Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Anne de Beaujeu – ‘Madame la Grande’ – was a controversial figure, a true daughter of the father she revered.2 Louis had, not without cost to his people, done much to increase the power and the territories of the French crown. Anne was likewise undoubtedly able, working within the confines of a position that was not always easy. One contemporary called her a ‘virago . . . a woman truly superior to the female sex . . . who did not cede to the resolution and daring of a man’. She would have been born to the height of sovereignty ‘had nature not begrudged her the appropriate sex’.

  Time and again, exceptional women would be praised as being hardly women at all and would sometimes seem to accede to the verdict themselves. Christine de Pizan described herself, when widowed, as metamorphosed into a man to provide for her family. But it was noted of Anne de Beaujeu that one of her most effective techniques was not to flaunt her position, being content usually to operate from behind the scenes.

  She was also a notable chess player.

  The volume of advice, Enseignements (‘Lessons for my Daughter’) that Anne wrote later in life warns a girl: ‘you should have eyes to notice everything yet to see nothing, ears to hear everything yet to know nothing and a tongue to answer everyone yet to say nothing prejudicial to anyone’. Keep your own counsel, she wrote, about ‘that which can affect your honour’, unless ‘it is something that strains your heart to conceal’; and then confide only inside the family.

  Anne advocated the virtues urged on women – piety and docility – but less for their own sake, if you look closely, than as a technique. Perhaps this is why the Enseignements has been compared to Machiavelli’s The Prince. The perfections and the ploys urged on men and on women may be different but each volume comes from the pen of a writer who sees virtue as a tool.3

  In the century ahead, France would see several notable instances of a woman’s authority coming from women who, directly or indirectly, had profited from Anne de Beaujeu’s example. Both Anne and Isabella of Castile were cited when successful women rulers were discussed in Baldassare Castiglione’s famous Book of the Courtier (published in Venice in 1528), for both would prove to have an influence which extended far beyond their own lands.

  3

  Youthful experience

  The Netherlands, France, 1483–1493

  More immediately, both Anne de Beaujeu and Isabella of Castile were mentors to another significant woman: Margaret of Austria. Margaret would grow up to be the third example of a successful female ruler cited by Castiglione. But Margaret was only a child when in 1483 she, like another young girl, Louise of Savoy, with whom as an adult she would sit across a conference table, came into Anne de Beaujeu’s care.

  Margaret’s mother Mary, the ruling Duchess of Burgundy, had inherited that territory from her father Charles ‘the Bold’ in the cold early spring of 1477. The nineteen-year-old Mary faced huge challenges. As soon as her father died, the French king, Louis XI, laid claim to a significant part of her lands, while the city-states of Flanders seized the chance to claim ever more autonomy. But Mary had support in the form of her stepmother, Charles’s widow, Margaret of York; sister of the English king, Edward IV, and the future king, Richard III. Together, the two women acted to resist the French invaders. They reached an accommodation with the Netherlands parliament, the Estates General, although not before the Estates had arrested and brutally executed some of the two women’s most trusted advisors. And they were able to bring about Mary’s long-planned marriage to Maximilian, Archduke of Austria and son of the Holy Roman Emperor.*

  The marriage took place the same summer and was blessed with two healthy children: Margaret ‘of Austria’ and her brother Philip. But in March 1482, Mary of Burgundy died after a riding accident. On a domestic level, Mary left her children to the care of her stepmother, Margaret of York. Duchess Mary had written of her stepmother that she had always held ‘our person and our lands and lordships in such complete and perfect love and goodwill that we can never sufficiently repay and recompense her’ and the younger Margaret – god-daughter to the elder – would come to feel the same way. But the ducal family of Burgundy was royal in all but name and for royal children, and especially royal girls, things were never that easy.

  Duchess Mary willed her lands to her children, with the regency to be held by her husband Maximilian during their minority. But the degree to which the Netherlanders were prepared to accept foreign Habsburg dominance would be a growing source of conflict. The city of Ghent wrested away Maximilian the right to bring up the young Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy. As for little Margaret of Austria, two days before Christmas 1482 the Treaty of Arras, which made peace between France and Burgundy, promised her in marriage to the thirteen-year-old Charles VIII, soon to be King of France under his sister Anne’s care. Territories such as Maçon became the property of France as Margaret’s dowry, on condition that she should not make any further claims on her mother’s lands. She, of course, was too young to object. Her father – ambitious, aggressive and intensely hostile to France’s expansionism – was furious at seeing the lands given away. But Maximilian was cut off from power in his dead wife’s lands by a regency council appointed to take control during his son’s minority.

  Just a year after her mother’s death, resplendent in adult black velvet and pearls, the three-year-old Margaret was sent towards France, escorted to the border by a great retinue. Only a tiny handful, however, was allowed to remain with her as she was carried through France on a triumphal progress. Margaret was met at the border by Anne de Beaujeu, whose status, as a mere daughter during her father’s reign, was still lower than Margaret’s. The three-year-old Margaret was given a ceremonial entry into Paris, where just two months earlier Anne had been denied one.

  On 22 June 1483, at the Loire chateau of Amboise that would become her principal residence, Margaret of Austria met and was formally engaged to her prospective husband, to whom, indeed, she was officially married the next day. She was now Dauphine of France. Two months later, on 30 August, old King Louis XI died. Margaret became, nominally, France’s queen and Anne de Beaujeu became effectively its ruler; not merely guardian of the young king but the country’s regent in all but name.

  Anne de Beaujeu’s assumption of power met with resistance. One of her concerns was that the disgruntled French nobles would try to kidnap the young king. Conversations reported between France’s princes spoke of sending Anne back to her household duties. But, slowly, she won most of the dissenters round, to ratify a status quo which, while declaring that in his early teens Charles VIII was sufficiently mature not to require a regency, yet left Anne and her husband in control of his person.1

  One noble not won round, however, was the Duc d’Orléans, who might otherwise have expected to lead a regency council. A kinsman of the king, he was moreover married to Anne’s humpbacked younger sister, Jeanne. The match had been made in cynicism by the old king who hoped thus to keep the ambitious d’Orléans without heir, saying callously that ‘any children they have will not cost them much to keep’.

  In the winter of 1484–85, offering to free the young king Charles from his sister Anne’s ‘clutches’, d’Orléans launched a rebellion. Anne de Beaujeu and the royal forces successfully put it down, always with the young king as their figurehead, to mask the unpalatable thought of a woman leading a military campaign. D’Orléans’s wife Jeanne (like Anne de Beaujeu a daughter of the dead King Louis) sided with her sister against her husband, while their mother Queen Charlotte, King Louis’s widow, sided with d’Orléans. But it was time to curb the ambitions of the Orléans clan through any means available. One means was marriage, made easier by the fact that Anne de Beaujeu was bringing up not only Margaret of Austria but a number of other aristocratic girls whose families were bound to her by ties of influence or family.

  One such girl was the eight-year-old Louise of Savoy, later Margaret of Austria’s adversary and ally, now a pawn to be deployed against the d’Orléans clan. Louise was born in 1476, t
he daughter of a younger son of the Duke of Savoy, a man his contemporaries knew as ‘Monsieur sans terre’ (Mr Lackland). Her mother dying when she was seven, Louise (and her younger brother Philibert) went to be raised by Anne de Beaujeu, a cousin on her father’s side as well as her aunt by marriage on her mother’s.

  In this extensive family, Louise of Savoy was very far from being an important member, and was certainly treated in a very different way than Margaret of Austria. While Margaret’s household accounts record a queenly entourage: twenty ladies and six lords in waiting, chaplain and treasurer, physician and secretaries, ponies and parrots, falcons and hounds, clothing even for her dolls, those around her had a significantly lower status. Louise was given eighty livres a year to buy a court gown for state occasions. Who would have guessed Margaret and Louise would one day meet as equals across the conference table?

  Louise of Savoy had, since she was two years old, nominally been betrothed to Charles d’Angoulême, a junior scion of the d’Orléans family almost twenty years older than she. Being tied to the penniless Louise was – another humiliation for her – a way for the French king Louis to clip the d’Orléans’s wings. When in 1487 Angoulême followed the example of his kinsman by joining another rebellion (an attempt so abortive it was known as the ‘Mad War’) he was ordered, by way of curbing his ambitions, to proceed with the marriage to Louise, on terms very favourable to the young bride. The ceremony went ahead on 16 February 1488. A surviving letter from Louise’s peripatetic father, making a rare appearance at her side, displays the eleven-year-old’s concerns.

  Her father wrote jocularly to his own new wife that Louise had questioned him about the wedding night in a way that showed her eagerness. But a look at the context of the phrase reveals a darker story:

  my daughter says that she is still too narrow and she does not know whether she might die of it; so much so that she asks every day how big and how long his thing is and whether it is as big and long as her arm, which shows that she is already itching to be at the business of you other old married women . . .

  When she was finally sent to live with her husband, in his château in the Loire valley and Cognac, Louise of Savoy had to come to terms with the facts that Charles d’Angoulême’s establishment was ruled by his mistress, the daughter of one of his officials, Jean de Polignac, and that his illegitimate children by several women would be reared with Louise’s own. Angoulême’s mistress, however, appears to have taken his young wife under her wing and Louise accepted her friendship; Anne de Beaujeu’s lessons in discretion and pragmatism had been well-learned. There were compensations. Louise had been raised in a family that valued books and the cultured Charles possessed a notable two hundred or more volumes. His library held romances, theological texts, Boethius and Ovid and the works of the ubiquitous Christine de Pizan, while his court was home to artists, notably the illuminator Robinet Testard, and men of letters such as the Saint-Gelais brothers.

  But every aristocratic girl learnt one lesson: that to raise her status in her husband’s household, she needed a male heir. Just three years into her marriage, still a young teenager but already concerned, Louise turned to a saintly hermit to pray for fertility. He reassured her not only of her prospect of bearing a son but also (she later said) of that son’s glorious prospects.

  The following year, 1492, Louise gave birth to a girl, Marguerite but in 1494 there followed the all-important boy. As Louise’s Journal later had it: ‘François, by the Grace of God, King of France, my pacific Caesar took his first sight of the light of day at Cognac, about ten hours after midday 1494, the 12th day of September.’2

  Change had also come, by now, for the most prominent of Louise of Savoy’s playmates. In 1491, Margaret of Austria’s secure and indulged life as Queen of France came to an abrupt end. The important dukedom of Brittany had, three years before, been inherited by a young ruling duchess, just as Margaret’s mother Mary had inherited the duchy of Burgundy. Anne of Brittany was not yet twelve when she inherited but she was, nonetheless, determined to rule. In pursuit of that aim, she had undergone a proxy marriage ceremony with Margaret of Austria’s father Maximilian, decades her senior but delighted to be thus striking a blow against the hated French, and one that would give the Habsburgs, with territory both to France’s east and west, something of a stranglehold on that country.

  But Anne de Beaujeu, still a dominant force in France, had other plans for Brittany. She was determined to annexe the duchy, whether by force of arms, or in some other way. Anne of Brittany was persuaded – or forced by the French troops encircling her borders – to renounce Maximilian and marry Charles VIII but it was noted the ceremony had no show of joy. (Hardly likely, perhaps, after the bride was, allegedly, forced to parade naked in front of her groom’s advisors to demonstrate her fitness for child-bearing.) Charles’s existing marriage to Margaret of Austria was annulled; not an unusual arrangement when a match made between two minors was unconsummated.

  Margaret of Austria had been dumped for a richer heiress; the victim of France’s quarrel with her father Maximilian. She was, nonetheless, kept in France for another two years; there was, after all, the question of what would happen to the dowry lands she had brought with her. Eventually, in May 1493, by a new treaty, her father Maximilian won them back but in the meantime Margaret had been moved out of royal Amboise and into conditions she clearly found humiliating. She had become attached to Charles VIII, and he to her, and now felt isolated. A desperate letter survives from Margaret to Anne de Beaujeu, pleading against the removal of a cousin and companion: ‘All the pastime I have and when I have lost her I do not know what I shall do’.

  Anne of Brittany would also become attached to her unenthusiastic husband Charles but found herself sidelined, with no voice in the affairs of her duchy, receiving ambassadors only with Anne de Beaujeu at her side. Anne de Beaujeu and her husband enjoyed less influence than once they had and spent more time on their estates. Nonetheless, when the time came for Charles to go to war in Italy, it was once again Anne de Beaujeu who was recalled to power, with Anne of Brittany left in her charge. There was perhaps always a concern as to what the young queen-duchess – who never gave up her dream of Brittany’s independence – might do if left unsupervised.

  Anne of Brittany quickly gave Charles VIII a son and when, finally, the thirteen-year-old Margaret of Austria was sent home, the future of France at least seemed assured. Margaret took with her a farewell gift made by Anne of Brittany’s most skilful embroideress. The two women kept up a connection but Margaret remained lastingly angry towards the country that had rejected her. On the way home she cracked a bitter joke when offered wine from that year’s worthless vines (sarments). They fitted in well, she said, with the king’s oaths, or serments.

  Margaret of Austria had experienced something of the twists and turns of Fortune that loomed so large in the late medieval mind. ‘Always remember that, as Saint Augustine says, you cannot be certain of even a single hour’, Anne de Beaujeu wrote. For the moment Fortune seemed to be favouring Louise of Savoy, now the mother of an important son, but perhaps she too had learnt that it was not easy for a woman to control her destiny.

  * The ancient title of Holy Roman Emperor – though it had for the last century been held by members of the Habsburg family – was an elective office for which the rulers of Europe could compete. Created for Charlemagne in 800, it carried special responsibility for, and prestige within, the Catholic church; a secular counterpart of the pope’s religious authority. It also, crucially, carried with it not only overlordship of the conglomeration of ecclesiastical and temporal principalities which made up Germany but also an ever-shifting degree of influence in certain other areas, most notably Italy. The Empire was not abolished until the Napoleonic era.

  4

  ‘Fate is very cruel to women’

  Spain, Savoy, France, 1493–1505

  Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy were now young women, looking to find their place in the wor
ld. But Margaret’s future was not yet clear. In June 1493, at Cambrai (the scene of several important later encounters) she again met her godmother and step-grandmother Margaret of York, for whom she had been named. The next few years were to be spent in the older Margaret’s company. But another marriage was always going to be on the board.

  In 1493, Margaret’s father Maximilian succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor. Margaret, like her brother Philip, was to be used to cement his great project: an anti-French alliance. Philip was to marry Juana, daughter of the rulers of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella; Margaret was to marry Juan, their heir.* The grand scheme comprised plans for the youngest daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Katherine of Aragon, to marry the heir to the English throne, thus cementing another useful alliance.

  On 5 November 1495, at Malines, Margaret of Austria underwent a proxy marriage with her Spanish prince. The discussions over whether she should set sail for Spain before Juana arrived in Flanders resemble, in a modern scenario, nothing so much as the exchange of hostages. Nonetheless, in late January 1497 she was under way. The weather was so bad her ship had to take refuge on the English coast, in Southampton, to the delight of the English king Henry VII, who sent letters urging her to lodge in the town long enough for him to visit and for her to avoid the ‘movement and roaring of the sea’. She might have wished she had, for in the Bay of Biscay her ship ran into storms so severe that Margaret composed a rueful epitaph:

  Here lies Margot, the willing bride,

  Twice married – but a virgin when she died

  (Cy-gist Margot la gentil’ damoiselle

  Qu’ha deux marys et encor est pucelle)

  Safely landed in Spain, Margaret met her new mother-in-law, Isabella of Castile. It was a chance to witness a woman exerting regal force in the most direct way. Margaret met a woman who, as she advanced in years, was most at ease in the rough habit of a Franciscan monk but who, in public, could appear decked in rubies the size of pigeons’ eggs. Isabella commissioned a female professor of Latin to remedy the defects in her education but nonetheless, educated her daughters as consorts, not as rulers.