Authors: Sarah Gristwood
Margaret of Austria had a prominent place in the cathedral, as well she deserved. She had even stripped her home at Mechelen of its tapestries and silver plate to make a good show at the coronation festivities. Fleuranges wrote a description to Louise of Savoy.
In France, meanwhile, all the ‘trinity’ were at a loss. In the winter of 1520–21 François had three accidents: a fall from a horse, a prank that ended in a fire, and a mock battle that got out of hand. Although none caused him any lasting injury, the last shave was close and made Louise palpitate over how easily she might have been wholly lost; ‘
femme perdu
’.
That was even before he went back to the Italian wars. Power in Italy was still a huge bone of contention between France and the Empire, particularly the disputed territories of Milan and Naples. Largely hemmed in by Charles’ territories to the south, east and north, François was alarmed by the way Charles’s new imperial title gave him also an Italian foothold.
In the spring of 1521 France made several incursions into foreign territory; French aggression was followed by Imperial retaliation and it was clear that England, abandoning its position of neutrality, would be forced into the conflict. In August 1521, Cardinal Wolsey crossed the Channel to Calais to act as a mediator between Charles and François. The French sent wine; Margaret of Austria (knowing his distaste for riding) sent a red velvet litter, lined with green satin, against which his cardinal’s robes would stand out clearly. More importantly but less tangibly, both sides had long been raising their voice to get him the papacy. But any talk of peace was unavailing. Instead, the cardinal moved on to Bruges for another round of diplomatic discussions with the emperor.
Ever pro-English, Margaret of Austria, ‘
la bonne Angloise
’, rushed to join them, supplementing the substantial presents of money made to the English suite with more domestic courtesies, including a daily breakfast delivery of fresh rolls, sugar and wine. She sent Wolsey candles to light his bedroom, while his musicians played at her parties; the upshot was that England entered a covert alliance with Charles V. The alliance between Charles and Henry was to be cemented at a future date by
his
marriage to Henry’s daughter Mary, disregarding the previous match made between Mary and the French dauphin. Margaret of Austria was one of the two signatories on the emperor’s behalf. She indeed had thrashed out the details with Wolsey. And in the summer of 1521, as Charles prepared for war with France, it was his aunt Margaret whose speech to the Netherlands’ governing body raised him men and money.
The war that was to dominate the next four years would be cripplingly expensive for both sides. But in France, there was simply no money. A visiting Englishman, William Fitzwilliam, wrote of how ‘the King borrows of any man that hath any and if any man refuse to lend he shall be so punished that all other shall take ensample from him . . . They eat up all they have, to their shirts.’ In this crisis, both François and Louise of Savoy would turn to expedients that divided them from powerful nobles, and even, briefly, from each other.
It was all tied to the ageing Anne de Beaujeu. Despite all the noble girls to whom she had been mentor and surrogate mother, Anne had born just one surviving child, a daughter, Suzanne (the addressee of Anne’s
Enseignements
), who had herself died at the end of April 1521. This left her husband Charles, the great Duc de Bourbon, a childless widower. Suzanne had been his kinswoman as well as wife; her claim to the Bourbon inheritance had been united with his. But now the question was what of the Bourbon lands he or his children by any second marriage could still inherit, for Charles de Bourbon came from the younger branch of the Bourbon family, Suzanne having been the last representative of the senior. Now Charles’s claim might be challenged, since both Louise of Savoy and François I also had Bourbon blood in their veins, through Louise’s mother, while the king could reasonably claim that the terms under which the lands had been granted saw them revert to the crown on the failure of the male line.
It was perhaps in an attempt to cut through this Gordian knot that Louise of Savoy took an extraordinary step. She, who had always fought so hard against remarriage, sent an envoy to Bourbon suggesting she should marry him. That way, since she was past childbearing age, the lands should still ultimately revert to her son’s crown.
The proposal is recorded only in a seventeenth-century continuation of the chronicle originally written by Bourbon’s secretary, so one cannot know for sure whether Bourbon really called her ‘the worst woman in the realm, the dread of all nations’. He would not marry her ‘for the whole of Christendom’, he added; Louise, when she heard, vowing that his words should cost him dear. King Henry, in England, made a personal story out of it, telling Charles V’s ambassador: ‘There has been much discontent between the King Francis and the said Bourbon, since he has refused to marry Madame the Regent, who loves him very much.’ More surely, Bourbon was discontented, feeling he was not given his right place in the realm.
Trouble at home was matched by disaster abroad, in the ongoing Italian wars. Six years earlier, the Battle of Marignano had given France control of Milan but in November 1521 the French lost the city again. To add another turn of the screw (reported one contemporary, Jean du Bellay), when the defeated general responsible for Milan’s loss came to explain himself to the king, he protested furiously that the problem had been lack of money, which had lost him his mercenaries. François roared that he had sent the money; the treasurer Semblançay answered that he had got the money ready to send but that it had been taken by Louise of Savoy, who claimed it in payment of a debt. It blew over of course but not before son confronted mother in a scene unparalleled in their history.
In the Netherlands by contrast, Margaret of Austria was prepared to pawn her jewels to fund her nephew as, in the spring of 1522, he prepared to set out again towards his Spanish territories. There, the ‘Revolt of the Comuneros’ had seen Castilian rebels rise against Charles, a man they saw as a foreigner, and attempt to make his incarcerated mother Juana, nominally still co-ruler with Charles, once more the active head of state. Margaret’s hand is all over her nephew’s policy of the first years of the 1520s and her loyalty was not without its reward: Charles had informed the States General that in his absence they would be governed by his aunt ‘who for so long has shown by her praiseworthy, memorable services and great experience, that she well knows how to honourably acquit herself of the said government and administration’. Charles also settled the question of Margaret’s claim to her father Maximilian’s estates, which she surrendered in return for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, payable in ten yearly instalments.
*
Margaret’s task would not be easy. The Netherlands were rife with problems – financial, structural and religious – as the years ahead would prove. Nonetheless, as a woman who sought her family’s advance and who welcomed authority, she was flying high. If there were a contest between the mother of the French king and the aunt of the Habsburg ruler, then Margaret of Austria and the Habsburgs, seemed again to have won.
That said, there was one cavil. The Habsburgs, even more immediately than the French monarchy, had to deal with an unexpected threat, the ramifications of which, although they can hardly have realised it, would come to dominate their century. In 1520 Martin Luther’s questioning of the pope’s authority led to a Papal Bull, or edict, that condemned him as a heretic. Luther publicly burned the Bull, along with volumes of canon law but his very estrangement from the church encouraged him to take his own thinking in more revolutionary directions.
Luther was moving towards the idea of justification by faith alone; that man’s salvation lay purely in his faith, not in any good works he might do – a central tenet of the reformed religion. At the same time, Luther’s refutation of papal authority imposed from distant Italy was already becoming identified with political discontent.
In March 1521 Charles V offered Luther a formal hearing at the Diet (or Assembly) of Worms, a town on the Rhine. It led not to agreement but to the formalising of a position of opposition. ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’, Luther was reported to have said; while Charles for his part declared that ‘My predecessors . . . left behind them the holy Catholic rites that I should live and die therein . . . I have therefore resolved to stake upon this cause all my dominions, my friends, my body and my blood . . .’
Margaret of Austria had herself been one of the great ladies critical of the ‘infinite abuses’ in the Catholic church and of the pope’s attempts to exercise secular authority in her territories; had numbered humanists and moderate reformers among her friends, had hosted Erasmus at her court. The Netherlands, the old Burgundy, had been the home of the
devotio moderna
, the more spiritual model of religion, particularly attractive to aristocratic ladies, to which Margaret’s godmother Margaret of York subscribed.
But after a papal legate arrived in Antwerp in the autumn of 1520, Margaret saw men such as Erasmus (and some of her own aides) publicly attacked in sermons; saw books burnt. The Papal Bull against Luther had been first published in the Netherlands. She issued the orders which, in 1523, ended with two reforming Augustine monks burnt and their monastery razed to the ground. Martin Luther had been an Augustinian friar and the monastery was believed to be a centre for the dissemination of his ideas.
‘The heresies of Martin Luther’, as Margaret wrote to the Prior of Brou, ‘are a great scandal to our Holy Mother Church’. It seems likely that her first priority was and would remain to damp down controversy, so far as was possible. But in a comparatively short space of time it would be evident that Luther had opened Pandora’s box, and he himself would be horrified at some of the beliefs and new creeds that flew out.
In France, Marguerite of Navarre had long been interested in the reform, with a small ‘r’, of the Catholic church. So, even, was her mother Louise of Savoy, to a degree, as had been Anne of Brittany and her daughters Queen Claude and Renée, while Marguerite’s brother François at this point was interested in anything which kept him one step ahead of the papacy. (Pope Leo had already sided with Charles and would in 1522 be succeeded by Pope Adrian, a prelate who had been Charles V’s tutor.) Lutheranism was never an option but for a brief period early in the 1520s, Marguerite’s way would be the goal of all the trinity: reforming the church from the inside, orienting it more towards the Bible, towards trained preachers, towards less emphasis on ritual and worship by rote.
But as the 1520s got under way, Marguerite was coming to a time of personal crisis. Her life since her brother’s accession had seen her juggle the great ceremonies of court life with more personal and spiritual concerns. A visit made by the king and queen to her house in 1517 had been followed by the grant of the rich duchy of Berry, that not only made her financially independent of her husband but (most unusually for a female, rather than a male, relative of the king) gave her the status of a
prince capétien
and the right to sit on her brother’s councils. The wording of the lengthy grant explicitly spells out that this was to be territory under Marguerite’s own governance, save only for a feudal allegiance to France. There was no mention of her husband anywhere in the document.
The return visit for the betrothal of the baby dauphin to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, at the end of 1518, saw Marguerite seated beside François in the courtyard of the Bastille, on a dais covered in cloth of gold, under a bower of flowers and greenery. A canopy of blue, spangled with stars and hung with gold balls, made the courtyard into a roofed room, while Louise of Savoy and Queen Claude sat in one of the galleries. While the king appeared with his male masquers in a white satin robe embroidered in gold, the ladies handed sweetmeats. In the spring of 1519, Marguerite took a sponsor’s role in the christening of what would prove an important boy: a second son for her brother King François, named Henri. Holding him at the font with Marguerite, representing his master for whom the child was named, was England’s new ambassador to France, Thomas Boleyn, whose daughter Anne would have been present (though unnoticed or at least unrecorded) at the engagement festivities. But when Marguerite set about reforming the local convent of Almenesches, winning over the pope to her choice for the new abbess, she took care to have a small lodging built for herself within the convent grounds.
In the early years of her brother’s reign Marguerite visited Lyons with the royal party and it is in the notably reformist Lyons, in the church of Saint-Jean, that she set the story in novella seventy-two of her
Heptaméron
. In this story, the Duchess of Alençon (‘who later became queen of Navarre’, as did Marguerite herself) overhears the sobs of another worshipper: a pregnant nun, who had been seduced by a monk. In the story, the duchess promises to take up the nun’s cause and institute reforms very much of the kind Marguerite was making in real life.
It is possible that in the autumn of 1519 Bonnivet launched another sexual assault upon Marguerite, although once again the suggestions are almost wholly literary. That autumn François, accompanied by his mother, sister and a group of nobles including both Marguerite’s husband and Bonnivet, set off on a leisurely progress towards Cognac. They stopped at the king’s new building project, Chambord, at Chatellherault and, in January 1520, at Bonnivet’s new Italian-style creation, Neuville-aux-Bois. The royal party left after just four days, leaving Bonnivet behind.