Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  At Greenwich Charles was greeted by Mary and her mother, and asked for his aunt Katherine’s blessing. Mary danced and played the virginals, and ambassadors reported that she was likely to become ‘a handsome lady, although it is difficult to form an idea of her beauty as she is still so small’. There were masques and Masses, jousts and banquets. One of the most successful entertainments was a reading of the list of grievances Henry VIII had sent to the French king. The treaty between the two allies declared that in 1523 Charles would invade France from Spain and Henry from Calais.

  Much though she might have longed for it, Katherine of Aragon was not without concern about the alliance between her husband and her nephew. Though Henry might dream of claiming his ‘antient right and title to the crown of France’, Katherine had witnessed Henry’s rage when, years earlier, her father Ferdinand had made an alliance only to let him down. Did she suspect that this time he would not forgive her the sins of her Habsburg connections so readily? In January 1523 she told Charles’s ambassador ‘vehemently’ that Charles had to deliver all he had promised: ‘It was much better to promise little and perform faithfully than to promise much and fail in part.’

  Her anxieties were all too justified, for the Anglo-Habsburg ‘Great Enterprise’ of 1523 against France was a disaster. Margaret of Austria offered Habsburg troops to the English, but nowhere near the three thousand horse and five thousand foot the English demanded. And even those she offered, she could not find the money to pay. The English troops sent to capture Boulogne marched instead on Paris but were turned back by foul weather and lack of supplies. Charles (distracted by French successes on the Spanish frontier) failed to keep to his part of the plan. And the French general the Duc de Bourbon, now in open rebellion against the king, who had promised to join Charles and Henry, failed to turn up at all, fleeing instead to Italy.

  Margaret had to take the recriminations of Henry VIII and Wolsey, the latter declaring that they would not have expected a lady of her wisdom to have tried to excuse herself ‘by inventions and compasses, by paraboles and assimulations’. By October Henry was secretly contemplating breaking his daughter’s betrothal to her cousin Charles and instead allying her to her cousin on the other side, the young King of Scots, James V, Margaret Tudor’s son.

  This would certainly remove one thorn in England’s side. The summer of 1522 saw skirmishes between England and Scotland. Albany led forces south, but the Scottish troops, remembering Flodden, refused to cross the border, and Henry was quick to cash in with the offer of a five-year peace. The following summer, Margaret Tudor caused to be read out in public a speech her young son had written in his own hand, urging that he should be allowed to make peace with his uncle of England. The Scottish authorities veered between waiting on Albany’s guidance and clamouring for their young king to be set free from Albany’s over-close tutelage; Margaret’s own popularity ebbed and flowed. As England burnt the Scottish town of Jedburgh, as Margaret fed them information about Scotland’s military dispositions, even her former supporters complained that she was ‘right fickle’. In October 1523 Albany again tried to invade England with French and Scottish troops, only to be roundly defeated.

  The Anglo-Habsburg alliance still, theoretically, stood; Margaret of Austria was certainly determined that it should. The English ambassador to the Low Countries reported her as saying she had always been ‘utterly inclined’ to Henry’s good. But the following March Katherine of Aragon would warn Charles’s ambassador that Henry was ‘very discontented’ and it is notable that she had to send her confessor secretly to do it.

  It would, the ambassador said, be ‘regrettable’ if the communication came to the ears of ‘certain English’; Wolsey was ‘very restless’ whenever he spoke to Katherine of Aragon, and frequently interrupted his discourse with her.

  Wolsey had been further alienated from the Habsburgs when, on the death of Pope Adrian, Charles V’s old tutor, in September 1523, after less than two years in office, Charles and Margaret of Austria failed to win him the papacy. (It went instead to another Medici, Clement VII.) But however far the ever-more powerful Wolsey might be from falling in with Katherine’s plans, he had time left to annoy another woman, too.

  There is a widespread belief that the enmity between Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey sprang early in her English career, when he was personally responsible for putting an end to her love match with a young English nobleman, and that much of what followed in the next decade sprang from this injury. It may be true, but the source that describes it, a book written by Wolsey’s gentleman usher George Cavendish, was at once both partisan and crafted some time after the event, as the few sources for this early stage of Anne’s career tend to be.

  Anne Boleyn’s name was linked to three men before Henry VIII, but we have little certain knowledge of any of the relationships. She had been brought home from France to marry her kinsman James Butler, heir to the disputed Irish earldom of Ormonde; a match proposed by her powerful Howard relatives, and one which might have sorted out several difficulties, since the Boleyns also claimed the earldom. It would moreover, from the viewpoint of Wolsey and his king, bind the powerful Butlers more closely to English interests. But the marriage did not take place. The question is why. There may have been some reluctance on the Butlers’ part but it is also possible that Anne herself intervened.

  As Cavendish tells it, while at court in attendance on Katherine of Aragon, Anne became acquainted with Henry Percy, heir to the great earldom of Northumberland, who was living in Wolsey’s household. Accompanying Wolsey to court, Percy ‘would fall in dalliance with the queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other, so that there grew such a secret love between them that at length they were ensured together intending to marry’. But when Wolsey found out, he instantly upbraided Percy with his ‘peevish folly’. Those of his rank were not supposed to marry for love. Wolsey had planned another, politically advantageous, marriage for him with a girl from the equally prominent Talbot family. And if Cavendish is to be believed, Henry had his eye on Anne already, though this last is perhaps unlikely.

  Percy’s father came roaring down to London, declaring his son was ‘a proud, presumptuous, disdainful, and very unthrifty waster’. Although the words are from Cavendish, the earl did certainly make an unscheduled visit to London in June 1523; the long-arranged Percy-Talbot match was for a time postponed. Percy was forbidden to see Anne Boleyn again and, browbeaten, complied. Anne, in Cavendish’s tale, swore that ‘if it lay ever in her power, she would work the cardinal as much displeasure’.

  The third relationship was with the poet and courtier Thomas Wyatt, whose family was a neighbour of the Boleyns in Kent. No question of marriage here: Wyatt was already married, albeit very unhappily, but that only gave more impetus to his expression of the courtly love fantasy. In the great game of courtly rivalry, one story has Wyatt (like Charles Brandon with Margaret of Austria) capturing a jewel from Anne and later flaunting it before Henry. The story itself is a useful pointer to the competitive court context in which the king’s interest was first aroused. Another story – that Wyatt tried to warn the king that Anne had been unchaste with him, but was ignored – seems unlikely.

  It is impossible to be sure exactly how many of the poems Wyatt later wrote were written with Anne Boleyn in mind, though she is surely the ‘Brunet’ who ‘set our country in a roar’. But one gives a striking testimony to Anne’s allure:

  Whoso list to hunt: I know where is a hind.

  But for me, alas I may no more;

  The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

  I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

  . . . graven with diamonds in letters plain

  There is written her fair neck round about:

  ‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,

  And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

  The poem paints Wyatt himself as the unsuccessful suitor, and Anne, the hind, as evasiv
e and chaste. It also breathes the kind of edgy romantic glamour guaranteed to make Anne a star and a quarry for the young men of the court, and to the not-quite-so-young man who led them. Even if, or perhaps especially because, that man was already married to the now less than glamorous Katherine of Aragon.

  It was probably in 1524 that Katherine of Aragon’s sexual relations with Henry came to an end. She was thirty-eight and Henry, himself five years younger, can no longer have felt that there was any point in trying to get another child on her. The queen’s energies would from now be devoted to raising her only child, the Princess Mary. ‘Daughters’, Anne de Beaujeu had written, ‘are a heavy responsibility – when they are young, you must watch over them carefully.’

  The well-educated Katherine helped teach her daughter Latin, French and some Spanish. A fine musician and dancer, Mary was also educated in penmanship, as well as needlework. Katherine also obtained the advice of the Spanish-born scholar Juan Luis Vives, who in 1523 she commissioned to write The Education of a Christian Woman, and who, while advocating a certain amount of classical reading, nonetheless believed a woman should know only ‘what pertains to the fear of God’.

  To Vives, the question was not of women’s mental inferiority, or otherwise; it was in the physical that their vulnerability lay. ‘In the education of a woman the principal and, I might say, the only concern should be the preservation of chastity.’ A better education might indeed lead to more strength in virtue but it is hard to feel that Mary was encouraged to let her mind run as free around the new humanist learning as, a decade or two later, her half-sister would be.

  In Scotland, meanwhile, Katherine of Aragon’s sister-in-law Margaret Tudor was also contemplating her offspring’s maturity. Her ally (or lover) Albany had never succeeded in establishing undisputed control of the turbulent country, and in May 1524 he retired to France, where Margaret’s estranged husband Angus now also lived, stirring up trouble for his rivals in Scotland wherever he could.

  Margaret Tudor seized power, with the support of certain powerful allies within the nobility. It was in everyone’s interest (whatever terms Albany and Margaret had or had not been on) to end the absent Albany’s regency. He himself had insisted, before leaving Scotland, that ‘the Queen should be obeyed in all her rights’. Margaret’s solution was to declare her twelve-year-old son James of age and able to rule his own territory. With the help of his mother, naturally.

  In England, Henry VIII was anxious to distance Scotland from the French connection that Albany’s ‘usurped’ powers represented. It was at this all too opportune moment that Angus managed to make his way back across the Channel to the English court. Henry and Wolsey were happy to back a plan by which Angus should assume an Anglophile rule of Scotland, with young James V as nominal ruler, and his mother likewise exercising a largely ceremonial function. But endless letters from Margaret declared that rather than this, she would turn to France for help, and that Angus would create ‘great jealousies’.

  On 26 July James was brought from Edinburgh to Stirling and, despite the fact that Scottish sovereigns were not supposed to assume rule until the age of fourteen, formally invested with the crown. Henry sent his nephew a jewelled sword, made him a member of the Order of the Garter, and suggested that he might marry his cousin Princess Mary: a plan with which Margaret Tudor was delighted to concur.

  But Henry also sent James’s stepfather Angus north towards Scotland with a force. ‘It is right to use the Queen of Scots as an instrument in this matter, but not so as all shall depend on her’, Wolsey wrote. ‘A good archer should have two strings to his bow, especially when one is made of threads wrought by woman’s fingers.’

  A reconciliation between Margaret Tudor and her husband Angus seemed the obvious next step. Obvious to everyone except Margaret. Angus was instructed ‘to endeavour to recover the Queen’s favour’; Margaret was urged that this reconciliation would be for the good of the country, that her personal feelings were not the point.

  Despite Margaret’s furious protest, Angus crossed the border into Scotland. As parliament sat in Edinburgh, Margaret closed the city gates. Angus and his supporters scaled the walls of the city, declaring in time-honoured fashion that they were the young king’s loyal subjects, seeking only to sit in parliament as their ancestors had done. Down the Royal Mile, at Holyrood with her son, Margaret hastily assembled a matching force and, to the English ambassador’s dismal bleating about her ‘willfulness’, ordered the cannons to be trained on her husband. At the young king’s command Angus and his allies retreated. Margaret and her son went in a torchlight procession up the hill into the greater security of Edinburgh Castle, whence Margaret sent a firmly worded request that her brother in England should not interfere in Scottish affairs.

  Parliament confirmed her regency but if Margaret Tudor had now demonstrated an unfeminine defiance, worse was to follow. The early months of 1525 saw Margaret ever more determinedly seeking a divorce from Angus. She ignored all her brother’s protests that marriage was ‘divinely ordained’, the more so since she was by now in love with Henry Stewart, a young man of the royal household, eleven years younger than she but promoted from the king’s carver to captain of the guard. A letter from her brother Henry VIII provoked an hour-long storm of tears, and a protest that such ‘had never been written to a noble woman’. That summer, she accepted for form’s sake the appearance of a reconciliation with Angus, but as parliament was reopened, with the king and his mother heading the procession while Angus carried the crown, some two thousand of Angus’s clansmen ranged outside Edinburgh’s walls faced Margaret’s guns within.

  A deal was struck, whereby four parties – Angus and three other nobles – would each in turn have custody of the young king. But at the end of 1525, after his three-month stint, Angus refused to give the boy up. James was forced to write an official letter saying he wished to remain in his stepfather’s care, but he sent another in secret, begging his mother to rescue him. She gathered an army and rode to Edinburgh but when Angus brought James out of the city beside him, her men dared not fire on ‘the person of their Prince’.

  James V was to spend the next two and a half years in what by his mother’s report amounted to polite captivity, while attempt after attempt at rescue failed. Is it unfair to say that in Scotland the game was in men’s hands? Margaret had been born royal, had tried to claim every power of queenship, had fought her way back from overthrow after overthrow. She had faced an impossibly difficult situation in Scotland, but her choices had contributed to her problems. She had proved herself something of a wildcard (just as, at the English court, Anne Boleyn was beginning to do). Perhaps the game of queens was not one she was ultimately fitted to play.

  16

  Pavia

  Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, 1525

  In France another woman was about to come into her own. Two other women, perhaps. Louise of Savoy had fantasised (with fear and perhaps also with hope?) that the future of her whole house would come to rest on her shoulders. She was about to find that dream come true. By contrast, Louise’s daughter Marguerite had known all her life that she was, in her own words, the least useful of their family trinity. But that was about to change.

  The trigger was, as so often, a twist in the endless wars between France and the Empire. The 1523 Anglo-Habsburg invasion might have fizzled out but that was far from the end of the story. The revolt of the disaffected Duc de Bourbon and the consequent trial of his allies had left a bad taste. He had roused much sympathy in a populace angry about the money mulcted from them to pay for François’s Italian wars. The French army that tried (under Bonnivet’s command) to capture Naples in the spring of 1524 was soundly defeated. But that summer François decided once more to venture his hand in Italy; determined, he said, to win ‘nothing less than the entire state of Milan and the kingdom of Naples’.

  In that summer, Queen Claude was clearly seriously ill. François declared that, ‘Never could I have believed that the b
ond of marriage enjoined by God would be so firm and difficult to break.’ He nevertheless set off for the south, accompanied by his wife and sister. Louise of Savoy, who in the past year had suffered two bad bouts of pleurisy, was soon in a state of collapse, as her daughter Marguerite reported: ‘What with the fatigue of the roads and the extremity of worry which she has to bear, [she] has had a flux of bleeding from all parts, just as in her bad fever.’

  That autumn Queen Claude died, followed just weeks later by her daughter Charlotte. Marguerite nursed the little girl, and tried to keep the news of her granddaughter’s death from Louise of Savoy, already distraught at the thought of her son’s departure. But in October, François appointed his mother as regent once more and led his army over the Alps, despite all Louise could say.

  To maintain a campaign through the winter season was a challenge. François insisted on camping beside the city of Pavia, some twenty miles from Milan. In the last week of February 1525, matters came to a head. When, on 24 February, a Spanish-Imperial army attacked and succeeded in dividing the French army, the four-hour battle saw the French suffer the greatest loss of noblemen since Agincourt, with Bonnivet among the fallen (having, it was said, ridden out to seek his own death after urging François to fight that day). In the catastrophic French defeat, one of the few to evade either death or capture was Marguerite’s husband Alençon but François himself was taken into imperial captivity.