Game of Queens (33 page)

Mary at first refused, but the pressure mounted. She wrote to her father begging him to consider ‘that I am but a woman and your child’. Finally, terrified for the lives of her friends, and indeed her own life, Mary capitulated and signed. The same document forced her to declare that she did ‘recognise, accept, take, repute and [ac]knowldege’ her father as head of the church in England and refute ‘the Bishop of Rome’s pretended authority’.

She saw her capitulation as a weakness. Mary Tudor probably never forgave herself for an action which helped to shape her as much as her mother’s firmness did. It did, however, signal the start of a new rapprochement with Henry. On 6 July 1536 Henry’s ‘dear and well-beloved daughter Mary’ rode secretly to join the father who had not spoken to her for five years. She received gifts and monies, and precedence over all but Queen Jane. Her position was curious and double-edged. On the one hand, she was favoured; on the other, she was watched, and closely.

Some around her suffered after the uprisings of 1536 and 1537 against Henry’s religious changes. The Catholic rebels of the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ demanded she be reinstated as her father’s heir. But if Mary lamented their failure, and the savage penalties the rebel leaders suffered, she did so silently. In 1538, she was warned by Cromwell about the ‘lodging of strangers’ at Hunsdon. In 1539, the discovery of a supposed Yorkist plot against King Henry resulted in the execution of, among others, the 68-year-old Margaret Pole, the kinswoman and former governess whom Mary had called her ‘second mother’. As Chapuys commented bitterly: ‘It would seem that they want to leave her as few friends as possible.’

Mary made the best of what personal relationships were left to her. Late in 1536 she wrote to her father that Elizabeth was such a child ‘as I doubt not but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming’. She got on well with her father’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves (despite the fact that the latter’s marriage had been made to cement a Protestant alliance); badly with the flighty Katherine Howard, not only Anne Boleyn’s cousin but nineteen to Mary’s twenty-three. As 1543 dawned, she must have been relieved when news came of the king’s impending and, as it turned out final, nuptials to a cultivated and self-controlled widow of thirty.

Katherine Parr had been a member of Mary’s household while Henry was courting her and her mother had served Katherine of Aragon. Katherine of Aragon may even have stood godmother to her namesake and eventual successor. Now, ironically, Katherine Parr, like Katherine of Aragon before her, would come to represent the English side in the long story of the Scottish wars.

In Scotland, Margaret Tudor was now completely estranged from power under her son James V’s rule. Her dream of an English alliance had never gone away. In the early months of 1536 she had been preparing for what in fact would never happen, a meeting between her son and her brother. But she could only watch as her third husband, Henry Stewart, cuckolded her and squandered her money. She tried to escape across the border into England, only to be brought north again. Something between an irrelevance and an embarrassment to both countries, Margaret Tudor could be found grumbling to the English envoy Sir Ralph Sadler that she had no letter from Henry: ‘though I be forgot in England, shall I never forget England. It had been but a small matter . . . to have spent a little paper and ink upon me.’

Margaret’s relationship to James grew a little easier in her new role of grandmother (to two short-lived boys, not to her famous granddaughter Mary). In 1537, to reseal the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France, James V married King François’s daughter Madeleine. He went to France to woo and wed her himself; as royal marriages go, it was a romantic story. But Madeleine (already ill with tuberculosis) died seven weeks after her arrival in Scotland. James needed a new bride, but King François was reluctant to commit his younger daughter to the Scottish climate. Luckily, there was an alternative; a young widow from an already-prominent French family.

Marie de Guise (Mary of Lorraine) was born, on 20 November 1515, into a clan rising quickly through the French territories. Her father Claude, Duc de Guise, was from the start of the reign a contemporary and crony of François. Claude’s father owned the huge independent duchy of Lorraine, as well as large estates within France itself, and laid claim to the kingdoms of Naples and Jerusalem. He was thus descended from the family that had produced Margaret of Anjou, wife of England’s Henry VI, and the woman who had played so controversial a part in the Wars of the Roses.

Claude’s mother, a cousin of François’s mother Louise of Savoy, was herself a famous figure. Philippa of Gueldres, a noted beauty in her youth, ignored the pleas of her family and retired into the austere embrace of the Poor Clares when the youngest of her thirteen children was still only twelve. Not only Claude and his elder brother Anthony, but also King François himself braved the convent walls to consult her.

Claude became a hero of François’s first Italian campaign, wounded almost to death at the Battle of Marignano but sufficiently recovered to ride at François’s side as the king entered Milan in triumph. From that time, the Guise star was in the ascendant. When François’s wars took him back to Italy in 1525, he left Claude as principal advisor to Louise of Savoy. When German reformers took advantage of François’s preoccupation to invade Lorraine, Claude was advised by his mother Philippa that while some illnesses could be cured by gentle care, heresy was a gangrene that had to be cauterised by fire or sword. From now on Claude (created duke on François’s return) was seen as a Catholic hero.

One of the biggest influences on Claude’s daughter, the young Marie de Guise, was probably her mother, the forceful and devout Antoinette de Bourbon, although the Guise and Bourbon clans were to be dramatically at odds later in the century. Antoinette was left to run the family estates in her husband Claude’s frequent absences. Their eldest daughter, Marie, may have been intended for the church, since when she entered her teens she was sent to join her grandmother Philippa in the convent of the Poor Clares. But it seems to have been her budding charms that, after two or three years, decided her uncle Anthony that she could be better deployed for the advantage of her family.

After Marie’s debut at court in 1531, she was soon treated by the king almost as one of his own daughters. There may have been some thought (in her family’s mind at least) that she might marry one of François’s sons but a few weeks after Henri was betrothed to Catherine de Medici, Marie was instead betrothed to the Duc de Longueville, one of France’s premier peers. The marriage was happy and Marie soon gave birth to a son. She was back at court in time to be one of the principal guests when her friend Madeleine married the Scottish king. Just four weeks before Madeleine’s death, Marie de Guise’s husband Longueville died, and a month later she gave birth to their second son.

The French king offered Marie to James V before her husband was two months buried. Marie was appalled, and the match beset with difficulty, not least about how much of her dowry should come from the Longueville estates, to the disadvantage of her sons. Rumour said François’s son Henri wanted to put Catherine de Medici aside in Marie’s favour. And soon another suitor entered the lists, in the increasingly portly shape of Henry VIII of England. Henry was attracted by everything he had heard of Marie, not least her large physique. ‘I may be big in person,’ she famously retorted, ‘but I have a little neck.’

At this stressful moment, Marie’s second son died, at just four months old. Letters between Marie, her father Claude and mother Antoinette agreed that nothing should be done without Marie’s consent; Marguerite of Navarre offered to mediate with her brother King François, but Marie (once an advantageous contract had been drawn up) took the sensible course. She set sail for Scotland in June 1538, leaving her surviving son, and the Longueville estates, in her mother Antoinette’s care.

Arriving in Scotland, Marie de Guise, encouraged by an exchange of lovely letters with her mother, did everything right: saying politely that James V’s new castles were the equal of anything on the Loire, befriending his illegitimate children and making a friend of Margaret Tudor, her new mother-in-law. The extent of Marie’s influence is unclear, unless we take anything from the fact that James resisted his uncle Henry’s efforts to urge him towards making his own break with Rome, but the marriage could be accounted, broadly speaking, successful. There were hints of personal dissent. In May 1540, Marie gave her husband a son, with another born just eleven months later. Within weeks, however, both babies were dead, to the great distress of both parents and their grandmother Margaret Tudor (who would die of a stroke that November).

Soon, there came another problem on the horizon: a renewed threat from England. Henry VIII’s attempt to assert a historic overlordship of Scotland failed, but when James V tried to ward off a military assault by himself invading England, he found that too many of his nobles had been bought off with English gold. Nevertheless, he pressed ahead, and while he was not himself present at the disastrous Battle of Solway Moss in November 1542, some stories say news of the defeat overset his already fragile reason. Nor was Marie in any position to help him, being by now in the final months of another pregnancy.

On 6 December 1542 James V took to his bed; on 8 December Marie de Guise was delivered of a daughter. Legend has it that James, hearing the news, murmured that ‘it cam’ wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass’. (The Stewart family had inherited the crown through Robert the Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie.) On 14 December he died, leaving the throne to be inherited by his six-day-old daughter, Mary Stuart.

Marie de Guise was not left in the officially sanctioned position that Margaret Tudor had held. Her husband had left no will naming her as protector, and insofar as Margaret Tudor might be regarded as a precedent, it was not an encouraging one. Protocol, moreover, required Marie to remain in her apartments, both as mourning royal widow and newly delivered royal mother. Meanwhile, the dominant position on the regency council was a bone to be fought over between the Earl of Arran (who, if the baby died, would inherit the throne) and the Archbishop of St Andrews, Cardinal Beaton.

Marie let it be known she sided with Beaton. Not only were his anti-English policies closer allied to her French interests but she probably had qualms about allowing Arran, himself so tantalisingly close to the throne, sole control of her vulnerable infant. Within a month of James V’s death Arran was proclaimed lord governor of Scotland, but Beaton was to be lord chancellor.

Among themselves, they had to find a way of confronting the ever-present English threat and holding the throne for the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Henry VIII proposed his solution: to marry the infant Queen of Scots to his son Edward, and have her raised at his own court, thereby securing control of her country. There was a real fear that if his proposal were refused outright he would launch an invasion. Marie de Guise could only play for time.

The first thing Marie did, amid fears that either England or Arran (vacillatingly in support of the English match) would kidnap the baby queen, was to get herself and Mary out of what was effectively Arran’s custody and into the greater security of Stirling Castle. Soon, Marie, with every sign of pleasure in the forthcoming alliance, was proudly showing her infant to Henry VIII’s envoy, Ralph Sadler. On 1 July the Treaties of Greenwich agreed to peace between Scotland and England during the lifetimes of Henry VIII and Mary Stuart, to a marriage between Mary and Henry’s son Edward to be concluded when she was eleven and to Arran, in the meantime, remaining as Scotland’s governor.

But Marie had no intention of ever seeing these plans fulfilled and she derived considerable support from their extreme unpopularity with the majority of Scots. A deal was struck which saw the infant Mary placed in the custody of four lords, rather than of Arran; Antoinette, in France, wrote to congratulate her daughter on her escape from ‘such a great and long captivity’. The baby Mary, Queen of Scots was crowned at Stirling on 9 September 1543.

It was the French ambassador, La Brosse, who helped Marie de Guise and Cardinal Beaton find an excuse – Henry VIII’s seizure of some Scottish ships, a breach of the peace – to declare void the Treaties of Greenwich made only months before and to formally renew the alliance with France. The summer of 1544 saw the start of the so-called ‘Rough Wooing’, a years-long and punitive campaign launched by an infuriated Henry to pay back the Scots for what he called ‘their falsehood and disobedience . . . putting man, woman and child to fire and sword’.

The ensuing devastation was no advertisement for Arran’s leadership of the country and Marie de Guise decided to launch a bid for the regency. Though the council agreed, the bid failed in view of the greater military power Arran could wield, but Marie won a role as leader of the special council that would now advise the lord governor.

Anne de Beaujeu’s advice – that widows should strive to keep power in their own hands – might have been ringing in her ears. Marie de Guise had preserved her daughter’s throne. But in England it remained unclear whether Henry VIII’s daughters could find such a female protector or role model – whether they would be as lucky.

27

Pawns and princesses

The Netherlands, France, 1537–1543

As the infant Mary, Queen of Scots assumed a throne she was too young to recognise and Henry VIII’s daughters faced an uncertain future, in France and the Netherlands, other princesses’ lives seemed set on the traditional path: to be moved like pawns for the advantage of their family.