Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (36 page)

CHAPTER 12

“YOUR MOST ASSURED SISTER”: ELIZABETH I AND THE KINGS OF FRANCE

Glenn Richardson

I

In July 1593, Elizabeth I wrote to Henri IV of France remonstrating with him over his conversion to Catholicism while promising to continue as his friend. Elizabeth signed herself: “Your most assured sister, if it be after the old fashion; with the new I have nothing to do.”
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Her words referred, of course, to Henri’s altered religion, but they also serve to remind us that Elizabeth was always acutely conscious of history in her dealings with France. Her own reputation as a strong monarch and a war leader, such as it is, would come to rest largely on the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
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Until then, however, the Tudor dynasty’s reputation and international status had been asserted most vigorously in “the old fashion” of war and peace with France.

Mary I was, of course, the first female Tudor sovereign to deal with France. Her highly experienced and effective representative there was Sir Nicholas Wotton, but Mary did not develop a personal rapport with her French counterpart as had her father and half-brother Edward. This was largely because King Henri II was little more than contemptuous of her as a female sovereign. Her marriage to Philip of Spain in July 1554 alienated him further. He rejected Mary’s efforts to mediate in what became the short-lived truce of Vaucelles of February 1556. Henri rightly concluded that England would enter the Habsburg–Valois conflict but he was wrong that this would be merely at Philip’s behest. The shelter he offered a number of English Protestant exiles, chiefly Thomas Stafford, who then plotted against Mary, was a more direct cause of English entry into the war than support for Spain.
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Unfortunately for Mary, the loss of Calais in January 1558 irreparably damaged her reputation as a warrior sovereign and at least some of that damage was inflicted by Elizabeth’s regime. Elizabeth’s relations with Charles IX and Henri III until 1589 and thereafter with Henri IV were always conducted in similarly difficult and constraining circumstances and, like Mary before her, Elizabeth faced contemporary assumptions that women were unsuited to the complexities of diplomacy and warfare. One apparent strategy adopted in presenting her effectively to her French counterparts was to refashion and from time to time deploy elements of a “chivalric” mode of dealing with French kings first essayed under Henry VIII. Elizabeth regularly used the rhetoric of honor, reputation, and esteem as she strove to portray herself as the more consistent, more generous, and more deserving party in the relationship. To some extent, of course, this language was characteristic of all princes in the sixteenth century, male or female. Elizabeth, however, also drew at times upon a more specific tradition of Anglo-French rhetorical interaction developed in her father’s time.
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Between 1515 and 1547 Henry VIII had conducted a very personally competitive relationship with his French counterpart, François Ier. Each monarch strove to display himself as the embodiment of princely and royal chivalry—generous, wise, and honorable and thus worthy of respect. When the two kings were in accord, they exchanged personal friends as ambassadors, sent each other presents and tokens of regard, and spoke of each other in elevated terms in a way that neither did toward or about any of their other contemporaries. When relations became cold they could be equally personal in their criticism of each other. They deployed highly nuanced language, ritual, and etiquette primarily to maintain an often difficult alliance between them.
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With the gradual emergence of a Protestant religious “settlement” in England, confessional differences were again an issue in its dealings with France. Much more significant, however, was the collapse of royal authority in France after the deaths of Henri II in 1559 and François II the following year. Elizabeth’s councilors and ambassadors were confronted with a political complexity in France unlike anything in the time of the earlier Tudors and were often uncertain about how best to respond. “France” was now far more than just its monarchy or its merchants. Engulfed in periodic bouts of religious and noble conflict that had potentially destabilizing consequences for England, it could neither be ignored nor mastered by the English sovereign. Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham and later Essex and Robert Cecil all tried to build networks of informants and allies in France—at the court, in the commercial and legal sectors, among the clienteles of the great French nobles, and within differing religious adherences. Not only were these varied networks poorly coordinated but they were also often competitively hostile toward each other and English dealings with France became more multilayered and more multidirectional than they had ever been before.
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II

Elizabeth’s initial response to the rise of the Huguenots was aggressively interventionist. In October 1562 she sent 6,000 troops under the earl of Warwick who seized Le Havre (Newhaven) ostensibly in support of Louis de Bourbon, prince de Condé.
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After concluding the Peace of Amboise in March 1563, the French regent Catherine de’ Medici sent an army (whose commanders included Condé) that forced the English from Le Havre. Yet, as Susan Doran has argued, despite this rocky start in their relations, Elizabeth and Catherine were able to establish a reasonable working relationship on the premise that the one avoided any more ill-considered adventures against French ports and the other avoided further interventions in Scotland.
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During the later 1560s, Anglo-French relations began to regain something of the more personal and spirited tone associated with the earlier decades of the century and focused on the possibility of Elizabeth’s marriage to one of the Valois princes.
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Although Henri d’Anjou himself never showed much interest, marriage negotiations did provide the springboard for the conclusion of a new Anglo-French alliance under the Treaty of Blois of April 1572. It was not a “diplomatic revolution” of the kind witnessed between Henry VIII and François Ier in 1527, nor a partnership of the kind Walsingham advocated against Spanish religion, but it did reorient English interests back toward France. For the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, her regime inclined more toward maintaining good relations with the French crown whenever possible and supporting it against Spain and the pro-Spanish Guise faction within France.
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During a second set of negotiations, carried on over six years between 1572 and 1578, for a marriage between Elizabeth and Henri III’s younger brother François, duc d’Alençon/Anjou, Elizabeth the woman and the potential bride, as opposed to the sovereign conducting the negotiations, remained largely invisible. But this changed from the spring of 1579 when, for a time, Elizabeth was serious about using a marriage alliance with France as a means of persuading Philip II to bring conflict in the Netherlands to an end. Anjou visited England in the late summer of 1579. The duke and the queen appeared very taken with each other and she evidently hoped that the question of Anjou’s religious practice could be resolved favorably for both parties. Her subjects, however, did not agree. A treaty of marriage was drafted in November 1579 but in the teeth of a widespread campaign of opposition in and well beyond the court, Elizabeth became convinced that she could not marry Anjou.

The queen still wanted a renewed alliance with France and in 1581 the most impressive French delegation to visit England during Elizabeth’s reign arrived. The queen received it with much pomp and grandeur and presented the visitors with a magnificent round of entertainments. These culminated in an elaborate, allegorical tournament staged at Whitsun in which those who favored the French match fought against those who did not. The tournament presented a carefully chosen set of chivalric motifs and analogies to communicate Elizabeth’s willingness to enter an alliance—but not one based on a marriage. As Susan Doran observes,

Overall, the allegory portrayed the queen as both an unobtainable object of desire in the chivalric tradition and a neo-Platonic celestial being; the clear message was that her chastity was part of her special mystique and that her marriage to the French prince was therefore out of the question.
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In staging this event, Elizabeth’s court revived an important strategy in Anglo-French diplomacy as practiced by her father. Henry VIII’s gender had also been part of his “special mystique” and was just as central to the allegorical chivalric combats in which he performed during various Anglo-French encounters in the 1520s. His robust masculinity had been asserted directly through his participation in those tournaments as proof of both his brotherly honor and England’s aggressive potential against France. By the same token, Elizabeth’s chaste femininity was asserted in her role as the unattainable lady of the tournament for whom all the men fought and as proof of both her sisterly (rather than wifely) honor and England’s potential still to be a friend to France, independent of a royal marriage. Thus the “Virgin Queen” was presented for the first time to the English and the French simultaneously and the chivalric register in which their relations were conducted was adapted to new circumstances.

After Anjou’s death in 1584, Elizabeth and Henri III strove to discover more about each other’s resources—material and human—in order to assess how far they could depend upon each other in the face of growing Spanish hostility and Philip’s apparent success in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The early 1580s saw a significant increase in intelligence-gathering in France, encompassing everything from basic fact-finding to elaborate counterespionage.
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The young Robert Cecil, living in Paris in 1583, was the author of a survey of the French provinces and notes on the nobility of France. A similar survey and notes on the French court were prepared by one Richard Cook of Kent and the sources used for them suggest that their authors had access to at least semi-public documents.
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By the mid-1580s the reading English public showed a greater interest in France and its religious problems and a considerable amount of material was printed to feed that appetite.
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Cook’s notes on the French court were published in England and may have been used in preparation of the grandest embassy that Elizabeth had yet sent to France: the presentation to Henri III of the Order of the Garter in February 1585.
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Here Elizabeth tapped very directly into the chivalric tradition of her father’s time, Henry VIII being the first sovereign to admit his French counterpart into the Order.
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The only study of Elizabeth’s attitude to the Garter has found that she was distinctly ambivalent about it. As a woman she could not be a member of the Order but as queen she was its sovereign. It has been suggested that her response was, in effect, to make a martial order into a courtly one, focused on herself.
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In her relations with the French kings, Elizabeth deployed membership of the Garter much as Henry VIII had done: as a culturally significant way of binding them to her beyond the terms of formal treaties. Led by the earl of Derby, the embassy was sent to reassure Henri of Elizabeth’s continuing regard and support after the death of his brother and the assassination of William of Orange in 1584.18

III

Elizabeth was powerless to influence French policy in the face of Henri III’s increasingly erratic rule and isolation. Attention increasingly turned toward Henri de Navarre, acknowledged by the French king as his successor after the death of Anjou. After Henri III’s assassination in August 1589, Henri de Navarre attempted to make good his claim to the French throne against the Catholic League’s refusal to recognize him. He requested help from Elizabeth who responded quickly. In September she provided 3,600 troops under Lord Willoughby, together with a loan of £15,000.
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This rapidly deployed support established the basis for what should have been a good working relationship between two very different personalities. Yet, almost from the outset, there were strong tensions and points of conflict over priorities. No sooner had English troops arrived than Henri led them, as part of a larger royal army, away from the coast and toward Paris and beyond. By November 1589 the English (under Willoughby) were suffering from inadequate shelter and provisions. The majority of losses among them were due to disease and hunger.
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All of this left Elizabeth and her council shocked and angered. Nevertheless, Henri renewed his calls for assistance in 1591 and once more Elizabeth responded. This time, troops under the earl of Essex were sent to Normandy to capture Rouen for Henri and to Brittany under Sir John Norris to assist in the fight against the Spanish who had landed there.

As noted at the outset, in July 1593 Henri abjured the Protestant faith in order, famously, to obtain control of Paris and with it the beginnings of effective power over France.
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Cosy references to religious unity and the future benefits to the faith of working together were hastily dropped from Elizabeth’s correspondence and Sir Thomas Wilkes, a committed Protestant, was sent to France to seek protection for Huguenots under the law and a new alliance with England on the basis of mutual royal dependence in the face of a common foe. As Wilkes’ instructions put it, the queen “would think it against reason to continue friendship and aid to the king of France without a correspondency on his part to join in offence against the king of Spain.”
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To which Henri responded that his capacity to fight Spain amidst a myriad of other problems he now encountered as king depended upon further help from Elizabeth.

The queen complained bitterly about Henri’s requests for further aid before he had repaid his debts to her. In response to a visit by the French envoy De Mouy, Elizabeth wrote to Henri on August 23, 1593 that she was astonished that he

did not think reparation for his infinite broken promises was called for rather than new demands. Why should she trust him more now than when he had much larger forces in the field, all to no purpose.
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