An Accidental Tragedy (8 page)

France, 1548–61

CHAPTER THREE

We may be very well pleased with her

The voyage had been no more eventful than any other of the time, dependent on wind and tides. The galley slaves would not have been used if there had been a favourable wind, since they could make little headway against strong contrary winds, and they only represented an additional force in calm weather, though were crucial while manoeuvring in harbour. Mary may have seen the lash used on them, as it was a practice she later forbad, whatever the circumstances. The ships would have been only lightly armed since they offered no promise of profit for pirates, and an attack by English forces was extremely unlikely. Seizing the child on land could always be disguised as a ‘rescue’, but to take her from the King of France’s personal galley while she was under his protection would have provoked an international incident from which even the hot-headed Somerset would draw back.

From Roscoff on 15 August 1548 Villegaignon had sent notice of Mary’s arrival, and when they reached St Pol a first welcoming party was waiting for them, including a mâitre d’hôtel, who acted much as a local tour guide, and, bizarrely enough, the Duchesse d’Étampes, the mistress of François I. There was no official court position for the mistresses of dead kings; she, presumably, had got news of Mary’s arrival through her gossip network, paid her own expenses and came out of curiosity. The entire nobility of France were agog to see the youngest monarch in Europe, who had already gained the status of a fairy queen. Villegaignon bade a relieved farewell to the royal party and was sent back to Scotland with men and ammunition for Marie’s continuing siege of
Haddington. He was also rewarded by being made Admiral of Brittany.

Mary now travelled twelve miles inland to Morlaix, where she made a state entry on 20 August. This was her first experience of the French countryside, and, since in France she did not need the armed guards that surrounded her everywhere in Scotland, she was able to satisfy her youthful curiosity. She had been taught four or five useful words of greeting and thanks in French, but in any case French was a foreign tongue there. Brittany had only been absorbed into France fourteen years earlier and most people spoke only Breton.

The boundaries of the kingdom were much less extensive than those of today, especially on the east, where Savoy stretched westwards to include Nice. From there, the border ran northwards along the valley of the Meuse, putting Metz and Verdun into the Holy Roman Empire, before turning west to include Picardy, but not Artois, which was in the Netherlands and therefore also under the rule of Charles V. There was a population of about 18 million compared to Scotland’s 800,000, and, with its mild climate and fertile soil, its agriculture was the most prosperous in Europe – there had not been a crop failure for almost a century. The French chroniclers were romantic to a man, and in their reports it seemed that sunshine arrived with Mary and that bad weather only returned on her departure. Joachim du Bellay, a poet and aristocrat who had travelled from Scotland with her, constantly sang her praises in verse as, later, Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, would do in prose. Du Bellay said that ‘when in her highland garb she resembled a goddess in masquerade’. It is hard to imagine what fantasy passed for Highland dress in a court totally unacquainted with the reality.

Mary’s journey was now across country to Nantes, where the royal party transferred to a barge to take them along the Loire. This should have been an idyllic journey, but at Ancenis, only a third of the way along the river, the young Lord Seton died of a ‘stomach flux’, probably as a result of food poisoning. Mary now had to comfort Seton’s sister, Mary, and attend her first funeral
Mass. The first link with her Scottish past was broken. She also had to say farewell to de Brézé, who left on royal orders, passing his duties over to Antoinette de Bourbon, Mary’s formidable grandmother.

Apart from her mother, Antoinette de Bourbon was the first scion of this ancient and powerful family that Mary had met. Antoinette was the wife of Claude, Duc de Guise, the son of René II de Lorraine and Philippa de Gueldres. Claude, whose two brothers were Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine, and Antoine, Duc de Lorraine, had, with Antoinette, nine children, all of whom were still alive. They were Mary’s uncles and aunts, and numbered amongst themselves two dukes, one marquis, two cardinals, one grand prior and two abbesses, as well as Mary’s mother, a queen regent. It was obviously vitally important that Mary make a good impression, and on 1 October 1548 Antoinette reported, ‘She is very pretty indeed, and as intelligent a child as you could see. She is brunette, with a clear complexion and I think that when she develops she will be a beautiful girl, for her complexion is fine and clear and her skin white. The lower part of her face is very well formed, the eyes are small and rather deep-set, the face is rather long. She is graceful and self-assured. To sum up, we may be very well pleased with her.’

Despite her good impression of her granddaughter, Antoinette de Bourbon did not find the Maries handsome or even clean, but she thought Lady Fleming was impressive. Excluding Marie de Guise, Antoinette, who lived to the age of eighty-nine, was the first of a long series of women Mary would meet who were powerful in their own right and who neither depended on their husband’s influence nor abandoned their femininity in the pursuit of personal power. At that moment, Antoinette wanted to establish her personal influence as Mary’s substitute mother and to ensure that the infant queen became a member of the Guise faction before she was surrounded by Henri’s court.

The royal courtiers were waiting for her at Carrières-sur-Seine, where she would lodge temporarily in the medieval fortress until the royal apartments in the château of St Germain-en-Laye were
made ready. Through Henri’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, orders were sent that the current occupants of Carrières be lodged in the village. The château of St Germain-en-Laye was only a few miles from Paris, but readily defensible on a cliff overlooking the River Seine. Its foundations dated from the twelfth century, and although François I had rebuilt it entirely as a palatial country estate, it still housed a garrison of 3,000 soldiers. His son was continuing with the refurbishments. Henri’s apartments were on the first floor, overlooking gardens laid out as elaborate parterres and pergolas, while the royal children were on the second floor with its sunny south-facing rooms. Henri was taking a personal interest in Mary’s quarters, sending precise instructions for the furnishings. He also asked for assurances that none of the workmen employed for the renovations had any infectious diseases, and established that all the neighbouring villages were infection free, thus establishing a
cordon sanitaire
around Mary, whom he now referred to as ‘my daughter’. She arrived in her temporary home at Carrières-sur-Seine on 16 October and was glad that her stay in the grim medieval castle was short. Henri had sent further instructions to Jean d’Humières, who was to be her chamberlain and, with his wife Françoise, in charge of the royal nursery, that ‘she takes precedence over my daughters. She is a crowned queen and, as such I would have her honoured and served.’ This meant, among other things, that she would have a cloth of state with her heraldic bearings hung over her chair and that her servants would kneel in her presence and walk backwards when withdrawing from it. Janet Sinclair would have found these formalities unnecessary but would have encouraged her little charge to behave with proper decorum and not give the French any opportunity to find the Scots’ manners barbaric, as the poet Brantôme had found their language. The other royal children, meanwhile, were enthusiastically beginning the education of their exotic, high-ranking nursery companion in the complex structure of the royal household.

This household was headed by the king. Henri de Valois had been born on 31 March 1519, the second son of François I, and
had had no thought of succeeding to the throne since his eldest brother, François, was in good health. When François I was released from his Spanish imprisonment in 1526 he ignored his sons and rode past them to liberty as they took his place as hostages, though the seven-year-old Henri was kissed goodbye by the tender-hearted Diane de Poitiers, eighteen years his senior. The princes’ imprisonment was harsh. By the time of their release in 1530, the eleven-year-old Henri had become morose and withdrawn but he was greeted on his return to France by Diane, who started to take an interest in the young man. When he rode in his first joust, held to celebrate his release, he carried her colours of black and white on his lance. Three years later, she accompanied him to his wedding to Catherine de Medici, an Italian heiress only two months older than him. Catherine was the only daughter of Lorenzo de Medici and a niece of Pope Clement VII, so the marriage provided François with a useful power base in Italy. Diane, with the Constable of France – Anne, Duc de Montmorency – led the aristocratic faction opposing Catherine as a foreign upstart, with Montmorency unfairly calling her ‘an Italian shopkeeper’s daughter’. These nobles, equally unfairly, accused Catherine of poisoning Henri’s elder brother when he died in 1536 after playing tennis in very hot weather and then drinking iced water, the water having been brought to him by his Italian secretary, Sebastian de Montecuculli. Since all Italians were thought to be expert with poisons, it seemed obvious to those that opposed her that Catherine was clearing a path to the throne of France for herself and her husband. Montecuculli, who was probably quite innocent, was tortured and, on the orders of François I, torn apart by horses.

Henri was now the married Dauphin in need of heirs, but Catherine had produced no children, and since Henri himself had fathered a bastard girl in 1537, the fault was laid entirely at the Dauphine’s door, with calls being made for a papal annulment of the marriage. Diane, now Henri’s mistress, adopted his illegitimate daughter as Diane de France. Then, to everyone’s relief, in 1545, Catherine became pregnant with François, Mary’s
future husband. The Diane and Montmorency faction was still antagonistic towards Catherine, but she was supported by François I and was at the king’s side during the illness which killed him in 1547. Catherine was now Queen of France and Henri was king with Diane as his
maîtresse en titre
, newly created Duchesse de Valentinois.

When Henri made an official entry – an
entrée joyeuse
– into Lyon in 1548, he was accompanied by Diane at his side. These splendid entries, according to the historian Sir Roy Strong, were ‘an essential part of the liturgy of secular apotheosis’. The pageant included twelve ‘Roman gladiators’ fighting with two-handed swords, garlanded oxen ridden by naked girls – Henri was especially fond of this display – and a young woman dressed as the goddess Diana, leading a lion on a silver chain. Catherine made her entry the next day; Henri asked that it be late in the day so that ‘her ugliness might pass unnoticed’. Diane was now associated with the goddess Diana, and her importance to Henri was marked symbolically in subtle ways – the royal monogram, for example which consisted of the letters ‘H’ and ‘C’ interlaced, but with the ends of the ‘C’ drawn to a point to represent the crescent moon, which was the symbol of Diana. Henri also adopted a monogram of two letter ‘Ds’ interlaced with his ‘H’.

Diane has attracted legends as magnets attract iron filings. The poet Brantôme said of her, ‘everyone around her breathed the air of eternal spring’. He also said that when he visited her in her seventieth year she looked no more than thirty; since she died at sixty-four, Brantôme’s statements should be garnished with plentiful salt. Queen Catherine was unfairly eclipsed by Diane, but in spite of this she loved her flagrantly unfaithful husband, and carried out her queenly duties knowing that the bulk of the population thought of her as an Italian witch. It was into this uneasy
ménage à trois
that the six-year-old Scots queen was thrust.

Henri was determined that Mary should become a French woman as quickly as possible, and he began by sending her Maries away to a convent some four miles distant at Poissy where they would be taught French by the Prior François de Vieuxpont.
From then on, Mary and her Maries spoke French in public, though in private they would occasionally speak in Scots to each other through fits of girlish giggles. Scots became a private nursery language. Meanwhile, Mary had the company of the royal children and, on Henri’s precise instruction, relayed to d’Humières by Diane, she shared a bedroom with Elisabeth, nicknamed Isabel, the king’s three-year-old daughter, who would become Mary’s closest companion in France.

Henri himself arrived at St Germain-en-Laye on 9 November 1548, when he ‘found her [Mary] the prettiest and most graceful princess he ever saw, as have the queen and all the court’, and Catherine said, ‘the little Scottish queen has but to smile to turn all French heads’. De Brézé wrote to Marie, her now-anxious mother, on 11 November, ‘I assure you, Madame, he [Henri] gave her the best welcome possible and continues to do so from day to day . . . he considers her no less than his own daughter. He will bring her up with the Dauphin in one court to accustom them to one another.’ Henri also wrote to Marie, on 11 December, continuing his praises for Mary but also giving a hint of troubled waters ahead: ‘I assure you, Madame, that you have sent a lady hither with the Queen your daughter who has pleased this company as much as the six most virtuous women in this country could have done . . . I mean Lady Fleming.’