Authors: Sarah Gristwood
In the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary scored a small but telling victory on behalf of one of her quasi-daughters when, in 1538, she supported her niece Christina of Denmark – a widow at sixteen – in her urgent desire not to make a second marriage with Henry VIII. The Holbein portrait painted in the course of the courtship gives little hint of the strong character behind Christina’s reputed declaration that if she had two heads, one of them would be at the King of England’s disposal.
Perhaps she got her trenchant tongue from Mary of Hungary, for when Mary heard that Henry had married again after Anne Boleyn’s execution, she wrote to her brother Ferdinand:
It is to be hoped, if one can hope anything from such a man, that if this one bores him he will find a better way of getting rid of her. I believe that most women would not appreciate it very much if this kind of habit becomes general, and with reason. And although I have no inclination to expose myself to dangers of this kind, I do after all belong to the female sex, so I shall also pray God that he may protect us from such perils.
Mary’s work in centralising the government of the various Netherlands provinces was too often hampered by the financial and military demands made by her brother Charles V. To pay for his Italian wars, taxes were raised across the Empire and in 1539 the citizens of Ghent rebelled, their violent uprising put down only when Charles himself arrived with an army. He paraded the rebellious burghers with halters around their necks, only to pardon them at Mary’s public request: an exercise of a queen’s traditional intercessory function equivalent to the one in England two decades before when three queens had pleaded for the apprentices’ lives. After the revolt was quelled, Mary of Hungary begged her brother to relieve her of her post but instead, her appointment was renewed.
In France, meanwhile, François had from the first largely ignored his new queen, Charles V and Mary of Hungary’s sister Eleanor. Yet the ghost of the Ladies’ Peace never quite went away. Eleanor was present at the peace negotiations between Charles and François in 1538, and took a more active role in 1544, when she met Charles as well as Mary.
Eleanor’s marriage to François remained childless. So, more seriously, did that of the heir to the French throne, Henri, and Catherine de Medici. Marguerite of Navarre comforted Catherine: ‘God will give you a royal line when you have reached the age at which women of the House of Medici are wont to have children. The King and I will rejoice with you then, in spite of these wretched backbiters.’
Catherine won for herself the support of the older generation. King François was always fascinated by anything from Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, and pleased by Catherine’s membership of the ‘
Petite Bande
’, the gang of hard-riding, hard-living young ladies with which he surrounded himself. When, in 1538, there were suggestions that the marriage might be set aside, Catherine spoke to her father-in-law, who assured her of his continued protection. The Venetian ambassador reported that she offered to go into a nunnery or to serve the lady who became her husband’s next wife; behaviour diametrically opposite to that of Katherine of Aragon.
Catherine’s husband Henri had never warmed to his bride. He was falling increasingly under the influence of Diane de Poitiers, the legendary court beauty who, despite the twenty-year age gap between them, became Henri’s mistress.
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Catherine de Medici, so the story goes, had holes sawn in the floorboards so she could watch, and learn from, what her husband and his mistress did in bed. (Ironically, over the next decade Diane would become one of Catherine’s strongest supporters, believing the disregarded Italian wife to be less of a threat to her own position than another, better-loved, consort might be.) More certainly, a royal doctor was called in to examine both Catherine and Henri and found slight abnormalities in both.
His advice, sadly unrecorded, seems to have been some slight change of practice or position. It was successful: in the summer of 1543 Catherine de Medici at last became pregnant. The baby was born in January 1544 and named for his grandfather, François; thus beginning another, better-known, stage in Catherine’s journey. (King François, present at the event, took such an urgent interest in the proceedings that he demanded to view the afterbirth.) Marguerite of Navarre wrote to her brother that this was ‘the most beautiful, the most longed for, and the most needed day that you and your kingdom have ever seen’.
Marguerite had continued to be a force in French affairs, and an ardent ally of her brother, attempting even, in 1540 and subsequently, to mediate an Anglo-French peace, with or without François’s knowledge. But she would find herself increasingly torn by the differences between her brother and her husband. By 1537 the Navarrese couple, attempting to regain that part of Navarre annexed by Spain, had entered into secret negotiations with the emperor Charles V, whose son Philip, they suggested, might marry their daughter, Jeanne d’Albret. Every letter to Marguerite’s brother breathes, in its exaggerated protestations of love and loyalty, her anxiety about acting against his interests in this way and perhaps her desire to reassure him, for the battlefield of Marguerite’s ever-troubled loyalties were about to see their most bitter conflict.
It is possible that Marguerite of Navarre’s relationship with her daughter was affected by the difficult relation she had with her mother, Louise of Savoy. Jeanne was at first raised largely in Normandy, where her foster mother Aymee de Lafayette lived. Jeanne’s father, Henri d’Albret, was occupied either at court or in his own southwestern territories, while Marguerite had always been preoccupied by her role as supervisor of her brother’s royal nursery.
Mentions of Jeanne in Marguerite’s letters are scarce; only two during the first seven years of her life, and in one of those Marguerite wrote that she needed to rest ‘away from my daughter, who is too noisy and boisterous’. By contrast, there was mention of Jeanne’s always-frail health when Marguerite was planning to take her away for a change of air in 1533.
In 1537, before she was ten years old, the question arose of how Jeanne might best be deployed as a marriageable pawn. Her father hoped she could be used to win the reunification of Navarre; her mother, deeply conflicted, wavered between supporting him or her brother, who had no wish to see the vital frontier state of Navarre thus allied to the Habsburg Empire.
That summer, François sent for his niece but the child was seriously ill with, as Marguerite of Navarre wrote, ‘fever and looseness of bowels with blood, which was so fast and furious that if God had not brought down her fever after twenty-four hours her little body would have had more than it could stand’. But Marguerite added:
I hope that He who put her in this world to be of service to you will give her grace to fulfil the desire of mother, father, and herself, which is rather to see her dead than [commit] any deed against your intention . . . On this I base my hope of her recovery.
The hope was not misplaced: Jeanne recovered and, with her parrot and her pet squirrel, was taken away to recuperate by her mother. From her tenth to her twentieth year Jeanne resided chiefly in Plessis-les-Tours, largely without either of her parents, on the orders of an uncle, François, determined they should not dispose of her to their advantage rather than to his.
While Jeanne d’Albret’s parents were angling for the Spanish match that might reunite the kingdom of Navarre, François had very different plans. In January 1540 he received an offer for Jeanne’s hand from the Duke of Cleves, a duchy in the Rhine. François was always keen to break the Empire’s hold on the German states, a hope the more realistic for the fact that some were tending towards the reformed religion. The marriage contract was drawn up in July that year. Jeanne, informed of her uncle’s plans in her mother’s presence, declared herself ‘content’.
It was understandable that her mother should delay as much as possible. Jeanne was still only twelve when, the following spring, Marguerite of Navarre wrote tearfully to the prospective bridegroom that the marriage was ‘not yet ripe according to God and nature’. François, however, pressed for an early conclusion to the alliance and ordered her parents to bring Jeanne to court, where her Cleves bridegroom had arrived. Marguerite succeeded only in winning the hostility of both her husband, angered she had bowed to François’s wishes, and her brother, irritated she had not done so more swiftly.
What happened next is a matter of conjecture. Only one report, from the Spanish spy Juan Martinez Descurra, survives. According to Descurra, Marguerite of Navarre suggested that her daughter should make a formal protest against the marriage before witnesses. With that protest in their pocket, Jeanne’s parents could safely allow the betrothal to go ahead, insisting on keeping Jeanne with them until she was a few years older, trusting that time would make an alliance between France and Cleves less pressing. Henri of Navarre agreed, warning his wife that if she blabbed, and word of the plan got to her brother François, he would see that she had ‘as bad an old age as any wife or woman ever had’.
The formal protest was safely stowed away, but with François himself bringing the duke to meet his bride, Jeanne d’Albret had to tell her formidable uncle that she had changed her mind. François asked who had coached her, and the angry conversation (which Descurra reports as an extended dialogue) saw Jeanne sobbing and shouting that she would rather throw herself down a well than marry the Duke of Cleves. François told her, and those around her, ominously, that ‘heads will fall for this’. As Jeanne reiterated her threat of suicide, her parents received a letter indicating that the emperor had no immediate intention of offering his son as an alternative husband. Marguerite and her husband had little choice but to let the Cleves marriage go ahead, at least in its initial stage.
What happened next is a confusing and worrying story. Marguerite of Navarre wrote to her brother King François that she had learnt with horror of her daughter’s defiance: ‘my daughter, appreciating neither the great honour you conferred upon her by condescending to visit her nor realising that a good daughter has no right to have a will of her own, has been so foolish as to beg you not to marry her to the Duke of Cleves’. She, Marguerite, would be only too happy to punish anyone who had put such ‘insolence’ into her head.
By the end of May, François was preparing resplendent wedding festivities. On 13 June 1541, at the château of Chatellerault near Poitiers, the betrothal was celebrated, the king himself escorting the twelve-year-old Jeanne.
Both parties were asked for, and gave, their assent, although later in life Jeanne d’Albret would tell her historian, Nicolas de Bordenave, that when asked for the third time whether she would marry the duke, she said only, ‘Don’t press me’. She had made another lengthy declaration ‘that the marriage proposed between me and the Duke of Cleves is against my will, that I never have consented to it, and that I never will’. Anything she might say to the contrary, the document continues, will have been spoken from fear. Fear of her uncle, of her father:
and of my mother the Queen, who had me threatened and beaten by the Baillive de Caen, my governess. [She] has several times brought pressure on me at the command of the Queen my mother, threatening that if I did not do everything the King wished . . . I would be so beaten and maltreated that I would die, and that I would be the cause of the ruin and destruction of my mother and father and of their house . . . I do not know to whom to appeal except to God, when I see that my mother and father have abandoned me.
As the marriage was celebrated with great solemnity, Jeanne, dressed in crimson satin trimmed with ermine, a golden crown and a gold and silver skirt trimmed with precious stones, was observed not to take a step towards the altar: whether, says Brantôme, ‘because she could not move under the weight of her costume, or whether she wished to protest to the last minute . . .’ François ordered the Constable of France, Montmorency, to take her by the collar and carry her there.
The nuptial Mass was followed by dinner and masquerades but the putting of the couple to bed was purely ceremonial, the bridegroom putting only a single ritual foot between the sheets. A week later the duke set out for Cleves and Jeanne, seriously ill, was taken back to Plessis by her mother.
What had really been going on? Various historians, through the centuries, have put forward various explanations, but each has a problem. If we follow the spy Descurra’s saga, we see a Marguerite of Navarre who first set up the pretence of Jeanne’s refusal and then backtracked to protect her own position, leaving the child to bear the king’s anger alone. If we give credence instead to Marguerite’s letter to François, we see perhaps the most extreme example of her prioritising of her brother’s needs over those of husband or child. If we believe Jeanne d’Albret’s declaration, Marguerite had gone further than that, threatening to have her daughter beaten within an inch of her life. And this the woman whose lifelong writings proclaim the female cause! The kindest explanation is that it was all, to some degree, a put-up job, with Jeanne complicit in her parents’ pretence, although this scenario would surely have required a good deal of a twelve-year-old’s acting ability.
Jeanne herself gave a measure of explanation later in life, although it still leaves much unclear:
The marriage was performed . . . against the will of the bride and of her father, who endured it rather than consented, in order not to anger the King. The daughter did not dare to oppose [it] openly, as much out of fear and respect for her uncle and for her mother (whom her brother had won over) as because of the embarrassment and simplicity of her age and sex . . .