Mary Queen of Scots (17 page)

In the interval, an event occurred of profound importance in the history
of Mary Stuart. On 17 November 1558 Mary Tudor, queen of England, died leaving no children. Her throne was inherited by her half-sister Elizabeth, an unmarried woman of twenty-five. Until such time as Elizabeth herself should marry and beget heirs, Mary was thus the next heiress to the English throne, by virtue of her descent from her great-grandfather Henry
VII
of England.
^b
But the actual situation was more complicated than this simple statement reveals. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry
VII
and his second wife Anne Boleyn; as Henry’s divorce from his first wife Catharine of Aragon had never been recognized by the Catholic Church, so Henry’s marriage to Anne was considered void by Catholic standards, and so Elizabeth herself was held by strict Catholic standards to be illegitimate and thus incapable of inheriting the English throne. By this process of reasoning, Mary Stuart should rightly have inherited the throne of Mary Tudor. The actions of Henry
VIII
himself did not help to clear up the confusion: in 1536 the English Parliament itself had debarred Elizabeth from the succession as illegitimate, and the Act which restored her to the succession in 1544 did not remove the stain of bastardy. Yet by the will of Henry
VIII
the throne was also debarred from going to a foreigner – which by English standards also ousted Mary herself from the succession. The troubles over this will and Mary’s claim to have her place in the English succession after Elizabeth, lay in the future. At the moment of Mary Tudor’s death, the troubles were all the other way about, and involved Elizabeth’s right to be queen in the first place.

Immediately on the death of Mary Tudor, Henry
II
of France formally caused his daughter-in-law Mary Stuart to be proclaimed queen of England, Ireland and Scotland, and caused the king-dauphin and queen-dauphiness to assume the royal arms of England, in addition to those of France and Scotland. Up till the death of Queen Mary Tudor, England had been firmly allied to Spain, through Mary’s marriage to the Spanish king; Henry now hoped to redress the balance by making a French claim to English dominion. This eminently political action on the part of the French king was to be flung in Mary’s face for the rest of her life, down to the moment of her trial in England nearly thirty years later. Yet it seems certain that she had even less opportunity for judging the wisdom of her father-in-law’s behaviour on this occasion than over the matter of the secret treaties. ‘They have made the Queen-Dauphiness go into mourning for the late Queen of England,’ commented the Venetian ambassador, who was in no doubt as to where the initiative for these moves came from.
²¹
At the time, the climate of French opinion was certainly such that Mary’s claims were considered no more than just: the French writers eagerly commented on the dauphiness’s English connection, and celebrated her accession to the triple crown in enthusiastic verse – as one of the Pleiade, Jean de Baïf wrote, in a celebratory wedding song: ‘Without murder and war, France and Scotland will be with England united.’ Ronsard imagined that Jupiter had decreed that Mary should govern England for three months, Scotland for three and France for six. In another nuptial song, René Guillon described the match as the union of the white lily of France with the white rose of the Yorkists – an allusion to Mary’s Tudor descent.
²²

The letters of the English ambassador were full of details to illustrate the manner in which these infuriating pretensions were being upheld by the French king: at the wedding of the Princess Claude at the beginning of the next year, a feature of the proceedings was that the dauphin and dauphiness bore the arms of England quartered with those of France. The state entry to the town of Châtelherault in November 1559 was marked by a canopy of crimson damask carried over Mary’s head with the arms of England, France and Scotland emblazoned on it. A canopy of purple damask with the French arms only was carried over Francis (by now the king of France) and the arms were painted on the gates of the town in the same fashion.
²³
The English state papers show a definite preoccupation with the subject, understandable in view of the shaky English policy at the start of a new reign. But Melville also reported in his memoirs that the cardinal caused the arms of England to be engraved on the queen’s silver plate;
²⁴
a great seal was struck bearing the royal figures of Francis and Mary, the date 1559 and the inscription round it referring to Francis and Mary, king and queen of the French, Scottish, English and Irish. Even while the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was being negotiated the cardinal and others made it their business to say that they doubted whether they should treat with any of England, save the dauphin and his wife.

The matter continued to be wrangled over after the accession of Francis. In February 1560 the government in London decided to point out to the French ambassador that although the English arms had first been borne by Mary under Henry
II
, she had not stopped bearing them with his death. Throckmorton had a long interview with the cardinal when he argued over the matter, saying that despite Mary’s admittedly English descent, she ought not to use the arms without any difference. In March the Council told Throckmorton to point out to Mary that ‘her father, the King of Scots, being higher than she, never bare the same; nor by the laws of the land is she next heir’. To this the bishop of Valence, on behalf of the
French king and queen made the somewhat disingenuous counterpoint that ‘the bearing of the English arms by the French Queen, was thought in France to be done for the honour of Elizabeth and to show that the French queen was her [Mary’s] cousin’.
²⁵

However, when peace was proclaimed between England, France and Scotland in 1560, Elizabeth herself consented to believe that Mary’s ‘injurious pretensions’ to the English throne sprang from the ‘ambitious desire of the principal members of the house of Guise’, rather than the wishes of either Francis, ‘by reason of his youth incapable of such an enterprise’, or the queen of Scots ‘who is likewise very young’.
²⁶
The explanation which satisfied the English queen two years later we may also accept as being the true one. Unfortunately, once political necessity dictated another course, it no longer satisfied either Queen Elizabeth or her advisers, and the subject of Mary’s pretensions to the English throne, made on her behalf by her father-in-law before she was sixteen years old, continued to haunt her for the rest of her career.

1559, which became a year of death at the French court, seemed destined at its outset to be a year of weddings. The marriage of Princess Claude to the young and handsome duke of Lorraine was celebrated with magnificence in February. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, finally signed in April between England and France on one side and France and Spain on the other, provided that all the French conquests in Italy made during the last eighty years should be surrendered, and made arrangements for two further royal weddings. Mme Marguerite, the long unmarried sister of Henry
II
, was to wed the duke of Savoy; Princess Elisabeth at the age of fourteen faced the prospect of marriage to Philip of Spain, freed for matrimony once more by the death of Mary Tudor. Mary Stuart’s last summer as dauphiness was spent in planning for the double wedding of these two beloved companions of her childhood, to be celebrated with the full regal panoply to which the French court was so well suited. As the Venetian ambassador commented, nothing was discussed at the French court but handsome and costly apparel.
²⁷

Beneath these eddies of sartorial rivalry there were the undercurrents of more dangerous enmities. The constable and Diane de Poitiers were now all-powerful with Henry
II
, and their own alliance was symbolized by the marriage of a grand-daughter of Diane with the son of the constable. Moreover, the Montmorency faction was beginning to have Protestant affiliations, in contrast to the strong Catholicism of the Guises, since Montmorency’s own nephew Admiral Coligny had become a Huguenot. These Huguenot connections were also starting to be shared by the third
powerful French family, the Bourbons, through their head, King Antoine of Navarre and his wife Jeanne d’Albret., As the cardinal busied himself with preparations for the double wedding, it must have seemed to him that the fortunes of the Guises had taken a definite downward trend. At this moment, the volatile wheel of fortune, which the Guises had so often observed turning to their advantage in the past, was once again to take a dynamic revolution in their favour.

On 15 June the duke of Alva arrived to claim Elisabeth by proxy for his master Philip
II
, and on 21 June the proxy wedding took place, although as the young bride had not yet reached the age of puberty, it was decided that she should not depart for the Spanish court until the autumn. On 27 June the marriage contract was signed between Mme Marguerite and the duke of Savoy. There were endless tournaments and festivities, and the culmination of the double event – the wedding of Marguerite – was only a few days away. On 30 June, the king, magnificent in the black and white which he wore because they were the favourite colours of Diane de Poitiers, mounted his horse Le Malheureux, entered the lists along with the duke of Guise wearing red and white, the duke of Ferrara in yellow and red, and the duke of Nemours commonly known to be enamoured of the duchess of Guise, in yellow and black.
^c
The king’s love of jousting amounted almost to a mania. He broke three lances with the duke of Savoy, the duke of Guise, and Jacques de Lorge, count of Montgomery, a Norman with Scottish blood, who was colonel of the archers of the guard, and a man of renowned courage.

All went well until, on a sudden whim, the king challenged Montgomery to break a last lance with him. Apparently, with some presentiment of evil, Montgomery tried to excuse himself from the encounter, until Henry finally commanded him to obey as his sovereign. Now Catherine de Medicis tried to dissuade her husband, having had two visions of ill-omen about the tournament. Her daughter Marguerite tells us in her memoirs that on the previous night Catherine had actually dreamt of the death of Henry, pierced in the eye by a lance, exactly as it transpired. Henry merely replied that he would break one more lance in the queen’s honour. Catherine’s forebodings were justified: the shock of the meeting between the two resulted in Montgomery’s lance splintering; one splinter went into the king’s right eye, another into his throat. Throckmorton, the English ambassador, described the scene; Henry was borne off, ‘nothing covered but his face, he moved neither hand nor foot, but lay as one amazed’.
²⁸

The king was carried to the near-by Hôtel des Tournelles, and here lay in a state of virtual unconsciousness for nine days. On 8 July, in a lucid moment, he ordered Queen Catherine to proceed with the marriage of Mme Marguerite and the duke of Savoy. The ceremony was bathed in extreme gloom: the church of St Paul, close by the Hôtel des Tournelles was hastily decorated and at midnight the young couple knelt at the altar. Catherine sat alone on the royal dais, in floods of tears, while Francis and Mary did not even attend, but remained within earshot of the king. Jérôme de la Rovère, bishop of Toulon, said a Low Mass, trembling all the while lest he should find the herald at arms announcing the death of the king at the door of the sanctuary. As Henry felt himself dying, he called for his son and began ‘My son, I recommend to you the Church and my people …’ but he could not go on. He gave the dauphin his blessing and kissed him. That evening he became paralysed, his breathing was painful, and at 1
AM
on 10 July he died with grossly swollen hands and feet, all showing signs of a virulent infection.

Queen Catherine was left to find gloomy consolation in the fact that the death of Henry
II
represented a signal triumph for the art of astrology to which she attached such importance. The king’s death had twice been predicted accurately, although of course neither prediction had served in any way to avert the king’s fate, this being a common disadvantage of this absorbing science. Catherine kept a tame astrologer, Luc Gauric, who predicted the death of the king in a duel – which was thought at the time to be extremely unlikely, as a king was seldom to be found in single combat.
^d

In 1555 the famous Nostradamus first published his prophecies, including the rhyme:

Afterwards, it was pointed out that the tilting helm strangely resembles a cage, and that the king’s visor was actually gilded; the two wounds were held to refer to the splintering of the lance, piercing the throat and the eye. There was actually one outcry demanding the burning of Nostradamus, the man who had prophesied ‘so ill and so well’.
^e

Francis
II
was now king of France at the age of fifteen and a half, and Mary Stuart queen at the age of sixteen. In one blow of a lance, the fortunes of the Guises had changed. Their niece was now in the very seat of power. The stage was now set for their triumph, however short-lived. The day of Henry’s death was referred to afterwards by one wit as ‘the eve of the feast of the three kings’, and it was commonly asserted that there were now three kings in France, Francis of Valois, Francis of Guise, and Cardinal Charles of Lorraine – ‘one king in name only and two kings of Lorraine in effect’.
³⁰
Immediately after his father’s death, Francis entrusted his father’s body to the constable, the Cardinal de Chastillon, Admiral Coligny and the marshal of Saint-André, and entered the coach which had come from the court on the Guises’ orders. King Francis entered first, and as Queen Mary hung modestly back, Queen Catherine forced her into the place of honour. The young king was taken to the Louvre, and by the time the deputation from the Parliament arrived, the government was already in the hands of the Guises.