Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Erasmus was just one of the artists and thinkers Margaret of Austria welcomed to Mechelen. Outwardly large, but by palace standards an unostentatious, brick-built house, Margaret’s home was a place where devotional works jostled Renaissance nudes. A mappa mundi that Van Eyck had made for her great-grandfather, Philip the Good, sat beside more recent acquisitions. One was what Margaret’s inventories describe as ‘Ung grant tableau’ (a large picture) ‘qu’on appelle, Hernoul-le-fin’; what is now called the Arnolfini portrait. This had, said her inventories of 1516, ‘been given to Madame by Don Diego’. Don Diego de Guevara, a Spaniard who had come into the service of Margaret’s family, was another courtier with a young female relation to place in the ducal household and the Arnolfini portrait (‘fort exquis’, exquisite, as one of Margaret’s later inventories describes it) may have been a token of his gratitude and a sign of just how highly these places were sought.

  Mechelen’s walls were hung with blue and yellow damask, with green taffeta, or with Margaret’s legendary collection of the tapestries for which the Netherlands was famous. Later, after the conquistador Cortés returned from Mexico, Margaret’s collection included Montezuma’s feather cloak, Aztec mosaic masks and a stuffed bird of paradise. As a northern pioneer of the kind of cabinet of curiosities beloved of Italian patrons, she employed a curator and two assistants to look after her collection.

  Those in charge of young girls, Anne de Beaujeu wrote, should:

  make sure they serve God, hear the Mass every day, observe the Hours and other devotions, pray for their sins, go to confession and frequently give alms. And to console them and enliven their youth and the better to maintain their love for you, you must sometimes let them frolic, sing, dance and amuse themselves happily but honestly, without groping, hitting, or quarrelling.1

  A fille d’honneur had no specific duties, which makes it all the likelier that Anne would have witnessed and perhaps participated in Margaret of Austria’s pleasures. Margaret kept close by her a paintbox, covered in purple velvet and disguised as a book, which she herself used frequently. Music was another important recreation. Her choir was legendary and she herself was a notable keyboard performer and composer of songs. The masses, motets and chansons in her music books were by the composers Anne herself later favoured when her interest in music formed a bond with Henry VIII.

  Margaret also played chess for recreation, with sets of chalcedony and jasper, and silver and gilt. (Her godmother, Margaret of York, who owned Mechelen before her, had kept volumes on chess in the study she hung with violet taffeta.) But Margaret of Austria played the same game also on a wider stage, as, in the years ahead, would Anne Boleyn.

  The thriving, merchant-led community of the Netherlands had a tradition of social mobility. The Arnolfini portrait features not an aristocratic but an aspirational merchant couple. This too, perhaps, was not without its effect on Anne. The Boleyns themselves, you might say, were an example of English social mobility. Not that Anne came from such humble stock as has often been claimed. There was merchant money in the Boleyn family but it was Anne’s great-grandfather who had made the family fortune and become Lord Mayor of London. In the go-getting Tudor age many great families had connections closer than hers with trade. Anne was better-born than two of Henry’s other wives; her mother was a scion of the mighty Howard family, eldest daughter of the Earl of Surrey, later Duke of Norfolk and her father, Thomas, had a connection to the Irish earldom of Ormonde and his mother was heiress to half the Ormonde fortune.

  But Thomas’s career in royal service began as a comparatively impecunious young man on the make. He rose rapidly, however. He was present when Katherine of Aragon was married to Henry VII’s heir in 1501 and was one of the escort that took the king’s eldest daughter Margaret Tudor to marry the King of Scots in 1503. By the time Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 Thomas Boleyn was in his early thirties, perhaps a little too old to be one of the king’s close cronies but as an accomplished man at the joust, as well as a linguist and a clever courtier, the sort of man Henry was glad to have about him.

  In 1512 Thomas was sent on his first diplomatic mission, to the court of Margaret of Austria. Anne Boleyn’s appointment there was proof of how well, in the course of a ten-month stay, the two had got on. There is a record of them shaking hands on a bet that they could advance in their negotiations in ten days, both wagering different types of horse: her Spanish courser against his hobby. In her letter to Thomas about Anne’s progress Margaret told him that if the young girl went on as well as she was doing, then ‘on your return the two of us will need no intermediary other than she’.

  Beyond a general, faintly sexualised, reference to her cosmopolitan gloss and Frenchified ways, Anne’s early experience abroad does not perhaps feature as strongly as it should in our understanding of her. She is more usually placed against a background of Hever, the lovely fortified manor house in the Weald of Kent bought and remodelled by her great-grandfather and inherited by her father Thomas in 1505. Hever is where she spent most of her childhood. There – preparing to go abroad for what was always likely to be a stay of years – she would have walked around the ravishing springtime orchards and gardens, taking, with an intelligent adolescent’s intensity, a last look.

  But though Mechelen too, under Margaret’s rule, had fine gardens aplenty, the contemporary image of court life dwelt on the snares and tares amid the plants. The Tudor rising classes both feared and needed the court. It was the only place where real secular preferment might be won but also the place where any slip of tongue or tactics, any overweening ambition or misplaced allegiance, could be, quite literally, fatal. This was the world into which Anne Boleyn was sent by her relations, aimed like any missile.

  On the one hand she was there as her family’s agent and ambassador, as surely as her father was England’s. On the other, what would this long separation do to her relationship with that family? She would at times be in company with her father and other family members in the decade ahead, when their careers brought them, too, across the Channel. But for long periods she must often have been forced on her own resources. In later years she was perceived as not showing a proper womanly reliance on the guidance of her family – the wider Howard clan – but after this decade largely on her own recognisance, why should she?

  At the court, where Margaret of Austria consulted with her council every day, Anne – with the wits, the determination and above all the power of observation de Carles noticed – surely learnt more than the French tongue. She might have observed a woman exercising power and perhaps even, within careful confines, enjoying her sexuality.

  For there was another lesson Anne Boleyn could have learnt in Margaret’s glamorous, cultivated sphere. The Netherlands (the old Burgundian) court was home to all the pageantry and parade of courtly love; that great game of sexual role playing that dominated upper-class Europe for three centuries and still influences us today.* This too was a game Anne learnt how to play.

  ‘Sir’, Anne wrote to her father, ‘I understand from your letter that you desire me to be a woman of good reputation [toufs onette fame] when I come to court . . .’ But the lessons she could learn at Mechelen were many and varied. The English court had long borrowed its best ideas from Burgundy. On the one hand, Margaret maintained a strict etiquette. Anne and her fellow maids were guarded carefully. On the other, Margaret wrote a poem for her young attendant ladies, warning them against taking the game too seriously:

  Trust in those who offer you service,

  And in the end, my maidens,

  You will find yourselves in the ranks of those

  Who have been deceived.

  A girl’s best defence lay in wit and confidence. ‘Fine words’ were a game that two could play. It was, of course, a game in which Anne Boleyn became the expert and which no one in Europe played more significantly.

  Margaret, for all her widow’s wear, allowed those around her to play the game of courtly love to an extent that could indeed be mis
understood by those from a less flexible culture. But – as events would shortly prove – Margaret knew when it was time to stop. Anne Boleyn should have taken heed.

  Fifteen years later, Europe would hear of Anne Boleyn as the rival of Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England and Margaret of Austria’s former sister-in-law. Theirs was a struggle in which the power of personality (and of personal appeal) was just another side of the coin to questions of policy.

  Anne’s time at the courts of the Netherlands, and later France, gave her the cosmopolitan polish that so captivated Henry VIII. But it also made her Katherine’s match in another sense. To watch a woman exercising power, in a way still unfamiliar to England, gave Anne a taste of the kind of European training Katherine herself had enjoyed as the daughter of Isabella, the Queen Regnant of Castile.

  The story of Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon, and of their daughters, was part of a much larger European picture. In the years ahead the royal women of the British Isles would be woven, or sometime weave themselves, into a web of rivalry and mutual reliance with Habsburg, Valois and Medici women every bit as colourful as they. But to understand that, it is first necessary to briefly look at the decades that went before.

  * The duchy of Burgundy had come to comprise not only the southerly territory we today think of as Burgundy but also much of modern Belgium and Holland. Since the original ‘Burgundy’ was indeed almost immediately to be yielded to France under the terms of Margaret of Austria’s marriage treaty, it will be more convenient to speak at once of ‘the Netherlands’. These Netherlands would themselves be split into the Catholic Spanish Netherlands and the seven independent Protestant provinces before the end of the sixteenth century.

  2

  ‘Lessons for my Daughter’

  Spain, France, 1474–1483

  The thirteenth of December 1474; the day after Isabella of Castile received news of King Enrique, her half-brother’s, death. She entered the great church of Castile’s capital, Segovia, dressed in plain mourning white; she emerged, after the Mass, decked with jewels and blazing with colour. In the porch, on a hastily built platform draped in brocade, she was proclaimed Castile’s queen. Isabella would become the first, and more famous, of two women who would set a precedent for the female rulers of the sixteenth century.

  As the coronation procession wound its way through the streets, Isabella of Castile rode on horseback, with nobles on foot bearing the train of her gown. Ahead of her went a lone horseman holding a drawn sword pointing upwards; the traditional symbol of kingship. When he heard the news, in distant Zaragosa, even Isabella’s husband Ferdinand of Aragon was shocked that she had taken to herself the symbolic sword. His advisors had assured him he could tame his wife ‘by satisfying assiduously the demands of conjugal love’. But Ferdinand protested in horror that he had never heard of a queen who usurped this masculine attribute.

  After five years of marriage, Ferdinand should have known his Isabella better. She had, after all, broken with precedent in herself arranging her marriage to him. The heir to a neighbouring kingdom edging the Pyrenees, he was a useful ally in Isabella’s battle for her own disputed throne.

  Isabella was not born to inherit Castile. There were two male heirs ahead of her; first her half-brother, Enrique, and then her full brother, Alfonso. But when Enrique succeeded to the throne with no sign of a child to follow him, and when Alfonso died suddenly during Enrique’s reign, Isabella’s position changed. It was then she made her alliance with Ferdinand, with the terms of the marriage ensuring that she would continue to outrank him in Castile. He was an experienced soldier who could fight her battles, as well as sire her children. A match made on practical grounds, it was nonetheless to become one of the most famously successful partnerships in Christendom.

  Ferdinand’s potential as stud was proven, although when Isabella took the throne the couple had only a daughter, not a son. His abilities as a soldier were also to prove useful, since Isabella was not the only candidate for queen regnant of Castile. Her sister-in-law, Enrique’s wife, had eventually born a daughter, Juana, although rumour said she was sired by a lover, Béltran, rather than by Enrique. That gave Isabella the chance to stake her own claim above that of the child, ‘la Beltraneja’, who would eventually retire defeated to a convent, while still in her teens. In 1470s Spain (as in England, some seventy years later) the twists of heredity decreed that it would be two women disputing a throne – and worth querying whether or not a woman trying to challenge a man would still have won her victory. But Isabella had also received the sanction of one theoretician, Fray Martin de Cordoba, in his Jardin de nobles doncellas:

  Some people, My Lady . . . take it badly when a kingdom or other state comes under the rule of a woman. But, as I will explain below, I disagree, since, from the very beginning of the World to the present, we see that God always gave women responsibility for humanity’s salvation, so that life would emerge from death.

  The struggle against the supporters of la Beltraneja (the War of the Castilian Succession) went on for another five years and it was almost the end of the 1470s before Ferdinand and Isabella could feel sure of Castile. By this time Isabella had also borne a son, Juan. Three more daughters would follow: Juana, Maria and Katherine.

  The crusade was now to drive out the Moors, who had for many years colonised Spain’s southern tip. Contemporaries varied in their opinions as to whether Ferdinand or Isabella was the most significant partner in their alliance, after Ferdinand succeeded his father in 1479. Despite the marriage agreement, Ferdinand had more authority in Isabella’s kingdom than she did in his. (Ferdinand’s Aragon was, unlike Castile, governed by a variant of the Salic Law that prohibited female rule although it did, unlike that prevailing in France, allow inheritance through the female line.) But her territory was by far the larger and richer and a Venetian diplomat said that she was the one most spoken of.1

  Ferdinand and his advisors took some time to accept this unusual situation but in the end the pair did much to live up to their famous slogan: that they would ‘command, govern, rule and exercise lordship as one’. Their motto was ‘Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Ferdinand’ – to stand as high, as high to stand, Isabel as Ferdinand.

  Famously, Isabella of Castile accompanied her armies to the battlefield – clad in armour and mounted on a warhorse – if not actually into the fray. She was an efficient organiser of supply and provisions, and of armaments, recruiting thousands of workmen to build roads along which the guns could pass. A mobile hospital comprising six huge tents was another of her innovations but her contribution was significant in two other ways. The first was the talismanic importance she had for her soldiers, so that her presence was said to spur on the Castilian troops to certain victory. (Interestingly, the troops cried out for ‘King’ Isabella.) The second was as a tactician but Isabella’s role can be hard to assess with certainty, since in military matters she was careful to defer to her husband, at least publicly.

  Isabella did not hesitate to take her daughters with her from one siege to another but it was her son Juan, and he alone, who was given the training of a future ruler. Isabella (like Elizabeth Tudor after her) may have regarded herself as an exception to the usual role allocated to women, as opposed to seeking a general expansion of that role. But nonetheless, as the fifteenth century drew towards its close, hers was a formidable example of female monarchy.

  In 1483 another woman came to join Isabella at the forefront of European politics: Anne de Beaujeu, ruling France on behalf of her thirteen-year-old brother, the new king. France had a tradition of royal women assuming responsibility on behalf of a male relative. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies had been written, at the beginning of the century, as an argument that an earlier French queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, should be allowed to act as regent during her husband’s bouts of insanity. (The City of Ladies, moreover, figured the Virgin Mary as exercising a regent’s powers on behalf of her heavenly son.)

  Born in 1461, Anne de Beaujeu
(also known as Anne of France) could never have succeeded to the throne, because France subscribed to the Salic Law. Instead she had, at thirteen, been married to a brother of the Duc de Bourbon, a gentle soul twenty-one years older than herself. Anne, at twenty-two, had escaped damage from the inbreeding which weakened so many of her family. Her father Louis XI had called her ‘the least foolish of women’; refusing to admit that there could be a clever one. And on his death he broke with tradition by giving her (and, nominally, her husband) charge of the young king Charles VIII, in preference to the normal combination that would have included his widow, the boy’s mother, as guardian and his male relatives forming a regency council. Instead, Louis’s widow, Queen Charlotte, was forbidden to have any contact with her son.

  Though the Salic Law debarred women from inheriting, or even transmitting, a claim to the throne, in one sense it favoured female authority in a limited sphere. As one contemporary writer, Jean de Saint-Gelais, put it, the person of an under-age king should be placed in the hands ‘of those nearest to him who are not entitled [non capables] to succeed’. It might seem less dangerous to give a measure of authority to a woman, since there could be no question of her snatching the final authority of monarchy itself, than to a male relative.