Game of Queens (9 page)

Her motives may have been political; she had her family's interests to follow, or they may have been personal. Perhaps past experiences had soured her of (usually masculine) authority. Perhaps, even, she had seen in her sister-in-law Juana's fate what happened when a royal wife abnegated public responsibility. Either way, the Bastard was declared a traitor. He took refuge in France, where he was welcomed by his half-sister Louise of Savoy.

While Philibert hunted, Margaret of Austria took up the reins of government, effectively telling him not to worry his pretty head. She summoned the council, appointed officers, discussed foreign policy with her brother when he visited and approved his plans for a continued
rapprochement
with France. She never neglected the parties or the hunting; there is an account of her appearing at one masque as Queen of the Amazons, with a crimson headdress and jewelled cuirass and with (one thinks of Isabella of Castile) a naked sword in hand. But her experience in Savoy was the final stage of her political apprenticeship; a rehearsal for activities on the wider European stage, to which fate was about to return her.

The summer of 1504 was scorchingly hot. Even Philibert was unable to hunt. So in the first days of September he returned to his avocation with even more enthusiasm. After a frenetic morning pursuing a wild boar, he flung himself down in the shade, gulping from a fountain, only to be seized by a sudden chill. At the palace, doctors were summoned but despaired. Margaret ordered her valuable pearls to be ground up for medicine but to no avail; Philibert died on the morning of 10 September. The story goes that Margaret's attendants had to restrain her from flinging herself from the window.

She did fling herself into the rebuilding of the family church at Brou, where Philibert was buried, causing her self-invented motto: ‘
FORTUNE. INFORTUNE. FORT. UNE
' to be carved all over it. This can be translated to imply that ‘fate is very cruel to women' or, conversely, that ‘Fortune. Misfortune. Strengthens. One'. The ‘e' of ‘
une
' makes it clear that it is a woman in question.
³
In the years ahead Margaret of Austria's palace at Mechelen was to feature wooden busts of herself and Philibert, in which Margaret, although she commissioned them after his death, wore the loose hair of a bride, rather than the widow's cap. At twenty-four, she was cheated of married life for yet a third time. Her father and brother were at first anxious to marry her off yet again but after three such ill-fated attempts at matrimony, Margaret declared herself ‘much disinclined to make another trial'.

But as well as her husband, she had lost her new-found role. Or had she? Philibert was succeeded by an eighteen-year-old half-brother whose youth made it seem, for a while, as though Margaret might manage to hold on to a measure of power. The new young duke, however, reneged on the deal, leaving Margaret furious. If he thought ‘that by such unmannerly treatment he can reduce us and put his intentions through, he has the wrong idea', she wrote later. ‘For all that we are a woman, our heart is of a different nature . . .'
*

 

In France, Louise of Savoy was also now a youthful widow. The little dauphin, the son that Anne of Brittany had borne to Charles VIII of France at the start of their marriage, had died in 1495. Louise's husband Charles d'Angoulême fell sick of a fever and died on his way to the dauphin's funeral. Resisting, like a striking number of these women, any attempt to marry her off again, Louise concentrated on keeping control of her son, François.

As the boy's leading kinsman, the Duc d'Orléans had claimed that Louise of Savoy could not take guardianship of her two children, being herself a minor, as France set twenty-five as the age of legal majority for women. But the young widow argued that in Cognac, where François was born, women were allowed to exercise rights of guardianship at fourteen. The royal council decided more or less in her favour, with the Duc d'Orléans (provided Louise did not remarry) given merely a supervisory role.

Louise of Savoy settled down in Cognac to administer her extensive lands. There she set about bringing up her two children in the strong-minded and scholarly tradition she had learnt in Anne de Beaujeu's household. ‘Also, my daughter, if at some point in the future God takes your husband, leaving you a widow, then you will be responsible for your children, like many other young women; have patience, because it pleases God, and govern wisely', Anne wrote in her
Enseignement
s. Louise's motto (borrowed from Lorenzo de Medici and written on the wall of her room at Angoulême) was ‘
libris et liberis
': books and children.

Her daughter, Marguerite, had the same teachers as her son. Both learnt Spanish and Italian from their mother, and Latin and biblical history from two humanist scholars, while a miniature shows Marguerite and her brother playing chess. But there was no doubt which of the two children occupied more of their mother's attention.

Louise of Savoy has been blamed for her focus on François but Marguerite herself would share that obsessive interest. And perhaps it was inevitable, as the childlessness of successive short-lived French kings brought François ever closer to the throne. When, in 1498, Charles VIII suddenly died, after hitting his head on the lintel of a doorway, the throne passed to Louis, Duc d'Orléans, the cousin of Louise's husband Angoulême. And Louis was still childless, the cynical predictions about his marriage to the crippled Jeanne having proved all too accurate.
⁴

After Charles VIII's death, his widow Anne of Brittany threw herself into hysterical mourning but also immediately took steps to resume her rights in her duchy. Her first marriage contract stipulated that if King Charles died, the only person she could remarry was the next King of France; a way to continue France's annexation of Brittany. The new king Louis XII accordingly took steps to set aside his existing wife, the barren Jeanne, on the grounds of non-consummation. Jeanne was asked to undergo a humiliating physical examination, a papal decree was granted and Jeanne retired to a convent, eventually to be canonised.

While the marriage of Louis and Anne of Brittany was politically necessary for both sides, this was no guarantee it would solve the problem of the succession. The groom was thirty-six and in poor health, while Anne's repeated pregnancies by Charles had not yet produced an heir.

Unless or until a son was born to King Louis and his new queen, Louise of Savoy's boy François was heir presumptive. Under these circumstances, Louise had to battle to be allowed to bring up François herself. She did have to bring her son rather more closely under Louis's eye, to Amboise on the Loire, where François and the gang of young men placed around him could enjoy the hunting and mock tournaments that were so much to his taste. She had also to submit to the surveillance of Louis's trusted man, the Seigneur de Gié, whose aggressive concept of his duties made the family feel like prisoners at times. Louise's children slept in her bedroom and an officer had to be present at the
lever
, the ceremonial rising of the young heir. One day, when Louise declared her children were still sleeping, an official went so far as to break down the door.

Anne of Brittany endured repeated pregnancies and Louise's journal makes no bones about her feelings. In 1502, ‘Anne, Queen of France, on the twenty-first of January, Saint Agnes Day, gave birth at Blois to a son; however, stillborn, he was no threat to my Caesar's rise to power.' There continued to be no sign of a living boy. In 1499 Louise and her children were at Romorantin, where Queen Anne joined their seclusion to avoid the plague, and there gave birth to a daughter, Claude. Was the idea of a match between this royal daughter and Louise's son François also born at Romorantin?

Perhaps neither mother wanted the match: Anne of Brittany because she secretly hoped to marry Claude, Brittany's heiress, to the imperial Habsburgs (Anne had always kept in touch with Margaret of Austria) and thus maintain her duchy's independence, while Louise of Savoy may have reflected that Claude came from a family with a poor record of fertility and was, like so many of her inbred clan, including Louis's first wife Jeanne, mildly deformed. Louise and Anne of Brittany were always in enmity, although in 1504 they had briefly collaborated to rid themselves of the overbearing Seigneur de Gié.

But in 1505, when Louis XII fell desperately ill, it made imperative what had long been discussed: the marriage of twelve-year-old François, the heir, to King Louis's seven-year-old daughter Claude. Louis's will placed the guardianship of Claude with her mother Anne but gave Louise a seat alongside her on the regency council. Both women swore to execute the will with their hands resting on a piece of the True Cross. King Louis recovered but the betrothal ceremony went ahead, with the pair then separating to grow up. The following spring another formal ceremony acknowledged François as Louis's heir.

Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy were now both young widows. But while Margaret was again plunged into uncertainty, Louise's path lay clear ahead.

 

 

 

*
Again it will often be convenient to speak of ‘Spain', although official unification of the Spanish kingdoms would not happen until the eighteenth century.

*
Impossible not to think, in comparison and contrast, of the ‘heart and stomach of a king' and Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

5

Princess Brides

England, Scotland, 1501–1505

A princess’s fate was to be married for her family’s benefit. Her own happiness, or otherwise, was a matter of fortune. Across the Channel, in England and in Scotland, two other royal girls were feeling the force of that lesson.

Katherine of Aragon finally arrived in England in 1501. Her marriage to its heir Prince Arthur was celebrated with extraordinary festivities. Isabella of Castile and her husband had displayed some qualms at sending their youngest to distant England, where the Tudor regime was still a fragile new arrival but Isabella was not the woman to let sentiment stand in the way of dynastic advantage.

Any foreign princess faced a terrifying prospect as she arrived, exhausted and travel-worn, on the shores of a foreign land after a long and dangerous journey, knowing her entire future depended on pleasing the man (or boy) she was about to meet, and that, at best, she faced a future of juggling her loyalties to him and her responsibilities to her native country. It must have taken all the festivities – the tournaments and the tumblers, the pageants and the parades between the river palaces – to pin the ritual smile on Katherine of Aragon’s face. And she may, as Isabella’s daughter, have been taken aback to discover the limitations on a royal Englishwoman’s power.

True, Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort – ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’ – exercised a good deal of influence but the same could not be said of his wife, Elizabeth of York. Moreover, both Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York had been required to set aside their blood rights to let Henry ascend his throne. There was no thought that a woman could rule in England, as she could in Castile, although Katherine could not have known how this assumption would come to haunt her.

In January 1502 the young couple set out for Ludlow, Arthur’s seat as Prince of Wales. But less than five months after the wedding came tragedy. On 2 April 1502 Prince Arthur died after a short illness, leaving his parents devastated and his wife in the most painful uncertainty. Another royal bride widowed early; another princess left stranded in a foreign country without an obvious role to play.

But marriage abroad was a princess’s lot. At the English court, one of Katherine’s new Tudor sisters-in-law was preparing for that destiny. Margaret Tudor had been born in 1489, the eldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. She was not quite four when her elder brother Arthur was sent to Ludlow at six years old, to assume his role as Prince of Wales, leaving Margaret to be raised with her younger siblings Henry and Mary. The royal children largely grew up at Eltham Palace, just outside London. Desiderius Erasmus, the great humanist from the Netherlands, accompanying the English scholar Thomas More to pay his respects in 1499, portrays them as happy, although his report makes it clear the eight-year-old Henry (‘already with a certain royal demeanour’) expected, and was given, precedence over the two girls.

There had already been discussions about Margaret Tudor’s future. In 1498 the Spanish ambassador reported to Ferdinand and Isabella on the proposed marriage between the eight-year-old Margaret and the 25-year-old James IV of Scotland but added that there were many ‘inconveniences’ involved. Henry VII said that his wife and his mother Margaret Beaufort had joined forces to protect little Margaret:

The Queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if the marriage were concluded, we should be obliged to send the Princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait but injure her and endanger her health.

Wait: as in wait to consummate the marriage. Here, Margaret Beaufort knew all too well what she was talking about. She had been married at twelve and a mother at thirteen; the birth had permanently damaged her slight physique. If the granddaughter named for her had inherited Margaret Beaufort’s small stature, this was a real and vivid concern. Nonetheless, on the 25th of January 1502 (just weeks after Arthur and Katherine set out for Ludlow) Richmond Palace saw the formal celebration of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to the King of Scots. Representatives of both countries signed the three agreements which made up the optimistically-named Treaty of Perpetual Peace, aimed at ending disputes between the ever-squabbling neighbours, and arranging the details of Margaret’s match and her £10,000 dowry.
¹