CHAPTER SIX
‘Alba rosis albis mine insere lilia …’
Nuptial song on the marriage of Francis and Mary,
referring to the union of the white lilies of France
and the white roses of the Yorkists
On 18th September, 1559, the young Francis was solemnly crowned king of France at Rheims: his consort Mary had already been crowned queen of Scotland in babyhood and unlike previous queens of France had thus no need of further coronation to confirm her royal state. The weather was wet and windy. Nor was there any great display of pageantry on this occasion, owing to the recent and shocking death of Henry II: Throckmorton noted savagely that the city was scarcely decorated at all ‘save that the arms of England, France and Scotland quartered were brimly set out in the show over the gate’.1 Francis himself wore a coat of black velvet and Mary alone of the ladies who attended the coronation was not dressed in dark colours. The day after the ceremony, court mourning was resumed for a year to mark the late king’s death. Although the ancient crown of St Denis had been placed on his head, the real power in France was very far from lying within the puny grasp of Francis II. The English ambassador Throckmorton analysed the situation as follows – the old French queen (Catherine) had the authority of regent, although she was not in fact regent in name; in the meantime the state was governed by the cardinal of Lorraine and the duke of Guise jointly, the duke having charge of the war, and the cardinal the ordering of all other affairs including finance and foreign affairs. The Venetian ambassador noted that the Guises now conducted secret inner discussions on matters of policy, just before official meetings of the Grand Council: these conferences took place either in Francis’s chamber or in that of Queen Catherine.2
This political ascendancy had its parallel in the domestic arrangements of the new king and queen of France: Guisards were made gentlemen of the bed-chamber to the king, and Mary’s new list of domestic officers was headed by those ladies who were to receive 800 livres in wages, including Antoinette of Guise, Anne d’Esté, the duchess of Aumale and the marquise of Elboeuf – her grandmother and her three Guise aunts. One of Mary’s first actions after the death of Henry II as a formal expression of her joy at coming to the throne was to make a donation to the grandmother who had contributed so much to her upbringing. The court of France, with Francis, Mary and Catherine at its head, now resumed the endless journeyings which characterized its way of life. These travels were prompted by a variety of motives, including the calls of the chase, domestic convenience and in certain cases the dictates of security or politics. In the first instance the entire court proceeded to Blois to wait for the signal of the departure of young Elisabeth to Spain; from Blois the royal cortège went to Varteuil, and from there to a snow-strewn Châtelherault, which they entered at the end of November. On 25th November Queen Catherine finally permitted her child to depart, with grief so extreme that even the Spanish ambassador was moved by it. Mary herself was equally distraught at the prospect of the departure of her friend: she entrusted Elisabeth with a touching letter to King Philip from his new sister-in-law, saying that she could hardly bear to part with Elisabeth, were it not for the fact that she knew Elisabeth would be happy and contented in her new life. Nevertheless for Mary herself the loss would be irreparable. She ended her letter by begging the Spanish king to receive it ‘as from the person who loves her [Elisabeth] the most in the world, and who wishes always to be – Vôtre bien bonne soeur Marie’.3
With Mary and the royal family immersed in their personal sorrow, the Guise brothers were left to grapple with the internal government of France, which represented at this period a problem which other less bold spirits might, with considerable justification, have shrunk from tackling. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis had not come in time to save France from cruel inflation, induced by the economic demands of the Italian wars. It has been estimated that at the death of Henry II the treasury staggered under a war debt of forty million livres the theoretical resources of the crown were ten million livres, but the actual income only amounted to about half this, and the interest on the royal debt consumed it. At the same time the kingdom was being rapidly dissected by the presence of two religions, as French Calvinism became the natural target for discontent with the central authority.4 Even if the country had not been plunged in such grave economic problems, some sort of regency, de facto if not de jure, would have been necessary for the young Francis. At the age of fifteen and a half, when he ascended the throne, his intelligence was scarcely more developed than his physique. In youth, like many other boys he had loved to hunt more than he had loved to learn, but since he was the dauphin of France, not enough pressure had been exerted to redress the balance. The result was that his mind, without being actually feeble, as his body was, had never really developed to the point when the possibilities of power and government excited him. As a king he lacked the necessary self-restraint to attend to the business of government when pleasure offered, his tutors in youth having concentrated more on the importance of the actual role he would play than the importance of the duties which were attached to it. The enemies of the Guises accused them of encouraging their nephew in his pursuit of pleasure in order to have the government of the realm to themselves. But there was no need to carry out such a policy of corruption, their work had already been done for them by the over-protective upbringing of Catherine de Médicis, who had with all her loving, maternal care developed only self-importance, not self-discipline, in her son.
The nature of the king’s character was fully appreciated by the watchful ambassadors at the French court. His routine was understood to be dominated by his frantic love of hawking: in December 1559 he was reported as having retired to Chambord till Christmas, to which the Chancellor of the Privy Council was obliged to repair in order ‘to arrange his finances for the next year’. In March 1560 when the king refused to see the English ambassadors, giving out that he was ill, their immediate instinct was to suspect that he was merely playing truant ‘as the king is wont to go abroad very often to amuse himself for several days without transacting business’. This was an age when monarchs were still expected to reproduce in themselves the personal qualities of greatness, to win the admiration of their subjects. Duke Francis of Guise owned much of his prestige to his physical courage: despite her frail health Mary Stuart was famed for being personally fearless. King Francis, on the other hand, was timid by nature. He had a certain pathetic dandyism, a love of display revealed by his personal accounts, where swords were made with hilts coloured to match his various costumes; but this was no substitute for the careless courage so attractive in princes.5 He lived in fear for his personal safety, which made it natural for him to depute the government of the kingdom happily to those he felt best able to secure it.
Francis was demonstrably incapable of ruling without guidance. But the vital regency – as it was in practice but not in name – was not surrendered to his wife’s uncles by the other great nobles of France without a struggle. The powerful family of Bourbon postulated strongly that the king was not, in fact, legally of age at all, being only fifteen. Not only had he no right to choose his own counsellors, but being still a minor, he should automatically accept the first prince of the blood as regent: this was of course none other than King Antoine of Navarre, head of the House of Bourbon. Behind this weak and indecisive figure-head stretched the shadow of his restless, ambitious and hot-headed younger brother Louis, prince of Condé, a recent Huguenot convert, and the sworn enemy of the Guises. An anonymous memoir of October 1559, which detailed these points, not only accused the Guises of trying to cut off Francis from his friends, but of aiming at putting the crown on their own heads, by emphasizing their spurious descent from Charlemagne. A Guise reply ‘Pour la majorité du Roy très chrestien Françôis deuxième’ by Jean du Tillet, bishop of Saint-Brieul, concentrated on the use of texts, laws and customs to prove firstly that the king of France traditionally came of age at fifteen, and thus had the right to choose his own Council, secondly that the regency in the past had not always been given to a prince of the blood, but on occasions also had been given to queens of France, and to the abbots of St Denis.6
King Antoine, having failed to assert his claims, withdrew from the court; the prince of Condé on the other hand took refuge in the Huguenot counter-plots which were the origin of the conspiracy of Ambroise. The spring plans of Francis and Mary and their court included a visit to Blois, and then on to the ancient medieval fortress of Amboise, where it was planned that the court should pass the Lenten season. Although this schedule was known to the Spanish ambassador at Christmas, the knowledge somehow eluded the Huguenot rebels, who laid their plans on the basis of finding the king at Blois – an infinitely easier centre to attack than Amboise, where the king was surrounded by his army. Condé was only the ‘silent captain’ of the enterprise, and did not appear in public as its leader. The ostensible ringleader of these Huguenot anti-Guisards was one La Renaudie; their aim was to seize the person of the king, with the immediate object of freeing him from the tutelage of the Guises, and the ultimate intention of setting up a new and Bourbon regency.
Amboise withstood the siege of the conspirators, and at the instigation of the cardinal of Lorraine the insurrection was punished by hideous reprisals in the streets of the town itself, while the chief rebels, having been tortured, were hung publicly in front of the castle windows after dinner in order that the court might enjoy the edifying sight. La Renaudie died bravely, protesting his loyalty to the king, and maintaining to the last that his only quarrel had been with the Guises. The cardinal, however, adroitly took the opportunity to point out to Francis that the fact that La Renaudie died so defiantly only went to show how cruelly he would have treated Francis if he had succeeded in capturing him. The blood-stained sight from the castle windows did not please every member of the French court. The gentle and tender Anne of Guise was so appalled at what she saw that she wept aloud, and cried out (all too percipiently, as it turned out) what a wealth of vengeance and hatred would fall on the heads of her innocent young sons in consequence. Nor is there any evidence that Mary, who all her life was characterized by a remarkable horror of bloodshed and positive aversion to violence, actually witnessed the hangings. It would have been remarkable if this delicate girl, whose health was a source of constant concern to those around her, and whose swoonings were a feature of court life, should have been considered a suitable spectator for these gruesome scenes.*
Quite apart from natural affection, there was another special reason for the great concern which the Guises always showed over the health of their niece. Although the Guises were accused of wishing to establish a Guise dynasty on the throne of France, it was an infinitely more practical plan to uphold the existing semi-Guise dynasty on the throne of France, in the persons of Francis and Mary, who were not only currently dominated by Guise influence, but whose children with their share of Guise blood would one day rule after them. The only flaw in all this planning was that there was as yet no dynasty, no clutch of Valois-Guise children to lay up security for the future – only an adolescent boy and girl both of them cursed with precarious health. Whether these frail creatures could be relied on to produce any child at all was very much open to question.
The question of the consummation of the marriage of Francis and Mary, owing to the delicate nature of the subject, rests in the sphere of probabilities rather than that of certainties. Yet it is of obvious importance in tracing the development of Mary’s character not only in France, but later in Scotland in the course of her confrontation with Darnley. The true facts of the situation are somewhat obscured because contemporary commentators understandably concentrated their observations on the simple issue of whether Mary was likely to conceive a child by Francis or not; whereas in the history of Mary, it is of equal interest to consider whether she had any sort of physical relationship with her first husband, or whether at the time of her return to Scotland she was still in fact a virgin. There was never apparently any doubt in the minds of those observers at the French court who had watched the young king grow up, that the queen of France would not produce a child, or if she did, as the Spanish ambassador crudely put it, ‘it will certainly not be the King’s’. Regnier de la Planche’s derisive comments on the king’s withered anatomy have already been noted (see footnote on p. 83). Although, to the joy of the Guises, Francis started to grow up somewhat once he became king, La Planche’s description of physical deformity suggests that there was no real hope of conception, even if in other respects he could be held to have attained puberty before he died. The fact that he was unable to conceive a child was also well known at court on the basis of his deformity, for this was an age when the public nature of royal life meant that problems, even of such an intimate nature, could not be kept altogether secret from the watchful ambassadors: when the Spanish ambassador in Brussels told the English ambassador categorically that it was out of the question that the Scottish queen should bear a child, he was probably acting on back-stairs palace gossip, reliable if scandalous.8
This does not altogether rule out the possibility that the marriage was in some fashion consummated. At the time of the wedding, the Venetian ambassador at the end of a long account of the ceremonies, reported that the marriage had in fact been consummated that night, indicating the respective ages of the young couple. In spite of the warnings of the doctors, Francis had not died in childhood, but had grown to the age of fifteen; the Guises presumably hoped that time would wreak a further miracle with his physique, and that he would one day be able to procreate the longed-for Valois and Guise heir. There is evidence to the effect that, despite the cynicism of the court, Mary herself believed that her marriage was a complete one. A month after the death of Henry II, when the Spanish ambassadors came to bid her adieu, they found her extremely pale, and she almost fainted.9 She received the letters of credit of the duke of Alva swooning and, supported by the cardinal, was lifted on the bed of the king. Chantonay made haste to tell the Spanish king that the general rumour was that the French queen was pregnant. Mary herself assumed the floating tunic, the conventional garb at the time for pregnant women, and the court went to Saint-Germain for the sake of better air for her health. However, by the end of September, these interesting rumours perished for lack of further support. Mary abandoned her floating tunics. There was no further mention of a royal pregnancy, and it was in fact only three months later that Challoner was able to report back to England the information which he had received in Brussels from Count de Feria.
To what then do we attribute these summer vapours of the young queen? Logically speaking, if there was to be any question of Mary being pregnant, however mistaken, the marriage must have been consummated. Unfortunately this is not an area where logic can necessarily be said to obtain. The general hope of the court, and the passionate desire of the Guises, was that Mary should conceive a child. This desire, which she herself heartily shared, must have been communicated to her most strongly. In this case, it seems likely that Mary transformed in her mind the feeble passion of the king into a true consummation of her marriage – indeed at the age of sixteen, the natural ignorance of youth must have made it all the easier for her to do so. In the same way she transformed in her mind the symptoms of ill-health into the symptoms of pregnancy: in the November of the previous year the English ambassador had reported that Mary was ‘very ill and looked very pale and on the 12th kept to her chamber all day long’.10 The following autumn, when Mary was actually queen of France, and the need for an heir increasingly urgent, it was easy to persuade herself that these symptoms, from which she had in fact suffered all her youth, had suddenly become those of pregnancy. Yet the king’s undeveloped and probably deformed physique and generally infantile constitution make it extremely unlikely that anything more than the most awkward embraces took place between them; whether or not Mary was technically a virgin when she arrived in Scotland, she was certainly mentally one, in that her physical relation with Francis can hardly have given her any real idea of the meaning of physical love.
Troublesome as was the internal situation in France, the situation in Scotland was not much better – and here again religious differences mingled with those of civil policy. French troops were sent in increasing numbers to the assistance of the queen regent, and the expedition of La Brosse, authorized by Francis and Mary in November 1559, included several doctors of the Sorbonne who were sent with a view to taking part in theological disputes with the Scottish Protestants if the occasion offered. In their turn, the Scottish insurgents being Protestant lords of the congregation, appealed for aid from Protestant England. When in October 1559 the duke of Châtelherault (the former Arran) joined the party of congregation, he presented them with a titular leader who had a claim to the Scottish throne. In October of that year the insurgents even occupied Edinburgh temporarily, announcing that, since Mary of Guise had brought French troops to conquer Scotland, it was now lawful to suspend her from her authority. But the Scots rebels – or reformers – did not make any true headway until a firmer alliance was concluded with England in the following spring. By the Treaty of Berwick, signed on 27th February, 1560, between Scotland as represented by Lord James and the Scottish lords of the congregation on behalf of Châtelherault in England represented by Norfolk, lieutenant of the north, it was stated that the English were to intervene for the preservation of the Scots ‘in their old freedom and liberties’. Under these auspices English troops now came into Scotland, and besieged Leith, occupied by the queen regent and her French troops: significantly, the campaign was known as ‘the War of the Insignia’ in England, because of Mary’s use of the royal arms.
The Treaty of Berwick on the Scottish borders had virtually coincided with the Tumult of Amboise in France: since Francis was thus unable to provide further military help for his wife’s dominions, it was decided to take the more sensible course of negotiation. By a commission dated April 1560 Francis and Mary authorized M. de Montluc, M. de Pelvé and M. de la Brosse to try to bring back their Scottish subjects to obedience by peaceful means, including a promise to forget past wrongs, and also authorized them to treat with the English queen if necessary. As a result of these negotiations, culminating in the Treaty of Edinburgh which was concluded on 6th July, 1560, it was agreed that both English troops and French troops (save sixty in Inchkeith and sixty in Dunbar) should withdraw from Scotland, and that Francis and Mary by giving up the use of the English arms should thus recognize Elizabeth’s title. On 15th July the English army moved away, and the French troops also started to embark; Lord St John was sent to France to ask Francis and Mary to ratify the treaty. This ratification was, however, never destined to take place, since on 11th August the Scottish Parliament promulgated a Protestant confession of faith, and five days later abolished the Pope’s jurisdiction, and prohibited the celebration of Mass under the pain of death for the third offence. In a historic gesture, the process now known as the Scottish Reformation was thus officially brought to birth. It was Parliament, not the queen, that had acted as the midwife: although constitutionally speaking, the enactment which produced the Reformation needed the queen’s assent, in fact it never received it. The Scottish Reformation was a strictly parliamentary will, the whole image of the Scottish monarchy had been altered in the mind of the people.
This long-term effect, however, was certainly not visible to Mary at the time. From the distance of the French court, it was difficult to realize that Queen Elizabeth had been constituted the protector of Protestantism in Scotland, whether she liked it or not, and that logically the Protestant Scots would turn to England rather than France for help in the future. Still more difficult was it to envisage that if Mary ever returned to her native country, her French Catholic connections would inevitably go against her, that a country which had newly reformed its own religion by act of Parliament without assent of the sovereign would regard the combination of her monarchical power, French upbringing and religious convictions as threatening its status quo.*
In the spring and summer of 1560, however, the Scottish insurgency made its chief impression on Mary as a series of appalling troubles which faced her mother, to whom she felt an almost pathetic devotion from a distance. She identified the religious rebels of Scotland with those of France, unaware that the temper of the Scottish people was changing towards the new religion, whereas in France religious opinion was sufficiently if tragically balanced to result in long and stultifying wars. A letter to her mother, describing the coming mission of M. de la Brosse and M. d’Amiens to Scotland, dating probably from the end of March 1560, is lavish in its promises of love and assistance, saying that she swears she will not let her mother down, since the king, she knows, has a passionate desire to succour her, and has given Mary his word that he will do so. Mary begs her mother to care for her health, and to trust in God to help her in her adversities – for God has already helped her so much in all her troubles that surely He will not abandon her now when she needs Him more than ever.12
Unhappily the health which Mary so passionately wished for her mother, eluded her. This gallant woman who faced an alien people, and attempted to do at least the best she could in the cause of peaceful administration, was severely stricken with dropsy. She was seriously ill before November 1559, and by April of the next year was far gone with the disease. On 11th June, only a few weeks before the final settlement of the Treaty of Edinburgh, she died, horribly swollen and in great pain. Knox rejoiced over her end; he saw in it the hand of God taking vengeance on her for her behaviour at the siege of Leith, when she was rumoured to have exulted over the corpses of the Protestant dead (although such behaviour is more characteristic of Knox himself than of the merciful Mary of Guise). ‘And within a few days thereafter yea, some say that same day,’ wrote Knox, ‘began her belly and loathsome legs to swell, and so continued till that God did execute his judgment upon her.’
Previously, Knox had described Mary of Guise’s assumption of the regency with equal contempt – ‘A crown was put upon her head … as seemly a sight … as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.’13 But in fact Knox, as often when writing with his pen dipped in acid, did Mary Guise an injustice as a ruler. In an extraordinarily difficult situation, she had tried to do her best, and carry out the advice of her brother the duke of Guise – ‘To deal in Scotland in a spirit of conciliation, introducing much gentleness and moderation into the administration of justice.’ On occasions she was even prepared to carry out these counsels against the advice of her Guise brothers who had given it to her: as Regnier de la Planche himself admitted, Mary of Guise’s plans for Scotland had always included acting gently and slowly by the use of Parliament and it was the Guise males who rejected this course, saying that their sister might be a good woman, but she would wreck everything by her tender methods.14 In her introduction of the French administrators Mary of Guise also genuinely believed she was benefiting the Scots, since she was frankly appalled at Scottish administrative methods. As for Scottish laws she wrote of them that they were the most unjust in the world, not so much in their provisions, as in the manner in which they were carried out, and when one considers the internal state of Scotland in the age in which she arrived there, particularly in areas like the borders, where administration was either non-existent or archaic in the extreme, it is easy to understand how she derived this impression.
Despite her own sincere Catholicism, Mary of Guise also possessed sufficient balance and political acumen not to identify the reformed religion immediately and totally with the forces of darkness. In 1555 D’Oysel’s hopes for a good reception among the Scots were dashed by what he described as the totally selfish attitude of the nobility, who wanted each one to be their own petty tyrant. But it was not until the events of late 1557, when the nobility of Scotland refused to fight under her banner against England, that Mary of Guise herself gave way to feelings of angry distrust for these treacherous lords, Catholic and Protestant alike. Even in 1559, when Henry II instructed that heresy was to be stamped out in Scotland, according to Melville, Mary of Guise still protested against her orders: although committed to a policy of French domination, on Mary’s behalf, by which she hoped to preserve Scotland for her daughter, Mary of Guise nevertheless attempted all along to implement this policy in the most humane manner. The English certainly both feared and admired her intellectual qualities: Thomas Randolph wrote apprehensively of ‘the Dowager’s craft and subtleties’. Throckmorton admired her ‘queenly mind’, and over the peace negotiations wrote to Cecil for the love of God ‘to provide that she were rid from hence, for she hath the heart of a man of war’.15 When she was on her deathbed, Mary of Guise summoned the lords of the Congregation to her side, and in an affecting interview asked them to believe that she had genuinely favoured the weal of Scotland as well as that of France. Whether the lords believed her or not, we can at least accept her word that by her own lights she had done so.
The news of the death of Mary of Guise was known in France on 18th June, but was kept from her daughter until 28th June – with good reason, as it turned out, for Mary Stuart’s grief when she finally did receive the news was heart-rending, and she underwent one of the physical collapses which inordinate sorrow was apt to induce in her. Michiel, the Venetian ambassador, had already paid tribute to Mary’s devotion to her mother, saying that ‘she loved her mother incredibly, and much more than daughters usually love their mothers’. Now he reported: ‘The death of the Queen Regent of Scotland was concealed from the most Christian Queen [Mary Stuart] till the day before yesterday, when it was at length told her by the Cardinal of Lorraine; for which her Majesty showed and still shows such signs of grief, that during the greater part of yesterday she passed from one agony to another.’*16 Nor were poor Mary of Guise’s earthly troubles entirely terminated by her death, for even her wretched dropsical corpse proved a source of dispute. A funeral oration was made for her in Notre Dame on 12th August, six weeks after her death, but it was not until October that her lead-lined coffin was allowed to be conveyed to France, because the Scottish preachers disapproved of the superstitious rites which they feared during her obsequies. In March 1561 her body was removed to Fécamp in Normandy and in July taken to Rheims, where it was finally buried in the church of the convent of St Pierre of which her sister Renée was abbess.
Mary’s love for her mother spurred her forward in her knowledge of Scottish politics; her appreciation of French and English politics was spurred on by her own increasing estimation of her position as queen of France and heiress – or rightful possessor – of the English throne. A few days after Henry II’s death, Throckmorton commented that everything was being done by the queen of Scotland, who took a great interest in all matters around her. Mary was also acute enough to send for an inventory of the crown jewels, many of which had passed into the hands of Diane de Poitiers, immediately after the death of her father-in-law, with a view to acquiring what were now her rightful property as queen of France. Throckmorton’s view of Mary Stuart has a particular interest. As English ambassador he had a definite motive for noting the twists and turns of her character as it developed; not only did she claim the English crown for her own, but she was also more plausibly the heiress to the throne. Life was uncertain, and Elizabeth was childless and unmarried; if Mary did not actually acquire the English throne by force, she might easily do so by inheritance. It thus behoved Throckmorton to keep a watchful eye on the nature and qualities of this young girl, whom the random chance of fate might one day establish as his own mistress.
It is significant that the Mary Stuart of Throckmorton’s dispatches is a more intelligent and mature girl than the beautiful wilful delicate creature of, for example, the Venetian ambassador’s reports to his own Italian court. Mary showed a hint of imperiousness in her words to Throckmorton concerning her refusal, with Francis, to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. ‘My subjects in Scotland do their duty in nothing,’ she told him, ‘nor have they performed their part in one thing that belongeth to them. I am their Queen and so they call me, but they use me not so … They must be taught to know their duties.’17 Earlier when Throckmorton was taken to have an interview with the royalties in February 1560 the preponderance of the conversation was had with the Queen Mother Catherine, but at the end of the interview when Catherine made an observation to the effect that she wished to be on good terms with Elizabeth, Mary did intervene. ‘“Yes,” she said, “the Queen my good sister may be assured to have a better neighbour of me being her cousin, than of the rebels, and so I pray you signify.”’18 The point may not have been a good one in terms of power politics – since Elizabeth might well prefer rebels across the border to an active young queen, however friendly, however cousinly – but it was one worth making from Mary’s point of view, and shows that her political intelligence was beginning to emerge from the cocoon of the cardinal’s tutelage.
The cardinal had been the instructor of her youth, but as queen of France, Mary had a new mentor in the art of politics – her mother-in-law Catherine de Médicis. It was no coincidence that Throckmorton had found the two queens sitting beside each other in February 1560. The records show that during the seventeen months in which Francis II reigned as king of France, Queen Catherine and Queen Mary were constantly in each other’s company, and in fact Queen Catherine, far from being excluded from the source of power by the death of her husband, formed a royal triumvirate at the top of the pyramid of the court; as the mother on whom the king depended emotionally, and as the queen dowager who had authorized the Guises to assume power, she was now of infinitely more account in the counsels of the kingdom than she had been during the reign of Henry II. There has been much speculation concerning the relations of Catherine de Médicis and Mary Stuart: it has been suggested that Catherine disliked her daughter-in-law so intensely that she was finally capable of poisoning her son Francis, in order to bring to an end Mary Stuart’s reign as queen of France. A great deal has been made of the story that Mary openly despised Catherine for her lowly birth, and described her contemptuously as nothing but the daughter of a merchant, the story resting on the word of the Cardinal de Santa Croce, the papal nuncio in France.19 Whether or not Mary, with the imprudence of youth, made this highly unwise remark, it is certainly easy enough to imagine that an unattractive older woman should be jealous of an exceptionally attractive younger one, with the additional complications of a throne to exacerbate their feelings, quite apart from the traditionally trying relationships of mother and daughter-in-law. Yet the fact is that whatever her private feelings, outwardly Catherine exhibited positively maternal kindness towards Mary during her period as queen of France, and gave Mary no reason to suppose that she was anything but most amicably inclined towards her.
In December 1559 the English envoys reported that Catherine and Mary listened daily to a sermon in the chapel, or in their mutual dining-chamber. The interviews which ambassadors held with the royalties throughout this period generally found both queens together, with Mary sitting on Catherine’s right hand. Often Mary and Catherine would be installed in one palace while Francis was away hunting based in another. In April, Mary was deeply depressed by the bad news from Scotland and it was Catherine who took it upon herself to comfort her, just as the previous year Mary had taken to heart Catherine’s own grief over the death of Henry. When Throckmorton had an interview with Mary on 6th August, Catherine was present and Mary requested Throckmorton to speak to the queen mother first.20 Catherine was also present at the interview which Francis and Mary granted to Throckmorton on 15th September at Saint-Germain, and she was together with the young couple when Condé was arrested on 31st October. The natural trend of court life was to throw the two queens together in conditions of extreme intimacy, a state which appeared to be accepted by both women with perfect satisfaction.
Catherine had indeed been so sternly schooled in the previous reign in the art of maintaining friendly relations with those in positions of power that it would have been inconceivable for her to have displayed any sort of jealousy of Mary in public, while Francis remained on the throne. But to understand the true feelings of Catherine de Médicis towards Mary, it is necessary to appreciate that despite all her cunning, Queen Catherine was fundamentally not a political woman but a mother. The instincts of motherhood, gratified at long last after a hideous period of infertility, remained her strongest emotions. Thus she judged every situation from the point of view of how it might affect the welfare of her children; her desire for political strength sprang from her conviction that the more power she possessed, the more help she could give them. Mary, as ally or rival, was judged primarily from the point of view of Francis. While Francis lived, while Mary was his wife and as such a necessary adjunct to his life and happiness, Catherine would treat her with all the warmth and consideration which was her due; but once Francis was dead, once Mary was no longer the helpmeet of one child but a potential threat to the happiness of another, the picture was liable to be very different. As Regnier de la Planche truly observed of Catherine after the death of Francis, when she finally became the official regent of France: for the past twenty-two years she had plenty of leisure to consider the humours and fashions of the whole French court, so that she understood very well how to play her hand so as to win the game at last.21
Mary in her turn did not fail to be influenced by the personality of her mother-in-law. Not only did she imbibe a thoroughly dynastic approach to the business of being a queen, but from Catherine she learnt also that intrigue was a necessary, even enjoyable part of politics. These two thoroughly feminine lessons – that the considerations of the child or unborn child, the continuance of the dynasty, should be placed above all others, and that the most effective weapons in a queen’s hand were those of diplomatic intrigue – were impressed on Mary consciously or unconsciously during the seventeen months in which she virtually shared the throne of France with Catherine de Médicis. The second lesson did not fall on particularly fertile ground: Mary, unlike Catherine, was not by nature a talented or adept intriguer. Yet she was to become an enthusiastic one. The effect of Catherine’s early lessons can certainly be discerned in Mary’s later career in Scotland and England.
Despite the temporary victory of the Catholic party at Amboise, the internal situation in France remained riven with economic difficulty and religious crisis. In France’s desperate financial situation, it was generally agreed by August, by Huguenots such as Coligny as well as Catholics such as the Guises, that the only hope lay in trying to establish some sort of civil unity. But it was easier to call for unity than to achieve it. Both sides had their own notions of what was necessary. At a meeting of the Grand Council, Coligny spoke out boldly in favour of the return of the Estates, and the diminution of the king’s guard, which he claimed was dividing Francis from his people. On 26th August, the Estates were convoked for the following December, and a date in January was chosen for a national synod of the French Church, provided the Pope should not have already announced an ecumenical council. But the lost tranquillity of France was not so easily restored. Still fearing for his life, Francis left Fontainebleau and went first to St Germain-en-Laye for safety, and then on to Orléans, which, with his wife and mother, he reached on 18th October. Here, surrounded by his army, he felt his person to be more secure, unaware that in his case the ravages of disease were more to be feared than the cold steel of the assassin. As the Spanish ambassador reported gloomily to his master that the religious situation in France was going from bad to worse,22the prince of Condé decided to gamble on a personal appeal to King Francis, whom he trusted to wean from the side of the Guises by the magnetism of his own physical presence. His trust was misplaced. On Condé’s arrival in Orléans, Francis, on the instructions of the Guises, reproached him tearfully with his enterprises against the government. The prince of Condé was arrested, and on 26th November condemned to death.
But as the Guises’ own fortunes had been transformed by the sudden death of Henry II, so Condé in his turn was to be saved by the workings of providence. The danger of ambitious hopes founded on the frail life of a solitary human being was once more demonstrated. King Francis announced his intention of setting off from Orléans to a prolonged hunting expedition, in the forests of Chenonceaux and Chambord, which would last him until the end of the month. But on Saturday 16th November, while still at Orléans, he returned from a day’s hunting in the country, and complained of violent ear-ache. On the Sunday he fell down in a faint while at vespers in the chapel of the Jacobins. The weather had turned unexpectedly icy that November, and the Guises were criticized by the Spanish ambassador for letting the king hunt when the weather was so cold. Nevertheless at first neither the watchful ambassadors, the vultures of the sixteenth-century court, nor the anguished adherents of Condé had any idea how serious the situation was.
Francis’s health had always been the Achilles’ heel of the Guises’ plans: his breath was foetid; his physical appearance was so alarming, with red patches on his livid cheeks, that it actually gave birth to sinister rumours that he had leprosy; from this rumour spread the still more disgusting gossip that Francis needed to bathe in the blood of young children, in order to cure himself. The peasants thus hid their children from the king as he passed, convinced that otherwise this young Herod would avail himself of their bodies. Subsequently both Catholics and Protestants accused each other of having invented this nauseating calumny: the cardinal was said to have invented it in order to pave the way for the Guises to ascend the French throne, and the Huguenots were accused of trying to blacken the reputation of the Catholic king. The true explanation of Francis’s facial condition was probably eczema, caused by the continual irritation of a purulent discharge from his ear; this originated from a chronic inflammation of the middle ear, arising from the constant respiratory infection of his childhood. When the king fell down in a faint on the Sunday, a large swelling appeared behind his left ear, caused by this inflammation spreading to the tissues above and below it.23
The Guises, whatever their private fears, were desperate to hide the gravity of his condition, and suspended the posts; they announced to the court merely that the fogs of the Loire had given the king a cold in the ear. The Venetian ambassador was sufficiently hoodwinked by the story to report that the two queens Mary and Catherine were fussing over the king, who was not actually ill. On 19th November the Spanish ambassador asked for, and got, an audience of the king, but was stopped at the door by the cardinal, who said that the king was suddenly worse. Chantonay immediately felt suspicious, and now noticed troubled glances among the Guises. Ridiculous rumours began to fly round the court: that a Huguenot valet had thrown a mortal powder into the king’s nightcap, or that an Orléans barber had poured poison into his ear, while doing his hair. Once more the occult art of astrology was called into play to cast light on the situation, and it was recalled that it had been predicted that Francis should not live long – a prophecy, incidentally, which had been made by doctors as well as astrologers, on the grounds of Francis’s health by the former, and of his horoscope by the latter. But the Venetian ambassador personally believed that much of Catherine’s sorrow was caused by her recollection of these predictions.24
The intense interest of the court in the illness of their sovereign was heightened by the fact that the fate of Condé hung in the balance. If Francis died, he would be succeeded by his brother Charles. As Charles was only eleven, there could on this occasion be no question of withholding the regency from the man generally believed to have the best claim to it – the first prince of the blood, King Antoine of Navarre – who was, of course, Condé’s elder brother. King Antoine’s first act as regent was certain to be the reprieve and release of Condé. If Francis lived, Condé would die. If Francis died, Condé would live. In face of such interest, it was impossible for the Guises to continue to cast a cloud of obscurity over the nature of the king’s disease forever. By 20th November, the Venetian ambassador was able to write off a full and accurate description of the king’s symptoms. On 27th November, Throckmorton informed Elizabeth that the king’s illness was now sufficiently serious for his doctors to doubt his ability to survive it; in any case it was thought that he could not expect to live very long, having wrecked his health in the first place by too much riding and exercise even before this ‘evil accident’. The Venetian ambassador now learnt from someone who had been in his chamber that the king was almost delirious. Even so, there were those who still believed that the illness was nothing more than a device of the Guises to prevent the supplication of Condé being put before Francis.25
Alas, the wretched little king, far from being the victim of a Guise plot, was the infinitely more tragic victim of his own constitution. He alternated between fevers and violent crises, followed by bouts of speechlessness. In addition to the natural sufferings of his condition, he also endured purgations and bleedings. On 28th November, a massive dose of rhubarb brought him some relief, but two days later the headaches and sickness redoubled. The watch in his bedroom was maintained ceaselessly by Mary and Catherine, whose joint role in his agony was to act endlessly as nurse and comforters. On 3rd December, it was reported to Venice by their ambassador that Queen Mary, Queen Catherine and the king’s brothers were taking part in processions to the churches of Orléans, to solicit divine aid for the king’s health.26 Otherwise Mary spent the last weeks of her husband’s life in patient, silent nursing in his darkened chamber. Unlike their niece the Guises bore the king’s affliction with little patience: their mental agonies at the prospect opened before them by his illness seemed almost as acute as the king’s physical sufferings. In their frenzy, they attacked the doctors for doing no more for the king than they would have done for a common beggar; and in their pursuit of remedies they even turned to the stone of alchemy.
Neither Mary’s patient nursing, nor that of Catherine, nor the rages of the Guises, nor their manifold remedies, affected in any way the ineluctable process of the king’s illness. The inflammation was now spreading upwards into the lobe of the brain, above the middle ear: on Monday 2nd December, there was an apparent improvement in his condition due to the temporary release of tension when the tumour was pierced. But the inflammation, having now reached the brain, formed an abscess within it. With the formation of the abscess, nothing could save the French king from death. By the evening of 3rd December, Francis was in extremis. On Thursday 5th December, he fell into a swoon. At some point in his agonies, he is said to have murmured a prayer taught to him by the cardinal: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my ministers have committed in my name and in my authority.’ But on the Thursday, at a time variously reported to be five, eleven or ten, by La Planche, Throckmorton and Chantonay, the king’s ordeal was at an end. A month off his seventeenth birthday, Francis II was dead.
Calvin wrote triumphantly to Sturm: ‘Did you ever read or hear of anything more timely than the death of the little King? There was no remedy for the worst evils when God suddenly revealed himself from Heaven, and He who had pierced the father’s eye, struck off the ear of the son.’27Calvin’s Knox-like exultation reflected the natural view of the French Huguenots who had seen their cause forever swallowed in the voracious Catholic maw of the Guises. Now with the likelihood of Navarre’s regency, it seemed that the French Huguenot cause had indeed been presented with a renewed opportunity to triumph through the death of the wretched Francis. The position of Mary was equally transformed by her husband’s death: at the age of just eighteen, she was no longer queen but queen dowager of France. Her entire position in Scotland, which had been founded on the umbrella-like protection which the French crown had extended to those Scots which it favoured, was likely to be in jeopardy now that her husband no longer sat on the French throne, and her uncles no longer directed French policy. Time would show whether she would evolve a better Scottish policy, or a worse one, but at all events on the death of Francis, Mary Stuart was obliged to work out a different one.
It is doubtful whether these political considerations were uppermost in the young queen’s mind during the days before her husband’s death, and the days of mourning afterwards. On the contrary, the evidence shows that, almost alone of the central figures at the French court, Mary abandoned herself to passionate grief at the death of the king, a grief founded on deep affection which she had felt for him, rather than the possible upset of her political plans. She had lost the companion of her childhood, the boy-husband who had loved her, and who had shared with her the happy intimacies of their charmed upbringing at the French court. Elisabeth had departed for Spain, Claude for Lorraine. Alone of her close royal companions of her youth, Francis had remained part of her life, and to their childhood intimacy had been added the natural intimacy of husband and wife. Since the first moment of their meeting at St Germain in October 1548, when the five-year-old Scottish queen had been solemnly presented to the four-year-old dauphin of France, and King Henry II had rejoiced over the immediate love which the children felt for each other, Mary and Francis had never been apart for longer than a few months at a time. They had thus been united by over twelve years of continuous friendship and companionship, and all that happy childhood memories can signify in the mind of a romantic and affectionate young girl. It was only six months since the death of her mother which had induced in her such profound feelings of affliction: now she found herself bereft of a husband, with whom indeed she had led a far more prolonged and contented existence than the few short months she had spent with her mother since babyhood. It was small wonder that Mary gave herself up to transports of true grief.
The sincerity of her feelings was not doubted at the time. Throckmorton commented that Francis had left ‘as heavy and dolorous a wife as of right she had good cause to be, who, by long watching with him during his sickness, and painful diligence about him’ had worn herself out and made herself ill. The stanzas which Mary wrote on the death of Francis, which struck a chord in the heart of Ronsard, bear witness to the eloquent simplicity of her grief for the lost love of her childhood:
Si en quelque séjour
Soit en Bois ou en Prée
Soit pour l’aube du jour
Ou soit sur la Vesprée
Sans cesse mon coeur sent
Le regret d’un absent
Si je suis en repos
Sommeillant sur ma couche
J’oy qu’il me tient propos
Je le sens qui me touche
En labeur et requoy
Tousjours est prez de moy …’*
The political realities of the situation would appear to her later – although some of them may have begun to come home to her when Catherine asked for the return of the crown jewels, which the date on the order of release and the short, hurriedly prepared inventories shows to have been only one day after King Francis’s death, in a ghastly parody of events after the death of King Henry, when Mary herself had demanded the return of the jewels from Diane de Poitiers. In the meantime Mary wore white and shut herself in a black room lit by torches to give herself up totally to her sorrow. As the Venetian ambassador commented: ‘Soon the death of the late King will be forgotten by all except his little wife, who has been widowed, has lost France, and has little hope of Scotland … her unhappiness and incessant tears call forth general compassion.’28
* The Spanish ambassador, who described how Queen Catherine and the principal nobles of the court were almost always present at the savage questioning of the prisoners, did not list Mary’s name among them (although it has sometimes been added to the list inaccurately by popular historians).7
* Already Mary was regarded as a foreigner by many of the people who were in fact her subjects; it is significant that an account of her magnificent wedding written by a Scotsman who was a member of the crowd makes absolutely no mention of the fact that Mary was herself Scottish. The writer proceeds as if Mary had actually been an Englishwoman.11
* A portrait of her mother, brought by Maitland to Scotland in 1563, was carried with her by Mary on all her travels throughout her captivity, and was finally found among her belongings at Fotheringhay.
* Wherever I may be
In the woods or in the fields
Whatever the hour of day
Be it dawn or the eventide
My heart still feels it yet
The eternal regret…
As I sink into my sleep
The absent one is near
Alone upon my couch
I feel his beloved touch
In work or in repose
We are forever close…
Translated by the author.