Mary Queen of Scots (18 page)
Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
When the Spanish ambassadors visited Queen Catherine to pay her their condolences, they found the room draped in black, the floor as well as the walls.
31
The windows were shut, and there was no light except two candles burning on an altar draped in black. Catherine herself sat in a severe black dress with no ornament except a collar of ermine. The new queen of France on the other hand was dressed in white, the white which she had insisted on wearing for her wedding only fifteen months before, and which now she could wear in earnest as the colour of mourning. Catherine responded only faintly to the ambassador’s condolences, but the new queen, prompted by her uncles, made a gracious little speech, urging them to come often to court, and asking them to give her compliments to the king of Spain. In the course of her speech she took care to sing the praises of her uncles. At the funeral of Henry
II
, begun at Notre Dame on 11 August, and completed at Saint-Denis on 13 August, the role of the Guises was even more significant than it had been at the beginning of the previous reign. Cardinal Charles, as abbot of St Denis presided over the interment. Another Guise brother, René of Elboeuf, held the hand of justice, Henry of Guise held the crown, Grand Prior Francis of Guise the sceptre, and the duke of Guise the royal banner of France. By making the young king, as one historian at the Guise family has put it, ‘their nephew by alliance, their pupil by necessity’,
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Mary Stuart had fulfilled the ultimate expectations of her family.
*
Mary’s grandfather, Duke Claude of Guise, and Francis’s grandfather King Francis
I
were second cousins; Mary and Francis were thus fourth cousins.
†
When Melville told Queen Elizabeth that Mary was ‘higher’ than her, Elizabeth remarked jealously that the rival queen must be ‘over high’. But, of course, Elizabeth, despite her obsession on the subject of Mary’s beauty, never actually met her: no man who saw her ever suggested that the queen of Scots was ‘over high’.
‡
It has recently been pointed out that Mary was not wearing her white mourning in this portrait for Francis
II
, since the picture was painted some time prior to August 1560 when Throckmorton reported Mary’s intention of sending her portrait to Elizabeth, and how she commented to him: ‘I perceive you like me better when I look sadly than when I look merrily, for it is told me that you desired to have me pictured when I wore the Deuil.’ Mary was therefore in mourning for her father-in-law Henry or her mother, Mary of Guise.
10
§
The poem most commonly attributed to her,
Adieu, plaisant pays de France
, has been shown to be the work of an eighteenth-century French journalist. The authentic poetry of Mary Stuart can best be judged from the poignant lines she wrote on the death of Francis, the sonnet by her to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, and the poems written during her captivity, published by John Leslie.
13
‖
Ronsard! Perchance a passing note of pain Speaks sometimes to thy heart in days gone by, When he who was thy king did not disdain To do thee honour for thy poesy.
…
15
a
For a discussion of Mary’s health in later life and the subject of porphyria
see this page
. It has been suggested that in youth Mary suffered from chlorosis, or ‘green sickness’, on the basis of Throckmorton’s description.
18
Chlorosis is, however, usually associated with malnutrition and general lack of exercise, fresh air and sunlight in adolescents living in slum conditions. In her upbringing at the French court Mary certainly did not lack proper exercise, fresh air or substantial meals: nor is the puffiness of the face, generally associated with chlorosis, mentioned in any of the contemporary descriptions of her appearance.
b
SEE
THE GENEALOGICAL TABLE
FOR SCOTTISH ROYAL SUCCESSION
c
He seemed to be in excellent health at the time although as Throckmorton had reported to London in May that the king was ill with vertigo, it is just possible that some giddiness afflicted him to explain the events that followed.
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d
Gauric also prophesied the death of Duke Francis of Guise correctly, saying that he would be struck down from behind. This met with annoyance as well as scepticism since Francis thought that the prophecy carried with it some implication of cowardice. He forgot that although only the back of the coward is turned towards the enemy, the dagger of the assassin also strikes from behind.
e
Queen Catherine was not always so fortunate, in astrological terms, in the truth of the predictions which were made to her. When the future Charles
IX
was born, it was prophesied that he would one day be as great a king as Charlemagne – a prediction which he did very little to fulfil during his days as king. Another son, for whom Nostradamus equally prophesied a brilliant future, died only eighteen months after his birth.
6 The White Lily of France‘Alba rosis albis nunc insere lilia …’
Nuptial song on the marriage of Francis and Mary, referring to the union of the white lilies of France and the white roses of the Yorkists
On 18 September 1559, the young Francis was solemnly crowned king of France at Rheims: his consort Mary had already been crowned queen of Scotland in babyhood and unlike previous queens of France had thus no need of further coronation to confirm her royal state. The weather was wet and windy. Nor was there any great display of pageantry on this occasion, owing to the recent and shocking death of Henry
II
: Throckmorton noted savagely that the city was scarcely decorated at all ‘save that the arms of England, France and Scotland quartered were brimly set out in the show over the gate’.
1
Francis himself wore a coat of black velvet and Mary alone of the ladies who attended the coronation was not dressed in dark colours. The day after the ceremony, court mourning was resumed for a year to mark the late king’s death. Although the ancient crown of St Denis had been placed on his head, the real power in France was very far from lying within the puny grasp of Francis
II
. The English ambassador Throckmorton analysed the situation as follows – the old French queen (Catherine) had the authority of regent, although she was not in fact regent in name; in the meantime the state was governed by the cardinal of Lorraine and the duke of Guise jointly, the duke having charge of the war, and the cardinal the ordering of all other affairs including finance and foreign affairs. The Venetian ambassador noted that the Guises now conducted secret inner discussions on matters of policy, just before official meetings of the Grand Council: these conferences took place either in Francis’s chamber or in that of Queen Catherine.
2
This political ascendancy had its parallel in the domestic arrangements of the new king and queen of France: Guisards were made gentlemen of the bed-chamber to the king, and Mary’s new list of domestic officers was
headed by those ladies who were to receive 800
livres
in wages, including Antoinette of Guise, Anne d’Esté, the duchess of Aumale and the marquise of Elboeuf – her grandmother and her three Guise aunts. One of Mary’s first actions after the death of Henry
II
as a formal expression of her joy at coming to the throne was to make a donation to the grandmother who had contributed so much to her upbringing. The court of France, with Francis, Mary and Catherine at its head, now resumed the endless journeyings which characterized its way of life. These travels were prompted by a variety of motives, including the calls of the chase, domestic convenience and in certain cases the dictates of security or politics. In the first instance the entire court proceeded to Blois to wait for the signal of the departure of young Elisabeth to Spain: from Blois the royal cortège went to Varteuil, and from there to a snow-strewn Châtelherault, which they entered at the end of November. On 25 November Queen Catherine finally permitted her child to depart, with grief so extreme that even the Spanish ambassador was moved by it. Mary herself was equally distraught at the prospect of the departure of her friend: she entrusted Elisabeth with a touching letter to King Philip from his new sister-in-law, saying that she could hardly bear to part with Elisabeth, were it not for the fact that she knew Elisabeth would be happy and contented in her new life. Nevertheless for Mary herself the loss would be irreparable. She ended her letter by begging the Spanish king to receive it ‘as from the person who loves her [Elisabeth] the most in the world, and who wishes always to be –
Vôtre bien bonne soeur Marie
’.
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With Mary and the royal family immersed in their personal sorrow, the Guise brothers were left to grapple with the internal government of France, which represented at this period a problem which other less bold spirits might, with considerable justification, have shrunk from tackling. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis had not come in time to save France from cruel inflation, induced by the economic demands of the Italian wars. It has been estimated that at the death of Henry
II
the treasury staggered under a war debt of forty million
livres
: the theoretical resources of the crown were ten million
livres
, but the actual income only amounted to about half this, and the interest on the royal debt consumed it. At the same time the kingdom was being rapidly dissected by the presence of two religions, as French Calvinism became the natural target for discontent with the central authority.
4
Even if the country had not been plunged in such grave economic problems, some sort of regency,
de facto
if not
de jure
, would have been necessary for the young Francis. At the age of fifteen and a half, when he ascended the throne, his intelligence
was scarcely more developed than his physique. In youth, like many other boys he had loved to hunt more than he had loved to learn, but since he was the dauphin of France, not enough pressure had been exerted to redress the balance. The result was that his mind, without being actually feeble, as his body was, had never really developed to the point when the possibilities of power and government excited him. As a king he lacked the necessary self-restraint to attend to the business of government when pleasure offered, his tutors in youth having concentrated more on the importance of the actual role he would play, than the importance of the duties which were attached to it. The enemies of the Guises accused them of encouraging their nephew in his pursuit of pleasure in order to have the government of the realm to themselves. But there was no need to carry out such a policy of corruption, their work had already been done for them by the over-protective upbringing of Catherine de Medicis, who had with all her loving, maternal care, developed only self-importance, not self-discipline, in her son.
The nature of the king’s character was fully appreciated by the watchful ambassadors at the French court. His routine was understood to be dominated by his frantic love of hawking: in December 1559 he was reported as having retired to Chambord till Christmas, to which the Chancellor of the Privy Council was obliged to repair in order ‘to arrange his finances for the next year’. In March 1560 when the king refused to see the English ambassadors, giving out that he was ill, their immediate instinct was to suspect that he was merely playing truant ‘as the king is wont to go abroad very often to amuse himself for several days without transacting business’. This was an age when monarchs were still expected to reproduce in themselves the personal qualities of greatness, to win the admiration of their subjects. Duke Francis of Guise owed much of his prestige to his physical courage: despite her frail health Mary Stuart was famed for being personally fearless. King Francis, on the other hand, was timid by nature. He had a certain pathetic dandyism, a love of display revealed by his personal accounts, where swords were made with hilts coloured to match his various costumes; but this was no substitute for the careless courage so attractive in princes.
5
He lived in fear for his personal safety, which made it natural for him to depute the government of the kingdom happily to those he felt best able to secure it.
Francis was demonstrably incapable of ruling without guidance. But the vital regency – as it was in practice but not in name – was not surrendered to his wife’s uncles by the other great nobles of France without a struggle. The powerful family of Bourbon postulated strongly that the king was not,
in fact, legally of age at all, being only fifteen. Not only had he no right to choose his own counsellers, but being still a minor, he should automatically accept the first prince of the blood as regent: this was of course none other than King Antoine of Navarre, head of the House of Bourbon. Behind this weak and indecisive figure-head stretched the shadow of his restless, ambitious and hot-headed younger brother, Louis, prince of Condé, a recent Huguenot convert, and the sworn enemy of the Guises. An anonymous memoir of October 1559, which detailed these points, not only accused the Guises of trying to cut off Francis from his friends, but of aiming at putting the crown on their own heads, by emphasizing their spurious descent from Charlemagne. A Guise reply
‘Pour la majorité du Roy très chrestien François deuxieme’
by Jean du Tillet, bishop of Saint-Brieul, concentrated on the use of texts, laws and customs to prove firstly that the king of France traditionally came of age at fifteen, and thus had the right to choose his own Council, secondly that the regency in the past had not always been given to a prince of the blood, but on occasions also had been given to queens of France, and to the abbots of St Denis.
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