Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have here no assured friends, and much less impartial counsel.

  Alas! Sir, wherein have I offended you, or what occasion of displeasure have I deserved? I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure . . . I never grudged in word or countenance, or showed a visage or spark of discontent.

  She had born the king ‘divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world’. Then came the crunch:

  When ye had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man. And whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience.

  If there be any just cause by the law that ye can allege against me, either of dishonesty or any other impediment to banish and put me from you, I am well content to depart to my great shame and dishonour. And if there be none, then here, I most lowly beseech you, let me remain in my former estate.

  She invoked the memory of the old kings – Henry’s father and her own – who had made the match. She spoke bitterly of the ‘new inventions’ of this new court. She asked Henry’s permission to write to Rome to which he, taken by surprise, could do nothing but agree. She rose to her feet, off the knees from which Henry had twice tried to raise her, made a low curtsey and, instead of returning to her seat, marched towards the door.

  Once again the crier called to her: ‘Katherine, Queen of England, come into the court’ but she did not pause: ‘it is no indifferent court for me, therefore I will not tarry’. Though the trial dragged on, with elderly witnesses describing what (they thought) had or had not happened in Katherine and Arthur’s wedding bed all those years ago, the process never recovered.

  The common people of England were with Katherine; the women especially. Outside the court, the French ambassador noted, ‘If the matter were to be decided by the women, the king would lose the battle, for they did not fail to encourage the queen at her entrance and departure by their cries.’ But Katherine of Aragon was looking elsewhere.

  Her appeal was that the case should be heard in Rome. The supporting documents were rushed over to Brussels, where Mendoza sent them on to the Vatican by express messenger. When agreement to Katherine’s request was wrung from a reluctant and distraught pope, copies of the papal decision were sent back to Flanders, some for posting there, and others for Margaret of Austria to send on to Katherine.

  In one meeting with Wolsey and Campeggio, Katherine warned that the king and his ministers should consider the reputation ‘of her nation and her relatives’. It was a declaration of the importance of Katherine of Aragon’s blood legacy; her fortitude was perhaps inherited from her mother Isabella.

  ‘Remember that whatever great alliance you achieve, you must never out of some foolish pride fail to value highly your own ancestors, those from whom you are descended – to fail in that would be against right and reason’, Anne de Beaujeu had said. This summer of 1529 was the one in which women were inclined to stake their claim most assertively.

  On 5 June, as Katherine of Aragon was readying her case, Margaret of Austria’s envoy to England reported that Wolsey had asked him ‘to declare on his word of honour whether he really thought the two Duchesses were in earnest’ in their plans for peace. The envoy declared ‘that he could answer for one of them; as to the other, time would tell’. Margaret of Austria’s meeting with Louise of Savoy was set for July, in the border town of Cambrai. All Europe was watching. Mendoza wrote to Charles V: ‘some think that the meeting of the two ladies will come to nothing’ but in his humble opinion ‘it cannot do harm, even if things do not immediately turn to good’.

  As the meeting at Cambrai neared, the flurry of messages on the precise stages of both ladies’ journeys resembled the behind-the-scenes work of a modern summit. Louise of Savoy declared her intention of bringing her chancellor, and the women of her chamber, but none of the French nobility. As she said to Margaret of Austria’s envoy, ‘You may tell my sister [Margaret] what my plans are, and that I hope we may hear of each other daily. Write also to her boldly that we must necessarily contend and argue, but that I sincerely hope it will be without anger or ill-will.’

  Margaret of Austria had been warned not to go to Cambrai, for fear King François would take her prisoner but she said that ‘if any of her councillors or courtiers were afraid, they might go home’. Told that she should at least take a strong escort, she replied that ‘if she brought one single armed man in her suite, people might imagine she was going on a warlike enterprise, and not on a work of peace . . .’

  Machiavelli had advised that war was of supreme importance for a ruler, but this was of course irrelevant or even damaging advice for women who could not lead their own armies into battle. But he also stressed the importance of presentation; and there they were surely even ahead of him.

  20

  The Ladies’ Peace

  Cambrai, England, July–December 1529

  Women – Castiglione had written in The Book of the Courtier – ‘have often corrected many of men’s errors’. This was the unspoken thought behind the interchange of letters between Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy, and this was the spirit in which they set out towards Cambrai. On Monday 5 July, Margaret of Austria was the first to arrive, carried in a magnificent litter and surrounded by twenty-four black-clad mounted archers, to take up her residence in St Aubert’s Abbey. Two hours later Louise of Savoy arrived, accompanied by her daughter, Marguerite. A Venetian envoy sent back a report: Louise arrived ‘in great state being clad in black velvet, with four ladies’ litters, and with her daughter the Queen of Navarre, and ladies on horseback. The Lord Chancellor preceded her and ambassadors followed . . .’

  Louise of Savoy had, in the event, brought across France some leading members of her son’s council and indeed her son the king, although he stayed some little distance away and spent the days hunting. Perhaps she didn’t feel quite as confident in her own experience of diplomacy as did Margaret of Austria (whose nephew Charles was many miles away).

  Louise had also her priests and her painter, her choristers, and the keepers of her furs and her silver. A chronicle describes the ‘triumphant’ sight of the train of clergymen and ladies: ‘it stretched from our House for half the road to St Pol and after them came hackneys and mules, very well appointed’. The town, struggling to feed and lodge all these people, had laid down rules for these huge and splendid retinues: no carrying of arms and serving men required to observe a curfew.

  Louise and Marguerite were taken immediately to Margaret of Austria, with whom they spent two hours, before taking up residence in the Hotel St Pol opposite. It must have been an emotional moment for Margaret and Louise, meeting after so many years. Marguerite of Navarre’s official role was to act as hostage for the imperial side, to guarantee the safety of Margaret of Austria. It is unclear whether she played any more active part. By now her interests were no longer necessarily identical with those of her brother and mother’s France. She had also responsibilities to her husband, whose prime goal was the restitution of that part of Navarre which Spain had annexed.

  The discussions took three weeks, and took their toll on both sides. Louise of Savoy was seemingly the fragile one, retiring each night in pain from the gout that had long plagued her, but when the Venetian envoy went to visit Margaret of Austria he found her, too, ‘in bed, dressed, having a slight pain in her leg’. Margaret began by making lots of demands; she was operating from the position of strength given her by her nephew’s recent victories.

  All Europe was watching, nervously. England, Venice and Florence were afraid France would make a peace with Charles that would leave them in the cold. King François was edgy, writing to his mother on 17 July that since the emperor valued his friendship so low, Louise should remind him that he could be just as strong an enemy. He was desperate to get away to where his soldiers were assembled for the war he still believed was coming but
he dared not leave without Louise’s assent.

  On 24 July peace was declared, prematurely. Margaret of Austria caused a hitch with a last-minute demand for certain border towns, Louise of Savoy and her daughter ordered their bags packed, and the papal nuncio had to intervene. Margaret offered concessions, relinquished some of her demands and engaged personally to arrange the return of François’s sons, the French princes, still held hostage in Spain. In the closing days of July, a treaty was ratified at last.

  On 1 August the three ladies – Margaret of Austria, Louise of Savoy and Marguerite of Navarre – went to Vespers in the abbey, receiving the congratulations of the men on both sides and, as the contemporary chronicle records, ‘taking each other’s hands, a beautiful thing to see’. On the 5th, the peace was celebrated with a huge public Mass in Cambrai Cathedral and a sermon on the text of ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. The Treaty of Cambrai would become better known as the Paix des Dames, the Ladies’ Peace.

  The terms were definitely favourable to the emperor’s party; ‘so advantageous to the Emperor’, reported an ambassador gleefully, ‘that some deception is suspected’. So advantageous, indeed, that François was reported less than happy with what his mother had done; although in the last resort, as always, he had vouchsafed to ‘place myself in your hands, to do what you think best’.

  Charles V agreed not to press his claims to Burgundy, accepting a hefty ransom in its place, while François’s sons, still hostage, would be released from their Spanish captivity on the payment of a further sum. François gave up his suzerainty over Flanders and Artois and his Italian claims. To cement the deal, it was agreed that the marriage of François to Charles’s sister Eleanor, promised after Pavia, should soon be solemnised. The role of England as the emperor’s long-term ally had not featured in the negotiations. Wolsey, who had been invited to attend and longed to go, was kept in England by a Henry VIII intent on the Blackfriars hearing. But at the last minute it was included in the deal.

  The choir sang a Te Deum, alms were thrown to the crowd, and wine flowed from the conduits. On 9 August King François came to join the party, and the emperor Charles sent Margaret of Austria his congratulations, as well he might.

  Meanwhile in England, on 23 July, the cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey were to have given their verdict. But instead, Campeggio formally referred the case to Rome. It was a triumph for Katherine, of a sort, but it proved to be a very hollow victory. On 11 September both cardinals formally relinquished their authority in the case. A month later came something that would once, in Wolsey’s recent heyday, have seemed unthinkable. The great minister was arrested; the Venetians reporting that ‘he has at length found fortune irate and hostile beyond measure . . . ruin, which may be said to exceed his late fame and elevation’.

  There is no doubt who Wolsey himself saw as responsible for his downfall, speaking of ‘a continual serpentine enemy about the king’. Later, he urged his supporters that everything should be tried in order that ‘the displeasure of my Lady Anne be somewhat assuaged . . . this is the only help and remedy. All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour’.

  On 3 November Henry opened what would come to be known as the Reformation Parliament. A month later Thomas Boleyn was made Earl of Wiltshire, and at the banquet which followed the ceremony, Anne was given precedence over all other ladies (even the king’s sister Mary).

  Katherine of Aragon, though still queen, cannot have looked back with any satisfaction as this momentous year came to an end. But neither, altogether, can Anne Boleyn. When, at the end of November, Henry and Katherine had an open confrontation about Anne, Anne’s furious response made her insecurity clear:

  Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand? I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and that you will cast me off . . . alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.

  It was a stalemate.

  21

  Exits and entrances

  The Netherlands, France, Italy, 1530–1531

  In continental Europe, neither of the protagonists of the ‘Ladies’ Peace’ lived long to enjoy their triumph of diplomacy.

  In February 1530, after a triumphal progress through Italy, Margaret of Austria’s nephew Charles V was formally crowned by the pope’s hands as Holy Roman Emperor. It was Margaret’s triumph. The children she had nurtured, her brother Philip’s progeny, and their offspring, held the reins of power across Europe, from Valencia to Vienna, Lisbon to Louvain.

  A letter she wrote to Charles in the months after Cambrai, concerning the state of the Habsburg Empire and her advice for his dealings with it, shows she was still active. But Margaret was nearing fifty. She had already thought of relinquishing her responsibilities and retiring to a convent near Bruges. She wrote to the mother superior, putting in place her financial provisions for the convent and adding that ‘the time approaches, since the emperor is coming, to whom with God’s help, I will render a good account of the charge and government which he has pleased to give me . . .’ But she was not to have the opportunity.

  According to the account of one Augustinian monk, in November 1530 a maid dropped a glass goblet near her bed and Margaret got a splinter in her foot. The tiny wound became infected, then gangrenous, and an amputation was decided on. Agreeing to it, she shut herself up for four days in prayer and preparation, receiving the Sacrament and revising her will. But the dose of opium given to her was so strong that, on 1 December 1530, she died before the operation.

  Her work on behalf of her nephew Charles – she proudly wrote to him in a final letter – had been such that she might hope for ‘divine remuneration, contentment from you, monseigneur, and the goodwill of your subjects’. Her last wish was that Charles should keep peace with France and England. Her heart was briefly placed in the tomb of her mother, Mary of Burgundy, before being taken south to join that of her last husband Philibert, at Brou, in the mausoleum she had so carefully rebuilt.

  For Louise of Savoy, meanwhile, the Ladies’ Peace meant the return from long captivity of her grandsons, the French princes. During their four-year captivity the conditions in which they were kept had become more and more miserable, held in a poorly furnished cell, without entertainment or French-speaking company. Margaret of Austria, as well as the French royal women, had become concerned about it and had written to her nephew to expostulate. But at the start of the 1530s, Louise’s trinity set out towards Bayonne, where the boys were to be handed over to François, together with the emperor’s sister Eleanor, now François’s bride by the terms of the Ladies’ Peace.

  Marguerite of Navarre, pregnant once again, had to be left behind at Blois; ‘banished’, as she put it, because of her ‘massive and too heavy belly’, while the other two who made up the ‘perfect triangle’ went on without her. This time she was convinced that the child would be a boy but the thought did not seem to bring her joy, as witness some of the poetry she addressed to her absent brother: ‘You tell me to take comfort / in my child, but I cannot . . . it is he who keeps me from doing my duty / to those I love a thousand times more than him’.

  Another poem, to her mother, resentfully recalled how much she, Marguerite, had done to bring about the release first of François and then of her nephews; and now she could not be present at the consummation. ‘How vexing it surely is, for a brave heart / that is unvanquished, / to be brought low by a mere baby.’

  Perhaps, as so often, guilt played a part in her complex tangle of emotions. Guilt at what the boys had suffered, or possibly about the way she was now divided from her brother by the interests of her husband, Henri of Navarre, whose infidelities added to her distress. On 15 July she gave birth to a boy, Jean, only for the child to die on Christmas Day. Marguerite wrote of the will of God but from that time on she wore only black.

  Early in 1531 she was (most unusually for a woman, and a royal woman) preparing the text of one long poem she had written for public
ation; not only that, but publication by an evangelical publisher, Simon du Bois. Marguerite’s lengthy religious Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of a Sinful Soul) was later translated by Elizabeth Tudor as a gift for her reforming stepmother, Katherine Parr.

  In it, as Elizabeth paraphrased, Marguerite ‘doth perceive how of herself and of her own strength she can do nothing that good is or prevaileth for her salvation, unless it be through the grace of God’. Its description of the sinful soul redeemed by grace may have spoken of something in Marguerite’s nature but salvation by grace alone (rather than devotional rituals or even good works) would also become the central piece of Protestant doctrine. This was dangerous territory: in 1530 the Diet of Augsburg had tried and failed to settle the divisions within the church. The next year, 1531, saw the formation of the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of the Lutheran princes within the Holy Roman Empire.

  Marguerite’s health continued to give cause for concern. Pregnant again, she miscarried the baby. Her failure to provide more male babies to serve her brother seems to have been yet another arrow in the quiverful of guilt she carried. March 1531 saw the French royal family celebrate the coronation of François’s new queen, Eleanor. But Louise of Savoy’s health was failing fast.

  Louise had long suffered from painful and debilitating bouts of gout and ‘the gravel’ (kidney stones). Marguerite had been her nurse as much as her advisor at Cambrai. By the end of the summer it was obvious Louise’s condition was serious. Marguerite wrote frantically to her brother François, begging he should come (‘because she is not content with me’) but to her distress, and that of Louise, he stayed away. Only Marguerite was present when, on 22 September, Louise died at the age of fifty-five. Saying – or so Marguerite later wrote in Les Prisons – that the sight of Marguerite caused her to feel pleasure and attachment to this world, when she needed to think only of God and the next, Louise sent Marguerite out of her presence at the last.