For Henri, Elizabeth’s accession was devastating news, and his first move was to have long-standing consequences for Mary. He declared Elizabeth illegitimate: since her father’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon had been declared invalid by the Pope his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was therefore bigamous. Thus, the throne was vacant and the nearest claimant by blood was Henri’s new daughter-in-law, Mary. The heralds proclaimed her Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland and from henceforth her arms carried the quarterings of all these states. The poets got to work praising Mary as a new prodigy, uniting France and Scotland with England, but in practical terms this achieved little except to infuriate Elizabeth. The English ambassador reported that ‘the young queen bore not the arms of England of her own notion, but by command of her father the late king and so seemed to excuse it. Her majesty [Elizabeth] thinks this excuse either very strange or very imperfect.’ Neither Cecil nor Elizabeth believed a word of this excuse.
What was more practical were the diplomatic arrangements made by France with England and Spain as part of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. All three participants were on the edge of bankruptcy and exhausted by war. Henri was under extreme pressure from Diane to negotiate the return of Montmorency from prison in Brussels; appeasing Philip was therefore important to him. In return for the peace, Henri gave up all his conquests in Italy, abandoned his claim to Savoy and allowed England the chance to repossess Calais in eight years. Marriage alliances would cement these agreements. Marguerite, Henri’s sister, was to marry Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy, while Mary’s childhood friend Princess Elisabeth was to be the bride of the recently widowed Philip of Spain. Both these engagements were entirely dynastic, since neither woman was consulted, and Mary now had her first personal taste of the realpolitik which dominated affairs of state: with the marriage of Elisabeth, she was peremptorily to lose a close friend.
As Queen and King of Scotland, on 21 April 1558, Mary and François sent a letter to Elizabeth with their endorsement of the treaty, vowing their love, hoping for peace and friendship and assuring her she would get nothing but good news from the bearer of the letter, who was in transit to Scotland as a counsellor of the queen regent. He was William Maitland of Lethington, whom Knox found to be ‘a man of sharp wit and reasoning’ and who was the most astute political mind in Scotland. His nickname was ‘Michael Wylie’, a corruption of Machiavelli, and he would become Mary’s chief minister in Edinburgh. He was able to offer Mary good advice but always put the interests of Scotland and himself at the forefront of his counsel, unlike Diane, who advised Henri to his own personal advantage first. Mary had no such disinterested counsellor.
On reviewing the situation of her northern neighbour, Elizabeth had been advised that in Scotland ‘the fortresses are all in the hands of the French, and of the Queen Dowager, who, being a Frenchwoman, it may be said that everything is in the power of his most Christian Majesty who keeps some twenty thousand infantry there as garrison. That force being sufficient as in two days they can send over as many troops as they please.’ This was hugely threatening and Elizabeth was delighted that the young couple signed a treaty that had been made at Upsettlington in Berwickshire, declaring peace between England and Scotland, without any claims on the English throne. This seemed to draw a very satisfactory line under Câteau-Cambrésis and she instructed her ambassador, Nicholas Throckmorton, to ‘have good countenance towards them’. On 28 May 1559, Mary and François signed this treaty and, since François stuttered too badly on such occasions, Mary declared on his behalf that Elizabeth was ‘her good cousin and sister’. The witnesses were Henri and Catherine, for once without what had now become the normal presence of her Guise uncles.
Neither were the uncles present at the reception afterwards where Mary’s escort was the newly freed Constable Montmorency, who was keen to show Throckmorton the loyalty of France. Throckmorton warned the constable that his mistress the queen would ‘find the public display of Mary’s arms strange’, especially when the couple had signed a treaty disclaiming any right of inheritance. The constable dodged the question by saying that he was in a Brussels prison when the arms were painted, and since Elizabeth carried the fleur-de-lis of France on her arms it was lawful for the Queen of Scotland, being of the house of England and so near to the crown, to carry the arms of England. The first diplomatic sabre-rattling over this issue passed off peaceably.
With the return of Montmorency, Diane’s influence was increasing again and her granddaughter married the constable’s son. None of this pleased the Guises, especially when Montmorency’s nephew, Admiral Coligny (‘admiral’ was a rank that applied equally to soldiers and sailors, and Gaspard de Coligny was, in modern terms, a general) embraced the Protestant cause, which was close to the heart of Elizabeth. Henri’s view was that since the crown was Catholic, any deviation toward the Reformation was not simply heresy, but far worse. It was, quite simply, treason and could be dealt with by civil means without involving the clerical power of Mary’s uncles, whose influence was, for the moment, slipping away.
Throckmorton also noticed that Mary was unwell and she soon had to retire from court in a state of nervous collapse. He found Mary and Henri’s daughter, Marguerite, ‘somewhat sickly’ and on 24 May, visitors said she was ‘very ill, pale and green and withal short-breathed and it is whispered among them [the French court] that she cannot live long’. By 18 June, one of Mary’s attendants felt that she ‘was very evil at ease and to keep her from fainting were fain to bring her wine from the altar . . . I never saw her look ill . . . she cannot long continue’. In fact, Mary was suffering from chlorosis, or the ‘green-sickness’, an adolescent anaemia brought about by irregularities in her menstrual cycle.
The news of Mary’s imminent death was, of course, exactly what Elizabeth wanted to hear. Since she, like the Scots, had no knowledge of the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, safely in Henri’s hands, she believed that Mary’s death would put the crown of Scotland into the easily bought hands of Châtelherault and her path to servile pacification north of the Tweed would be clear. It would also remove a troublesome claimant to her own throne – thought by many, who proclaimed Elizabeth’s illegitimacy, to be the true heir to Henry VIII – a claim displayed in Mary’s heraldry itself. These arms were found ‘prejudicial to the Queen her state and dignity’ by Elizabeth’s loyal College of Arms.
These disputes over who carried what as their arms may seem petty to us today, but in a time without newspapers or television they represented the public signature of the sovereign. Most people would recognise that anyone displaying arms was a person of importance and the royal arms would be universally known, as would the arms of a local nobleman.
Mary had, in the year since her wedding in April 1558, gone from being the fairy princess gleaming with jewels to a political pawn. Largely unaware of the danger of the heraldic claims made on her behalf, she was now overtaken in importance by Montmorency, and was losing status thanks to her uncles’ temporary eclipse. Diane had taken no part in all of this, since, wisely, she was at Anet with the king, but Montmorency had fulfilled her wishes to gain supremacy over the Guises completely. The effect on Mary was typical. Whenever reality forced her to go against her wishes, or if she felt that she was being ignored, she collapsed physically. The manipulative lessons of Diane and Catherine may have been learnt, but she still lacked the political skill to put them into practice.
Much more to Mary’s taste were the preparations for the two weddings arising from the Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, although the first of them would deprive her of her childhood friend, Princess Elisabeth. These weddings were an essential move for Henri since they would cement a Catholic alliance with Spain and prevent any possibility of a similar alliance between Elizabeth of England and Philip. So keen was Henri on such a Franco-Spanish bond that he suggested his youngest daughter, Marguerite, as a bride for Philip’s son, Don Carlos. Philip, however, had decided on a single marriage and the Duke of Alba left t
he Netherlands with over a thousand in his retinue to act as proxy. Henri was disappointed in Philip’s non-appearance, only to be brusquely told that kings of Spain do not fetch their brides.
On 22 June 1559 the Duke of Alba placed his naked foot in a bed already occupied by Elisabeth and their toes touched. He smiled and, while his valet replaced his hose, the courtiers applauded. Elisabeth was now Isabel de la Paz, Queen of Spain, although she would not travel to Spain until 30 January 1560.
The Duke of Savoy had arrived in Paris with a similar entourage on the previous day (21 June) and on the 27th he vowed his betrothal to Henri’s sister, another Marguerite, who, still unmarried at thirty-six, was eager for her wedding to be held on 4 July as well. This would strengthen the clause of the treaty returning Savoy to its duke, who had been ousted by François I. The betrothal took place, not as Mary’s had at the Louvre, but at the Palais de Tournelles, where Henri planned a grand tournament to last five days in the Rue Sainte-Antoine in front of the palace. It was all supervised with great enthusiasm by Henri himself, who was in his element recreating the legendary past. The paving stones and street-side stalls had been taken away and replaced with an amphitheatre, raised boxes for the ladies, stabling for horses, an armoury and a tiltyard. There were triumphal arches with rooms for dressing, and, on each side, twenty-foot-high pillars surmounted by figures of victory. The royal box, with cloth-of-gold hangings studded with fleurs-de-lis, held Catherine and Henri, for once tactfully separated from Diane de Poitiers by Mary and her dauphin. The Dukes of Alba and Savoy, with their brides and fiancées, were in private boxes on either side.
On 28 June 1559, a company of lancers from the Dauphin’s company jousted successfully and the next day the gens d’armes from the noble houses of France followed them. The climax came on 30 June when François de Guise, Alfonso d’Este, Prince of Ferrara, and the Duc de Nemours challenged all comers. Henri, clothed in the black and white of Diane, with black-and-white feather plumes on his helmet and a black-and-white scarf on his lance, also entered the lists. The two heralds which came before the king were Scots, ‘fair set out with the King Dolphin and Queen Dolphin’s arms as all the world might easily perceive’.
Jousting is punishing physically, requiring strength as well as horsemanship since the object of the exercise is to break your lance, usually made of ash, on your opponent’s shield or armour. Deflecting the blow does not count for so much since withstanding the impact while unseating your opponent is the principal purpose. In the same year, at jousts held for the accession of Elizabeth in London, the Earl of Essex had met fifteen challengers and had broken fifty-seven lances. Essex, however, was a lusty teenager; Henri had turned forty, with a greying beard, although, with his usual male bravado, he made no concessions to his age and was still astonishing the court by playing enthusiastic tennis. The ever gloomy Throckmorton, having noted the continuing display of Mary’s quartered arms, reported that the king ‘overmuch exercised himself at tennis and other pastimes [and] was driven into a disease called vertigo’. Henri made his first two courses of jousting successfully enough, but on the third, against Gabriel de Lorges, Comte de Montgomery, the captain of the Garde Écossais, the king was nearly unhorsed. De Lorges, tactfully, acknowledged the king as the victor but Henri was having none of it and challenged de Lorges to run again. Catherine and the Dauphin begged him to let the matter rest and de Lorges at first refused to ride, but Henri, as his sovereign lord, commanded him and they hastily remounted, Henri on a Turkish stallion given to him by the Duke of Savoy.
The two horsemen met, and their lances shattered, but with disastrous results, as Antoine de Caraccioli, Bishop of Troyes wrote to Corneille Musse, Bishop of Bonito: ‘The king was struck on the gorget [the piece of armour protecting the throat] the lance broke, but the visor was not strapped down and several splinters wounded the king above the right eye. He swayed from the force of the blow and the pain, dropping his horse’s bridle, and the horse galloped off to be caught and held by the grooms. Helped from his horse, his armour taken off and a splinter of a good bigness, was removed.’ The jousting attendants immediately surrounded the prostrate king and administered rosewater and vinegar but failed to revive him. Throckmorton thought that ‘the hurt seemed not to be great’ and judged him to be ‘but in little danger’. The king fainted twice more and ‘lay like one amazed’. The Dauphin also fainted.
The king was taken to his chamber in the palace, the gates were locked and no one was allowed entrance. The unfortunate de Lorges begged the king to cut off his hand or his head but Henri said that de Lorges had done nothing requiring pardon, since he had been ordered to run the course and had ‘carried himself like a brave knight and a valiant man-at-arms’. Surgeons with forceps extracted some further smaller splinters from his face, purged him with rhubarb and chamomile, took twelve ounces of blood, purged him again, applied ‘refrigeratives’ and gave him barley-gruel. Overnight he ‘had a very evil rest, whereof there was great lamentations’. By next morning the entire royal family and the influential nobility were in urgent attendance. Montmorency told Elisabeth that the worst that could happen would be the loss of an eye and optimistic statements were issued, although they deceived no one. ‘There was good hope that he might recover as all his surgeons declared.’ However, Throckmorton now had little hope: ‘The king was very weak and to have the sense of all his limbs almost benumbed . . . he moved neither hand nor foot.’
The surgeons feared that the major splinter might have pierced the pia mater, the innermost membrane enveloping the brain, and even penetrated the brain itself. To find out more, they acquired the severed heads of recently executed criminals and drove similar splinters through their foreheads, but these experiments revealed nothing conclusive. André Vesalius, the most eminent anatomist in Europe and surgeon to Philip II, came hotfoot from Brussels but even he could do nothing. The king was dying. Several ambassadors and courtiers have recorded various versions of the king’s last words, but it seems likely that Henri simply swam in and out of consciousness in his sickroom, crowded as it was with doctors and family members. On the fourth day after the accident, it became clear that the wound was now seriously infected and the king fell into a violent fever.
Even if kings are dying, the dynastic business of the state must continue, and the marriage of the Duke of Savoy and Henri’s sister, Marguerite, took place. Since it was clear to everyone that Henri was nearing the end and that the wedding could not take place while the court was in mourning, it became now a matter of urgency. It could not be the splendid triumph that Henri had planned for his sister’s wedding, and perhaps not one to rival Mary’s, but at least it could be another demonstration of Valois splendour in the July sunshine. Perhaps those watching would forget that the nuptuals cemented a treaty returning French-held territories to their rightful, mainly Italian, owners.
In the present woeful circumstances no member of the royal family dared travel more than a few hundred yards from the king’s bedside and the ceremony was held in the nearby church of St Paul. Since Henri had fallen into a fitful sleep from which he was unlikely to awaken, the marriage took place at midnight in the sombre interior of the church already half-prepared for mourning. In the darkened chapel sat Catherine, in floods of tears, knowing that she was about to become a widow in a foreign country. Mary and the Dauphin sat holding on to each other in the hastily fetched royal thrones, fearful of what almost inevitably lay in store for them. Somehow Marguerite and the Duke of Savoy got through the ceremony and Marguerite rushed back to her brother’s side.
Next day the king received the final sacrament, and on 10 July 1559 at one o’clock in the afternoon he went into ‘a gigantic spasm and monstrous flailing of his limbs’, then fell back on his bed. A doctor put his ear to the king’s chest then straightened, shaking his head, as a priest laid a crucifix on Henri’s chest. The Dauphin fainted again and was carried from the room. With a rustle of silks, everyone else, including Catherine de Medici, turned from looki
ng at the now-dead king and dropped to their knees in front of Mary Stewart. At that moment the teenage Queen of Scots had also become the Queen of France.
CHAPTER SIX
She universally inspires great pity
In the streets workmen hastily tore down the festive hangings put up to celebrate Marguerite’s wedding and replaced them with funeral wreaths as cannon fired solemn salutes. ‘Hardly had Henri closed his mouth when François, Duc de Guise and his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine had seized the person of the king [François] and his brothers, [and] taken them to the Louvre along with the two queens, leaving the king’s body to the royal guard and the princes of the blood.’ Mary went first to St Germain – she was told it was for her own safety – and Catherine went to Medan, a few miles upriver, while the Guise coup d’état reached its completion in Paris.
In Paris, by 13 July 1559, three days after Henri’s death, it was reported that ‘the house of Guise ruleth and doth all about the French king. What will succeed further is unknown until the King of Navarre’s coming, which is uncertain.’ The King of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, was a vociferous antagonist of the Guise faction. He claimed that, since he was only fifteen, François could not appoint his own council and therefore Antoine, as the closest in blood, should be appointed regent; his arrival in Paris had been expected daily since the death of Henri. But on 18 July ‘the French king hath given him [the King of Navarre] to understand that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duc de Guise shall manage his whole affairs’. Antoine was a Bourbon who could trace his descent directly from Louis IX (St Louis) and had married Jeanne d’Albret, the niece of François I. However, fortunately for the Guise brothers, he was rarely other than weak, vacillating and indecisive.
An Accidental Tragedy Page 10
