Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Margaret’s task would not be easy. The Netherlands were rife with problems – financial, structural and religious – as the years ahead would prove. Nonetheless, as a woman who sought her family’s advance and who welcomed authority, she was flying high. If there were a contest between the mother of the French king and the aunt of the Habsburg ruler, then Margaret of Austria and the Habsburgs, seemed again to have won.

  That said, there was one cavil. The Habsburgs, even more immediately than the French monarchy, had to deal with an unexpected threat, the ramifications of which, although they can hardly have realised it, would come to dominate their century. In 1520 Martin Luther’s questioning of the pope’s authority led to a Papal Bull, or edict, that condemned him as a heretic. Luther publicly burned the Bull, along with volumes of canon law but his very estrangement from the church encouraged him to take his own thinking in more revolutionary directions.

  Luther was moving towards the idea of justification by faith alone; that man’s salvation lay purely in his faith, not in any good works he might do – a central tenet of the reformed religion. At the same time, Luther’s refutation of papal authority imposed from distant Italy was already becoming identified with political discontent.

  In March 1521 Charles V offered Luther a formal hearing at the Diet (or Assembly) of Worms, a town on the Rhine. It led not to agreement but to the formalising of a position of opposition. ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’, Luther was reported to have said; while Charles for his part declared that ‘My predecessors . . . left behind them the holy Catholic rites that I should live and die therein . . . I have therefore resolved to stake upon this cause all my dominions, my friends, my body and my blood . . .’

  Margaret of Austria had herself been one of the great ladies critical of the ‘infinite abuses’ in the Catholic church and of the pope’s attempts to exercise secular authority in her territories; had numbered humanists and moderate reformers among her friends, had hosted Erasmus at her court. The Netherlands, the old Burgundy, had been the home of the devotio moderna, the more spiritual model of religion, particularly attractive to aristocratic ladies, to which Margaret’s godmother Margaret of York subscribed.

  But after a papal legate arrived in Antwerp in the autumn of 1520, Margaret saw men such as Erasmus (and some of her own aides) publicly attacked in sermons; saw books burnt. The Papal Bull against Luther had been first published in the Netherlands. She issued the orders which, in 1523, ended with two reforming Augustine monks burnt and their monastery razed to the ground. Martin Luther had been an Augustinian friar and the monastery was believed to be a centre for the dissemination of his ideas.

  ‘The heresies of Martin Luther’, as Margaret wrote to the Prior of Brou, ‘are a great scandal to our Holy Mother Church’. It seems likely that her first priority was and would remain to damp down controversy, so far as was possible. But in a comparatively short space of time it would be evident that Luther had opened Pandora’s box, and he himself would be horrified at some of the beliefs and new creeds that flew out.

  In France, Marguerite of Navarre had long been interested in the reform, with a small ‘r’, of the Catholic church. So, even, was her mother Louise of Savoy, to a degree, as had been Anne of Brittany and her daughters Queen Claude and Renée, while Marguerite’s brother François at this point was interested in anything which kept him one step ahead of the papacy. (Pope Leo had already sided with Charles and would in 1522 be succeeded by Pope Adrian, a prelate who had been Charles V’s tutor.) Lutheranism was never an option but for a brief period early in the 1520s, Marguerite’s way would be the goal of all the trinity: reforming the church from the inside, orienting it more towards the Bible, towards trained preachers, towards less emphasis on ritual and worship by rote.

  But as the 1520s got under way, Marguerite was coming to a time of personal crisis. Her life since her brother’s accession had seen her juggle the great ceremonies of court life with more personal and spiritual concerns. A visit made by the king and queen to her house in 1517 had been followed by the grant of the rich duchy of Berry, that not only made her financially independent of her husband but (most unusually for a female, rather than a male, relative of the king) gave her the status of a prince capétien and the right to sit on her brother’s councils. The wording of the lengthy grant explicitly spells out that this was to be territory under Marguerite’s own governance, save only for a feudal allegiance to France. There was no mention of her husband anywhere in the document.

  The return visit for the betrothal of the baby dauphin to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, at the end of 1518, saw Marguerite seated beside François in the courtyard of the Bastille, on a dais covered in cloth of gold, under a bower of flowers and greenery. A canopy of blue, spangled with stars and hung with gold balls, made the courtyard into a roofed room, while Louise of Savoy and Queen Claude sat in one of the galleries. While the king appeared with his male masquers in a white satin robe embroidered in gold, the ladies handed sweetmeats. In the spring of 1519, Marguerite took a sponsor’s role in the christening of what would prove an important boy: a second son for her brother King François, named Henri. Holding him at the font with Marguerite, representing his master for whom the child was named, was England’s new ambassador to France, Thomas Boleyn, whose daughter Anne would have been present (though unnoticed or at least unrecorded) at the engagement festivities. But when Marguerite set about reforming the local convent of Almenesches, winning over the pope to her choice for the new abbess, she took care to have a small lodging built for herself within the convent grounds.

  In the early years of her brother’s reign Marguerite visited Lyons with the royal party and it is in the notably reformist Lyons, in the church of Saint-Jean, that she set the story in novella seventy-two of her Heptaméron. In this story, the Duchess of Alençon (‘who later became queen of Navarre’, as did Marguerite herself) overhears the sobs of another worshipper: a pregnant nun, who had been seduced by a monk. In the story, the duchess promises to take up the nun’s cause and institute reforms very much of the kind Marguerite was making in real life.

  It is possible that in the autumn of 1519 Bonnivet launched another sexual assault upon Marguerite, although once again the suggestions are almost wholly literary. That autumn François, accompanied by his mother, sister and a group of nobles including both Marguerite’s husband and Bonnivet, set off on a leisurely progress towards Cognac. They stopped at the king’s new building project, Chambord, at Chatellherault and, in January 1520, at Bonnivet’s new Italian-style creation, Neuville-aux-Bois. The royal party left after just four days, leaving Bonnivet behind.

  In novella four of the Heptaméron the heroine is in bed, and presumably undressed, when ‘without further ado, he jumped into bed beside her.’ Her first thought is to denounce her attacker and demand that her brother order his head struck off. But the heroine’s lady-in-waiting (who the Seigneur Brantôme’s writings identified as Madame de Châtillon, Marguerite’s former governess) warns that everyone would say ‘this poor gentleman . . . could not have attempted it without great encouragement. Everyone will say it has not been without fault on your side’. Madame warns the heroine to be more careful in the future, since ‘many women who have led lives more austere than yours have been humiliated by men less worthy of love than he’.

  It seems as if, around this point in her life, Marguerite of Navarre suffered some sort of emotional trauma. In the early summer of 1521 Marguerite penned an extraordinary letter, the first of many, to Guillaume Briçonnet, the reforming Bishop of Meaux, a man at war with medieval superstition but at home with the mysticism to which Marguerite was drawn. (Meaux would become the centre for a group of progressive clergy, several of them connected with Marguerite, and all eventually to come under attack by the Catholic church, from which, however, none had at this stage any thought of splitting.) ‘I must deal with countless matters that cause me to be afraid and thus ask that you take up my cause and bring me spiritual succor’, Marg
uerite wrote.

  Some of the things she wrote were in tune with the new tenets of religion: ‘Knowing that there is need of only one thing, I turn to you, entreating you to make yourself the means of reaching him [God] through prayer.’ Some were more personal: in her second letter to Briçonnet, she wrote that she felt ‘very much alone . . . Take pity on me . . . I beg you at least to visit me in writing and stir up the love of God in my heart.’ Her repeated insistence that she was ‘unworthy’, ‘useless’, ‘worse than dead’ must be seen in the context of reformist theology, which believed humans were unworthy without God’s grace. Nonetheless, it is hard not to read into her letters something more when Marguerite begs Briçonnet to help kindle her ‘poor heart covered with ice and dead from cold’ and when Briçonnet, a few years later, congratulates her on having obeyed his rule ‘of telling everything without fear’.

  She wrote frequently of her ‘sterility’. Thirteen years of marriage and, at thirty, she had not yet born a child. In 1522 she believed she was pregnant but found herself mistaken. She was also nursing Louise of Savoy, who was suffering increasingly serious bouts of gout. Briçonnet, twenty years older than she, offered himself as her adoptive son and both took seriously the relationship (to sixteenth-century eyes a genuine one, made ‘par alliance’), Marguerite signing herself as ‘your sterile mother’.

  Briçonnet, however, had other concerns from the first: that Marguerite should recruit her mother and brother to her spiritual quest, so that ‘from you three will come forth as an example of life, a fire to burn and illumine the rest of the kingdom’. When she failed to do so quickly enough, he reproached her: ‘you have not taken your gloves off. I do not yet see any flames issuing from your hands.’ In fact, by the end of 1522, the attempts made by Briçonnet’s deputy Michel d’Arande to instruct Louise of Savoy were causing the king’s confessor to complain to the theologians at the university; the first red danger sign of troubles ahead.

  Anne de Beaujeu, the last of her generation, died on 14 November 1522, just five weeks after François had settled the larger part of the disputed Bourbon lands on his mother Louise. Anne’s reaction was to bequeath to her son-in-law Charles, Duc de Bourbon, her own personal properties, in recompense for the ‘good, great, praiseworthy and recommendable services and pleasures’ he had rendered her and her late daughter Suzanne. Bourbon had now a daring, even treasonous, scheme: to marry Charles V’s sister Eleanor and thus ally himself with François’s enemy.

  Such dissent in the French ranks was the more serious for the fact that in the summer of 1522, England had fulfilled the promise made earlier to Charles V – the fruit of all that eager diplomacy – and played its part in keeping the balance of power in Europe by declaring war on France. There had been a hint of future storms at the beginning of the year, when King François tackled Cardinal Wolsey on what might seem a trivial matter: the family of one of his wife’s maids, young Anne Boleyn, had decided she should come home. What; did they feel that France was no longer safe for Englishwomen?

  Wolsey attempted to reassure the French king. It was no such matter, he said. Merely, a marriage had been arranged between Anne and her kinsman James Butler, the Irish Earl of Ormonde. But of course, Anne Boleyn’s future was not to pan out that way.

  * He had also settled his brother Ferdinand’s position, by giving him control of Maximilian’s hereditary Austrian lands and regency in Charles’s absence of the German territories. This marked the start of the division of the house of Habsburg into two branches: the Spanish, of which Charles (and later Charles’s son Philip) was the head and the Austrian.

  PART III

  1522–1536

  Nor should you be melancholy or discomfited if you find yourself in some foreign or unpleasant alliance, but praise God and believe that He is always just and never does anything but what is reasonable. Therefore, my daughter, if it is so ordained and it happens that you have much to suffer, have complete patience, finding in whatever awaits you the will and pleasure of the Creator . . . if you want to live with peace of mind, protect yourself from stumbling into the snares of jealousy.

  Lessons for my Daughter, Anne of France (Anne de Beaujeu) published 1517–1521

  15

  ‘Wild for to hold’

  England, Scotland, 1522–1524

  Spring 1522 in London. At Cardinal Wolsey’s palace of York Place, the pre-Lent festivities were celebrated with more than usual splendour. The pageant might have come from the old Burgundian court: an assault on the Château Vert, the Green Castle or Castle of ‘Vert’ue. The castle was made of wood and green tinfoil, sturdy enough for its towers to support eight ladies dressed in white satin, each representing a virtue, with her character or ‘reason’ picked out in yellow. The knights, led by King Henry VIII himself, and their spokesman, Ardent Desire, were dressed in cloth of gold and blue satin and were warded off, for a judicious interval, with a barrage of sweetmeats and rosewater.

  In the end, of course, the masculine attackers prevailed; the colder female virtues warmed by masculine ardour, and everyone danced happily. But no one, for a few years yet, could guess how telling the pageant would prove to be. The lady representing Perseverance – newly come home from France – was Anne Boleyn.

  The Anne Boleyn who appeared at the English court in 1522 would have been a very finished product. Not beautiful, perhaps, but surely compelling; sophisticated, and with the all-important gloss of difference. Later reports show her as ‘very eloquent and gracious, and reasonably good-looking.’ ‘Not one of the handsomest women in the world’ as a Venetian diplomat would put it, when the time came that ambassadors took note of Anne Boleyn, she was ‘of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, a bosom not much raised and eyes which are black and beautiful’.

  But her years abroad had given her wide experience in the ways of a court. Indeed, if, as seems likely, she had been called on to act as an Anglo/French interpreter she may have gained not only experience of the queen’s, the women’s, rooms, but also an unusually direct appreciation of political dealings, more so for the fact that her father was for a time also attached to the French court.

  Anne Boleyn’s very ‘Frenchness’ would have been a novelty to the English courtiers. It is hard to realise now, after centuries in which French has been the lingua franca of diplomatic and social circles, that it was not so in the early sixteenth century, when Latin was the universal language.

  As the writer, cleric and diplomat Lancelot de Carles described Anne: ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English, by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman’. By contrast, Katherine of Aragon was now thirty-six, not young by the standards of the day. Repeated pregnancies had taken their toll and the ever-watchful ambassadors had for some time resorted to praising the beauty of her complexion, rather than her figure. Her five years’ seniority to her husband was beginning to show.

  As long ago as 1514 a rumour had gone the rounds of Europe that Henry VIII ‘meant to repudiate his present wife . . . because he is unable to have children by her’; premature at the time, but seeming less so with every year that went by. It was probably in 1522 that Henry took Mary Boleyn – Anne’s sister – as his mistress. She, all too appropriately, represented Kindness in the York Place pageant. But whatever personal distress the relationship may have caused Katherine of Aragon, assuming she knew, this was not one to threaten her position as queen. Indeed, Henry was at this point, publicly at least, still very much the married man, moralising over the comportment of his sister Margaret Tudor in Scotland.

  We last encountered Margaret on her return to Scotland some five years earlier, complaining bitterly (in an anachronistic but very Tudor fashion) that her husband Angus no longer loved her. Henry VIII and his wife Katherine were horrified, urging the sanctity of marriage on Margaret. But Scotland’s affairs, which implicitly meant those of Margaret Tudor, had been a point of issue between Wolsey and Louise of Savoy at the discussions scheduled to follow the Field of Cloth o
f Gold.

  The friar that Henry and Katherine of Aragon had (again) sent north tactfully blamed certain of Margaret’s councillors for having seduced her into seeking ‘an unlawful divorce from lawful matrimony directly against the ordinance of God and utterly repugnant to man’s law’. But Margaret was having none of it. ‘I had no help of his Grace my brother, nor no love of my lord of Angus and he to take my living at his pleasure and despoil’, she wrote to Henry VIII’s representative, Lord Dacre. ‘Methink my lord, ye should not think this reasonable, if ye be my friend.’ Her allegiance had often wavered between her natal and her present country; she had often been torn. But now: ‘I must cause me to please this realm, when I have my life here.’

  When the Duke of Albany returned from his visit to France in November 1521, Margaret Tudor welcomed him warmly. Though they had in the past been rivals for power in Scotland, she had perhaps learnt that there were worse evils. When he reached Edinburgh, and the constable handed him the keys of the castle, Albany courteously handed them back to Margaret. It must have been balm to her wounded spirit. While Margaret and Albany set about joint rule, as queen mother and regent, it was the turn of her estranged husband Angus to flee into French exile. It was probably Angus’s Douglas clan who first started the rumour that Margaret and Albany were having an affair.

  Soon Henry VIII was also complaining of Albany’s ‘dishonourable and damnable abusing of our sister, inciting and stirring her to be divorced from her lawful husband for what corrupt intent God knoweth’. Margaret wrote to Wolsey complaining of false reports; Wolsey advised Henry that Margaret had clearly been suborned. But meanwhile, England’s borders with Scotland were fortified.

  Anglo-Scottish relations were the worse for the fact that in one sense Katherine of Aragon was now riding high. England’s European interest at this point no longer lay with France – Scotland and Albany’s old ally – but with the Habsburgs. The end of May 1522 saw the arrival of Charles V in England for a six-week visit, celebrated with extraordinary splendour, to affirm his English alliance and, with his future marriage to his cousin the Princess Mary, a permanent binding of England into the Habsburg hegemony. Charles and Mary’s children would, if Henry himself had no sons, inherit an empire that stretched from England to the Mediterranean, to say nothing of Spain’s colonies across the Atlantic. This, however, was for the moment secret, given that Mary was still officially betrothed to the French dauphin.