Game of Queens (40 page)

By the autumn of 1556 France and the Habsburgs were once again at war, with a French army attacking the Netherlands. By March 1557 Philip had urgent reason to seek English support. He arrived at Greenwich on 19 March, to resume his marital duties and to persuade England into the war. Parliament and council had long opposed Mary’s desire to send troops and money to her husband’s fight; something the terms of the marriage treaty had been designed to prevent. But French support for yet another minor rebellion in England helped to change the minds of the English government: a support so ill-timed that it has been suggested the whole thing was the work of Spanish agent provocateurs.

War against France, at this point, was war against the pope. Small wonder that the French ambassador commented that a distraught Mary was on the eve ‘of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom’. But some of the rhetoric of war was interesting. Thomas Stafford, the rebel leader, used as justification for his act the theory that Mary had broken the terms of her father’s will by marrying without the declared consent of the councillors Henry had appointed for the under-age Edward. (Absurd but noteworthy, in that it was not a charge ever likely to be levelled against a male monarch.) Mary, speaking to her council ‘expounded to them the obedience which she owed her husband and the power which he had over her as much by divine as by human law’.

In June a herald was sent to the French court, to – literally – throw down the gauntlet. Henri II dismissively declared that:

as the herald came in the name of a woman it was unnecessary for him to listen to anything further, as he would have done had he come in the name of a man to whom he would have replied in detail . . . ‘Consider how I stand when a woman sends to defy me to war.’

But Philip was able to send to France a six-thousand-strong English army. He himself sailed from Dover on 6 July, never to return. The siege of Saint-Quentin was considered a notable Anglo-Spanish victory but the campaign went sour when, in January 1558, the French took Calais. England’s last remaining continental outpost had been in her possession for two centuries and its loss was a humiliation for England abroad, and a personal failure for Mary. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe reported that, in her unhappy latter days, she told her trusted lady, Susan Clarencius, that although she regretted the absence of her husband Philip, it was Calais the embalmers would find engraved upon her heart.

It was another lesson, and one Elizabeth Tudor was surely learning, that war was an evil to be avoided at all costs: a reason to be wary of foreign alliances, and foreign allies.

In January 1558 Mary once again informed her husband that his last visit had left her pregnant. He expressed proper delight but probably few this time thought it anything other than a phantom pregnancy. By April Mary knew she had been mistaken; and everyone knew her half-sister Elizabeth was likely to be her heir. The Venetian ambassador had written the year before that ‘all eyes and hearts’ were turned towards Elizabeth as Mary’s successor, and that she or her people were found behind every plot. When in the late summer of 1558 it became clear that Mary was very ill, Elizabeth had a network waiting.

At forty-two, Mary Tudor had endured a lifetime of difficult health, often beset by stress-related problems; something that was true of many of the women in the latter half of this story. In early October the queen’s condition worsened and on 28 October Mary added a codicil to her will. If she continued to have no ‘fruit nor heir of my body’, she would be followed by ‘my next heir and successor by the Laws and Statutes of this realm’: Elizabeth.

Philip’s special ambassador, De Feria, rushed to Hatfield, where he found Elizabeth impatiently waiting. Wanting Elizabeth to acknowledge her debt to Philip and Spain, he instead heard her declare that the affection of the people would bring her to the throne; an affection Mary had lost ‘because she had married a foreigner’. De Feria warned that ‘she is determined to be governed by no one’. And so it would prove.

In the early morning of 17 November, Mary Tudor slipped quietly away. The blame game would quickly take over her memory. By 1588, the Protestant exile, Bartholomew Traheron, could write that she was ‘spiteful, cruel, bloody, wilful, furious, guileful, stuffed with painted processes, with simulation and dissimulation, devoid of honesty, devoid of upright dealing, devoid of all seemly virtues’. Five years after Mary’s death, in his
Book of Martyrs
, John Foxe would have his say.

The Venetian ambassador Michieli had written of Mary Tudor that:

in certain things she is singular and without an equal; for not only is she brave and valiant unlike other timid and spiritless women, but so courageous and resolute, that neither in adversity nor peril did she ever display or commit any act of cowardice or pusillanimity, maintaining always, on the contrary, a wonderful grandeur and dignity . . .

But his description was coloured by the fact he believed her sex ‘cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part in government’.

The gynocracy debate had, moreover, just seen its most famous contribution. In the spring of 1558 the Scottish reformer John Knox published his
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, claiming that to put a crown on a woman’s head was as inappropriate ‘as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow’: ‘the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’. It was, he wrote, ‘a thing most repugnant to nature that women rule and govern over men’.
¹

Women in general, Knox declared, were ‘weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment’. Mary Tudor was the ‘horrible monster Jezebel’. Nor was Knox’s the only voice; other writers, such as Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby and Thomas Becon, likewise linked their attacks on Mary’s Catholicism with her sex.

But facts speak louder than words and the fact was that Mary Tudor had ruled England with a successful assumption of authority. As John Aylmer wrote in his 1559 refutation of John Knox (
An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, concerninge the Government of Wemen
): ‘it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’. Mary Tudor, granddaughter of Isabella of Castile, had proved it was a possibility. That was her legacy, her gift to the women who came after her. Although she never wanted it to be her Tudor half-sister Elizabeth, who would benefit most immediately.

34

‘if God is with us'

France, 1558–1560

As Mary Tudor
died and Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne, in France the three women who would one day be called upon to take charge of a realm still saw their future as subsumed in a husband's authority. But Europe's religious divides already underpinned the fabric of their lives, whether or not the process was plain to see.

In April 1558, the fifteen-year-old Mary Stuart achieved the destiny for which she had been reared: marriage with François, the fourteen-year-old French dauphin. The recapture of Calais was a victory led by Mary's Guise family and this was their reward. The ceremonies were spectacular, albeit that Mary's vivid white-clad beauty showed up her new husband's puny frailty.
¹

‘These nuptials really were considered the most regal and triumphant of any that have been witnessed in this kingdom for many years', wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘from the pomp and richness of the jewels and apparel both of the lords and ladies; or from the grandeur of the banquet and stately service of the table, or from the costly devices of the masquerades and similar revels'.

At the state banquet that followed the ceremony, six clockwork-powered mechanical ships with silver masts sailed over the billowing cloth waves of a painted sea. Each was captained by a royal man, who invited aboard the lady of his choice. King Henri II chose Mary herself and the dauphin his mother, Catherine de Medici. Marie de Guise, unable to leave Scotland to be present at the ceremony, appointed her mother to represent her in the negotiations. But the important deal was the one made behind the scenes.

The official marriage treaty (like those of Mary Tudor and of Isabella of Castile before her) carefully preserved the independence of the Scottish nation. But under the instruction of her Guise uncles the fifteen-year-old queen had some days earlier signed another, secret, treaty by which Scotland, should she die childless, would become the property of France. Would Elizabeth Tudor, even at fifteen, have signed away her country so blithely?

François would now be called the King Dauphin. Even more problematic, at the end of the year after Mary Tudor died in England, was the decision to blazon the heraldic arms of England together with those of France and Scotland on all Mary Stuart and François's goods. It was a clear declaration that France did not recognise the Protestant Elizabeth – a bastard, to Catholics – as queen. Instead they saw Mary Stuart, Henry VII's true-born great-granddaughter, as Mary Tudor's heir. By the following summer, ushers were calling out to ‘make way for the Queen of England' as Mary Stuart went to chapel.

In fact, where the French government was concerned, cooler diplomatic counsels would prevail, and they soon were dealing with Elizabeth Tudor as England's queen. But between the two royal kinswomen, the question of Mary Stuart's rights to the English throne continued to be an issue until their dying days.

 

Catherine de Medici's star continued to rise through the 1550s. When Henri II backed Catherine's claim to inheritance in Tuscany, the Venetian ambassador Michele Soranzo wrote that ‘the Queen will have all the merit should Florence be liberated'. (The same man also wrote that she was ‘loved by all'.) When northern France was itself invaded in 1557, Catherine – once again regent while Henri pursued France's war with Philip of Spain – did much to calm the people of Paris and persuade them to give Henri men and money.

But Europe was growing tired of war, and the vital peace that was negotiated at the end of the decade would have another woman's fingerprints all over it. Christina of Denmark, the widowed Duchess of Lorraine (and one of the nieces Mary of Hungary raised) had, she claimed, for several years been trying to bring about a peace between the two great powers. She had felt the effects of the conflict at first hand; suspected in Lorraine because of her Habsburg connection and then forced into exile as a result of French action. In October 1558 she wrote to her cousin, Philip of Spain, that she was happy to act as mediator in any peace negotiations, but that he must provide for her safety ‘not only because I am a woman, but because, as you know, I am not in the good graces of the French'.

The talks begun that autumn had to be halted, not least because of the need to mark Charles V's funeral and the deaths of Mary of Hungary and Mary Tudor. But in the spring of 1559, shortly after Christine's son the young Duke of Lorraine was married to the French king's daughter Claude, they began again in the small town of Cateau-Cambrésis, some twenty kilometres from Cambrai, where three decades earlier Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy had negotiated the Ladies' Peace. As her kinsman and representative Baron Howard of Effingham wrote to Elizabeth Tudor: ‘the assembly hath been entirely procured by the Duchess's labour and travail . . . and she is continually present at all meetings and communications'.

Christina of Denmark sat at the head of the table, the French on her left, the Spanish opposite her and the English on her right. Just as at Cambrai all those years ago, the talks almost stalled several times, with Christina catching the ambassadors at the very door to prevent them walking out. As the Venetian Tiepolo wrote: ‘The Duchess, regardless of personal fatigue, went to and fro between the Commissioners, with the greatest zeal, ardour, and charity, imploring them to come together again.' In April, finally, a deal was agreed.

The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis brought an end to decades of the Italian Wars. France essentially agreed to abandon its historic claims in the peninsula. This was greatly to Spain's favour but there was a downside to the agreement for Habsburg interest as a whole, since the concessions made to France cut the Holy Roman Empire off from Spain. Nevertheless, Spain itself emerged stronger.

Christina wrote to the French king that, ‘I feel the utmost satisfaction in having been able to bring about so excellent an arrangement, and one which cannot fail to prove a great boon to Christendom.' She returned to the Netherlands a heroine; a worthy ‘daughter' to Margaret of Austria, and Mary of Hungary, surely?

Ironically, it was probably her very roots in the Netherlands, her independent popularity in that country that, in Philip's eyes, militated against her gaining its regency; the post which had been up for grabs since Mary of Hungary's retirement, and which would instead be given to Margaret of Parma in June. Christina of Denmark spent the next nineteen years as advisor to her son in Lorraine, and a dozen more in a fiefdom of her own in Italy, never ceasing to keep a wary eye out for undue pressure being placed on either territory by either Philip of Spain or France, in the person of Catherine de Medici.
²

 

The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis saw Catherine de Medici and Henri II's eldest daughter, the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth de Valois, promised in marriage to Philip of Spain (and the French king's sister Marguerite to the Duke of Savoy). But indirectly, the treaty would soon bring tragedy to the French royal family.