Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  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’Estea 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 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.

  The portrait of Elisabeth by Clouet gives an attractive impression of her lively face, full but slanting eyes, dimpled chin and large faun-like ears: she has an air not so much of beauty as of enjoyment of life, as she looks coolly across her stiffly jewelled dress. In girlhood, she was a sweet-natured child, who loved to draw with Clouet, and also, according to Brantôme, was fond of poetry and music. Claude was also reported by Brantôme to be fond of learning, as had been her Aunt Marguerite, Henry’s sister, who did not marry the duke of Savoy until 1559, and was thus still part of the royal family at this date. Henry’s own daughter, Marguerite, the high-spirited heroine of many later adventures in French court life, was over twelve years younger than Mary Stuart, and only came into the royal nursery when the Scottish queen had already left it for the court; her exotic character can therefore have played no part in Mary Stuart’s actual childhood. The three brothers of the dauphin, whose tender health caused their mother such agonizing concern, were also sufficiently younger than Mary to play no effective part in these early nursery years, which are thus dominated by Francis and Elisabeth.

  As yet, Mary had not encountered the father of the young family into which she was now adopted. This meeting finally took place in November. The confrontation from both points of view was eminently satisfactory. Mary Stuart saw a man of thirty years, swarthy and melancholy of visage, seldom smiling, obsessed either with the troubles of his government, or with the physical exercise for which he had a mania. Henry II, as one Venetian ambassador observed, found conversation with women difficult; it was part of Diane de Poitiers’s prolonged and successful hold over him that he enjoyed her somewhat masculine intelligence, where other women bored him. In children, however, he took a genuine and tender delight. Mary Stuart was fortunate in that she charmed him as a child, and successfully converted later the appeal of childhood into the more alluring appeal of femininity. Of Mary, he wrote quite simply that she was the most perfect child he had ever seen. Soon the cardinal of Lorraine was writing happily off to the child’s mother that the king had taken such a liking to her daughter that he spent much of his time chatting to her, sometimes by the hour together, and by the time Mary was eleven the cardinal was able to report proudly that she knew so well how to entertain the king with suitable subjects of conversation that she might have been a woman of twenty-five.13

  The next ten years in the state of France were among the most ominous in her history – for they were the years in which the seeds of civil war were sown. As the realm floundered in inflation brought about by an endless series of foreign wars and rising prices due to the influx of silver from the New World, the lesser nobility turned away in vain from the crown, which could no longer support them financially, to the menacing circle of great nobles which surrounded the throne; now religious division also reared its head, to augment the nation’s woes. But although Mary arrived in France at the very outset of this disastrous period it would be wrong to paint these years in her life as anything but a time of untroubled private happiness, in which all the dramas were domestic, and the griefs and pleasures only the inevitable ones of every childhood.

  It is often said that a secure childhood makes the best foundation for a happy life. In marked contrast to her cousin Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart enjoyed an exceptionally cosseted youth. It is left to the judgement of history to decide whether it did, in fact, adequately prepare her for the extreme stresses with which the course of her later life confronted her. What is certain is that the next six years of her life have a dream-like quality, in which she appears to have been cut off from the rough events of politics by a cocoon of servants and other satellites, whose only duty was to nurture the royal nurslings in as great a state of luxury as possible. Her life divided into two parts – at court with the princesses and with her Guise relations. The Guises were, however, fully aware of the value of maintaining their little half-royal cuckoo well and truly in the royal nest, and made no difficulties at the prospect of having her brought up so much at court – as Duchess Antoinette pointed out in January 1549, on hearing that Mary was sharing a room with Elisabeth, nothing was better for her future prospects.14

  At this time the establishment of the royal children was by no means a fixed entity: it was essential that a household of such dimensions should be moved every few months in order that the castle which it had inhabited might be literally spring-cleaned. Mary’s life consisted largely of a series of glamorous journeyings under their aegis: for example, the royal accounts for the year 1550 show that in January all the children were at Saint-Germain until April, when they went to Fontainebleau. On Ist May they were back at Saint-Germain, on 4th October they were at Mantes-sur-Seine, and on 24th November at Bury in Touraine, to avoid an epidemic, staying on the way at Diane de Poitiers’s new palace at Anet. 1551 shows the same pattern of movement, with the children beginning the year at Meudon, in April at the palace of Blois, Mary herself at the
court in June, then back to Blois, with the dauphin going to Chambord. In January 1552, the king took them all again to Saint-Germain.15

  Unconsciously, Mary began to form the impression that these palaces of such splendour, such dimensions, were the natural habitat of royalty. To one who still dimly remembered the infinitely smaller castles of Scotland, the French palaces seemed like the grandiose dwellings of another planet. Fontainebleau and James V’s palace of Falkland, in Fife, for example, both had their original in the traditional royal passion for the hunt, yet how different they were in scale. Although Fontainebleau was far from completed in its ultimate estate when Mary Stuart first arrived there, the magnificent structure laid down by Francis I, the two wings joined by the lofty, painted gallery of Primaticcio, cannot have failed to impress her with its sumptuous display of Italian opulence grafted on to the French imagination. The completion and decoration of the famous ballroom, under the direction of Philibert de l’Orme, continued throughout the reign of Henry II: there the interlaced Hs and Cs still commemorate to questioning modern eyes either the king and his wife or the king and his mistress, Diane the huntress, whose symbol was the crescent moon. In the same way, the palace of pleasure which Henry built over the vast fortress of Francis i at Saint-Germain, safe on its strategic escarpment, was in the course of construction during Mary’s French life: but the immensity and scale of the buildings were already in existence. The châteaux of the Loire had in the main already been endowed with their fabled beauty and dimensions in the previous reign: to Francis i is owed the staircase at Blois and its exquisite Renaissance wing, another triumph of the Italian style in France. Chambord, with over 400 rooms, seems to foreshadow Versailles in the flourish of its enormous scale, the most spectacular of all Francis’s creations, for which work went on steadily despite the growing bankruptcy of the crown. The richness of its decoration, the impressive white mass of its building, the unforgettable north-west façade across the water, cannot have failed to leave an indelible impression on the mind of a child – that this was how monarchs lived.

  It would seem that the favourite château of the royal children, the place they regarded as the source of supreme amusement, was in fact none of the actual royal dwellings, but Anet, the home of Diane de Poitiers, which she had built for herself as a sort of monument to the spirit of the goddess Diana with Philibert de l’Orme as architect. Du Bellay called it ‘Dianet’, playing on the name of the house and its beautiful creator, and the dauphin wrote with boyish enthusiasm of the pleasures of Anet – what a beautiful house; beautiful gardens! beautiful galleries! so many other beauties! Indeed, he has never slept better than when at Anet, in a huge bed, in the king’s own chamber.16 The position of Anet on the river meant that some endless journeyings of the court could be made conveniently there by barge. Today, even what still exists of sixteenth-century Anet dazzles the eye with the perfection of its detail, the exquisite gateway with its balustrade, the marble dome with marble brought from Rome, the statues of Germaine Pilon, the chastely elegant memorial chapel to Diane’s favourite colours of black and white. But under the sway of Diane de Poitiers, Anet was as remarkable for its reputation for douceur de vivre, as it was for the novelty and beauty of its buildings.

  These constant journeyings meant that each month dawned with new pleasures for the children. Their daily trappings were equally exotic. They were, for example, surrounded with pets – in 1551 there were four big dogs and twenty-two little lap dogs, as well as falcons and pet birds. Horses there were in abundance, Fontaine and Enghien being the dauphin’s favourites, and Bravane and Madame la Réale the favourites of Mary Stuart; horses also frequently formed the subject for presents, since the dauphin, despite his frail physique, had the typical burning passion of the Valois for the chase. At one point the royal nursery was even sent two bears by the Marshal de Saint-André, although the cost of keeping them in food proved to be prohibitive, and in addition there were tiresome reparations to be made for the damage they did, as for example at Blois, where the home of one Dame Pillonne suffered from their ferocious attentions. The children were shown wolves and boars, wild animals from Africa. There were also two-legged amusements – troops of travelling actors and Italian acrobats were stopped on their route by the royal governor to entertain his charges, by performing ‘farces et buffoneries’; a maître de danse was dispatched from the court by the king; there were bills also for choirs of singers, and the players of tambourins. There were bills for materials for the royal children to make the sweets of which they were particularly fond. 83 livres, spent on a ball for the marriage of one of the princesses’ chambermaids, gives the impression that the slightest occasion for rejoicing was seized on by this pleasure-loving household.*17

  The moves of the royal household, delightful as they may have been for the children, meant endless upheaval for their servants: they frequently entailed staying at meagre villages en route, where villagers were apt to be angry at the loss of their food to the grand strangers. Roads were difficult and the quantity of luggage involved was a constant problem, as were the beasts to carry the luggage, whom the stable men had somehow to find or commandeer. Consequently transport, wherever possible, was made by river, as at Anet. The mountain of luggage used by the children was in part accounted for by their wardrobes. It was thought right that Mary Stuart should be more richly attired than the princesses, to mark her future position as their brother’s bride. Her accounts reveal both the abundance and the formality of a royal child’s wardrobe: yards of shot red and yellow taffeta for dresses, dresses of gold damask, dresses of black edged with silver, canvas and buckram to stiffen the dresses, white Florentine serge stockings, a vasquine or type of farthingale to hold out the dresses, shot taffeta petticoats and orange taffeta petticoats lined with red serge. Her accessories are equally elaborate: there is mention of bonnets of silver thread and black silk, orange wool to be dyed scarlet for stockings, furs to trim her clothes. Shoes are plentiful – ten pairs of ordinary shoes in the accounts of 1551, three white, three purple, two black and two red and also white, yellow, red and black velvet shoes. There are bills for exquisite embroideries on the clothes – rose leaves of gold thread for caps, and a bill for the embroidery of a device on a favour of white taffeta which Mary gave to the dauphin. There are bills for leather gloves of dog-skin and deerskin. The accessories are in keeping with the rest: a black velvet purse to keep the combs of the queen of Scots in, a crystal mirror covered with velvet and silk ribbons, gold and silver paillettes to be sewn on to her clothes, endless chains, collars and gold belts, as well as three brass chests to hold her jewels, which included a chain of pearls and green enamel, a gold ring with a ruby in it, and jewelled buttons of many different colours and shapes.19

  The attendants who surrounded Mary Stuart and the French princesses were on the same lavish scale: indeed much of the troubles of their peregrinations arose from the enormous quantities of servants who were thought necessary to maintain their estate. The royal household had already grown to alarming proportions before Mary Stuart’s arrival, so that by the end of 1547 Henry was forbidding d’Humières to engage any more servants; but it swelled again on the Scottish queen’s appearance. Chamberlains rose from four in 1550 to ten in 1558, and maîtres d’hôtel from four to seven. The stables were burdened with attendants to cope with the royal baggage, and the baggage of the household. There were five doctors, thirty-seven pages of honour to grow up alongside the dauphin (although these at least received no wages), porters, four masters of the wardrobe, two general controllers, and twenty-eight valets de chambre at differing wages to carry the infant princes, feed them and serve them. In order to attend to the babies the Dame d’Humières had twenty-two ladies of various ranks under her command. The number of apothecaries rose from one to three, barbers from one to four, pantry aides from two to six – although it may be noted that in all this panoply of service, there was provision for only two laundresses and one bearer of water, leading one to suppose that the ro
yal nurseries were more luxurious than they were hygienic. The kitchen was especially well endowed with roasters, soup-makers and the like, the numbers once again perpetually on the increase. Indeed, when one considers the vast amount of food consumed either by the children or more probably by their attendants, one can see that in the royal nursery of France, wages, attendants, children and cost chased each other upwards in a spiral reminiscent of the economy of a modern state. On one day alone, 8th June, 1553, the household consumed over 250 loaves of bread, eighteen pieces of beef, eight sheep, four calves, twenty capons, 120 chickens and pigeons, three deer, six geese and four hares.20

  Despite all this concern for material well-being, the need for more spiritual attainments was not neglected. Education was taken seriously at this Renaissance court, and Catherine de Médicis, herself nourished in the atmosphere of Italian learning, was a considerable patron of the arts. In the past it was considered that Mary must have been a child of considerable academic brilliance, since Brantôme described her reciting a Latin speech of her own composition before the king and entire court, before she was twelve years old. Certainly she learnt Latin, but the discovery of a book of her Latin themes in the last century has corrected the impression somewhat and shows that, with respect to Latin, Mary was more of an earnest student than a prodigy.21 These Latin themes now exist in the shape of a bound book, with the original French themes set by M. de Saint-Estienne or some other tutor on the left-hand page, and the Latin on the right-hand page. Some are in the form of letters to Princess Elisabeth, occasionally jointly with her sister Claude. Two letters are directed to the cardinal of Lorraine, one containing the suitable, if somewhat priggish sentiment: ‘Many people in these days, mon oncle, fall into errors in the Holy Scriptures, because they do not read them with a pure and clean heart.’ Curiously enough, one of the letters is actually addressed to John Calvin: but there is no evidence that the letter with its solemn, childlike invocation, ‘Christus filius Dei te avocet, Calvine’, was ever actually dispatched and it seems extremely improbable that it should have been more than a youthful exercise, the original inspiration for which remains obscure.* Many of the themes are occupied with the names of learned women and girls, as befits a princess of the Renaissance, and probably many of them were actually done in preparation for the famous Latin speech.