Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  Opposed to the power of the Guises, less fanatically Catholic in her sympathies, Catherine was likely to view with suspicion any attempt by Mary to get involved in politics. From a personal point of view, she endured rather than embraced the presence of this young, attractive princess to whom everyone declared their love, from her husband to her eldest son through to the court and their effusive poets, Ronsard, du Bellay, Chastelard and other members of the Pléiade. Temperamentally these two women were unalike and Catherine had for too long suffered unfavourable comparisons with the irresistible attractions of Diane de Poitiers, forced to bite her tongue and bide her time. Understandably the queen mother was unwilling to have her young daughter-in-law step into Diane’s charming shoes. It was hardly surprising that she was motivated by duty rather than love in her dealings with her.

  Just over a year after Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin François tragedy struck when least expected, in the middle of triumph and celebration. During the summer of 1559 the court could speak of nothing but the costumes and the plans for the celebrations for the forthcoming double wedding. Philip II of Spain, who had half-heartedly wooed Elizabeth I and been politely rebuffed, was affianced to Elizabeth de Valois, Mary’s favourite sister-in-law. Marguerite, the king’s youngest sister, was to marry Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, another former suitor to Queen Elizabeth of England when she was but a princess in disgrace. With these marriages, the alliance between Spain and England was further weakened as Philip looked to France for his wider peace.

  During the days of extravagant tournaments, pageants and festivities Mary, as dauphine and Queen of Scots, and François, as dauphin and now provokingly King of Scotland, were at the centre of the elaborate ceremonies. One of the high points was the three-day jousting tournament that celebrated the signing of the marriage contract between Madame Marguerite and Savoy. This was also an occasion for broadcasting to the people, and to France’s enemies abroad, the full power and pretensions of the state. The heralds accompanying the dauphin’s party were magnificently arrayed with the arms of France and Scotland but also ‘with an [e]scutcheon of England set forth to the show, as all the world might easily perceive’. Just to impress further on the watching crowd, and on every eagle-eyed ambassador and foreign dignitary, the young dauphine and Queen of Scots’ right to the throne of her cousin, England’s arms also were embroidered on the front, back and sleeves of the heralds’ tunics. All these details were duly noted by the English, deepening their growing distrust of the imperialist ambitions of the Guises, with Mary Queen of Scots as their irrefutable prize.

  On the third day, the king entered the lists accompanied by the Duc de Guise and two other noblemen, and they challenged all comers. Henri was dressed in black and white, the colours of Diane de Poitiers, and successfully ran several courses, watched by the ladies and gentlemen of the court. The king was urged by all to retire in triumph. Against the strongest advice he insisted on being given a fresh lance and running one more course. So determined was he to test his luck to the limit he commanded a reluctant young captain of the Scottish guard to oppose him. During this final joust the king was struck by a blow which smashed the magnificent plume of feathers from his helmet: a splinter from his opponent’s shattered lance was driven up under the visor, through his eye and into his brain. Henri was carried from the field, his head covered, his limbs motionless, it seemed ‘as one amazed’. The watching courtiers were overcome with grief and fear, men and women openly weeping, uneasy at the evident workings of a divine will. ‘Thus God makes Himself known’ ambassador Throckmorton reported back to the English lords of the council, ‘that in the very midst of these triumphs suffers this heaviness to happen.’69

  Catherine de Medici had received from her soothsayers various warnings of the unexpected nature of Henri II’s death. She had apparently also dreamt the exact details of his demise. To the superstitious queen there was suddenly an awful certainty that even as the surgeons laboured and Henri lingered there could in fact be no hope of recovery. The ill-starred king died ten days later in the night of 10 July at forty-one years old: his unprepared, inadequate, fifteen-year-old son, François, succeeded to the throne. Aged sixteen, Mary had achieved everything her family had desired; she was now queen of the grandest monarchy in Europe. But real power resided elsewhere.

  Catherine de Medici quickly dispatched Diane de Poitiers to the country, divesting her of the jewels given her by the dead king and the lovely château of Chenonceaux. With their own kin now as Queen of France, the Guises were suddenly elevated to the right hand of monarchy. Having laid their plans and exhibited their patience and cunning, the Duc de Guise and Cardinal of Lorraine seemed to have the prize of ultimate power in their grasp. The young king and queen were well schooled to look to them for guidance. They were inexperienced and keen to delegate the mighty authority of state. On that transitional eve it appeared likely that François II’s reign would be the cloak for extreme Catholic and Guise-centred policies to prevail. Throckmorton, writing to his new queen, Elizabeth, expressed his unease, ‘the house of Guise is like to govern all about the King, who is much affected towards them’.70 But the Guises could not control fate, nor the irresistible force for religious reformation, nor in fact the ambitions and patient guile of the queen mother, Catherine de Medici.

  This could have been Mary’s chance to translate her influence over her devoted young husband into a wider responsibility for the course of his government. She had all the natural intelligence, strength of mind, energy and purpose to make her a worthy governor like her mother. But she was too much in thrall to her uncles’ influence, bred in her from childhood, and too pampered and inexperienced at this stage to choose such a path of authority and responsibility. There was, however, one authority she would come to seek above all others, to her own tragic end, and the seed of this desire was planted here by her uncles and her father-in-law. The pursuit of her claim on the crown of England, in preference to her cousin Elizabeth or, failing that, as Elizabeth’s named successor, became the overriding ambition of her life. Camden recognized her persistence in this claim as the factor from which ‘flowed as from a Fountain all the Calamities wherein she was afterwards wrapped’.71

  Given that the Queen of Scots’ legitimate claim on the English throne made for an inherent threat to Elizabeth, it was particularly tragic that Mary was not equipped with natural good judgement or the wise counsel of others with more experience and diplomacy than herself. Elizabeth had her brilliant, self-sacrificing William Cecil at the centre of a group of loyal men, while Mary had but the cunning, self-serving Guises during her ascendancy in France, and a shifting band of unreliable supporters in Scotland (an untrustworthy half-brother and two ruinous husbands among them) fuelled with their own ingrained tribal feuds and alliances.

  In fact it was growing unease amongst the French nobility about the power of the Guise brothers that brought Mary Queen of Scots closest to danger in her short reign as Queen of France. The religious reformers were gaining voice and ground. Huguenots were increasingly vocal and in the aftermath of the peace of Cateau-Cambresis the Guises stiffened the heresy laws. Anyone holding or even attending illicit meetings risked the death penalty. The denunciation of such meetings also was made obligatory on pain of death, which encouraged and rewarded informers and further deepened the rifts in French society.

  The rebels looked to the King of Navarre, the next prince in line to the throne after Henri II’s sons, and to his brother the Prince of Condé as figureheads for their campaign. A minor nobleman from Périgord, la Renaudie, was charged with command of the rebel troops. A secret assembly of malcontents met in February 1560 in Nantes to restate their loyalty to their young king François but at the same time confirmed their determination to bring the Guises to account. Their coup was planned to take place on 10 March but was postponed for six days. However, news of this conspiracy leaked out and the whole court, including the new young king and Mary, was quickly moved to the Château of Amboi
se, set high above the Loire and considered impregnable enough to withstand any attack or siege.

  The religious reformers were offered the Edict of Amboise by the king, most probably at the urging of his mother Catherine de Medici. It was an apparently generous recognition of their grievances: an amnesty for all peaceful dissenters; release of all religious prisoners; the possibility of petitioning the king. However, this tolerance was not extended to the conspirators. As they gathered in the woods surrounding the château, some still unarmed, they were set upon by a force of the royal cavalry. Many were killed on the spot, including la Renaudie, whose body was carried back to Amboise and hung on a gibbet, ‘before the Court gate’, as an awful warning. Around his neck hung the inscription: ‘La Renaudie, chief of the rebels’.72

  Others were hunted down and dragged back into the town, tied in groups to the tails of the cavalry horses. Summary trials and executions were enacted in their hundreds. A great deal of reckless courage was shown by the rebels during the ‘Tumult of Amboise’ but the revenge of the Guise brothers was ferocious. According to the sixteenth-century chronicler, Louis Regnier de la Planche, the brothers strove to convince the king that this uprising had little to do with disaffection towards the Guises and was aimed primarily at murdering François and possibly Mary too. Mary, no doubt trusting her uncles’ judgement, was instrumental in persuading her husband he was in mortal danger. The terrified boy-king then nominated the Duc de Guise as his lieutenant-general of the kingdom, thereby giving him unlimited powers and unleashing his bitter revenge.

  No one in the castle or town was immune to the horror of what then followed. There were not sufficient gibbets for the slaughter, and so ordinary rebels were hung in groups from any convenient structure; even the château and its walls were shadowed with these pathetic bundles: ‘les créneaux et les portes du chateau furent chargés de grappes humaines’.73 Others were drowned in the Loire, attached six or eight at a time to poles, and more were thrown into the great river tied in sacks. On 17 March, twenty-two rebels died in this way, followed by another twenty-five the following night. Some unfortunates were ‘appointed to die on the wheel’. Throckmorton, Elizabeth’s ambassador with the court at Amboise, added to his catalogue of death, ‘among these that are taken there are eighteen of the bravest captains in France’.74 The captains and nobles were saved for more theatrical executions, their deaths being enacted in front of the whole court after dinner. Louis Regnier de la Planche described the depraved entertainment:

  Those of Guise reserved the chiefs until after dinner, in order to afford some pastime to the ladies, and they and the ladies placed themselves at the windows, just as though it had been a question of enjoying the sight of some mummery; and, what is worse, the King and his young brothers appeared at these spectacles, as though one had wished to embitter them, and the victims were pointed out to them by the cardinal [de Lorraine], with the gestures of a man greatly rejoiced; and when they died with noble constancy, he observed: ‘Look, Sire, at those shameless and desperate men. See how the fear of death is powerless to abate their pride and wickedness! What would they do, then, if they held you in their power?75

  These were men, often of the nobility, who were tortured with ingenious ferocity (the Guises suspected that the Bourbon Prince of Condé was behind the rebellion and needed cast-iron evidence before convicting a prince of the blood). Their death sentence was carried out in front of the court: they were beheaded, or hung, drawn and quartered. The Venetian ambassador noted that on 17 March, for instance, six or seven were hanged, ‘towards nightfall … all dying with the greatest constancy as the others did this morning, saying that for every one of them who died, twenty would come in their stead’.76 They sang psalms as they died; the last sounds on their lips were in celebration of their ‘true God’. It was the duty of each member of the watching royal family and courtiers to show no squeamishness or pity. Faced with the punishment of their enemies, they could not flinch or turn away. One of Catherine’s young daughters, Claude, could not maintain the aristocratic code of dispassion and went in tears to her mother, distressed by the ‘cruautés et inhumanités’77 of what she was forced to see. Mary, although not much older herself, was expected to be an impassive witness. There is no record of the effect such a spectacle had on her.

  In a period of history when terrible cruelties were routinely enacted man on man and by ruling powers on the weak, when heretics were burnt alive, often having had their tongues torn out to stop them praying aloud or singing hymns at the stake, and when extremes of torture were an accepted part of interrogation, the excessive bloodthirstiness and cruelty of the reprisals at Amboise horrified many of the spectators and participants. According to contemporary records, some of those present never regained their health or peace of mind. Catherine de Medici apparently prostrated herself in front of the Guises in an attempt to save an old family friend, the Baron de Castlenau. Chancellor Olivier, a mild-mannered and tolerant man, friend to many of the rebel noblemen, was so mortified that he had not had the strength of character to oppose the Guises, took to his bed a broken man. With his friends’ reproaches, as they went to their deaths, echoing in his ears he died before the month was out. The convulsion of horror at the events still haunted the town centuries later.

  As queen, Mary was at the very centre of the tragedy. When even great heroic generals like her uncle were rattled and for political reasons warning, in apocalyptic terms, what destruction would be wreaked on the Valois monarchy if the rebels had their way, when the whole court was gripped by fear, there must have been moments when Mary herself feared for her life. Over a period of about a week the king’s troops rode out every day to engage with any rebels, round up the survivors and bring them back to Amboise for interrogation and execution. The women, Mary and Catherine de Medici among them, remained closely confined for most of the month of March in a much fortified castle and town, full of alarms and rumours of incursions.

  Mary had a naturally adventurous and courageous spirit and, although a committed Catholic, was not a natural fanatic, not a persecutor of those whose beliefs were not her own. We have no evidence as to what she thought of the relentless pursuit and punishment of the rebels, but there was every reason to believe that she had accepted her uncles’ assurances that these men were murderous traitors. It had been impressed on the young royal couple that they had been intent on murdering François and herself; that it was a personal rebellion rather than one fuelled by religious conviction and real political grievances against her uncles’ greed for power and heavy-handed persecution of dissenters.

  Perhaps her relaxed attitude to the reformed religion in her own kingdom, when she eventually returned the following year to become the reigning and resident Queen of Scotland, could be dated in part from this lacerating experience. Even the fanatic persecutor, the Duc de Guise, came to realize that Protestantism had become too deeply rooted in France for it ever to be satisfactorily eradicated through violence and suppression.

  If Mary had been better schooled in governance and less dependent on her uncles it is possible to believe that she might have been a moderating hand in the treatment of the French heretics. But even if she had managed to throw off the mantle of the Guises she had to contend with Catherine de Medici, older, wiser, more determined, more wily, and intent this time on maintaining her grip on power. Mary’s apprenticeship was limited by her natural respect for her family elders and her acceptance of the prevailing view that women should not presume they had as great a capacity for government as men.

  In fact, her chance to rule in her own right would come more quickly than she could ever have imagined, but she had to endure the deaths of the two people closest to her before she could stand on the world stage as a monarch alone. Mary was to arrive heavily encumbered with the ambitions of others and the folly of her youth, her claim on the English throne blighting her relationship with her cousin Elizabeth before it had had a chance to blossom. As a contemporary saw it: ‘For hereupon Qu
een Elizabeth bare both Enmity to the Guises, and secret Grudge against her; which the subtile Malice of men on both sides cherished, Emulation growing betwixt them, and new occasions daily arising, in such sort that it could not be extinguished but by Death.’78

  The Tumult of Amboise brought to the fore the real suspicions throughout Europe that Elizabeth I had been fomenting rebellion, on grounds of religion, in France and Scotland, in an attempt at destabilizing both the nations which were most threatening to her. The Venetian ambassador reporting back from the bloodbath of Amboise declared: ‘So this has been the greatest conspiracy of which there is any record, for there was knowledge of it in England, Scotland, Germany, and almost all over Christendom.’79 And the Guise brothers themselves, writing to their sister the dowager queen Mary of Guise, made it clear they considered Elizabeth had ‘been stirring the coals … to draw fruit of her evil disposition’.80

  Certainly this kind of internal uproar within the country which most threatened England’s security was greeted with opportunistic delight by the new Elizabethan government. The English ambassador Throckmorton, writing to Cecil from Amboise, underlined the obvious: ‘present affairs [of the French] are great and many. They will accord with [Elizabeth’s] demands, but redeem the time till these garboils [tumults] are overblown and their affairs in better readiness … Now is the opportunity; now may she do what she will. Whereunto this stir will grow God knows … for they begin to stir in a great many more places.’81