Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  On the advice of the leading Protestant, Admiral de Coligny, Catherine de Medici called a meeting of the full council for August; a discreet move to curb the exclusive influence the Guises had at first enjoyed. She herself made the first speech, hoping the councillors might find a policy whereby the king ‘could conserve his sceptre, his subjects find relief from their suffering and the malcontents find contentment’. But events would overtake the peaceable plan.

  The first of these involved the Bourbons; Antoine, and particularly Condé, who preferred to put their faith in military might rather than Catherine’s assemblies, prepared through the autumn for armed confrontation. Condé was arrested and his wife imprisoned, while there were stories the Guises, in league with the Spaniards, planned to seize Jeanne d’Albret and her son. But the second event was more definitive still. Young King François II, notwithstanding his passion for hunting, had always been frail and sickly, and on 9 November, after riding out in the cold, he fell ill.

  It soon became clear that his condition was serious. Catherine de Medici wrote of how hard it was ‘to see the terrible and extreme pain that the King, my son is suffering’. François II had an abscess in his ear, and sepsis set in. Everyone, even his mother, had to think of what would happen if the worst befell.

  The heir, Catherine’s next son, Charles, was only ten, so the Estates General would have to vote on a regency. Their choice was likely to fall on Antoine de Bourbon, for all that his brother Condé was now under sentence of death. This would leave no great place for Catherine. Boldly, she called Antoine de Bourbon into her presence (and that of the Guises) and accused him of having plotted, treacherously.

  Terrified that the same sentence would fall on him as on his brother, Antoine weakly offered to give up his rights in the regency to Catherine de Medici; an offer with which she was quick to close, citing examples of other queen mothers who had ruled on behalf of a young son, notably the thirteenth-century Blanche of Castile, mother of the revered Louis IX. The Guises were alarmed that they too would be called to account for their dubious part in prosecuting Condé and all too aware that their influence would suffer once their niece Mary was no longer queen. Catherine placated both parties, and made them embrace. Pitting her rivals against each other, she had seemingly emerged above the fray. She had become an operator. It was a triumph of her personal diplomacy.

  François II died on 5 December 1560, after a reign of only sixteen months. This was Catherine de Medici’s moment. An English diplomat wrote that, ‘The Queen was blithe of the death of King Francis her son, because she had no guiding of him.’ Calling a meeting of the council, she told them: ‘Since it has pleased God to deprive me of my elder son, I mean to submit to the Divine will and to assist and serve the King, my second son [Charles IX], in the feeble measure of my experience.’

  She had decided, she told the council:

  to keep him beside me and to govern the state, as a devoted mother must do. Since I have assumed this duty, I wish all correspondence to be addressed in the first place to me; I shall open it in your presence and in particular in that of the King of Navarre [Antoine de Bourbon], who will occupy the first place in the council as the nearest relative of the King . . .

  Antoine gave his assent, protesting his loyalty, and so did the Guises. Both parties ascribed the actions which had produced their former enmity to the orders of the dead François II; Catherine de Medici colluded in the pretence, content with the situation she had set up. At forty-one, she had attained immense authority. The Venetian ambassador wrote that her will was supreme: ‘it is she who will henceforth have her hand upon the most important negotiations’. Before the year was out, she had herself proclaimed Governor of the Kingdom, ‘Catherine by the grace of God, Queen of France, Mother of the King’.

  François II’s early death would have huge consequences for his widow Mary Stuart, and thus, indirectly, for Elizabeth in England. Mary Stuart had been raised in the expectation that her role as queen consort of wealthy France would outrank that of queen regnant of obscure Scotland. But now, fewer than two years into her marriage, as she sat in the darkened room, custom prescribed for a mourning queen, she must have known her future had changed, completely and unexpectedly.

  There was yet another woman, also in France, whose future would be profoundly affected by the ramifications of François’s death. It was clear Catherine de Medici had used Antoine de Bourbon as pawn and cat’s paw. Did the word of his humiliation, and his vacillation, persuade Jeanne d’Albret that she should take a stand? Calvinism, with its authoritarian logic, its insistence on a black and white simplicity, must have had an emotional appeal. At Christmas communion, at Pau, she publicly forswore Rome and, as her personal historian Nicolas de Bordenave recorded, ‘having made a confession of faith, partook of Holy Communion according to the rites of the said Reformed Religion’. Bordenave later recorded that once the previously reluctant Jeanne had ‘put everything in God’s hands’, she did so ‘with such constancy that never again could she be turned from her course, no matter what assaults Satan and the world made upon her’.1

  Jeanne d’Albret was hailed by other Protestant players on the international board. Calvin first wrote to her in mid-January 1561, declaring that he had no need to advise her, for ‘when I see how the spirit of God rules you I have more occasion to give thanks than to exhort you’. Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador Throckmorton had been told to congratulate Jeanne on her ‘affection for the true religion’, commenting that the time offered ‘great opportunities to encourage those well-disposed’.

  Both Calvin and Queen Elizabeth regretted the defection of Antoine, now declared Lieutenant-General of France, as Catherine had promised. The Florentine ambassador took his appointment as a sign of Catherine’s weakness, declaring that she had ‘finally proven that she is only a woman’. But Antoine’s reward was less than he hoped. When he suggested that, in the event of Catherine’s illness, her responsibilities should devolve on him, her reply was uncompromising: ‘I shall never be too ill to supervise whatever affects the service of the King my son.’

  In the middle of 1561, delayed by the need to settle affairs in Béarn before she left (not least the protection of her Calvinist ministers), Jeanne d’Albret set out to join her husband at the French court. She hoped, perhaps, to stiffen his commitment to the Protestant faith.

  The Spanish ambassador wrote that along the way ‘everywhere the heretics await her coming as if she were the Messiah, because they are certain she will perform miracles on their behalf. Personally I do not doubt it, for wherever she goes she meets with no resistance.’ Throckmorton told Elizabeth’s minister Cecil, after Jeanne had moved on from Orléans, of how twenty-five religious ladies, ‘the fairest of sixty’, threw aside their habits and scaled the walls, so convinced were they now of ‘the superstitions of the cloister, and the pleasures of secular company’. The Venetian ambassador called Jeanne a woman ‘di terribile cervello’ (of a fearsome brain). Catherine, noted the Spanish ambassador, ‘will have a hard time living with her’.

  Jeanne d’Albret made herself a focus of Protestantism at the French court, setting up a religious council, welcoming new evangelists, winning a certain following among other young court ladies and regularly attending Protestant services ‘with the doors open’. She also sent word to England that Elizabeth Tudor’s ‘credit is great, and the more so for standing so firmly in God’s cause. [Jeanne] was glad to hear that the candles and candlesticks were removed from the Queen’s chapel.’ Her husband Antoine, by contrast, attended both Protestant and Catholic services in these months.

  Antoine, as even Calvin in Geneva heard with profound disapproval, by now notorious as a ladies’ man, was involved with one of the pretty young attendants around Catherine de Medici. Even Calvin became drawn into the attempt to heal Antoine’s marriage to Jeanne, but nothing could weigh against the inducements held out by the other side. Spain even offered him (‘in principle’) another kingdom to compensate for the loss of
Navarre.

  ‘I have always worked for the advancement of [the Religion]’, Jeanne d’Albret declared later in her memoirs. Her husband ‘having withdrawn from the first zeal that he had had for it, was for me a tough thorn, I won’t say in the foot, but in the heart.’ By contrast, ‘I have always, by the grace of God, followed the straight path.’ The Venetian envoy wrote that Jeanne was harassing Antoine ‘night and day’, while he was trying to force her into at least outward conformity. Forbidden to hold Calvinist services in her apartment, she went to those in Condé’s, and when Antoine confronted her as she was about to step into the carriage, the rows were ‘so loud everyone in the château could hear’.

  When Jeanne d’Albret’s ever-fragile health gave way, Antoine changed tactics and sought to separate himself from her. A year after his wife’s conversion, he openly set his face even against the measures of tolerance now proposed by Catherine de Medici, declaring his determination to ‘live in closest friendship with the Guises’. His brother Condé, however, would take his place as leader of the threatened Huguenots. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1561, the anti-Protestant alliance of the Guises and Montmorency had the support also of Spain, the emperor, and the pope: an all-male conspiracy to which they were eager to recruit Antoine.

  Catherine de Medici, by contrast, was strongly behind the Colloque of Poissy, which met that summer in what proved a vain attempt to reconcile religious divides. She issued an amnesty for all religious offences committed since her husband’s death, delaying French churchmen from attending the Counter-Reformation’s Council of Trent, but Catherine’s toleration was a pragmatic measure aimed at preserving her son’s monarchy. As she wrote to her reproachful son-in-law Philip of Spain, the experience of decades in France taught that ‘violence only serves to increase and multiply [this infection], since by the harsh penalties which have constantly been enforced in this kingdom, an infinite number of poor people have been confirmed in this belief’.

  Her edict in January 1562 allowed Protestants to practise their faith as long as it were outside town walls. But it was greeted with horror by domestic and foreign Catholic powers, despite her continued assurance that she and her children ‘wished to live in the Catholic faith and obedience to Rome’. The parlement of Paris at first refused to register the edict, specifically, in their formal remonstrance, linking their refusal to Catherine’s sex. ‘Laws both sacred and profane insist that the woman is in holy bond to her husband and children in holy bond to their father, which is to say that the entire family is of the same religion as the father of the family’; that is, of the religion Henri II had followed. Failing to follow this, they said, produced ‘nothing but contention, rancour, and division’. Deliberately, Catherine displayed herself, with her children, at every Catholic ritual.

  To her daughter Elisabeth, Philip’s wife, Catherine wrote word to ignore any rumours: ‘I do not mean to change my life or my religion or anything. I am what I am in order to preserve your brothers and their kingdom.’ But Jeanne d’Albret was cut from very different cloth. When Catherine de Medici asked Jeanne to moderate her Protestant behaviour, Jeanne’s reply was uncompromising: ‘Madame, if I had my son and all the kingdoms in the world within my hands, I would rather cast them to the bottom of the sea than lose my salvation.’

  Catherine de Medici did not give up. She was still cultivating Jeanne d’Albret to a marked degree. As Jeanne prepared to leave the French court in the spring of 1562, Catherine kept her close as she and her son received foreign ambassadors; even going shopping in Paris together, ‘disguised as bourgeois ladies in simple headdress’. Indeed, Catherine was identified with Jeanne’s interest to the point where Elizabeth Tudor could instruct Throckmorton ‘to encourage the Queen Mother, the Queen of Navarre, and the Prince of Condé to show their constancy [and to convey] her intention to stand by them’.

  But it was no longer possible to resist the demands of Antoine, and of the Spanish ambassador, that Jeanne should be sent away from court. Her son Henri had been taken away from her, to be educated under his father’s charge by conservative Catholic tutors. Jeanne, allowed to say goodbye to him, told the child that if ever he went to Mass she would disinherit him, or so the Cardinal of Ferrara said. The eight-year-old held out for several months before finally, predictably, being seen at Mass with his father and the royal family. By that time, the temperature of the religious conflict had risen in an alarming way.

  On 1 March 1562 the Duc de Guise, while visiting family estates in the Champagne region, was riding to Mass through the small town of Vassy, property of his niece Mary Stuart, when he heard the provocative sound of a Protestant service coming, illegally, from a building within the town walls. Whether or not his armed escort actually began what came to be called the Massacre of Vassy, it left more than seventy Protestants dead and more than a hundred wounded. Small wonder that Jeanne d’Albret secretly fled southwards to her own territories. The First War of Religion, as it would become known, was under way, with women prominent on either side.

  38

  ‘Two Queens in One Isle’

  Scotland and England, 1561–1565

  Events in France had radically altered the life of one young woman who had expected to live out her life there. Now that Catherine de Medici was the power in the land where Mary Stuart had expected to be queen, the Queen of Scots’s eyes turned another way. After her young husband King François died, Mary, as a childless widow, had no role in France, while Scotland had no royal visible on the throne.

  In August 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots landed at Leith, with the intention of governing her country. Just what kind of a fist she made of it is hotly disputed by historians; a question that goes right to the heart of the notion of the female ruler in the sixteenth century.

  Mary made no attempt to consolidate her position in France. On the first day of her widowhood she handed the queen’s jewels back to Catherine de Medici. A Scottish contemporary mentioned her next move as being motivated by Catherine’s ‘rigorous and vengeable dealing’. The forty days seclusion may have given Mary the thinking space she needed. Her Guise relatives were pushing for another marriage; pushing hard (through her aunt Louise who had many Spanish connections) for the Spanish heir Don Carlos, receiving offers from the kings of Denmark and Sweden, from the dukes of Ferrara and Bavaria. The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand offered one of his sons, while the Scots offered their leading noble Arran, Châtelherault’s son. Philip’s son Don Carlos was the prize but this was blocked by Catherine de Medici, who was writing in code to the Queen of England – who likewise had no wish to be caught between two jaws, northern and southern, of a Spanish vice – that this should be circumvented. Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth, Mary’s old playfellow, had married Philip II but was as yet childless; and Catherine did not want a rival at her court.

  Mary herself was determined on returning to Scotland. The English envoy Throckmorton reported that Mary felt she could count on her family there; that she ‘holds herself sure of Lord James and all the Stuarts’. It was, perhaps, a mark of her political naivety. Her half-brother Lord James Stuart – able, ambitious and quickly gaining control of a country where only his illegitimacy prevented him succeeding his father James V – would surely have preferred to see his legitimate but wholly inexperienced half-sister stay well away.

  There was a perverse benefit in the very fact of Mary being a young woman whom the lords thought they could manipulate. Mary agreed that she would maintain the religious status quo, with Protestantism the official (if far from universal) religion, while she herself should be allowed to hear the Catholic Mass in her own chapel at Holyrood. It is unlikely, however, that she altogether understood the deal she was making. On her very first progress, it became clear that Lord James regarded the deal as extending only to Holyrood; not even to any other of her palaces where Mary might happen to be staying. And the problem was more fundamental. After the death of Marie de Guise in 1560, Scotland had reorganised itself into a country run by its lor
ds, together with a Reformation Parliament which abolished the Mass and refuted the pope’s authority. In England, letters were filed as coming from ‘the States of Scotland’, as if from a Scottish republic.

  This was the rub. In the centuries ahead it would be speculated why Mary Stuart failed in Scotland while Elizabeth Tudor in England succeeded. One answer surely lies in the fact that Mary was eighteen when she began to rule. Elizabeth Tudor had been an unusually experienced twenty-five when she ascended the throne; her sister Mary thirty-seven. But too much altogether may be put down to personality, ability and training; too little to the fact that the Scottish nobles, and the Scottish church, had a very different concept of their relationship with their monarchy.

  There is also the issue of her ministers. It is sometimes regretted that Mary had no minister as able as Elizabeth’s Cecil. That is not altogether true; in William Maitland of Lethington she had ‘Michel Wylie’, the Scottish Machiavelli, who would become one of her chief officers. Maitland, like Lord James, was a Protestant, and his devotion to an increasing rapport with an England would eventually put him at odds with his queen, although for the first half of her reign, Mary’s own eyes were turned England’s way.

  On the death of her husband François II, Mary Stuart told the Earl of Bedford, who brought Elizabeth’s letters of condolence, that Elizabeth ‘shows the part of a good sister, whereof she [Mary] has great need’. She reiterated that she and Elizabeth were (as she had written of Mary Tudor) two queens ‘in One Isle, both of one language, both the nearest kinswoman that each other hath and both Queens’. She failed to realise that although Elizabeth told Maitland she was ‘obliged’ to love Mary (‘as being nearest to me in blood of any other’), for the English, the question of Mary’s claim to the English throne, stood – and would continue to stand – in the way.