Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Diplomatically, she would attempt to steer something of a neutral path. Her son Henri was still in French hands, and an heir to the French throne, while the Huguenots had as yet insufficient military strength to stand against the royal armies. But within her own fiefdom, she made her stance clear. Antoine, she said, had sent orders to Pau that the parlement should cease all exercises of the Reformed Religion and exile any officials not Catholic. She in turn withdrew her permission for him to negotiate with Spain about exchanging Navarre for Sardinia, saying it had been ‘given through force and fear, not having dared refuse a husband’:

  When I learned this, I used the natural sovereign power God had given me over my subjects, which I had ceded to my husband for the obedience which God commands; but when I saw that it was a question of my God’s glory and the purity of his worship . . .

  One way or another, the marriage was coming to an end.

  The violence that followed the Massacre of Vassy in 1562 forced Catherine de Medici, however reluctantly, to put herself under the protection of the Duc de Guise, who arrived at Fontainebleu with a thousand cavalrymen. As the Protestants appealed to their co-religionists in Geneva, to the German Protestant princes and to Elizabeth of England, Catherine, with the Guises, was forced to find aid both from Philip of Spain and the papacy. Despite the wreckage of her policies, her personal courage remained high as she appeared on the ramparts above Rouen. ‘My courage is as great as yours,’ she told the men.

  Another, too, showed bravery in these wars. Whatever his vacillations of policy, no one had ever doubted Antoine de Bourbon’s physical courage. But, when he had merely wandered into the bushes to relieve himself, he was hit in the shoulder. The wound became gangrenous and he died a few weeks later, on 17 November. Catherine allowed Antoine’s widow, Jeanne, to take control of her son’s education, although for the next few years he would effectively remain a hostage at court.

  In the following spring of 1563 Jeanne d’Albret wrote a long letter to Catherine de Medici:

  I trust, Madame, that you will not find that I have exceeded my duty by addressing myself to you on wings that fly above the heads of others . . . I am fully aware, Madame, of your perfect good will and friendship, and of your desire to further my son’s welfare and my own, and I cannot ignore your acts, so praiseworthy that I kiss the ground where you walk. But forgive me, Madame, if I write as I spoke to you at St Germain, where you did not seem to mind. Your good intentions are obstructed by the interference of those whom you know too well for me to describe them . . .

  The letter also makes reference to a recent ‘pitiful event’, for Antoine’s was not the only important death that season. In February 1563, to the grief of his niece Mary in Scotland, the Duc de Guise was assassinated. Catherine was suspected; she is said to have told Condé (who had been captured by her royalist party) that Guise’s death ‘released her from prison’. Ironically, however, it also made her by default the leader of the Catholic faction, while the Protestant one was led by Condé and Admiral de Coligny, supported by the emotive figure of Jeanne d’Albret.

  There was a brief breathing space for everyone. In March the Edict of Amboise gave freedom of conscience, and limited freedom of worship, to Huguenots. In the summer of 1563, Catherine de Medici adopted the device that had earlier been used to confirm Marie de Guise’s authority in Scotland, when she had her thirteen-year-old son Charles IX declared of age, despite the opposition of the Paris parlement.

  The first act of the young king was to hand his mother the ‘power to command’, declaring that she ‘would continue to govern as much and more than before’. When, some months later, Charles IX issued a decree maintaining a fragile peace between the Guises and the Colignys clan, his mother boasted that he had done so ‘without anyone’s prompting’. But that seems, to say the least of it, unlikely.

  Jeanne d’Albret, meanwhile, was also consolidating her authority. The year 1563 saw the abolition in her lands of the traditional religious processions and the arrival of the extra ministers she had requested from Calvin. ‘The Queen of Navarre has banished all idolatry from her domains and sets an example of virtue with incredible firmness and courage’, wrote one. Many of Jeanne’s nobles and officials were against her reform, and the reformer Jean-Raymond Merlin fretted that ‘she is inexperienced . . . having always been either under a father who managed affairs, or under a husband who neglected them’.

  A few months after Jeanne’s imposition of Protestantism she was, Merlin said, ‘épouvantée’ (aghast) at news the Spanish had stationed troops on her frontier, and that though he had pushed her into forbidding the Mass in one town, she was hanging back (‘paralysed by fear’) from repudiating the papacy entirely. The Spanish envoy, once again Descurra, had brought her a letter of remonstrance from the King of Spain. She replied:

  Although I am just a little princess, God has given me the government of this country so that I may rule it according to His Gospel and teach it His laws. I rely on God, who is more powerful than the King of Spain . . .

  Philip had attempted to neutralise the widowed Jeanne by marrying her into his house but now he told his secretary of state that ‘this is quite too much of a woman to have as a daughter-in-law’.

  Next, frighteningly, Jeanne d’Albret received a letter from an emissary of the papacy, Cardinal d’Armagnac, sent from Trent to warn her away from the reformist path. But to that too Jeanne replied, with mounting indignation:

  I condemn no one to death or imprisonment, which penalties are the nerves and sinews of a system of terror – I blush for you, and feel ashamed when you falsely state that so many atrocities have been perpetrated by those of our religion. Purge the earth first from the blood of so many just men shed by you and yours . . . As in no point I have deviated from the faith of God’s Holy Catholic church, nor quitted her fold, I bid you keep your tears to deplore your own errors . . . I desire that your useless letter may be the last of its kind.

  On 28 September 1563 Pope Pius IV summoned Jeanne to appear before the Inquisition in Rome, on a charge of heresy. If she failed to appear she would be excommunicated and her lands declared free to anyone who could take them. She had six months to comply.

  From this predicament she was once again rescued by Catherine de Medici; albeit Catherine’s motives were not solely sisterly. The papacy’s intrusion on French sovereign power had long been a bone of contention. In December, Catherine sent a special envoy to Rome protesting that the pope’s actions were ‘against the ancient rights and privileges of the Gallican Church’.

  Philip of Spain, meanwhile, planned to kidnap Jeanne and deliver her to the Inquisition in Spain. But elements of the plan leaked out when an embroiderer employed by Catherine de Medici’s daughter Elisabeth – Philip’s wife – passed on word of what one of the agents had said while in his cups. The former French princess passed word to her mother’s ambassador: an example either of natal trumping marital loyalties or of female solidarity.

  ‘I put myself wholly under the wing of your powerful protection’, Jeanne d’Albret wrote gratefully to Catherine de Medici. ‘I will go to find you wherever you may be and shall kiss your feet more willingly than the Pope’s’. Protection, however, had a price. Jeanne was summoned to the French court and Catherine wrote that she must moderate her religious policy ‘in such a way that her subjects will not be led to rebel nor her neighbours to support them’. Jeanne should let her subjects ‘all live in freedom of conscience and in the exercise of their own religion without forcing of any’. Jeanne’s edict of February 1564 permitted a measure of Catholic as well as a measure of Calvinist worship and the pardon of all religious crimes that could not be considered lèse-majesté.

  Jeanne d’Albret dawdled in obeying Catherine de Medici’s summons to court; she had, after all, to arrange for her land to be ruled in her absence. But by the spring of 1564 it was Catherine herself who was setting out, taking her court and her son, the king, on a progress through France that would last for more th
an two years; ten thousand people on a twenty-seven-month journey, equipped with everything from portable triumphal arches to a travelling zoo. At the beginning of June, in Maçon, Jeanne at last joined the royal tour, herself accompanied by three hundred cavalry and eight Calvinist ministers. From the start, her intransigence was clear.

  The day after Jeanne’s arrival, as the Corpus Christi procession passed under her windows, members of her suite shouted lewd remarks. In Lyons, a few days later, she attended Huguenot sermons, taking her son with her, until a provoked Catherine stopped the Calvinist services, took Jeanne’s son Henri back into her own hands and swore she would cut off the head of anyone who did not attend Mass. But in some ways the progress had the unifying effect Catherine hoped for and, in Lyons, a joint procession of Catholic and Protestant children was staged to celebrate the current state of religious harmony.

  As the journey wore on, Jeanne d’Albret often requested to be allowed to return to her own lands and to take her son with her. This was refused. Henri would continue to accompany the court. Jeanne, as a compromise, was instructed to retire to Vendôme; her own land but closer at hand and held in fief to the French crown.

  Even Vendôme had seen conflict between the Calvinist lieutenants Jeanne had appointed and the royal agent the Protestants claimed was persecuting them. But Jeanne was to remain in its environs for some months. Everyone wanted her out of the way of the meeting that was looming at Bayonne, on the Spanish border.

  There, Catherine de Medici hoped once again to see her daughter Elisabeth – a longed-for personal as well as a vital diplomatic encounter. But Philip of Spain, annoyed with Catherine’s tolerant religious policy, and refusing to attend the meeting himself, had refused even to let his wife attend if Jeanne d’Albret and Condé were present; not wishing, he said, his wife to meet ‘with rebels and fomenters of sedition’.

  The meeting was a grand diplomatic spectacle and no doubt a rare personal pleasure for both Catherine de Medici and her daughter. But even here there was a conflict of interests. ‘How Spanish you have become, my daughter,’ Catherine said to Elisabeth, observing the latter’s wholesale adoption not only of Spanish dress and manners but also of Philip’s opinions. Philip had sent with his wife the Duke of Alba, a notorious hardliner and ardent Catholic, to dragoon Catherine into clamping down on the Huguenots. He failed, but conversely, the very fact of Catherine’s having met him was taken by the Huguenot leaders as a worrying sign.

  Immediately after the Bayonne meeting, Catherine de Medici, characteristically, once more set about appeasing the Protestant leaders. In the summer of 1565 Jeanne was allowed to leave Vendôme for Nérac (capital of the duchy of Albret, which gave her her name), there to receive the court on its homeward journey. Catherine urged Jeanne to return to the Catholic faith; Jeanne used the time to introduce her son Henri to leading Huguenots. When the royal circus finally reached Paris in early summer 1566, Jeanne d’Albret was with them but – so the Spanish ambassador complained – still behaving intransigently.

  40

  ‘Majesty and love do not sit well together’

  Scotland, 1565–1567

  In the summer of 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots married her kinsman, Lord Darnley. What followed is one of the better-known tales in British history; a catastrophic chain of events and errors. Was Mary Stuart, like Jeanne d’Albret, a rebel against what those around her saw as good order and authority? Was she a fool for love? Or was she making what she saw as her best bid at keeping the rule of her country in her own (and a husband’s) hands, however misguided her gamble proved to be? From the start, contemporary opinions were contradictory.

  When Mary Stuart met, and to all appearances swiftly fell for Henry, Lord Darnley, she seemed to be fitting into the stereotype John Knox had used to discredit the whole idea of women’s rule: infatuated, a prey to unbridled sensuality. As she told the English ambassador Randolph: ‘Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable’. At eighteen, Darnley was tall (taller even than Mary’s six foot), elegant, an expert in the manly arts and educated in a way which gave him a veneer of courtly civility, however illusory that would prove to be.

  When, in February 1565, Mary went to greet Darnley on the Scottish coast, there was a subtext to any possible love story. The English parliament had objected to Mary’s claim to the English throne on the grounds that she was a foreigner, as well as a woman and a Catholic. But if she could ally her claim to that of the English-born Margaret Douglas, Margaret Tudor’s daughter and Darnley’s mother, or to that of her son, it might be a different story.

  This begs the question of why Elizabeth Tudor had agreed to let Darnley and his father Lennox go north to Scotland when they had asked permission the year before. The plausible reason was that Lennox needed to deal with his Scottish lands, but surely Elizabeth must have guessed what might happen? The idea of a match between Mary and Darnley had first been mooted long ago. Is it conceivable that Elizabeth was purposely handing Mary a poisoned chalice, knowing that Darnley would make Mary the worst of husbands?

  It was Elizabeth Tudor herself who – inadvertently or otherwise – put the seal on the affair. Mary Stuart had been pressing for some definite commitment from Elizabeth regarding her place in the succession. In the middle of March Elizabeth’s answer arrived; that ‘nothing shall be done until her Majesty (Elizabeth) shall be married, or shall notify her determination never to marry’. No wonder it took the English ambassador Thomas Randolph two days to brace himself to deliver the message.

  Within weeks Mary and Darnley were openly courting, with Mary defying convention to nurse him herself when he fell ill. When Elizabeth sent orders recalling Lennox and Darnley to England, Mary commanded them instead to remain. She was strengthened in her resolve by France’s support, and by that of her former mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, whom it suited to have Elizabeth under pressure at this time.

  Before the marriage, Darnley began to show himself as ‘proud, disdainful and suspicious’, drunken and violent. The question is whether or not Mary knew this; whether any infatuation she felt for him had already died. Throckmorton, sent to the Scottish court to bring Darnley home, found a queen ‘seized with love in ferventer passions than is comely’ even for ‘mean persons’. But Randolph wrote to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, that Mary showed so much change in her nature ‘that she beareth only the shape of the woman she was before’. A fool for love, or one already seeing love slip away?

  ‘What shall become of her, or what life with him she shall lead, I leave it to others to think’, Randolph prophesied gloomily. As Throckmorton quoted to Leicester and Cecil: ‘Majesty and love do not sit well together, nor remain on one throne.’ But Randolph was a partial witness, and royal marriages were not made for pleasure; and this one was going ahead whatever anybody said. Mary was unmoved by the disapproval of both her half-brother Lord James (now Earl of Moray) and Maitland. She was understandably disenchanted with their pro-English policy, while the fickle and ambitious Earl of Morton, another powerful player in Scottish affairs, was a kinsman of Darnley’s.

  ‘Greater triumphs there never were in time of Popery than were this Easter at the resurrection and at her high mass’, reported Randolph grimly to Cecil at the end of April: ‘She wanted now neither trumpet, drum, nor fife, bagpipe nor tabor . . . Upon Monday she and divers of her women apparelled themselves like burgesses’ wives, went upon their feet up and down the town, and of every man they met they took some pledge of money towards the banquet.’

  Mary was riding high.

  Elizabeth Tudor’s attempt to forbid the match was countered by Mary Stuart with a mixture of wilful misunderstanding: Elizabeth had always said that Mary should marry an Englishman, hadn’t she? and outright anger. ‘You can never persuade me that I have failed your mistress’, Mary told Randolph, ‘but rather she to me; and some incommodity it will be as well for her to lose my amity as hers will be to me.’

  The wedding took place o
n 29 July 1565, in Mary’s private chapel, with Mary wearing the white dress of her widowhood. The ceremony was Catholic, although Darnley removed himself before the nuptial Mass. The heralds proclaimed him now King of Scotland: ‘. . . this Queen is now become a married wife’, Randolph wrote to Leicester, ‘and her husband, the self-same day of his marriage, made a king’. A king, however, ‘so proud and spiteful, that rather he seemeth a monarch of the world than he that no long since we have seen and known the Lord Darnley’.

  Darnley’s kingship was in many ways an empty title. Mary never managed to procure him the Crown Matrimonial, which would have secured his position as a monarch of Scotland, independent of Mary, even in the event of her death. The great problem for reigning queens – the position of a consort – had caught out Mary. But it had also caught out Darnley.

  In the first months of their marriage Mary and Darnley were able to subsume any anxieties into activity. They set out in force (and, in Darnley’s case, in a specially-made gilt breastplate) to pursue and punish those lords who, under the leadership of her half-brother Moray, were now in open rebellion. Since battle was never really engaged with a fleeing foe, this became known as the Chaseabout Raid. But Mary showed to advantage, with loyal Scotsmen flocking to join her cause, more of them every day.

  She sent Elizabeth word that she wanted no more interference in the affairs of her country; that she hoped she and her cousin could be the best of friends once more but only after Elizabeth had declared Mary her heir, she and Darnley. She reconciled most of the lords to her cause and split off the few rebels who held to Moray. When, at Mary’s invitation, the Earl of Bothwell returned to the country and took command of the army, the rebels simply melted away. This, however, left the divisions in the royal marriage all the plainer to see.