CHAPTER FIVE

Queen-Dauphiness

Just as we see, half rosy and half white Dawn and the Morning Star dispel the night In beauty thus beyond compare impearled The Queen of Scotland rises on the world

Ronsard to Mary Queen of Scots,
translated by Maurice Baring

The French court, in true Renaissance fashion, desired its principals to shine out luminously against a background of endless pageantry; never were its wishes more splendidly gratified than in the marriage ceremonies of Francis, dauphin of France, and Mary Queen of Scots. The wedding itself took place on Sunday, 24th April at the cathedral of Notre Dame. The contemporary Discours du Grand et Magnifique Triomphe faict du Mariage gives a full description of the festivities, in which the writer himself seems to be frequently awed by the magnificence of what he is recounting.¹ Already in March, Henry had asked the French Parliament to stay at the convent of the Augustins, in order that its palace could be adequately and conveniently prepared. Notre Dame itself was embellished with a special structure outside in the antique manner, to make a kind of open-air theatre, and an arch twelve feet high inside. The royal fleur-de-lys was embroidered everywhere, and positively studded the canopy in front of the church.

The first sign to meet the eyes of the eagerly waiting crowds were the Swiss guards, resplendent in their liveries, who entered the theatre to the sound of tambourins and fifes. Then came Francis, duke of Guise, hero of France, uncle of the bride, and in the absence of the Constable de Montmorency, in captivity in Brussels since the defeat of Saint-Quentin, actually in charge of the proceedings. Then came Eustace du Bellay, the bishop of Paris, who considerately made sure that the view of the common people was not impeded so that they could see the show. Then came a procession, headed by a series of musicians, all dressed in yellow and red, with trumpets, sackbuts, flageolets, violins and other musical instruments. Then followed a hundred gentlemen-in-waiting of the king. Then came the princes of the blood, gorgeously apparelled, to the wonder, and presumably satisfaction, of the onlookers. Then came abbés and bishops bearing rich crosses and wearing jewelled mitres, and after them the princes of the Church, even more magnificently dressed, including the cardinals of Bourbon, Lorraine and Guise, and the cardinal legate of France (who had given the bride and groom the necessary papal dispensation for the marriage since they were cousins) who entered with a cross of gold borne before him.*

Now entered the King-Dauphin Francis, led by the King Antoine of Navarre and his two younger brothers Charles, duke of Orléans, and Henry, duke of Angoulême. Finally entered the centrepiece of the occasion, Mary, queen-dauphiness, led by Henry II and her cousin the duke of Lorraine. Mary Stuart, on this the first of her three wedding-days, was dressed in a robe as white as lilies, so sumptuous and rich that the pen of the contemporary observer fell from his hands at the thought of describing it. Since white was traditionally the mourning colour of the queens of France, Mary Stuart had defied tradition to wear it on her wedding-day; it certainly remained a favourite shade with her throughout her youth, and even in later years she loved to have something white about her face and neck: perhaps of all colours she felt that it set off her brilliant colouring to best advantage. On this occasion, her immensely long train was borne by two young girls; tall and elegant, she herself must have glittered like the goddess of a pageant, with diamonds round her neck, and on her head a golden crown garnished with pearls, rubies, sapphires and other precious stones, as well as one huge carbuncle worth over 500,000 crowns.

The young queen was followed by Catherine de Médicis, led by the prince of Condé, Mme Marguerite, the king’s sister, the duchess of Berry, and other princesses and ladies dressed with such grandeur that once again their robes could hardly be described for fear of repetition. The queen of Navarre had brought with her to Paris her six-year-old son, the future Henry IV, who at this wedding had his first sight of the capital which he was one day to make his own. At a given moment, the king drew a ring off his finger and gave it to the cardinal of Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, who thus espoused the pair, in the presence of the bishop of Paris; the bishop then made a wedding oration, described as being both ‘scientific and elegant’.

All the while, with typical concern for the reactions of the populace, the duke of Guise was touring the whole theatre with two heralds, making sure that the nobles were not blocking the view of the people in the streets or at the windows. When he was satisfied the heralds cried out loudly:‘Largesse! Largesse!’ and threw a mass of gold and silver pieces to the crowd, at which there was an immediate tumult and clamour as the people scrambled over each other to help themselves – so much so that some fainted and others lost their cloaks in their greed. Meanwhile all the nobility entered the church itself in the same order as before, to find another resplendent royal canopy, as well as gold carpets, within. The bishop of Paris then said Mass with King Henry and Queen Catherine on one side of the altar, and King-Dauphin Francis and Queen-Dauphiness Mary on the other; during the offertory, further sums of gold and silver were distributed outside. When Mass was over, the fine display of nobility paraded all over again, with Henry taking the greatest care to show himself to his people, although in the words of the Discours – ‘Monseigneur de Guise arranged everything’.

A long and Lucullan banquet followed in which only one jarring note occurred to mar the general rejoicing: in the course of the meal, the gracefully leaning head of the queen, on its frail neck, started to ache under the weight of the heavy crown which adorned it. King Henry had to command a lord-in-waiting, M. de Saint-Seuer, Chevalier de Saint-Crispin, to take the crown and hold it. If this ominous incident portended the danger of placing too heavy a crown on too young a head, no one at the time commented on the symbolism. Otherwise nothing untoward marked the celebrations, except that the Sire de Saint-Jehan, favourite of the dauphin, had his eye put out during the jousting: but even this minor tragedy was not held to mar the general sense of accomplishment. At the ball, Henry danced with Mary, Francis with his mother, the king of Navarre with the Princess Elisabeth, the duke of Lorraine with the Princess Claude, and so on down the royal scale. This was only the beginning: when the ball was over at four or five in the afternoon, the entire court then processed to the palace of the parliament, the gentlemen on horseback and the ladies in litters. In order to give the maximum pleasure to the people, they travelled by a different route, and the crowds who rushed in vast numbers to watch them pass, almost blocking their progress by their density, were rewarded by a sight of the new queen-dauphiness in a golden litter with her mother-in-law Catherine, and the new king-dauphin following on horseback with his gentlemen, their horses adorned with crimson velvet trappings.

A new order of entertainment now followed, organized by the duke of Guise as grand master of the ceremonies: indeed, although the dauphin wrote sadly to the constable at Brussels, regretting that he would be absent on the wedding-day of his ‘bon compère Francôis’,² it is doubtful whether the Duke of Guise shared his new nephew’s sorrow, since the marriage celebrations thus entrusted to him gave him a renewed opportunity to shine in the popular eye. The president, counsellors and officers of the Parliament were all present at the supper which now ensued, their scarlet robes mingling with glittering robes of the court. After a supper, a second celebratory ball was held, even more splendid than the first, and punctuated by an endless series of masks and mummeries, in which the royal family themselves took part. Twelve artificial horses made of gold and silver cloth were brought into the ball-room: the dauphin’s brothers, Charles and Henry, the Guise and Aumale children, and other princelings then mounted the horses, and proceeded to draw along a series of coaches with them which contained a number of bejewelled occupants singing melodiously. After this spectacle, in which the fact that the gem-studded passengers were intended to be pilgrims struck the only conceivable note of austerity, six ships were drawn into the ball-room; their silver sails were so ingeniously made that they seemed to be billowing in an imaginary wind, and the ships themselves gave the impression of truly floating on the ball-room floor. Each of these magic barques had room for two voyagers, and after touring the ballroom, the noble gentlemen at the helm selected the ladies of their choice, and helped them into their boats. Once again, however, in spite of the delicate fantasy of the scene, choice was dictated more by court ceremony than by the promptings of romance. The duke of Lorraine chose Mme Claude, the king of Navarre chose his wife, the duke of Nemours chose Mme Marguerite, King Henry chose his daughter-in-law and Francis chose his mother. The further magnificence of the occasion proved once again to beggar description – for as the author of the Discours observed, no one could really decide which was lighting up the ball-room more brightly – the flambeaux, or the flash of the royal jewels.

While distinctions of this esoteric nature occupied the contemporary observers, it is, however, possible for us, with hindsight, to see behind these elaborate ceremonies, which continued for several days, and discern the tarnish behind the tinsel. The land of France was virtually bankrupted by its prolonged struggle against the Empire, which had involved it in such time-, men-and money-consuming Italian wars. Yet Henry felt it essential to make this luxurious display, to uphold the prestige of the monarchy in the eyes of the people, and indeed the nobility. The king of Navarre whispered malevolently into the ear of the Venetian ambassador at the celebrations, ‘Thou seest the conclusion of a fact which very few credited till now,’ and hinted that the constable had steadily opposed this Guise marriage. The ambassador commented that the special pomp and display of the occasion was due to the fact that no dauphin of France had been married in Paris for two hundred years since they had all brought wives from abroad.³ It is, however, likely that King Henry was less impressed by the historical nature of the occasion than by his desperate need to wipe out the defeat of Saint-Quentin in the imagination of the populace.

There is no reason to suppose that this canker at the centre of the gilded apple of fortune which now lay within her palm was apparent to Mary herself. During the wedding ceremonies, she had fulfilled the role to perfection for which she had been trained since childhood. Her new husband loved her, and was scarcely likely to treat her as Henry had treated Catherine, since the danger of a Diane de Poitiers was remote in such an immature bridegroom. Boy-husband or not, he was nevertheless the dauphin of France, and Mary thoroughly enjoyed her elevated rank as queen-dauphiness, for which she felt herself to be eminently fitted, being unable to remember a time when she was not treated with deference as a queen in her own right. When she needed advice, her uncles were to hand, anxious to supply it. She enjoyed the feminine friendship of her sister-in-law Elisabeth, or her Aunt Anne of Guise. She was young. She was beautiful. She was admired. An ecstatic letter to her mother in Scotland, written on her actual wedding-day, is almost incoherent with happiness at her new state and mentions how much honour not only Francis but her new father-in-law and mother-in-law continually do to her.⁴ Scotland itself seemed far away. Although on her wedding-day, the great cannon of Edinburgh Castle, Mons Meg, was fired, the shot reaching as far as Wardie Moor, not many reverberations of either this or any other Scottish explosion were liable to be heard at the French court of which Mary was the most lucent ornament. The first few months of her new existence as queen-dauphiness were among the happiest and most carefree in a lifespan which did not turn out to include many such oases: this was indeed the time when Mary, like Faust, might have addressed the passing moment: ‘Linger awhile, you are so fair.’

The legendary beauty of Mary Stuart has been much vaunted. She was praised in her own day by her contemporaries, and in the four centuries since her death her charms have often been extolled in literature and poetry. It is interesting to consider whether she was, in fact, a beauty in the classical sense of the word, or whether her reputation was based on courtly flattery in her own day, and the romantic circumstances of her history ever since. A true estimate of her appearance is the more difficult to make because no authentic portraits of her exist, dating from the years of her personal reign in Scotland. We have no record at all of her beauty or otherwise from the age of nineteen to twenty-five, generally held to be the peak years of a woman’s appearance. The authentic portraits of her as dauphiness and queen of France, all done before she was twenty years old, are also comparatively few in number; yet it is on these we must rely in order to acquire an accurate impression of her appearance when she was in her prime, since the next series of pictures were done nearly twenty years later and spring from the years of captivity. Her beauty has sometimes been judged disparagingly on the evidence of these portraits – unjustly so, since by then it had naturally been somewhat impaired by the ravages of ill-health, and imprisonment, to say nothing of middle-age itself. The beauty of Mary Stuart should be judged firstly on the evidence of the French portraits of her youth; secondly, since beauty, that insubstantial quality, exists so powerfully in the eye of the beholder, it should be judged from the verdicts of her contemporaries who, flatterers or otherwise, had at least an opportunity of estimating her quality for themselves.

Whether she was a beauty by our standards or not, Mary Stuart was certainly rated a beauty by the standards of her own time: even the venomous Knox, never inclined to pay compliments to those with whose convictions he disagreed, described her as ‘pleasing’, and recorded that the people of Edinburgh called out ‘Heaven bless that sweet face’ as she passed on her way. Sir James Melville, an experienced man of the world who prided himself on his detachment, called her appearance ‘very lovesome’. Ronsard paid her superb tributes: he wrote of her hands which he particularly admired and their long, ringless fingers, which he compared in a poetic phrase to five unequal branches; he wrote of the unadorned beauty of her throat, free of any necklace, her alabaster brow, her ivory bosom. When she was a young widow, he wrote of her pacing sadly but gracefully at Fontainebleau, her garments blowing about her as she walked, like the sails of a ship ruffled in the wind.⁵ The word goddess was the one which seemed to come most naturally to Brantôme in writing of her: she was ‘une vraie Déesse’ of beauty and grace; he picked out her complexion for special praise, and described its famous pallor which rivalled and eclipsed the whiteness of her veil, when she was in mourning. Furthermore Mary had the additional charm of a peculiarly soft, sweet speaking voice: not only did Ronsard and Brantôme praise her ‘voix très douce et très bonne’in France but even the critical Knox admitted that the Scots were charmed by her pretty speech when she made her oration at the Tolbooth at the opening of Parliament, ‘exclaiming vox Dianae! The voice of a goddess … was there ever orator spake so properly and so sweetly!’ It was also a point on which even the most hostile English observers commented on her first arrival in that country, including Knollys and Cecil’s own emissary White.⁶

Her effect on the men around her was certainly that of a beautiful woman: the poet Châtelard fell violently, if slightly hysterically, in love with her; not only on the eve of his execution did he call her ‘the most beautiful and the most cruel princess in the world’, but on their journey back to Scotland he exclaimed that the galleys needed no lanterns to light their way ‘since the eyes of this Queen suffice to light up the whole sea with their lovely fire’. The Seigneur de Damville was also said to have been so enamoured of the young queen that he followed her to Scotland, leaving his young wife at home, and if we are to believe Brantôme, Mary’s little brother-in-law Charles was so much in love with her that he used to gaze at her portrait with longing and desired to marry her himself after the untimely death of Francis.⁷ In Scotland Mary’s beauty as well as her position was said to have captured not only the obsessional Arran, but the dashing Sir John Gordon and the youthful, handsome George Douglas. Her first English jailer, Sir Francis Knollys, although unpromising material for female wiles, was considerably seduced by the charming personality of his captive; and although the later so-called affair with Lord Shrewsbury was undoubtedly the creation of his wife’s malicious imagination, nevertheless the fact that the accusation could be taken so seriously by the English court shows that all her life Mary was considered a beautiful and desirable woman, whose physical attractions could never be totally left out of account. At the time of her illness at Jedburgh when she was twenty-three, the Venetian ambassador wrote of her being a princess who was ‘personally the most beautiful in Europe’.⁸ There seems no reason to doubt that this was the general verdict of Europe during her lifetime, and that Mary Queen of Scots was a romantic figure to her own age, no less than to subsequent generations.

Despite these tributes, a consideration of her physiognomy leads one to believe that Mary Stuart was not a beauty in the classical sense – to use the language of our own day, she was an outstandingly attractive woman, rather than an outstandingly beautiful one. Her most marked physical characteristic to outside eyes must have been her height, and it is said that when she fled to England from Scotland after her defeat at Langside, strangers recognized her by it. In an age when the average height of the men was considerably shorter than it is today, Mary Stuart was probably about five feet eleven inches tall, that is to say, taller than all but the tallest women today. She grew fast in adolescence, as her grandmother indicated in her letters. At her French wedding she is said to have stood shoulder to shoulder with her Guise uncles: obviously she inherited this height from her mother, Mary of Guise, who in her day was celebrated for her upstanding stature throughout Europe. Even at the date of her execution, when Mary was humped by age and rheumatics, an English eye-witness still noted that she was ‘of stature tall’;⁹ and the figure on her tomb in Westminster Abbey, modelled from details taken immediately after her death, is five feet eleven inches long. Yet clearly, this stature was never considered to be a disadvantage, and her height, when described, is always commented on with admiration.* This may be in part due to the fact that although tall, Mary had extremely delicate bones, unlike her mother who had much sturdier proportions. Mary’s height, and the slenderness of her youth, which lasted until ill-health and the troubles of captivity made her put on weight in middle-age, combined to give an appearance of graceful elongation: it also made her an excellent dancer, as both Conaeus and Melville bear witness, and a good athlete, who could hunt, hawk and even ride at the head of an army, in a manner calculated to dazzle the public eye at a time when the personal image of a sovereign was of marked consequence.

The portraits of Mary Stuart show that she had a small, well-turned head, and beautiful long hands; coins in particular reveal that she had a neck which was positively swan-like. One of her special charms was her colouring; the blonde hair of her childhood had darkened by the time of her marriage to a shade just lighter than auburn – a bright golden-red. The Deuil Blanc portrait† shows that her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a colour like amber, which today would probably be described as hazel, and this colouring was of course certainly set off to brilliant advantage by her incomparable complexion. Curiously enough Mary seems to have had rather similar colouring to her cousin Elizabeth, yet one woman was generally accounted a beauty by her contemporaries, and the other was engaged in a constant, tenacious battle to extract the reassurance of compliments from her courtiers, having been so deprived of them in youth. Possibly it was the quality of the skin which distinguished the cousins as young women: Elizabeth as a young girl was described as having a good skin of somewhat sallow (‘olivastra’) tint by the Venetian ambassador at the English court – and this was an age when a luxurious skin was considered a prerequisite of beauty.¹¹

It was Mary’s heavy lowered eyelids, under their delicately arched brows, which gave a brooding almost sensual look to her face, a physical characteristic which was to increase with age. Otherwise her features were extraordinarily firm and regular. The drawing of Mary as dauphiness shows that by the time she was fifteen, the soft roundness of her childish face had formed into a perfect oval. Although her nose was long, it was not yet pronouncedly so, and the slight aquiline tendency is only just perceptible in the drawing (illustration 7). Her chin was well-modelled, her mouth, fashionably small, had a pretty curve; she had a beautiful high ‘bombée’ forehead, which the caps and veils of the time set off to perfection; and her ears, although large, were elegantly made, and seemed indeed specially designed to bear the lambent ear-rings of the time.

Above all, in her length, her small neat head, her grace, we may suppose that Mary Stuart resembled the contemporary Mannerist ideal. A small bronze bust of her in the Louvre, possibly by Germain Pilon, which is regarded as an authentic if not necessarily contemporary attempt at her features when queen of France, shows the lovely leaning head, the long almond-shaped eyes, and the beautiful disposition of head, neck and shoulder. How significantly she resembled the Mannerist figures of the time, the elongated figures and angular disposition of Primaticcio’s designs, the long and delicate forms, the tapering limbs, thin necks and small hands of the figures in the Galerie d’Etampes at Fontainebleau, or the sculptures of Jean Goujon. It was the same grace and elegance which her contemporaries admired in Mary Stuart, the type of beauty which they were already learning to admire in art, and could now appreciate in life, all the more satisfyingly because it was in the person of a princess. Nor must it be forgotten that to these physical attributes she added the essential human ingredient of charm, a charm so powerful that even Knox was openly afraid of its effects on her Scottish subjects – and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, also upon himself. It was the charm of Mary Stuart, that charm which is at once more dangerous and the most desirable of all human qualities, which put the finishing touches to her beauty in the eyes of her beholders.

Not only the appearance, but also the character of Mary Stuart made her admirably suited to be a princess of France in the age in which she lived. The years she spent in France represented the classical period when art and architecture flourished there; it was a time when there was a remarkable flowering in all intellectual fields as writers and artists began to free themselves from the tutelage of Italy. Nor only did Primaticcio and Serlio prosper, but individual figures appeared like Philibert de l’Orme whose art was not only classical but genuinely French. Philibert de l’Orme and Goujon, on the one hand, and Ronsard and the Pléiade on the other, created the first original and independent movements since the Renaissance first touched France. This culture was firmly centred round the court, the court at which Mary Stuart glittered, and the tributes paid to her by the poets of the time make it clear that she was the ideal star to be shining in the firmament at this particular moment. She loved their company: ‘Above all,’ wrote Brantôme, ‘she delighted in poetry and poets, and most of all in M. de Ronsard, M. du Bellay and M. de Maisonfleur, who had made such fine poems and elegies for her, which I have often seen her read to herself in France and Scotland, with tears in her eyes and sighs in her heart.’¹² Mary was exactly the sort of beautiful woman, not precisely brilliant, but well-educated and charming, who inspired and stimulated poets by her presence to feats of homage, which were also able to take their place in the annals of literature. It was an admirable combination of artist and subject, of the sort which occurs throughout history; and Mary Stuart’s own verses, although of a simple and modest nature,* do at least illustrate her love and sympathy for the art of poetry.

The odes of Maisonfleur in praise of Mary Stuart have vanished from the eye; du Bellay, however, celebrated her personal attractions in several poems, including a sonnet in 1557, and a Latin poem celebrating her forthcoming marriage, in which he described heaven as endowing her with beauty of spirit and of face, together with royal grace and honour. With Ronsard the young queen enjoyed a genuine and long-lasting friendship: the fact that Ronsard had been in Scotland at the court of James v added a special poignancy to their relationship, since Ronsard understood the very different conditions of the island from which she had sprung, and to which she might one day return. In the first verses he dedicated to her, which appeared in 1556, he certainly reminded her of the fact, and how, since her arrival in France, he had served as her tutor in poetry, hailing her in lavish terms as ‘o belle et plus que belle et agréable Aurore’. It has been suggested that it was in response to a request from Mary that Ronsard published the first collected edition of his works in 1560;¹⁴ when she departed from France, he denounced the cruel fortune which had led Scotland to seize her. When Châtelard faced the executioner, according to Brantôme, he refused all other consolation except the hymns of Ronsard, which he had been asked by Ronsard to present to the Scottish queen. Four years after her departure, Ronsard sent Mary his newest volume by the French ambassador, and he boasted that he kept her portrait continually in front of him in his library.

It is sad to record that even Ronsard, despite these high-flown sentiments, occasionally deserted Mary’s shrine. In July 1656 he published a verse collection Elégies, Mascarades et Bergeries; although Bergeries is dedicated to the queen of Scotland, the first two portions are dedicated to the queen of England, and contain a quatrain suggesting that Queen Elizabeth rivalled in beauty the queen of Scotland, being two brilliant suns contained within the same island. For this outburst, he received a fine diamond from the queen of England. He may perhaps be forgiven for this temporary disloyalty for the beauty of his sonnet to Mary in captivity: he wrote that nothing now remained to him except the sorrow which unceasingly recalled to his heart the memory of his fair princess, and harangued with anger the queen who had imprisoned her – ‘Royne, qui enfermez une Royne si rare’. It was probably for this pledge of ancient loyalties, romantically renewed, that Mary’s secretary sent Ronsard 2000 crowns and Mary herself responded:

Ronsard, si ton bon cueur de gentille nature
Tement pour le respect dun peu de nouriture
Quen tes plus jeunes ans tu as resceu d’un Roy
De ton Rooy alie et de sa mesme loy …*

Her friendship with Ronsard illustrates how fully Mary enjoyed the pleasures of the French court to which she was so well suited. As Castelnau de Mauvissière, an experienced diplomat and man of the world, noted in his memoirs, she turned herself so completely into a French woman that she seemed not only the most beautiful of all her sex, but also the most delightful, both in her speech and in her demeanour.

There was only one small cloud in this summer’s sky – and still no bigger than a man’s hand. The exquisite fifteen-year-old queen-dauphiness who danced and hawked and hunted her way through the changing routine of the court’s pleasures, was able to pursue these pastimes more by the light of will-power than that of robust physical strength. The warning signs of ill-health which had existed during her adolescence had not been successfully brushed away. Her beauty was touched, and possibly enhanced, by a certain fragility. In the spring of 1559, Sir John Mason wrote complacently to Cecil: ‘The Queen of Scots is very sick, and men fear she will not long continue.’ He added the pious hope: ‘God take her to Him so soon as may please Him.’ In May, the English ambassador, Throckmorton, mentioned that the queen-dauphiness had been ill again, and when on 24th May the English envoys were conducted before the queen, Throckmorton pronounced a grave opinion: ‘Assuredly, Sir, the Scottish Queen in my opinion looked very ill on it, very pale and green, and withal short breathed, and it is whispered here among them that she cannot live long.’¹⁶ In June 1559, she was twice reported as swooning: once she had to be given wine at the altar, and on the second occasion the Spanish ambassador said he had heard that she was suffering from an unspecified but incurable malady. The following autumn Mundt wrote to Elizabeth in London that Mary was ‘in a consumption …’¹⁷ Yet whatever the young queen-dauphiness suffered from at this stage, it is clear that despite her pallor, her dizzy spells and her short breath, Mary also brought to her life an intense nervous energy which enabled her to lead an enormously active life when she was not actually suffering. A dangerous accident while out hunting in December 1559 when she was swept off her horse by a bough showed both her reckless courage and the straits to which it could lead her. This combination of a weak physique and overriding will was one which she shared, to some degree, with her husband Francis: it must have led to a bond between them.*

In September 1558 the first sour note was struck in the political existence of the dauphiness. On their way home to Scotland, the ranks of the nine Scottish commissioners who had come to France to arrange the marriage contract were suddenly struck by illness, as a result of which four of them died in one night, and James Stewart himself fell ill, although he recovered. In a letter to her mother of 16th September, Mary spoke of this decimation as being God’s will,¹⁹ but at the time another more sinister explanation was advanced. Knox murmured of poison, either Italian or French, as did Herries and Buchanan, and even Leslie noticed ‘through suspicion of venom, many wondered’.²⁰ It was suggested that the brothers of the queen-regent, the Guises, had determined to poison the commissioners because they had discovered something about the secret treaties which signed away the birthright of Scotland. It is true that it was vital to the Guises’ plans that the secret of the treaties should be preserved; on the other hand, almost every sudden death in this century was attributed to poison, on principle, by the commentators: if there was anything to the suspicions at all, it was curious that when the remaining commissioners presented themselves to the Scottish Parliament in November, they suggested no further inquiry into the matter, and put no obstacle in the way of the crown matrimonial being granted to Francis.

Another phrase used by Mary in the same letter to her mother showed that the realities of the French international situation were beginning to come home to her: she described how the French court were all ‘hoping for a peace, but this is still so uncertain, that I shall say nothing to you about it, except that they say the peace should not be arranged by prisoners like the Constable and the Marshal Saint-André’. The summer of 1558 had indeed been occupied with the general European desire for a peace settlement. Henry listened the more eagerly to the counsels of the peace party in France, not only because of the desperate state of his finances, but also because he was anxious to secure the return of his favourite, the constable, from captivity. The Guises, on the other hand, were far from anxious for a peace with England and Spain by which they feared that France would surrender many of her conquests abroad, and the rival Montmorency would triumph at home, and as Mary Stuart stressed to her mother, they felt it unworthy that a prisoner like the constable should have so much say in a peace settlement, whose main provision seemed to be to secure his return to France. Even when the negotiations for peace were begun at Cercamp, the open rivalry between Guises and Montmorencys was a feature of the French king’s entourage, Diane de Poitiers having by now thrown in her lot firmly with the Montmorencys. The negotiations at Cercamp did not culminate in peace until the April of the next year, when the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was finally signed.

In the interval, an event occurred of profound importance in the history of Mary Stuart. On 17th November, 1558 Mary Tudor, queen of England, died leaving no children. Her throne was inherited by her half-sister Elizabeth, an unmarried woman of twenty-five. Until such time as Elizabeth herself should marry and beget heirs, Mary was thus the next heiress to the English throne, by virtue of her descent from her great-grandfather Henry VII of England.* But the actual situation was more complicated than this simple statement reveals. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn; as Henry’s divorce from his first wife Catharine of Aragon had never been recognized by the Catholic Church, so Henry’s marriage to Anne was considered void by Catholic standards, and so Elizabeth herself was held by strict Catholic standards to be illegitimate and thus incapable of inheriting the English throne. By this process of reasoning, Mary Stuart should rightly have inherited the throne of Mary Tudor. The actions of Henry VIII himself did not help to clear up the confusion: in 1536 the English Parliament itself had debarred Elizabeth from the succession as illegitimate, and the Act which restored her to the succession in 1544 did not remove the stain of bastardy. Yet by the will of Henry VIII the throne was also debarred from going to a foreigner – which by English standards also ousted Mary herself from the succession. The troubles over this will, and Mary’s claim to have her place in the English succession after Elizabeth, lay in the future. At the moment of Mary Tudor’s death, the troubles were all the other way about, and involved Elizabeth’s right to be queen in the first place.

Immediately on the death of Mary Tudor, Henry II of France formally caused his daughter-in-law Mary Stuart to be proclaimed queen of England, Ireland and Scotland, and caused the king-dauphin and queen-dauphiness to assume the royal arms of England, in addition to those of France and Scotland. Up till the death of Queen Mary Tudor, England had been firmly allied to Spain, through Mary’s marriage to the Spanish king; Henry now hoped to redress the balance by making a French claim to English dominion. This eminently political action on the part of the French king was to be flung in Mary’s face for the rest of her life, down to the moment of her trial in England nearly thirty years later. Yet it seems certain that she had even less opportunity for judging the wisdom of her father-in-law’s behaviour on this occasion than over the matter of the secret treaties. ‘They have made the Queen-Dauphiness go into mourning for the late Queen of England,’ commented the Venetian ambassador, who was in no doubt as to where the initiative for these moves came from.²¹ At the time, the climate of French opinion was certainly such that Mary’s claims were considered no more than just: the French writers eagerly commented on the dauphiness’s English connection, and celebrated her accession to the triple crown in enthusiastic verse – as one of the Pléiade, Jean de Baïf, wrote, in a celebratory wedding song: ‘Without murder and war, France and Scotland will be with England united.’ Ronsard imagined that Jupiter had decreed that Mary should govern England for three months, Scotland for three and France for six. In another nuptial song, René Guillon described the match as the union of the white lily of France with the white rose of the Yorkists – an allusion to Mary’s Tudor descent.²²

The letters of the English ambassador were full of details to illustrate the manner in which these infuriating pretensions were being upheld by the French king: at the wedding of the Princess Claude at the beginning of the next year, a feature of the proceedings was that the dauphin and dauphiness bore the arms of England quartered with those of France. The state entry to the town of Châtelherault in November 1559 was marked by a canopy of crimson damask carried over Mary’s head with the arms of England, France and Scotland emblazoned on it. A canopy of purple damask with the French arms only was carried over Francis (by now the king of France) and the arms were painted on the gates of the town in the same fashion.²³ The English state papers show a definite preoccupation with the subject, understandable in view of the shaky English policy at the start of a new reign. But Melville also reported in his memoirs that the cardinal caused the arms of England to be engraved on the queen’s silver plate;²⁴ a great seal was struck bearing the royal figures of Francis and Mary, the date 1559 and the inscription round it referring to Francis and Mary, king and queen of the French, Scottish, English and Irish. Even while the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was being negotiated the cardinal and others made it their business to say that they doubted whether they should treat with any of England, save the dauphin and his wife.

The matter continued to be wrangled over after the accession of Francis. In February 1560 the government in London decided to point out to the French ambassador that although the English arms had first been borne by Mary under Henry II, she had not stopped bearing them with his death. Throckmorton had a long interview with the cardinal when he argued over the matter, saying that despite Mary’s admittedly English descent, she ought not to use the arms without any difference. In March the Council told Throckmorton to point out to Mary that ‘her father, the King of Scots, being higher than she, never bare the same; nor by the laws of the land is she next heir’. To this the bishop of Valence, on behalf of the French king and queen, made the somewhat disingenuous counterpoint that ‘the bearing of the English arms by the French Queen, was thought in France to be done for the honour of Elizabeth and to show that the French queen was her [Elizabeth’s] cousin’.²⁵

However, when peace was proclaimed between England, France and Scotland in 1560, Elizabeth herself consented to believe that Mary’s ‘injurious pretensions’ to the English throne sprang from the ‘ambitious desire of the principal members of the house of Guise’, rather than the wishes of either Francis, ‘by reason of his youth incapable of such an enterprise’, or the queen of Scots ‘who is likewise very young’.²⁶ The explanation which satisfied the English queen two years later we may also accept as being the true one. Unfortunately, once political necessity dictated another course, it no longer satisfied either Queen Elizabeth or her advisers, and the subject of Mary’s pretensions to the English throne, made on her behalf by her father-in-law before she was sixteen years old, continued to haunt her for the rest of her career.

1559, which became a year of death at the French court, seemed destined at its outset to be a year of weddings. The marriage of Princess Claude to the young and handsome duke of Lorraine was celebrated with magnificence in February. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, finally signed in April between England and France on one side and France and Spain on the other, provided that all the French conquests in Italy made during the last eighty years should be surrendered, and made arrangements for two further royal weddings. Mme Marguerite, the long-unmarried sister of Henry II, was to wed the duke of Savoy; Princess Elisabeth at the age of fourteen faced the prospect of marriage to Philip of Spain, freed for matrimony once more by the death of Mary Tudor. Mary Stuart’s last summer as dauphiness was spent in planning for the double wedding of these two beloved companions of her childhood, to be celebrated with the full regal panoply to which the French court was so well suited. As the Venetian ambassador commented, nothing was discussed at the French court but handsome and costly apparel.²⁷

Beneath these eddies of sartorial rivalry there were the undercurrents of more dangerous enmities. The constable and Diane de Poiters were now all-powerful with Henry II, and their own alliance was symbolized by the marriage of a granddaughter of Diane with the son of the constable. Moreover, the Montmorency faction was beginning to have Protestant affiliations, in contrast to the strong Catholicism of the Guises, since Montmorency’s own nephew Admiral Coligny had become a Huguenot. These Huguenot connections were also starting to be shared by the third powerful French family, the Bourbons, through their head, King Antoine of Navarre and his wife Jeane d’Albret. As the cardinal busied himself with preparations for the double wedding, it must have seemed to him that the fortunes of the Guises had taken a definite downward trend. At this moment, the volatile wheel of fortune, which the Guises had so often observed turning to their advantage in the past, was once again to take a dynamic revolution in their favour.

On 15th June the duke of Alva arrived to claim Elisabeth by proxy for his master Philip II, and on 21st June the proxy wedding took place, although as the young bride had not yet reached the age of puberty, it was decided that she should not depart for the Spanish court until the autumn. On 27th June the marriage contract was signed between Mme Marguerite and the duke of Savoy. There were endless tournaments and festivities, and the culmination of the double event – the wedding of Marguerite – was only a few days away. On 30th June, the king, magnificent in the black and white which he wore because they were the favourite colours of Diane de Poitiers, mounted his horse Le Malheureux and entered the lists along with the duke of Guise wearing red and white, the duke of Ferrara in yellow and red, and the duke of Nemours, commonly known to be enamoured of the duchess of Guise, in yellow and black. The king’s love of jousting amounted almost to a mania.* He broke three lances with the duke of Savoy, the duke of Guise, and Jacques de Lorge, count of Montgomery, a Norman with Scottish blood who was colonel of the archers of the guard and a man of renowned courage.

All went well until, on a sudden whim, the king challenged Montgomery to break a last lance with him. Apparently, with some presentiment of evil, Montgomery tried to excuse himself from the encounter, until Henry finally commanded him to obey as his sovereign. Now Catherine de Médicis tried to dissuade her husband, having had two visions of ill-omen about the tournament. Her daughter Marguerite tells us in her memoirs that on the previous night Catherine had actually dreamt of the death of Henry, pierced in the eye by a lance, exactly as it transpired. Henry merely replied that he would break one more lance in the queen’s honour. Catherine’s forebodings were justified: the shock of the meeting between the two resulted in Montgomery’s lance splintering; one splinter went into the king’s right eye, another into his throat. Throckmorton, the English ambassador, described the scene; Henry was borne off, ‘nothing covered but his face, he moved neither hand nor foot, but lay as one amazed’.²⁹

The king was carried to the nearby Hôtel des Tournelles, and here lay in a state of virtual unconsciousness for nine days. On 8th July, in a lucid moment, he ordered Queen Catherine to proceed with the marriage of Mme Marguerite and the duke of Savoy. The ceremony was bathed in extreme gloom: the church of St Paul, close by the Hôtel des Tournelles, was hastily decorated and at midnight the young couple knelt at the altar. Catherine sat alone on the royal dais, in floods of tears, while Francis and Mary did not even attend, but remained within earshot of the king. Jérôme de la Rovère, bishop of Toulon, said a Low Mass, trembling all the while lest he should find the herald at arms announcing the death of the king at the door of the sanctuary. As Henry felt himself dying, he called for his son and began ‘My son, I recommend to you the Church and my people …’ but he could not go on. He gave the dauphin his blessing and kissed him. That evening he became paralysed, his breathing was painful, and at 1 a.m. on 10th July he died with grossly swollen hands and feet, all showing signs of a virulent infection.

Queen Catherine was left to find gloomy consolation in the fact that the death of Henry II represented a signal triumph for the art of astrology to which she attached such importance. The king’s death had twice been predicted accurately, although of course neither prediction had served in any way to avert the king’s fate, this being a common disadvantage of this absorbing science. Catherine kept a tame astrologer, Luc Gauric, who predicted the death of the king in a duel – which was thought at the time to be extremely unlikely, as a king was seldom to be found in single combat.*

In 1555 the famous Nostradamus first published his prophecies, including the rhyme:

The young lion shall overcome the old one
In martial field by a single duel
In a cage of gold he shall put out his eye
Two wounds from one, then he shall die a cruel death.

Afterwards, it was pointed out that the tilting helm strangely resembles a cage, and that the king’s visor was actually gilded; the two wounds were held to refer to the splintering of the lance, piercing the throat and the eye. There was actually one outcry demanding the burning of Nostradamus, the man who had prophesied ‘so ill and so well’.†

Francis II was now king of France at the age of fifteen and a half, and Mary Stuart queen at the age of sixteen. In one blow of a lance, the fortunes of the Guises had changed. Their niece was now in the very seat of power. The stage was now set for their triumph, however short-lived. The day of Henry’s death was referred to afterwards by one wit as ‘the eve of the feast of the three kings’, and it was commonly asserted that there were now three kings in France, Francis of Valois, Francis of Guise, and Cardinal Charles of Lorraine – ‘one king in name only and two kings of Lorraine in effect’.³⁰ Immediately after his father’s death, Francis entrusted his father’s body to the constable, the Cardinal de Chastillon, Admiral Coligny and the marshal of Saint-André, and entered the coach which had come from the court on the Guises’ orders. King Francis entered first, and as Queen Mary hung modestly back, Queen Catherine forced her into the place of honour. The young king was taken to the Louvre, and by the time the deputation from the Parliament arrived, the government was already in the hands of the Guises.

When the Spanish ambassadors visited Queen Catherine to pay her their condolences, they found the room draped in black, the floor as well as the walls.³¹ The windows were shut, and there was no light except two candles burning on an altar draped in black. Catherine herself sat in a severe black dress with no ornament except a collar of ermine. The new queen of France on the other hand was dressed in white, the white which she had insisted on wearing for her wedding only fifteen months before, and which now she could wear in earnest as the colour of mourning. Catherine responded only faintly to the ambassador’s condolences, but the new queen, prompted by her uncles, made a gracious little speech, urging them to come often to court, and asking them to give her compliments to the king of Spain. In the course of her speech she took care to sing the praises of her uncles. At the funeral of Henry II, begun at Notre Dame on 11th August, and completed at Saint-Denis on 13th August, the role of the Guises was even more significant than it had been at the beginning of the previous reign. Cardinal Charles, as abbot of St Denis, presided over the interment. Another Guise brother, René of Elboeuf, held the hand of justice, Henry of Guise held the crown, Grand Prior Francis of Guise the sceptre, and the duke of Guise the royal banner of France. By making the young king, as one historian at the Guise family has put it, ‘their nephew by alliance, their pupil by necessity’,³² Mary Stuart had fulfilled the ultimate expectations of her family.

* Mary’s grandmother, Duchess Antoinette of France, and Francis’s maternal grandmother were first cousins; Mary and Francis were thus third cousins.

* When Melville told Queen Elizabeth that Mary was “higher’ than her, Elizabeth remarked jealously that the rival queen must be ‘over high’. But, of course, Elizabeth, despite her obsession on the subject of Mary’s beauty, never actually met her: no man who saw her ever suggested that the queen of Scots was ‘over high’.

† It has recently been pointed out that Mary was not wearing her white mourning in this portrait for Francis II, since the picture was painted some time prior to August 1560 when Throckmorton reported Mary’s intention of sending her portrait to Elizabeth, and how she commented to him: ‘I perceive you like me better when I look sadly than when I look merrily, for it is told me that you desired to have me pictured when I wore the Deuil.’ Mary was therefore in mourning for her father-in-law Henry or her mother, Mary of Guise.¹⁰

* The poem most commonly attributed to her, Adieu, plaisant pays de France, has been shown to be the work of an eighteenth-century French journalist. The authentic poetry of Mary Stuart can best be judged from the poignant lines she wrote on the death of Francis, the sonnet by her to Queen Elizabeth in 1568, and the poems written during her captivity, published by John Leslie.¹³

* Ronsard! Perchance a passing note of pain Speaks sometimes to thy heart in days gone by, When he who was thy king did not disdain To do thee honour for thy poesy …¹⁵

* For a discussion of Mary’s health in later life and the subject of porphyria see Chapter 22. It has been suggested that in youth Mary suffered from chlorosis, or ‘green sickness’, on the basis of Throckmorton’s description.¹⁸ Chlorosis is, however, usually associated with malnutrition and general lack of exercise, fresh air and sunlight in adolescents living in slum conditions. In her upbringing at the French court Mary certainly did not lack proper exercise, fresh air or substantial meals: nor is the puffiness of the face, generally associated with chlorosis, mentioned in any of the contemporary descriptions of her appearance.

* See genealogical table.

* He seemed to be in excellent health at the time although as Throckmorton had reported to London in May that the king was ill with vertigo, it is just possible that some giddiness afflicted him to explain the events that followed.²⁸

* Gauric also prophesied the death of Duke Francis of Guise correctly, saying that he would be struck down from behind. This met with annoyance as well as scepticism since Francis thought that the prophecy carried with it some implication of cowardice. He forgot that although only the back of the coward is turned towards the enemy, the dagger of the assassin also strikes from behind.

† Queen Catherine was not always so fortunate, in astrological terms, in the truth of the predictions which were made to her. When the future Charles IX was born, it was prophesied that he would one day be as great a king as Charlemagne – a prediction which he did very little to fulfil during his days as king. Another son, for whom Nostradamus equally prophesied a brilliant future, died only eighteen months after his birth.