Game of Queens (36 page)

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.

30

‘device for the succession'

England, 1547–1553

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.

There is no doubt that the religious reforms had the active support of the young king. That fact, in a sense, gave Mary Tudor her opportunity. Writing to express her horror at the changes quickly imposed on the celebration of the Mass (communion in both kinds for laity as well as clergy, and a denial of the real presence), she insisted that she would ‘remain an obedient child' to her father's ordinances, until such time as her brother should ‘have perfect years of discretion': a waiting game. The more evangelical the doctrine propounded, the more furiously Mary's household practised according to the old forms. But for a time she was given a measure of leeway, with Edward's council ever conscious of her watchful Habsburg relatives.

When, late in 1549, ‘Protector' Somerset was deposed from the pre-eminent position he had taken upon himself, there were rumours Mary would become her half-brother's regent. Instead John Dudley, a successful military commander and fellow reformer, thrust himself into power. As the new forces on the council struck an alliance with France, sidelining the Habsburg interest, Mary was placed under increasing pressure to cease having the Mass said, even in her private household.

Even before this, Mary had felt her position to be sufficiently precarious that she told the Habsburg ambassador she might need to flee the country. In 1550, it seemed that would indeed become a necessity, and a plot was hatched between Mary Tudor, the ambassador, and Mary of Hungary, who sent three ships to stand by off the Essex coast, waiting to snatch her away.

Edward VI wrote indignantly of how ‘you, our nearest sister' wished ‘to break our laws and set them aside deliberately and of your own free will . . . I will see my laws strictly obeyed'. By contrast, the Christmas celebration of 1550 brought the king's other sister Elizabeth to London ‘with a great suite of gentlemen and ladies', escorted by a hundred of the king's horse and formally welcomed by the council. The point being, as the imperial ambassador bitterly pointed out, to show that she who had embraced the new religion had ‘become a very great lady'. Elizabeth was preferred to Mary by the new elite, being ‘more of their kidney'.

Elizabeth's image as a virtuous Protestant princess had been somewhat besmirched, less than two years before, by the scandal of her ‘affair' with Thomas Seymour, the brother of Protector Somerset, who had married the widowed Katherine Parr. It started out as a distasteful story of bedroom romps in which the forty-year-old Seymour smacked the teenaged Elizabeth's bare backside. But when Katherine Parr died after giving birth to Seymour's child, it became clear Seymour sought to marry Elizabeth, a girl with a claim to the throne.

The early months of 1549 saw what must, for the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth, have been a terrifying official inquiry, with her servants, including her governess and surrogate mother Kat Ashley, incarcerated in the Tower. She herself fought free, although Seymour went to the block. Elizabeth's famous comment that ‘this day died a man of much wit and little judgement' is probably apocryphal but she had shown that when danger threatened, she could act not from the heart but from the head.

The Seymour affair may have reinforced the lesson her mother's fate could have taught her: that sex is dangerous. For the moment, she concentrated on displaying the kind of maidenly modesty that would speedily ensure her complete rehabilitation in the eyes of Edward VI's court. Kat Ashley's husband recalled the ‘free talk' and ‘trim conferences' which took place between Elizabeth and those she gathered around her, notably her tutor Roger Ascham. She appeared in the demure garb that befitted Edward's ‘sweet sister Temperance', deliberately positioning herself in contrast to the Catholic Mary.

When, in March 1551, Mary came to London, she rode through the streets escorted by a host of gentlefolk, each carrying their rosary. The council reacted, at first, merely with a war of attrition against members of Mary's household. Soon, however, she was under such pressure that Mary of Hungary wrote to the imperial ambassador that if they took the Mass away from Mary Tudor she would have to endure it but if they tried to force her into ‘erroneous practices . . . it would be better for her to die than to submit'.

Once again, however, all the participants drew back from the brink. This was in part because of continental troubles that entailed a need to secure England's wool trade with the Netherlands, although Mary of Hungary, afraid England would join with France, proposed invading England to place Mary Tudor on the throne and secure the precious trade that way.
¹
Edward's councillors were no doubt conscious that Mary was still, by the terms of their father's will, her brother's heir. This consciousness was about to grow more acute as 1552 turned to 1553 and Edward caught first one cold, then another, which he failed to shake off.

As his health worsened, the young king, committed to his position as defender of the reformed faith, was for obvious reasons determined his throne should not pass to Mary. If it did, Edward told a reluctant lord chief justice, ‘it would be all over for the religion whose fair foundation we have laid'.

Less obviously, he determined that Elizabeth had also to be excluded, despite her adherence to the new faith. Elizabeth, he explained, was the daughter of a disgraced woman ‘more inclined to couple with a number of courtiers rather than reverencing her husband, so mighty a King'. Perhaps the truth was that Elizabeth Tudor was too much her father's daughter to consent to the overturning of his will, or that John Dudley, now running England behind the cloak of the royal council, knew she would never be his puppet.