Authors: Sarah Gristwood
2.
This baby, Lady Margaret Douglas, would grow up to be the mother of Lord Darnley, while her half-brother James would become father of Darnley’s wife, Mary, Queen of Scots, so that Margaret was twice over the founder of the united British monarchy.
3.
This may seem ironic, considering Henry’s future history.
Chapter 13: The Field of Cloth of Gold
1.
This may mean that, in contrast to the usual practice for a formal masquing dance, men and women danced together.
Chapter 14: Repercussions
1.
Traditionally, no prince was officially entitled to call himself Holy Roman Emperor until crowned by the pope, in Rome. But Charles’s predecessor Maximilian had broken with this tradition, winning from the pope the right to call himself emperor-elect. Charles would eventually be crowned by the pope – the last holder of the title so to be – but not for another decade.
Chapter 17: ‘a true, loyal mistress and friend’
1.
Mary was not formally created Princess of Wales but that was not a mark of personal disfavour. As a female she could only ever be heir presumptive, not heir apparent, since her father – if not by Katherine then by some future wife – might father a legitimate boy. The same issue was debated in the 1940s, when it was asked whether the future Elizabeth II could be invested as Princess of Wales, and it was decided, regretfully, that she could not. This situation changed only with the revision to the laws of succession in the twenty-first century.
2.
A centuries-long movement ‘compared to which the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature’, so CS Lewis wrote.
3.
Though the phrase developed only slightly later, the reality could already be seen in France. François was far from being a fool for love, but Anne d’Heilly, the mistress for whom he abandoned Françoise de Foix after his return from Pavia, could be seen openly at his side on state occasions.
4.
The poem had possibly been influenced by the struggles of Isabella of Castile with La Beltraneja, her rival for the Castilian throne. But it still had resonance in Isabella’s daughter’s day.
Chapter 18: New pieces on the board
1.
Or rather, in that westernmost section of Hungary that remained under Habsburg rule. Part was put under Ottoman rule and yet a further part became the separate principality of Transylvania, itself to enjoy a notable female ruler in the shape of Isabella Jagiellon, a great-niece of Caterina Sforza. Isabella Jagiellon would become the first ruler to issue an edict of universal religious toleration.
2.
Henri had also inherited the large nearby territory of Béarn, and although Navarre would give Marguerite, and in time her daughter, the title of queen, Béarn was the richer property.
Chapter 19: ‘ladies’ might well come forward’
1.
Legitimacy was, in any case, something the pope had the power to bestow. A child might be considered legitimate, as was Margaret Tudor’s daughter, Margaret Douglas, even after divorce or annulment, if their parents had married in good faith.
Chapter 23: ‘a native-born Frenchwoman’
1.
Mary Tudor, Anne Boleyn’s former mistress, was also absent. Her health really was poor; she would die within the year, amid rumours she was killed by the ‘sorrow’ of seeing her brother Henry abandon his wife. But her hostility was in contrast to the attitude of Henry’s other sister, Margaret Tudor in Scotland, who would write to Anne, once queen, as ‘our dearest sister’, and who was happy to see her daughter Margaret Douglas welcomed to Anne’s court.
Chapter 24: ‘inclined towards the Gospel’
1.
Though both Zwingli and by now Luther rejected the idea that the bread and wine consecrated by the priest during the Mass became literally the flesh and blood of Christ, Luther still held by Christ’s ‘real presence’ at the ceremony, which was denied by Zwingli and his ‘sacramentarians’.
2.
In the war that followed, Marguerite – inspecting troops and reporting their condition, taking part in the interrogation of a spy – regretted that she could not do more, since the emperor’s iniquities were enough ‘to make all women want to be men’. ‘Since I cannot give you the help I would like to, being a woman, I will not stop assembling a battlefield of praying supplicants,’ she wrote, in words that would be echoed in St Teresa of Avila’s plan to restore the church with a praying army.
Chapter 25: ‘to doubt the end’
1.
The question has often been asked whether the foetus was deformed – a ‘shapeless mass of flesh’ in one later report – which would have raised the question, in the sixteenth- century mind, of witchcraft or satanic practices. Although the accusation of witchcraft had been levelled against several great ladies in the fifteenth century, notably Henry IV’s widow Joan of Navarre and Elizabeth Woodville’s mother Jacquetta, it was not an issue raised in Anne’s day, nor did witchcraft feature in the formal accusations made against her. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, op. cit., pp. 561–70, for the role the fear of witchcraft played in the century and perhaps in the decline of women’s power at the end of it. It has been said that the ‘Age of Queens’ also gave birth to the great age of the witch-hunt. Between 1400 and 1800, forty to fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on charges of witchcraft, the number mounting from 1560, when the burnings of heretics, as such, slowed. Witchcraft was seen as the natural successor to heresy, with the difference that it was particularly (though far from exclusively) associated with women. The
Malleus Maleficarum
(Hammer of Witches) published in 1487 specifically asserted that witches were more likely to be women, a 1484 papal bull gave approval to anti-witch activities, and in 1532 Charles V’s
Lex Carolina
gave the death penalty to both heretics and witches. A crusade against witches was part of the Spanish attempt to impose order on the Low Countries in the 1560s.
2.
Parker would become Elizabeth I’s Archbishop of Canterbury.
3.
Richmond’s death was the more distressing for the fact that the king’s niece Margaret Douglas – Margaret Tudor’s daughter and another heir to the throne – had weeks earlier been detected in a secret betrothal to Thomas Howard and sent to the Tower.
Chapter 27: Pawns and princesses
1.
Diane had a long court career behind her. Another woman raised partly under Anne de Beaujeu, she had served both of King François’s wives, as well as his mother Louise of Savoy. She was related to Catherine through their shared descent from the La Tour d’Auvergne family.
2.
Marguerite also instructed the French ambassador in England, Marillac, to intercede on behalf of Anne of Cleves, now in some sort her in-law.
3.
Calvin would later be best known for his reforming ministry in Geneva and for the doctrine of predestination, which held that all events, and the fate of all souls, have been preordained by God.
Chapter 28: New winds
1.
The Reformation in England had produced female martyrs on both sides: Elizabeth Barton the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, who prophesied against Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and was hung for it, and the Protestant Anne Askew, who was burned at the stake, having first been shockingly racked.
Chapter 30: ‘device for the succession’
1.
When, in October 1551, Marie de Guise visited Edward’s court on her way home from France, Mary was invited to help entertain her. Sadly she declined, pleading ill health, afraid, perhaps, of more pressure. One of several meetings in this story one only wishes could have taken place.
Chapter 31: ‘Herculean daring’
1.
A king’s wife might, however, enjoy the status of
femme sole
; that is, of a woman able to conduct financial and legal affairs in her own right, without going through a male protector.
2.
The military aspect of a monarch’s role was not the only one to be problematic for female rulers. Like her male predecessors, Mary Tudor would make a point of ‘touching’ to cure scrofula, the King’s Evil, and other diseases; a huge symbolic importance was placed on what was believed to be the monarch’s healing touch. The French had used the monarch’s supposed healing power as one justification for the Salic Law, in that it showed monarchy to be a quasi-priestly role, which, self-evidently, no woman could exercise.
3.
In the twelfth century Henry I, trying to ensure the succession of his daughter Matilda, had attempted to decree that her country would not be subject to her husband.
Chapter 32: ‘not one year of rest’
1.
In the event, Charles’s son Philip would get Spain and its New World territories, and the Netherlands. The Holy Roman Empire, as well as the Austrian lands, would go to Charles’s brother Ferdinand’s branch of the family. This had not been Charles’s original plan; he had wanted Philip to succeed him as Holy Roman Emperor. The painstaking memorandum Mary drew up concerning the future allocation of power, and defence of the Habsburg interests, shows just how divisive this issue was.
2.
It would be one motive behind Elizabeth Tudor’s famous pacifism.
3.
Married off to her first cousin Joao, the heir of Portugal, Juana was summoned to take the Spanish regency after Joao died, just three weeks after the birth of their only son, whom she left behind in the care of his grandmother Catalina, Juana the Mad’s youngest daughter, a former princess of Spain, and regent of Portugal. Charles V wrote to his son that Juana’s instructions should be based on those given to Mary of Austria: ‘but as [Juana] is of a more active disposition . . . be sure to insist upon it that she and her advisors . . . forbear from those new interpretations of their instructions of which they have sometimes been known to be lavish’. Founder of the Convent of the
Descalzas Reales
(the Barefoot Royals), in Madrid, Juana is believed also to have been admitted to the Jesuit order under the pseudonym Mateo Sanchez.
Chapter 33: Sisters and rivals
1.
Knox had earlier spent several years sentenced to row the French galleys as punishment for his part in an anti-French rebellion, something that surely helped harden his attitude.
Chapter 34: ‘if God is with us’
1.
She broke with tradition in wearing the white that suited her so well. White was, all too prophetically, the colour not of marriage but of mourning in the French royal family.
2.
Christina’s ambitions in another direction were also thwarted. On the death in prison of their father Christian of Denmark, his rights devolved on her elder sister Dorothea, who was, however, as a childless and ageing woman persuaded to cede them to Christina. She never won the help she needed to recover that throne but, from 1561, styled herself as rightful Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Her daughters would also be women of influence, the older becoming Governor of Siena, and the younger Regent of the Tyrol.
3.
Less happily but perceptively he wrote to Jeanne that ‘it is your natural tendency to torment your husband and all who love you’ – to test them, in terms of pop psychology.
4.
The concern of the Estates was that, in the event of Jeanne’s death, Antoine should not become their ruler and that only Jeanne’s children should inherit. It was the same distinction between king and king consort that had plagued Mary and Philip in England and that would deny the Crown Matrimonial to Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband, Lord Darnley.
Chapter 37: ‘Rancour and division’
1.
Jeanne commissioned Bordenave to write a history of her provinces. She also commissioned a volume of
Mémoires
– or, more accurately, 120 pages of self-justification – to be written for her in the first person. Two lines in particular stick in the memory: that ‘if I wished to undertake the defence of my sex, I could find plenty of examples’; and the opening line: ‘I have always considered that if a person is not satisfied with herself in herself, the contentment that others can have of her is only a half in her conscience.’
Chapter 38: ‘Two Queens in One Isle’
1.
For much of Elizabeth’s reign, all the possible candidates to succeed her were female. The Grey sisters and Margaret Clifford were descended from Henry VIII’s sister Mary; Margaret Douglas and her granddaughter Arbella Stuart from Henry’s sister Margaret.
2.
She would use him as a foil through which she could show her resolute chastity. As Anne de Beaujeu had written: ‘suppose a castle is beautiful and so well-guarded that it is never assailed; then it is not to be praised, nor is a knight who has never proven himself to be commended for his prowess. To the contrary, the thing most highly commended is that which has been in the fire yet cannot be scorched . . .’
Chapter 40: ‘Majesty and love do not sit well together’
1.
This has been used as evidence that she must (as her enemies alleged) have been sleeping with Bothwell before Dunbar, since otherwise the foetuses could not have been sufficiently developed to have shown themselves a pair.