An Accidental Tragedy (15 page)

Mary had been used to controlling her court in domestic matters, but now ministers of state, generals and chancellors were eager to please her. This was heady stuff and she never allowed herself to realise that she was merely a shadow for her uncles. The chapel royal was filled with the music of the royal composers Clément Jannequin and Claudin de Sermisy, both of whom provided risqué chansons for Mary’s after-dinner entertainment. De Sermisy provided at least one drinking song:

Hey, hey, hey, the woods!

We are praying to God the king of kings

To preserve this good French wine

Thus we will drink six draughts for three.

Hey, hey, hey, the woods!

In order to clear our voices

Let us drink as much again, I am going for it

Hey, hey, hey, the woods!

Whether Mary joined in the drinking – possibly an explanation for the frequent royal indispositions – is pure speculation. Another song filled with the melancholy of unrequited love gave an unwittingly unhappy prediction of Mary’s future.

I have walked a hundred thousand steps for you

And done much folly,

Lived without rules or limits.

So now I am lost in melancholy.

Alas! What will be my life?

Nothing remains but unhappiness.

A thousand sorrows for one solitary pleasure!

At this time, however, Mary was the happiest young woman in Europe. All the natural wishes of a sixteen-year-old girl were heard and granted. She was indulged and she was denied nothing, while all the time she was being cynically manipulated. This was another dangerous reinforcement of her belief, like that of a Hollywood film star, that no one would ever disagree with her.

Throckmorton reported that ‘the Queen of Scotland . . . is a great doer here, and takes all upon her’. René de Bouillé, a French historian, said, ‘The feeble organisation of the king could only have one outcome, the single passion of which his beautiful and gracious consort was the object.’ And Mary Stewart, out of respect, out of admiration, and out of past experience, was prepared to use all her influence to increase and affirm the status, salutary if sometimes dangerous, of her uncles. François, on their instructions, dismissed Montmorency from the court, and his rooms were occupied by the Cardinal of Lorraine, while the Duc de Guise had taken the former apartments of Diane de Poitiers.

Henri’s body was embalmed, and after a funeral Mass in Notre Dame he was buried in the Cathedral of St Denis. The last official act of Montmorency as Constable of France was to throw his baton of office into the tomb and cry out, ‘Le roi est mort’, then, after three paternosters had been said, he retrieved the baton and called, ‘Vive le roi!’

So began what wits of the time called the reign of the three kings: François de Valois, François de Guise, and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine. The Guise family at last held the power which for years had been their dreams, and Mary Stewart had made it possible. She had been educated to be Queen of France and carefully tutored to accept the advice of her uncles.
However, Mary had learned from Diane that the Guise power had to be expressed through François, and she was only too willing to guide him.

The king now became the focus for anti-Guise sentiments led by Louis de Condé, brother of the still-vacillating King of Navarre. He was the reverse of his brother, being vigorous and outspoken, and had recently converted to Protestantism. It was when this Louis de Condé fomented a plot to overthrow the brothers and seize the king in 1560 that a new word entered the vocabulary of French Protestantism: the plotters met at the port of Hugues on the west coast of France and from then on French Protestants became known as Huguenots.

The conflict between Huguenot, or Protestant, and Catholic was to dominate the remainder of Mary’s life. The roots of the conflict had started to thrive many years previously in a growing popular disaffection with the Church of Rome. In many ways the Church had grown top-heavy, controlling every aspect of daily life, from baptism through marriage, to death and burial. It administered all schools and universities, where learning, like all church services, was conducted in Latin, a language which the common people did not understand. Equally, the Bible was closed to the populace and remained untranslated from St Jerome’s Latin. The Mass was a mystery experienced only by the priesthood and merely witnessed at a discreet distance by the laity. Access to heaven – after a suitable period in purgatory – was obtained only through the good offices of the priesthood. Saints, however, were presumably multilingual and could be prayed to in the vernacular and anywhere.

In the fourteenth century the devastating spread of the Black Death had carried off nearly a third of Europe’s population, in spite of the ardent, though wholly impotent, prayers of the Church. Conflict over papal elections had resulted in the Great Schism which produced rival popes in Rome and in Avignon, each solemnly declaring that they alone spoke the absolute indisputable truth, but who only held power so long as their secular masters had use for them. Then, in England at the end of
the century, John Wycliffe, a distinguished scholar, set about a refutation of much of the dogma of the Church. He led a band of poor priests into the countryside, preaching to the people and, what was even more shocking, using an English translation of the Bible. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century historian, called Wycliffe ‘The deep-lying tap-root of the whole tree’. Although Wycliffe was allowed to die in peace, his Bohemian follower, Jan Hus, was not so lucky, and he became the first martyr of the reformers. More than a hundred years later, the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, like Wycliffe, managed to survive in spite of preaching a form of humanist Christianity across Europe, even being a welcome guest of the rigidly conservative Catholic, Thomas More.

Then, on 31 October 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther lost his admittedly short temper in Wittenberg. The popular appeal of his reforms and condemnations of papal corruption spread to the princes within the Holy Roman Empire who themselves rose against the Catholic Emperor Charles V. At first Charles tolerated their demands, but in 1529 he withdrew his decree of toleration. The princes protested and the followers of their movement got their name – Protestants. Inevitably there were splits inside the movement, with Anabaptists calling for all property to be held in common. Attacking the ownership of property was going far too far and they were put down with sadistic savagery.

Switzerland, still a loose confederation of city-states, became an established refuge for Protestants, and by August 1535 Geneva was a Protestant republic. In the following year the preacher appointed to the Cathedral of St Pierre was a Frenchman from Picardy, Jean Cauvin, now known as John Calvin. His coreligionist George Wishart had been preaching the doctrines of the Helvetic Confession in Scotland when he was martyred by Beaton in 1546. In his turn, John Knox had spent part of his exile in Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor. The movement had taken root among most of the nobility in Scotland, many joining it to make a political protest against what they saw as the
Frenchification of their country. The movement had had no charismatic leader until, on 2 May 1559, Knox finally returned to Scotland and what had previously been protest turned into a civil war in all but name.

In France, the secular discontent with the arrogant power of the House of Guise was now given a religious element as Catholics and Huguenots formed battlelines. For Mary herself, the Catholic faith was an integral part of life. She had attended Mass daily, and occasionally more often. Her own chaplain had performed the ceremony and heard her childish confessions in her own chapel, often with her childhood companions. It was as normal and as comforting to her as breathing fresh air or washing her face. Mary had none of the fervour of the Huguenots, whom her late father-in-law had regarded simply as traitors from the lower classes. Mary’s experiences of the lower classes were either as cheering crowds or as servants whom she treated with kindness and who adored her with more than sycophantic servility. Her half-brother Lord James Stewart’s conversion to the Protestant cause in Scotland shocked her more because it put him in opposition to her mother than because she thought his eternal soul was in danger. However, she did persuade François to write to him rapping his knuckles; Stewart wrote back unrepentantly, hoping that François might convert. It was puzzling to Mary that French noblemen could object to her uncles or her husband on religious grounds, and both Catherine and her uncles saw to it that she knew as little as possible about it. Heresy was, after all, part of the mysterious world inhabited by men and part of the politics of the court, in which she took no great part. Mary had been told what was expected of her – a nursery full of heirs to the throne – and Diane would have told her that, given the physical condition of her husband, she should not be overeager to achieve this. On her wedding night she and her Dauphin would have been put to bed together, but the court had no great expectation of triumphantly blood-stained sheets on the next morning and, for the moment, Mary was happy to continue in a marriage of friendship, rather than physical love.

Mary was now content in her role as Queen of France, Scotland and England, having her plate engraved with ‘Franciscus et Maria, Dei Gratia Franciae, Scotiae, Angliae et Hibernae, Rex et Regina’. It was less than tactful to serve his supper from it. He had been advised by Elizabeth and Cecil to start courting Catherine since ‘she hath in deed and in effect the authority (though not in name) of Queen Regent’. The grip of the Guise brothers extended as far as Scotland, for on 3 August 1559 the royal couple sent signed sheets of blank paper to Marie de Guise for distributing gifts in their names. François appeased Elizabeth by using only the traditional styles and seals, but Mary thoughtlessly continued to use ‘Maria, Dei Gratia, Regina Franciae, Scotiae, Angliae et Hiberniae’.

By 27 August, Guise control was complete; when Throckmorton delivered a letter to François, he merely scanned it and replied that he thanked Elizabeth for her letter and told Throckmorton that he would do whatever his uncles advised. The letter was then passed to Mary, who read it more carefully, thanked Elizabeth and said she would do whatever her uncles advised. The protests by the King of Navarre came to nothing: ‘the house of Guise doth all and the King of Navarre meddleth not’. Neither Mary nor François now had any real power.

Mary was, in fact, preparing to take part in her next great pageant, the coronation of François in the cathedral of Rheims. As an already crowned queen, Mary would be merely a spectator and, in any case, the queens of France were traditionally crowned in St Denis. Since the court was in mourning, the coronation could have been postponed, but worries over the king’s health meant that this was not desirable. Mourning was still being observed and a command was issued that ‘no noblemen or ladies shall be apparelled with any goldsmith’s work, or embroidery but shall only wear velvet or other like, without any great show and that the next day they enter into the
deuil
[mourning] again and so continue for this twelvemonth’.

On 16 September 1559, the king arrived at Rheims in a great storm of wind and rain but nothing could diminish the spectacle of
his entry. There was a ‘machine of great invention’, a sun burst which opened, allowing the king to approach a giant red heart which, in its turn, parted to reveal a nine-year-old girl in silver and cloth of gold who placed the keys to the city into his hands.

On Sunday, 17 September, Mary and François attended vespers, during which François presented a gold statue of his namesake St Francis of Assisi to the cathedral. This was now carpeted, and tapestries taken from the adjacent bishop’s palace and from the Louvre, showing the coronation of Clovis and the victories of Scipio, were hung around the interior. Next morning, with sunlight pouring through the thirteenth-century stained glass, the royal procession moved the short distance from the palace where it had spent the night. Archbishop Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine in his full finery escorted François, who was dressed in plain white to signify his purity, as he was prepared for anointing. This was the most sacred part of the ceremony and was done with chrism kept in the abbey of St Rémi, two miles distant. So sacred was the chrism that when it was at the cathedral for the ceremony the three nobles who carried it were regarded as hostages of the abbey until its safe return.

Duly rendered sacred, François withdrew and changed into his coronation robes of blue velvet, lined with crimson taffeta and trimmed with ermine and gold fleurs-de-lis. He was then invested with the sceptre, as well as a baton of justice, and was given a ring in token of his marriage to France. Understandably, the fragile fifteen-year-old was staggering noticeably after what had been a five-hour ceremony, and so the gold crown was simply held above his head when he was led to his throne. The archbishop then shouted ‘Vivat Rex!’ which was echoed back by the congregation in the packed cathedral. Songbirds were released, a Te Deum was sung and the congregation relaxed.

The royal ladies were seated in a specially constructed box so that they could not only see but also be seen. Catherine once again wore the black of her native Italy and her daughters followed suit, but Mary wore the
deuil blanc
familiar from
her portraits. It was the correct dress for a French queen in mourning and it sent the clear signal that she had no intention of allying herself with the Italian Medicis. Mary was a Guise. Throckmorton also noted that the arms of England, France and Scotland quartered were very ‘brimly’ set out above the city gates.

After the ceremony the congregation attended a state dinner where François, as a token of his new status, dined alone with the company seated around him. He was, however, tired and withdrew early, proceeded by pages carrying his regalia. This was far from the pomp enjoyed so much by his father. He now suffered from regular fainting fits and his inability to concentrate meant that he could have no part in the cabinets or meetings convened by the Guises. His fondness for hunting, provided he was never in any danger, proved an asset and he was encouraged to spend more time on horseback, albeit with armed guards in constant attendance. Mary was more fearless on horseback and rode with enthusiasm, on one occasion being swept from her horse by an overhanging branch. The hunt was in full cry and galloped past her without noticing her fall, to the extent that her headdress was ridden over; however, she redressed her hair, remounted and rejoined the chase, although ‘she hath determined to change that kind of exercise’ – a determination she did not, in fact, keep.