Game of Queens (14 page)

Henry VIII’s younger sister, the eighteen-year-old Mary Tudor, had long been contracted to marry Margaret of Austria’s nephew, Charles. Mary had only recently been in correspondence with Margaret about the style of dress the Flemish ladies preferred. But earlier, in 1514, as Margaret of Austria urged ever more desperately that her father should push ahead with the match between her nephew and the English princess, a match vital for fostering the peace in her Netherlands territories, her father Maximilian and her erstwhile father-in-law Ferdinand were conspiring to keep her in the dark about very different plans.

In 1514 Ferdinand wrote to his ambassador (was he supposed to show Margaret the letter?) that she was ‘the most important person in Christendom, since she acts as mediator in almost all the negotiations between the princes’. In another letter, he wrote that ‘Madam Margaret is the person on whom, more than anyone else on earth, peace or war depends.’ But the flattery may have been intended to keep her in line.

He and Maximilian now proposed that instead of marrying Mary Tudor, as had been arranged, to cement the alliance between England and the Habsburgs, Charles should instead marry the French king’s little daughter, Renée. Ferdinand was also offering the recently bereaved Louis XII a new bride of his own; either Margaret herself, or Margaret’s niece Eleanor. Louis chose the nubile Eleanor and the marriage articles were drawn up.

‘Madame Margaret’, Ferdinand said:

dwells on the great difference of age between the King of France [fifty-one] and Madame Eleanor [seventeen]. Lanuza [the ambassador] is to tell her that in marriage of great kings difference of age is never taken into account . . . Madame Margaret is mistaken if she thinks it a disadvantage that Madame Eleanor is so thin. Thin women generally . . . bear more children than stout ones . . .

As Margaret frantically wrote to Maximilian, it was all very well for Spain to make peace with France. They had the barrier of the mountains to protect them, and England had the sea. The Netherlands, long the object of France’s rapacity, were protected by no such freak of geography. But no holds were barred in the attempt to unite the empire, France and Spain into one future ‘family’, of which Maximilian envisaged himself the head. And when England too made its peace with France, there was yet another change of marriage plans. The proposed marriage between Louis XII and Eleanor was off. Instead, he would marry the woman who had been promised to Margaret’s nephew Charles: King Henry VIII of England’s sister Mary.

In addition to the hastily assembled trousseau and to the immense ‘Mirror of Naples’ diamond the French king had sent as a wedding gift, Mary Tudor would, of course, take a number of English ladies in her train, and the Boleyns were never going to miss such an opportunity. In August 1514, Thomas Boleyn wrote to Margaret of Austria to ask that his daughter might be released from service in order – her French, thanks to Margaret, being now so good! – to transfer to the French court. The place Margaret had given Anne Boleyn as a great favour was to be put aside for an even more promising opportunity.

Anne’s name is not on the list of those who accompanied Mary on her journey from England and she is not recorded as being in France until slightly later. Her whereabouts for those few months are unknown. Margaret of Austria and her court were in Zeeland when Thomas Boleyn’s letter arrived and that may have caused the delay. Or Margaret may have stalled, either from reluctance to foster this Anglo-French marriage in even the smallest way, or out of sheer pique. And, as Margaret would feel acutely, Mary Tudor’s was far from the only royal marriage that year.

In May, Margaret of Austria’s niece Mary was summoned to Maximilian’s court in Vienna, preparatory to a marriage with the son of the King of Hungary. In June, Margaret was called upon to arrange, at very short notice, the marriage of her niece Isabella, not yet thirteen, to King Christian of Denmark, twenty years Isabella’s senior, whose ambassadors arrived on a Wednesday and, on the Saturday, declared their wish that the marriage should take place the next day, the day of Christian’s coronation. ‘But Monseigneur’, Margaret wrote to her father, ‘it was very difficult to arrange such a solemn function in so short a time . . . but, anxious to please them and gratify their desires, I agreed . . . and I did my best to have everything arranged and put in order.’ The bride at least, she wrote touchingly, was a figure ‘it certainly did one good to look at’. This marriage would end badly but for the next year Isabella, like her elder sister Eleanor (now re-betrothed to the heir of Portugal), was to be left in Margaret’s care.
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Margaret of Austria also found herself under pressure from events within the Netherlands. Her nephew Charles was now in his teens and beginning to resent the government of an autocratic aunt. She had long been at odds with William de Croy, the Sieur de Chievres, the nobleman who had been left as governor of the country in her brother’s absence, until Margaret replaced him. Chievres remained tutor and mentor to her young nephew Charles, working well enough with Margaret until the League against France she had helped to mould offended his strongly French sympathies. Things came to a head over a seemingly unrelated matter. Castile – one of the territories of which Charles would be ruler – was in the grip of a nationalist movement; the Castilians concerned alike about their current government by Ferdinand of Aragon and their future under a boy being reared wholly in the Netherlands. The Castilian faction at Margaret of Austria’s court was headed by Don Juan Manuel de la Cerda, a political agitator whom Ferdinand was anxious to get into his hands. It seemed a comparatively minor matter to Margaret to have Don Juan arrested with the intention of sending him to Aragon, but she found she had gone too far.

Don Juan was a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the glorious chivalric order of Burgundy to which even privileged foreign males such as Henry VIII were proud to belong. Now the knights – headed by Charles as their titular leader, and by Chievres – came to Margaret in a deputation, furiously brandishing the statutes which declared that one of the order could be tried only by his brother knights. Margaret was indignant and uncomprehending: ‘Ah, Messeigneurs, if I were such a man as I am a woman I would make you bring your statutes to me and make you sing out passages from them!’ (Perhaps she was aware that her former mother-in-law Isabella of Castile had persuaded the papacy to grant her administration of three such chivalric orders, although not without some masculine grumbling that this was ‘a monstrous thing’.)

The affair ended when Maximilian (himself a former head of the order) had Don Juan brought to Germany for investigation. But Margaret of Austria had lost much goodwill among the local nobility.

Under the influence of Chievres, the Estates General demanded that Charles should be declared of age, offering Maximilian a large sum of money if he would agree. Maximilian did not even warn Margaret he was planning to do so. No wonder her letters to him complain that he does not take her fully into his confidence, so that the foreign ambassadors seem to know more of events than she.

In the spring of 1515, letters from Charles to the various provinces of the Netherlands declared ‘it is fit and reasonable that all things which concern our rights, greatness, lordship and even the doing of justice and our other affairs, should be conducted henceforth in our name and under our title’.

Maximilian himself wrote to Charles (and sent a copy to Margaret) that: ‘we make no doubt, because of the honour and love you owe to our very dear daughter, your aunt, that you communicate your chief and most arduous business to her and that you take and use her good advice . . .’ But Maximilian was to find he too was no longer as important as he had been in Charles’s country.

Now that Margaret of Austria was displaced, complaints about her rule came in thick and fast. She was blamed for having failed to maintain the alliance she had made with the Netherlands’ trading partner, England and for having used Netherlands money for alien wars – although it might be more accurate to say that she had failed entirely to stop her father from doing so – and even for having illegitimately enriched herself.

Through all this Margaret had to put on a brave face, as she accompanied her nephew on the extended tour that marked the handover of power. But, as she wrote to her father, she asked herself whether she should not retire south to her own lands and devote herself to her own ‘small interests’. Shortly after Charles’s emancipation – while Maximilian nonetheless continued to bombard her with business – she replied that she had passed on his letter to de Chievres but could do no more, ‘for now I do not meddle in any business’.

In fact, time would show that Margaret of Austria was too determined, too canny a politician to remain long in the shadows. Someone who could be circumvented, yes, but still someone around whom even the most alpha males moved carefully. After that six-month tour of the provinces with her nephew, at a meeting of the council she read aloud to Charles a memorandum refuting the accusations made against her, accusations planned, she said, ‘to give you suspicions of me, your humble aunt, to withdraw from me your goodwill and confidence, which would indeed be a poor recompense for the services which I have rendered you until now . . .’

‘Item: Madame has lent her money for State affairs and has greatly reduced the expenses of her own household . . . For three years, far from having a pension for her services, she spent her dowry as long as it lasted’. At the end of her oration it was agreed ‘that Madame was held fully discharged from all things’. Margaret of Austria ‘gracefully’ retired for a time into her books, her estates, her ongoing plans for the building of her husband Philibert’s tomb in Brou. But she did so without any shadow hanging over her head.

10

‘a splendid New Year's gift'

France, 1514–1515

Another royal death in France would soon prove to be another turn of the wheel of Fortune. This one meant that while Margaret of Austria's star seemed to have fallen, that of her erstwhile playmate Louise of Savoy would rise dramatically. But not without some scares along the way.

The arrival in France of Mary Tudor – young, nubile, and presumably fertile – cannot have been welcome to Louise and her family, anxious lest the birth of a son to the old king should spoil François's chance of the throne. But old Louis XII seemed enchanted with his new bride and claimed to have performed great feats in the bedroom.

Perhaps no one quite believed it. François's friend, the courtier and adventurer Fleuranges, reported François had told him: ‘unless people are lying very hard, I now know that the king and queen cannot possibly have children'. But there were other worrying possibilities. As the king's son-in-law and putative heir, François had led the party to welcome Mary Tudor and taken a starring role in the jousts in her honour. He got on notably well with his beautiful nineteen-year-old stepmother-in-law. Soon Louise was being warned to keep a close eye on her son, lest he himself father a male baby to supplant him. But Louise's anxieties were not to last.

Fleuranges reported rumours that the King of England had sent a filly to the King of France to gallop him off to heaven or to hell. It proved all too accurate a prophecy. Less than three months after Mary Tudor was married, on 1 January 1515, her husband Louis XII was dead.

Fleuranges described how the new François I put on mourning clothes and, ‘coming to the palace in haste, informed all the princes and ladies of the kingdom, especially his mother, Madame Louise. It was a splendid New Year's gift, I must say . . .' Louise recorded: ‘On the first day of January I lost my husband and on the first day of January my son became king of France.'

Technically, it was unclear whether François was king until it was confirmed that Mary Tudor was not pregnant. But the principle of ‘the king is dead – long live the king' prevailed, the more so since no one thought a posthumous baby was likely. The official period of mourning was cut short and François was crowned at the end of the month.

 

For the new dynasty in France, Mary Tudor, the old king's widow, represented a loose thread. But Mary would find her own solution; another Tudor sister prepared to put passion before policy. Wolsey had urgently warned, from the earliest days of her widowhood, that she should give no heed to any new ‘motion of marriage' that might be made to her. ‘I trust the King my brother and you will not reckon in me such childhood', she replied, from her widow's seclusion, indignantly.

But there were ‘motions' a-plenty. Rumours of the Duke of Lorraine, of François himself putting Claude away to marry her, of her brother cementing another foreign, this time Habsburg, alliance with her hand. It may have been this, and an awareness that disputes over her dowry would play a major part in her future, if it were negotiated between the two kings, that decided Mary Tudor to act.

Before she left England she had extracted an informal promise from her brother that if she married the aged King Louis, she would be allowed to choose her next husband. And she knew on whom her choice would light. Charles Brandon had escorted her to France; in January he was sent to negotiate her return to England. There was already an acknowledged attraction between the pair, and on Brandon's arrival Mary sent for him. ‘I never saw woman so weep', wrote Brandon afterwards in excuse, telling Wolsey on 5 March that. ‘The queen would never let me be in rest till I had granted her to be married and so, to be plain with you, I have married her heartily and lain with her.'