Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Her world had gone from darkness into light. It was, on the surface, a fairy-tale piece of romanticism. Katherine, at twenty-four, still had the sunny good looks noted when she first came to England. She was described by ambassadors as being buxom, amiable and lively, inclined to smile even in adversity. Interestingly, however, letters between Katherine of Aragon and her father Ferdinand before the marriage suggest a more pragmatic agenda behind the love match, and a more active role for Katherine. Ferdinand urged his daughter to use ‘all your skill and prudence’ so as swiftly to ‘close the deal’.1 And Katherine, once safely wed, told Ferdinand that she loved her new husband so well firstly because he was the ‘so true son of your highness’, who desired to serve Ferdinand ‘with greater love and obedience’ than even a blood son might. This identification of Katherine of Aragon with Spain’s interests was a potential source of danger. But for the moment, this marriage gave the young Henry a partner more experienced in the ways of the world than he.

  Perhaps there was a hint of trouble to come when in January 1510 Katherine suffered her first miscarriage. But this was in itself not an uncommon occurrence. More worrying, in hindsight, with our knowledge of both Katherine’s and her daughter Mary’s gynaecological history, was the fact that her doctors seem to have convinced Katherine she had miscarried one of twins and was still pregnant, although even the Spanish ambassador reported she had resumed her menstrual cycle. She remained in seclusion, preparing for childbirth, until forced to emerge, discreetly, in the spring. By that time, however, she was able to announce that she was pregnant once again.

  On the morning of New Year’s Day 1511, Katherine gave birth to a boy, christened Henry, amid great rejoicing. After just seven weeks, the baby died, but again, such misfortunes were not uncommon in the sixteenth century. Certainly Katherine of Aragon’s relationship with Henry remained strong; strong enough so that by 1513 she was able to influence her husband and steer his country in the direction of an alliance with the Habsburgs and her birth family. She had obviously not forgotten her connection with Margaret of Austria, who had been one of the godparents of that short-lived baby boy.

  Margaret of Austria’s role as Governor of the Netherlands was not always easy; indeed, she wrote that she often wished herself back in her mother’s womb. She had to tread carefully around her father: ‘I know that it is not my business to interfere in your said affairs, as I am an inexperienced woman in such matters, nevertheless the great duty I have towards you emboldens me to beg of you . . . to take care whilst there is still time’, she wrote on one occasion. (‘Rude and ungracious’ was how he described the advice so carefully hedged around.) She had, moreover, to stand up for the needs of the Netherlands themselves, as distinct from her father’s grandiose policies. But she scored an early victory for those Netherlands when she succeeded in overturning a trade agreement with England that was highly detrimental to its interests: the ‘Malus Intercursus’.

  Five years before Anne Boleyn arrived in the Netherlands, moreover, Margaret of Austria had been a major player in the League of Cambrai, trusted in 1508 to represent her father, Emperor Maximilian, and her former father-in-law Ferdinand to negotiate an alliance with the French to aid the papacy against the encroachments of Venice. Maximilian wrote to advise her to engage all the houses on one side of Cambrai,2 leaving the other to the French king’s representative. Meanwhile the French king, Louis, himself wrote chattily to remind her of how he had played with her when she was a little girl at Amboise. Even the pope, another partner in this alliance against the encroachments of the Venetian republic, was in the habit of sending Margaret devotional objects and relics of great value, while Henry VII ordered his ambassador to speak to Margaret about English interests. As her court poet Jean Lemaire put it: ‘Madame Margaret has seen and experienced more at her youthful age . . . than any lady on record, however long her life.’

  Commentators spoke of her ‘courteous and caressing manners’. Although Margaret wrote to her ambassador in England that the negotiations gave her a headache and that she and her opponent frequently ‘got into each other’s hair’, she was willing to bring all her various abilities to the fight. Was it at Margaret of Austria’s court that Anne Boleyn learnt that her gender – femininity, sex itself – could be a weapon; could be a gambit in the great game that would set her against another woman – another queen – as surely as black and white face across the chessboard?

  But the League of Cambrai did not long endure after the pope decided that France itself represented more of a threat than Venice. The year 1511 saw the pope organising a Holy League against France, to which he recruited Maximilian and Ferdinand, Venice and Henry VIII. Margaret’s father wrote that French perfidy would teach her a lesson: ‘We have more experience of the French than you have . . . and we would rather you were deceived by their fair speeches than ourselves, so that you would take more care in future.’

  Faced with a long-running problem (the revolt of the Duke of Guelders, striving to win back the independence of his territory), at the end of 1510 Margaret wrote in agitation to her father: ‘you know I am a woman and that it is not my place to meddle in war . . . I beseech you my lord to have good advice over all this . . .’ Yet a few months later: ‘My Lord, I am readying myself . . . in order to march before our army. The army makes a very good sight, together with the artillery . . .’ Her father told her that she had fought ‘with the courage of a man and not that of a woman’.

  The year 1512 was particularly wearing. Guelders gained the backing of the French and Margaret had no money to fight either her own or her father’s various campaigns. But in 1513 the new anti-French coalition was confirmed and Margaret was as central to the process as its very name, the Treaty of Mechelen, suggests. Margaret (in contrast to her former sister-in-law Juana) was at the heart of European diplomacy.

  * There she was to bring up not only her nephew Charles but also three of his sisters. Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand, however, was raised in Spain by the grandfather for whom he was named, while a younger sister Catalina, born after Juana had returned to Spain, shared her mother’s captivity.

  * He paid those who allowed him to take out their teeth, rather than the reverse; a practice that might endear him to many today.

  7

  ‘False imputations’

  France, the Netherlands, 1513

  ‘A woman’, Castiglione wrote, ‘has not so many ways of defending herself against false imputations as has a man.’ Margaret of Austria was one of several women about to prove the truth of that dictat. The first six years of Margaret’s regency had left her looking like a woman with her hands very firmly on the reins. Anne de Beaujeu’s perfect pupil, you might say; the sort of woman Anne meant when she wrote that noblewomen were, ‘and should be, a pattern and an example for others in all things’.

  But a great deal of Anne de Beaujeu’s advice centred on one particular theme:

  Suffer no man to touch your body, no matter who he is . . . not one in a thousand escapes without her honour being attacked or deceived, however ‘good’ or ‘true’ her love. Therefore, for the greatest certainty in such situations, I advise you to avoid all private meetings, no matter how pleasant they are . . .

  Even the slightest slip could incur blame. Or, as Anne de Beaujeu had written in an uncomfortable prophecy:

  There is no man of worth, however noble he may be, who does not use treachery, nor to whom it does not seem good sport to deceive or trick women of rank . . . there is no man so perfect who, in matters of love, is truthful or keeps his word.

  The truth of that was about to be proved by Margaret of Austria herself, and perhaps also in France by the daughter of Anne de Beaujeu’s protégée, Margaret’s former playmate Louise of Savoy.

  The early years of Louise’s daughter Marguerite are inevitably known chiefly through accounts of her brother François, on whom centred all the hopes of the family ‘trinity’.1 But Marguerite’s marriage had long been discussed. While still
a child she had been offered as a bride for the future Henry VIII but the offer was declined, since it was felt that England’s heir merited a daughter of the King of France, not a mere cousin.

  As François’s probable accession, and his marriage to King Louis XII’s daughter Claude were established, England came back with a counter-offer: the suggestion that Marguerite might indeed marry the younger Henry if Louise of Savoy would marry his father, the widowed Henry VII. But Louis of France feared this double alliance might admit too much English influence into his country. When the English then suggested that Marguerite herself might marry the ageing Henry VII, she is reputed to have given a spirited refusal: ‘When my brother becomes king I will marry a man who is young, rich and noble – without having to cross the Channel!’ But in fact, in 1509, Marguerite was married off to the personally unimpressive Charles, Duc d’Alençon, thus settling a longstanding territorial dispute between the house of Alençon and Marguerite’s house of Angoulême.

  In 1513 it was not Marguerite of Navarre but the English who crossed the Channel. And not for matters of love but of war. In theory at least England’s efforts were directed at regaining the power and the territories it had held on the continent for much of the Middle Ages, and lost only in the fifteenth century. But in fact war was recognised as the main business, as well as pleasure, of the ruler – Machiavelli had very explicitly said as much – and Henry VIII was delightedly flexing his muscles as a warrior king when his alliance with the pope and Emperor Maximilian against France brought him abroad at the head of a mighty army.

  That August, the fall of the town of Thérouanne, near the borders of France and the Netherlands, was followed by the siege and triumphant capture of the wealthy walled city of Tournai. And when the treaty she struck between her father Maximilian and Henry VIII brought Henry across the English Channel, Margaret of Austria was there. Her father, quixotically, had declared his intention of serving as a volunteer in the English army. When he asked her to join him at the besieged town of Tournai, she replied that she would do so if it were really necessary, ‘but otherwise, it is not fitting for a widow to be trotting about and visiting armies for pleasure . . .’ Was she protesting too much? Perhaps.

  Later, Margaret of Austria did take her nephew Charles to meet her father and Henry VIII at Lille, and went on to Tournai, with notable consequences. Although it might not be considered worthy of record in the chronicles of great European events, the small drama played in the summer of 1513 and the following months is worth anatomising, not only for the insight it gives into the protagonists (Henry VIII included) but as a test case of the way a powerful woman could be manipulated through her sexuality; the way in which, particularly where women were concerned, the personal became part of the political.

  The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall described how Henry received Charles and Margaret outside Tournai and brought them into the town ‘with great triumph. The noise went that the Lord Lisle made request of marriage to the Lady Margaret . . . but whether he proffered marriage or not she favoured him highly.’ Lord Lisle was the recently ennobled Charles Brandon, a man on the make and already a man with a colourful marital history.

  Born in the gentry, Brandon had been raised at court. His father died at Bosworth, bearing Henry’s standard on the battlefield that gave Henry VII his crown. This sacrifice on the father’s part ensured favour for the son. A star of the tiltyard, he first jousted publicly on the occasion of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry VIII and had, crucially, quickly become the boon companion of the younger man. Contracted in youth to one of Elizabeth of York’s gentlewomen, he made her pregnant before repudiating the match to marry her wealthy widowed aunt instead. He sold many of the aunt’s lands before having that marriage annulled, on the grounds of consanguinity, and returning to marry the younger woman, who then died in 1510, leaving Brandon free. Made a Knight of the Garter in April 1513, he was created Viscount Lisle in May, when he was also betrothed to the eight-year-old Elizabeth Grey, heir to the Lisle barony.

  He had raised fifteen hundred men for the 1513 campaign and, at the siege of Tournai, led a successful assault on one of the city gates, in reward for which Henry handed him the keys of the surrendering city. Margaret of Austria’s agent with the English army reported to her that he was ‘a second king’; but he was someone she would, in any case, have been watching carefully.

  Margaret and her nephew Charles spent ten days with the English forces; ten days of ‘great solace’. (In celebration of the victory, Margaret was presented with a six-piece tapestry depicting Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies.) It is likely that Anne Boleyn was in Margaret of Austria’s train, observing the phenomenon that was the young Henry VIII. Spectators reported that one evening Henry danced ‘from the time the banquet finished until nearly day, in his shirt [that is, without his doublet]’ with Margaret and with Margaret’s ‘damsels’.

  But Margaret of Austria may not have had eyes only for Henry. What she saw in those ten days was Brandon and King Henry answering all comers at the joust, Brandon and King Henry dressed identically in purple velvet decked with gold, Brandon coming in disguise with the king to the masque that followed a banquet of a hundred dishes. On 20 October Margaret and her nephew returned to Lille but talk of their visit to Tournai continued.

  When Brandon was created Duke of Suffolk, it may have been in tribute to his prowess in France but such a leap, for such a man, attracted a great deal of international comment. Erasmus was among the shocked. Some said Brandon had been dramatically elevated so as to make him a more fitting match for Margaret: ‘Gossip has it that Maximilian’s daughter Margaret is to marry that new duke, whom the King has recently turned from a stableboy into a nobleman.’ In May, Brandon and Henry were once again defenders at a tournament, bearing the motto ‘Who can hold that will away’, perhaps suggesting that Brandon might be about to make a foreign journey.

  If Brandon indeed had pretensions to Margaret of Austria’s hand, it looked as though Henry were encouraging them. But the king found it at least prudent to express annoyance, writing to Margaret to promise signal punishment of the rumour-mongers. He acknowledged, however, ‘that the common report is in divers places that marriage is contemplated between you and our very dear and loyal cousin and councillor the Duke of Suffolk’. Margaret’s feelings can be seen in two long letters, signed simply ‘M’. [see note on sources] ‘M’ dared not write directly to king or duke, she said, ‘because that I fear my letters to be evil kept’. Discretion was the watchword, for all this was a tardy slamming of the stable door, and Margaret sounds a repeated note of almost hysterical caution.

  After having been some days at Tournai, she had been, she declared, struck by King Henry’s love for Brandon and by ‘the virtue and grace’ of Brandon’s person (‘the which me seemed that I had not much seen gentleman to approach it’). Because of ‘the desire the which he always showed me that he had to do me service’, she forced herself ‘to do unto him all honour and pleasure’. This seemed to be ‘well agreeable’ to King Henry, who indeed ‘many time spake unto me, for to know if this goodwill . . . might stretch unto some effect of promise of marriage’. As Margaret tells it, it was Henry who urged that this (a love match, a woman making her own choice?) ‘was the fashion of the ladies of England and . . . was not there holden for evil’. Margaret replied that ‘it was not here the custom and that I should be dishonoured and holden for a fool and light’.

  But Henry VIII would brook no argument. Margaret of Austria was forced to find another plea: that the English were so soon to leave the country. This went down better but Henry warned Margaret that she would surely have to marry somebody: ‘that I was yet too young for to abide thus; and that the ladies of his country did remarry at fifty and threescore years’. Margaret insisted she had no desire to marry again: ‘I was too much unhappy in husbands.’ But the men would not believe her. Twice more, in Brandon’s presence, Henry urged the match on Margaret, telling her again that she might well be
forced into a marriage. Unconvinced by her protests, ‘he made me to promise in his hand that howsoever I should be pressed of my father, or otherwise, I should not make alliance of marriage [with] prince of the world, at the least unto his return, or the end of the year’.

  What was going on? Was Henry truly playing Cupid, sportingly trying to help his crony towards this great match? Was he trying to avoid Margaret making another match; one disadvantageous to England? And what of the feelings of the two people most involved?

  In what sounds like a three-way conversation ‘at Tournai in my chamber one night after supper, full late’, Brandon told Margaret (she wrote) he would never marry, nor yet take ‘lady nor mistress, without my commandment, but would continue all his life my right humble servant’. These were the tropes of courtly love; Margaret of Austria, that child of a determinedly chivalrous court, was perhaps taken in. She promised ‘to be to him such mistress all my life as to him who me seemed desired to do me most of service’. And after that, said Margaret crossly, there was, nor should have been, any more said of the affair, if it had not been for some ‘gracious letters’ which had not been carefully and privately kept.

  She was not, after all, quite swept away. Not too swept away to query whether King Henry, in his role of ‘trwcheman’ or go-between, had (for whatever motive) perhaps protested even more than Brandon felt, or to note that many of the questions asked about the rumoured match seemed to be more concerned with Henry’s part in it than her own.