Mary now travelled twelve miles inland to Morlaix, where she made a state entry on 20 August. This was her first experience of the French countryside, and, since in France she did not need the armed guards that surrounded her everywhere in Scotland, she was able to satisfy her youthful curiosity. She had been taught four or five useful words of greeting and thanks in French, but in any case French was a foreign tongue there. Brittany had only been absorbed into France fourteen years earlier and most people spoke only Breton.
The boundaries of the kingdom were much less extensive than those of today, especially on the east, where Savoy stretched westwards to include Nice. From there, the border ran northwards along the valley of the Meuse, putting Metz and Verdun into the Holy Roman Empire, before turning west to include Picardy, but not Artois, which was in the Netherlands and therefore also under the rule of Charles V. There was a population of about 18 million compared to Scotland’s 800,000, and, with its mild climate and fertile soil, its agriculture was the most prosperous in Europe – there had not been a crop failure for almost a century. The French chroniclers were romantic to a man, and in their reports it seemed that sunshine arrived with Mary and that bad weather only returned on her departure. Joachim du Bellay, a poet and aristocrat who had travelled from Scotland with her, constantly sang her praises in verse as, later, Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, would do in prose. Du Bellay said that ‘when in her highland garb she resembled a goddess in masquerade’. It is hard to imagine what fantasy passed for Highland dress in a court totally unacquainted with the reality.
Mary’s journey was now across country to Nantes, where the royal party transferred to a barge to take them along the Loire. This should have been an idyllic journey, but at Ancenis, only a third of the way along the river, the young Lord Seton died of a ‘stomach flux’, probably as a result of food poisoning. Mary now had to comfort Seton’s sister, Mary, and attend her first funeral Mass. The first link with her Scottish past was broken. She also had to say farewell to de Brézé, who left on royal orders, passing his duties over to Antoinette de Bourbon, Mary’s formidable grandmother.
Apart from her mother, Antoinette de Bourbon was the first scion of this ancient and powerful family that Mary had met. Antoinette was the wife of Claude, Duc de Guise, the son of René II de Lorraine and Philippa de Gueldres. Claude, whose two brothers were Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine, and Antoine, Duc de Lorraine, had, with Antoinette, nine children, all of whom were still alive. They were Mary’s uncles and aunts, and numbered amongst themselves two dukes, one marquis, two cardinals, one grand prior and two abbesses, as well as Mary’s mother, a queen regent. It was obviously vitally important that Mary make a good impression, and on 1 October 1548 Antoinette reported, ‘She is very pretty indeed, and as intelligent a child as you could see. She is brunette, with a clear complexion and I think that when she develops she will be a beautiful girl, for her complexion is fine and clear and her skin white. The lower part of her face is very well formed, the eyes are small and rather deep-set, the face is rather long. She is graceful and self-assured. To sum up, we may be very well pleased with her.’
Despite her good impression of her granddaughter, Antoinette de Bourbon did not find the Maries handsome or even clean, but she thought Lady Fleming was impressive. Excluding Marie de Guise, Antoinette, who lived to the age of eighty-nine, was the first of a long series of women Mary would meet who were powerful in their own right and who neither depended on their husband’s influence nor abandoned their femininity in the pursuit of personal power. At that moment, Antoinette wanted to establish her personal influence as Mary’s substitute mother and to ensure that the infant queen became a member of the Guise faction before she was surrounded by Henri’s court.
The royal courtiers were waiting for her at Carrières-sur-Seine, where she would lodge temporarily in the medieval fortress until the royal apartments in the château of St Germain-en-Laye were made ready. Through Henri’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, orders were sent that the current occupants of Carrières be lodged in the village. The château of St Germain-en-Laye was only a few miles from Paris, but readily defensible on a cliff overlooking the River Seine. Its foundations dated from the twelfth century, and although François I had rebuilt it entirely as a palatial country estate, it still housed a garrison of 3,000 soldiers. His son was continuing with the refurbishments. Henri’s apartments were on the first floor, overlooking gardens laid out as elaborate parterres and pergolas, while the royal children were on the second floor with its sunny south-facing rooms. Henri was taking a personal interest in Mary’s quarters, sending precise instructions for the furnishings. He also asked for assurances that none of the workmen employed for the renovations had any infectious diseases, and established that all the neighbouring villages were infection free, thus establishing a cordon sanitaire around Mary, whom he now referred to as ‘my daughter’. She arrived in her temporary home at Carrières-sur-Seine on 16 October and was glad that her stay in the grim medieval castle was short. Henri had sent further instructions to Jean d’Humières, who was to be her chamberlain and, with his wife Françoise, in charge of the royal nursery, that ‘she takes precedence over my daughters. She is a crowned queen and, as such I would have her honoured and served.’ This meant, among other things, that she would have a cloth of state with her heraldic bearings hung over her chair and that her servants would kneel in her presence and walk backwards when withdrawing from it. Janet Sinclair would have found these formalities unnecessary but would have encouraged her little charge to behave with proper decorum and not give the French any opportunity to find the Scots’ manners barbaric, as the poet Brantôme had found their language. The other royal children, meanwhile, were enthusiastically beginning the education of their exotic, high-ranking nursery companion in the complex structure of the royal household.
This household was headed by the king. Henri de Valois had been born on 31 March 1519, the second son of François I, and had had no thought of succeeding to the throne since his eldest brother, François, was in good health. When François I was released from his Spanish imprisonment in 1526 he ignored his sons and rode past them to liberty as they took his place as hostages, though the seven-year-old Henri was kissed goodbye by the tender-hearted Diane de Poitiers, eighteen years his senior. The princes’ imprisonment was harsh. By the time of their release in 1530, the eleven-year-old Henri had become morose and withdrawn but he was greeted on his return to France by Diane, who started to take an interest in the young man. When he rode in his first joust, held to celebrate his release, he carried her colours of black and white on his lance. Three years later, she accompanied him to his wedding to Catherine de Medici, an Italian heiress only two months older than him. Catherine was the only daughter of Lorenzo de Medici and a niece of Pope Clement VII, so the marriage provided François with a useful power base in Italy. Diane, with the Constable of France – Anne, Duc de Montmorency – led the aristocratic faction opposing Catherine as a foreign upstart, with Montmorency unfairly calling her ‘an Italian shopkeeper’s daughter’. These nobles, equally unfairly, accused Catherine of poisoning Henri’s elder brother when he died in 1536 after playing tennis in very hot weather and then drinking iced water, the water having been brought to him by his Italian secretary, Sebastian de Montecuculli. Since all Italians were thought to be expert with poisons, it seemed obvious to those that opposed her that Catherine was clearing a path to the throne of France for herself and her husband. Montecuculli, who was probably quite innocent, was tortured and, on the orders of François I, torn apart by horses.
Henri was now the married Dauphin in need of heirs, but Catherine had produced no children, and since Henri himself had fathered a bastard girl in 1537, the fault was laid entirely at the Dauphine’s door, with calls being made for a papal annulment of the marriage. Diane, now Henri’s mistress, adopted his illegitimate daughter as Diane de France. Then, to everyone’s relief, in 1545, Catherine became pregnant with François, Mary’s f
uture husband. The Diane and Montmorency faction was still antagonistic towards Catherine, but she was supported by François I and was at the king’s side during the illness which killed him in 1547. Catherine was now Queen of France and Henri was king with Diane as his maîtresse en titre, newly created Duchesse de Valentinois.
When Henri made an official entry – an entrée joyeuse – into Lyon in 1548, he was accompanied by Diane at his side. These splendid entries, according to the historian Sir Roy Strong, were ‘an essential part of the liturgy of secular apotheosis’. The pageant included twelve ‘Roman gladiators’ fighting with two-handed swords, garlanded oxen ridden by naked girls – Henri was especially fond of this display – and a young woman dressed as the goddess Diana, leading a lion on a silver chain. Catherine made her entry the next day; Henri asked that it be late in the day so that ‘her ugliness might pass unnoticed’. Diane was now associated with the goddess Diana, and her importance to Henri was marked symbolically in subtle ways – the royal monogram, for example which consisted of the letters ‘H’ and ‘C’ interlaced, but with the ends of the ‘C’ drawn to a point to represent the crescent moon, which was the symbol of Diana. Henri also adopted a monogram of two letter ‘Ds’ interlaced with his ‘H’.
Diane has attracted legends as magnets attract iron filings. The poet Brantôme said of her, ‘everyone around her breathed the air of eternal spring’. He also said that when he visited her in her seventieth year she looked no more than thirty; since she died at sixty-four, Brantôme’s statements should be garnished with plentiful salt. Queen Catherine was unfairly eclipsed by Diane, but in spite of this she loved her flagrantly unfaithful husband, and carried out her queenly duties knowing that the bulk of the population thought of her as an Italian witch. It was into this uneasy ménage à trois that the six-year-old Scots queen was thrust.
Henri was determined that Mary should become a French woman as quickly as possible, and he began by sending her Maries away to a convent some four miles distant at Poissy where they would be taught French by the Prior François de Vieuxpont. From then on, Mary and her Maries spoke French in public, though in private they would occasionally speak in Scots to each other through fits of girlish giggles. Scots became a private nursery language. Meanwhile, Mary had the company of the royal children and, on Henri’s precise instruction, relayed to d’Humières by Diane, she shared a bedroom with Elisabeth, nicknamed Isabel, the king’s three-year-old daughter, who would become Mary’s closest companion in France.
Henri himself arrived at St Germain-en-Laye on 9 November 1548, when he ‘found her [Mary] the prettiest and most graceful princess he ever saw, as have the queen and all the court’, and Catherine said, ‘the little Scottish queen has but to smile to turn all French heads’. De Brézé wrote to Marie, her now-anxious mother, on 11 November, ‘I assure you, Madame, he [Henri] gave her the best welcome possible and continues to do so from day to day . . . he considers her no less than his own daughter. He will bring her up with the Dauphin in one court to accustom them to one another.’ Henri also wrote to Marie, on 11 December, continuing his praises for Mary but also giving a hint of troubled waters ahead: ‘I assure you, Madame, that you have sent a lady hither with the Queen your daughter who has pleased this company as much as the six most virtuous women in this country could have done . . . I mean Lady Fleming.’
Henri made sure of Mary’s thorough education in French manners by placing her under the watchful eye of Diane, who continued to act as an intermediary between the king and d’Humières, even training the nurses for the royal nursery personally at her own château of Anet, north-west of Paris. Diane and Mary became close friends, and from the start Diane saw that Mary would grow into a considerable beauty, according to the strictures accepted for female beauty at the time. They were classified in eight groups of three:
3 things white, the skin, the teeth, and the hands.
3 things black, the eyes, the eyebrows, and the eye lashes.
3 things red, the lips, the cheeks, and the nails.
3 things long, the body, the hair, and the hands.
3 things short, the teeth, the ears, and the feet.
3 things narrow, the mouth, the waist, and the ankles.
3 things big, the arms, the thighs, and the calves.
3 things small, the breasts, the nose, and the head.
Of these, Mary already possessed what could be expected of a child for six and Diane could see that, with care, the other attributes would follow in time. She, herself, could tick all the boxes and was widely thought to possess a magic elixir which preserved her beauty. In fact her daily routine had no such magic; she rose at three, bathed in cold water, summer or winter, and then rode for three hours before returning to bed for reading and meditation. She administered her considerable estates herself with great efficiency and ate only sparingly. Amid a court ablaze with all the colours of the rainbow she dressed only in black and white, which were technically the colours of a widow in semi-mourning, but were also her heraldic colours. With her tall figure and upright bearing she stood out from everyone else and could not be ignored. Previously, it had been the custom of a royal mistress to appear with her left breast exposed as a sign that her heart was available to her lover, and Diane may well have done so on occasions. She is never shown thus in portraits, although in the many idealised representations of Diane as her alter ego Diana she often appears totally naked. Interestingly, Diane produced no royal bastards from her liaison with Henri in spite of both of them having children with other partners.
A crucial issue which concerned the court was how the child Mary would relate to her future husband, the Dauphin, even though the marriage was one of dynastic convenience and the principles of royal duty would have been thoroughly explained to Mary by Diane. This was all too necessary since the Dauphin was a complete contrast to the healthy and extrovert Mary, and his conception had been a major trial for Catherine. She knew that her position at court was still highly insecure while she had seemed incapable of producing an heir, and the poor woman had gone to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goal. Knowing of her husband’s fecundity it is said that the desperate queen had holes bored in the floor above his bedchamber so that she could watch him in bed with Diane. Diane, in her turn, had coerced Henri to do his marital duty as often as possible. Menstrual cycles had been watched, astrological tables had been consulted, foul-smelling poultices had been applied and grisly potions had been drunk by the desperate 25-year-old Catherine. Her personal physician, Dr Fernel, had given her more practical advice, the details of which are unfortunately unknown to us today. Eventually, the welcome result had been Dauphin François. Inevitably, Catherine had been accused of having used witchcraft in order to conceive, though there is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim. In contrast to Mary’s scantily attended christening in the cold of St Michael’s Church in Linlithgow, François had been christened in the Chapel of St Saturnin at Fontainebleau, a month after his birth in January 1543. The ceremony, lit by 300 torches carried by the Royal Guard, had been attended by the nobility of France, the hierarchy of the Church and all foreign ambassadors, arrayed in their finest. François, however, was not the Dauphin that France that Henri had prayed for.
According to contemporaries he had an ‘obstruction of the brain’ which meant that he spoke through his nose – this was probably the result of adenoids – and red livid marks occasionally appeared on his face, which ‘were sure signs of ill health and a short life’. Others said that the Dauphin was timid, bilious, with an underdeveloped intelligence and was incapable of sustained effort; ‘Very good teachers have been provided for him . . . yet their success is very small.’ He was undersized and thin, and seemed to the courtiers to be a prince destined to stay a child. But he tried to overcome his physical failings and astonished the court with his vivacity, loving hunting and weapons. In 1551, when he was only seven years old, he had archery butts built in the galleries at the Palace of Blois.
Tho
ugh Mary and François had met in the nursery, they had yet to appear in public. This would happen on 4 December 1548 at St Germain, when Mary’s uncle François, Duc de Guise, married Anne d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara. Protocol demanded that, as a crowned queen, Mary would dance with her limping fiancé immediately after Henri and Catherine had danced together, Lady Fleming having taught her enough simple steps to acquit herself with honour. She was a ready pupil and thoroughly enjoyed not only showing off her aptitude but also the physical pleasure of dancing, a joy that would stay with her for the rest of her life. At the ball, the tiny couple were led onto the floor by Diane and Lady Fleming, the musicians started a prearranged and reasonably slow melody and the display started. With her heavy brocade dress, embroidered with jewellery, and elaborately dressed hair, Mary was at first hesitant, but the music caught her and she started to enjoy herself, even though she found she was supporting the Dauphin. The entire court watched closely. Her limbs seemed straight, her feet were dainty in their satin slippers, and her smile was enchanting. To an audience expert in judging horses and cattle it seemed that she would probably breed healthy dauphins in her turn and the courtiers breathed a sigh of relief – all, that is, except the English ambassador, who saw the union of England’s two greatest enemies made flesh in the two children. The dance ended, and Mary, stooping a little, kissed the Dauphin on the lips as formality required, while members of the court applauded and smiled reassuringly at each other. Lady Fleming led Mary to the king, who bent and kissed his little ‘daughter’ before complimenting Lady Fleming on the skills of her charge for rather longer than either Diane or Queen Catherine would have thought strictly necessary.
An Accidental Tragedy Page 6
