Game of Queens (23 page)

The trigger was, as so often, a twist in the endless wars between France and the Empire. The 1523 Anglo-Habsburg invasion might have fizzled out but that was far from the end of the story. The revolt of the disaffected Duc de Bourbon and the consequent trial of his allies had left a bad taste. He had roused much sympathy in a populace angry about the money mulcted from them to pay for François’s Italian wars. The French army that tried (under Bonnivet’s command) to capture Naples in the spring of 1524 was soundly defeated. But that summer François decided once more to venture his hand in Italy; determined, he said, to win ‘nothing less than the entire state of Milan and the kingdom of Naples’.

In that summer, Queen Claude was clearly seriously ill. François declared that, ‘Never could I have believed that the bond of marriage enjoined by God would be so firm and difficult to break.’ He nevertheless set off for the south, accompanied by his wife and sister. Louise of Savoy, who in the past year had suffered two bad bouts of pleurisy, was soon in a state of collapse, as her daughter Marguerite reported: ‘What with the fatigue of the roads and the extremity of worry which she has to bear, [she] has had a flux of bleeding from all parts, just as in her bad fever.’

That autumn Queen Claude died, followed just weeks later by her daughter Charlotte. Marguerite nursed the little girl, and tried to keep the news of her granddaughter’s death from Louise of Savoy, already distraught at the thought of her son’s departure. But in October, François appointed his mother as regent once more and led his army over the Alps, despite all Louise could say.

To maintain a campaign through the winter season was a challenge. François insisted on camping beside the city of Pavia, some twenty miles from Milan. In the last week of February 1525, matters came to a head. When, on 24 February, a Spanish-Imperial army attacked and succeeded in dividing the French army, the four-hour battle saw the French suffer the greatest loss of noblemen since Agincourt, with Bonnivet among the fallen (having, it was said, ridden out to seek his own death after urging François to fight that day). In the catastrophic French defeat, one of the few to evade either death or capture was Marguerite’s husband Alençon but François himself was taken into imperial captivity.

Nothing was left to François ‘but my honour and my life’. He wrote to his mother immediately, begging her not to lose heart, ‘but to exercise your accustomed prudence’. Louise of Savoy forced herself to write reassuringly back, while her daughter Marguerite wrote to one of his companion noblemen, Montmorency, a Marshall of France: ‘All my life I will envy you because I cannot perform for him the duties you are now performing; for although my will to do so is greater than yours, it is impossible, since fate has wronged me by making me a woman.’ Montmorency, in return, asked Marguerite to write often, since news of herself and her mother was ‘the only thing which gives [the king] the utmost pleasure’.

François was never going to be treated other than honourably. Soon, one of the noblemen who shared his captivity wrote to Louise that he required not only money, but silver plate. There was, however, concern about François’s desire to fast several days a week; soon his sister was writing to say that if he would not eat meat and eggs in Lent he should remember fish did not agree with him. (In the end he observed the meat-free season by eating tortoises.)

Some three months after his capture, François was taken to Spain, reaching Madrid at the beginning of August, royally entertained the whole way. Meanwhile, his mother was left to deal with the effects of his captivity. ‘Being so unfortunate’, François wrote to his subjects, ‘I have had no greater satisfaction than to know of the obedience which you have shown to Madame, as loyal subjects and as good Frenchmen. I recommend her to you.’

‘Come soon, for never had I such longing to see you’, François wrote to his mother. But this was impossible. Louise of Savoy had too many other problems to manage: primarily to ensure that Charles V (or his ally Henry VIII) did not follow up the French defeat by invading France itself. Burgundy – now French, but the ancestral home of Margaret of Austria’s family – was a particular concern, since Charles had a special interest in recapturing this part of his heritage. More ships were commissioned, and the returning remnants of François’s army paid and heartened. She had, moreover, to defend the crown itself against any incursions, under these circumstances, on royal authority. Murmurings that the regent should be not the king’s mother but his nearest male kinsman quickly died when the said nobleman instead accepted a place on her council, but the Paris
parlement
had still to be won round. Louise had to use all her tact.

One specific cause of complaint was that the royal family had been too lax on religious unorthodoxy, had expanded their privileges at the expense of the church’s authority. Here Louise, naturally more conservative than either of her children, or perhaps simply more fearful, made some concessions: she needed the new pope’s support more than ever against Spain.

Across Europe, 1525 was something of a turning point in religious affairs. In Spain the Inquisition clamped down on the mystically-oriented ‘Illuminati’ within its ranks; in Germany, Luther’s divergence from the main humanist reform movement became apparent. In this year the first of a growing number of German princely rulers followed where the cities were leading and joined hands with the Lutherans. Conversely, when peasant revolt broke out across Habsburg lands, it was linked, not altogether to Luther’s pleasure, to the religious Reformation. It was also in this year that the more radical Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, both introduced a new liturgy to replace the Mass, and dedicated his
Commentary on the True and False Religion
to the King of France.

An important tenet of the new faith was that ordinary people should be able to read the Bible in their own language, rather than having it confined to priestly Latin. But in this new climate the publication of Bibles in vernacular French was banned. Marguerite’s mentor Briçonnet escaped heresy charges only because of his court connections. Nonetheless, wrote Chancellor Duprat to King François, Marguerite’s mother ‘manages so well that she has completely rehabilitated the realm’.

Louise of Savoy had real success with her foreign policy. On 30 August the Peace of the More (with Cardinal Wolsey as one of the prime negotiators and Thomas Boleyn one of the signatories) restored harmony with England. She also sent envoys to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, Suleiman the Magnificent, warning that if he did not come to France’s assistance Charles V would soon become ‘the master of the world’. But one of her overtures brought trouble for another lady.

Margaret of Austria greeted the news of Pavia with a public display of rejoicing: fireworks, processions and prayers. She was, however, concerned that the vulnerably placed Netherlands might be threatened by an alliance between France and England. And she was receptive when Louise of Savoy sent her secretary to the Netherlands to arrange a six-month truce. But Charles was furious when he heard that Margaret had arranged an armistice for those territories under her authority, without waiting to hear his overall plan: ‘I cannot conceal from you, madame, that I have found it very strange, and very far from satisfactory, that this should have been done without knowing my intentions, and without receiving instructions on this behalf, and powers from me’, he wrote on 15 August. His own treaty concerning the cessation of hostilities was to be published immediately, and her own should be regarded as ‘null and void . . . for it is my express intention that it should not be held of the smallest force or value’. She was still his ‘good mother and aunt’, but all the same . . .

Wolsey was likewise annoyed that Margaret of Austria had concluded peace with France without consulting him: ‘I should never have thought that, after so many stipulations, promises, and declarations made by madame, she would have been the first to break through them,’ he told the imperial envoys. ‘The perplexity and doubt by which madame is said to be assailed, and which have induced her to take this step, are no excuse . . .’

By contrast, the imprisoned François greeted the letters brought to him by Margaret of Austria’s envoy with compliments and gratitude. He referred all questions to his sister Marguerite of Navarre, travelling to Madrid to negotiate the peace and François’s freedom. François had refused to negotiate with his captors while imprisoned, insisting everything should await his sister’s arrival. This was Marguerite’s chance and she would, she said, ‘throw the cinders of her bones to the winds’ to do her brother service.

She was by now free of other ties. Her husband Alençon, almost the only noble to escape from Pavia, was jeered at by the crowds as he made his way back to France; variously blamed for having ordered a retreat when none was needed and for having fled the field. Marguerite wrote that he, ‘the prisoner of his freedom’, now found his life ‘a living death’. Whether or not she blamed him (as it seems her mother did), she nursed him in the fatal illness which followed and on his death wrote to François that her grief ‘made her forget all reason’. Three days later, however, she was carefully composing her face so as not to upset Louise: ‘I would feel miserable, seeing I am of no use to you’, she told François, ‘if I were to disturb the person who is doing so much for you and for what is yours.’

In July, she received her safe conduct to travel through the emperor’s lands, and wrote again to François (the trinity kept up a speedy interchange of letters and poems) that ‘fear of death, prison, or any other ill have now become so familiar that to me they are liberty, life, health, glory and honour, since I believe that through them I could share your fortune, which if I could I’d bear alone’. But by the time she could set sail at the end of August, the Mediterranean waves were so bad her whole retinue was seasick. When she landed, riding across Spain with an honour guard sent by the emperor behind her, she heard that François was gravely ill; news that made her pick up the pace still further, travelling ten or twelve leagues a day until most of her servants were left behind. ‘I cannot get over my fear of being inadequate’, she wrote.

As she drew near to Madrid she sent off another note to François’s companion Montmorency, that ‘never did I know what a brother is until now; and never would I have thought I could love him so much!’ On her arrival on 19 September she found the doctors had given François up for lost. Not so Marguerite. One of Louise of Savoy’s envoys in Madrid described how she:

asked all the gentlemen of the king’s household and her own, as well as the ladies, to pray to God. They all took communion and afterwards mass was said in the king’s chamber . . . After the mass, my lady the duchess had the Blessed Sacrament presented to the king so that he might adore it . . .

François managed to swallow a piece of the sacred wafer, and Marguerite took the rest. From that time François’s fever abated. (It seems likely the abscess in his head had burst.) Marguerite despatched a messenger, with orders to press his horse until it foundered under him, to their mother, from whom the news of François’s illness had hitherto been kept. Louise wrote back to Marguerite of her ‘resurrection’; the idea of François’s danger had thrown her into ‘passion and death’.

Marguerite’s nursing – or her prayers – may have saved François, but as she began peace talks with the emperor at Toledo, her diplomacy was less successful. Charles V had been warned against himself receiving Marguerite: ‘being young and a widow she comes . . . to see and be seen’. Charles ordained that the two should meet ‘alone in a chamber with one of my ladies to guard the door’. Marguerite found him ‘quite cold’; putting her off by saying he had to consult with his council. She got on better with his sister Eleanor, one of the children Margaret of Austria had raised, the now-widowed Queen of Portugal who had returned to live at her brother’s court. The two women spoke late into the night but when in subsequent days Marguerite tried to use Eleanor as a conduit she found her unresponsive: ‘they keep her on a tight rein’.

None of the proposals Marguerite was able to put to Charles V was acceptable. The talks were suspended and Marguerite spent her days visiting convents for prayer and consolation. Another attempt, almost a month later, again failed. The stumbling block was always France’s reluctance to return Burgundy, while Charles made it clear he had no intention of ransoming François simply for cash. At the beginning of December, with the truce almost expired, Marguerite was forced to leave for France again, without promise of her brother’s release, sending with almost hysterical frequency as many as several letters as day to be sure her brother did not want her to return. [
see note on sources
]

She was greatly distressed at having failed in this, the most important mission of her life, writing to Montmorency that ‘the farther I go, the unhappier I am to know that I am not worthy to serve the one who so deserves it’. The journey itself was exhausting, the stringent terms of her safe conduct meaning ‘that every day for a month I was on horseback at six o’clock in the morning and did not arrive at my destination until night’.

It was Louise of Savoy who decided that even Burgundy (along with François’s Italian claims and other border territories) was a price worth paying to free François from what was beginning to look like perpetual captivity. Earlier, the imperial ambassador had written that she was the one who might be in any degree flexible in this, although Marguerite, on her journey north, was likewise urging François: ‘do not be held back by lands or children, for your kingdom needs you’. The treaty of Madrid, signed in the first weeks of 1526, ordained that the French king should immediately be set free, that he should marry the emperor’s sister Eleanor and that his two eldest sons, aged six and eight, should be sent to Charles V as hostages.