Game of Queens (12 page)

He had raised fifteen hundred men for the 1513 campaign and, at the siege of Tournai, led a successful assault on one of the city gates, in reward for which Henry handed him the keys of the surrendering city. Margaret of Austria's agent with the English army reported to her that he was ‘a second king'; but he was someone she would, in any case, have been watching carefully.

Margaret and her nephew Charles spent ten days with the English forces; ten days of ‘great solace'. (In celebration of the victory, Margaret was presented with a six-piece tapestry depicting Christine de Pizan's
City of Ladies
.) It is likely that Anne Boleyn was in Margaret of Austria's train, observing the phenomenon that was the young Henry VIII. Spectators reported that one evening Henry danced ‘from the time the banquet finished until nearly day, in his shirt [that is, without his doublet]' with Margaret and with Margaret's ‘damsels'.

But Margaret of Austria may not have had eyes only for Henry. What she saw in those ten days was Brandon and King Henry answering all comers at the joust, Brandon and King Henry dressed identically in purple velvet decked with gold, Brandon coming in disguise with the king to the masque that followed a banquet of a hundred dishes. On 20 October Margaret and her nephew returned to Lille but talk of their visit to Tournai continued.

When Brandon was created Duke of Suffolk, it may have been in tribute to his prowess in France but such a leap, for such a man, attracted a great deal of international comment. Erasmus was among the shocked. Some said Brandon had been dramatically elevated so as to make him a more fitting match for Margaret: ‘Gossip has it that Maximilian's daughter Margaret is to marry that new duke, whom the King has recently turned from a stableboy into a nobleman.' In May, Brandon and Henry were once again defenders at a tournament, bearing the motto ‘Who can hold that will away', perhaps suggesting that Brandon might be about to make a foreign journey.

If Brandon indeed had pretensions to Margaret of Austria's hand, it looked as though Henry were encouraging them. But the king found it at least prudent to express annoyance, writing to Margaret to promise signal punishment of the rumour-mongers. He acknowledged, however, ‘that the common report is in divers places that marriage is contemplated between you and our very dear and loyal cousin and councillor the Duke of Suffolk'. Margaret's feelings can be seen in two long letters, signed simply ‘M'.
[see note on sources
] ‘M' dared not write directly to king or duke, she said, ‘because that I fear my letters to be evil kept'. Discretion was the watchword, for all this was a tardy slamming of the stable door, and Margaret sounds a repeated note of almost hysterical caution.

After having been some days at Tournai, she had been, she declared, struck by King Henry's love for Brandon and by ‘the virtue and grace' of Brandon's person (‘the which me seemed that I had not much seen gentleman to approach it'). Because of ‘the desire the which he always showed me that he had to do me service', she forced herself ‘to do unto him all honour and pleasure'. This seemed to be ‘well agreeable' to King Henry, who indeed ‘many time spake unto me, for to know if this goodwill . . . might stretch unto some effect of promise of marriage'. As Margaret tells it, it was Henry who urged that this (a love match, a woman making her own choice?) ‘was the fashion of the ladies of England and . . . was not there holden for evil'. Margaret replied that ‘it was not here the custom and that I should be dishonoured and holden for a fool and light'.

But Henry VIII would brook no argument. Margaret of Austria was forced to find another plea: that the English were so soon to leave the country. This went down better but Henry warned Margaret that she would surely have to marry somebody: ‘that I was yet too young for to abide thus; and that the ladies of his country did remarry at fifty and threescore years'. Margaret insisted she had no desire to marry again: ‘I was too much unhappy in husbands.' But the men would not believe her. Twice more, in Brandon's presence, Henry urged the match on Margaret, telling her again that she might well be forced into a marriage. Unconvinced by her protests, ‘he made me to promise in his hand that howsoever I should be pressed of my father, or otherwise, I should not make alliance of marriage [with] prince of the world, at the least unto his return, or the end of the year'.

What was going on? Was Henry truly playing Cupid, sportingly trying to help his crony towards this great match? Was he trying to avoid Margaret making another match; one disadvantageous to England? And what of the feelings of the two people most involved?

In what sounds like a three-way conversation ‘at Tournai in my chamber one night after supper, full late', Brandon told Margaret (she wrote) he would never marry, nor yet take ‘lady nor mistress, without my commandment, but would continue all his life my right humble servant'. These were the tropes of courtly love; Margaret of Austria, that child of a determinedly chivalrous court, was perhaps taken in. She promised ‘to be to him such mistress all my life as to him who me seemed desired to do me most of service'. And after that, said Margaret crossly, there was, nor should have been, any more said of the affair, if it had not been for some ‘gracious letters' which had not been carefully and privately kept.

She was not, after all, quite swept away. Not too swept away to query whether King Henry, in his role of ‘
trwcheman
' or go-between, had (for whatever motive) perhaps protested even more than Brandon felt, or to note that many of the questions asked about the rumoured match seemed to be more concerned with Henry's part in it than her own.

Margaret had been told, she wrote, that Brandon had shown off a diamond ring of hers ‘which I cannot believe, for I esteem him much a man of virtue and wise'. But one night at Tournai, ‘after the banquet he put himself upon his knees before me and in speaking and him playing, he drew from my finger the ring and put it upon his and then showed it to me and I took to laugh'.

Margaret told Brandon he was a thief, a ‘
laron
' and that she hadn't thought the king kept thieves in his company. Brandon couldn't understand the word
laron
, so Margaret tried the Flemish word, ‘
dieffe
', and begged him (once that evening, when he seemed not to understand her and once next morning through the king) to return the ring to her ‘because it was too much known'. She gave him one of her bracelets instead; a less incriminatingly familiar piece of jewellery.

But Brandon took the ring from her again at Lille and would not give it back, saying he would give her other, better, rings. He ‘would not' understand her protests and Margaret could only beg that the jewel would never be shown to anybody. She had been carried beyond what her prudence would allow. But all the same, at bottom the matter of the ring was, or should have been, a courtly game. Fun, flattering, and genuinely warming, no doubt, to a woman who was still, as Henry VIII kept reminding her, too young to have given up on love, but not in itself to be taken seriously.

The serious part came in the second letter, in which Margaret of Austria promised to show ‘all the inconveniences which may happen of this thing'. She had been horrified to discover the business was being spoken of at home, abroad, even in Germany ‘so openly as in the hands of merchant strangers'. An English merchant had dared to make wagers upon it and though she was grateful for everything Henry had done to quash the story, ‘yet I see the bruit is so imprinted in the fantasies of people . . . [that] I continue always in fear'.

The letter shows her not as the powerful fixer but as a very rattled, still-young, woman. Nonetheless, Margaret of Austria had made her choice: power over pleasure. But the same trap that had caught even the confident and experienced Margaret of Austria may in the same year have ensnared the more vulnerable Marguerite of Navarre.

 

Clever, complex, self-critical and conflicted, Marguerite was the author of a huge body of published writings that were highly unusual for her day in exploring, almost obsessively, a woman's inner journey. Most notable is the
Heptaméron
, a collection of stories about love and lust, supposedly told to each other by a group of stranded travellers, which Marguerite wrote later in life. Though modelled (like Christine de Pizan's
City of Ladies)
on Boccaccio's
Decameron
, parts of the
Heptaméron
display so many echoes of real life that the idea that it is to some degree autobiographical cannot entirely be dismissed [
see note on sources
].

Her near-contemporary, the writer Brantôme, identifies Marguerite and a young nobleman called Guillaume Gouffier, Seigneur de Bonnivet, as the protagonists of one particular story that describes a sexual assault. Although much of Brantôme's writing is scurrilous to the point of pornography, he is the better a witness for the fact that both his mother and his grandmother had been Marguerite's ladies-in-waiting.

The protagonists of novella ten of the
Heptaméron
are Floride and Amadour; the flowerily-named Marguerite and the amorous Bonnivet? In the novel Amadour had been married to Floride's favourite attendant, Avanturade, who died early; in real life Bonnivet married Marguerite's lady-in-waiting Bonaventure, who likewise died young. Floride had known Amadour in childhood; just so had the real-life Bonnivet come into Marguerite's family circle when his elder brother was appointed to oversee the education of her brother François. That was in Marguerite's youth but in 1513 Marguerite had been four years a married woman, which made her fair game in the essentially adulterous sport of courtly love.

In December 1513 Marguerite and her husband, Alençon, visited Louise in Cognac. The hapless Alençon had fallen from his horse and broken his arm when François came to join them, with Bonnivet in his train. And, if the events of the
Heptaméron
are in any sense autobiographical, Bonnivet was set on the path ‘that leads to the forbidden goal of a lady's honour'. The protagonists of the novel have an encounter in which Amadour seizes Floride's hands and takes her feet ‘in a vice-like grip'. ‘His whole expression, his face, his eyes change as he speaks. The fair complexion flushes with a fiery red; the kind, gentle face contorts with a terrifying violence, as if there were a raging inferno belching fire in his heart and behind his eyes. When Floride repulses him he claims to have been merely testing her; a familiar trope of the courtly love story.
²

Marguerite had a difficult and dramatic emotional history.
*
A letter to her spiritual advisor tells us than in her childhood Louise of Savoy had so ‘beaten and berated' Marguerite for some ‘folly and guile', that Marguerite could not believe her mother really loved her. But the continued prevalence of sexual violence in Marguerite's writing may suggest some specific concern or trauma. The narrator of the
Heptaméron
, Parlamente, warns her female listeners against men's treachery: ‘A woman's love is rooted in God and founded on honour . . . But most [men's] love is based on pleasure, so much so that women not being aware of men's evil intentions, sometimes allow themselves to be drawn too far.'

Perhaps, like Margaret of Austria, Marguerite of Navarre had learnt a painful lesson. And there was a lesson there for Anne Boleyn too, surely, though only time would prove how well or badly she had learnt it.

 

 

 

*
Marguerite's lifelong concern with the establishment of hospitals and the care of orphaned children makes it very hard not to think of another people's princess who compensated for lack of love closest to home by loving all the world in the hope it would love her.

8

Flodden

Scotland, England, 1513

The same quarrel between France and its neighbours that had taken Charles Brandon across the Channel was also fought in the British Isles, and would continue to be fought through the first part of the century. Where France led, its old ally Scotland would usually follow, whereas in England, Katherine of Aragon had been one of the chief promoters of war against France, her Aragonese father’s ancient enemy.

As the Venetian ambassador put it: ‘the King is bent on war, the Council is averse to it; the Queen will have it and the wisest councillors in England cannot stand against the Queen’. But any resumption of the centuries-old conflict between England and Scotland would set Katherine of Aragon painfully at odds with her husband’s sister, Margaret Tudor, wife of the King of Scots.

When Henry VIII set off on campaign in France in the summer of 1513, Katherine was left as ‘Regent and Governess’ of England, albeit with a council of noblemen to advise her. Her appointment might well have been controversial. Half a century earlier, when Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou had tried to exercise power during his incapacity, the result had been a power struggle culminating in civil war: the Wars of the Roses.

‘Moreover it is a right great perversion / A woman of a land to be a regent’ ran a popular ditty, while descriptions of Margaret of Anjou as a ‘great and strong laboured woman’ went hand in hand with slurs on her sexual morality. But since then, the mechanics of Henry VIII’s accession had been (in the words of the Garter Herald) ‘over seen by the mother of the said late king’; Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort. Katherine’s influence over her husband’s policies was an accepted, if not necessarily a welcome, fact. And there was, in any case, a different tussle looming.