Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Five years earlier, in 1492, a single triumphant year had seen Isabella of Castile riding into the palace of the Alhambra, victorious at last over the Moors who had long occupied southern Spain, her expulsion of the Jews and the discovery of the New World by her protégé Christopher Columbus. But even more significant, perhaps, would be Isabella’s work in supporting – but also, crucially, in reforming – the Catholic church in Spain.

  In 1478 Isabella had applied to the pope for permission to launch the Inquisition in Spain. Her and Ferdinand’s officers acted so harshly that the pope felt impelled to intervene; they were replaced, ironically, with the now-infamous Tomás de Torquemada, who soon established not only an authoritarian spiritual rule but an efficient network of tribunals across all the territories of the Catholic kings. This impetus fuelled action against Moor and Jew. Isabella’s Castile had been frontline territory, with Islam on its very boundaries. But her efforts would prove something of a pre-emptive strike, explaining why Protestantism would never make any real incursion on the Spanish peninsula.

  The impetus for change came from Isabella herself. She boasted that in her eagerness to root out other, heretical strands of faith: ‘I have caused great calamities and depopulated towns, lands, provinces and kingdoms’. The human cost of her actions was high. A priest who observed the expulsion of Jews, whose families had lived in Spain for centuries, recorded the emigrants collapsing, giving birth, dying by the roadside ‘so that there was no Christian who was not sorry for them’. Nevertheless, after her death, there were moves for Isabella’s canonisation.

  This was the spirit and the lesson that her daughters carried abroad, as they were married off to spread the influence of Isabella and Ferdinand’s dynasty. Margaret of Austria, as she arrived in Spain, had the chance to meet at least some of her new sisters-in-law. The eldest – named Isabella for the mother whose heir she was – had years earlier been married to the heir of the King of Portugal. Her young spouse was killed in a riding accident after they had been married a mere seven months, and after years of family pressure Isabella was persuaded in 1497 to marry Manuel, who had replaced her first husband as Portugal’s king. As Margaret of Austria arrived in the country, Isabella was departing, while Juana had already left for the Netherlands.1

  Margaret of Austria certainly met her youngest sister-in-law, who was preparing to eventually leave the Spanish court. The marriage of Katherine of Aragon to the English Prince Arthur was becoming ever more pressing. On July 1498, Spain’s ambassador in England wrote that:

  The Queen and the mother of the King [Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort] wish that the Princess of Wales [Katherine] should always speak French with the Princess Margaret [of Austria] who is now in Spain, in order to learn the language and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England. This is necessary, because these ladies do not understand Latin and much less, Spanish.

  Margaret was warmly welcomed in Spain despite a certain clash of cultures. The seventeenth-century Jesuit author Pedro Abarca, in his Reyes de Aragon, wrote that although Margaret was allowed all her habitual servants, freedom and diversions, she was warned not to treat grandees ‘with the familiarity and openness usual with the houses of Austria, Burgundy and France but with the gravity and measured dignity of the kings and realms of Spain’.

  Just months after his marriage to Margaret, in the autumn of 1497, the frail, over-solemn Juan died and Margaret (‘so full of sorrow’, as she described herself, ‘that there was no room for any more griefs’) lost the baby she was carrying. Her court poet Jean Lemaire, in Couronne Margaritique, later wrote that she endured a labour of twelve days and nights without food or sleep.2

  Margaret told her father that Queen Isabella never left her and that she would have died were it not for her mother-in-law’s care. Ferdinand and Isabella wrote to Maximilian that Margaret was ‘as strong and full of courage as you would wish her to be and we try to console her . . . we have and will have as much care of her as we would have if her husband were alive’. A generous reaction, given that many contemporaries believed Juan had been killed by overindulgence in ‘the pleasures of marriage’ with the hot-blooded Margaret.

  Margaret of Austria now had no real role in Spain, any more than she had had in France after Charles VIII abandoned her. Again, however, Margaret stayed for a time in her new country, where she had found great popularity. Her departure was delayed while her father-in-law and her father haggled over her dowry, her future marriage possibilities, her best deployment in the ongoing tug-of-war with France, and finally over the route and timing of her journey. But early in 1499 – crossing by land the France of which she had once been called queen – she returned to Flanders. Nineteen years old and once again cheated of married life.

  She arrived just in time to stand godmother (alongside her own godmother Margaret of York) to her brother Philip of Burgundy’s son by Juana of Aragon, the eventual heir to both Spain, through his mother, and to his father’s Netherlands territories. For the Habsburg dynasty the birth of baby Charles was a triumph but on a personal level the marriage of Philip and Juana was a disaster. Not perhaps for the husband, who had from the first treated his wife with a contempt bordering on cruelty but for Juana, who responded to this harsh treatment with a devotion to Philip so slavish – and if hostile reports are to be believed, so hysterically jealous – that it became the chief grounds for the allegations of her insanity.

  Margaret’s personal sympathies were probably torn. In any case, she was soon given her own residence at the castle of le Quesnoy, away from the court. Politically, in March 1501 the Spanish ambassador Fuensalida was able to report disgruntledly that Madame Margaret ‘simply follows her brother’s fancies in all things’. When later asked by the Spanish to mediate between the warring couple, she sent word to Ferdinand that there was nothing she could do. As the Spanish ambassador reported ominously, ‘she is returning to her own lands now because she is not able to suffer here the things that she sees going on . . .’

  Margaret of Austria was not going to remain in the Netherlands forever. Discussions, conducted by her father and brother, about yet another marriage had begun while she was still in Spain, with mentions of the Duke of Milan, the kings of Scotland, Hungary and even France, since Margaret’s childhood husband Charles VIII had died and a new king held the French throne. In the end, the choice of Margaret’s next husband fell on the young Duke of Savoy, Philibert, brother of Margaret’s erstwhile playmate Louise of Savoy.

  The duchy of Savoy was the gateway to Italy, the stage of much of the competitive fighting between the great European powers, and so the match gave Margaret of Austria’s relatives access to a strategically vital territory. Moreover while Philibert was technically a vassal of Maximilian’s, his French upbringing at Anne de Beaujeu’s hands meant he was very much under the sway of that country. This was something Margaret’s father and brother may have been eager to change.

  Margaret showed no eagerness to remarry. But although this third marriage would prove to be the least important on the great European stage, it would be the one which gave her most happiness. Philibert, a party-loving daredevil just a few months younger than she, shared, with Margaret’s brother, the sobriquet of ‘the Handsome’. The marriage contract was signed in Brussels on 26 September 1501 and Margaret of Austria set off in October (accompanied for the first half league by Margaret of York, the last time they would meet). At the beginning of December she met Philibert near Geneva and was received enthusiastically. For the first time Margaret had a partner who shared her vitality. Touring the duchy together, they settled down at the castle of Pont l’Aine near Borg in the spring of 1503.

  But there was another side to Philibert’s gaiety. His time was occupied in hunting, jousting and dancing; he had no interest in attending to the business of the duchy. That was dealt with by his illegitimate half-brother, René, until the advent of Margaret, who had no intention of leaving the ‘Bastard of Savoy’ his authority. Whether or not h
er hostility was justified, she used every weapon at her disposal against him, even involving her father to have René stripped of the letters of legitimacy that gave him, a bastard, the right to his property.

  Her motives may have been political; she had her family’s interests to follow, or they may have been personal. Perhaps past experiences had soured her of (usually masculine) authority. Perhaps, even, she had seen in her sister-in-law Juana’s fate what happened when a royal wife abnegated public responsibility. Either way, the Bastard was declared a traitor. He took refuge in France, where he was welcomed by his half-sister Louise of Savoy.

  While Philibert hunted, Margaret of Austria took up the reins of government, effectively telling him not to worry his pretty head. She summoned the council, appointed officers, discussed foreign policy with her brother when he visited and approved his plans for a continued rapprochement with France. She never neglected the parties or the hunting; there is an account of her appearing at one masque as Queen of the Amazons, with a crimson headdress and jewelled cuirass and with (one thinks of Isabella of Castile) a naked sword in hand. But her experience in Savoy was the final stage of her political apprenticeship; a rehearsal for activities on the wider European stage, to which fate was about to return her.

  The summer of 1504 was scorchingly hot. Even Philibert was unable to hunt. So in the first days of September he returned to his avocation with even more enthusiasm. After a frenetic morning pursuing a wild boar, he flung himself down in the shade, gulping from a fountain, only to be seized by a sudden chill. At the palace, doctors were summoned but despaired. Margaret ordered her valuable pearls to be ground up for medicine but to no avail; Philibert died on the morning of 10 September. The story goes that Margaret’s attendants had to restrain her from flinging herself from the window.

  She did fling herself into the rebuilding of the family church at Brou, where Philibert was buried, causing her self-invented motto: ‘FORTUNE. INFORTUNE. FORT. UNE’ to be carved all over it. This can be translated to imply that ‘fate is very cruel to women’ or, conversely, that ‘Fortune. Misfortune. Strengthens. One’. The ‘e’ of ‘une’ makes it clear that it is a woman in question.3 In the years ahead Margaret of Austria’s palace at Mechelen was to feature wooden busts of herself and Philibert, in which Margaret, although she commissioned them after his death, wore the loose hair of a bride, rather than the widow’s cap. At twenty-four, she was cheated of married life for yet a third time. Her father and brother were at first anxious to marry her off yet again but after three such ill-fated attempts at matrimony, Margaret declared herself ‘much disinclined to make another trial’.

  But as well as her husband, she had lost her new-found role. Or had she? Philibert was succeeded by an eighteen-year-old half-brother whose youth made it seem, for a while, as though Margaret might manage to hold on to a measure of power. The new young duke, however, reneged on the deal, leaving Margaret furious. If he thought ‘that by such unmannerly treatment he can reduce us and put his intentions through, he has the wrong idea’, she wrote later. ‘For all that we are a woman, our heart is of a different nature . . .’*

  In France, Louise of Savoy was also now a youthful widow. The little dauphin, the son that Anne of Brittany had borne to Charles VIII of France at the start of their marriage, had died in 1495. Louise’s husband Charles d’Angoulême fell sick of a fever and died on his way to the dauphin’s funeral. Resisting, like a striking number of these women, any attempt to marry her off again, Louise concentrated on keeping control of her son, François.

  As the boy’s leading kinsman, the Duc d’Orléans had claimed that Louise of Savoy could not take guardianship of her two children, being herself a minor, as France set twenty-five as the age of legal majority for women. But the young widow argued that in Cognac, where François was born, women were allowed to exercise rights of guardianship at fourteen. The royal council decided more or less in her favour, with the Duc d’Orléans (provided Louise did not remarry) given merely a supervisory role.

  Louise of Savoy settled down in Cognac to administer her extensive lands. There she set about bringing up her two children in the strong-minded and scholarly tradition she had learnt in Anne de Beaujeu’s household. ‘Also, my daughter, if at some point in the future God takes your husband, leaving you a widow, then you will be responsible for your children, like many other young women; have patience, because it pleases God, and govern wisely’, Anne wrote in her Enseignements. Louise’s motto (borrowed from Lorenzo de Medici and written on the wall of her room at Angoulême) was ‘libris et liberis’: books and children.

  Her daughter, Marguerite, had the same teachers as her son. Both learnt Spanish and Italian from their mother, and Latin and biblical history from two humanist scholars, while a miniature shows Marguerite and her brother playing chess. But there was no doubt which of the two children occupied more of their mother’s attention.

  Louise of Savoy has been blamed for her focus on François but Marguerite herself would share that obsessive interest. And perhaps it was inevitable, as the childlessness of successive short-lived French kings brought François ever closer to the throne. When, in 1498, Charles VIII suddenly died, after hitting his head on the lintel of a doorway, the throne passed to Louis, Duc d’Orléans, the cousin of Louise’s husband Angoulême. And Louis was still childless, the cynical predictions about his marriage to the crippled Jeanne having proved all too accurate.4

  After Charles VIII’s death, his widow Anne of Brittany threw herself into hysterical mourning but also immediately took steps to resume her rights in her duchy. Her first marriage contract stipulated that if King Charles died, the only person she could remarry was the next King of France; a way to continue France’s annexation of Brittany. The new king Louis XII accordingly took steps to set aside his existing wife, the barren Jeanne, on the grounds of non-consummation. Jeanne was asked to undergo a humiliating physical examination, a papal decree was granted and Jeanne retired to a convent, eventually to be canonised.

  While the marriage of Louis and Anne of Brittany was politically necessary for both sides, this was no guarantee it would solve the problem of the succession. The groom was thirty-six and in poor health, while Anne’s repeated pregnancies by Charles had not yet produced an heir.

  Unless or until a son was born to King Louis and his new queen, Louise of Savoy’s boy François was heir presumptive. Under these circumstances, Louise had to battle to be allowed to bring up François herself. She did have to bring her son rather more closely under Louis’s eye, to Amboise on the Loire, where François and the gang of young men placed around him could enjoy the hunting and mock tournaments that were so much to his taste. She had also to submit to the surveillance of Louis’s trusted man, the Seigneur de Gié, whose aggressive concept of his duties made the family feel like prisoners at times. Louise’s children slept in her bedroom and an officer had to be present at the lever, the ceremonial rising of the young heir. One day, when Louise declared her children were still sleeping, an official went so far as to break down the door.

  Anne of Brittany endured repeated pregnancies and Louise’s journal makes no bones about her feelings. In 1502, ‘Anne, Queen of France, on the twenty-first of January, Saint Agnes Day, gave birth at Blois to a son; however, stillborn, he was no threat to my Caesar’s rise to power.’ There continued to be no sign of a living boy. In 1499 Louise and her children were at Romorantin, where Queen Anne joined their seclusion to avoid the plague, and there gave birth to a daughter, Claude. Was the idea of a match between this royal daughter and Louise’s son François also born at Romorantin?

  Perhaps neither mother wanted the match: Anne of Brittany because she secretly hoped to marry Claude, Brittany’s heiress, to the imperial Habsburgs (Anne had always kept in touch with Margaret of Austria) and thus maintain her duchy’s independence, while Louise of Savoy may have reflected that Claude came from a family with a poor record of fertility and was, like so many of her inbred clan, including Louis’s f
irst wife Jeanne, mildly deformed. Louise and Anne of Brittany were always in enmity, although in 1504 they had briefly collaborated to rid themselves of the overbearing Seigneur de Gié.

  But in 1505, when Louis XII fell desperately ill, it made imperative what had long been discussed: the marriage of twelve-year-old François, the heir, to King Louis’s seven-year-old daughter Claude. Louis’s will placed the guardianship of Claude with her mother Anne but gave Louise a seat alongside her on the regency council. Both women swore to execute the will with their hands resting on a piece of the True Cross. King Louis recovered but the betrothal ceremony went ahead, with the pair then separating to grow up. The following spring another formal ceremony acknowledged François as Louis’s heir.

  Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy were now both young widows. But while Margaret was again plunged into uncertainty, Louise’s path lay clear ahead.

  * Again it will often be convenient to speak of ‘Spain’, although official unification of the Spanish kingdoms would not happen until the eighteenth century.

  * Impossible not to think, in comparison and contrast, of the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ and Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

  5

  Princess Brides

  England, Scotland, 1501–1505

  A princess’s fate was to be married for her family’s benefit. Her own happiness, or otherwise, was a matter of fortune. Across the Channel, in England and in Scotland, two other royal girls were feeling the force of that lesson.