Game of Queens (5 page)

Machiavelli, who portrayed fickle Fortune as a woman, saw war as a prince’s first duty, as well as pleasure. By contrast, Christine’s model of the virtuous ruler downplayed the ruler’s role as warlord (a practical problem for the female ruler, leaving aside the question of any innately pacific tendencies) and stressed the ‘prudence’ which, in the Aristotelian concept, was the entry point of all the other virtues. Prudence was a virtue attributed to the majority of these women, and
The Book of the City of Ladies
made a point of describing a number of women from both ancient and more recent French history who had successfully governed nations or territories.

The continuity of experience – the repetition of tropes and patterns through the century – is something of a theme of this book. Most can be allowed to manifest themselves through the course of the narrative but one is so insistent as to require special note: the question of how frequently debate about these powerful women centres on their bodies. Each of these women would prove to have a role beyond the usual consort’s function of a breeding machine but nonetheless the story abounds with questions of debated virginity and fertility, of women most easily attacked through querying their chastity or their desirability. Questions, even, as to whether the division of a sovereign’s body natural and body politic might not be the best way to allow female rule. This was perhaps the idea behind Elizabeth I’s famous speech at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king . . .’

Though the forceful women of fifteenth-century Italy are sadly beyond the scope of this story, Caterina Sforza may be the most striking of ‘the ones that got away’ (as well as being another suggested as a model for the new chess queen). Machiavelli, who encountered Caterina when sent on an embassy, described how, besieged, with her children taken hostage, Caterina pulled up her skirts and showed the besiegers ‘her genital parts’, telling them she had the means to make more children if necessary. Caterina was perhaps unique even among contemporaries but nonetheless, the stress on a powerful woman’s physicality is something that endures.

Modern comparisons are often invidious and will largely be excluded from this book. Nonetheless, at this of all moments, they cannot be ignored completely. A decade ago as I write – on 19 January 2006, to be precise – the
New York Times
paid an international group of women a backhanded compliment. It was, it said, ‘the most interesting and accomplished group of female leaders’ ever assembled – ‘with the possible exception of when Queen Elizabeth I dined alone’.

A good deal has changed in the last ten years concerning women’s role on the international stage. But a lot has
not
changed – and that includes the visibility of much of women’s history. Elizabeth and her kinswomen apart, the female rulers of sixteenth-century Europe are not always familiar to the general reader in English-speaking countries. In the attempt to change that, this book must be regarded as an opening gambit. But one thing at least it can hope to do: prove that Elizabeth I could dine in some extraordinary company.

Author's Note

Of the sixteen protagonists in this book, four are called some version of ‘Margaret' and another four variants of ‘Mary'. I therefore make no apology for distinguishing them as clearly as possible, even at the cost of some consistency. Thus while Margaret of Austria keeps her natal title despite her three marriages, Marguerite ‘of Navarre' is so described even before her marriage to the king of that small country. It is the title under which she is most familiar, the title under which her writings are still published today. Also in the interests of clarity, spelling, punctuation and capitalisation have sometimes been modernised.

PART I

1474–1513

‘Since you have given women letters and continence and magnanimity and temperance, I only marvel that you would not also have them govern cities, make laws and lead armies . . .'

The Magnifico replies, also laughing:

‘Perhaps even that would not be amiss . . . Do you not believe that there are many to be found who would know how to govern cities and armies as well as men do? But I have not laid these duties on them, because I am fashioning a Court Lady, not a Queen.'

The Book of the Courtier
, Baldassare Castiglione 1528

1

Entrance

The Netherlands, 1513

The girl who arrived at the court of the Netherlands in the summer of 1513 was a courtier’s daughter, bred to know the steps of the dangerous courtly dance; a life where assets were exchanged for attendance, where favour was won by flattery. She knew how the pageantry of a Christmas masque could spell a message, how a family’s fortune could rise or fall on a ruler’s whim and that in the great chess game of European politics, even she might have a part to play.

No one, of course, had yet any idea just how great a part that would be.

She arrived as the latest of the eighteen maids of honour waiting on Margaret of Austria, the Regent of the Netherlands. At just twelve years old, she had been handed over to a stranger (one of the regent’s esquires) and escorted from her manor house home in the Weald of Kent, in England, to make the rare journey across the sea. She would have been keyed up to a pitch of excitement, but scared, too, surely. Perhaps no arrival in her life, not even her arrival at the Tower of London more than twenty years later, would be quite as alienating as this one.

Twelve years old; or about that, anyway. We do not know the date of Anne Boleyn’s birth with certainty. We deduce it, in fact, partly from the knowledge that she came to Margaret of Austria’s court in 1513 and that twelve was the youngest age at which a girl would normally take up such duties.

‘I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me’, Margaret wrote to Anne’s father. The tribute meant the more for the fact that Margaret had herself served a European-wide political apprenticeship unparalleled even in the sixteenth century. At thirty-three, after six years ruling the Netherlands on behalf of her father Maximilian and his grandson, her nephew Charles, she was a figure of international authority. To follow the early career of Margaret of Austria is to read a
Who’s Who
of sixteenth-century Europe. And Margaret would come to play a significant role in the lives of two of the most controversial queens in English history.

‘Whatever you do, place yourself in the service of a lady who is well regarded, who is constant and who has good judgement’, one of Margaret’s mentors, the French governor Anne de Beaujeu, had advised in a manual of instruction for her daughter. If Anne Boleyn were to learn the lesson that a woman could advance ideas, exercise authority and control her own destiny, she could hardly have fallen into better hands.

The controversial German scholar Cornelius Agrippa dedicated
On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex
to Margaret of Austria. Agrippa said the differences between men and women were merely physical: ‘the woman hath that same mind that a man hath, the same reason and speech, she goeth to the same end of blissfulness, where shall be no exception of kind’, and that the only reason women were subordinate was lack of education and masculine ill-will.

In schoolgirl French – French being the chosen language of Margaret of Austria’s court – Anne Boleyn wrote to her father of her determination to make the most of her opportunities. She wrote with distinctly idiosyncratic grammar and spelling (she would strive, she wrote in that letter, to learn to speak French well ‘and also spell’) but under a tutor’s eye. Margaret’s court might be a centre both of power and of pleasure but it was also Europe’s finest seminary. The French diplomat, Lancelot de Carles, later described how the young Anne ‘listened carefully to honourable ladies, setting herself to bend all her endeavour to imitate them to perfection and made such good use of her wits that in no time at all she had command of the language’.

Portraits of the woman Anne Boleyn met in 1513 display a subtle mixture of messages. Since the end of her third and last marriage, Margaret of Austria had made a point of having herself painted always in a widow’s coif, with only the white of the headdress and the sleeves of her costume relieving the inky black. At first sight, no more sombre figure could be imagined. But appearances can be deceptive. To appear as a widow was on the surface a statement of self-abnegation, almost of weakness, a plea for pity. But in fact it allowed a woman both moral and practical authority; the only role that allowed her to operate independently, as neither child nor chattel.

In heraldry, black was the colour of trustworthiness, or ‘
loyaute
’. Margaret of Austria had a name for reliability but one Italian visitor noted that as well as ‘a great and truly imperial presence’, she had ‘a certain most pleasing way of laughing’. Black fabric, which needed much expensive dye and labour to produce its depth of colour, was the luxury material of the sixteenth century. And in the portrait, now in Vienna, the pale fur on Margaret’s sleeves is costly ermine. The court to which Anne Boleyn had come, whether at the summer palace of Veure (La Veuren), or at Margaret’s main base of Mechelen, was a place of culture and luxury. Among the illustrated books Anne Boleyn could have seen in Margaret’s library was the already-famous
Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
(a legacy from Margaret’s last husband), as well as newer books decked with flowers in the margins. Anne would later exchange notes with Henry VIII in the margins of just such a book.

Erasmus was just one of the artists and thinkers Margaret of Austria welcomed to Mechelen. Outwardly large, but by palace standards an unostentatious, brick-built house, Margaret’s home was a place where devotional works jostled Renaissance nudes. A
mappa mundi
that Van Eyck had made for her great-grandfather, Philip the Good, sat beside more recent acquisitions. One was what Margaret’s inventories describe as ‘
Ung grant tableau’
(a large picture)
‘qu’on appelle, Hernoul-le-fin
’; what is now called the Arnolfini portrait. This had, said her inventories of 1516, ‘been given to Madame by Don Diego’. Don Diego de Guevara, a Spaniard who had come into the service of Margaret’s family, was another courtier with a young female relation to place in the ducal household and the Arnolfini portrait (‘
fort exquis
’, exquisite, as one of Margaret’s later inventories describes it) may have been a token of his gratitude and a sign of just how highly these places were sought.

Mechelen’s walls were hung with blue and yellow damask, with green taffeta, or with Margaret’s legendary collection of the tapestries for which the Netherlands was famous. Later, after the conquistador Cortés returned from Mexico, Margaret’s collection included Montezuma’s feather cloak, Aztec mosaic masks and a stuffed bird of paradise. As a northern pioneer of the kind of cabinet of curiosities beloved of Italian patrons, she employed a curator and two assistants to look after her collection.

Those in charge of young girls, Anne de Beaujeu wrote, should:

make sure they serve God, hear the Mass every day, observe the Hours and other devotions, pray for their sins, go to confession and frequently give alms. And to console them and enliven their youth and the better to maintain their love for you, you must sometimes let them frolic, sing, dance and amuse themselves happily but honestly, without groping, hitting, or quarrelling.
¹

A
fille d’honneur
had no specific duties, which makes it all the likelier that Anne would have witnessed and perhaps participated in Margaret of Austria’s pleasures. Margaret kept close by her a paintbox, covered in purple velvet and disguised as a book, which she herself used frequently. Music was another important recreation. Her choir was legendary and she herself was a notable keyboard performer and composer of songs. The masses, motets and
chansons
in her music books were by the composers Anne herself later favoured when her interest in music formed a bond with Henry VIII.

Margaret also played chess for recreation, with sets of chalcedony and jasper, and silver and gilt. (Her godmother, Margaret of York, who owned Mechelen before her, had kept volumes on chess in the study she hung with violet taffeta.) But Margaret of Austria played the same game also on a wider stage, as, in the years ahead, would Anne Boleyn.

The thriving, merchant-led community of the Netherlands had a tradition of social mobility. The Arnolfini portrait features not an aristocratic but an aspirational merchant couple. This too, perhaps, was not without its effect on Anne. The Boleyns themselves, you might say, were an example of English social mobility. Not that Anne came from such humble stock as has often been claimed. There was merchant money in the Boleyn family but it was Anne’s great-grandfather who had made the family fortune and become Lord Mayor of London. In the go-getting Tudor age many great families had connections closer than hers with trade. Anne was better-born than two of Henry’s other wives; her mother was a scion of the mighty Howard family, eldest daughter of the Earl of Surrey, later Duke of Norfolk and her father, Thomas, had a connection to the Irish earldom of Ormonde and his mother was heiress to half the Ormonde fortune.