Game of Queens (46 page)

Jeanne d’Albret fled the French court in 1562, amid rumours that her husband Antoine was preparing to capture and imprison her. But Jeanne still had, she would later insist in her memoirs, the covert support of Catherine de Medici, herself anxious to escape from the influence of the Guises.

Catherine, Jeanne wrote, ‘approved everything I had done and made an infinity of complaints against my husband’. Jeanne was the one who now withdrew, refusing to assist Catherine’s negotiations with Antoine’s committedly Huguenot brother, Condé. For the next few years she would be occupied chiefly in her own lands. ‘God . . . has always granted me the grace to preserve this little corner of Béarn, where little by little, good increases and evil diminishes.’

Diplomatically, she would attempt to steer something of a neutral path. Her son Henri was still in French hands, and an heir to the French throne, while the Huguenots had as yet insufficient military strength to stand against the royal armies. But within her own fiefdom, she made her stance clear. Antoine, she said, had sent orders to Pau that the
parlement
should cease all exercises of the Reformed Religion and exile any officials not Catholic. She in turn withdrew her permission for him to negotiate with Spain about exchanging Navarre for Sardinia, saying it had been ‘given through force and fear, not having dared refuse a husband’:

When I learned this, I used the natural sovereign power God had given me over my subjects, which I had ceded to my husband for the obedience which God commands; but when I saw that it was a question of my God’s glory and the purity of his worship . . .

One way or another, the marriage was coming to an end.

The violence that followed the Massacre of Vassy in 1562 forced Catherine de Medici, however reluctantly, to put herself under the protection of the Duc de Guise, who arrived at Fontainebleu with a thousand cavalrymen. As the Protestants appealed to their co-religionists in Geneva, to the German Protestant princes and to Elizabeth of England, Catherine, with the Guises, was forced to find aid both from Philip of Spain and the papacy. Despite the wreckage of her policies, her personal courage remained high as she appeared on the ramparts above Rouen. ‘My courage is as great as yours,’ she told the men.

Another, too, showed bravery in these wars. Whatever his vacillations of policy, no one had ever doubted Antoine de Bourbon’s physical courage. But, when he had merely wandered into the bushes to relieve himself, he was hit in the shoulder. The wound became gangrenous and he died a few weeks later, on 17 November. Catherine allowed Antoine’s widow, Jeanne, to take control of her son’s education, although for the next few years he would effectively remain a hostage at court.

In the following spring of 1563 Jeanne d’Albret wrote a long letter to Catherine de Medici:

I trust, Madame, that you will not find that I have exceeded my duty by addressing myself to you on wings that fly above the heads of others . . . I am fully aware, Madame, of your perfect good will and friendship, and of your desire to further my son’s welfare and my own, and I cannot ignore your acts, so praiseworthy that I kiss the ground where you walk. But forgive me, Madame, if I write as I spoke to you at St Germain, where you did not seem to mind. Your good intentions are obstructed by the interference of those whom you know too well for me to describe them . . .

The letter also makes reference to a recent ‘pitiful event’, for Antoine’s was not the only important death that season. In February 1563, to the grief of his niece Mary in Scotland, the Duc de Guise was assassinated. Catherine was suspected; she is said to have told Condé (who had been captured by her royalist party) that Guise’s death ‘released her from prison’. Ironically, however, it also made her by default the leader of the Catholic faction, while the Protestant one was led by Condé and Admiral de Coligny, supported by the emotive figure of Jeanne d’Albret.

There was a brief breathing space for everyone. In March the Edict of Amboise gave freedom of conscience, and limited freedom of worship, to Huguenots. In the summer of 1563, Catherine de Medici adopted the device that had earlier been used to confirm Marie de Guise’s authority in Scotland, when she had her thirteen-year-old son Charles IX declared of age, despite the opposition of the Paris
parlement
.

The first act of the young king was to hand his mother the ‘power to command’, declaring that she ‘would continue to govern as much and more than before’. When, some months later, Charles IX issued a decree maintaining a fragile peace between the Guises and the Colignys clan, his mother boasted that he had done so ‘without anyone’s prompting’. But that seems, to say the least of it, unlikely.

Jeanne d’Albret, meanwhile, was also consolidating her authority. The year 1563 saw the abolition in her lands of the traditional religious processions and the arrival of the extra ministers she had requested from Calvin. ‘The Queen of Navarre has banished all idolatry from her domains and sets an example of virtue with incredible firmness and courage’, wrote one. Many of Jeanne’s nobles and officials were against her reform, and the reformer Jean-Raymond Merlin fretted that ‘she is inexperienced . . . having always been either under a father who managed affairs, or under a husband who neglected them’.

A few months after Jeanne’s imposition of Protestantism she was, Merlin said, ‘
épouvantée
’ (aghast) at news the Spanish had stationed troops on her frontier, and that though he had pushed her into forbidding the Mass in one town, she was hanging back (‘paralysed by fear’) from repudiating the papacy entirely. The Spanish envoy, once again Descurra, had brought her a letter of remonstrance from the King of Spain. She replied:

Although I am just a little princess, God has given me the government of this country so that I may rule it according to His Gospel and teach it His laws. I rely on God, who is more powerful than the King of Spain . . .

Philip had attempted to neutralise the widowed Jeanne by marrying her into his house but now he told his secretary of state that ‘this is quite too much of a woman to have as a daughter-in-law’.

Next, frighteningly, Jeanne d’Albret received a letter from an emissary of the papacy, Cardinal d’Armagnac, sent from Trent to warn her away from the reformist path. But to that too Jeanne replied, with mounting indignation:

I condemn no one to death or imprisonment, which penalties are the nerves and sinews of a system of terror – I blush for you, and feel ashamed when you falsely state that so many atrocities have been perpetrated by those of our religion. Purge the earth first from the blood of so many just men shed by you and yours . . . As in no point I have deviated from the faith of God’s Holy Catholic church, nor quitted her fold, I bid you keep your tears to deplore your own errors . . . I desire that your useless letter may be the last of its kind.

On 28 September 1563 Pope Pius IV summoned Jeanne to appear before the Inquisition in Rome, on a charge of heresy. If she failed to appear she would be excommunicated and her lands declared free to anyone who could take them. She had six months to comply.

From this predicament she was once again rescued by Catherine de Medici; albeit Catherine’s motives were not solely sisterly. The papacy’s intrusion on French sovereign power had long been a bone of contention. In December, Catherine sent a special envoy to Rome protesting that the pope’s actions were ‘against the ancient rights and privileges of the Gallican Church’.

Philip of Spain, meanwhile, planned to kidnap Jeanne and deliver her to the Inquisition in Spain. But elements of the plan leaked out when an embroiderer employed by Catherine de Medici’s daughter Elisabeth – Philip’s wife – passed on word of what one of the agents had said while in his cups. The former French princess passed word to her mother’s ambassador: an example either of natal trumping marital loyalties or of female solidarity.

‘I put myself wholly under the wing of your powerful protection’, Jeanne d’Albret wrote gratefully to Catherine de Medici. ‘I will go to find you wherever you may be and shall kiss your feet more willingly than the Pope’s’. Protection, however, had a price. Jeanne was summoned to the French court and Catherine wrote that she must moderate her religious policy ‘in such a way that her subjects will not be led to rebel nor her neighbours to support them’. Jeanne should let her subjects ‘all live in freedom of conscience and in the exercise of their own religion without forcing of any’. Jeanne’s edict of February 1564 permitted a measure of Catholic as well as a measure of Calvinist worship and the pardon of all religious crimes that could not be considered lèse-majesté.

Jeanne d’Albret dawdled in obeying Catherine de Medici’s summons to court; she had, after all, to arrange for her land to be ruled in her absence. But by the spring of 1564 it was Catherine herself who was setting out, taking her court and her son, the king, on a progress through France that would last for more than two years; ten thousand people on a twenty-seven-month journey, equipped with everything from portable triumphal arches to a travelling zoo. At the beginning of June, in Maçon, Jeanne at last joined the royal tour, herself accompanied by three hundred cavalry and eight Calvinist ministers. From the start, her intransigence was clear.

The day after Jeanne’s arrival, as the Corpus Christi procession passed under her windows, members of her suite shouted lewd remarks. In Lyons, a few days later, she attended Huguenot sermons, taking her son with her, until a provoked Catherine stopped the Calvinist services, took Jeanne’s son Henri back into her own hands and swore she would cut off the head of anyone who did not attend Mass. But in some ways the progress had the unifying effect Catherine hoped for and, in Lyons, a joint procession of Catholic and Protestant children was staged to celebrate the current state of religious harmony.

As the journey wore on, Jeanne d’Albret often requested to be allowed to return to her own lands and to take her son with her. This was refused. Henri would continue to accompany the court. Jeanne, as a compromise, was instructed to retire to Vendôme; her own land but closer at hand and held in fief to the French crown.

Even Vendôme had seen conflict between the Calvinist lieutenants Jeanne had appointed and the royal agent the Protestants claimed was persecuting them. But Jeanne was to remain in its environs for some months. Everyone wanted her out of the way of the meeting that was looming at Bayonne, on the Spanish border.

There, Catherine de Medici hoped once again to see her daughter Elisabeth – a longed-for personal as well as a vital diplomatic encounter. But Philip of Spain, annoyed with Catherine’s tolerant religious policy, and refusing to attend the meeting himself, had refused even to let his wife attend if Jeanne d’Albret and Condé were present; not wishing, he said, his wife to meet ‘with rebels and fomenters of sedition’.

The meeting was a grand diplomatic spectacle and no doubt a rare personal pleasure for both Catherine de Medici and her daughter. But even here there was a conflict of interests. ‘How Spanish you have become, my daughter,’ Catherine said to Elisabeth, observing the latter’s wholesale adoption not only of Spanish dress and manners but also of Philip’s opinions. Philip had sent with his wife the Duke of Alba, a notorious hardliner and ardent Catholic, to dragoon Catherine into clamping down on the Huguenots. He failed, but conversely, the very fact of Catherine’s having met him was taken by the Huguenot leaders as a worrying sign.

Immediately after the Bayonne meeting, Catherine de Medici, characteristically, once more set about appeasing the Protestant leaders. In the summer of 1565 Jeanne was allowed to leave Vendôme for Nérac (capital of the duchy of Albret, which gave her her name), there to receive the court on its homeward journey. Catherine urged Jeanne to return to the Catholic faith; Jeanne used the time to introduce her son Henri to leading Huguenots. When the royal circus finally reached Paris in early summer 1566, Jeanne d’Albret was with them but – so the Spanish ambassador complained – still behaving intransigently.

40

‘Majesty and love do not sit well together'

Scotland, 1565–1567

In the summer of 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots married her kinsman, Lord Darnley. What followed is one of the better-known tales in British history; a catastrophic chain of events and errors. Was Mary Stuart, like Jeanne d'Albret, a rebel against what those around her saw as good order and authority? Was she a fool for love? Or was she making what she saw as her best bid at keeping the rule of her country in her own (and a husband's) hands, however misguided her gamble proved to be? From the start, contemporary opinions were contradictory.

When Mary Stuart met, and to all appearances swiftly fell for Henry, Lord Darnley, she seemed to be fitting into the stereotype John Knox had used to discredit the whole idea of women's rule: infatuated, a prey to unbridled sensuality. As she told the English ambassador Randolph: ‘Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable'. At eighteen, Darnley was tall (taller even than Mary's six foot), elegant, an expert in the manly arts and educated in a way which gave him a veneer of courtly civility, however illusory that would prove to be.

When, in February 1565, Mary went to greet Darnley on the Scottish coast, there was a subtext to any possible love story. The English parliament had objected to Mary's claim to the English throne on the grounds that she was a foreigner, as well as a woman and a Catholic. But if she could ally her claim to that of the English-born Margaret Douglas, Margaret Tudor's daughter and Darnley's mother, or to that of her son, it might be a different story.