An Accidental Tragedy (13 page)

Scots and French now live in unity

As they were brothers born in one country.

Clear now of all suspicion,

One to the other to keep true fraternity,

Defend each other both by land and sea.

Henri had wanted the world to note the new marriage and alliance and, although the expense had been crippling, he had been triumphantly successful. By the end of all this Mary was, unsurprisingly, ‘ill-disposed’.

CHAPTER FIVE

She cannot long continue

In Edinburgh the celebrations for Mary’s marriage were, since the common people had not the slightest interest in it, much more muted, costing a mere £183 9s 9d and consisting mainly of the monstrous cannon Mons Meg firing a single shot. It carried for two miles and fell harmlessly in the fields to the north-west of the city. Of greater interest in Scotland was the mysterious death at Calais of four of the marriage treaty commissioners during their return to Scotland. Poison was immediately suspected, but a plot hatched by the French is extremely unlikely since it was greatly to the advantage of France that the marriage agreement, apparently so advantageous to the Scots government, be ratified by them without further delay. It was, after all, considering the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, quite worthless.

Mary wrote as a married woman to her mother in a letter on 16 September 1558. Writing like any young bride worried for the health of a new husband who has gone abroad on active service, she tells Marie that the king – ‘the king my husband’ – was encamped in Picardy where various maladies were current. In all probability, the treaty commissioners had died from one of these. Mary knew that one purpose of the campaign was to negotiate the release of Anne de Montmorency. Since Philip had returned to Spain on account of Mary Tudor’s childlessness, he was keen to seek some kind of peace with France. Having the Constable of France and other nobles in his prisons, and knowing that Henri could not afford another major campaign, Philip felt the time was right to bring Henri to the negotiating table.

Henri, having already made all Scotsmen French citizens,
could now claim that he was, in fact, king of both countries. The Scots felt that they were gaining parity, but the French knew that Scotland was simply becoming a
départment
of France. With this assurance and the hostility of Philip towards his wife, Mary Tudor, cutting off any alliance from across the Channel, Henri was equally happy to negotiate with Spain.

However, before this could happen, the political chessboard was once more upset when on 17 November 1558 Mary Tudor died. She had already suffered two hysterical pregnancies and had been unfeelingly rejected by Philip as ugly, sexually repellent and infertile. She was heartily loathed by the bulk of the population for her extreme Catholicism – the many martyrdoms of her reign had earned her the nickname of ‘Bloody Mary’. She may have died from the seemingly inconsequential cause of influenza, which was the commonest cause of death in 1557. This tragically unhappy woman was now succeeded by her 25-year-old half-sister Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Tudor was a complete contrast to Mary Stewart. She had been tutored by the scholar Roger Ascham, who said of her, ‘Her study of true religion and learning is most eager. Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up. She talks French and Italian as well as she does English, and has often talked to me readily and well in Latin, moderately in Greek.’ She had practical experience of the politics of self-preservation, having spent time in the Tower of London in 1554 while her cousin Mary Stewart was establishing her own court in France. Her childhood had been one of hardship and constant threat of death, while Mary had basked in the uncritical adoration of her uncles. Elizabeth’s lifelong companion was to be the devoted and brilliantly devious William Cecil. Together they were already the most formidable political team in Europe.

For Henri, Elizabeth’s accession was devastating news, and his first move was to have long-standing consequences for Mary. He declared Elizabeth illegitimate: since her father’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon had been declared invalid by the Pope his
marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was therefore bigamous. Thus, the throne was vacant and the nearest claimant by blood was Henri’s new daughter-in-law, Mary. The heralds proclaimed her Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland and from henceforth her arms carried the quarterings of all these states. The poets got to work praising Mary as a new prodigy, uniting France and Scotland with England, but in practical terms this achieved little except to infuriate Elizabeth. The English ambassador reported that ‘the young queen bore not the arms of England of her own notion, but by command of her father the late king and so seemed to excuse it. Her majesty [Elizabeth] thinks this excuse either very strange or very imperfect.’ Neither Cecil nor Elizabeth believed a word of this excuse.

What was more practical were the diplomatic arrangements made by France with England and Spain as part of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. All three participants were on the edge of bankruptcy and exhausted by war. Henri was under extreme pressure from Diane to negotiate the return of Montmorency from prison in Brussels; appeasing Philip was therefore important to him. In return for the peace, Henri gave up all his conquests in Italy, abandoned his claim to Savoy and allowed England the chance to repossess Calais in eight years. Marriage alliances would cement these agreements. Marguerite, Henri’s sister, was to marry Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy, while Mary’s childhood friend Princess Elisabeth was to be the bride of the recently widowed Philip of Spain. Both these engagements were entirely dynastic, since neither woman was consulted, and Mary now had her first personal taste of the realpolitik which dominated affairs of state: with the marriage of Elisabeth, she was peremptorily to lose a close friend.

As Queen and King of Scotland, on 21 April 1558, Mary and François sent a letter to Elizabeth with their endorsement of the treaty, vowing their love, hoping for peace and friendship and assuring her she would get nothing but good news from the bearer of the letter, who was in transit to Scotland as a counsellor of the queen regent. He was William Maitland of Lethington,
whom Knox found to be ‘a man of sharp wit and reasoning’ and who was the most astute political mind in Scotland. His nickname was ‘Michael Wylie’, a corruption of Machiavelli, and he would become Mary’s chief minister in Edinburgh. He was able to offer Mary good advice but always put the interests of Scotland and himself at the forefront of his counsel, unlike Diane, who advised Henri to his own personal advantage first. Mary had no such disinterested counsellor.

On reviewing the situation of her northern neighbour, Elizabeth had been advised that in Scotland ‘the fortresses are all in the hands of the French, and of the Queen Dowager, who, being a Frenchwoman, it may be said that everything is in the power of his most Christian Majesty who keeps some twenty thousand infantry there as garrison. That force being sufficient as in two days they can send over as many troops as they please.’ This was hugely threatening and Elizabeth was delighted that the young couple signed a treaty that had been made at Upsettlington in Berwickshire, declaring peace between England and Scotland, without any claims on the English throne. This seemed to draw a very satisfactory line under Câteau-Cambrésis and she instructed her ambassador, Nicholas Throckmorton, to ‘have good countenance towards them’. On 28 May 1559, Mary and François signed this treaty and, since François stuttered too badly on such occasions, Mary declared on his behalf that Elizabeth was ‘her good cousin and sister’. The witnesses were Henri and Catherine, for once without what had now become the normal presence of her Guise uncles.

Neither were the uncles present at the reception afterwards where Mary’s escort was the newly freed Constable Montmorency, who was keen to show Throckmorton the loyalty of France. Throckmorton warned the constable that his mistress the queen would ‘find the public display of Mary’s arms strange’, especially when the couple had signed a treaty disclaiming any right of inheritance. The constable dodged the question by saying that he was in a Brussels prison when the arms were painted, and since Elizabeth carried the fleur-de-lis of France on her arms it was
lawful for the Queen of Scotland, being of the house of England and so near to the crown, to carry the arms of England. The first diplomatic sabre-rattling over this issue passed off peaceably.

With the return of Montmorency, Diane’s influence was increasing again and her granddaughter married the constable’s son. None of this pleased the Guises, especially when Montmorency’s nephew, Admiral Coligny (‘admiral’ was a rank that applied equally to soldiers and sailors, and Gaspard de Coligny was, in modern terms, a general) embraced the Protestant cause, which was close to the heart of Elizabeth. Henri’s view was that since the crown was Catholic, any deviation toward the Reformation was not simply heresy, but far worse. It was, quite simply, treason and could be dealt with by civil means without involving the clerical power of Mary’s uncles, whose influence was, for the moment, slipping away.

Throckmorton also noticed that Mary was unwell and she soon had to retire from court in a state of nervous collapse. He found Mary and Henri’s daughter, Marguerite, ‘somewhat sickly’ and on 24 May, visitors said she was ‘very ill, pale and green and withal short-breathed and it is whispered among them [the French court] that she cannot live long’. By 18 June, one of Mary’s attendants felt that she ‘was very evil at ease and to keep her from fainting were fain to bring her wine from the altar . . . I never saw her look ill . . . she cannot long continue’. In fact, Mary was suffering from chlorosis, or the ‘green-sickness’, an adolescent anaemia brought about by irregularities in her menstrual cycle.

The news of Mary’s imminent death was, of course, exactly what Elizabeth wanted to hear. Since she, like the Scots, had no knowledge of the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, safely in Henri’s hands, she believed that Mary’s death would put the crown of Scotland into the easily bought hands of Châtelherault and her path to servile pacification north of the Tweed would be clear. It would also remove a troublesome claimant to her own throne – thought by many, who proclaimed Elizabeth’s illegitimacy, to be the true heir to Henry VIII – a claim displayed in Mary’s heraldry itself. These arms were found ‘prejudicial to the
Queen her state and dignity’ by Elizabeth’s loyal College of Arms.

These disputes over who carried what as their arms may seem petty to us today, but in a time without newspapers or television they represented the public signature of the sovereign. Most people would recognise that anyone displaying arms was a person of importance and the royal arms would be universally known, as would the arms of a local nobleman.

Mary had, in the year since her wedding in April 1558, gone from being the fairy princess gleaming with jewels to a political pawn. Largely unaware of the danger of the heraldic claims made on her behalf, she was now overtaken in importance by Montmorency, and was losing status thanks to her uncles’ temporary eclipse. Diane had taken no part in all of this, since, wisely, she was at Anet with the king, but Montmorency had fulfilled her wishes to gain supremacy over the Guises completely. The effect on Mary was typical. Whenever reality forced her to go against her wishes, or if she felt that she was being ignored, she collapsed physically. The manipulative lessons of Diane and Catherine may have been learnt, but she still lacked the political skill to put them into practice.

Much more to Mary’s taste were the preparations for the two weddings arising from the Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, although the first of them would deprive her of her childhood friend, Princess Elisabeth. These weddings were an essential move for Henri since they would cement a Catholic alliance with Spain and prevent any possibility of a similar alliance between Elizabeth of England and Philip. So keen was Henri on such a Franco-Spanish bond that he suggested his youngest daughter, Marguerite, as a bride for Philip’s son, Don Carlos. Philip, however, had decided on a single marriage and the Duke of Alba left the Netherlands with over a thousand in his retinue to act as proxy. Henri was disappointed in Philip’s non-appearance, only to be brusquely told that kings of Spain do not fetch their brides.

On 22 June 1559 the Duke of Alba placed his naked foot in a bed already occupied by Elisabeth and their toes touched. He
smiled and, while his valet replaced his hose, the courtiers applauded. Elisabeth was now Isabel de la Paz, Queen of Spain, although she would not travel to Spain until 30 January 1560.

The Duke of Savoy had arrived in Paris with a similar entourage on the previous day (21 June) and on the 27th he vowed his betrothal to Henri’s sister, another Marguerite, who, still unmarried at thirty-six, was eager for her wedding to be held on 4 July as well. This would strengthen the clause of the treaty returning Savoy to its duke, who had been ousted by François I. The betrothal took place, not as Mary’s had at the Louvre, but at the Palais de Tournelles, where Henri planned a grand tournament to last five days in the Rue Sainte-Antoine in front of the palace. It was all supervised with great enthusiasm by Henri himself, who was in his element recreating the legendary past. The paving stones and street-side stalls had been taken away and replaced with an amphitheatre, raised boxes for the ladies, stabling for horses, an armoury and a tiltyard. There were triumphal arches with rooms for dressing, and, on each side, twenty-foot-high pillars surmounted by figures of victory. The royal box, with cloth-of-gold hangings studded with fleurs-de-lis, held Catherine and Henri, for once tactfully separated from Diane de Poitiers by Mary and her dauphin. The Dukes of Alba and Savoy, with their brides and fiancées, were in private boxes on either side.