Game of Queens (21 page)

In novella four of the
Heptaméron
the heroine is in bed, and presumably undressed, when ‘without further ado, he jumped into bed beside her.’ Her first thought is to denounce her attacker and demand that her brother order his head struck off. But the heroine’s lady-in-waiting (who the Seigneur Brantôme’s writings identified as Madame de Châtillon, Marguerite’s former governess) warns that everyone would say ‘this poor gentleman . . . could not have attempted it without great encouragement. Everyone will say it has not been without fault on your side’. Madame warns the heroine to be more careful in the future, since ‘many women who have led lives more austere than yours have been humiliated by men less worthy of love than he’.

It seems as if, around this point in her life, Marguerite of Navarre suffered some sort of emotional trauma. In the early summer of 1521 Marguerite penned an extraordinary letter, the first of many, to Guillaume Briçonnet, the reforming Bishop of Meaux, a man at war with medieval superstition but at home with the mysticism to which Marguerite was drawn. (Meaux would become the centre for a group of progressive clergy, several of them connected with Marguerite, and all eventually to come under attack by the Catholic church, from which, however, none had at this stage any thought of splitting.) ‘I must deal with countless matters that cause me to be afraid and thus ask that you take up my cause and bring me spiritual succor’, Marguerite wrote.

Some of the things she wrote were in tune with the new tenets of religion: ‘Knowing that there is need of only one thing, I turn to you, entreating you to make yourself the means of reaching him [God] through prayer.’ Some were more personal: in her second letter to Briçonnet, she wrote that she felt ‘very much alone . . . Take pity on me . . . I beg you at least to visit me in writing and stir up the love of God in my heart.’ Her repeated insistence that she was ‘unworthy’, ‘useless’, ‘worse than dead’ must be seen in the context of reformist theology, which believed humans were unworthy without God’s grace. Nonetheless, it is hard not to read into her letters something more when Marguerite begs Briçonnet to help kindle her ‘poor heart covered with ice and dead from cold’ and when Briçonnet, a few years later, congratulates her on having obeyed his rule ‘of telling everything without fear’.

She wrote frequently of her ‘sterility’. Thirteen years of marriage and, at thirty, she had not yet born a child. In 1522 she believed she was pregnant but found herself mistaken. She was also nursing Louise of Savoy, who was suffering increasingly serious bouts of gout. Briçonnet, twenty years older than she, offered himself as her adoptive son and both took seriously the relationship (to sixteenth-century eyes a genuine one, made ‘
par alliance
’), Marguerite signing herself as ‘your sterile mother’.

Briçonnet, however, had other concerns from the first: that Marguerite should recruit her mother and brother to her spiritual quest, so that ‘from you three will come forth as an example of life, a fire to burn and illumine the rest of the kingdom’. When she failed to do so quickly enough, he reproached her: ‘you have not taken your gloves off. I do not yet see any flames issuing from your hands.’ In fact, by the end of 1522, the attempts made by Briçonnet’s deputy Michel d’Arande to instruct Louise of Savoy were causing the king’s confessor to complain to the theologians at the university; the first red danger sign of troubles ahead.

Anne de Beaujeu, the last of her generation, died on 14 November 1522, just five weeks after François had settled the larger part of the disputed Bourbon lands on his mother Louise. Anne’s reaction was to bequeath to her son-in-law Charles, Duc de Bourbon, her own personal properties, in recompense for the ‘good, great, praiseworthy and recommendable services and pleasures’ he had rendered her and her late daughter Suzanne. Bourbon had now a daring, even treasonous, scheme: to marry Charles V’s sister Eleanor and thus ally himself with François’s enemy.

Such dissent in the French ranks was the more serious for the fact that in the summer of 1522, England had fulfilled the promise made earlier to Charles V – the fruit of all that eager diplomacy – and played its part in keeping the balance of power in Europe by declaring war on France. There had been a hint of future storms at the beginning of the year, when King François tackled Cardinal Wolsey on what might seem a trivial matter: the family of one of his wife’s maids, young Anne Boleyn, had decided she should come home. What; did they feel that France was no longer safe for Englishwomen?

Wolsey attempted to reassure the French king. It was no such matter, he said. Merely, a marriage had been arranged between Anne and her kinsman James Butler, the Irish Earl of Ormonde. But of course, Anne Boleyn’s future was not to pan out that way.

*
He had also settled his brother Ferdinand’s position, by giving him control of Maximilian’s hereditary Austrian lands and regency in Charles’s absence of the German territories. This marked the start of the division of the house of Habsburg into two branches: the Spanish, of which Charles (and later Charles’s son Philip) was the head and the Austrian.

PART III

1522–1536

Nor should you be melancholy or discomfited if you find yourself in some foreign or unpleasant alliance, but praise God and believe that He is always just and never does anything but what is reasonable. Therefore, my daughter, if it is so ordained and it happens that you have much to suffer, have complete patience, finding in whatever awaits you the will and pleasure of the Creator . . . if you want to live with peace of mind, protect yourself from stumbling into the snares of jealousy.

Lessons for my Daughter,
Anne of France (Anne de Beaujeu) published 1517
–1521

15

‘Wild for to hold'

England, Scotland, 1522–1524

Spring 1522 in London. At Cardinal Wolsey's palace of York Place, the pre-Lent festivities were celebrated with more than usual splendour. The pageant might have come from the old Burgundian court: an assault on the
Château Vert
, the Green Castle or Castle of ‘Vert'ue. The castle was made of wood and green tinfoil, sturdy enough for its towers to support eight ladies dressed in white satin, each representing a virtue, with her character or ‘reason' picked out in yellow. The knights, led by King Henry VIII himself, and their spokesman, Ardent Desire, were dressed in cloth of gold and blue satin and were warded off, for a judicious interval, with a barrage of sweetmeats and rosewater.

In the end, of course, the masculine attackers prevailed; the colder female virtues warmed by masculine ardour, and everyone danced happily. But no one, for a few years yet, could guess how telling the pageant would prove to be. The lady representing Perseverance – newly come home from France – was Anne Boleyn.

The Anne Boleyn who appeared at the English court in 1522 would have been a very finished product. Not beautiful, perhaps, but surely compelling; sophisticated, and with the all-important gloss of difference. Later reports show her as ‘very eloquent and gracious, and reasonably good-looking.' ‘Not one of the handsomest women in the world' as a Venetian diplomat would put it, when the time came that ambassadors took note of Anne Boleyn, she was ‘of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, a bosom not much raised and eyes which are black and beautiful'.

But her years abroad had given her wide experience in the ways of a court. Indeed, if, as seems likely, she had been called on to act as an Anglo/French interpreter she may have gained not only experience of the queen's, the women's, rooms, but also an unusually direct appreciation of political dealings, more so for the fact that her father was for a time also attached to the French court.

Anne Boleyn's very ‘Frenchness' would have been a novelty to the English courtiers. It is hard to realise now, after centuries in which French has been the
lingua franca
of diplomatic and social circles, that it was not so in the early sixteenth century, when Latin was the universal language.

As the writer, cleric and diplomat Lancelot de Carles described Anne: ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English, by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman'. By contrast, Katherine of Aragon was now thirty-six, not young by the standards of the day. Repeated pregnancies had taken their toll and the ever-watchful ambassadors had for some time resorted to praising the beauty of her complexion, rather than her figure. Her five years' seniority to her husband was beginning to show.

As long ago as 1514 a rumour had gone the rounds of Europe that Henry VIII ‘meant to repudiate his present wife . . . because he is unable to have children by her'; premature at the time, but seeming less so with every year that went by. It was probably in 1522 that Henry took Mary Boleyn – Anne's sister – as his mistress. She, all too appropriately, represented Kindness in the York Place pageant. But whatever personal distress the relationship may have caused Katherine of Aragon, assuming she knew, this was not one to threaten her position as queen. Indeed, Henry was at this point, publicly at least, still very much the married man, moralising over the comportment of his sister Margaret Tudor in Scotland.

 

We last encountered Margaret on her return to Scotland some five years earlier, complaining bitterly (in an anachronistic but very Tudor fashion) that her husband Angus no longer loved her. Henry VIII and his wife Katherine were horrified, urging the sanctity of marriage on Margaret. But Scotland's affairs, which implicitly meant those of Margaret Tudor, had been a point of issue between Wolsey and Louise of Savoy at the discussions scheduled to follow the Field of Cloth of Gold.

The friar that Henry and Katherine of Aragon had (again) sent north tactfully blamed certain of Margaret's councillors for having seduced her into seeking ‘an unlawful divorce from lawful matrimony directly against the ordinance of God and utterly repugnant to man's law'. But Margaret was having none of it. ‘I had no help of his Grace my brother, nor no love of my lord of Angus and he to take my living at his pleasure and despoil', she wrote to Henry VIII's representative, Lord Dacre. ‘Methink my lord, ye should not think this reasonable, if ye be my friend.' Her allegiance had often wavered between her natal and her present country; she had often been torn. But now: ‘I must cause me to please this realm, when I have my life here.'

When the Duke of Albany returned from his visit to France in November 1521, Margaret Tudor welcomed him warmly. Though they had in the past been rivals for power in Scotland, she had perhaps learnt that there were worse evils. When he reached Edinburgh, and the constable handed him the keys of the castle, Albany courteously handed them back to Margaret. It must have been balm to her wounded spirit. While Margaret and Albany set about joint rule, as queen mother and regent, it was the turn of her estranged husband Angus to flee into French exile. It was probably Angus's Douglas clan who first started the rumour that Margaret and Albany were having an affair.

Soon Henry VIII was also complaining of Albany's ‘dishonourable and damnable abusing of our sister, inciting and stirring her to be divorced from her lawful husband for what corrupt intent God knoweth'. Margaret wrote to Wolsey complaining of false reports; Wolsey advised Henry that Margaret had clearly been suborned. But meanwhile, England's borders with Scotland were fortified.

 

Anglo-Scottish relations were the worse for the fact that in one sense Katherine of Aragon was now riding high. England's European interest at this point no longer lay with France – Scotland and Albany's old ally – but with the Habsburgs. The end of May 1522 saw the arrival of Charles V in England for a six-week visit, celebrated with extraordinary splendour, to affirm his English alliance and, with his future marriage to his cousin the Princess Mary, a permanent binding of England into the Habsburg hegemony. Charles and Mary's children would, if Henry himself had no sons, inherit an empire that stretched from England to the Mediterranean, to say nothing of Spain's colonies across the Atlantic. This, however, was for the moment secret, given that Mary was still officially betrothed to the French dauphin.

At Greenwich Charles was greeted by Mary and her mother, and asked for his aunt Katherine's blessing. Mary danced and played the virginals, and ambassadors reported that she was likely to become ‘a handsome lady, although it is difficult to form an idea of her beauty as she is still so small'. There were masques and Masses, jousts and banquets. One of the most successful entertainments was a reading of the list of grievances Henry VIII had sent to the French king. The treaty between the two allies declared that in 1523 Charles would invade France from Spain and Henry from Calais.

Much though she might have longed for it, Katherine of Aragon was not without concern about the alliance between her husband and her nephew. Though Henry might dream of claiming his ‘antient right and title to the crown of France', Katherine had witnessed Henry's rage when, years earlier, her father Ferdinand had made an alliance only to let him down. Did she suspect that this time he would not forgive her the sins of her Habsburg connections so readily? In January 1523 she told Charles's ambassador ‘vehemently' that Charles had to deliver all he had promised: ‘It was much better to promise little and perform faithfully than to promise much and fail in part.'

Her anxieties were all too justified, for the Anglo-Habsburg ‘Great Enterprise' of 1523 against France was a disaster. Margaret of Austria offered Habsburg troops to the English, but nowhere near the three thousand horse and five thousand foot the English demanded. And even those she offered, she could not find the money to pay. The English troops sent to capture Boulogne marched instead on Paris but were turned back by foul weather and lack of supplies. Charles (distracted by French successes on the Spanish frontier) failed to keep to his part of the plan. And the French general the Duc de Bourbon, now in open rebellion against the king, who had promised to join Charles and Henry, failed to turn up at all, fleeing instead to Italy.