Game of Queens (43 page)

The Protestant Scots ‘think the Dowager does more harm than five hundred Frenchmen’, the Duke of Norfolk said. Marie (writing to her Guise brothers that ‘our troubles and affairs increase here by the hour’) found the strain told badly on her health. Her leg so swollen that ‘if any lay his finger upon it, it goes in as with butter’ – with, it was said, only her tears keeping the watery swelling of dropsy at bay – she was losing lord after lord to the other side.

Her health was rapidly worsening. Just after midnight on 11 June, Marie de Guise died, with several of the Scottish lords she had seen turn from friend to enemy at her side. On 6 July Scotland and England (with France represented by the Guises) signed the Treaty of Edinburgh. All English and French troops were to withdraw, while in France, the young Mary, Queen of Scots would cease using the English arms.

For the duration of Mary Stuart’s absence in France, Scotland would be ruled by a council of twelve lords, chosen jointly by the queen and by the Scottish parliament (one of whose first actions was to declare Scotland a Protestant country). If Mary and her husband François refused to ratify the Treaty, then England would intervene to protect the Scottish Reformation; a refusal the likelier for the fact that Mary, frantically mourning her mother, had not been consulted as to the treaty’s terms.

With Mary apparently permanently based in France it seemed as if the council, headed by Châtelherault and Mary’s increasingly ambitious half-brother Lord James, had things satisfactorily under their own control. But fate had a twist in store.

In her last letter, Marie de Guise wrote of her health that ‘I do not know what will happen’. In fact, as regarded her impending death, she probably did have some idea. But she could not possibly have foreseen the overthrow that was about to come to her daughter Mary Stuart.

PART VI

1560–1572

The greater and better parts of Christendom would be very wrong to complain, seeing themselves presently governed by princesses whose natural intelligence, seasoned by long experience of good and bad fortune both in wars and domestic matters, have put a great many kings to shame.

Pierre de Ronsard
Mascarades et Bergeries
1565

37

‘Rancour and division'

France, 1560–1561

France was becoming the theatre in which the religious conflicts of Europe played out most clearly. In March 1560 came the Conspiracy of Amboise, a Protestant plot to overthrow the Guises and the government. It may or may not have been supported by Elizabeth Tudor of England; some of the conspirators, under torture, implicated the Prince de Condé, the committed Protestant brother of Jeanne d'Albret's husband Antoine, and there were also suggestions about Antoine.

That summer Jeanne and Antoine, at home at Nérac, accompanied by Condé, requested Calvin to send them a preacher, Theodore Beza. Another minister wrote ecstatically of the atmosphere that awaited him in their territory: ‘Preaching is open – in public. The streets resound to the chanting of the Psalms. Religious books are sold as freely and openly as at home [in Geneva].'

A letter from Beza to Calvin written on 25 August says that ‘the ladies commend themselves warmly to you'. The importance of great ladies in spreading the reformed faith was universally acknowledged: Condé's wife, Eleonore de Roye, was another significant figure. Nothing, however, was yet to be done openly. Indeed, Antoine and Jeanne still sent an envoy to the pope, to assure Rome of their orthodoxy.

Catherine de Medici, meanwhile, was arguing forcefully that the way to forestall any more religious troubles was to allow a measure of tolerance of the French Protestants. Catherine was on the rise. Mary, Queen of Scots was now Queen Consort of France, but by the start of 1560, there were mutters of discontent about the hold her Guise family had over the young king. Catherine de Medici's policy of allowing the Guises to take the political foreground, while she remained aloof as a sorrowing widow and mother, was paying off.

Catherine sought to make a distinction between those genuinely committed to the new faith and those disaffected with the Guise regime; between, even, those of Protestant beliefs, and those prepared to rebel to promulgate them. The Edict of Romorantin, of May 1560, was Catherine's doing: an edict that confined the trial of religious cases to the ecclesiastical courts, which could not impose the death penalty. She also urged, successfully, for peace with England and for France's withdrawal from active participation in Scottish affairs, the latter decision perhaps the easier for the death of Marie de Guise.

On the advice of the leading Protestant, Admiral de Coligny, Catherine de Medici called a meeting of the full council for August; a discreet move to curb the exclusive influence the Guises had at first enjoyed. She herself made the first speech, hoping the councillors might find a policy whereby the king ‘could conserve his sceptre, his subjects find relief from their suffering and the malcontents find contentment'. But events would overtake the peaceable plan.

The first of these involved the Bourbons; Antoine, and particularly Condé, who preferred to put their faith in military might rather than Catherine's assemblies, prepared through the autumn for armed confrontation. Condé was arrested and his wife imprisoned, while there were stories the Guises, in league with the Spaniards, planned to seize Jeanne d'Albret and her son. But the second event was more definitive still. Young King François II, notwithstanding his passion for hunting, had always been frail and sickly, and on 9 November, after riding out in the cold, he fell ill.

It soon became clear that his condition was serious. Catherine de Medici wrote of how hard it was ‘to see the terrible and extreme pain that the King, my son is suffering'. François II had an abscess in his ear, and sepsis set in. Everyone, even his mother, had to think of what would happen if the worst befell.

The heir, Catherine's next son, Charles, was only ten, so the Estates General would have to vote on a regency. Their choice was likely to fall on Antoine de Bourbon, for all that his brother Condé was now under sentence of death. This would leave no great place for Catherine. Boldly, she called Antoine de Bourbon into her presence (and that of the Guises) and accused him of having plotted, treacherously.

Terrified that the same sentence would fall on him as on his brother, Antoine weakly offered to give up his rights in the regency to Catherine de Medici; an offer with which she was quick to close, citing examples of other queen mothers who had ruled on behalf of a young son, notably the thirteenth-century Blanche of Castile, mother of the revered Louis IX. The Guises were alarmed that they too would be called to account for their dubious part in prosecuting Condé and all too aware that their influence would suffer once their niece Mary was no longer queen. Catherine placated both parties, and made them embrace. Pitting her rivals against each other, she had seemingly emerged above the fray. She had become an operator. It was a triumph of her personal diplomacy.

François II died on 5 December 1560, after a reign of only sixteen months. This was Catherine de Medici's moment. An English diplomat wrote that, ‘The Queen was blithe of the death of King Francis her son, because she had no guiding of him.' Calling a meeting of the council, she told them: ‘Since it has pleased God to deprive me of my elder son, I mean to submit to the Divine will and to assist and serve the King, my second son [Charles IX], in the feeble measure of my experience.'

She had decided, she told the council:

to keep him beside me and to govern the state, as a devoted mother must do. Since I have assumed this duty, I wish all correspondence to be addressed in the first place to me; I shall open it in your presence and in particular in that of the King of Navarre [Antoine de Bourbon], who will occupy the first place in the council as the nearest relative of the King . . .

Antoine gave his assent, protesting his loyalty, and so did the Guises. Both parties ascribed the actions which had produced their former enmity to the orders of the dead François II; Catherine de Medici colluded in the pretence, content with the situation she had set up. At forty-one, she had attained immense authority. The Venetian ambassador wrote that her will was supreme: ‘it is she who will henceforth have her hand upon the most important negotiations'. Before the year was out, she had herself proclaimed Governor of the Kingdom, ‘Catherine by the grace of God, Queen of France, Mother of the King'.

François II's early death would have huge consequences for his widow Mary Stuart, and thus, indirectly, for Elizabeth in England. Mary Stuart had been raised in the expectation that her role as queen consort of wealthy France would outrank that of queen regnant of obscure Scotland. But now, fewer than two years into her marriage, as she sat in the darkened room, custom prescribed for a mourning queen, she must have known her future had changed, completely and unexpectedly.

 

There was yet another woman, also in France, whose future would be profoundly affected by the ramifications of François's death. It was clear Catherine de Medici had used Antoine de Bourbon as pawn and cat's paw. Did the word of his humiliation, and his vacillation, persuade Jeanne d'Albret that she should take a stand? Calvinism, with its authoritarian logic, its insistence on a black and white simplicity, must have had an emotional appeal. At Christmas communion, at Pau, she publicly forswore Rome and, as her personal historian Nicolas de Bordenave recorded, ‘having made a confession of faith, partook of Holy Communion according to the rites of the said Reformed Religion'. Bordenave later recorded that once the previously reluctant Jeanne had ‘put everything in God's hands', she did so ‘with such constancy that never again could she be turned from her course, no matter what assaults Satan and the world made upon her'.
¹

Jeanne d'Albret was hailed by other Protestant players on the international board. Calvin first wrote to her in mid-January 1561, declaring that he had no need to advise her, for ‘when I see how the spirit of God rules you I have more occasion to give thanks than to exhort you'. Queen Elizabeth's ambassador Throckmorton had been told to congratulate Jeanne on her ‘affection for the true religion', commenting that the time offered ‘great opportunities to encourage those well-disposed'.

Both Calvin and Queen Elizabeth regretted the defection of Antoine, now declared Lieutenant-General of France, as Catherine had promised. The Florentine ambassador took his appointment as a sign of Catherine's weakness, declaring that she had ‘finally proven that she is only a woman'. But Antoine's reward was less than he hoped. When he suggested that, in the event of Catherine's illness, her responsibilities should devolve on him, her reply was uncompromising: ‘I shall never be too ill to supervise whatever affects the service of the King my son.'

In the middle of 1561, delayed by the need to settle affairs in Béarn before she left (not least the protection of her Calvinist ministers), Jeanne d'Albret set out to join her husband at the French court. She hoped, perhaps, to stiffen his commitment to the Protestant faith.

The Spanish ambassador wrote that along the way ‘everywhere the heretics await her coming as if she were the Messiah, because they are certain she will perform miracles on their behalf. Personally I do not doubt it, for wherever she goes she meets with no resistance.' Throckmorton told Elizabeth's minister Cecil, after Jeanne had moved on from Orléans, of how twenty-five religious ladies, ‘the fairest of sixty', threw aside their habits and scaled the walls, so convinced were they now of ‘the superstitions of the cloister, and the pleasures of secular company'. The Venetian ambassador called Jeanne a woman ‘
di terribile cervello
' (of a fearsome brain). Catherine, noted the Spanish ambassador, ‘will have a hard time living with her'.

Jeanne d'Albret made herself a focus of Protestantism at the French court, setting up a religious council, welcoming new evangelists, winning a certain following among other young court ladies and regularly attending Protestant services ‘with the doors open'. She also sent word to England that Elizabeth Tudor's ‘credit is great, and the more so for standing so firmly in God's cause. [Jeanne] was glad to hear that the candles and candlesticks were removed from the Queen's chapel.' Her husband Antoine, by contrast, attended both Protestant and Catholic services in these months.

Antoine, as even Calvin in Geneva heard with profound disapproval, by now notorious as a ladies' man, was involved with one of the pretty young attendants around Catherine de Medici. Even Calvin became drawn into the attempt to heal Antoine's marriage to Jeanne, but nothing could weigh against the inducements held out by the other side. Spain even offered him (‘in principle') another kingdom to compensate for the loss of Navarre.

‘I have always worked for the advancement of [the Religion]', Jeanne d'Albret declared later in her memoirs. Her husband ‘having withdrawn from the first zeal that he had had for it, was for me a tough thorn, I won't say in the foot, but in the heart.' By contrast, ‘I have always, by the grace of God, followed the straight path.' The Venetian envoy wrote that Jeanne was harassing Antoine ‘night and day', while he was trying to force her into at least outward conformity. Forbidden to hold Calvinist services in her apartment, she went to those in Condé's, and when Antoine confronted her as she was about to step into the carriage, the rows were ‘so loud everyone in the château could hear'.