woefully inadequate, and Parois was up in arms. Her litany of complaints was endless. For example, more baggage animals were needed because Mary’s bed often arrived late at its destination. She had been forced to borrow beds, which was humiliating. On top of this, valuable objects had been damaged because, in the absence of sufficient mules to which her coffers could be securely strapped, they had been thrown onto carts, where they were jolted.
Mary, continued Parois, had nothing to wear. New fashions were in vogue, and she was in danger of being left behind. She urgently needed outfits for a wedding, and because she was growing so quickly, her touret (the jeweled frame on which the high collar at the back of the neck was stretched) needed lengthening. A pair of diamond settings mounted on thin metal would do the trick, but she lacked the money to buy them. Mary was also pleading to have monograms (most likely M or MR, for “Marie la Royne”) sewn onto her dresses in the style that had lately become all the rage. But money was too tight.
One result of Parois’s incessant complaints was a growing rumor that Mary’s credit was bad. This was scandalous and also highly inconvenient, since it meant suppliers would not deliver anything or accept further orders unless paid first in cash. Regular supplies on credit were essential to the smooth operation of a royal court, but the merchants argued that if Mary defaulted, they would be forced to sue for compensation in Scotland, an unacceptable commercial risk.
Soon the staff were in revolt again. In the financial year 1555–56, salaries fell into arrears and absenteeism was rife. There were accusations of corruption and misappropriation, seemingly confirmed when a gift of cash that Henry II had given Mary to spend at the fair at St.-Germain went missing, allegedly stolen.
Parois was unable to cope and took sick leave, forcing Antoinette of Bourbon to step in and maintain basic services in Mary’s suite. Antoinette took stock of the position. She did not believe Parois was up to the job and wanted her to resign. Unfortunately, it was one of the few occasions when both of Mary’s uncles were absent. Antoinette considered replacing Parois unilaterally, but thought the matter too important and delicate to be handled on her own. She even hinted that Mary’s mother might have to make a special visit to France.
The crunch came at Blois right after Christmas, while the cardinal was on a mission to Italy and unable to intervene. Mary, now thirteen, gave away some of her old dresses to two of her aunts. In performing this seemingly innocent gesture, she followed, as she afterward claimed, her mother’s advice, since these aunts, her mother’s younger sisters, were abbesses and the gifts were deeds of charity. The clothes, made of luxurious and costly fabrics, were to be cut up and turned into altar coverings. Such gifts, following hard on the heels of others to Mary’s servants, had sparked Parois’s jealousy. She spitefully snapped, “I see that you’re afraid in case you enrich me! Obviously you mean to keep me poor.”
This was no way to address a queen, but Mary answered regally. She was trying hard to control her emotions, something she always found difficult but could usually manage at least in the opening stages of a confrontation. “How sad,” she replied, and then excused herself.
Yet this was no isolated skirmish: it marked the culmination of a clash of personalities. Mary was precocious and vivacious, able to conduct herself in ways far older than her age, still barely a teenager but one who expected to get her own way. Parois was a much older woman burdened by self-importance and an inflated sense of duty. She was at best fussy, at worst a killjoy and a prig. She had already reported Mary to her mother for insubordination when Mary had insisted on wearing too much jewelry.
Mary wrote to her mother, giving her side of the story and pouring out her heart. “Madam, I most humbly beseech you to believe that there’s nothing in any of this, since . . . I’ve never stopped her from exercising authority over my wardrobe, because I knew very well that I shouldn’t.” However, she admitted: “I did tell John, my valet de chambre, that when she wished to remove anything he should inform me, because, if I wanted to give it away, I might find it gone.”
The clash of wills had been expressed through a battle to control Mary’s wardrobe. Now that it was in the open, Mary saw no reason to yield. “As to what she told you of my intransigent willfulness, madam, I’ve never had of her the credit of giving away a single pin, and thus I’ve acquired a reputation for being mean to the point where quite a few people have said to me how little I resemble you.”
Mary meant this last remark to hit home, since her mother always prided herself on her generosity to her own servants. She then vented her indignation against Parois. “I’m actually quite amazed,” she continued, “that she could tell you anything so far removed from the truth.”
It was an impasse, and when the Cardinal of Lorraine returned from Italy, there was no more prevarication. As he warned his sister, Parois was “ill” in Paris. She had left Mary’s household after the scene and it was unlikely she would return. Her “indisposition” was serious, possibly fatal. In any case, she wished to resign. The young Queen of Scots had gotten her way.
Mary herself, added the cardinal inscrutably, had been “sick,” mainly because of “things she had discovered toward the end that were scarcely possible to bear.” She had now fully recovered and was just as she was before, her looks and conversation holding everyone enthralled. But clearly some damage had been done.
A year later, Mary revisited the affair when she told her mother that Parois “had almost been the cause of my death for the fear I had of falling under your displeasure.”
This was the first of several occasions in her life when Mary said she had been close to death or wished she were dead. This was not simply teenage melodrama. Mary really had been seriously ill. Not the least of the enigmas about her is her medical history. In many respects, her health was robust. She rode her ponies every day and was able to meet extreme physical demands. But her good health was punctuated by episodic illnesses, often triggered by anxiety or stress, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which acute physical pain and sickness were followed by rapid recovery. In her adult life, Mary complained of rheumatism and “spleen,” the former common in an age without central heating and the latter caused by a gastric ulcer that eventually burst. But that does not fully explain her mood swings, which we know she felt, because in later life she wore a ring, an amethyst, that she believed had magical properties “contre la melancholie.”
The symptoms were always the same. She would vomit, suffer abdominal pain, feel overwhelming sadness or depression, and burst into tears. She supposedly had a surfeit of “black bile,” for which she was given medicines that, not surprisingly, failed to work. During one of her severest attacks in Scotland, witchcraft was blamed and a search instigated for the culprits and their charmed “bracelets.”
A modern but disputed explanation is that Mary had inherited an illness known as porphyria. An overproduction of purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicates the nervous system, and in cases of acute intermittent porphyria, the commonest type, the victim suffers sudden bouts of vomiting, abdominal pain, weakness or paralysis of the limbs and psychogenic changes resembling hysteria. Despite the severity of these symptoms, the patient recovers speedily afterward.
Porphyria was first suggested when medical historians, claiming that George III was among those suffering from the disease, tried to trace its descent back to his Stuart ancestors, in particular to James VI and I. Their diagnosis of George III is still controversial. Many experts believe that his symptoms could easily have been caused by bipolar disorder, and even if James, Mary’s son, could be shown to have had porphyria, it does not automatically follow that he acquired it on his mother’s side.
The riddle cannot be resolved. From the viewpoint of her biographers, it does not greatly matter, since what she herself experienced were her symptoms, which are fully documented. As to the illnesses of her youth, there is more than enough evidence th
at they were quite unrelated to porphyria.
When Mary was nearly eight, she was laid low by a bout of gastroenteritis. Between the ages of ten and twelve, she was sick a number of times, once with a palpitation of the heart, but in each case the doctors blamed excessive eating. Once they prescribed a diet of rhubarb, a general remedy for patients thought to have an imbalance of the bodily “humors” (“black bile” was one of them) as stipulated in the medical textbooks, and especially for overexcitement.
At the age of eleven, Mary had a toothache. Much more seriously, at an unknown date she was struck down by smallpox. Henry II sent her his personal physician, Jean Fernel, a doctor with a legendary reputation who had first come to his attention as Catherine de Medici’s gynecologist. Mary recalled her treatment in a letter to Elizabeth I, who herself had the disease in October 1562. “He would never tell me,” she said, “the recipe of the lotion that he applied to my face, having punctured the pustules with a lancet.” Although Elizabeth was her rival for the English throne, Mary’s heart went out to her, as every noblewoman feared the ravages of smallpox even more than plague or childbirth. In the event, both women’s skin was unmarked.
When Mary was thirteen and a half, she succumbed to an illness lasting several months. The symptoms included recurring attacks of fevers and chills, vomiting, headaches and abdominal pain. But this was not porphyria; it was a well-known viral disease prevalent in the summer called “the sweat” or “quartan ague.” Mary caught it in August 1556 during a particularly hot spell. Her attacks were “wonderfully severe and sharp,” and they were followed by remissions lasting between eight and ten days. “It is one of the maladies of this year which are affecting many,” the cardinal reassured her worried mother. The dauphin had also fallen victim, as had the Duke of Guise’s eldest son, Henry.
This was the illness to which Mary referred when she told her mother that Parois “had almost been the cause of my death for the fear I had of falling under your displeasure.” Her sickness and Parois were firmly connected in her mind. Parois, the classic aggrieved ex-employee, had been smearing her reputation in Paris, insinuating that she had spoken ill of Catherine de Medici to Diane de Poitiers. The result was that Catherine froze her out. It was a setback, because the Guise family had been making steady progress in their efforts to win over Catherine, despite her privately expressed doubts about the feasibility of their Franco-British project.
No permanent damage was done. When Mary’s uncles declared their niece to have reached the age of majority and arranged for her to have her own household, they had run a calculated risk. Overall it had worked out well, but after the debacle over Parois they were taking no chances. From this point on, Mary’s establishment was overseen from Joinville and Meudon, with Anne d’Este playing a leading role. No new governess was appointed, and soon Mary could describe her aunt and uncles as equally responsible for her.
When war with Spain was resumed, the Guise family got their biggest opportunity so far. In February 1556, the truce of Vaucelles with Spain broke down. Although meant to last five years, it did not hold, and by the summer of 1557, Philip II had brought England as well as Spain, Savoy and the Netherlands into the war against France. In August, an army led by Duke Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy invaded northern France and laid siege to the market town of St.-Quentin in Picardy, close to the frontier. A smaller French army under Constable Montmorency marched to the relief of the town, but was crushed, and six hundred nobles were captured, including the constable and four of his sons, who were imprisoned.
It was the most humiliating French military defeat of the sixteenth century. In a panic Henry II sent for the Duke of Guise, then in Italy, and appointed him lieutenant-general of the kingdom. The duke became the royal viceroy at the stroke of a pen. Not only did he have full command of all French military and naval forces, he also received the signet seal, enabling him to issue directives to the secretaries of state concerning such matters as foreign affairs, finance and the royal household.
Henry II wanted to launch a counterattack, especially against England. Having recaptured Boulogne in 1550, he now wished to liberate Calais and its surrounding forts, the last enclave of the English occupation of France left over from the Hundred Years War.
The duke instantly saw the possibilities. He led a masterful attack on Calais on January 1, 1558, when a severe frost made it possible for his troops almost literally to walk on water. The weakness of the town was its old-fashioned castle. The English garrison was complacent and there had been defectors, but this scarcely mattered because the Guise assault was so rapid and precise. The surrounding forts were taken after a brief bombardment, and on the 24th Henry II made a ceremonial entry into the town to the sounds of the anthem “When Israel Came Out of Egypt.” The king was elated by the reconquest, which in his view more than compensated for the catastrophe of the constable’s defeat at St.-Quentin.
As Henry walked in procession with his nobles and councilors through the streets of Calais in his azure and gold robes trimmed with ermine and wearing his “imperial” crown, the Guise brothers were poised to capitalize on their momentous victory. They had monopolized politics in 1557–58. Their success lay in their effective collaboration, meticulous planning and intelligence gathering; their command of technical detail was unsurpassed. To recover Calais from its English occupation had been the aim of the French monarchy for more than a century. Previous attempts had come to nothing. Suddenly the goal had been achieved. It seemed to be a miracle, one entirely due to the genius of the Guises.
The constable was still a prisoner in Brussels, and to underline the internal realignment of power, the Cardinal of Lorraine clapped his nephew into irons on a charge of heresy. The Guise family were at the pinnacle of their power. They seemed to be invincible. If ever there was a moment for them to reap their due reward, this was it.
5
Education
MARY’S EDUCATION was meticulously planned. The old medieval assumption that book learning was irrelevant to kings and nobles had been shattered in France when Louise of Savoy prescribed a course of study for her son, Francis I, modeled on the best practice of the Italian Renaissance. Francis studied biblical history, rhetoric, and Greek and Latin literature. He learned to speak Italian and Spanish with reasonable fluency. He grew up to be a keen artistic connoisseur, who built a unique collection of paintings and antique sculptures, and a patron of writers and musicians. At his invitation Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini took up residence in France, each for several years. Among his many treasures, Francis owned the Mona Lisa, which he kept with other prized paintings from his collection in his bathroom.
The status of women at the French court had been transformed by the traffic between France and Italy. Women in Italy were essential contributors to courtly society, valued especially as conversationalists. Women’s education had been championed in Europe by the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives and the Englishman Thomas More. In Mary’s case, her family believed it essential to her courtly training to prescribe a course of study that followed their ideals. A key element was a knowledge of languages, followed by rhetoric, history and poetry. Although these subjects seemed relatively esoteric, they were considered almost entirely practical.
The art of politics and of governing well, as the theorists believed, could be taught from the examples of history. Next, the art of speaking well and of political persuasion—rhetoric or eloquence—was studied from the texts of classical and modern languages and from poetry. The leading advice books, among them Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, held that “the arts of speaking and of ruling well” were closely related and best acquired from studies of antiquity. A ruler or councilor unable to mold language “like wax after his own mind” would be sure to fail. The “greatness and gorgeousness of an oration” were that “at the first show” of the words, their dignity and brightness would appear like “tables of painting placed in their good and natural light.” Governors had to be able to speak conf
idently in public: their audiences, whether select groups of advisers or parliaments, could be “moved” by the skillful use of oratory, hence they should be taught the best of the models and techniques that the Greek and Roman rhetoricians had perfected.
The most striking thing about Mary’s education is that she followed a curriculum almost identical to that of her male counterpart, the dauphin. This was unusual for a girl. It cannot have been solely because she was a queen, because Henry II’s daughters and those of a number of his leading councilors also took their places in the schoolroom. But without her royal connections, Mary could not have hoped for the caliber of tutors or the unrestricted access to books and rare manuscripts that she enjoyed.
Her set texts included Cicero’s On Duties, Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Training of an Orator, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of famous Greeks and Romans. In studying them, Mary would have progressed from acquiring a basic knowledge of Latin grammar to a more intensive study and imitation of the leading authors, reading Greek writers in Latin translations at first. When she had mastered Latin, she would have moved on to Greek and Italian and possibly Spanish. Her vernacular was, of course, already French.
Like all students who followed this curriculum, Mary was expected to make translations from her own language into Latin and to write prose compositions imitating the techniques for which Cicero and others were famous. Along the way, she would have been introduced to texts, notably by Plato and Aristotle, that had an ethical and philosophical content, to Ptolemy’s standard work on geography, and to histories such as those of Plutarch and Livy.
Taken together, these elements were regarded as a vocational course of study, the equivalent (for a prospective ruler) of a degree in business administration. The final stage, more or less akin to graduation, was for Mary to deliver an oration in Latin in front of her family and the entire royal court in the great hall at the Louvre. Most of those present would have understood it, depending on how grammatically fluent her oration was and how quickly she talked.