Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Queen Elizabeth wrote yet again to her ‘sister Sovereign’: ‘whatsoever we can imagine meet for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same [so] that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, and a faithful friend’. Elizabeth was aware that a blow to one monarch, and a female monarch, damaged any monarchy. ‘You shall plainly declare to the lords that if they shall determine anything to the deprivation of the Queen their sovereign lady of her royal estate . . . we will make ourselves a plain party against them, for example to all posterity’, she wrote to her ambassador in Scotland.

  It may have been the fear of Elizabeth’s wrath that kept Mary’s lords from proceeding to any lethal extremity. Nonetheless, in Elizabeth Tudor’s eyes Mary Stuart had committed an unforgivable crime. She had made all female rulers look foolish – exactly as men like John Knox had always suspected them to be.

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  ‘daughter of debate’

  The Netherlands, France, England, 1566–1571

  In continental Europe too, religious divisions were hardening. In the Netherlands Margaret of Parma, acting as regent for her half-brother Philip of Spain, had from the start faced a situation even more difficult than that which had plagued her aunt Mary of Hungary when she was regent for her brother Charles V.1

  Charles V, who had been reared in the Netherlands, spent much of his reign moving around his vast territories. Philip, although too painstaking not to pay due tribute to the Netherlands and its culture, was every inch a Spaniard, determined to rule from Madrid, or from the vast new palace he was building nearby, the Escorial. This left the Netherlands dissatisfied with their position as, effectively, a mere colony and Philip with little real understanding of the seventeen very different provinces that made up his northern holding. But it also left Margaret of Parma, given far less authority than her predecessors, trying to implement instructions sent from Philip, many weeks’ journey away.

  No one as yet spoke of the dissent in the Netherlands as a struggle for independence. Instead, the trouble was cast in religious terms. The Netherlands Council of State was coming under the leadership of the Stadtholder William of Orange, who had been raised partly under the influence of Mary of Hungary and was much trusted by her and by Charles V. Now William, brought into alliance with the German Protestant princes through a marriage with Anna of Saxony, electrified the Council by expressing his continued opposition to Philip on religious grounds. Himself a Catholic, he could not concede that a monarch had the right to decide his subjects’ beliefs. Philip, horrified by the growing power of the Protestants in France, had earlier ordered Margaret of Parma to strictly enforce Charles V’s Placarten, edicts imposing harsh penalties against heresy. William told the council that ‘the king errs if he thinks that the Netherlands, surrounded as they are by countries where religious freedom is permitted, can indefinitely support the sanguinary edicts’.

  In April 1565 a Confederacy of noblemen, William’s younger brother Louis prominent among them, presented a petition to Margaret of Parma, requesting an end to the persecution of Protestants. The next year saw a wave of iconoclasm, as Protestants of various denominations swept through the Netherlands destroying Catholic images; exactly the kind of news most certain to appal Philip of Spain. Religious discontent was fostered by economic hardship: as one observer put it, ‘It is folly to enforce the edicts while corn is so dear.’

  Margaret’s instinct was to agree to the demands of the Confederacy, as long as its members joined her in restoring order. In Italy, the counselling of the Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius Loyola, had mediated in Margaret’s troubled marriage to Farnese and her patronage had been vital in getting Loyola’s nascent Society of Jesus off the ground. But, like Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth of England, she seems to have made a distinction between religious belief and civil disobedience. Also like Catherine de Medici, however, she would be thwarted in the attempt to act on any such belief. Elizabeth, in England, would hold out for longer.

  The report Margaret of Parma sent to Philip sounded a despairing note. ‘Everything is in such disorder that in the greater part of the country there is neither law, faith nor king.’ Despite the sound of panic, she was taking steps successfully to deal with the situation. The noblemen, content their petition was to be forwarded to Philip, had for the most part rallied behind the regent, the country was calm and the effect of her words was surely not what she desired. Even as Margaret caused a triumphal medal to be struck, figuring her as an Amazon wielding both sword and olive branch, the hard-line Duke of Alba was despatched north from Spain to deal with what Philip saw as a rebellion, while the request that between ten to twenty thousand Spanish troops should be allowed to march through France, Netherlands-bound, was another source of alarm to the French Protestants and another thorn in the side of Catherine de Medici.

  On his arrival Alba set up the Council of Troubles, a body directly under his control, to enforce the Placarten with the utmost stringency. More than three thousand people would be executed over the next five years. In June 1568 sixty Netherlands nobles, including a cousin of the French Admiral de Coligny, were put to death on the Grand Place in Brussels. But by then (in September 1567), Margaret of Parma had resigned her regency.

  Margaret’s resignation was a protest against Alba’s powers, which were greater than her own and perhaps also against his policies, though it might be a mistake to assume her motives were humanitarian. Margaret retired to L’Aquila in Italy, where she was appointed governor of Abruzzo but she was still identified with the harsh rule of Spain. A 1622 picture in Berlin’s museum of history, The tied-up Dutch provinces before Duke Alba, shows Alba enthroned in judgement above seventeen chained women, representing the provinces. Cardinal Grenville wields bellows to inflate Alba’s fury while behind him Margaret of Parma fishes for their goods in a river of blood.2

  Events in the Netherlands reverberated throughout Europe. In England, at the end of 1567, word of the Spanish activities finally saw an end to the proposal of a marriage between Elizabeth and the Habsburg archduke, the emperor’s son. Moreover, William of Orange, now escaped to Germany, sought to drive the Spanish from the Netherlands. He would look not only to the German princes but also to the French Protestants for help in raising an army. As the French court arrived back from its ‘Grand Tour’ it became clear that one major source of dissent was going to be the desire of the Huguenots (and particularly of Admiral de Coligny, who had gained a quasi-paternal ascendancy over the young king, Charles IX) to aid their fellow Protestants across the border.

  The clampdown in the Netherlands even affected Jeanne d’Albret. Throughout 1566, after the court’s return, she remained in Paris, possibly in a house of her own rather than in the uncongenial atmosphere of the court itself. Eyeing the sexual licence of the French court, she wrote disgustedly. ‘It is not the men who invite the women but the women who invite the men’. She was increasingly ill and increasingly at odds with other ladies of the court, notably Anne d’Este (the former Duchesse de Guise) and thus also with Anne’s mother Renée, Marguerite of Navarre’s former protégée. But she was also taking her son Henri on brief, seemingly innocuous visits to lands of her own nearby.

  It apparently came as a surprise to Catherine de Medici when the Spanish ambassador told her, in the middle of February 1567, that Jeanne, with her son, had slipped back to the southwest and out of French control. ‘This woman is the most dévergondée (shameless) and passionate creature in the world’, raged Catherine.

  Jeanne d’Albret recorded in her Mémoires how often she had cried for peace and how often Catherine and her son had tried to lure her back to court ‘under the pretext of doing me the honour of making me the mediator between the King and his subjects of the Reformed religion’. But Jeanne’s path led another way.

  In September 1567 the Huguenot leaders Condé and Coligny, mistrusting the French crown’s promise of religious tolerance, made an unsuccessful attempt to capture the young king. Six tho
usand Swiss guards were hired to escort Catherine and her son back to Paris but Condé and Coligny then embarked on a siege of the city. Their assaults were unavailing and they were forced to retreat southwards, but it is little wonder that in May 1568, weeks after a peace had finally been negotiated with the rebels, Catherine de Medici became gravely ill. When she recovered, it was to find Coligny and Condé in flight. Catherine’s intentions were to ‘run them to earth, defeat them and destroy them’. Would she include Jeanne in her hostility?

  For that autumn, as Condé and Coligny rode towards the Huguenots’ stronghold of La Rochelle, on the coast of the southwest of France, where Protestantism had gained the greatest support, Jeanne d’Albret had set out to join their party, with her daughter Catherine and fifteen-year-old Henri. ‘Do not think . . . that I undertook this journey lightly’, she said in the Mémoires she caused to be written some eight weeks into her stay. ‘Believe me, it was not without conflict, with others and with myself . . . I not only had to fight outside enemies, I had a war in my entrails. Even my will was in league against me.’

  She was to remain in La Rochelle – ‘deprived of the pleasure of my own houses, but only too happy to suffer for my God’ – for almost three years. She was, she wrote to Catherine de Medici, in ‘the service of my God and of the truth faith’. But Catherine was unlikely to be mollified.

  Jeanne d’Albret wrote also to Elizabeth of England, whose ‘good will’ she continued to laud. She also wrote propaganda pamphlets and ran a body called the Council of the Queen of Navarre, charged with the administration of the town and all not strictly military aspects of the campaign. She set the troops she had brought to work strengthening La Rochelle’s fortifications. At the end of 1568 the Spanish ambassador was reporting that she ‘continued to share the leadership’ with Condé.

  Then, at the Battle of Jarnac on 13 March 1569, the Prince de Condé was taken prisoner and then slain, leaving nominal command of the Huguenot cause to two fifteen-year-olds: Jeanne’s son Henri of Navarre, and his cousin, the son of Condé. It was Jeanne who led the boys out to receive the acclamation of the Huguenot troops. It was Jeanne who wrote begging that Elizabeth of England would ‘continue the affection you bear to so just and legitimate a cause . . . Amongst us, great and small are resolved to spare neither our lives nor our fortunes in the service of God’s quarrel.’ Although Catherine de Medici referred to her as ‘marching with the Admiral’, when Coligny and the boys went out on campaign Jeanne was left behind to cope with as many as sixty thousand refugees as people poured into La Rochelle.

  Most among the Huguenot leadership were now thinking of peace. Not so Jeanne d’Albret, who was almost taken prisoner while outside the walls overseeing the construction of new fortifications. By the spring of 1570, it was Jeanne’s determination that was continuing the fight. It would be Jeanne who later held out for freedom of worship as the price of peace, rather than Catherine’s subtler and more pragmatic offer of freedom of conscience, with its suggestion of outward conformity.

  Jeanne wrote to Catherine de Medici:

  I can scarcely persuade myself having once had the honour of knowing Your Majesty’s sentiments intimately that you could wish to see us reduced to such an extremity or to profess ourselves of no religion whatever, which must be the case if we are denied the public exercise of our own ritual . . . We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than abandon our God, the which we cannot maintain unless permitted to worship publicly, any more than a human body can live without meat or drink.

  The war, in all directions, was becoming ever more bitter. Outside La Rochelle, Catherine’s son Henri, Duc d’Anjou, leading the fighting on the crown’s side, was behaving with terrifying savagery. There were rumours that Catherine, earlier in the troubles, had tried to kill Condé by means of a poisoned apple (a Snow White touch), and a man arrested on his way to Coligny’s service was indeed carrying a packet of poison, while the Spanish ambassador reported Catherine had been trying to rid herself of the Protestant leaders by sorcery.

  Catherine had been greatly saddened when her daughter Elisabeth, Philip of Spain’s wife, died in childbirth in October 1568. This also meant she had no longer any special hold on Elisabeth’s widower Philip of Spain, who had long been disgusted by her pragmatic religious stance. Catherine had written that she envied Elizabeth of England because ‘all the subjects share the Queen’s religion; in France it is quite another matter’. But in fact, Elizabeth Tudor might have greeted that with an ‘if only’.

  At the beginning of May 1568 the imprisoned Mary Stuart escaped from Loch Leven, and her lords’ custody. Her supporters were defeated at the Battle of Langside on 13 May, and on 16 May she crossed the Solway Firth and fled across the border into England.

  Mary had believed Elizabeth Tudor’s protestations of sisterly solidarity; believed Elizabeth would immediately restore her to her throne. In many ways that was Elizabeth’s first instinct: queenship called to queenship. But this was met with disagreement from most of Elizabeth’s councillors, especially Cecil. Elizabeth’s attitude was complex. As Mary sent an appeal to Elizabeth’s fellow feeling ‘not from a queen, but from a gentlewoman’, Elizabeth was gloating over the purchase of Mary’s famous black pearls – twenty-five of them, the size and colour of grapes – for which she had outbid Catherine de Medici.

  Mary reluctantly agreed to Elizabeth’s suggestion of an inquiry into her conduct, and into the rumours that she had been involved in her husband Darnley’s death. The inquiry opened at York that autumn. The Scottish lords tried to ensure a ‘guilty’ verdict by producing the infamous ‘Casket Letters’; letters purporting to prove Mary a murderous adulteress but which were almost certainly faked. Even with these dubious documents before them, the commissioners failed to reach any real verdict, leaving Mary to remain as the ‘guest’ of her ‘dear cousin and friend’ Elizabeth; locked into an indefinite genteel captivity.

  The inquiry had repercussions of a different sort. The commissioners had been led by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth’s kinsman and premier peer and a man with his own stake in the English throne. Norfolk had at first been horrified by the letters that seemed to prove Mary’s ‘inordinate’ love for Bothwell. Norfolk’s instructions from Elizabeth’s government had included the clause that anyone plotting Mary’s marriage ‘shall be ipso facto acknowledged as traitorous and shall suffer death’, but when one of Mary’s lords suggested to him that the best way of neutralising Mary, and providing for the English succession, was to marry her himself, the idea took root in his mind.

  The story of the next few months is uncertain, but Norfolk’s aspirations were clearly something of an open secret at the English court. Dangerously, they became linked to the discontent felt by peers in the north of England, many of whom had never lost their Catholic faith. The result was the so-called Revolt of the Northern Earls in the autumn of 1569, which aimed to free Mary, if not actually to place her on Elizabeth’s throne.

  The rebellion failed, and many of the rebels suffered the harshest punishments. Norfolk was sent to the Tower, where he languished for some months. But what of Mary? The Queen of Scots had written to Norfolk as to her future husband; had made and sent him embroideries depicting a fruitful vine (Mary herself) and a hand clipping away the barren branch (Elizabeth). No direct reprisals were taken against Mary Stuart but she was kept in closer captivity.

  In February 1570, the pope issued the bull Regnans in excelsis, depriving Elizabeth of ‘her pretended right to her realm’ and sanctioning any Catholic who attempted to depose her. This greatly raised the level of tension in England, both increasing and highlighting Elizabeth’s vulnerability. In a poem she probably wrote in 1571, Elizabeth Tudor described Mary Stuart:

  The daughter of debate

  That discord aye doth sow

  Shall reap no gain where former rule

  Still peace hath taught to know.

  Her words would prove prophetic.

  In France,
Catherine de Medici’s goal was the reduction of tension, not its increase. On 8 August 1570 the Treaty of St Germain finally brought peace: freedom of conscience and freedom of worship limited to certain locations. But there had been other peace treaties and none had lasted. Jeanne d’Albret for one, during the long negotiations, had called this ‘a peace made of snow this winter that would melt in next summer’s heat’. Now Catherine had a plan to cement it. As early as May 1569 Sir Henry Norris told Elizabeth of England that Catherine de Medici planned ‘to practice to withdraw the Queen of Navarre’ by offering her daughter Margot in marriage to Jeanne’s son Henri. Marriage was always Catherine’s favourite way out of any diplomatic difficulty.

  Catherine also had another marriage in mind. England had more reason than ever to pursue the safety of a French alliance against the increasing power and aggression of Spain. The summer of 1571 saw the ‘discovery’ of the Ridolfi Plot (of which Elizabeth’s ministers may in fact long have known), to place Mary Stuart and the Duke of Norfolk on England’s throne, with Spanish support and an invasion force headed by the Duke of Alba.

  So Queen Elizabeth was amenable to Catherine’s suggestion, in December 1571, that she might marry François, the Duc d’Alençon, instead of his elder brother, the reluctant Anjou. François, his mother Catherine coolly observed, was ‘much less scrupulous’ than his brother in matters of religion; sympathetic, even, to the Huguenots. Altogether less ‘like a mule’ as Elizabeth’s envoy chimed in enthusiastically, and ‘more apt than th’other’ when it came to getting children.

  England and France concluded the Treaty of Blois, whereby they agreed to support each other against the Spanish enemy. It now seemed more desirable than ever that this alliance should be cemented dynastically. In June came the formal offer of Alençon’s hand. Elizabeth’s ambassador (and later spymaster) Francis Walsingham feared that the small and pockmarked seventeen-year-old Alençon would never pass the crucial test, given ‘the delicacy of Her Majesty’s eye’. Nevertheless, as the court set off on its annual summer progress, the marriage seemed still a real possibility.