Elizabeth and Mary Page 14
The French fleet sent to spirit the young Queen of Scots away had sailed around the north coast of Scotland to elude the English and finally came to moorage at Dumbarton. To accompany her to her new life in France she had a bevy of Scottish children, among them the subsequently celebrated ‘Four Maries’ – Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, Mary Seton and Mary Beaton – all daughters of noble Scottish families. Her adult court included the lords Erskine and Livingston and Lady Fleming, her stepaunt and governess. Also accompanying the young queen was her eldest illegitimate half-brother James Stewart and two younger, Lord Robert and Lord John. Seventeen years old, educated and adventurous, Lord James was to spend some time at the French court in the entourage of his young sister, and it is quite probable that during this time Mary forged her strong affection for this brother, a trust she found hard to relinquish even when he, as Earl of Moray, was made regent in her place years later. Mary’s mother was grief-stricken at sending her only daughter from her, on a journey which was inherently hazardous, and made all the more so by the threat of intervention from the aggressive English fleet.
By the beginning of August the French galleys bearing their important cargo eventually sailed down the Clyde and out to sea. There was every evidence that the Queen of Scots was blessed with an adventurous spirit which was to be one of the main motivating characteristics of her life. While others faded with homesickness or seasickness, Mary thrived. The journey around the west coast of England was plagued with storms and fears of an English attempt at ambush and kidnap, but nothing seemed to sap her robust health and merry temperament. Her mother meanwhile was overcome with sadness: ‘The old Queen doth lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvels that she heareth nothing from her.’33
The French commander de Brézé had in fact sent a series of letters to console the grieving queen mother and in them consistently asserted that Mary, alone of all the party, remained cheery of temper and free of seasickness, despite the terrible storms that almost overwhelmed them off the coast of Cornwall. ‘Madam,’ he wrote on 18 August 1548, ‘in the belief that it will be a comfort to you to have news of the Queen, your daughter … she prospers, and is as well as ever you saw her. She has been less ill upon the sea than any one of her company, so that she made fun of those that were …’34 In these leviathan seas they had broken their rudder but Providence, he claimed, came to their aid and the essential steerage was mended without loss of life. After almost a week at the mercy of the sea, the royal entourage arrived at Roscoff on the dramatic coastline of Finistère. There were members of that party whose suffering would have made them think it well named as ‘the end of the world’.
Mary’s charm, high spirits and adventurousness had already impressed the whole company who had shared her eventful voyage. The kind de Brézé wrote again on 1 November, ‘I believe, madame, that [the king] will find her as pleasing and as much to his fancy as all those who have seen her and found her pretty and of clever wit.’35
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the French court was the most magnificent and sophisticated in Europe. When Mary arrived in 1548 it was dominated by two women, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, and Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. These women were indeed powerful but it was power exercised covertly, through influence and manipulation, through persuasion and pillow talk, bribery and possibly even poison. While Henri lived, Catherine appeared to be eclipsed by the phenomenon of Diane de Poitiers. Preternaturally beautiful, seductive and socially skilled, she was nearly twenty years his senior, a woman whom age could not diminish. But it was Catherine who was the more remarkable. Patiently willing to bide her time, wily, pragmatic, treacherous, she was to prove herself the ultimate stateswoman in utter control of herself and the dynasty through control of her children.
Diane had been the king’s mistress since he was about nineteen. The story went that François I, in despair at the death of his eldest son, had been complaining to Diane, widow of the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy, of the melancholic nature and uncouth manners of his second son, who had so tragically become dauphin and heir to his throne. Diane had laughingly replied ‘he must be made to fall in love, and that she would make him her gallant’.36 Her plan worked so well that not only did she civilize him but, in introducing him young to the charms of her company, she ensured he was incapable of ever replacing her as the most influential woman in his life. For the following twenty-one years until his death Henri spent up to a third of each day in Diane’s company.
Catherine had none of her advantages of beauty or facile personality. She was a neglected scion of the Florentine merchant family of Medici, and had never been popular in France. Married at fourteen, she had to countenance very early her husband’s evident preference for his mistress and faithfulness to her until death. After ten miserable years of barren marriage, Catherine became sullen in her unhappiness and sinister in her superstitions and suspected occult powers. It had seemed to Catherine only supernatural intervention could save her from humiliation, and the threatened repudiation by her husband. The fact that she then managed to produce ten children, four of them sons, in a twelve-year flurry of miraculous fecundity explained some of her preoccupations with the occult and her subsequent absolute control over her family. Once Henri II died in 1559, however, the true power of the Medici sprang forth from its long incubation.
Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded queen. What Catherine lacked in beauty she made up for in intelligence, cunning and family ambition. After years of silence and antipathy her time at last had come. But it was not vengeance so much as power which she desired. From that point on, the interests and fortunes of her children were her main concern. Through the youth and inadequacy of her sons as kings she became the real power driving the French monarchy for the last thirty years of her life, as omnipotent queen mother throughout three reigns.
The France that Mary first encountered in 1548 was a country increasingly riven by religious dissent. Calvinism and evangelicalism were well established among the lower clergy and the urban bourgeoisie and were already infiltrating into the higher strata of society. François I’s intellectual sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was strongly evangelical in her faith, although she never broke definitively with the Catholic Church. Everywhere, heresy was enthusiastically rooted out with threats of torture, banishments and public burnings. Banned books were placed on an index and booksellers who defied these proscriptions risked being burnt along with their heretical volumes.
The court, however, seethed with its own factions and intrigues and increasingly was drawn into the religious wars. In the sixteenth century it was a lavish self-contained community, of king and queen and their families, the nobles from the provinces and their entourages, the foreign ambassadors and the princes étrangers, who, although with territories outside the kingdom, nevertheless attended the French court. This huge superstructure, centred on the glorification of the king, needed an even more vast army of workers, with priests, soldiers, officials, tradesmen, domestic servants, huntsmen, grooms, entertainers, poets, teachers and musicians. It was a largely peripatetic court, just as it had been in the Middle Ages, on the move between a series of châteaux, driven as much by the royal passion for hunting and the desire for new forests and new animals to kill, as by the more pragmatic need to clean the residences every few months or so, find new sources of food having exhausted the immediate hinterland, and display the king to his people.
To give an example of the logistics involved during François I’s reign, stabling was required for somewhere in the region of 24,000 horses and mules needed for transportation and recreation alone. His son’s court was no less prodigal. Wagons carried the plate, tapestries and furniture and when the roads became too difficult the court and all its entourage and equipment took to the water. Most of the favourite royal châteaux sat beside the mighty Rive
r Loire basking in its pleasant, hospitable climate, bordered by lush forests filled with animals, often artificially stocked for the king’s pleasure, sometimes even with imported exotics. Mary was a fine horsewoman all her life, as was her mother, and Diane de Poitiers looked particularly picturesque acting out one of her many roles as Diana the huntress. But it was Catherine de Medici who was the most fearless of all the court women. She rode as fast and recklessly as any man, and in order to facilitate her speed and manoeuvrability, had invented a way of riding side-saddle that was much closer to the modern technique, and much more effective than the old-fashioned box-like affair in which women were meant sedately to sit.
Everywhere was evidence of François I’s passion not only for hunting but for building, and the appreciation of art. This he had expressed actively, acquisitively, by collecting masterpieces for his royal palaces, particularly for Fontainebleau. Excellence in all things was the mark of an extrovert Renaissance king. Naturally, it was to the Italian masters that he turned. The king’s greatest coup was to persuade Leonardo da Vinci at the end of his life to come and live at court. He arrived in 1516 with La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa), The Virgin with Saint Anne, and Saint Jean Baptiste in his luggage, and settled at Amboise.
The great sculptor Benvenuto Cellini also spent some time at court and sculpted for François in 1544 his Nymph of Fontainebleau. On the walls of the bathhouse, situated immediately under the library, François hung his da Vincis and Raphaels and a magnificent portrait of himself by Titian, portraitist of the age to popes and kings. Although by the time Mary arrived in France, the first François was dead, the visual richness and cultural diversity of his legacy lived on in every royal palace. She would grow up amongst these treasures and then, as queen to the second François, a pygmy shadow of his grandfather, she would fleetingly inherit it all.
However, aged not yet six and newly arrived in her adopted country, Mary first had to meet the royal children, among them the dauphin, and her own Guise relations. She had been placed by her mother under the guardianship of her maternal grandmother, the remarkable Antoinette de Bourbon, Duchesse de Guise. Antoinette and her husband Claude de Lorraine had founded the Guise dynasty with their brood of ten, tall, strong and mettlesome children. Antoinette had proved a wise and rigorous mother and adviser to her impressive daughter: she would endeavour to pass on the same family pride and courage to her granddaughter.
The little Scottish queen was welcomed into this rich and glamorous court with sentimental excitement: had she not just been rescued from their mutual enemy, the brutal English? Had not French courage and nobility of purpose snatched this innocent child from the ravening beast? But there was real fascination too. She was their future queen, a pretty and spirited girl with the novelty of her Scottish tongue and the mystique of her distant mist-wreathed land to charm them. Although there was a long historic relationship between Scotland and France, and some intermixing of the countries’ nationals, Scotland was still considered by the French to be barbaric in climate, terrain and the character of its people. Mary’s beauty and charm of manner was celebrated all the more because of this piquant contrast.
Most important for the development of Mary’s character was the fact that her future father-in-law, Henri II, decreed pre-eminent status for the Queen of Scots. She was to grow up with his own sons and daughters but on any official occasion she was to precede the French princesses, a visual reminder to her companions and to the child herself of her unique importance even among the elite of the French court.
Two months after her arrival on the smugglers’ coast of Brittany, Mary was introduced to the grandeur of the French monarchy, which was now to become her own. By easy stages her party proceeded via Morlais and Nantes to St Germain-en-Laye, once a medieval fort but subsequently domesticated and decorated by François I to befit a great renaissance king. King Henri was away on progress through his kingdom and so at the palace she was greeted by his children, the family amongst whom she was to live until she was an adult. They were all younger than she was, and with her Guise inheritance she would remain taller and handsomer, even as they grew.
Her own betrothed, the Dauphin François, was not yet five and having been rather sickly since birth was much smaller and frailer than the Queen of Scots, but their friendship seemed to be forged immediately. Montmorency, the Constable of France, writing to Mary’s mother reported, ‘I will assure you that the Dauphin pays her little attentions, and is enamoured of her, from which it is easy to judge that God gave them birth the one for the other.’37 François’s sister Elizabeth, just three and a half years old, was to become a real friend and as close as a sister to Mary. Claude, another sister, was just a baby, while Catherine de Medici was pregnant again with her fourth child, due the following February. Mary was entering a nursery full of much-doted-on children, to whom Catherine was to add another seven, her last pregnancy in 1556 producing twin girls, who died almost immediately.
Given Catherine’s unhappy decade of childlessness and the rigours she had gone through in attempting to conceive, these children were not just precious, semi-miraculous creatures, they were immutable proof to her enemies of her own fitness to be queen. No minutia of their health and wellbeing was too trivial for her concern. They were fussed over and indulged, the darlings of their parents and the court. Due to this odd conjugation of circumstance, Mary was introduced into, what was for the time, an unusually child-centred world, in which she was the star. Even the king, the most important personage in the land, was interested in meeting this five-year-old. He congratulated the Duc de Guise on his niece and said how much he was looking forward to seeing her: ‘no one comes from her who does not praise her as a marvel’.38
Despite her later antipathy, there is no evidence that Catherine de Medici was anything other than kind to Mary when she was a child. But there was no doubt that she and the factions around her, who opposed the rapidly ascendant power of the Guises, were unhappy with the proposed alliance of the Valois monarchy with Mary Queen of Scots. Seen as merely a Guise in Scottish disguise, Mary, in marrying the dauphin, would be delivering the most terrific coup for the family. To complicate these political antagonisms further, Catherine’s arch rival, Diane de Poitiers, was an influential supporter of the Guises (her elder daughter was married to the third Guise brother, Mary’s uncle Claude) and Madame, as Diane was known, exercised the most influence of all with the king.
Diane de Poitiers’s charm and her interest in the young queen attracted Mary’s confidence and affection. Writing to Mary’s mother in Scotland, Diane recognized the young girl’s pre-eminent status and promised to extend to her a motherly care: ‘As to what concerns the Queen, your daughter, I will exert myself to do her service more than to my own daughter, for she deserves it more.’39 This seductive and cultivated courtesan was to become one of the poles of female influence on the growing girl.
The other was Mary’s austerely devout and authoritative grandmother, Antoinette, Duchesse de Guise. A few of her letters to her daughter, Mary’s mother, remain and in their psychological insights and human responsiveness they speak across four and a half centuries of timeless affections and concerns:
‘I was more glad than I can say to learn of the arrival of our little Queen in as good a health as you could wish her to have.’ The duchess wrote to Mary of Guise on 3 September 1548, just before introducing her granddaughter to her new family.
I pity the sorrow that I think you must have felt during her voyage, and I hope you had news of her safe arrival, and also the pain that her departure must have caused you. You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that methinks you hardly know now what pleasure means. But still you must hope that at least this absence and loss of your child will at least mean rest and repose for the little creature, with honour and greater welfare than ever before, please God. I hope to see you yet sometimes before I die … But believe me, in the meanwhile I will take care that our little Queen s
hall be treated as well as you can desire for her. I am starting this week, God willing, to meet her and conduct her to St Germain, with the Dauphin. I shall stay with her there for a few days to arrange her little affairs, and until she grows somewhat used to the Dauphin and his sisters. Lady Fleming will, if the King allows it, remain with the child, as she knows her ways; and Mademoiselle Curel will take charge of her French education. Two gentlemen and other attendants are to be appointed to wait upon the little Queen, and her dress and appointments shall be fitting for her rank.40
To her son, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Antoinette conveyed her first impressions of her little granddaughter, ‘I assure you, my son, she is the prettiest and best at her age you ever saw.’41 And when Henri II eventually met his prospective daughter-in-law in early December, he was as charmed as everyone else: ‘I have no doubt that if the Dauphin and she were of age, or nearly so, the King would soon carry the project [of their marriage] to completion. They are already as friendly as if they were married. Meanwhile he has determined to bring them up together and to make one establishment of their household, so as to accustom them to one another from the beginning. He has found her the prettiest and most graceful Princess he ever saw, as have also the Queen and all the court.’42
The conversion of this charming Scottish girl into a French princess was considered the overriding purpose of her education from this point on. Apparently she had arrived speaking Scots and not much else – although very soon was speaking French with great facility and learning Latin. As French culture was universally judged to be far superior to Scottish, and her Scottish entourage already had attracted some unfavourable comment for their roughness and lack of personal hygiene, it would be unlikely that there was much attempt by her new family and tutors to keep the young Queen of Scots’ own culture alive. Her sovereignty over Scotland was always considered to be secondary to her potential as consort to the King of France. Although Mary retained some of the original household who had accompanied her from Scotland, within two years all but Lady Fleming were superseded by French men and women.