Authors: Sarah Gristwood
‘brother . . . wanting her to return’:
It was possibly on her demoralised journey home that Marguerite wrote to her brother an undated, cryptic and desperate letter. She seems frantic to know whether François will send for her, tortured by the thought of what he may do, afraid he may ‘abandon the right path’, or afraid of what he may require her to do, by way of ‘proof of surrender’. The letter, which Marguerite begs her brother to burn, breathes either the shame she seems so often to have felt, or a terrified awareness of the need for secrecy. Her great nineteenth-century editor, Génin, was in no doubt of what François was demanding, to her horror: that she make their relationship a physically, as well as emotionally, incestuous one. But it is hard now to see what in the letter compels such an extreme reading, which indeed hardly fits with Marguerite’s reiterated offers to come to her brother, instantly. (Incest was, moreover, an absolutely favourite bugbear for writers of the first half of the nineteenth century.) Barbara Stephenson in
The Power and Patronage of Marguerite of Navarre
(Ashgate, 2004), p. 119, argues convincingly that the letter may have been written by another ‘Marguerite’.
‘Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn . . .’:
There are quite literally as many different versions as there are writers on the subject of the chronology of Henry’s letters, but I dwell too briefly on the subject to feel the need here to add to them. I find persuasive Eric Ives’s theory as to which constitute the first three letters in the sequence, although otherwise I would differ slightly from his timetable.
‘if the recollections . . . are accurate’:
A letter supposedly from Jeanne is quoted in full by Nancy Lyman Roelker, cited below, p. 127.
I am writing to tell you that up to now I have followed in the footsteps of the deceased Queen, my most honoured mother – whom God forgive – in the matter of hesitation between the two religions. The said Queen was warned by her late brother the King, François I . . . not to get new doctrines in her head so that from then on she confined herself to amusing stories. Besides, I well remember how long ago, the late King [of Navarre], my most honoured father . . . surprised the late Queen when she was praying in her rooms with the ministers Roussel and Farel, and how with great annoyance he slapped her right cheek and forbade her sharply to meddle in matters of doctrine. He shook a stick at me which cost me many bitter tears and has kept me fearful and compliant until after they had both died.
Unfortunately, there have been questions as to the letter’s authenticity, see Broad and Green, op. cit., pp. 111/2.
Part IV: 1537–1553
The biography of Mary of Hungary has been written by Jane de Iongh, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, (
Mary of Hungary: Second Regent of the Netherlands
(Faber & Faber, 1959); that of Marie de Guise by Rosalind K. Marshall,
Mary of Guise
(Collins, 1977). The most recent biography of Mary Tudor is Anna Whitelock’s powerful
Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen
(Bloomsbury, 2009), following Linda Porter’s
Mary Tudor: The First Queen
(Portrait, 2007), and Judith Mary Richards’
Mary Tudor
(Routledge, 2008). The main biographical study of Jeanne d’Albret in English is still Nancy Lyman Roelker’s
Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret
(Harvard University Press, 1968).
Parts VI and VIII
I have written twice before about the reign of Elizabeth I, in
Elizabeth & Leicester
(Bantam, 2007) and
Arbella: England’s Lost Queen
(Bantam, 2003). The bibliographies of those books provide a more extensive list of reading and reference but there are books not then available of which I have since had the benefit. To Alison Weir’s
Elizabeth the Queen
(Jonathan Cape, 1998) and Anne Somerset’s
Elizabeth I
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) has now been added Lisa Hilton’s
Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), the European perspective of which I found particularly valuable. John Guy’s
My Heart is My Own
(HarperCollins, 2004) remains the outstanding biography of Mary, Queen of Scots.
To R. J. Knecht’s
Catherine de’ Medici
(Routledge, 1998) and Leonie Frieda’s
Catherine de Medici
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) has now been added Nancy Goldstone’s
The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015). Several of the French primary sources are now available online:
Lettres de Catherine de Médicis
(Paris, 1880),
Mémoires et poésies de Jeanne d’Albret
(Paris, 1893), N. de Bordenave,
Histoire de Bearn et Navarre
(Société de l’Histoire de France Paris, 1873),
Mémoires et Lettres de Marguerite de Valois
(Paris, 1842).
While Christina of Denmark must join the long line of European women of whom there is no recent biography in English, Julia Cartwright’s biography
Christina of Denmark: Duchess of Milan and Lorraine 1522–1590
(New York, 1913) is online.
Academic work I found particularly valuable included
High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations
ed., by Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves and Jo Eldridge Carney (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Rayne Allinson’s
A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe
, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki (University of Illinois 2009): especially articles by Carole Levin on Elizabeth, by Mary C. Ekman on Jeanne d’Albret, and Mihoko Suzuki on Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici. (See also Susan Doran’s essay on the same subject in Glenn Richardson (ed.),
The Contending Kingdoms: England and France 1420–1700
(Ashgate, 2008).)
Acknowledgements
This book might never have reached its present form without the help of one person in particular – my old friend (and unofficial editor!) Margaret Gaskin who, as so often before, came to my rescue and spent many hours helping me to mould a viable form out of some very challenging raw material. Her abilities make up for my deficiencies – thank you, Margaret. There is someone else I’ve had occasion to thank on every book I’ve done – the historian Alison Weir. Her unflagging support and enthusiasm never fails her friends.
A number of other historians have been kind enough to help me, by reading material or by answering queries. I owe an immense debt to the kindness of Dr Elena Woodacre at the University of Winchester, who organised a positive team of academic specialists to read parts of the text and ensure this generalist’s book has as few errors as possible. I am indebted to Dr Jonathan Spangler, Dr Lucinda Dean, Cathleen Sarti, Rocio Martinez Lopez, Estelle Paranque and Una Mcllvenny as well as to Aislinn Muller. I am also very grateful to Professor Carole Levin at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, whose own work has been a source of inspiration and who supplied me with the
New York Times
quote which is the key to my preface. Thanks, too, to Dr Tracy Borman, Dr Linda Porter and Nicola Tallis, as well as to Dr Sara Wolfson and Professor Louise Wilkinson for their work in organising a conference on ‘Premodern Queenship and Diplomacy in Europe’, held at Canterbury Christ Church University in September 2014, which I found of the greatest assistance. Needless to say, any mistakes which remain in the book are my own responsibility entirely.
I want also to thank my agents, Peter Robinson in the UK and George Lucas in the US, and my publishers. In the UK, at Oneworld past and present: Fiona Slater for having commissioned the book with such enthusiasm, Sam Carter for having so kindly taken it over, and, especially, Jonathan Bentley-Smith for practical help and patience beyond the call of duty. In the US, at Basic Books, Lara Heimert and Leah Stecher for their acuteness and commitment. To all these and more – I only hope the book is worthy.
For more on the gynocracy debate and its relevance for women today, as well as some influential women only touched upon in this book, please visit the website:
Notes
Preface
1.
In Russia, where change came later, it was only in the eighteenth century, during the rule of Catherine the Great, that the chess queen really overtook the Vizier. By the same token, the chess queen’s initial appearance in the early part of the millennium had also coincided, if that is the word, with a brief boom in female authority.
2.
And beyond; as witness, for example, the 1915 Women’s International Peace Conference that hoped to end the First World War.
Chapter 1: Entrance
1.
The English ambassador often saw Margaret’s nieces and nephews playing outdoors around a bonfire, or in winter with a sled rigged like a ship.
Chapter 2: ‘Lessons for my Daughter’
1.
The Concordia de Segovia, made weeks after Isabella took the throne of Castile, decreed that her arms would precede his on all chancery documents, however his signature would come first; a typical and effective, compromise. The Concordia was not without critics who held that Ferdinand – himself great-grandson of an earlier Castilian king – should now be Castile’s ruler ‘because he is a man’.
2.
Many of the women in this story would, at the least, find it prudent in public to invoke their father’s, rather than their mother’s, legacy.
3.
Whether these supposed womanly virtues do not, however, in themselves constitute a limitation on women remains an issue up to our own day.
Chapter 3: Youthful Experience
1.
A device that would subsequently be used by several other French-educated queens.
2.
The journal was less a diary as we know it than a note – possibly compiled for astrological reasons – which at some point later in her life recorded all the significant events that had happened on particular days of the year.
Chapter 4: ‘Fate is very cruel to women’
1.
The third daughter, Maria, was, when Isabella also died early, called upon to step into her dead sister’s shoes and in her turn marry Manuel.
2.
Lemaire would eventually move from Margaret’s service to that of Anne of Brittany; an example of how, intentionally or otherwise, interaction between women could be maintained by their officers.
3.
Margaret’s insistence on keeping Philibert’s heart with her was not wholly unlike the behaviour that would have her sister-in-law Juana declared insane.
4.
One seventeenth-century chronicler reported that ‘for a moment’ Anne de Beaujeu contemplated seizing the crown herself.
Chapter 5: Princess Brides
1.
The sixteenth-century Scottish historian John Leslie said another possibility was mooted; that if Henry’s male line should ever die out, Margaret’s heirs would succeed to the English throne. If so, well and good, for ‘England would not accress unto Scotland but Scotland would accress unto England,’ said Henry prophetically. But at the time, with two of Henry’s sons alive and well, that must have seemed unlikely.
Chapter 6: Repositioning
1.
More appealingly, Ferdinand told his daughter that ‘To be well married is the greatest blessing in the world . . . and source of all other kinds of happiness’, an indirect tribute to Isabella of Castile.
2.
The border town of Cambrai was the scene of Margaret’s own later triumph, and a name that comes up time and again in this story.
Chapter 7: ‘False imputations’
1.
When the fourteen-year-old François was taken from his mother’s care to live at court, Louise wailed in her
Journal
that his departure had ‘left me all alone’, for all that Marguerite remained with her. It is hard not to think of Henry VIII, although the father of a healthy daughter, considering himself childless in the years ahead.
2.
Years later Anne Boleyn, arrested, would express the hope that Henry wished only to test her.
Chapter 9: Wheel of Fortune
1.
When Eleanor’s betrothal to the heir of Portugal fell through, she was instead married to his father, the Portuguese King Manuel himself, who had already been married to two of her Spanish aunts, Isabella of Castile’s daughters. No wonder the results of Habsburg inbreeding would become notorious.
Chapter 11: ‘One of the lowest-brought ladies’
1.
Her granddaughter, Mary, would be similarly convinced that it was impossible for a woman to rule alone, unsupported ‘by the firmness of a man’. And would choose as disastrously.