Mary Queen of Scots (21 page)

But as the Guises’ own fortunes had been transformed by the sudden death of Henry
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, so Condé in his turn was to be saved by the workings of providence. The danger of ambitious hopes founded on the frail life of a solitary human being was once more demonstrated. King Francis announced his intention of setting off from Orleans on a prolonged hunting expedition, in the forests of Chenonceaux and Chambord, which would last him until the end of the month. But on Saturday 16 November, while still at Orleans, he returned from a day’s hunting in the country, and complained of violent ear-ache. On the Sunday he fell down in a faint while at vespers in the chapel of the Jacobins. The weather had turned unexpectedly icy that November, and the Guises were criticized by the Spanish ambassador for letting the king hunt when the weather was so cold. Nevertheless at first neither the watchful ambassadors, the vultures of the sixteenth-century court, nor the anguished adherents of Condé, had any idea how serious the situation was.

Francis’s health had always been the Achilles’ heel of the Guises’ plans:
his breath was foetid; his physical appearance was so alarming, with red patches on his livid cheeks, that it actually gave birth to sinister rumours that he had leprosy; from this rumour spread the still more disgusting gossip that Francis needed to bathe in the blood of young children, in order to cure himself. The peasants thus hid their children from the king as he passed, convinced that otherwise this young Herod would avail himself of their bodies. Subsequently both Catholics and Protestants accused each other of having invented this nauseating calumny: the cardinal was said to have invented it in order to pave the way for the Guises to ascend the French throne, and the Huguenots were accused of trying to blacken the reputation of the Catholic king. The true explanation of Francis’s facial condition was probably eczema, caused by the continual irritation of a purulent discharge from his ear; this originated from a chronic inflammation of the middle ear, arising from the constant respiratory infection of his childhood. When the king fell down in a faint on the Sunday, a large swelling appeared behind his left ear, caused by this inflammation spreading to the tissues above and below it.
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The Guises, whatever their private fears, were desperate to hide the gravity of his condition, and suspended the posts; they announced to the court merely that the fogs of the Loire had given the king a cold in the ear. The Venetian ambassador was sufficiently hoodwinked by the story to report that the two queens Mary and Catherine were fussing over the king, who was not actually ill. On 19 November the Spanish ambassador asked for, and got, an audience of the king, but was stopped at the door by the cardinal, who said that the king was suddenly worse. Chantonay immediately felt suspicious, and now noticed troubled glances among the Guises. Ridiculous rumours began to fly round the court: that a Huguenot valet had thrown a mortal powder into the king’s nightcap, or that an Orleans barber had poured poison into his ear, while doing his hair. Once more the occult art of astrology was called into play to cast light on the situation, and it was recalled that it had been predicted that Francis should not live long – a prophecy, incidentally, which had been made by doctors as well as astrologers – on the grounds of Francis’s health by the former, and of his horoscope by the latter. But the Venetian ambassador personally believed that much of Catherine’s sorrow was caused by her recollection of these predictions.
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The intense interest of the court in the illness of their sovereign was heightened by the fact that the fate of Condé hung in the balance. If Francis died, he would be succeeded by his brother Charles. As Charles was only eleven, there could on this occasion be no question of withholding
the regency from the man generally believed to have the best claim to it – the first prince of the blood, King Antoine of Navarre – who was, of course, Condé’s elder brother. King Antoine’s first act as regent was certain to be the reprieve and release of Condé. If Francis lived, Condé would die. If Francis died, Condé would live. In face of such interest, it was impossible for the Guises to continue to cast a cloud of obscurity over the nature of the king’s disease forever. By 20 November, the Venetian ambassador was able to write off a full and accurate description of the king’s symptoms. On 27 November, Throckmorton informed Elizabeth that the king’s illness was now sufficiently serious for his doctors to doubt his ability to survive it; in any case it was thought that he could not expect to live very long, having wrecked his health in the first place by too much riding and exercise even before this ‘evil accident’. The Venetian ambassador now learnt from someone who had been in his chamber, that the king was almost delirious. Even so, there were those who still believed that the illness was nothing more than a device of the Guises to prevent the supplications of Condé being put before Francis.
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Alas, the wretched little king, far from being the victim of a Guise plot, was the infinitely more tragic victim of his own constitution. He alternated between fevers and violent crises, followed by bouts of speechlessness. In addition to the natural sufferings of his condition, he also endured purgations and bleedings. On 28 November, a massive dose of rhubarb brought him some relief, but two days later the headaches and sickness redoubled. The watch in his bedroom was maintained ceaselessly by Mary and Catherine, whose joint role in his agony was to act endlessly as nurses and comforters. On 3 December, it was reported to Venice by their ambassador that Queen Mary, Queen Catherine and the king’s brothers were taking part in processions to the churches of Orleans, to solicit divine aid for the king’s health.
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Otherwise Mary spent the last weeks of her husband’s life in patient silent nursing in his darkened chamber. Unlike their niece, the Guises bore the king’s affliction with little patience: their mental agonies at the prospect opened before them by his illness seemed almost as acute as the king’s physical sufferings. In their frenzy, they attacked the doctors for doing no more for the king than they would have done for a common beggar; and in their pursuit of remedies they even turned to the stone of alchemy.

Neither Mary’s patient nursing, nor that of Catherine, nor the rages of the Guises, nor their manifold remedies, affected in any way the ineluctable process of the king’s illness. The inflammation was now spreading upwards into the lobe of the brain, above the middle ear: on Monday,
2 December, there was an apparent improvement in his condition due to the temporary release of tension when the tumour was pierced. But the inflammation, having now reached the brain, formed an abscess within it. With the formation of the abscess, nothing could save the French king from death. By the evening of 3 December, Francis was
in extremis.
On Thursday 5 December, he fell into a swoon. At some point in his agonies, he is said to have murmured a prayer taught to him by the cardinal: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my ministers have committed in my name and in my authority.’ But on the Thursday, at a time variously reported to be five, eleven or ten, by La Planche, Throckmorton and Chantonay, the king’s ordeal was at an end. A month off his seventeenth birthday, Francis
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was dead.

Calvin wrote triumphantly to Sturm: ‘Did you ever read or hear of anything more timely than the death of the little King? There was no remedy for the worst evils when God suddenly revealed himself from Heaven, and He who had pierced the father’s eye, struck off the ear of the son.’
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Calvin’s Knox-like exultation reflected the natural view of the French Huguenots who had seen their cause forever swallowed in the voracious Catholic maw of the Guises. Now with the likelihood of Navarre’s regency, it seemed that the French Huguenot cause had indeed been presented with a renewed opportunity to triumph through the death of the wretched Francis. The position of Mary was equally transformed by her husband’s death: at the age of just eighteen, she was no longer queen but queen dowager of France. Her entire position in Scotland which had been founded on the umbrella-like protection which the French crown had extended to those Scots which it favoured, was likely to be in jeopardy now that her husband no longer sat on the French throne, and her uncles no longer directed French policy. Time would show whether she would evolve a better Scottish policy, or a worse one, but at all events on the death of Francis, Mary Stuart was obliged to work out a different one.

It is doubtful whether these political considerations were uppermost in the young queen’s mind during the days before her husband’s death, and the days of mourning afterwards. On the contrary, the evidence shows that, almost alone of the central figures at the French court, Mary abandoned herself to passionate grief at the death of the king, a grief founded on deep affection which she had felt for him, rather than the possible upset of her political plans. She had lost the companion of her childhood, the boy-husband who had loved her, and who had shared with her the happy intimacies of their charmed upbringing at the French court. Elisabeth had departed for Spain, Claude for Lorraine. Alone of her close royal
companions of her youth, Francis had remained part of her life, and to their childhood intimacy had been added the natural intimacy of husband and wife. Since the first moment of their meeting at St Germain in October 1548, when the five-year-old Scottish queen had been solemnly presented to the four-year-old dauphin of France, and King Henry
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had rejoiced over the immediate love which the children felt for each other, Mary and Francis had never been apart for longer than a few months at a time. They had thus been united by over twelve years of continuous friendship and companionship, and all that happy childhood memories can signify in the mind of a romantic and affectionate young girl. It was only six months since the death of her mother which had induced in her such profound feelings of affliction: now she found herself bereft of a husband, with whom indeed she had led a far more prolonged and contented existence than the few short months she had spent with her mother since babyhood. It was small wonder that Mary gave herself up to transports of true grief.

The sincerity of her feelings was not doubted at the time. Throckmorton commented that Francis had left ‘as heavy and dolorous a wife as of right she had good cause to be, who, by long watching with him during his sickness, and painful diligence about him’ had worn herself out and made herself ill. The stanzas which Mary wrote on the death of Francis, which struck a chord in the heart of Ronsard, bear witness to the eloquent simplicity of her grief for the lost love of her childhood:

The political realities of the situation would appear to her later – although some of them may have begun to come home to her, when Catherine asked for the return of the crown jewels, which the date on the order of release and the short hurriedly prepared inventories shows to have been only one day after King Francis’s death, in a ghastly parody of events after the death of King Henry, when Mary herself had demanded the return of the jewels from Diane de Poitiers. In the meantime Mary wore white and shut herself in a black room lit by torches to give herself up totally to her sorrow. As the Venetian ambassador commented: ‘Soon the death of the late King will be forgotten by all except his little wife, who has been widowed, has lost France, and has little hope of Scotland … her unhappiness and incessant tears call forth general compassion.’
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7 Mary the Widow