Game of Queens (41 page)

In the summer of 1559, at a joust to celebrate his daughter's marriage to Philip, his opponent's lance struck Henri II in the face. His visor shattered, a splinter entered his eye, and after nine days of agony, he died.

It was, unquestionably, a personal tragedy for Catherine de Medici. The perceptive Venetian ambassador had noted that ‘more than anyone else she loves the King'. But arguably it was also an opportunity, or to put it more kindly, a challenge to which she dared not fail to rise. Had not Anne de Beaujeu, holding the throne for another boy-king of France half a century before, singled out widowhood as the time of a powerful woman's greatest responsibility – and autonomy?

The new king, Catherine de Medici's eldest son François II, was a sickly teenager, susceptible to influence. But Catherine's was not the only voice in his ear and in the first days of her son's reign she could take a seat at the table of power only by allying herself with the new Queen Mary's Guise family. As the Guises moved swiftly to take possession of the fifteen-year-old king, Catherine abandoned her husband's body to join them. Her presence lent them legitimacy; others who might have hoped to seize a measure of power, notably the Guises' great rival, the Constable of France, Montmorency, were left lamenting.

Once installed in the Louvre, Catherine de Medici allowed herself to relapse into the mourning seclusion expected of a French queen dowager. Her daughter-in-law Mary frequently joined her in her black silk-shrouded apartments. In a letter to her ‘true friend, good sister and cousin' Elizabeth of England, Catherine wrote that her loss was ‘so recent and so dreadful and brings such pain, regret and despair that we have need of God, who has visited us with this affliction, to give us the power to endure it'. A visitor described her as so ‘wept out' as to bring tears to their own eyes.

Under Guise influence, the new king told Montmorency that he was ‘anxious to solace thine old age'; effectively, that he was being pensioned off. Jeanne d'Albret's husband Antoine de Bourbon would, as first Prince of the Blood, have expected to head a regency council, but he too found himself sidelined, to the point where Catherine de Medici commented he was ‘reduced to the position of a chambermaid'. Catherine herself, by contrast, got a speedy and lavish financial settlement. The title she claimed for herself – Queen Mother, rather than the conventional Dowager Queen – showed clearly that she considered her part to be about the future, not the past.

Although the English ambassador Sir Nicholas Throckmorton declared, in the first days after Henri II's death, that the ‘House of Guise ruleth', a fortnight later he opined that Catherine had ‘though not in name, yet in deed and in effect th'authority of Regent'. From the early days of her son's reign, his official acts opened with the words: ‘This being the good pleasure of the Queen, my lady-mother, and I also approving of every opinion that she holdeth, am content and command that . . .' The challenges facing France – faction, the terrible debt caused by Henri's wars, and religious controversy – were enough to employ the talents of all François's possible advisors.

By now, Protestantism had reached its tentacles into every level of French society. Within a few years as many as two million people worshipped in a thousand congregations, while two of Constable Mont-morency's nephews had converted, including notably (a name that would resound later in French history) Gaspard, Admiral de Coligny. King Henri II had taken a hard line against the dissidents but now it was not so easy.

The new faith was gaining a particular hold in the southwest and in the territories of Navarre and Béarn. The seeds were also sown (in France as in the British Isles) of a clash of two ruling women, Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d'Albret, one on either side of the religious divide.

 

In 1555 another female ruler had ascended a throne on France's southern borders. The first half of the 1550s saw Jeanne d'Albret, heiress of Navarre, as a wife and a mother, her first child having been born in 1551. Sadly that son died just before his second birthday, but by that time Jeanne was pregnant again. Henri was born on 14 December 1553, in the family seat of Pau. The family legend surrounding his birth said Jeanne d'Albret's father promised to hand over a will in her favour if she sang, while giving birth, a local song to the Virgin, and if her baby were born without a cry. His conditions being fulfilled, he handed over the will but took the baby, saying ‘That is for you, my girl, but this is for me.' When Jeanne was born a girl, the Spanish sneered that the ‘the bull has sired a lamb'. Showing the baby to the people, ‘The lamb has given birth to a lion!' he proclaimed triumphantly.

Jeanne's marriage to Antoine de Bourbon was a loving one, troubled only by Jeanne's insecurities. Antoine's letters are full of reassurance and perhaps a touch of exasperation: ‘. . . no husband ever loved a wife as I love you. I hope, my dear, that in time you will realise it, more than you have up to now.' She should rid herself of her fears concerning both his safety and his fidelity: ‘I am saving everything I have for my spouse, praying her to do the same.' On another occasion he wrote that, ‘I have offended neither God nor you, and have no desire to begin now. I am surrounded by trotting horses every day, I feel fine and feel no need for a mare . . .'
³

Her father's death in the spring of 1555 made her Jeanne III. Antoine's letter to Jeanne during what proved to be her father's last illness breathes warmth, if also a clear measure of apprehension: ‘I fear that your nature will cause you to
faire une demonstration
[to make a fuss] and I beg you to keep calm. I assure you that [if need be] you have a husband who will be father, mother, brother and husband to you.'

Jeanne d'Albret's marriage to Antoine – a prince expected to rule on her behalf – might well have been seen as one way to circumvent the anomaly of female rule. This was how things had worked for the country's first reigning queens, for Navarre did have some tradition of female sovereignty, even before the troubled reign of Jeanne's grandmother Catherine de Foix. But the equation worked out differently. Jeanne instructed the Estates of Béarn that she wished to rule jointly with her husband, since ‘if she, who was their Queen and sovereign lady, regarded him as her lord, they should do the same, because the husband is lord of the person and property of his wife'.

By contrast, the Estates (who had to ratify by vote the selection of a new sovereign) declared that Jeanne was their ‘true and natural Lady', while her husband, by their law, had only stewardship of her goods. It took them five days of debate to give in and accept a joint sovereignty. The ceremony that crowned her Jeanne III was based on that of Jeanne II and her husband in 1329.
⁴
The marriage remained a devoted one. ‘You say you want to wear a coiffe next summer and I think you could not do better, it became you very well last year. I am sending by the bearer a golden chain', Antoine wrote.

Jeanne tried to smooth over concerns at the French court that Antoine (through the ubiquitous Descurra, the spy who had reported on Jeanne's first, Cleves, marriage) was intriguing with the emperor over the restoration of the part of Navarre that Spain had annexed, just as her mother Marguerite of Navarre tried to smooth over her husband's intrigues. Antoine was as desperate to do the deal as his father-in-law had been, but the Habsburgs played him in the same way. Finally, he began looking for another source of support and found it in the Protestant faction.

It is now impossible to be sure whether Jeanne or her husband first began the move towards Protestantism. It was Antoine, at this stage, who conducted the correspondence with Calvin, Antoine to whom the French Protestant (or ‘Huguenot') community looked. Brantôme famously wrote of Jeanne that she ‘loved a dance more than a sermon', and that he had heard ‘on good authority' she reproached Antoine for his interest, saying that ‘if he wanted to ruin himself she did not wish to lose her possessions'.

But some Protestant contemporaries were already thinking of Jeanne. On 19 July 1559 the new Queen Elizabeth of England (prompted by her minister William Cecil) wrote to both King and Queen of Navarre. To Antoine, she expressed herself ‘anxious to please and serve'. To Jeanne her tone is at once more encouraging, and more that of one beleaguered sister addressing another: ‘
si Deus nobiscum quis contra nos?
' (If God is with us, who can be against us?) Elizabeth was anxious to have the pleasure of Jeanne's acquaintance but since distance did not permit that, it would have to be done in spirit and goodwill, honouring Jeanne ‘not only for [your] rank in the world but even more for the true profession and sincerity of your Christian religion, in which [I] pray the Creator may keep [you] by His grace, and that [you] may continue a supporter of His Holy Word'. Religion was making bonds between powerful women, just as it would ultimately divide them.

35

‘maidenly estate'

England, 1558 –1560

Elizabeth Tudor's sex, as well as her Protestant religion, set the terms of her rule from the first; a perceived weakness that the ‘Virgin Queen' would manage to make a strength.

On the one hand, the long game she played, dangling the tantalising possibility of her hand in marriage, would prove to be one of the best tools of her diplomacy. On the other, like other reigning queens, Elizabeth did not present herself as a woman when it suited her not to. The doctrine of the monarch's two bodies had been implicit at her sister Mary's funeral, when the Bishop of Winchester described her as: ‘a Queen, and by the same title a King also' but the idea had its clearest expression in Elizabeth's reign. Just three days after her sister's death she told parliament: ‘I am but one body naturally considered though by [God's] permission a body politic to govern . . .' A few years later (in relation to an obscure piece of property dealing), her lawyers spelled it out for her. A monarch, they said, was ‘utterly devoid of Infancy, old Age, and natural Deformities or Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to'. Including mortality and, presumably, femininity.

The very ideal of government – ‘the king counselled' – gained added impetus from the ruler being a woman. Even the supportive John Aylmer wrote in his refutation of John Knox's tirade against women rulers that Elizabeth's sex mattered the less because England was not ‘a mere monarchy', nor yet a mere oligarchy or democracy, but ‘a rule mixt of all three'. In other words, that Elizabeth's sex did not matter, because she was not that powerful, anyway.
*

Knox's work, originally written to take aim at the Catholic rulers Mary Tudor and Marie de Guise, was now, all too obviously, potentially a slur on the Protestant Elizabeth. John Calvin wrote a private letter to William Cecil, in which he admitted he and Knox had discussed the problem. Calvin's feeling was that a female sovereign was ‘a deviation from the original and proper order of nature . . . to be ranked no less than slavery'. But there was, Calvin admitted, the biblical Deborah and also the idea derived from the prophet Isaiah that ‘Queens should be nursing mothers of the church'. The idea Knox, and others, now employed was to figure Elizabeth as a reincarnation of Deborah; an ‘extraordinary' woman, exempted from the ‘proper order of nature' only by the ‘special providence' of God.

It was assumed from the first that Elizabeth would, for better or worse, soon be sharing her authority with a husband. On 21 November 1558, within four days of the old queen's death, the Spanish ambassador De Feria wrote to King Philip that ‘everything depends upon the husband this woman may take'. Meanwhile, every decision made was, in a sense, provisional. Even Elizabeth's mainstay William Cecil could in these early days be found reproaching a messenger for having taken papers directly to the queen, as ‘a matter of such weight being too much for a woman's knowledge'. Cecil would be only one of the influential voices urging now and later that a husband was her and the realm's ‘only known and likely surety': ‘God send our mistress a husband, and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession'. At the time, it still seemed likely.

Both Elizabeth and ‘her people', De Feria warned, ‘will listen to any ambassadors who may come to treat of marriage'. Three weeks later, on 14 December: ‘Everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner, and they cannot make out whom she favours, so that every day some new cry is raised about a husband.' As well as Philip of Spain himself (reluctant but resigned), there was the persistent Eric of Sweden. Charles V's brother Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor, offered one of his younger sons; Scotland proposed the Earl of Arran. Home-grown candidates included the Earl of Arundel, Sir William Pickering and of course the perennial frontrunner (as the next two decades would continue to prove him) Elizabeth's Master of Horse, Robert Dudley.

Certainly it was assumed that she must and would marry someone. There was, Elizabeth Tudor herself observed, ‘a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married'. The Holy Roman Emperor's envoy agreed that she should (‘as is woman's way') be eager ‘to marry and be provided for. For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable'. She herself would say that ‘I have already joined myself to an husband in marriage, namely the kingdom of England'. It was the rhetoric her sister had used but Elizabeth would prove to take it more seriously.