CHAPTER THREE
‘The little Queen of Scots is the most perfect child that I have ever seen’
King Henry II of France
From the moment of her arrival in France, and indeed for the next twelve years, Mary Stuart was the focus of excited happy interest. The eulogistic poems and formal epithalamia which poured forth from the pens of French poets such as du Bellay and Saint-Gelais on the occasion of her marriage in 1558 were not more laudatory than the enthusiastic descriptions which were now penned by the entire French court as well as her Guise relations. Henry II himself set the tone. When asked what precedence Mary should be given, he ruled that ‘ma fille, la Royne d’Ecosse’ should walk before his daughters, the princesses of France, first of all because the marriage with the dauphin had already been decided on, and secondly because she was herself a crowned queen of an independent country. ‘And as such,’ he wrote, ‘I want her to be honoured and served.’1 In marked contrast to her childhood treatment in Scotland, where she was considered at first a sickly child, unlikely to live, and later a pawn in a dynastic game, even at five years old Mary was hailed as a figure of romance in France, a brave little queen who had been forced to flee the barbaric Scots, the cruel English, for the safe arms of all-embracing France. The stage was already set in French minds for the appearance of a childish heroine; to their satisfaction, Mary Stuart with her charm, her prettiness and the natural docility of youth, was ideal material to be moulded into the playing of this golden role.*
The first stage of her two-month journey towards the French court took Mary merely to Morlaix, where she was received by the lord of Rohan, accompanied by the nobility of the country, and lodged in a Dominican convent. She was then taken to the church, where a Te Deum was sung in honour of her safe arrival, which appears to have had but a limited effect, since on her route past the town gate, the drawbridge broke and fell into the river under the weight of horsemen. The Scottish lords in her suite, their natural suspicions of the foreigners unassuaged after a week in France, immediately started to shout ‘Treachery! Treachery!’, at which the lord of Rohan shouted out indignantly, ‘No Breton was ever a traitor!’ However, for the few days Mary remained at Morlaix, to pacify the Scots all the gates of the town were taken off their hinges and the chains of the bridges were broken.2
From Morlaix, Mary’s route lay overland to the Seine, and she then proceeded up the great river by boat towards the castle of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the royal children were then in residence. King Henry himself was absent from his family throughout the summer and autumn campaigning. A request for M. de Brezé to join him meant that Mary’s companion during her sea voyage now handed her over in turn to the care of her grandmother, Duchess Antoinette of Guise, who, it was planned, should smooth over the next period of transition before she reached Saint-Germain. Although we learn from de Brezé’s report to Mary of Guise, made many months later, that the whole journey was punctuated with tragedy – both guardians, Lords Erskine and Livingston, were severely ill, and one of the queen’s train ‘le petit Ceton’ (young Seton) died at Ancenis3 – this decimation of Mary Stuart’s suite seems to have passed comparatively unnoticed, since into her life now swept the formidable lady who was to exert one of the strongest influences on her childhood.
The kindly interference of Antoinette of Guise in her daughter Mary’s Scottish affairs, at the time of her marriage to James V, has already been noticed. Alone of Mary Stuart’s close relations, she was blessed with longevity, dying only in 1583, four years before her granddaughter’s execution, at the age of eighty-nine, though perhaps she herself did not view her longevity as such a blessing, since in the course of her life she was fated to witness time’s sickle cut such terrible swathes in her family that she in fact outlived all of her twelve children except one. The daughter of Francis, count of Vendôme and Marie of Luxembourg, she was married to Claude, duke of Guise at the age of sixteen. The birth of twelve children, between 1515 and 1536, was not a particularly remarkable feat by the standards of the time, but the vigorous strain of the Guises appears to have resisted the inroads of infant mortality with unusual vitality and of the twelve, ten survived; the mother of this remarkable brood was, in herself, a remarkable woman. She exhibited considerable administrative talent, which she handed on to her daughter Mary of Guise – not only at domestic economy, a subject at which she was considered to excel, but in the running of the vast and increasing Guise dominions, surrounding their palace of Joinville. Unlike her sons, she seems to have had a genuine streak of austerity in her disposition, and the great life of the court, the magnificent but insubstantial rewards of human glory, seem to have plucked no chord of sympathy in her nature. Her family pride, on the other hand, was enormous, and her sense of her sons’ destiny on a similar scale. Much later in her history, when Charles IX offered her a choice of rank as a princess of the blood, to which in spite of the pretensions of the Guises, she was not strictly entitled, she replied loftily that no rank could be more honourable to her than that of her husband.
Traditionally, she kept her coffin in the gallery which led the way to Mass, dressed herself in black and with a proper sense of her own end, reminiscent of Philip II of Spain, surrounded herself with objects necessary to her own funeral.4
Antoinette of Guise also possessed a vein of wry humour which doubtless enabled her to endure the many stresses to which a matriarch is subject, and maintain her health and courage intact. At Joinville, for example, her famous charity was dispelled with a certain amount of common sense. When a convent of nuns applied to her for funds for building, she is said to have remarked dryly: ‘Edifiez vos moeurs, et j’édifierai vos murs.’ Masculine frailty met with an equally practical approach: on one occasion Antoinette discovered that her husband was having a liaison with a village-girl, and that their trysting place was a certain little hut on the edge of the estate, called ‘La Viergeotte’. Without raising the subject of the girl with the duke, Antoinette merely asked him to meet her also at this particular hut; with some embarrassment, the duke agreed, only to find that the hut had been transformed into a luxurious nest of pleasure, decorated in palatial style, and now in his wife’s opinion worthy of his ducal position. Subsequently Duke Claude built a little castle on the spot, with the significantly interlaced initials, A and C, and the motto: ‘Toutes pour une: là, et non plus’.
Duchess Antoinette was in ecstasies at the appearance of her granddaughter, and wrote immediately to Mary of Guise in Scotland to express the measure of her approval; she also assured her that she would see about the little girl’s wardrobe, which, coming from Scotland, Mary of Guise obviously suspected might not be up to the elegant standards of the French court. The duchess was, however, a great deal less enthusiastic over Mary’s Scottish train, whom she described as thoroughly ill-looking and farouche, and with the exception of the captivating Lady Fleming, not even, in her opinion, properly washed. The duchess clearly shared the general desire of the French, whether on the part of the Guises or the court, to have the complete education of this child, and thoroughly expunge from her all traces of her Scottish past, which it was felt would ill equip her for her glorious future role as queen of France. The possibility that she might also one day have to act as queen regnant to her native land of Scotland was felt to be definitely subordinate. No qualms were therefore felt at the prospect of cutting the little Scottish queen off immediately from her Scottish attendants. Mary of Guise, however, with superior foresight, had sent instructions that Lady Fleming was to continue as her governess, despite the claims of a French woman, Mlle Curel. The duchess wrote back to say that her daughter’s wishes were being respected. Mary Stuart also retained a Scotswoman, Jehane St Clare (or Jean Sinclair), as her nurse; de la Brousse hinted to Mary of Guise that the nurse was difficult to please, for which he blamed her Scots blood (‘You know that nation,’ he wrote. ‘I need say no more.’), but Jean Sinclair was presumably merely grumbling at novelty, in the universal tradition of her profession, when finding herself in a foreign land.5
Antoinette has left us a physical description of Mary as she appeared to French eyes on her first arrival, in a letter to her son written in October. She is described as ‘very pretty indeed’ as well as being extremely intelligent, and her grandmother hastens to prophesy that she will actually be a beauty when she grows up, especially as the little queen is also graceful and self-assured in her movements. With the help of this letter, which as it was not written to the child’s mother seems candid enough, and the earliest picture of Mary Stuart, dating from July 1552, when she was nine and a half years old, it is possible to form a definite impression of her childish, preadolescent appearance. This drawing, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly, was done in response to a request from Catherine de Médicis for portraits of all her children, to include her future daughter-in-law, Mary; as the French queen was apparently weary of endless identical stylized profiles of her children, she asked that the picture should be done swiftly in crayon, to give some sort of genuinely child-like impression.6 The charming oval of Mary’s girlhood face is well captured: it is evident that her features were of the type inclined to be hawk-like in later life, which had a special attraction when still enveloped by the softness of youth. Her complexion was glowingly white, and the texture of the skin, as her grandmother noted, especially fine. The nose, which was to lengthen considerably as Mary grew older, was now still delightfully balanced in the contours of her face and Duchess Antoinette also commended her mouth and chin as being particularly well formed. The deep-set eyes of which her grandmother wrote were prettily set like two almonds beneath her high forehead; and their bright golden-brown colour contrasted with the fair, almost ashblonde, hair which Mary enjoyed as a young girl. All in all, it was not surprising that the French court and Mary’s doting relations were alike well satisfied with what they saw.
Duchess Antoinette now set in train the second part of the journey to Saint-Germain, which she reported to her son on 9th October she was making by slow stages. The care of the Guises for their nursling was more than matched by the solicitude which King Henry himself was showing, by letter, from a distance.7 So thoroughly were the cleaning operations of the castle of Saint Germain taken in hand on his instructions, that the children of France were still at the medieval fortress of Carrières when Mary arrived there on 16th October. Two months from her arrival on the soil of France, she was now propelled into the royal nursery. It is difficult to believe that any set of young princes in the history of Europe had been so fussed over, so lavished with care and attention, as the children of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis. The letters of their mother are replete with maternal anxieties of the sort most generally associated with mothers who have no nurses, rather than with a queen, who might be supposed to have at least the duties of the court to distract her. This devotion, this concentrated attention to the minutiae of a child’s existence, was fully shared during her childhood by Mary, who received in addition the extra care of her Guise relations: so concerned were they over her welfare that her uncle the cardinal, that great prince of the Church, appeared as worried over her toothache and her swollen face as about matters of national policy. Her grandmother, dedicated to the cause of her moral welfare, and her uncle, bestowing on her in youth the tenderness of a father, combined with the king of France himself, and the governors of his children, to make Mary Stuart’s upbringing one of rigorous supervision.
The solicitude bestowed in such rich measure on the royal nursery of France arose to some degree from the special circumstances of the children’s birth. Catherine de Médicis, a woman who has gone down to history as a mother before all else, and to whom much has been forgiven on these grounds, was for many years denied by fate the very role she most craved. Married off to a dauphin, Henry of France, with nothing to commend her but her relationship to the Pope and her dowry, lacking birth in the strict aristocratic sense, and lacking beauty in even the most prejudiced eyes of her allies, her early years at the French court were made still more unbearable by the additional torture of sterility. By 1538 there were rumours that she was to be sent back to Italy, to make room for some more nubile bride for the dauphin, one who would at least have achieved the state of puberty, unlike the wretched Catherine. What potions, what prayers, what magic arts Catherine summoned to her aid in her struggles with her cruel destiny will never be fully known. By 1540, with the help, it was said, of pills of myrrh given her by the famous Jean Fernel, she finally reached the state of puberty; by April 1543 she was at last pregnant. Finally, in 1544, Francis of Valois was born. He was sickly from birth, it was true, a weakness generally attributed to the many remedies his mother had taken both before and during her pregnancy, but for all that he represented security – he was a child, and he was an heir. The royal children of France followed in quick and satisfying succession. Elisabeth, later to be the third wife to Phillip II of Spain, in April 1545, Claude, who married the duke of Lorraine, in 1547, the future Charles IX in 1550, the future Henry IIIin 1551, Francis, duke of Alençon, in 1554, and Marguerite, the bride of Henry of Navarre, in 1553. Three other children died at birth. The princes and princesses thus made up in numbers what they lacked in rude health: none of them was robust and together they gave Catherine ample material for concern, from the right clothes for little Henry in hot weather, to the correct amount of food which each child should consume to make it either thinner or fatter.
Tenderness towards the royal children was not the sole prerogative of their mother. The constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, was also deeply involved in their welfare – it was indeed to the constable that Queen Catherine broke the moving news of her first pregnancy, saying that she knew that he desired to see her with children just as much as she did.8 Another powerful force in the royal nursery was that of Henry II’s mistress, the legendary Diane de Poitiers. The enemies of Mary Stuart, in her later career, have sometimes suggested that she was debauched in early childhood by the corrupting influence of this woman, who although already aged forty-eight when Mary arrived in France, exerted and continued to exert till his death the most total fascination over her royal lover. Diane de Poitiers, as her letters show, was a woman who, quite apart from her attractive interest in the arts, took an enormous interest in every part of the kingdom’s affairs. This was indeed a considerable part of her attraction for the king: she interpreted the role of mistress in the true Renaissance sense, rather than in the nineteenth-century style of a grand voluptuary. She herself had been married at the age of fifteen to a man much older than herself, Louis de Brezé, by whom she had two daughters, and with whom, as historians now agree, she led a blameless life. She has also now been acquitted of the accusation that she subsequently sacrificed her honour to Francis I, in order to save the life of her father, the Seigneur de Saint-Vallier; it was this smear which gave rise to the story that she acted as the mistress of two kings in her lifetime.9 Diane should be judged as the mistress of Henry II only, a position which she undertook as though she felt it her duty to exploit her undoubted assets – the beauty which age could not dim, intelligence, energy, and abounding health to support it all, health over which she took great trouble.
Her flagrant adultery with the king may contrast paradoxically to our notions with the excellent upbringing which she gave to her own daughters – Françoise who married the duke of Boillon in 1547 and Louise who married Duke Francis of Guise’s son in the same year – but to the age in which she lived, the paradox was not apparent. Equally, she exhibited, without any sense of impropriety, strong maternal instincts towards the king’s own children, and even on occasion towards his wife – for stories were told that she actually hustled the king towards the royal marriage bed, so seriously did she take the role of mistress. Certainly, she took infinite trouble to make both the Dame and Seigneur d’Humières her allies; she recommended a nurse for the royal children, and actually trained her at Anet first, to make sure she would give satisfaction; she inquired ceaselessly over Mme Elisabeth’s measles and other domestic matters; the subject of Charles d’Orleans’s wet nurse, and her suitability or otherwise for her task, runs through a whole summer of letter-writing. As Mary Stuart arrives at Carrières, we find that it is Diane who passes on the king’s request that Mary and Elisabeth should share a room, since it is the king’s dearest wish that they should become friends; again it is Diane who expresses Henry’s desire that the Scottish suite should be sent away, and the situation is accepted as perfectly natural.10
The first crucial encounter for Mary at the French court was with her intended husband, the Dauphin Francis. It is to be presumed that if these two children, aged nearly six and nearly five respectively, had heartily disliked each other on sight, the Scottish–French marriage alliance would still have proceeded. Nevertheless, the French courtiers hung over the meeting of the two royal children like so many sentimental cupids: whatever the contrast between the bouncing and healthy little girl, and the timid, sickly boy a year her junior, whose health had already been the matter of much concern, owing to the abnormalities of his birth, the meeting was nevertheless pronounced to be a great success. At the wedding of Francis of Guise and Anne d’Estea in December 1548, they danced happily together, as Henry II hastened to report to Mary’s mother, while the English ambassador looked on sardonically. A few weeks after the first meeting, Henry was writing to the duke of Guise that Francis and Mary already got on as well as if they had known each other all their lives. By the March of the year following, Constable de Montmorency, commenting on the love that the dauphin bore for his little bride, described him as feeling as much for her as though she were both his sweetheart and his wife – ‘sa mie et sa femme’ – a touching commentary on the contemporary conventions of feeling.11 On the principle of the sunflower and the sun, a frail child naturally rewards a more healthy specimen of the race with its admiration; a younger child hero-worships an older one; an unattractive child responds to a beautiful one by loving it. On all these counts, it was natural for Francis to love Mary Stuart, even if he had not been heavily encouraged to do so. As it is, the constant reiteration of tales of his somewhat pathetic passion for her, from many sources, make it certain that his adoration for her was indeed genuine, and not just the projection of courtly wishful thinking.
Since we have Brantôme’s word that Mary Stuart could only speak Scots when she arrived in France – barbarous and ill-sounding, he called it – she had evidently picked up enough French in the past two months, with the facility of childhood, to communicate with a fellow-child. Later, she was to be described, also by Brantôme, as speaking French with perfect grace and elegance: although she did not lose her Scots, French became the language which Mary naturally wrote and spoke for the rest of her life.12 Possibly it was the hope of bringing this about which had influenced Henry in his decision to send away the Scottish suite; even the four Maries were sent to the convent of the Dominican nuns at Poissy, where Prior François de Vieuxpont was charged with their education, instead of being kept permanently at their mistress’s side. It thus came about that the most intimate female friend of Mary Stuart’s childhood and adolescence was Elisabeth of France, younger by two and a quarter years, a friendship shared, to a lesser extent, by her younger sister Claude. With these two princesses, Mary Stuart had in common the elevating but separating gift of royal blood; the fact that Elisabeth also shared the same nurtured golden childhood made her the female human being of whom Mary Stuart felt herself afterwards to be most fond, and of whom she retained the most nostalgic memories in later life.
The portrait of Elisabeth by Clouet gives an attractive impression of her lively face, full but slanting eyes, dimpled chin and large faun-like ears: she has an air not so much of beauty as of enjoyment of life, as she looks coolly across her stiffly jewelled dress. In girlhood, she was a sweet-natured child, who loved to draw with Clouet, and also, according to Brantôme, was fond of poetry and music. Claude was also reported by Brantôme to be fond of learning, as had been her Aunt Marguerite, Henry’s sister, who did not marry the duke of Savoy until 1559, and was thus still part of the royal family at this date. Henry’s own daughter, Marguerite, the high-spirited heroine of many later adventures in French court life, was over twelve years younger than Mary Stuart, and only came into the royal nursery when the Scottish queen had already left it for the court; her exotic character can therefore have played no part in Mary Stuart’s actual childhood. The three brothers of the dauphin, whose tender health caused their mother such agonizing concern, were also sufficiently younger than Mary to play no effective part in these early nursery years, which are thus dominated by Francis and Elisabeth.
As yet, Mary had not encountered the father of the young family into which she was now adopted. This meeting finally took place in November. The confrontation from both points of view was eminently satisfactory. Mary Stuart saw a man of thirty years, swarthy and melancholy of visage, seldom smiling, obsessed either with the troubles of his government, or with the physical exercise for which he had a mania. Henry II, as one Venetian ambassador observed, found conversation with women difficult; it was part of Diane de Poitiers’s prolonged and successful hold over him that he enjoyed her somewhat masculine intelligence, where other women bored him. In children, however, he took a genuine and tender delight. Mary Stuart was fortunate in that she charmed him as a child, and successfully converted later the appeal of childhood into the more alluring appeal of femininity. Of Mary, he wrote quite simply that she was the most perfect child he had ever seen. Soon the cardinal of Lorraine was writing happily off to the child’s mother that the king had taken such a liking to her daughter that he spent much of his time chatting to her, sometimes by the hour together, and by the time Mary was eleven the cardinal was able to report proudly that she knew so well how to entertain the king with suitable subjects of conversation that she might have been a woman of twenty-five.13
The next ten years in the state of France were among the most ominous in her history – for they were the years in which the seeds of civil war were sown. As the realm floundered in inflation brought about by an endless series of foreign wars and rising prices due to the influx of silver from the New World, the lesser nobility turned away in vain from the crown, which could no longer support them financially, to the menacing circle of great nobles which surrounded the throne; now religious division also reared its head, to augment the nation’s woes. But although Mary arrived in France at the very outset of this disastrous period it would be wrong to paint these years in her life as anything but a time of untroubled private happiness, in which all the dramas were domestic, and the griefs and pleasures only the inevitable ones of every childhood.
It is often said that a secure childhood makes the best foundation for a happy life. In marked contrast to her cousin Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart enjoyed an exceptionally cosseted youth. It is left to the judgement of history to decide whether it did, in fact, adequately prepare her for the extreme stresses with which the course of her later life confronted her. What is certain is that the next six years of her life have a dream-like quality, in which she appears to have been cut off from the rough events of politics by a cocoon of servants and other satellites, whose only duty was to nurture the royal nurslings in as great a state of luxury as possible. Her life divided into two parts – at court with the princesses and with her Guise relations. The Guises were, however, fully aware of the value of maintaining their little half-royal cuckoo well and truly in the royal nest, and made no difficulties at the prospect of having her brought up so much at court – as Duchess Antoinette pointed out in January 1549, on hearing that Mary was sharing a room with Elisabeth, nothing was better for her future prospects.14
At this time the establishment of the royal children was by no means a fixed entity: it was essential that a household of such dimensions should be moved every few months in order that the castle which it had inhabited might be literally spring-cleaned. Mary’s life consisted largely of a series of glamorous journeyings under their aegis: for example, the royal accounts for the year 1550 show that in January all the children were at Saint-Germain until April, when they went to Fontainebleau. On Ist May they were back at Saint-Germain, on 4th October they were at Mantes-sur-Seine, and on 24th November at Bury in Touraine, to avoid an epidemic, staying on the way at Diane de Poitiers’s new palace at Anet. 1551 shows the same pattern of movement, with the children beginning the year at Meudon, in April at the palace of Blois, Mary herself at the court in June, then back to Blois, with the dauphin going to Chambord. In January 1552, the king took them all again to Saint-Germain.15
Unconsciously, Mary began to form the impression that these palaces of such splendour, such dimensions, were the natural habitat of royalty. To one who still dimly remembered the infinitely smaller castles of Scotland, the French palaces seemed like the grandiose dwellings of another planet. Fontainebleau and James V’s palace of Falkland, in Fife, for example, both had their original in the traditional royal passion for the hunt, yet how different they were in scale. Although Fontainebleau was far from completed in its ultimate estate when Mary Stuart first arrived there, the magnificent structure laid down by Francis I, the two wings joined by the lofty, painted gallery of Primaticcio, cannot have failed to impress her with its sumptuous display of Italian opulence grafted on to the French imagination. The completion and decoration of the famous ballroom, under the direction of Philibert de l’Orme, continued throughout the reign of Henry II: there the interlaced Hs and Cs still commemorate to questioning modern eyes either the king and his wife or the king and his mistress, Diane the huntress, whose symbol was the crescent moon. In the same way, the palace of pleasure which Henry built over the vast fortress of Francis i at Saint-Germain, safe on its strategic escarpment, was in the course of construction during Mary’s French life: but the immensity and scale of the buildings were already in existence. The châteaux of the Loire had in the main already been endowed with their fabled beauty and dimensions in the previous reign: to Francis i is owed the staircase at Blois and its exquisite Renaissance wing, another triumph of the Italian style in France. Chambord, with over 400 rooms, seems to foreshadow Versailles in the flourish of its enormous scale, the most spectacular of all Francis’s creations, for which work went on steadily despite the growing bankruptcy of the crown. The richness of its decoration, the impressive white mass of its building, the unforgettable north-west façade across the water, cannot have failed to leave an indelible impression on the mind of a child – that this was how monarchs lived.
It would seem that the favourite château of the royal children, the place they regarded as the source of supreme amusement, was in fact none of the actual royal dwellings, but Anet, the home of Diane de Poitiers, which she had built for herself as a sort of monument to the spirit of the goddess Diana with Philibert de l’Orme as architect. Du Bellay called it ‘Dianet’, playing on the name of the house and its beautiful creator, and the dauphin wrote with boyish enthusiasm of the pleasures of Anet – what a beautiful house; beautiful gardens! beautiful galleries! so many other beauties! Indeed, he has never slept better than when at Anet, in a huge bed, in the king’s own chamber.16 The position of Anet on the river meant that some endless journeyings of the court could be made conveniently there by barge. Today, even what still exists of sixteenth-century Anet dazzles the eye with the perfection of its detail, the exquisite gateway with its balustrade, the marble dome with marble brought from Rome, the statues of Germaine Pilon, the chastely elegant memorial chapel to Diane’s favourite colours of black and white. But under the sway of Diane de Poitiers, Anet was as remarkable for its reputation for douceur de vivre, as it was for the novelty and beauty of its buildings.
These constant journeyings meant that each month dawned with new pleasures for the children. Their daily trappings were equally exotic. They were, for example, surrounded with pets – in 1551 there were four big dogs and twenty-two little lap dogs, as well as falcons and pet birds. Horses there were in abundance, Fontaine and Enghien being the dauphin’s favourites, and Bravane and Madame la Réale the favourites of Mary Stuart; horses also frequently formed the subject for presents, since the dauphin, despite his frail physique, had the typical burning passion of the Valois for the chase. At one point the royal nursery was even sent two bears by the Marshal de Saint-André, although the cost of keeping them in food proved to be prohibitive, and in addition there were tiresome reparations to be made for the damage they did, as for example at Blois, where the home of one Dame Pillonne suffered from their ferocious attentions. The children were shown wolves and boars, wild animals from Africa. There were also two-legged amusements – troops of travelling actors and Italian acrobats were stopped on their route by the royal governor to entertain his charges, by performing ‘farces et buffoneries’; a maître de danse was dispatched from the court by the king; there were bills also for choirs of singers, and the players of tambourins. There were bills for materials for the royal children to make the sweets of which they were particularly fond. 83livres, spent on a ball for the marriage of one of the princesses’ chambermaids, gives the impression that the slightest occasion for rejoicing was seized on by this pleasure-loving household.*17
The moves of the royal household, delightful as they may have been for the children, meant endless upheaval for their servants: they frequently entailed staying at meagre villages en route, where villagers were apt to be angry at the loss of their food to the grand strangers. Roads were difficult and the quantity of luggage involved was a constant problem, as were the beasts to carry the luggage, whom the stable men had somehow to find or commandeer. Consequently transport, wherever possible, was made by river, as at Anet. The mountain of luggage used by the children was in part accounted for by their wardrobes. It was thought right that Mary Stuart should be more richly attired than the princesses, to mark her future position as their brother’s bride. Her accounts reveal both the abundance and the formality of a royal child’s wardrobe: yards of shot red and yellow taffeta for dresses, dresses of gold damask, dresses of black edged with silver, canvas and buckram to stiffen the dresses, white Florentine serge stockings, a vasquine or type of farthingale to hold out the dresses, shot taffeta petticoats and orange taffeta petticoats lined with red serge. Her accessories are equally elaborate: there is mention of bonnets of silver thread and black silk, orange wool to be dyed scarlet for stockings, furs to trim her clothes. Shoes are plentiful – ten pairs of ordinary shoes in the accounts of 1551, three white, three purple, two black and two red and also white, yellow, red and black velvet shoes. There are bills for exquisite embroideries on the clothes – rose leaves of gold thread for caps, and a bill for the embroidery of a device on a favour of white taffeta which Mary gave to the dauphin. There are bills for leather gloves of dog-skin and deerskin. The accessories are in keeping with the rest: a black velvet purse to keep the combs of the queen of Scots in, a crystal mirror covered with velvet and silk ribbons, gold and silver paillettes to be sewn on to her clothes, endless chains, collars and gold belts, as well as three brass chests to hold her jewels, which included a chain of pearls and green enamel, a gold ring with a ruby in it, and jewelled buttons of many different colours and shapes.19
The attendants who surrounded Mary Stuart and the French princesses were on the same lavish scale: indeed much of the troubles of their peregrinations arose from the enormous quantities of servants who were thought necessary to maintain their estate. The royal household had already grown to alarming proportions before Mary Stuart’s arrival, so that by the end of 1547 Henry was forbidding d’Humières to engage any more servants; but it swelled again on the Scottish queen’s appearance. Chamberlains rose from four in 1550 to ten in 1558, and maîtres d’hôtel from four to seven. The stables were burdened with attendants to cope with the royal baggage, and the baggage of the household. There were five doctors, thirty-seven pages of honour to grow up alongside the dauphin (although these at least received no wages), porters, four masters of the wardrobe, two general controllers, and twenty-eight valets de chambre at differing wages to carry the infant princes, feed them and serve them. In order to attend to the babies the Dame d’Humières had twenty-two ladies of various ranks under her command. The number of apothecaries rose from one to three, barbers from one to four, pantry aides from two to six – although it may be noted that in all this panoply of service, there was provision for only two laundresses and one bearer of water, leading one to suppose that the royal nurseries were more luxurious than they were hygienic. The kitchen was especially well endowed with roasters, soup-makers and the like, the numbers once again perpetually on the increase. Indeed, when one considers the vast amount of food consumed either by the children or more probably by their attendants, one can see that in the royal nursery of France, wages, attendants, children and cost chased each other upwards in a spiral reminiscent of the economy of a modern state. On one day alone, 8th June, 1553, the household consumed over 250 loaves of bread, eighteen pieces of beef, eight sheep, four calves, twenty capons, 120 chickens and pigeons, three deer, six geese and four hares.20
Despite all this concern for material well-being, the need for more spiritual attainments was not neglected. Education was taken seriously at this Renaissance court, and Catherine de Médicis, herself nourished in the atmosphere of Italian learning, was a considerable patron of the arts. In the past it was considered that Mary must have been a child of considerable academic brilliance, since Brantôme described her reciting a Latin speech of her own composition before the king and entire court, before she was twelve years old. Certainly she learnt Latin, but the discovery of a book of her Latin themes in the last century has corrected the impression somewhat and shows that, with respect to Latin, Mary was more of an earnest student than a prodigy.21 These Latin themes now exist in the shape of a bound book, with the original French themes set by M. de Saint-Estienne or some other tutor on the left-hand page, and the Latin on the right-hand page. Some are in the form of letters to Princess Elisabeth, occasionally jointly with her sister Claude. Two letters are directed to the cardinal of Lorraine, one containing the suitable, if somewhat priggish sentiment: ‘Many people in these days, mon oncle, fall into errors in the Holy Scriptures, because they do not read them with a pure and clean heart.’ Curiously enough, one of the letters is actually addressed to John Calvin: but there is no evidence that the letter with its solemn, childlike invocation, ‘Christus filius Dei te avocet, Calvine’, was ever actually dispatched and it seems extremely improbable that it should have been more than a youthful exercise, the original inspiration for which remains obscure.* Many of the themes are occupied with the names of learned women and girls, as befits a princess of the Renaissance, and probably many of them were actually done in preparation for the famous Latin speech.
Mary Stuart as a child neither had nor was trained to have the brain of the calibre of, for example, an Elizabeth Tudor. She was, however, by nature bright and quick, with a pliant turn of mind which her governess praised, because it made her eager to learn. Her schoolmasters, chosen by Catherine, included Claude Millot and Antoine Fouquelin. In true Renaissance fashion, she was given all-round education; she learnt not only Latin, but Italian, Spanish and apparently some Greek;* she learnt to draw; she learnt to dance, an art at which she was universally agreed to excel both in childhood and in later life; she learnt to sing – the songs of Clément Marot were special favourites; she learnt to play the lute, for which Brantôme described her long white fingers as being ideally suited.22Graceful, athletic, she was above all anxious to please those around her.
Her letters to her mother, the earliest, preserved in the Register House at Edinburgh, dating from the age of seven, show her as having a clear, legible hand, remarkably like the even, rounded hand-writing which she retained for the rest of her life (although with age the writing grew considerably larger). This early, polite little note – whose neatness probably bears witness to some sort of overseer – ends with the characteristic salutation of any seven-year-old child to its mother – M. de Brezé will give her all the rest of her news, thus saving her daughter a longer letter.23 Mary Stuart’s letters to Mary of Guise bear witness to the enormous interest which the mother took in the smallest details of her daughter’s upbringing, despite the distance which separates them: the sphere in which she appears to have exerted the strongest influence of all is that of her daughter’s religious education. Mary of Guise laid it down that her daughter was to hear daily Mass; she was given a French chaplain of her own, Guillaume de Laon, as well as retaining her Scottish one, the prior of Inchmahome, who stayed with her in France out of devotion, and without wages. In all the travels of the court, care was taken to transport the young queen’s own communion vessels, so that she could receive the sacrament from them, without any risk of infection; her accounts include payments for a coffer in which to carry these vessels around.24 The religious education of the royal children was supervised among others by Pierre Danes, professor of Greek and later bishop of Lavane, and Jacques Amyot, abbot of Bellosaire and translator of Plutarch.
Happily, Duchess Antoinette was able to report to Mary of Guise that her daughter was extremely devout. When the duchess and the cardinal felt that it was time for the child to make her first Holy Communion, Mary wrote to her mother eagerly of her desire to do so. She was at her grandmother’s at Meudon for the feast of Easter, and requested the necessary permission, not only because her grandmother and her uncle thought it right, but also because she herself fervently desired to ‘receive God’. Mary signed herself: ‘Your very humble and obedient daughter, Marie’.25
In 1550 Mary of Guise herself came to France to judge the progress of her very humble and obedient daughter. Her letters of 1549 show her to have become increasingly depressed and lonely in Scotland, for which the internal situation certainly gave her just cause; she longed to consult with her brothers on her best course of action, as well as to see her daughter and son Francis again; furthermore, there was the perennial vexed question of her French dowry, whose emoluments were more than ever necessary, as a result of her financial straits brought on by maintaining the French troops in Scotland. This visit represented the central point of Mary’s childhood; overjoyed at the prospect, she wrote off ecstatically to her grandmother: ‘Madame, I have been very glad to be able to send these present lines, for the purpose of telling you the joyful news I have received from the Queen my Mother, who has promised me by her letters dated April 23rd that she will be here very soon to see you and me, which is to me the greatest happiness which I could wish for in this world, and indeed I am so overjoyed about it, that all I am thinking about now is to do my whole duty in all things and to study to be very good, in order to satisfy her desire to see in me all that you and she hope for …’26 Evidently Mary had conceived a sort of hero-worship for her mother, a superior being, the female equivalent of her splendid uncles, an image of strength, reliability and comfort, whom she wished to do her best to impress.
Mary of Guise landed at Dieppe in September, and arrived at the court, which was then at Rouen, on 25th September. Her household had made detailed preparations for the journey to fashionable France – although the recent death of the dowager’s father, Duke Claude of Guise, meant that her own clothes were all of black, and her ladies at brightest in grey velvet and taffeta.27 Mary Stuart had had a dangerous attack of flux in early September, but she was apparently well enough to be present at the regal reception which Henry and Catherine gave to her mother in Normandy. Throughout all the next winter, the dowager queen of Scotland enjoyed the plentiful pageantry of the court ceremonies, and enjoyed also the company of her daughter. Nothing seems to have marred the love which existed between mother and daughter, when a year later Mary of Guise sailed back to Scotland again; having had what turned out to be the last sight of her daughter in her lifetime, she left behind such strongly growing roots of love in her daughter’s heart that the young Mary had a virtual nervous breakdown with grief at the news of her death in 1560, even though she had not actually seen her for nine years.
In other spheres than that of mother and daughter relations, the visit of Mary of Guise to France was considerably less successful. She herself marred it to a certain extent by her financial importunities towards the French king: anxious as she was to pave the way for her final assumption of the regency of Scotland as soon as possible, she was determined to secure as many honours and as much French money as might be available for her Scottish train, in order to bind them to her. Her personal finances were also desperately in need of succour, her servants’ wages were in arrears, she was forced to borrow from her friends such as the countess of Montrose and Elizabeth, countess of Moray, who could ill afford it, and also to lean on the Scottish merchants as a possible source of aid.28The lawlessness of Scotland had increased mightily in the last two years, and hatred of the new foreigner – the French who were now attempting to administer this apparently barbaric country, by their own lights – was succeeding ripely to the previous hatred of the English. In May 1551 Sir John Mason reported from Tours that the dowager of Scotland was making the whole court weary of her, from the highest to the lowest, by being such an importunate beggar for herself and her chosen friends. ‘The King,’ said Sir John, ‘would fain be rid of her, and she, as she pretendeth, would fain be gone.29
Two untoward incidents also marred the atmosphere of the visit. In the first place – although no hint of it reached the young Mary’s own ears – her daughter’s safety did not seem to Mary of Guise to be totally secure. At the end of April 1551 a mysterious plot for poisoning the young Scottish queens was discovered;30 it was devised by an archer of the guard named Robert Stuart, but a certain mystery hangs over the whole conspiracy, and it has never been made clear exactly why, or at whose instigation, the murder was supposed to take place. The French ambassador in London reported to the Constable de Montmorency in France that a Scot named Henderson had revealed to him Stuart’s fell design. The would-be assassin had suggested to Lord Warwick and Lord Paget that by committing such a crime he might render valuable service to the English Council. Warwick, by his own account, expressed horror at the proposal, and sent Stuart to prison, but finally let him be extradited to France. Stuart was thus imprisoned in the castle of Angers, and finally hanged, drawn and quartered, without the enigma of his true inspiration or purpose ever being cleared up. It seems an unlikely moment for the English government to have sponsored any such plan: firstly, the English had not yet given up all hope of the eventual marriage of Mary Stuart and Edward VI, and when Lord Northampton came on a formal embassy to France in the summer of 1551, to convey the Garter to Henry II, he once again applied for the Scottish queen’s hand. Secondly, the English were not noticeably enraged by the refusal of the French to entertain the proposal – a refusal which they had certainly anticipated. Northampton took the denial calmly, and according to his instructions, merely applied formally for the hand of the Princess Elisabeth for the English king, in the place of that of Mary Stuart.31
The second untoward incident was the flagrant love affair which sprang up between Henry II and Mary’s governess, Lady Fleming. The king’s eye lighted on the pretty Scotswoman comparatively early in her stay at the French court, for de Brezé reported on the success she was having, and with perhaps a certain lack of taste, Henry himself took the trouble to write to Mary of Guise and tell her what an excellent job Lady Fleming was making of her task as her daughter’s governess. Regarded as captivating by her admirers, Lady Fleming also appears to have had a strongly irritating streak, which involved her enjoying her success at the French court to the full, but making little effort to accommodate herself to French ways in a manner which would smooth the path of the Scottish queen’s household. When the question of a doctor for Mary Stuart arose, a letter from Giovanni Ferreri to the bishop of Orkney puts forward the name of a certain Scotsman, William Bog – ‘so learned he will bear comparison with any Frenchman’ and also particularly adept at ‘diagnosing Scottish temperaments’.32 The understanding of Scottish temperaments was felt to be particularly essential in this case, because not only was Mary’s ‘temperament’ held, for medical purposes, to be Scottish, but also Lady Fleming would not otherwise be able to explain what was wrong with her mistress, as she was incapable of communicating with a French doctor.
Constable de Montmorency saw in Lady Fleming’s charms, and their effect on the king, an excellent opportunity of spiting his established enemy, Diane de Poitiers. The liaison did not succeed in toppling the favourite, but it did result in the incautious Lady Fleming giving birth to a son, Henry, later known as the Bastard of Angoulême, whose famous agility in later life at Scottish dances at the French court bore permanent witness to his hybrid heredity. According to Brantôme’s wittily malicious report, Lady Fleming scandalized the court by exclaiming aloud in French, which she spoke with a broad Scottish accent: ‘I have done all that I can, and God be thanked, I am pregnant by the King, for which I count myself both honoured and happy.’33 Her happiness at her condition was short-lived: her indiscretion was punished by her being sent home to Scotland, as a result of the combined wrath of Catherine and Diane, to whom no interloper was tolerable, and Mary was given a new governess in the shape of Mme de Parois.
The departure of Mary of Guise first to London, where the French fashions of her ladies impressed the English court, and then to Scotland for a renewal of the harsh struggle for stable government, marked the breaking of one more Scottish link in Mary Stuart’s childhood. Even Mary of Guise’s last weeks in France were marked by tragedy, for her son Francis of Longueville, who had greeted the arrival of his half-sister in France with such generous boyish enthusiasm, and declared her to be the most charming sister in all the world, died suddenly in September 1551, the victim of some swift, childish disease. ‘I think, Madame, that Our Lord will that I should be one of His own,’ wrote Mary of Guise sadly to her mother on the subject, ‘since he has visited me so often and so heavily.’34
The substitution of Mme de Parois for the errant Lady Fleming marked a further step in the obliteration of Mary’s Scottish personality. Mary still loved to dress herself up in Scottish national dress. She even managed to charm the French with the spectacle, although to their critical gaze her attire seemed dreadfully outlandish, if not downright bizarre: however, as, according to a French print current at the time, ‘Scottish dress’ for a girl consisted merely of a series of wild animals’ skins draped about the person,*perhaps the dismay of the sophisticated French court is not too difficult to understand. At all events it was the graceful deportment and queenly bearing which Mary brought to her garb which was generally felt to carry the day. But for all Mary’s enthusiasm for her native country or its customs Scottish clothes were by now for her definitely a form of fancy dress. Patriotism, wilfulness or the desire to please might lead her to don them: nothing could alter the fact that with the passing of every year, the progress of Mary towards becoming a French woman – a child of the smooth land of France rather than of the rugged land of Scotland – became still more marked.
* It is noticeable that the French love affair with Mary Stuart has been gallantly continued by many French historians; this point of view may be summed up by the words of the eminent chronicler of her childhood, Baron de Ruble, who, writing in 1891, describes: ‘les belles années qu’elle passa en France, jusqu’à la date néfaste où ell fut obligeé d’échanger le séjour de son pays d’adoption, un riant climat, la cour galante et polie des Valois, l’espérance d’un règne glorieux, contre l’Ecosse, un ciel brumeux et le commerce plein d’aigreur et de perfidie des lairds presbytériens’.
* One charming tradition concerning the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots is not founded on fact: there is a story that the word ‘marmalade’ originated when a chef in the royal kitchen stirred and stirred his oranges muttering over and over again the words: ‘Marie est malade’ until the oranges turned into a delicious golden mixture. Unfortunately, the word ‘marmelade’ was already in use in 1480, deriving from the Portuguese marmelo (a quince).18
* The editor of Mary’s Latin themes, A. de Montaiglon, suggested that Mary might have heard the name of Calvin often mentioned since an edition of his Institutes was published in Paris in 1553. But there is no record of any such edition in France, either in French or Latin, before 1562. An edition of the Institutes was published in Geneva in 1554.
* Her Scottish library contained Greek books.
* Plaid of a sort was already known at this date, and Mary later wore it in Scotland; but tartan, in the form we know it today, was not, and nor was the kilt.