Mary Queen of Scots (9 page)

Antoinette of Guise also possessed a vein of wry humour which doubtless enabled her to endure the many stresses to which a matriarch is subject, and maintain her health and courage intact. At Joinville, for example, her famous charity was dispensed with a certain amount of common sense. When a convent of nuns applied to her for funds for building, she is said to have remarked dryly:
‘Edifiez vos moeurs, et j’édifierai vos murs.’
Masculine frailty met with an equally practical approach: on one occasion Antoinette discovered that her husband was having a liaison with a village-girl, and that their trysting-place was a certain little hut on the edge of the estate, called
‘La Viergeotte’.
Without raising the subject of the girl with the duke, Antoinette merely asked him to meet her also at this particular hut; with some embarrassment, the duke agreed, only to find that the hut had been transformed into a luxurious nest of pleasure, decorated in palatial style, and now in his wife’s opinion, worthy of his ducal position. Subsequently Duke Claude built a little castle on the spot, with the significantly interlaced initials, A and C, and the motto:
‘Toutes pur une: là, et non plus.’

Duchess Antoinette was in ecstasies at the appearance of her grand-daughter, and wrote immediately to Mary of Guise in Scotland to express the measure of her approval; she also assured her that she would see about the little girl’s wardrobe, which, coming from Scotland, Mary of Guise obviously suspected might not be up to the elegant standards of the French court. The duchess was, however, a great deal less enthusiastic over Mary’s
Scottish train, whom she described as thoroughly ill-looking and
farouche
, and with the exception of the captivating Lady Fleming, not even, in her opinion, properly washed. The duchess clearly shared the general desire of the French, whether on the part of the Guises or the court, to have the complete education of this child, and thoroughly expunge from her all traces of her Scottish past, which it was felt would ill equip her for her glorious future role as queen of France. The possibility that she might also one day have to act as queen regnant to her native land of Scotland was felt to be definitely subordinate. No qualms were therefore felt at the prospect of cutting the little Scottish queen off immediately from her Scottish attendants. Mary of Guise, however, with superior foresight, had sent instructions that Lady Fleming was to continue as her governess, despite the claims of a French woman, Mlle Curel. The duchess wrote back to say that her daughter’s wishes were being respected. Mary Stuart also retained a Scotswoman, Jehane St Clare (or Jean Sinclair) as her nurse; de la Brousse hinted to Mary of Guise that the nurse was difficult to please, for which he blamed her Scots blood (‘You know that nation,’ he wrote. ‘I need say no more.’), but Jean Sinclair was presumably merely grumbling at novelty, in the universal tradition of her profession, when finding herself in a foreign land.
⁵

Antoinette has left us a physical description of Mary as she appeared to French eyes on her first arrival, in a letter to her son written in October. She is described as ‘very pretty indeed’ as well as being extremely intelligent, and her grandmother hastens to prophesy that she will actually be a beauty when she grows up, especially as the little queen is also graceful and self-assured in her movements. With the help of this letter, which as it was not written to the child’s mother seems candid enough, and the earliest picture of Mary Stuart, dating from July 1552, when she was 9½ years old, it is possible to form a definite impression of her childish, pre-adolescent appearance. This drawing, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly was done in response to a request from Catherine de Medicis for portraits of all her children, to include her future daughter-in-law, Mary; as the French queen was apparently weary of endless identical stylized profiles of her children, she asked that the picture should be done swiftly in crayon, to give some sort of genuinely child-like impression.
⁶
The charming oval of Mary’s girlhood face is well captured: it is evident that her features were of the type inclined to be hawk-like in later life, which had a special attraction when still enveloped by the softness of youth. Her complexion was glowingly white, and the texture of the skin, as her grandmother noted, especially fine. The nose, which was to lengthen considerably as Mary grew
older, was now still delightfully balanced in the contours of her face and Duchess Antoinette also commended her mouth and chin as being particularly well formed. The deep-set eyes of which her grandmother wrote, were prettily set like two almonds beneath her high forehead; and their bright golden-brown colour contrasted with the fair, almost ash-blonde, hair which Mary enjoyed as a young girl. All in all, it was not surprising that the French court and Mary’s doting relations were alike well satisfied with what they saw.

Duchess Antoinette now set in train the second part of the journey to Saint-Germain, which she reported to her son on 9 October she was making by slow stages. The care of the Guises for their nursling was more than matched by the solicitude which King Henry himself was showing, by letter, from a distance.
⁷
So thoroughly were the cleaning operations of the castle of Saint Germain taken in hand on his instructions, that the children of France were still at the medieval fortress of Carrières when Mary arrived there on 16 October. Two months from her arrival on the soil of France, she was now propelled into the royal nursery. It is difficult to believe that any set of young princes in the history of Europe have been so fussed over, so lavished with care and attention, as the children of Henry
II
and Catherine de Medicis. The letters of their mother are replete with maternal anxieties of the sort most generally associated with mothers who have no nurses, rather than with a queen, who might be supposed to have at least the duties of the court to distract her. This devotion, this concentrated attention to the
minutiae
of a child’s existence, was fully shared during her childhood, by Mary, who received in addition the extra care of her Guise relations: so concerned were they over her welfare that her uncle the cardinal, that great prince of the Church, appeared as worried over her toothache and her swollen face, as about matters of national policy. Her grandmother, dedicated to the cause of her moral welfare, and her uncle, bestowing on her in youth the tenderness of a father, combined with the king of France himself, and the governors of his children, to make Mary Stuart’s upbringing one of rigorous supervision.

The solicitude bestowed in such rich measure on the royal nursery of France arose to some degree from the special circumstances of the children’s birth. Catherine de Medicis, a woman who has gone down to history as a mother before all else, and to whom much has been forgiven on these grounds, was for many years denied by fate the very role she most craved. Married off to the dauphin, Henry of France, with nothing to commend her but her relationship to the Pope and her dowry, lacking birth in the strict aristocratic sense, and lacking beauty in even the most
prejudiced eyes of her allies, her early years at the French court were made still more unbearable by the additional torture of sterility. By 1538 there were rumours that she was to be sent back to Italy, to make room for some more nubile bride for the dauphin, one who would at least have achieved the state of puberty, unlike the wretched Catherine. What potions, what prayers, what magic arts Catherine summoned to her aid in her struggles with her cruel destiny will never be fully known. By 1540, with the help, it was said, of pills of myrrh given her by the famous Jean Fernel, she finally reached the state of puberty; by April 1543 she was at last pregnant. Finally, in 1544, Francis of Valois was born. He was sickly from birth, it was true, a weakness generally attributed to the many remedies his mother had taken both before and during her pregnancy, but for all that he represented security – he was a child, and he was an heir. The royal children of France followed in quick and satisfying succession. Elisabeth, later to be third wife of Phillip
II
of Spain, in April 1545; Claude, who married the duke of Lorraine, in 1547, the future Charles
IX
in 1551, the future Henry
III
in 1551, Francis, duke of Alençon, in 1554, and Marguerite, the bride of Henry of Navarre, in 1553. Three other children died at birth. The princes and princesses thus made up in numbers what they lacked in rude health: none of them was robust and together they gave Catherine ample material for concern, from the right clothes for little Henry in hot weather, to the correct amount of food which each child should consume to make it either thinner or fatter.

Tenderness towards the royal children was not the sole prerogative of their mother. The constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, was also deeply involved in their welfare – it was indeed to the constable that Queen Catherine broke the moving news of her first pregnancy, saying that she knew that he desired to see her with children just as much as she did.
⁸
Another powerful force in the royal nursery was that of Henry
II
’s mistress, the legendary Diane de Poitiers. The enemies of Mary Stuart, in her later career, have sometimes suggested that she was debauched in early childhood by the corrupting influence of this woman, who although already aged forty-eight when Mary arrived in France, exerted and continued to exert till his death the most total fascination over her royal lover. Diane de Poitiers, as her letters show, was a woman who, quite apart from her attractive interest in the arts, took an enormous interest in every part of the kingdom’s affairs. This was indeed a considerable part of her attraction for the king: she interpreted the role of mistress in the true Renaissance sense, rather than in the nineteenth-century style of a grand voluptuary. She herself had been married at the age of fifteen to a man much older than
herself, Louis de Brezé, by whom she had two daughters, and with whom, as historians now agree, she led a blameless life. She has also now been acquitted of the accusation that she subsequently sacrificed her honour to Francis
I
, in order to save the life of her father, the Seigneur de Saint-Vallier; it was this smear which gave rise to the story that she acted as the mistress of two kings in her lifetime.
⁹
Diane should be judged as the mistress of Henry
II
only, a position which she undertook as though she felt it her duty to exploit her undoubted assets – the beauty which age could not dim, intelligence, energy, and abounding health to support it all, health over which she took great trouble.

Her flagrant adultery with the king may contrast paradoxically to our notions with the excellent upbringing which she gave to her own daughters – Françoise who married the duke of Boillon in 1547 and Louise who married Duke Francis of Guise’s son in the same year – but to the age in which she lived, the paradox was not apparent. Equally, she exhibited, without any sense of impropriety, strong maternal instincts towards the king’s own children, and even on occasion towards his wife – for stories were told that she actually hustled the king towards the royal marriage bed, so seriously did she take the role of mistress. Certainly, she took infinite trouble to make both the Dame and Seigneur d’Humières her allies; she recommended a nurse for the royal children, and actually trained her at Anet first, to make sure she would give satisfaction; she enquired ceaselessly over Mme Elisabeth’s measles and other domestic matters; the subject of Charles d’Orleans’s wet nurse, and her suitability or otherwise for her task, runs through a whole summer of letter-writing. As Mary Stuart arrives at Carrières, we find that it is Diane who passes on the king’s request that Mary and Elisabeth should share a room, since it is the king’s dearest wish that they should become friends; again, it is Diane who expresses Henry’s desire that the Scottish suite should be sent away, and the situation is accepted as perfectly natural.
¹⁰

The first crucial encounter for Mary at the French court was with her intended husband, the Dauphin Francis. It is to be presumed that if these two children, aged nearly six and nearly five respectively, had heartily disliked each other on sight, the Scottish–French marriage alliance would still have proceeded. Nevertheless, the French courtiers hung over the meeting of the two royal children like so many sentimental cupids: whatever the contrast between the bouncing and healthy little girl, and the timid, sickly boy a year her junior, whose health had already been the matter of much concern, owing to the abnormalities of his birth, the meeting was nevertheless pronounced to be a great success. At the wedding
of Francis of Guise and Anne d’Esté in December 1548, they danced happily together, as Henry
II
hastened to report to Mary’s mother, while the English ambassador looked on sardonically. A few weeks after the first meeting, Henry was writing to the duke of Guise that Francis and Mary already got on as well as if they had known each other all their lives. By the March of the year following, Constable de Montmorency, commenting on the love that the dauphin bore for his little bride, described him as feeling as much for her as though she were both his sweetheart
and
his wife –
‘sa mie et sa femme’
– a touching commentary on the contemporary conventions of feeling.
¹¹
On the principle of the sunflower and the sun, a frail child naturally rewards a more healthy specimen of the race with its admiration; a younger child hero-worships an older one; an unattractive child responds to a beautiful one by loving it. On all these counts, it was natural for Francis to love Mary Stuart, even if he had not been heavily encouraged to do so. As it is, the constant reiteration of tales of his somewhat pathetic passion for her, from many sources, make it certain that his adoration for her was indeed genuine, and not just the projection of courtly wishful thinking.

Since we have Brantôme’s word that Mary Stuart could only speak Scots when she arrived in France – barbarous and ill-sounding, he called it – she had evidently picked up enough French in the past two months, with the facility of childhood, to communicate with a fellow-child. Later, she was to be described, also by Brantôme, as speaking French with perfect grace and elegance: although she did not lose her Scots, French became the language which Mary naturally wrote and spoke for the rest of her life.
¹²
Possibly it was the hope of bringing this about which had influenced Henry in his decision to send away the Scottish suite; even the four Maries were sent to the convent of the Dominican nuns at Poissy, where the Prior François de Vieuxpont was charged with their education, instead of being kept permanently at their mistress’s side. It thus came about that the most intimate female friend of Mary Stuart’s childhood and adolescence was Elisabeth of France, younger by two and a quarter years, a friendship shared, to a lesser extent, by her younger sister Claude. With these two princesses, Mary Stuart had in common the elevating but separating gift of royal blood; the fact that Elisabeth also shared the same nurtured golden childhood made her the female human being of whom Mary Stuart felt herself afterwards to be most fond, and of whom she retained the most nostalgic memories in later life.