Game of Queens (26 page)

When, in May 1527, Florence turned against the Medici, most of Catherine’s male relatives fled, but the child was left behind as a hostage for her family. She was placed in the Santa Lucia convent for her security but this was an establishment at odds with the Medici family. At the end of that year, amid a visitation of the plague, she was moved (veiled, and at dead of night, to avoid aggression from the Florentine people) to the more sympathetic Murate convent. But the European politics that made Italy a battleground still made Florence dangerous territory for her.

In France too – the country with which Catherine de Medici would be so much associated – there was also a new generation on the way. Late in 1526 François I asked his sister Marguerite to help him by marrying Henri d’Albret, the King of Navarre, a small but strategically important neighbouring kingdom of which the larger part had been annexed by Spain in 1512.
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The provisions made for her security were exceptional, the marriage contract stipulating that she would have joint control, with her husband, of any territories François might give him, that she would retain control of any territories she already possessed or that Henri might give her and, in the event of his death, control of any children, without the male guardianship that had so troubled Louise of Savoy. Marguerite accepted the not-disagreeable young man, nine years her junior, and the match proved happy. In autumn 1527 they set off south on a visit to his kingdom and although Marguerite came to feel isolated, so distant from the French court, she wrote with a typically cautious optimism that her marriage was going so well ‘up to this point . . . that I congratulate myself upon it’.

Perhaps she was better off at one remove from Paris. She had been in the highest favour after François’s release from Habsburg captivity; his ally in the continued international negotiations through which he sought to talk his way out of the treaty he had signed with Charles. But the months during which François was in Spain had seen the conservatives harden their grip on religious affairs. On his return François, it is true, had moved to protect the reformers once again – Marguerite wrote promising to maintain their cause – but the conservatives did not give up easily.

An example of the difficulties was the plight of Louis de Berquin, the scholar Marguerite of Navarre esteemed ‘as much as if he had been myself’. During François’s captivity Berquin had been arrested and accused of having committed heresy for a second time, a lapse which carried the death penalty. On the king’s return, he was reprieved only through Marguerite’s intervention; she was, after all, still actively encouraging the production of works – the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular – which the religious authorities condemned.

In the spring and summer of 1528 she was back at court, and pregnant, after the ‘sterile’ years of her first marriage. She wrote to François that she had felt the baby stir for the first time while reading a letter from him, and ‘now I sleep contented, and wake up feeling so well that with my whole heart I praise the one who has not forgotten us’. As the birth came closer, however, she wrote frankly to her brother about her qualms: ‘the suffering that I fear to undergo, as much as I desire it’. She longed for his presence at the birth.

When labour began it was indeed long and difficult but on 16 November she was delivered of (as she herself had always expected) a daughter. This baby, Jeanne d’Albret, was her father’s heir presumptive since Navarre, unlike France, was not governed by the Salic Law. Henri had himself inherited Navarre from his mother, Catherine de Foix, albeit her accession in 1483 had been challenged by her uncle, who claimed that the Salic Law should apply in Navarre as in France; a challenge followed by a long period of civil war.

‘Finally, my daughter’, Anne de Beaujeu had written, ‘as good counsel and as a general rule, make sure that all your desires, works, wants, and wishes are in God and to His credit, meanwhile awaiting His grace and just dispositions in great humility of heart’. But she wrote at a time when God’s wishes had not seemed a matter of such uncertainty as those that her readers faced a few decades into the sixteenth century.

Religious dissent was growing more acute. In France, on 1 June 1528, while Marguerite was occupied with her pregnancy, extremist reformists defaced a public statue of Virgin and Child; an act of vandalism which caused a widespread and violent outrage. When, amid this climate, the trial of Louis de Berquin was resumed a few months later, Marguerite wrote to her brother on behalf of ‘poor Berquin’. He was, however, sentenced to life imprisonment and to having his tongue pierced. Berquin made the mistake of appealing to the Paris
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, which ordered that he should be executed. Since François was away at the time, Marguerite’s hands were tied. Berquin was burnt alive, together with his books. Marguerite remained a good Catholic, albeit of the reforming variety. Although some of the Meaux circle of reforming Catholics she supported would join the new faith, others had denounced Luther as early as the start of the decade. The moderate position, however, was becoming harder to maintain.

In the Netherlands Margaret of Austria was also having to clamp down on Lutheranism, forbidding the meeting of groups to study the Bible, which she believed distanced the people from ‘the reverence due to the sacraments, the honour due to the Mother of God and the saints’. At the beginning of the decade she had seen off a chief inquisitor of the Low Countries she regarded as too cruel and autocratic but in 1525 new inquisitors were appointed, with greater powers. The next year, 1526, her ambassador was instructed to tell Charles that his aunt ‘had the greatest pleasure’ in trying to extirpate the Lutherans.

Religious dissent within Christendom perhaps gave the rulers of Europe a reason to break off their great game of internecine warfare, which had exhausted everyone’s country and everyone’s treasury. So too, more forcibly, did the ever-mounting threat from without: the Islamic Ottoman Empire, on Europe’s Eastern frontier.

Early in 1528, Wolsey urged Margaret of Austria to use her influence for a general peace. Yet the initial moves may have come from elsewhere. In October Margaret’s state secretary, while in Paris, was summoned to see Louise of Savoy, who told him of her great desire for peace; a desire he was to communicate to Margaret. Louise also sent her own secretary, Bayart, to Mechelen.

Margaret of Austria played hard to get; perhaps from a genuine lack of interest (her nephew Charles V was doing better in the wars than Louise of Savoy’s son), or perhaps simply because she was the better tactician, manoeuvring Louise into the position of supplicant. In dubious tones, she told the English envoy to her court that ‘considering the odious writing of the Princes to each other, she thought the matter was not so soon to be pacified’.

Two days later, when the French emissary saw her again, she would only allow that if by any chance she should change her mind, she would need Louise to provide very good reasons why the emperor should listen to her. Five weeks later, Bayart was back in Mechelen with definite proposals from Louise and her suggestion that she and Margaret should meet.

The negotiations went backwards and forwards. Louise of Savoy’s first (and second) proposals for the peace terms were described as ‘captious and ambiguous’ by Margaret of Austria’s council; Louise’s changes to the amended version were vehemently rejected by the Netherlands envoys. Even when a compromise was reached between the two women or their negotiators, Louise had to try to explain the Netherlanders’ presence in Paris to her son, whom she had not yet consulted, and the envoys, making their way on to Spain with difficulty, had still to persuade Charles.

But Charles, perhaps unexpectedly, gave his aunt all authority. Peace – at least a ladies’ peace – was clearly an idea whose time had come.

19

‘ladies might well come forward'

The Netherlands, England, January–June 1529

Throughout the crucial year of 1529, in the small arena comprising two sides of the English Channel, two dramas ran in tandem. Both were focused on women, extraordinarily. In continental Europe, two women came together in search of peace. And in England, two others were locked in a personal war.

On 3 January 1529 Margaret of Austria wrote a letter to her chief steward, specifically expounding the idea that peace between her nephew the emperor and France would stand a better chance if discussed by ladies. Neither of the two sovereigns, Charles V or François I, she wrote, could compromise his dignity by being the first to talk of reconciliation but, ‘On the other hand, how easy for ladies . . . to concur in some endeavours for warding off the general ruin of Christendom, and to make the first advance in such an undertaking!' No less an authority than Christine de Pizan had declared that peace was women's special province.

The male rulers might fear loss of honour if they showed themselves too ready to forget the causes of the war, Margaret said, ‘but ladies might well come forward in a measure for submitting the gratification of private hatred and revenge to the far nobler principle of the welfare of nations'. The King of France and the emperor, moreover, would have to answer to their friends and allies (notably England) for anything to which they might agree, but allowing their womenfolk to do it for them would ‘take away all responsibility'.

Margaret of Austria's phrase the ‘general ruin of Christendom' is perhaps key: the Ottoman threat was looming large in everyone's mind. Indeed, when the fighting season began again later that spring, the Turkish advance on Europe would lend the whole matter more urgency. That spring, Margaret was busy trying to draw everybody in. On 15 May she told a potentially suspicious Henry VIII that Louise of Savoy had often urged her to talk of peace and she had come to feel she had no choice but to listen. She had ‘no doubt' that King Henry would be pleased to hear the news. On the 26th she wrote in cipher telling her nephew a meeting with Louise of France had been agreed but that it was important to keep England happy.

In a postscript the next day she added that a messenger had just arrived from Katherine of Aragon, saying that Henry was pushing ahead with the judicial proceedings to try his marriage and that Katherine urgently needed Margaret to send her lawyers. At this point, any overt partisanship for Katherine might well have embarrassed Margaret's diplomacy; nevertheless, she sought advice on Katherine's behalf. On 26 May she wrote to Charles V that she was ‘sending to Malines [Mechelen] to obtain the opinion of experienced lawyers in that place . . . the poor Queen is very perplexed, and there is no one in England who dares take up her defence against the King's will'.

But the story of the ladies' peace was intercut, in England, with two other women's stories.

 

In England, in 1528, the dreaded sweating sickness almost brought an end to the vexed question of Henry VIII's love life. In the middle of June, one of Anne Boleyn's ladies fell sick and Henry, always terrified of disease, sent Anne hotfoot down to Hever, writing to her that his doubts about her health ‘disturbed and alarmed me exceedingly'. He ended by saying that ‘I wish you in my arms, that I might a little dispel your unreasonable thought'; an illuminating glimpse of their relationship. A couple of days later Henry heard that Anne had fallen ill. ‘The most afflicting news that could have arrived' was how he described it, adding with equally illuminating precision that he would gladly bear ‘half' her illness to make her well.

But in July a recovered Anne was back at court and the question of Henry's plans for her was still on the pope's plate. While a French success in Italy might have relieved the necessity for the pope to appease the emperor, in June 1528 Charles had started winning, and from then on the pope's fear of Charles's armies in Italy would be a dominant feature of the case. Nonetheless, the pope appointed a representative to look into the validity of Henry's marriage: Cardinal Campeggio, who arrived in England in October 1528.

Campeggio went to Katherine of Aragon, suggesting she retire to a nunnery, relying on her ‘prudence' and ‘example of a queen in France who did the same and is still honoured by God and that kingdom'; Louis's first wife, Jeanne. This would, with a little fudging, have allowed Henry to marry again, since Katherine could be seen as dead to the world and yet offer no implications for their daughter's legitimacy.
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But Katherine was having none of it.

She saw Henry the next day and demanded, as she had earlier, some ‘indifferent' (that is, impartial, not English) counsel. The next day she was with Campeggio again. Obsessively running over past events, she declared ‘on her conscience' that her marriage to Henry's elder brother Prince Arthur had left her as ‘intact and uncorrupted as the day she left her mother's womb' and that they could tear her ‘limb from limb' before she altered her intention ‘to live and die in the estate of matrimony'. Campeggio, at the end of it all, could only report feebly that ‘nothing more occurred to me' to say.

And Katherine of Aragon had a trick up her sleeve. Among the papers of the late Spanish ambassador de Puebla was found a copy of the document the pope had sent to Katherine's mother Isabella on her deathbed, meaning that Katherine was free to marry Henry whether or not she had slept with Arthur. In it, declared Charles V's current ambassador Mendoza, ‘consists the whole of the queen's right'.

At the Christmas celebrations, while Henry and Katherine displayed a public front of unity, Anne Boleyn was in a lodging nearby. As Campeggio put it: ‘The king persists more than ever in his desire to marry this lady [Anne], kissing her and treating her in public as though she were his wife.'