by John Guy
Mary’s education was overseen by Catherine de Medici, Diane de Poitiers and the Cardinal of Lorraine, who were responsible for choosing her tutors. Diane’s role was crucial; she herself was exceptionally well educated. She was a renowned patron of artists, writers and poets, the most influential purchaser of classical and Italian works of art after Francis I’s death and the connoisseur who did more than anyone else to establish the taste of Henry II’s court.
Mary studied elementary Latin and general subjects under Claude Millot and Antoine Fouquelin. Nothing is known about Millot beyond his glowing reports on her progress and the fact that she awarded his brother a pension, but Fouquelin was the author of a celebrated treatise on rhetoric, La rhétorique françoise, published in Paris in 1557, with a dedication to his young pupil in which he enthused over her abilities and potential.
When she had mastered the rudiments, Mary joined the dauphin for more advanced Latin lessons under Jacques Amyot, a classical expert whom Henry II had appointed as a tutor to his sons. While Amyot was teaching the royal children, he was preparing his new edition of Plutarch’s Lives, finally published in 1559. He may have assigned Mary written exercises based on his own translations, but it is more likely she was first introduced to Plutarch in a concise edition, or crib, made by Georges de Selve, a former student of Pierre Danes, her Greek tutor.
Danès was a leading scholar specially chosen by Henry II to teach Greek to the dauphin. He served on a commission to reform the University of Paris and had been a student of Guillaume Budé, the foremost French intellectual under Francis I and a linguist so brilliant he had learned Greek in weeks without a teacher. Danès tried to imitate his mentor’s inspirational methods, and Mary carefully studied L’Institution du prince, Budé’s classic manual for rulers, which was based on his distillation of the works of ancient authors. She owned a handsome copy in manuscript, which she brought back to Scotland with her possessions after the death of Francis II.
Her Latin compositions, written when she was eleven and twelve, are still extant in a leather-bound exercise book in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She was required to write a series of sixty-four short essays in Latin on themes prescribed by her tutors. They reveal the range of her reading, which was far from comprehensive but included Aesop’s fables, the works of Cicero and Plato, the plays of the Roman comic author Plautus and above all Plutarch’s Lives.
Mary often cited the Colloquies of Erasmus, the best-selling anthology of essays by the preeminent Dutch humanist. Written in smooth and eloquent Latin with brilliant flashes of wit and irony, the Colloquies was designed to entertain and instruct students in ways that led them back to primary texts of Scripture and the classical tradition. She also owed a copy of Erasmus’s masterpiece, The Praise of Folly, which included biting satires on monarchy and flattery, and may have left Mary with a keen sense of her duty to balance luxuries and pleasure with her role as a guardian of her people.
Mary’s own essays are disappointing in view of her later ebullience: stilted and moralistic, they reflect less her own opinions than the views her tutors wished her to express. Many appear to be little more than her own translations of existing model answers, and most are in the form of letters, since an epistolary style was considered to be the easiest to acquire and the best way for a student to begin studying oratory.
A majority were to her best friend, Princess Elizabeth, Henry II’s eldest daughter. Other “correspondents” included the dauphin, Princess Claude and her uncles. Doubtless the other royal children read the essays addressed to them over Mary’s shoulder, but the purpose of the themes was to practice a rhetorical style. None of the letters was ever sent.
One to the Cardinal of Lorraine began, “Many people in these days, my uncle, fall into errors in the Holy Scriptures, because they do not read them with a pure and clean heart.” This was typical of the banality of Mary’s schoolroom exercises, but a few to Elizabeth and Claude lapse into informality: “I am going to the park to rest my mind a little.” “The king has given me leave to take a deer in the park with Madame de Castres.” “The queen has forbidden me to go to see you, my sister, because she thinks you have measles, for which I am very sorry.”
About the time that Mary was writing her themes, she was studying Ptolemy’s pioneering textbook on geography, a work written in the second century A.D. and rediscovered in the 1400s. Ptolemy had mistakenly claimed that the earth is the center of the universe and that the sun, planets and stars revolve around it. But he was the first cartographer to project the spherical surface of the earth onto a flat plane and to superimpose a grid of lines of latitude and longitude over it. He placed north at the top of his maps. And he or perhaps his editors provided pithy comments on various countries and cities, offering a thumbnail sketch of them and their inhabitants.
Mary possessed a fine copy of the Geography, printed in Rome in 1490, which had once belonged to the leading Florentine banking family the Frescobaldis. From her studies, she would have learned that Scotland was much farther north than France, though farther south (and therefore warmer) than it really is relative to the equator. She would have read that in summer Edinburgh had a maximum of nineteen hours of daylight, when Paris had only sixteen. According to Ptolemy, much of Scotland was flat, the exception being the dense forests and high mountains of Caledonia (his name for the Highlands), a region that he compressed into too small a space between Glasgow and Inverness. While accurate about the hours of daylight, Ptolemy’s depiction of Scotland was spoiled by an elongated and inaccurate projection, and by his ignorance of the mountainous border region between England and Scotland. Nevertheless, Mary was fascinated by geography and kept this volume into her adulthood.
When she was nearly thirteen, she delivered an extemporaneous Latin declamation in the great hall of the Louvre to an audience including Henry II, Catherine de Medici and her uncles. Her speech defended the education of women and refuted a courtier’s opinion that girls should forgo learning. It was a topic she had chosen herself, reflecting her conviction that the Italian view of learning as fundamental for both sexes was fully justified.
The near-contemporary description of the oration, by Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, is rapturous. “Only think,” he wrote, “what a rare and wonderful thing it was to see that learned and beautiful queen declaiming thus in Latin, which she understood and spoke admirably.” Unfortunately, Bourdeille’s fulsome praise cannot be taken at face value. At the time he was only two years older than Mary, was almost certainly not present at her declamation, and is notorious for his hyperbole.
Her oration was competent, but no more. And she was heavily coached. She had already written fifteen essays on the same topic, and although she crammed in a formidable number of references to the achievements of learned women, it turns out nearly every one was taken from a single source: a letter by the admired Italian writer Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano. Mary either owned a copy or had borrowed one from the royal library at Fontainebleau, because the slavish repetition of these citations cannot be a coincidence.
Her forte lay elsewhere. According to her tutors and the reports of her governess Parois, she was attentive and industrious, more so than the dauphin, whose inability to concentrate and lack of motivation earned him a homily from Mary in one of her essays. But she was never a born classicist: she could understand Latin better than she could speak it, and was much more attracted to French vernacular poetry, which she studied under Pierre de Ronsard, the chief writer of the Pléiade.
This was a circle of seven poets at Henry II’s court who wrote verses and panegyrics in return for patronage. They were in the vanguard of a literary movement that aimed to show that nationhood could be shaped by a common language and that the French language could stand on equal terms with Latin, Greek and Italian. They also wanted to prove that poetry on secular topics such as love, friendship, prowess in arms or the individual self could equal that on religious subjects. To this end, Ronsard had to show that
the French language could satisfy the demands of the most elevated literary genres, such as Greek and Roman epics and lyrics, or the latest fashionable Italian sonnets and canzoni.
An intense rivalry developed between adherents of the Pléiade and those rhetoricians, classicists and historians whom Ronsard held to be stuffy and old-fashioned and to write in barbarous French. It was a battle that pitched the young Turks of the Pléiade against the old guard, a clash of styles that quickly captivated the young Mary, who fell in step behind the Pléiade. Whereas the old guard used complex metaphors and convoluted pedagogic constructions that their rivals likened to the tower of Babel, the young Turks followed Dante’s advice to write using clear, elegant, simple words based on colloquial speech: language so lucid and graceful that it sparkled, achieving an effect so sublime it could melt people’s hearts.
Ronsard came to Mary’s attention because he knew Scotland. He had first served there as a page in the household of Madeleine, James V’s first wife, staying on for more than two years. Mary was impressed by his campaign for vernacular poetry; if given the choice, she would sooner read French literature than the classics, and as she was already a queen, it was only natural that she would be offered the choice.
“Above all,” remarked Bourdeille, “she loved poetry and poets, but especially M. de Ronsard, M. du Bellay and M. de Maisonfleur, who wrote charming poems and elegies for her, including those on her departure from France, which I have often seen her reading to herself in France and in Scotland, with tears in her eyes and sighs in her heart.” Her selection of authors is easily explained, because du Bellay was the leading member of the Pléiade after Ronsard, and Maisonfleur was a soldier-poet attached to the Duke of Guise. But whether Mary wrote verses on the theme of her return from France to Scotland is a moot point.
She herself was never much of a poet. Her extant output is small, although she did attempt a few sonnets in French and Italian during her long years of captivity in England. After her trial and execution, poems were attributed to her that were written in her honor but which she did not write herself. Most blatantly, the verses she is said to have composed as she began her return voyage to Scotland are an outright forgery:
Adieu, plaisant pays de France!
O ma patrie,
La plus chérie!
Qui a nourri ma jeune enfance!
These lines, first appearing in the Anthologie françoise of 1765, are not Mary’s but the work of an eighteenth-century French journalist eager to publish a scoop. If she made a significant contribution to French poetry, it was as a patron and not as an author.
Ronsard’s bid for patronage came in 1556, the year in which his circle began to call itself the Pléiade. He had first vied to catch the attention of Mary’s uncles, and when that failed, he turned instead to her. It was almost a year after her oration at the Louvre; she was nearly fourteen. He first apostrophized her as the Roman goddess of dawn, the “beautiful and more than beautiful and charming Aurora.” His poem “À la Royne d’Écosse” was a personal and a political eulogy. He offered his services “to you, to your nation, and to your crown.”
Mary agreed to be Ronsard’s patron. She afterward helped him to publish the first edition of his works. And in return, he and his followers became a compassionate presence in her life, sending her verses and providing her with some of the emotional reassurance and support she needed at her bleakest and most anxious moments. The writers of the Pléiade lined up behind the monarchy in the political and religious crises that afflicted France during the Wars of Religion. They remained loyal to Mary, whose reputation they considered it their duty to defend. Ronsard admittedly hedged his bets, dedicating poems to Elizabeth I, whom he flattered by saying she was Mary’s equal in beauty. But such lapses apart, they behaved honorably and retained Mary’s lifelong affection.
And even if her own proficiency as a writer was comparatively modest, Mary’s love of poetry tells us something about her. She reveled in the imaginative, the romantic, the thoughtful. She had also become idiomatically and culturally French: as immersed in the language, its mental patterns and associations, as any native speaker.
It was no longer simply that Mary spoke fluent French; her identity was altered if not completely transformed. Although her tastes and leisure preferences centered on music, dancing and embroidery, the pastimes of aristocratic women throughout Europe, the types she preferred were quite different from those a native Scotswoman would enjoy. They were qualitatively different from her mother’s, even though Mary of Guise was born a Frenchwoman, since they were as much Italian as French, reflecting the latest styles at Henry II’s court, where cultural imports from Florence, Milan and Mantua became the rage. In singing and dancing, Mary tended to prefer styles developed in Mantua and Milan, whereas in embroidery she valued most the opulent designs of Florence and Venice.
Her singing voice was soft but clear, and she was trained like a Mantuan singer to modulate her tone to suit the declamation of the text, the acoustics of the building or the timbre of the instrumental accompaniment. Sometimes she sang while accompanying herself on the lute. At other times she played the clavichord or the harp.
As a musician she was nothing out of the ordinary, but as a dancer she had real flair. She was agile enough to master the complex routines of the latest fashionable dances, and rhythmic enough always to appear graceful. By the use of simple gestures, it was said she could conjure up emotions to match the music.
Henry II knew talent when he saw it, and the potential for theater. He went to great lengths to find Mary a suitable Italian dancing master, and she and the dauphin practiced regularly together in anticipation of the balls that would follow their betrothal.
Mary adored dancing. She sought out every opportunity to perform, appearing at the family festivals organized by her Guise relations at Joinville and Meudon as well as attending court events. At Holyrood after her return to Scotland, she danced almost every night with her four Maries. Often she danced until after midnight, for which she was castigated by the Calvinists, who saw it as “depravity . . . attending the practice of France,” an invitation to “idolatry” and sexual transgression.
Mary also loved embroidery. It was thought to be an ideal form of relaxation when it was too cold or wet to go outdoors, and when she was nine, two pounds of twisted woolen yarn were ordered so she could begin her training under the expert eye of Pierre Danjou, Henry II’s personal embroiderer. She gained satisfaction from what she learned, and in Scotland often sat sewing during meetings of the Privy Council or while receiving ambassadors. Later, when in exile in England, her needlework would give her a comforting, calming way of spending the long years. “All the day,” she was reported then as saying, “she wrought with her needle, and that the diversity of the colors made the work seem less tedious, and [she] continued so long at it till very pain did make her to give it over.”
Catherine de Medici encouraged Mary’s interest. She herself was a skilled amateur embroiderer, trained as a child at the Murate Convent in Florence, where the nuns were famous for their needlework. Mary began with knitting and plain sewing, after which she progressed to the more decorative work of needlepoint: the minute stitches of petit point as well as gros point. The aim was to make gifts or to ornament the heavy, dark-paneled rooms with tapestry-like wall hangings, valances, or table and cushion covers. The outlines of the intended design would be sketched out first on canvas from a pattern taken from an emblem book, then filled in as delicately as possible with a variety of colored wools or silks.
Even as a child, Mary had a taste for luxury. She had a passion for brodures—the most sumptuous and expensive embroideries—and especially the jeweled or enameled sort used for headdresses or as strapwork on bodices or sleeves. Such accessories were greatly coveted, but were too difficult for amateurs to make, as they involved stitching directly onto silk or satin, using thread of fine metal or else silk yam onto which the tiny pearls or other small jewels were attached. When Mary fou
nd as a teenager that she could not live without these items, she purchased them indiscriminately, ignoring the protests of Parois.
On a more mundane level, Mary adored making cotignac, a type of French marmalade, putting on an apron and boiling quinces and sugar with powder of violets in a saucepan for hours before laying out the slices of crystallized fruits. The four Maries were all required to help her, and a mockup kitchen was created in their apartments so they could play at cooking and housekeeping, pretending to be servants or bourgeois women organizing their domestic routine and doing their own shopping. It was a game that Mary always remembered and sometimes played in Scotland, usually in St. Andrews, where she had a house near the abbey.
She loved pets and wanted as many as possible around her. Dogs, especially terriers and spaniels, were her favorites, and she let them romp around freely as was the custom in royal and aristocratic households. At one time she kept sixteen, and her kitchen staff were given standing instructions to save table scraps for them.
Her second favorite animals were ponies. When she was about fifteen, she asked her mother to send her “some good haqueneys, which I have promised to Monsieur and the others who have asked me for them.” By this she meant that she wanted Mary of Guise to send ponies from the Shetland Isles, at the northern tip of Scotland, as presents for the dauphin’s younger brothers, Princes Charles, Henry and Francis, then aged eight, seven and four. These ponies were ideal for children to learn to ride, renowned for their small size, gentle temperament and shaggy coat.
