Authors: Sarah Gristwood
The narrative Jeanne commissioned relates how she secretly drew up a protest: ‘Whether she was advised to do so or whether she did it on her own initiative’. It is hard to imagine an unadvised twelve-year-old coming up with such a ploy. But it is easy, the more you read Jeanne’s declaration, with its dramatic tale of threatened beatings, to suspect you are witnessing Marguerite of Navarre’s ability with fiction. Perhaps what we are seeing here is a teenager set in motion by her parents but then unable to retreat from the stand she had taken, as a more experienced politician might be able to do. In all events, this was a wound which would fester. And this was not, with Jeanne technically now Cleves’s wife, ever going to be the end of the story.
Small wonder that a letter from Marguerite to her son-in-law that winter describes Jeanne as still thin and ill: ‘We are doing everything to fatten her up, but she does not gain weight.’
2
Jeanne herself wrote to her new husband: ‘there is no medicine in the world which could do so much for my health as knowing that yours is good’. Perhaps she had learned how to dissimulate in a good, or a politic, cause. Or perhaps the coaching went on.
France and Charles V were once again at war when, early in 1543, Jeanne d’Albret was despatched to join her new husband, who was proving himself a valuable French ally. But she was still on French soil when word came that the Duke of Cleves had been forced to switch sides and renew his country’s old allegiance to the emperor. François immediately demanded an annulment of the marriage and instructed Marguerite and her husband to provide the evidence.
Marguerite of Navarre produced Jeanne’s signed protest declaring she had been married under duress. Marguerite and her husband would never have dared speak out, she claimed:
if Cleves had behaved to you as he should have and as I hoped, we would never have entertained such a thought, and would have preferred to see our daughter die, as she said she would, rather than lift a finger to prevent her going to any place . . . where . . . she could serve you. Since he is so infamous we no longer fear to speak the truth . . .
Jeanne was forced to sign yet another witnessed declaration, this time with her uncle François’s full approval. Even then, there was yet another coda to this story.
Although Cleves himself had decided instead to seek an alliance with one of the emperor’s nieces, before the fraught annulment could finally go through the pope had to be convinced. Letters from Marguerite of Navarre in the spring of 1545 declared she had ‘forsaken all maternal tenderness’ to force her daughter into the alliance; those from Jeanne declared that ‘my mother, the Queen, preferred obedience to the king to her own life, and to mine’.
The marriage was finally annulled in November. Whatever the truth of the affair, it is unlikely the fourteen-year-old Jeanne understood or forgave completely, and the bitterness she felt may have been a lasting legacy.
By contrast, Marguerite of Navarre and her brother François seemed to be back on their usual terms, apart from the ever-present religious question. A conference in 1541 attempted to find some common ground between Protestant and Catholic but its failure would see increased persecution of Protestants (as they would come to be called) both in the Low Countries and in France.
The mood of the times was growing ever harder. When in 1542 François resumed his war with the emperor Charles V, he dared not leave behind him a country split by any challenges to state or church authority. From her husband’s duchy of Béarn, Marguerite wrote to her brother about the cruelties perpetrated in the name of eliminating heresy: ‘a poor woman whose baby was aborted by torture . . . and many other things that should be heard by you alone’. She was, as so often, carefully treading a fine line; protesting not about the principle but rather the extremities of the persecution.
Complaining of a local bishop who was preaching that both the king and his sister supported heretics, Marguerite made a point of dissociating herself from those who attacked the ‘real presence’ in the Mass: ‘Thank God, my Lord, none of our people has ever been found to be sacramentarians.’ But she and her husband believed the local monks had ‘found a way of putting poison in the incense’ and were trying to do away with them.
She found herself at odds with her former protégé, the austere French theologian John Calvin, over her protection for two mystic preachers.
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By contrast the pope – who had enjoyed discussions with Marguerite – was inclined to regard her as his spokesperson at François’s court. All good Catholics had fresh reason to be hopeful in these years. The opening of the Council of Trent in 1545 signalled a new crusading spirit in the Catholic church, discussing the reform of corrupt practices as well as doctrinal decrees. But inevitably the ‘Counter-Reformation’ would itself be the pretext for aggression against dissenters in the years ahead. At the beginning of 1545 Marguerite was horrified when François, at the pope’s request, authorised the massacre of perhaps several thousand members (estimates vary wildly) of the unorthodox Waldensian sect.
Marguerite may, as she so often did, have found refuge in writing: encouraging those around her to undertake translations of Plato’s dialogues while she herself began exploring the relationship between the kind of ideal love figured in the courtly romances and Plato’s ideas. On her southern estates she surrounded herself with the talented and literary. Her writings, however, provide no clear answer to Marguerite of Navarre’s continued ambivalence about her female role; an ambivalence the events of these years can have done little to diminish.
In 1544 she wrote to François of the desire she had had all her life to serve him not as a sister but as a brother. Conversely, she would write too of her wish that she might give birth to a hundred warriors to serve him. Perhaps that admixture of messages is something with which many women had to deal in the sixteenth as in any other century.
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New winds
England, France, 1544–1547
In England in 1544, Katherine Parr was, like Katherine of Aragon before her, left regent when Henry went away to war against France. When England’s ongoing affrays with the Scots set her at odds with Marie de Guise, it was an echo in a minor key of the events of 1513, when Katherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor had found their armies at enmity.
Katherine Parr’s regency also allowed both of her stepdaughters, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, to witness a woman successfully wielding power; a spectacle familiar on the continent which had not always come England’s way.
Even religious differences seemed, at first, to be subsumed under the new Queen Katherine’s reforming zeal. Katherine Parr had her own literary aspirations, producing first the anonymous
Psalms or Prayers
and then, under her own name,
Prayers or Meditations
, which made her the first queen to be a published author in English, if not French, history. The ten-year-old Elizabeth Tudor made Katherine a New Year’s present of her translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s
The Mirror of Glass of a Sinful Soul
but when Katherine Parr commissioned the translation into English from the Latin of some of Erasmus’s
Paraphrases upon the New Testament
, Katherine’s other stepdaughter Mary was one of the translators. Ill health prevented Mary from completing her translation of the
Gospel According to John
, but the final version nevertheless included a lengthy dedication to Mary as a ‘peerless flower of virginity’.
Katherine Parr very nearly went the way of others of Henry’s queens when she fell under suspicion for the extent of her reforming tendencies.
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Mary Tudor, by contrast, was able to accommodate to her father’s religious policies, which still included the supremacy of the Mass, the celibacy of priests and the necessity of confession. In her brother Edward’s reign, it would be a different story.
At the beginning of 1544 Henry VIII, fifty-two, and with no sign of the longed-for second son, laid down another Act of Succession. If he had no further child and if his son Edward died without heir, then the throne would pass to Mary. If she too died childless, then to Elizabeth. Both sisters feature in the anonymous painting
The Family of Henry VIII
. In the centre sits Henry, enthroned, the young Edward at his right hand, and at his left the long-dead Jane Seymour, mother of the all-important boy. These three are framed in a network of gilded pillars. Pointedly outside the magic circle of legitimate royalty, framed by another set of rather less conspicuous pillars, the two royal daughters stand separately; Mary, the elder, to Henry’s right, and Elizabeth to the left.
In December 1546, the message of the portrait was ratified by the king’s will, which confirmed the place in the succession of both Mary Tudor and then (assuming neither her brother nor Mary left any heirs) Elizabeth. But as 1546 turned to 1547; as Henry lay dying, that seemed an unlikely contingency.
The early part of 1547 saw a general clearing of the decks. The death of the obese and ailing Henry VIII on 28 January 1547 was followed, barely two months later, by that of his old rival, King François.
Marguerite of Navarre had spent the last few months on her estates, in pain from arthritis and apprehensive of the future. At the time of her brother’s death, she was on the road to try to meet – rescue, revive – him, an echo of her dash to Spain twenty years earlier. She was staying at a convent in Poitou when the news of his death reached her: not for several months could she bring herself to leave. ‘O death, who conquered the Brother, / come now in your great goodness / and pierce the Sister with your lance’
,
she wrote in the
Chanson spirituelle,
and:
My life was filled with sugar and honey
when it was sustained by his
but now it is nothing but absence and bitterness
(Le Navire)
The last few years had seen difficulties between brother and sister. But in the end he had, as she had recently written to him, supported her ‘in the office of king, of master, of father and brother and of true friend’. François’s death was not only a bitter personal, but also a practical, loss: a loss of influence, as well potentially of the pension François had made her. Small wonder that one source of friction between her and her daughter was the high expense of Jeanne’s household, which Marguerite found, as she wrote to Jeanne’s financial controller, ‘insupportable’.
The new king, Henri II, relieved Marguerite of her financial worries but wrote of her dismissively as ‘my good old aunt’. The new king’s solemn entry into Lyons saw Marguerite of Navarre, who had once taken pride of place in every procession, grateful for a place in Catherine de Medici’s carriage. (‘I share your distress, as I always knew you shared mine’, Catherine had written to her.) Catherine was now, of course, Queen of France.
The deaths of the men in this story brought all too often, for better or for worse, a dramatic change for their women. In England as in France, Henry VIII’s daughters (and his widow) had to trim their sails to a new wind. The effects of the powerful kings’ deaths spread like ripples from a stone in a pond. They would even be felt in Scotland, albeit that, for some years to come, the fate of Scotland would be bound to that of France ever more closely.
The death of Henry VIII brought no end to the Rough Wooing, which indeed, in September 1547, saw the disastrous Scottish defeat at Pinkie Cleugh. Amid real fears that the young Queen Mary would be kidnapped by the English, Marie de Guise contemplated a suggestion by the new King Henri II that the four-year-old Queen of Scots should marry his three-year-old son the dauphin and be raised in France. The plan was agreed and on 7 August 1548, with a numerous Scottish retinue (including her famous contemporaries and future attendants the ‘four Marys’), the little Queen of Scots set sail for France and for what, it was assumed, would be her future country.
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Accommodations
France, 1548–1550
Everyone, you might say, had to make accommodations in these years. In Scotland, Marie de Guise was certainly having to deal with the realities of practical politics. It was two years before the relief of a peace treaty, made in 1550 between England and France, and in which Scotland was included, allowed Marie to return to France for an extended visit. She was lucky: she might well never have seen her daughter again.
The English envoy to the French court wrote that Marie’s work in Scotland ‘is so highly taken here as she is in this court made a goddess’. It had been suggested that the Scots governor, Arran, should be replaced by a French governor, which would have allowed Marie a comfortable retirement but one account says she went to Henri and announced she wanted to rule Scotland.
She had the immense distress, during her visit, of losing her one surviving son, with whom she had so recently been reunited, the young Duc de Longueville. She also heard of a plot to poison her small daughter, the Queen of Scots. ‘Our Lord must wish me for one of his chosen ones, since he has visited me so often with such sorrow’, she wrote to her mother Antoinette. But she prepared to return to Scotland, acknowledging where her future lay.
The little Queen of Scots, meanwhile, was growing up very happily at the French court. The Scottish train with which she arrived had largely been sent away. The French complained the Scots were uncouth and dirty, and even the four Marys were sent to be educated at a convent near Poissy, since the aim was to make Queen Mary as French as possible. But she had come to a welcoming place. Henri II and his wife Catherine de Medici were devoted parents, constantly demanding reports and portraits when absent from their children, among whose number Mary was now included. There are records of the endless chain of pets brought into the nursery – mastiffs, and even a bear – and reports, as she grew older, of Mary and her attendants taking pleasure in playing at cookery.