Game of Queens (8 page)

Margaret of Austria had been dumped for a richer heiress; the victim of France’s quarrel with her father Maximilian. She was, nonetheless, kept in France for another two years; there was, after all, the question of what would happen to the dowry lands she had brought with her. Eventually, in May 1493, by a new treaty, her father Maximilian won them back but in the meantime Margaret had been moved out of royal Amboise and into conditions she clearly found humiliating. She had become attached to Charles VIII, and he to her, and now felt isolated. A desperate letter survives from Margaret to Anne de Beaujeu, pleading against the removal of a cousin and companion: ‘All the pastime I have and when I have lost her I do not know what I shall do’.

Anne of Brittany would also become attached to her unenthusiastic husband Charles but found herself sidelined, with no voice in the affairs of her duchy, receiving ambassadors only with Anne de Beaujeu at her side. Anne de Beaujeu and her husband enjoyed less influence than once they had and spent more time on their estates. Nonetheless, when the time came for Charles to go to war in Italy, it was once again Anne de Beaujeu who was recalled to power, with Anne of Brittany left in her charge. There was perhaps always a concern as to what the young queen-duchess – who never gave up her dream of Brittany’s independence – might do if left unsupervised.

Anne of Brittany quickly gave Charles VIII a son and when, finally, the thirteen-year-old Margaret of Austria was sent home, the future of France at least seemed assured. Margaret took with her a farewell gift made by Anne of Brittany’s most skilful embroideress. The two women kept up a connection but Margaret remained lastingly angry towards the country that had rejected her. On the way home she cracked a bitter joke when offered wine from that year’s worthless vines (
sarments
). They fitted in well, she said, with the king’s oaths, or
serments
.

Margaret of Austria had experienced something of the twists and turns of Fortune that loomed so large in the late medieval mind. ‘Always remember that, as Saint Augustine says, you cannot be certain of even a single hour’, Anne de Beaujeu wrote. For the moment Fortune seemed to be favouring Louise of Savoy, now the mother of an important son, but perhaps she too had learnt that it was not easy for a woman to control her destiny.

*
The ancient title of Holy Roman Emperor – though it had for the last century been held by members of the Habsburg family – was an elective office for which the rulers of Europe could compete. Created for Charlemagne in 800, it carried special responsibility for, and prestige within, the Catholic church; a secular counterpart of the pope’s religious authority. It also, crucially, carried with it not only overlordship of the conglomeration of ecclesiastical and temporal principalities which made up Germany but also an ever-shifting degree of influence in certain other areas, most notably Italy. The Empire was not abolished until the Napoleonic era.

4

‘Fate is very cruel to women'

Spain, Savoy, France, 1493–1505

Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy were now young women, looking to find their place in the world. But Margaret's future was not yet clear. In June 1493, at Cambrai (the scene of several important later encounters) she again met her godmother and step-grandmother Margaret of York, for whom she had been named. The next few years were to be spent in the older Margaret's company. But another marriage was always going to be on the board.

In 1493, Margaret's father Maximilian succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor. Margaret, like her brother Philip, was to be used to cement his great project: an anti-French alliance. Philip was to marry Juana, daughter of the rulers of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella; Margaret was to marry Juan, their heir.
*
The grand scheme comprised plans for the youngest daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Katherine of Aragon, to marry the heir to the English throne, thus cementing another useful alliance.

On 5 November 1495, at Malines, Margaret of Austria underwent a proxy marriage with her Spanish prince. The discussions over whether she should set sail for Spain before Juana arrived in Flanders resemble, in a modern scenario, nothing so much as the exchange of hostages. Nonetheless, in late January 1497 she was under way. The weather was so bad her ship had to take refuge on the English coast, in Southampton, to the delight of the English king Henry VII, who sent letters urging her to lodge in the town long enough for him to visit and for her to avoid the ‘movement and roaring of the sea'. She might have wished she had, for in the Bay of Biscay her ship ran into storms so severe that Margaret composed a rueful epitaph:

Here lies Margot, the willing bride,

Twice married – but a virgin when she died

(Cy-gist Margot la gentil' damoiselle

Qu'ha deux marys et encor est pucelle)

Safely landed in Spain, Margaret met her new mother-in-law, Isabella of Castile. It was a chance to witness a woman exerting regal force in the most direct way. Margaret met a woman who, as she advanced in years, was most at ease in the rough habit of a Franciscan monk but who, in public, could appear decked in rubies the size of pigeons' eggs. Isabella commissioned a female professor of Latin to remedy the defects in her education but nonetheless, educated her daughters as consorts, not as rulers.

Five years earlier, in 1492, a single triumphant year had seen Isabella of Castile riding into the palace of the Alhambra, victorious at last over the Moors who had long occupied southern Spain, her expulsion of the Jews and the discovery of the New World by her protégé Christopher Columbus. But even more significant, perhaps, would be Isabella's work in supporting – but also, crucially, in reforming – the Catholic church in Spain.

In 1478 Isabella had applied to the pope for permission to launch the Inquisition in Spain. Her and Ferdinand's officers acted so harshly that the pope felt impelled to intervene; they were replaced, ironically, with the now-infamous Tomás de Torquemada, who soon established not only an authoritarian spiritual rule but an efficient network of tribunals across all the territories of the Catholic kings. This impetus fuelled action against Moor and Jew. Isabella's Castile had been frontline territory, with Islam on its very boundaries. But her efforts would prove something of a pre-emptive strike, explaining why Protestantism would never make any real incursion on the Spanish peninsula.

The impetus for change came from Isabella herself. She boasted that in her eagerness to root out other, heretical strands of faith: ‘I have caused great calamities and depopulated towns, lands, provinces and kingdoms'. The human cost of her actions was high. A priest who observed the expulsion of Jews, whose families had lived in Spain for centuries, recorded the emigrants collapsing, giving birth, dying by the roadside ‘so that there was no Christian who was not sorry for them'. Nevertheless, after her death, there were moves for Isabella's canonisation.

This was the spirit and the lesson that her daughters carried abroad, as they were married off to spread the influence of Isabella and Ferdinand's dynasty. Margaret of Austria, as she arrived in Spain, had the chance to meet at least some of her new sisters-in-law. The eldest – named Isabella for the mother whose heir she was – had years earlier been married to the heir of the King of Portugal. Her young spouse was killed in a riding accident after they had been married a mere seven months, and after years of family pressure Isabella was persuaded in 1497 to marry Manuel, who had replaced her first husband as Portugal's king. As Margaret of Austria arrived in the country, Isabella was departing, while Juana had already left for the Netherlands.
¹

Margaret of Austria certainly met her youngest sister-in-law, who was preparing to eventually leave the Spanish court. The marriage of Katherine of Aragon to the English Prince Arthur was becoming ever more pressing. On July 1498, Spain's ambassador in England wrote that:

The Queen and the mother of the King [Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort] wish that the Princess of Wales [Katherine] should always speak French with the Princess Margaret [of Austria] who is now in Spain, in order to learn the language and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England. This is necessary, because these ladies do not understand Latin and much less, Spanish.

Margaret was warmly welcomed in Spain despite a certain clash of cultures. The seventeenth-century Jesuit author Pedro Abarca, in his
Reyes de Aragon
, wrote that although Margaret was allowed all her habitual servants, freedom and diversions, she was warned not to treat grandees ‘with the familiarity and openness usual with the houses of Austria, Burgundy and France but with the gravity and measured dignity of the kings and realms of Spain'.

Just months after his marriage to Margaret, in the autumn of 1497, the frail, over-solemn Juan died and Margaret (‘so full of sorrow', as she described herself, ‘that there was no room for any more griefs') lost the baby she was carrying. Her court poet Jean Lemaire, in
Couronne Margaritique
, later wrote that she endured a labour of twelve days and nights without food or sleep.
²

Margaret told her father that Queen Isabella never left her and that she would have died were it not for her mother-in-law's care. Ferdinand and Isabella wrote to Maximilian that Margaret was ‘as strong and full of courage as you would wish her to be and we try to console her . . . we have and will have as much care of her as we would have if her husband were alive'. A generous reaction, given that many contemporaries believed Juan had been killed by overindulgence in ‘the pleasures of marriage' with the hot-blooded Margaret.

Margaret of Austria now had no real role in Spain, any more than she had had in France after Charles VIII abandoned her. Again, however, Margaret stayed for a time in her new country, where she had found great popularity. Her departure was delayed while her father-in-law and her father haggled over her dowry, her future marriage possibilities, her best deployment in the ongoing tug-of-war with France, and finally over the route and timing of her journey. But early in 1499 – crossing by land the France of which she had once been called queen – she returned to Flanders. Nineteen years old and once again cheated of married life.

She arrived just in time to stand godmother (alongside her own godmother Margaret of York) to her brother Philip of Burgundy's son by Juana of Aragon, the eventual heir to both Spain, through his mother, and to his father's Netherlands territories. For the Habsburg dynasty the birth of baby Charles was a triumph but on a personal level the marriage of Philip and Juana was a disaster. Not perhaps for the husband, who had from the first treated his wife with a contempt bordering on cruelty but for Juana, who responded to this harsh treatment with a devotion to Philip so slavish – and if hostile reports are to be believed, so hysterically jealous – that it became the chief grounds for the allegations of her insanity.

Margaret's personal sympathies were probably torn. In any case, she was soon given her own residence at the castle of le Quesnoy, away from the court. Politically, in March 1501 the Spanish ambassador Fuensalida was able to report disgruntledly that Madame Margaret ‘simply follows her brother's fancies in all things'. When later asked by the Spanish to mediate between the warring couple, she sent word to Ferdinand that there was nothing she could do. As the Spanish ambassador reported ominously, ‘she is returning to her own lands now because she is not able to suffer here the things that she sees going on . . .'

Margaret of Austria was not going to remain in the Netherlands forever. Discussions, conducted by her father and brother, about yet another marriage had begun while she was still in Spain, with mentions of the Duke of Milan, the kings of Scotland, Hungary and even France, since Margaret's childhood husband Charles VIII had died and a new king held the French throne. In the end, the choice of Margaret's next husband fell on the young Duke of Savoy, Philibert, brother of Margaret's erstwhile playmate Louise of Savoy.

The duchy of Savoy was the gateway to Italy, the stage of much of the competitive fighting between the great European powers, and so the match gave Margaret of Austria's relatives access to a strategically vital territory. Moreover while Philibert was technically a vassal of Maximilian's, his French upbringing at Anne de Beaujeu's hands meant he was very much under the sway of that country. This was something Margaret's father and brother may have been eager to change.

Margaret showed no eagerness to remarry. But although this third marriage would prove to be the least important on the great European stage, it would be the one which gave her most happiness. Philibert, a party-loving daredevil just a few months younger than she, shared, with Margaret's brother, the sobriquet of ‘the Handsome'. The marriage contract was signed in Brussels on 26 September 1501 and Margaret of Austria set off in October (accompanied for the first half league by Margaret of York, the last time they would meet). At the beginning of December she met Philibert near Geneva and was received enthusiastically. For the first time Margaret had a partner who shared her vitality. Touring the duchy together, they settled down at the castle of Pont l'Aine near Borg in the spring of 1503.

But there was another side to Philibert's gaiety. His time was occupied in hunting, jousting and dancing; he had no interest in attending to the business of the duchy. That was dealt with by his illegitimate half-brother, René, until the advent of Margaret, who had no intention of leaving the ‘Bastard of Savoy' his authority. Whether or not her hostility was justified, she used every weapon at her disposal against him, even involving her father to have René stripped of the letters of legitimacy that gave him, a bastard, the right to his property.