Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Complaining of a local bishop who was preaching that both the king and his sister supported heretics, Marguerite made a point of dissociating herself from those who attacked the ‘real presence’ in the Mass: ‘Thank God, my Lord, none of our people has ever been found to be sacramentarians.’ But she and her husband believed the local monks had ‘found a way of putting poison in the incense’ and were trying to do away with them.

  She found herself at odds with her former protégé, the austere French theologian John Calvin, over her protection for two mystic preachers.3 By contrast the pope – who had enjoyed discussions with Marguerite – was inclined to regard her as his spokesperson at François’s court. All good Catholics had fresh reason to be hopeful in these years. The opening of the Council of Trent in 1545 signalled a new crusading spirit in the Catholic church, discussing the reform of corrupt practices as well as doctrinal decrees. But inevitably the ‘Counter-Reformation’ would itself be the pretext for aggression against dissenters in the years ahead. At the beginning of 1545 Marguerite was horrified when François, at the pope’s request, authorised the massacre of perhaps several thousand members (estimates vary wildly) of the unorthodox Waldensian sect.

  Marguerite may, as she so often did, have found refuge in writing: encouraging those around her to undertake translations of Plato’s dialogues while she herself began exploring the relationship between the kind of ideal love figured in the courtly romances and Plato’s ideas. On her southern estates she surrounded herself with the talented and literary. Her writings, however, provide no clear answer to Marguerite of Navarre’s continued ambivalence about her female role; an ambivalence the events of these years can have done little to diminish.

  In 1544 she wrote to François of the desire she had had all her life to serve him not as a sister but as a brother. Conversely, she would write too of her wish that she might give birth to a hundred warriors to serve him. Perhaps that admixture of messages is something with which many women had to deal in the sixteenth as in any other century.

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  New winds

  England, France, 1544–1547

  In England in 1544, Katherine Parr was, like Katherine of Aragon before her, left regent when Henry went away to war against France. When England’s ongoing affrays with the Scots set her at odds with Marie de Guise, it was an echo in a minor key of the events of 1513, when Katherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor had found their armies at enmity.

  Katherine Parr’s regency also allowed both of her stepdaughters, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, to witness a woman successfully wielding power; a spectacle familiar on the continent which had not always come England’s way.

  Even religious differences seemed, at first, to be subsumed under the new Queen Katherine’s reforming zeal. Katherine Parr had her own literary aspirations, producing first the anonymous Psalms or Prayers and then, under her own name, Prayers or Meditations, which made her the first queen to be a published author in English, if not French, history. The ten-year-old Elizabeth Tudor made Katherine a New Year’s present of her translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s The Mirror of Glass of a Sinful Soul but when Katherine Parr commissioned the translation into English from the Latin of some of Erasmus’s Paraphrases upon the New Testament, Katherine’s other stepdaughter Mary was one of the translators. Ill health prevented Mary from completing her translation of the Gospel According to John, but the final version nevertheless included a lengthy dedication to Mary as a ‘peerless flower of virginity’.

  Katherine Parr very nearly went the way of others of Henry’s queens when she fell under suspicion for the extent of her reforming tendencies.1 Mary Tudor, by contrast, was able to accommodate to her father’s religious policies, which still included the supremacy of the Mass, the celibacy of priests and the necessity of confession. In her brother Edward’s reign, it would be a different story.

  At the beginning of 1544 Henry VIII, fifty-two, and with no sign of the longed-for second son, laid down another Act of Succession. If he had no further child and if his son Edward died without heir, then the throne would pass to Mary. If she too died childless, then to Elizabeth. Both sisters feature in the anonymous painting The Family of Henry VIII. In the centre sits Henry, enthroned, the young Edward at his right hand, and at his left the long-dead Jane Seymour, mother of the all-important boy. These three are framed in a network of gilded pillars. Pointedly outside the magic circle of legitimate royalty, framed by another set of rather less conspicuous pillars, the two royal daughters stand separately; Mary, the elder, to Henry’s right, and Elizabeth to the left.

  In December 1546, the message of the portrait was ratified by the king’s will, which confirmed the place in the succession of both Mary Tudor and then (assuming neither her brother nor Mary left any heirs) Elizabeth. But as 1546 turned to 1547; as Henry lay dying, that seemed an unlikely contingency.

  The early part of 1547 saw a general clearing of the decks. The death of the obese and ailing Henry VIII on 28 January 1547 was followed, barely two months later, by that of his old rival, King François.

  Marguerite of Navarre had spent the last few months on her estates, in pain from arthritis and apprehensive of the future. At the time of her brother’s death, she was on the road to try to meet – rescue, revive – him, an echo of her dash to Spain twenty years earlier. She was staying at a convent in Poitou when the news of his death reached her: not for several months could she bring herself to leave. ‘O death, who conquered the Brother, / come now in your great goodness / and pierce the Sister with your lance’, she wrote in the Chanson spirituelle, and:

  My life was filled with sugar and honey

  when it was sustained by his

  but now it is nothing but absence and bitterness

  (Le Navire)

  The last few years had seen difficulties between brother and sister. But in the end he had, as she had recently written to him, supported her ‘in the office of king, of master, of father and brother and of true friend’. François’s death was not only a bitter personal, but also a practical, loss: a loss of influence, as well potentially of the pension François had made her. Small wonder that one source of friction between her and her daughter was the high expense of Jeanne’s household, which Marguerite found, as she wrote to Jeanne’s financial controller, ‘insupportable’.

  The new king, Henri II, relieved Marguerite of her financial worries but wrote of her dismissively as ‘my good old aunt’. The new king’s solemn entry into Lyons saw Marguerite of Navarre, who had once taken pride of place in every procession, grateful for a place in Catherine de Medici’s carriage. (‘I share your distress, as I always knew you shared mine’, Catherine had written to her.) Catherine was now, of course, Queen of France.

  The deaths of the men in this story brought all too often, for better or for worse, a dramatic change for their women. In England as in France, Henry VIII’s daughters (and his widow) had to trim their sails to a new wind. The effects of the powerful kings’ deaths spread like ripples from a stone in a pond. They would even be felt in Scotland, albeit that, for some years to come, the fate of Scotland would be bound to that of France ever more closely.

  The death of Henry VIII brought no end to the Rough Wooing, which indeed, in September 1547, saw the disastrous Scottish defeat at Pinkie Cleugh. Amid real fears that the young Queen Mary would be kidnapped by the English, Marie de Guise contemplated a suggestion by the new King Henri II that the four-year-old Queen of Scots should marry his three-year-old son the dauphin and be raised in France. The plan was agreed and on 7 August 1548, with a numerous Scottish retinue (including her famous contemporaries and future attendants the ‘four Marys’), the little Queen of Scots set sail for France and for what, it was assumed, would be her future country.

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  Accommodations

  France, 1548–1550

  Everyone, you might say, had to make accommodations in these years. In Scotland, Marie de Guise was certainly having to deal with the realities of prac
tical politics. It was two years before the relief of a peace treaty, made in 1550 between England and France, and in which Scotland was included, allowed Marie to return to France for an extended visit. She was lucky: she might well never have seen her daughter again.

  The English envoy to the French court wrote that Marie’s work in Scotland ‘is so highly taken here as she is in this court made a goddess’. It had been suggested that the Scots governor, Arran, should be replaced by a French governor, which would have allowed Marie a comfortable retirement but one account says she went to Henri and announced she wanted to rule Scotland.

  She had the immense distress, during her visit, of losing her one surviving son, with whom she had so recently been reunited, the young Duc de Longueville. She also heard of a plot to poison her small daughter, the Queen of Scots. ‘Our Lord must wish me for one of his chosen ones, since he has visited me so often with such sorrow’, she wrote to her mother Antoinette. But she prepared to return to Scotland, acknowledging where her future lay.

  The little Queen of Scots, meanwhile, was growing up very happily at the French court. The Scottish train with which she arrived had largely been sent away. The French complained the Scots were uncouth and dirty, and even the four Marys were sent to be educated at a convent near Poissy, since the aim was to make Queen Mary as French as possible. But she had come to a welcoming place. Henri II and his wife Catherine de Medici were devoted parents, constantly demanding reports and portraits when absent from their children, among whose number Mary was now included. There are records of the endless chain of pets brought into the nursery – mastiffs, and even a bear – and reports, as she grew older, of Mary and her attendants taking pleasure in playing at cookery.

  She shared a bedroom with Elisabeth, the eldest daughter of Catherine and Henri. The king often wrote to Marie de Guise with ‘tidings of our little household’. More significantly, Mary and the French princesses shared the same educational curriculum as the dauphin François: history and rhetoric, languages and poetry.

  From the first, care was taken to foster the idea of love in the dauphin and his future bride or, in the slightly older and infinitely stronger Mary, of protectiveness. Care was taken, too, to pay due tribute to Mary’s rank. Henri II was enchanted with his future daughter-in-law, and wrote that ‘she should take precedence over my daughters. For the marriage between her and my son is decided and settled; and apart from that, she is a crowned Queen’.

  With hindsight, it is too tempting to look back to Mary Stuart’s childhood and ask what it was in her education that so signally failed to teach her how to rule. Mary had come to a country with a formidable tradition of female governance, for all that Catherine de Medici had not yet come into her own, and from one where her mother was already a leading player. But the question may be misguided, the answer lying in Mary’s character and with lessons that cannot be consciously taught. The branches of study in which Mary excelled were embroidery (in years to come she would often sit and sew through Scottish council meetings) and dancing. She was taught what were considered the skills of rule but she never learnt the edgy arts, the awareness of danger and opportunity, that Elizabeth Tudor in England learnt during her difficult youth. She was expected to live her life less as ruler of Scotland than as consort of France and it is hard not to feel that, to her ultimate danger, that expectation shaped her.

  It is a too-ready assumption that Mary Stuart’s early consciousness of her status was a source of friction between her and Catherine de Medici, based on a tale that she spoke of Catherine as a merchant’s daughter. But it is largely the work of fiction, extrapolating backwards from the later conflict between Catherine and Mary’s Guise relations, to suggest that Catherine regarded the child with unremitting hostility. Catherine must anyway largely have been preoccupied with her continuous childbearing: ten children in twelve years, with Henri’s mistress Diane de Poitiers assisting at the births.

  In the first years of her husband’s reign Catherine de Medici found that her new title did not in any way mean she could shift her husband’s dependence on his mistress. Many years later, in a letter concerning her daughter Margot’s marital problems, Catherine wrote that she had only ‘made good cheer’ to Diane for Henri II’s sake, ‘for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore’. In her capacity as overall superintendent of the royal nurseries Diane would have been a figure in the life of the little Queen Mary. But as Henri’s reign wore on, Diane’s influence was perhaps beginning to fade, while just the opposite was happening with Catherine de Medici.

  By the start of the 1550s one observer noted that the king now treated his wife ‘with so much affection and attention that it is astounding’. She had first been made nominal regent in 1548, when her husband needed to travel out of the realm to secure his interests in Italy. Four years later she was given rather more authority in a second regency, when the king went to war with the Habsburgs.

  To her annoyance, she found she still had to share the power but what is striking is the zest with which she took to the duties, writing to Constable Montmorency over her task of raising troops and money for Henri: ‘I shall soon be past mistress, for I study nothing else all day long . . . you may count on me to press and push.’ She was, in other words, beginning to assume the posture that would see her set against another woman in another story of a clash of queens.

  The question of a marriage for Jeanne d’Albret had survived her uncle King François’s death: it was to be a source of friction between her cousin, the new king, and her parents, who still secretly hankered after a Spanish match. It was however, as before, the king’s will that would prevail. On 20 October 1548 Jeanne was happy to be married to Antoine de Bourbon, France’s premier noble, first in line of succession to the throne if Henri’s sons should produce no heirs.

  Antoine was an attractive man, whose bravery as a soldier perhaps masked a more fundamental lack of resolution in his personality. The hasty ceremonies were scanty compared to those which had marked the abortive Cleves match. But as King Henri noted: ‘I have never seen a happier bride than this one, she did nothing but laugh’, adding that Marguerite of Navarre, by contrast, was in floods of tears, which seemed not to trouble her daughter in the slightest.

  A courtier noted that Antoine ‘performs his marital duties very well both day and night. He says that the six couplings went off very gaily.’ Contemporaries noted that Jeanne, later so austere and forceful, seemed besotted by her husband. Marguerite wrote to Antoine in the summer of 1549 that her daughter had ‘no pleasure or occupation except in talking about or writing to you’. Antoine, for his part, wrote to Jeanne with surprising tenderness: ‘I would never have thought that I would love you as I do. I intend another time, when I have to take a long trip, to have you with me, for all alone, je m’ennuye (I grow weary).’ However, his military duties often kept him away and Jeanne spent time with her mother, in what would prove to be the last year of Marguerite’s life.

  Marguerite of Navarre had lived too long, as perhaps had Anne de Beaujeu before her. Though still only in her fifties, she was the last survivor of her generation, with even those who had been her protégées, such as Anne Boleyn, now gone. Retreating to a modest country estate, she ventured outside on a damp night, possibly to watch a comet, which caused the chill which brought about her death on 21 December 1549.

  There had clearly been a degree of rapprochement, if such were needed, with Jeanne. In those last months, mother and daughter exchanged a series of verse letters expressing, albeit in highly stylised terms, ideas of love and loss when apart from each other. Jeanne d’Albret’s reaction to Marguerite of Navarre’s death is not recorded but in the years ahead she would come to take on her mother’s mantle, as arguably Marguerite had taken on Louise of Savoy’s, promoting certain of her mother’s causes, however, in ways Marguerite could not have foreseen.

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  ‘device for the succession’

  England, 1547–1553

&nb
sp; In England too, with Henry VIII dead and a new boy-king on the throne, the question of accommodation to new political realities was coming sharply to the fore. Edward VI and his advisors were committed to the new faith in a way that would never have occurred to Henry VIII. Those who clung to the old faith would find the times growing ever more difficult. Notable among them was Edward’s 31-year-old half-sister, Mary Tudor.

  Conservative Catholics might be pernickety enough to query a marriage conducted without the pope’s authority but when her father died, Mary Tudor showed no sign of querying that her nine-year-old brother, as a male, had a superior right to the throne.

  Another woman had long been watching over Mary Tudor’s safety: the regent of the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary. After submitting to her father and acknowledging her own bastardy, Mary Tudor was forced to write to Mary of Hungary, as well as to Charles V, declaring that she had done so freely. Mary of Hungary (like Charles’s wife, Isabella of Portugal) would be sent reports as to Mary Tudor’s welfare. Emperor and regent both refused to acknowledge Edward until sure of Mary Tudor’s position. As Mary of Hungary wrote to their ambassador: ‘We likewise refrain from sending you any letters for our cousin, the Princess Mary, as we do not yet know how she will be treated.’

  She was, at first, treated remarkably gently, given enough lands to make her one of the country’s leading magnates, a generosity designed to buy her complicity with the new regime. But nothing would buy her complicity in the attacks on religious rituals which, under a regency council headed by Jane Seymour’s brother Edward, soon to be Duke of Somerset, were shortly under way.