Game of Queens (15 page)

This was more than lèse-majesté, but the couple could rely on a measure of protection from the French, to whom this appeared a handy way of avoiding either the expense of a queen dowager permanently in France or of Mary's being used to cement some unwelcome political alliance. With Mary's brother Henry, it was a different story. But even he was not too angry to be placated by the couple's promising to make over to him Mary's dowry and any goods she had received through her marriage. (To François's fury, she sweetened the deal by smuggling back to her brother in England the fabulous Mirror of Naples.) Returning home, her marriage confirmed in a public English ceremony, Mary Tudor settled into a future of domesticity. Many of her English ladies returned home with her but Anne Boleyn (perhaps because her command of French was so good) remained behind.
*
In the early days of her French sojourn, Anne had, if later stories are to be believed, to witness her sister Mary's a brief relationship with the libidinous François, and to witness, too, its detrimental effect on Mary Boleyn's reputation. The lessons in love, and in the dangers it posed for women, were coming in thick and fast.

Mary Tudor's was not the future every royal woman would choose. Louise of Savoy's
Journal
noted coolly that Mary, on the last day of March, had married Brandon, ‘a person of low estate'. Temperamentally, perhaps, Louise had more in common with Margaret of Austria. She too could vouch for Brandon's charms but she received word of such an illicit love match with incomprehension. Something, she wrote to Maximilian, so senseless that the idea would never have entered her head.

 

Louise of Savoy was almost forty, still in her prime, when her son François I inherited the French throne. There seems from the first to have been a sense that the business of government – at least in these early stages of his reign – was at least as much her concern as her son's. ‘A boy's best friend is his mother' might have been the motto for early modern monarchs. England had recently seen two new rulers – Edward IV and Henry VII – treat their mothers as mentors (and unlike those two, François had not had to fight for his crown).

As the main officers of state were confirmed in their office (as François's brother-in-law, Alençon, his sister Marguerite's husband, was declared second person of the realm and Bonnivet Admiral of France), several of Louise's trusted officials were also given important places. She herself was given estates – the duchy of Angoulême, that of Anjou, the counties of Maine and Beaufort and the barony of Amboise – that made her hugely wealthy.

Nor was the earlier governess of the French royal family, Anne de Beaujeu, forgotten. Her son-in-law, the Duc de Bourbon, was made Constable of France. This would be an appointment with consequences, since the amalgamation of Bourbon's own lands with those Anne's daughter Suzanne stood to inherit made a huge and potentially controversial land mass right in the centre of France. Anne, like Louise and Marguerite but unlike François's wife, the pregnant Claude, accompanied François to his coronation in Rheims.

As Louise of Savoy's
Journal
had it:

This day of the Conversion of St Paul 1515 my son was anointed and consecrated in the church of Rheims. For this I hold myself grateful to the Divine Mercy, by which I am amply repaid for all the adversities and inconvenience which came to me in my early years and in the flower of my youth. Humility has borne me company and Patience has never abandoned me.

The humility was not evident to all. Charles Brandon wrote of Louise to Henry VIII: ‘it is she who runs all and so may she well; for I never saw a woman like to her, both for wit, honour and dignity. She hath a great stroke in all matters with the King her son.'

A Venetian envoy asked the veteran Marshal Trivulzio who really held power in the land; who controlled the king? The answer was that Louise of Savoy,

lays claim to managing everything, not allowing him to act without her concurrence . . . it is his mother, with Madame de Bourbon [the still-active Anne de Beaujeu] and Boisy [François's former governor, Bonnivet's brother], who really manage everything. It is a great pity to see him under petticoat government. But what can you expect, the way he lives? He does not get out of bed until a little before noon. Then, after dressing and hearing mass, he goes straight to dinner. Immediately afterwards he withdraws to his mother. Then, after a short while with the council, he plunges into amusement which goes on incessantly until supper time.

Venice now knew to whom to apply. ‘The Most Christian King's most illustrious mother' was soon assuring the Venetians her son would prove ‘the greatest and most faithful friend' their city had ever had.

The year before her son's accession, Louise of Savoy had been at Blois when the ceiling of her room came down. ‘I think it was a sign that the whole of this house was destined to rest on me', she wrote later in her
Journal
, ‘and that I was divinely appointed to have charge of it.' But in many ways it would be a burden, as well as an opportunity. When the Venetian envoy added that François's mother ‘applies all her energy to accumulating money', it was a reputation that would cling to Louise. But perhaps it was also the result of what one writer called Louise's avidity for security; something Louise shared with Henry VII's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. But Henry had shared his mother's close-fistedness, while Louise faced the very real problem of how freely her son could spend, not least on the expensive sport of war.

On Louise of Savoy, inevitably, fell much of the task of helping to sort out the difficult relationships of François I's reign. His relationship with Charles V, as ruler of the Netherlands, seemed in the short term to be assured by Charles's betrothal to Louis XII's four-year-old daughter Renée (yet another royal marriage destined never to take place). Louise hoped also to bring the pope to her side, by arranging the marriage of his Medici brother to her half-sister, Philiberte of Savoy.

But the three-way relationship between the French crown, the papacy and France's secular and religious bodies had long been edgy. In 1516 François, surely with Louise's advice behind the scenes, hammered out with Pope Leo an agreement known as the Concordat of Bologna, which gave François the right to nominate his own religious officials. This, however, put him into conflict with the Paris
parlement
and with the faculty of theology at the university, which had previously been involved in making such appointments.
*
The
parlement
was likewise outraged that the king's sister Marguerite and her husband Alençon had been given an annual pension of twenty thousand
livres
and the lucrative right to name the head of each of France's trade guilds, as well as the duchy of Armagnac, which the
parlement
held to be inalienably attached to the French crown itself.

Marguerite's role in her brother's quarrels with both his
parlement
and his religious authorities would have later consequences, not least for Marguerite. But for the moment, his generosity meant her husband Alençon accepted that her place would now be largely at her brother's court, where she took on many of the ceremonial duties of a queen, just as her mother accepted much of the workload of a king. In story four of the
Heptaméron
Marguerite wrote of a young prince (‘fond of the ladies, of hunting and generally enjoying himself') whose wife ‘was rather difficult and did not enjoy the same things as he did, so he always used to take his sister along as well'. Her letters to him were most often signed as François's most humble and most obedient subject and sister, or ‘
et mignonne
', darling.

Queen Claude was shy, plain and afflicted with a limp, and almost solidly pregnant, with deliveries in 1515, 1516, 1518, 1519, 1520, 1522 and 1523, though only two of the children outlived their parents. But it seems Louise of Savoy – and surely Marguerite too – valued Claude for what she could do for François and they could not. Though the near-contemporary biographer the Seigneur de Brantôme wrote that Claude was bullied by her mother-in-law as well as ignored by her husband, there is no evidence that she resented her treatment; she had, after all, grown up partly under Marguerite's and Louise's, wing.

The relationship between mother and son was so close that when François ran a thorn into his leg, Louise wrote that ‘true love forced me to suffer the same pain'. So her feelings about her son's natural venturesomeness were mixed. She was terrified when he had a boar captured and set loose in the courtyard at Amboise, only to kill it himself with one blow of the sword. It was infinitely worse when it became clear François was determined to pursue his ambitions for the disputed territory of Milan, to which he had an hereditary claim.

When François left for the Italian wars, taking all the nobles of his blood with him, he announced that his mother would act as regent while he was away:

We have decided to leave the government of our realm to our well beloved and dear Lady and Mother, the Duchess of Angoulême and Anjou, in whom we have entire and perfect confidence who will by her virtue and prudence, know how to acquit this trust.

Though the Italian wars would prove to be an endlessly enduring business, François's efforts in 1515 met with impressive success. In September, the Battle of Marignano was, said one observer, a battle of giants, in which François's forces achieved an overwhelming victory over the army of Swiss mercenaries assembled by the Sforzas, the current rulers of Milan, in alliance with the Papal States. Never had there been seen so spirited and cruel a battle, François boasted to his mother. Louise, with Claude, immediately went on pilgrimage to Notre Dame de la Guiche to give thanks for the preservation of ‘him, whom I love better than myself, my boy, glorious and triumphant Caesar, subjugator of the Swiss'. On 10 October, François entered Milan in triumph, the very model of a young warrior king.

When the news came of François's return from Marignano, Louise of Savoy, Marguerite and Claude set out to meet their ‘triumphant Caesar', as Louise's journal describes him. ‘God knows that I, poor mother, was overjoyed to see my son safe and whole after all he had suffered and endured to serve the common good.' By January 1516 they were with him for his triumphant entry into Marseille.

The pattern of Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century was one of three young men sowing their oats: François I, the Habsburg Charles and Henry VIII of England. Each had a woman – mother, aunt or wife – standing behind him. And if the last years had seen several women trying to juggle the demands of power with their female destiny, Louise seemed to have been the most successful.

 

 

 

*
There has long been debate over whether Anne Boleyn, appointed to Queen Claude's household, remained there for the duration of her stay in France, or whether she was transferred to that of Marguerite, who seems a more likely mentor. But Marguerite's involvement in her brother's court perhaps makes the distinction unnecessary, and we can assume Anne would at the very least have been acutely conscious of the doings of so charismatic a figure.

*
The Paris was by far the most powerful of France's seven
parlements
– a provincial high court, rather than a legislative assembly. François's voice in it was his chancellor, Duprat, a long-standing associate of Louise's.

11

‘One of the lowest-brought ladies'

Scotland, England, 1515–1517

For Henry VIII's elder sister, Margaret Tudor, things had long been going badly. But an event such the death of Louis XII in France had an effect far beyond his own country, even in distant Scotland, France's ‘Auld Ally'.

As long ago as the autumn of 1513, Henry, in England, had been receiving agents' reports that the Scots lords ‘were not pleased that the Queen should have rule, as they fear she will comply too much with England'. Even when, in February 1514, Margaret managed to push through an uneasy peace with England, not everyone on her council was happy.

But when in March 1514 the summoning of the Scottish parliament exhibited her to the people in the eighth month of her pregnancy, she was cheered to the rafters, the more so since her gracious speech left most of the real business of the session to others and allowed the parliament to take control of all the main fortresses in the country. As the madonna, the mother, the dead king's relict, she was welcome in the country. It was when she tried to overstep those bounds that there was a difficulty.

On 30 April she gave birth to a second son, Alexander, Duke of Ross. In England Henry and Katherine of Aragon, who had possibly suffered a miscarriage the previous autumn, still had no living child. That Margaret Tudor's offspring would succeed to the throne of England looked more likely than ever. In the summer she emerged from her confinement and on 12 July the Scottish nobles signed a unanimous statement in support of her regency. ‘Madame,' it ran, ‘we are content to stand in one mind and will to concur with all the lords of the realm to the pleasure of our master the King's grace, your grace and for the common weal . . .' Yet within a few weeks, the situation had changed completely.

On 14 August, in a secret ceremony, Margaret Tudor was married for a second time, to the Earl of Angus. Roughly her own age (twenty-four) he was a scion of the powerful but controversial Douglas clan, and hated by most of the other nobles.