Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Margaret had been told, she wrote, that Brandon had shown off a diamond ring of hers ‘which I cannot believe, for I esteem him much a man of virtue and wise’. But one night at Tournai, ‘after the banquet he put himself upon his knees before me and in speaking and him playing, he drew from my finger the ring and put it upon his and then showed it to me and I took to laugh’.

  Margaret told Brandon he was a thief, a ‘laron’ and that she hadn’t thought the king kept thieves in his company. Brandon couldn’t understand the word laron, so Margaret tried the Flemish word, ‘dieffe’, and begged him (once that evening, when he seemed not to understand her and once next morning through the king) to return the ring to her ‘because it was too much known’. She gave him one of her bracelets instead; a less incriminatingly familiar piece of jewellery.

  But Brandon took the ring from her again at Lille and would not give it back, saying he would give her other, better, rings. He ‘would not’ understand her protests and Margaret could only beg that the jewel would never be shown to anybody. She had been carried beyond what her prudence would allow. But all the same, at bottom the matter of the ring was, or should have been, a courtly game. Fun, flattering, and genuinely warming, no doubt, to a woman who was still, as Henry VIII kept reminding her, too young to have given up on love, but not in itself to be taken seriously.

  The serious part came in the second letter, in which Margaret of Austria promised to show ‘all the inconveniences which may happen of this thing’. She had been horrified to discover the business was being spoken of at home, abroad, even in Germany ‘so openly as in the hands of merchant strangers’. An English merchant had dared to make wagers upon it and though she was grateful for everything Henry had done to quash the story, ‘yet I see the bruit is so imprinted in the fantasies of people . . . [that] I continue always in fear’.

  The letter shows her not as the powerful fixer but as a very rattled, still-young, woman. Nonetheless, Margaret of Austria had made her choice: power over pleasure. But the same trap that had caught even the confident and experienced Margaret of Austria may in the same year have ensnared the more vulnerable Marguerite of Navarre.

  Clever, complex, self-critical and conflicted, Marguerite was the author of a huge body of published writings that were highly unusual for her day in exploring, almost obsessively, a woman’s inner journey. Most notable is the Heptaméron, a collection of stories about love and lust, supposedly told to each other by a group of stranded travellers, which Marguerite wrote later in life. Though modelled (like Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies) on Boccaccio’s Decameron, parts of the Heptaméron display so many echoes of real life that the idea that it is to some degree autobiographical cannot entirely be dismissed [see note on sources].

  Her near-contemporary, the writer Brantôme, identifies Marguerite and a young nobleman called Guillaume Gouffier, Seigneur de Bonnivet, as the protagonists of one particular story that describes a sexual assault. Although much of Brantôme’s writing is scurrilous to the point of pornography, he is the better a witness for the fact that both his mother and his grandmother had been Marguerite’s ladies-in-waiting.

  The protagonists of novella ten of the Heptaméron are Floride and Amadour; the flowerily-named Marguerite and the amorous Bonnivet? In the novel Amadour had been married to Floride’s favourite attendant, Avanturade, who died early; in real life Bonnivet married Marguerite’s lady-in-waiting Bonaventure, who likewise died young. Floride had known Amadour in childhood; just so had the real-life Bonnivet come into Marguerite’s family circle when his elder brother was appointed to oversee the education of her brother François. That was in Marguerite’s youth but in 1513 Marguerite had been four years a married woman, which made her fair game in the essentially adulterous sport of courtly love.

  In December 1513 Marguerite and her husband, Alençon, visited Louise in Cognac. The hapless Alençon had fallen from his horse and broken his arm when François came to join them, with Bonnivet in his train. And, if the events of the Heptaméron are in any sense autobiographical, Bonnivet was set on the path ‘that leads to the forbidden goal of a lady’s honour’. The protagonists of the novel have an encounter in which Amadour seizes Floride’s hands and takes her feet ‘in a vice-like grip’. ‘His whole expression, his face, his eyes change as he speaks. The fair complexion flushes with a fiery red; the kind, gentle face contorts with a terrifying violence, as if there were a raging inferno belching fire in his heart and behind his eyes. When Floride repulses him he claims to have been merely testing her; a familiar trope of the courtly love story.2

  Marguerite had a difficult and dramatic emotional history.* A letter to her spiritual advisor tells us than in her childhood Louise of Savoy had so ‘beaten and berated’ Marguerite for some ‘folly and guile’, that Marguerite could not believe her mother really loved her. But the continued prevalence of sexual violence in Marguerite’s writing may suggest some specific concern or trauma. The narrator of the Heptaméron, Parlamente, warns her female listeners against men’s treachery: ‘A woman’s love is rooted in God and founded on honour . . . But most [men’s] love is based on pleasure, so much so that women not being aware of men’s evil intentions, sometimes allow themselves to be drawn too far.’

  Perhaps, like Margaret of Austria, Marguerite of Navarre had learnt a painful lesson. And there was a lesson there for Anne Boleyn too, surely, though only time would prove how well or badly she had learnt it.

  * Marguerite’s lifelong concern with the establishment of hospitals and the care of orphaned children makes it very hard not to think of another people’s princess who compensated for lack of love closest to home by loving all the world in the hope it would love her.

  8

  Flodden

  Scotland, England, 1513

  The same quarrel between France and its neighbours that had taken Charles Brandon across the Channel was also fought in the British Isles, and would continue to be fought through the first part of the century. Where France led, its old ally Scotland would usually follow, whereas in England, Katherine of Aragon had been one of the chief promoters of war against France, her Aragonese father’s ancient enemy.

  As the Venetian ambassador put it: ‘the King is bent on war, the Council is averse to it; the Queen will have it and the wisest councillors in England cannot stand against the Queen’. But any resumption of the centuries-old conflict between England and Scotland would set Katherine of Aragon painfully at odds with her husband’s sister, Margaret Tudor, wife of the King of Scots.

  When Henry VIII set off on campaign in France in the summer of 1513, Katherine was left as ‘Regent and Governess’ of England, albeit with a council of noblemen to advise her. Her appointment might well have been controversial. Half a century earlier, when Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou had tried to exercise power during his incapacity, the result had been a power struggle culminating in civil war: the Wars of the Roses.

  ‘Moreover it is a right great perversion / A woman of a land to be a regent’ ran a popular ditty, while descriptions of Margaret of Anjou as a ‘great and strong laboured woman’ went hand in hand with slurs on her sexual morality. But since then, the mechanics of Henry VIII’s accession had been (in the words of the Garter Herald) ‘over seen by the mother of the said late king’; Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort. Katherine’s influence over her husband’s policies was an accepted, if not necessarily a welcome, fact. And there was, in any case, a different tussle looming.

  Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France had set it too on a collision course with the ‘holy alliance’ of which England was a part, dragging the two island neighbours into war with each other. Katherine herself – just as had her mother Isabella of Castile – accompanied the country’s army northwards when the Scots took advantage of Henry’s absence and invaded. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, historian and tutor at the Spanish court, heard that ‘in imitation of her mother Isabella’, Katherine gave a moving speech to rally the troops, telling them that
‘they should be ready to defend their territory, that the Lord smiled upon those who stood in defence of their own’.

  She wrote to the Netherlands (her letter addressed to that rising man Thomas Wolsey, there with King Henry) that she was busy ‘making standards, banners, and badges’. She also wrote to Margaret of Austria, asking her to send a physician to Henry. And, like her mother Isabella before her, Katherine immersed herself in the most fundamental preparations for war. She organised troops and money to go northwards – artillery, provisions and ships – and told Wolsey also that ‘My heart is very good to it.’

  The Earl of Surrey, in the north, was England’s first line of defence and a second wave of troops was stationed across the Midlands. But Katherine herself (who carried in her luggage a light gold helmet with a crown) was prepared if necessary to command a third wave even further to the south, despite the fact that she was perhaps once again in the early stages of pregnancy. Events meant her force was not needed but the possibility was sufficiently realistic for the Venetian ambassador in London to report that, ‘Our queen also took the field against the Scots with a numerous force one hundred miles from here.’

  Katherine of Aragon’s fervour was in sharp contrast to the feelings of Margaret Tudor, who Katherine had known a decade before, on her first arrival in England, and with whom, on a personal level, she felt considerable sympathy.

  Margaret Tudor had always taken seriously the idea that it was her mission to bring about closer relations between England and Scotland, but that dream had looked fragile almost from the start of her brother’s reign. Her husband, James IV, had been horrified by the anti-French league formed between England and its allies, including Spain, the Empire and the papacy. He wrote – and made Margaret write – to the crowned heads of Europe, beseeching them to keep the peace.

  One welcome event in the spring of 1512 was the birth of another son. But Margaret Tudor’s hopes of an Anglo-Scottish alliance seemed far from accomplishment, and further than ever when the French queen Anne of Brittany sent James her glove, with a letter begging him to be her champion. Margaret was horrified that her husband took so seriously a gesture from the games of chivalry. Later stories report that she dreamt of seeing him hurled from a cliff, while her own jewels, under her horrified gaze, changed from diamonds into a widow’s pearls.

  A kind of family relationship continued; the ambassador who came north to talk to James also brought a letter from Henry to Margaret. When Margaret had recently been pregnant with her surviving boy, Henry and Katherine had sent the girdle of Our Lady to her from Westminster Abbey. But when, dining with the ambassador, Margaret plied him with questions about the brother she had not seen for a decade – and also about the enthusiasm husband and brother shared for building up their navies – the man assumed she had been told by her husband to gather naval secrets. Small wonder the ambassador reported that she ended the meeting ‘right heavy’.

  The collapse of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland – by now clearly inevitable – was all the more strange for the fact that Margaret Tudor and her Scottish son were still Henry VIII’s heirs. Henry was in France when the Scottish herald arrived, bearing a declaration of war. Henry shouted that James IV was a man of no faith and that he himself was, harking back to a claim made centuries before, ‘the very owner’ of Scotland, which James held only by homage. It would ‘become him, being married to the king of England’s sister, to recount the king of England his ally,’ Henry said. ‘I care nothing but for the mistreating of my sister, that would God she were in England on a condition she cost the Scottish king not a penny.’

  Presciently, James IV had not waited to hear Henry VIII’s reply before he began to muster his armies. On his way to join them, he called at Linlithgow to see Margaret, now (like Katherine) in the early throes of another pregnancy. He dismissed her dreams of his death, her pleas that he should not go: ‘It is no dream. Ye are to fight a mighty people.’ If she really spoke those words, they could have been in pride as well as terror, since they had been her people too. There is a tower in Linlithgow from which, yet another romantic story says, Margaret strained her eyes southwards to watch for James’s return. But they also say that, so certain had she been of what would happen that day, she did not send to search the battlefield at Flodden where, on 9 September, the armies met.

  The loss of Scottish life was appalling; perhaps as many as ten thousand men. Katherine, in England, described the victory in triumphant terms to Henry, sending her husband the coat of the slain Scottish king, James IV. She would have sent the king himself (as a prisoner, or as a corpse?), she wrote, ‘but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it’.

  When the news of her husband’s death, 140 rugged miles away, reached Margaret Tudor at Linlithgow, the 23-year-old pregnant widow acted both swiftly and decisively. Though the battle had been fought well south of the border, the English armies might yet advance into Scotland. Margaret took her eighteen-month-old son, the new James V, further inland, to her castle of Stirling, where the rocky crags below made the castle at least feel invulnerable. There, James V was crowned on 21 September, just twelve days after his father’s death, in what became known as the Mourning Coronation.

  After the catastrophe of Flodden, only fifteen temporal lords and a handful of bishops were left alive to help Margaret govern the country. A reeling council, a mere twenty-three men, hastily read and approved the will James had made before he left Linlithgow, which appointed Margaret as regent for their son. Just half a century earlier, after all, Scotland had seen another queen consort, Mary of Guelders, act as regent for her son, the nine-year-old James III. Margaret was to be ‘testamentary tutrix’ to the new James V, though she was not to act without a quorum of lords that would be permanently on hand to advise her.

  In their wreck of a country, Margaret Tudor and the Scottish council acted swiftly to try to restore order. As September turned to October, royal proclamations were sent out forbidding the looting of houses and the molesting of women left (as so very many were) without a male protector. Stirling, and other fortresses, were strengthened, for all that there were hardly enough men left to garrison them.

  Very quickly, however, cracks began to appear in the Scottish command. When Margaret wrote to the pope, suggesting her candidates for several bishoprics left vacant when their incumbents died at Flodden, there was anger that she had failed to consult the lords about her choices. More seriously, there was division over what line to pursue with England, whose troops were still, as a punitive measure, burning crops and raiding villages along the Scottish border. A number of younger lords wanted to continue the war and avenge their kinsmen. To do so, they wanted the help of their traditional ally, France. And they wanted a military leader, the obvious candidate being the man who was now (since the infant James V had as yet no siblings) Scotland’s heir.

  John Stuart, Duke of Albany, cousin of James IV, had spent his whole life in exile in France, his father having been exiled after trying to seize the Scottish throne. Now, many lords thought he should be recalled. On 26 November the council wrote to the French king, asking him to send Albany home to Scotland ‘for its defence’. Margaret was to continue her role as regent and tutrix of the young king, whose person was to be ‘kept as devised in the late King’s will’. Henry VIII for one was horrified, convinced that Albany might easily depose a vulnerable baby monarch; might spirit him away to the Outer Isles and thence who knew where, much as his great-uncle Richard III was widely believed to have spirited away his nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’. Henry saw himself as his Scottish nephew’s natural protector. But that was not how the situation appeared to the Scots.

  For Margaret Tudor, there must have been a clash of loyalties; a clash familiar to many royal consorts but surely in this case worse than most, since her husband had actually been killed by her brother’s troops. Yet in the task that now came upon her so suddenly, Henry was the closest natural advisor she had left for the protect
ion of herself and her son. For their part the Scottish lords must have looked at Margaret with double vision. On the one hand she was their queen, wife of one beloved Scottish king and mother of their present ruler. On the other, she was the sister of the man, Henry VIII, who had caused that same king’s death and brought them defeat and disgrace. The message Henry sent north was tactfully mediated – that Margaret’s sister-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, sent her love – but the more Margaret Tudor seemed to turn towards her brother for help, the more divided the perception of her grew.

  For all her triumphalism, Katherine expressed herself personally sympathetic to Margaret. ‘The Queen of England for the love she bears the Queen of Scots would gladly send a servant to comfort her.’ Margaret wrote back asking Katherine to put her in Henry’s remembrance. In the weeks after Flodden Katherine did indeed send Friar Bonaventure Langley to Stirling to discuss a truce. As can be seen time and again, the personal, the feminine, was a cover for the political. One story had Margaret claiming war might have been averted had she only been able to meet with the sister-in-law she had known at the English court: ‘If we shall meet, who knows what God by our means may bring to pass?’ But any closeness to the Queen of England could still be one strike against the Queen of Scotland.

  Margaret Tudor suffered other disadvantages. Unlike her European contemporaries, or Katherine, she had been raised by a woman, Elizabeth of York, who had been kept away from power by her husband Henry VII. Margaret struggled to occupy a position to which, Tudor-like, she laid claim but for which nothing in her life had prepared her.

  In the years ahead she would find herself caught in a different trap; the trap that lay in wait for powerful women. The trap that had entangled Marguerite of Navarre and Margaret of Austria and the trap that (not at the courts of France or the Netherlands but at that of England) would have one last deadly game to play. Meanwhile, the protagonist of that legendary drama was soon to move from the orbit of Margaret of Austria to that of Marguerite of Navarre, as the shifting landscape of the European scene sent the young Anne Boleyn her way.