Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens

(#litres_trial_promo)

Catherine Ashley and treasurer Parry were even more afraid. On facing arrest, Parry had rushed into his wife’s room and said to her in great distress that he wished he had never been born ‘for I am undone, and wrung his Hands, and cast away his Chain from his Neck, and his Rings from his Fingers’,

(#litres_trial_promo) as if he expected then and there to be beheaded.

The following day, Tyrwhit interrogated Elizabeth again, but by now she had composed herself. She appeared to be wholly cooperative but gave only careful, anodyne answers: she could not be certain what Parry or Catherine Ashley had been induced to reveal but she kept her own hand as close as possible to her chest. Tyrwhit thought her calmness and reason meant he was getting round her with his subtle questioning but he did have the intelligence to realize that he was up against a fifteen-year-old girl who was already a formidable advocate: ‘I do assure your Grace’, he wrote to Somerset, ‘she hath a very good Wit, and nothing is gotten off her, but by great policy.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Although Elizabeth’s servants talked more fully as Tyrwhit’s tactics frightened or tricked them, they never revealed anything that could be construed as a conspiracy between their mistress and Seymour. Any marriage involving the princess, they declared, was always dependent on the knowledge and approval of the king, the Lord Protector and the Council. Tyrwhit was suspicious that there was much more to be confessed, but he was frustrated in his investigations by the consistency of their blameless story: ‘They all sing one Song, and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the Note before.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

The fear of torture and the discomfort of the conditions in which Elizabeth’s servants were held cannot be underestimated. It was winter and Mrs Ashley had been moved into a windowless dungeon to induce her further to talk. Here during freezing February she could neither sleep at night, the cold was so intense, nor see by day where no light could penetrate. Always too was the ever present threat of death. In fact it was remarkable that everyone managed to keep that one song in tune, despite the threats, cajolery, forged letters and invented confessions which were flung at them during that chilling start to 1549. Eventually Tyrwhit gave up disgruntled. As far as he was concerned Elizabeth was the architect of this resistance: ‘I do believe that there hath been some secret Promise, between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the Cofferer, never to confess to Death; and if it be so, it will never be gotten out of her.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

After her initial discomposure, Elizabeth’s confidence had grown as the interrogations proceeded. Indeed, she was able to summon a tone of remarkable self-righteousness, an attitude which was to become one of her favourite and most effective stances in negotiations throughout her life when she felt she was on dubious ground. In a letter to the all-powerful Lord Protector Somerset she alternated her tone between imperiousness and submission to achieve her effect: ‘Master Tyrwit and others have told me that there goeth rumours Abroad, which be greatly both against my Honour, and Honesty, (which above all things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower; and with Child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord these are shameful Slanders.’ She then requested urgent permission to come to court and show herself ‘as I am’, distinctly signing herself with the poignant reminder of her youth, her vulnerability and his responsibility, as protector of the realm, towards her, ‘Your assured Friend to my little Power, Elizabeth’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Here was a girl, just turned fifteen, without any powerful guardian to protect her interests, or even her life, reminded in her interrogation that ‘she was but a subject’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and how perilous her situation had become. She was bullied, threatened and lied to but had managed to keep her wits about her to such an extent that she was able to get the better of her inquisitor and make demands of him and his master, the Lord Protector. When the council decided they would replace Catherine Ashley with Robert Tyrwhit’s wife, who would keep a closer eye on the young princess, Elizabeth threw a fit: ‘She took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next Day.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Tyrwhit was no match for such a dramatic display of grief. He did allow her to write to Somerset and argue her case (although he grumbled that she would take none of his advice). Through sheer force of will, emotion and logic, Elizabeth got her way. Eventually Tyrwhit’s wife was withdrawn and Mrs Ashley reinstated. Tyrwhit was nonplussed by many things about Elizabeth, not least her devotion to her governess. ‘The Love yet she beareth her is to be wondered at,’ he wrote.

(#litres_trial_promo) His own job as interrogator was done and he himself withdrew from the fray, relieved no doubt and uneasy at the thought that somehow he had been forestalled by a mere girl.

It is impossible to know just how far Elizabeth compromised herself with Seymour, although there is plenty of evidence that she found him attractive, as well as how troubling she found that attraction. But Tyrwit may well have been right that her servants’ loyalty and courage and her own intelligence and coolness under fire prevented something more damaging to Elizabeth’s prospects, even her life, from emerging. Elizabeth was distressed by the fact that even by March, Catherine Ashley was still imprisoned in the Tower and, despite her fears that this might implicate her in any of her governess’s perceived guilt, she wrote another impassioned letter to the Lord Protector:

My lord:

I have a request to make unto your grace which fear has made me omit till this time … I will speak for … Katherine Ashley, that it would please your grace and the rest of the Council to be good unto her … First, because she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty. And therefore I ought of very duty speak for her, for Saint Gregory sayeth that we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is, bringeth us into this world – but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Elizabeth never forgot the sacrifices of these partners in her first ordeal. On her accession and throughout their lives she treated both with great favour, knighting Parry and making him treasurer of the household and visiting Catherine Ashley on her deathbed in July 1565, mourning her deeply.

Elizabeth and her servants escaped further punishment but the Lord Admiral Seymour was tried for treason, found guilty and beheaded on 20 March 1549. The whole lethal business had taken just three months. Through this treacherous time Elizabeth had learned some lessons as to the value of circumspection over spontaneity, the necessity of will and intellect ruling the heart. She also learnt about loyalty, the depths of her own, and how her very life could depend on the loyalty and love of her servants, her people. Nothing would make her join in the vilification of Seymour even when she was still under some suspicion herself. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop,’ the disliked Mrs Tyrwhit noted when Elizabeth heard that Seymour’s lands were being divided up and dispersed, but she then added, ‘She can not hear him discommended.’

(#litres_trial_promo) However, at fifteen, Elizabeth already had absorbed a wisdom that at forty had eluded the ambitious, swaggering Seymour. On the day of his execution she is reputed to have made the possibly apocryphal comment, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’

(#litres_trial_promo) From that day on, Elizabeth would ensure that no one could ever say that of her.

While Elizabeth, exiled from safety, protection and power, endured her baptism of fire, her cousin Mary was embarking on her own more literal exile with a cheerful heart. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had got her way at last: her daughter was to be taken to safety, contracted to marry the dauphin to become eventually Queen of France. The marriage treaty was signed on July 7 1548 and with it the alliance with France was strengthened. Mary hoped that now the French would give her much-needed aid in her struggles to protect her daughter’s kingdom from the English.

These marauding English had seized the town of Haddington, John Knox’s birthplace, in the eastern Borders. The Scottish troops, reinforced with some five thousand or more Frenchmen, were attempting to wrest it back again when Mary, intrepid as ever, just two days after signing the marriage treaty for her daughter, rode to the town to exhort the troops to greater resistance. Accompanied by her entourage of lords and ladies she headed for the nunnery on the edge of town, from there to gain a better vantage point. But unfortunately her party arrived just as the English gunners were perfecting their range. In an immense explosion of dust and smoke sixteen of her accompanying gentlemen and others of her party were mown down, along with their horses, in a scene of terrible carnage. Even for a woman of her fortitude and experience this horror was too much to bear; the dowager queen fainted with shock. Nothing could have convinced her more graphically of the wisdom of the imminent dispatch of her daughter.

The French fleet sent to spirit the young Queen of Scots away had sailed around the north coast of Scotland to elude the English and finally came to moorage at Dumbarton. To accompany her to her new life in France she had a bevy of Scottish children, among them the subsequently celebrated ‘Four Maries’ – Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, Mary Seton and Mary Beaton – all daughters of noble Scottish families. Her adult court included the lords Erskine and Livingston and Lady Fleming, her stepaunt and governess. Also accompanying the young queen was her eldest illegitimate half-brother James Stewart and two younger, Lord Robert and Lord John. Seventeen years old, educated and adventurous, Lord James was to spend some time at the French court in the entourage of his young sister, and it is quite probable that during this time Mary forged her strong affection for this brother, a trust she found hard to relinquish even when he, as Earl of Moray, was made regent in her place years later. Mary’s mother was grief-stricken at sending her only daughter from her, on a journey which was inherently hazardous, and made all the more so by the threat of intervention from the aggressive English fleet.

By the beginning of August the French galleys bearing their important cargo eventually sailed down the Clyde and out to sea. There was every evidence that the Queen of Scots was blessed with an adventurous spirit which was to be one of the main motivating characteristics of her life. While others faded with homesickness or seasickness, Mary thrived. The journey around the west coast of England was plagued with storms and fears of an English attempt at ambush and kidnap, but nothing seemed to sap her robust health and merry temperament. Her mother meanwhile was overcome with sadness: ‘The old Queen doth lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvels that she heareth nothing from her.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

The French commander de Brézé had in fact sent a series of letters to console the grieving queen mother and in them consistently asserted that Mary, alone of all the party, remained cheery of temper and free of seasickness, despite the terrible storms that almost overwhelmed them off the coast of Cornwall. ‘Madam,’ he wrote on 18 August 1548, ‘in the belief that it will be a comfort to you to have news of the Queen, your daughter … she prospers, and is as well as ever you saw her. She has been less ill upon the sea than any one of her company, so that she made fun of those that were …’

(#litres_trial_promo) In these leviathan seas they had broken their rudder but Providence, he claimed, came to their aid and the essential steerage was mended without loss of life. After almost a week at the mercy of the sea, the royal entourage arrived at Roscoff on the dramatic coastline of Finistère. There were members of that party whose suffering would have made them think it well named as ‘the end of the world’.

Mary’s charm, high spirits and adventurousness had already impressed the whole company who had shared her eventful voyage. The kind de Brézé wrote again on 1 November, ‘I believe, madame, that [the king] will find her as pleasing and as much to his fancy as all those who have seen her and found her pretty and of clever wit.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the French court was the most magnificent and sophisticated in Europe. When Mary arrived in 1548 it was dominated by two women, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, and Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. These women were indeed powerful but it was power exercised covertly, through influence and manipulation, through persuasion and pillow talk, bribery and possibly even poison. While Henri lived, Catherine appeared to be eclipsed by the phenomenon of Diane de Poitiers. Preternaturally beautiful, seductive and socially skilled, she was nearly twenty years his senior, a woman whom age could not diminish. But it was Catherine who was the more remarkable. Patiently willing to bide her time, wily, pragmatic, treacherous, she was to prove herself the ultimate stateswoman in utter control of herself and the dynasty through control of her children.

Diane had been the king’s mistress since he was about nineteen. The story went that François I, in despair at the death of his eldest son, had been complaining to Diane, widow of the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy, of the melancholic nature and uncouth manners of his second son, who had so tragically become dauphin and heir to his throne. Diane had laughingly replied ‘he must be made to fall in love, and that she would make him her gallant’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Her plan worked so well that not only did she civilize him but, in introducing him young to the charms of her company, she ensured he was incapable of ever replacing her as the most influential woman in his life. For the following twenty-one years until his death Henri spent up to a third of each day in Diane’s company.

Catherine had none of her advantages of beauty or facile personality. She was a neglected scion of the Florentine merchant family of Medici, and had never been popular in France. Married at fourteen, she had to countenance very early her husband’s evident preference for his mistress and faithfulness to her until death. After ten miserable years of barren marriage, Catherine became sullen in her unhappiness and sinister in her superstitions and suspected occult powers. It had seemed to Catherine only supernatural intervention could save her from humiliation, and the threatened repudiation by her husband. The fact that she then managed to produce ten children, four of them sons, in a twelve-year flurry of miraculous fecundity explained some of her preoccupations with the occult and her subsequent absolute control over her family. Once Henri II died in 1559, however, the true power of the Medici sprang forth from its long incubation.

Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded queen. What Catherine lacked in beauty she made up for in intelligence, cunning and family ambition. After years of silence and antipathy her time at last had come. But it was not vengeance so much as power which she desired. From that point on, the interests and fortunes of her children were her main concern. Through the youth and inadequacy of her sons as kings she became the real power driving the French monarchy for the last thirty years of her life, as omnipotent queen mother throughout three reigns.

The France that Mary first encountered in 1548 was a country increasingly riven by religious dissent. Calvinism and evangelicalism were well established among the lower clergy and the urban bourgeoisie and were already infiltrating into the higher strata of society. François I’s intellectual sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was strongly evangelical in her faith, although she never broke definitively with the Catholic Church. Everywhere, heresy was enthusiastically rooted out with threats of torture, banishments and public burnings. Banned books were placed on an index and booksellers who defied these proscriptions risked being burnt along with their heretical volumes.

The court, however, seethed with its own factions and intrigues and increasingly was drawn into the religious wars. In the sixteenth century it was a lavish self-contained community, of king and queen and their families, the nobles from the provinces and their entourages, the foreign ambassadors and the princes étrangers, who, although with territories outside the kingdom, nevertheless attended the French court. This huge superstructure, centred on the glorification of the king, needed an even more vast army of workers, with priests, soldiers, officials, tradesmen, domestic servants, huntsmen, grooms, entertainers, poets, teachers and musicians. It was a largely peripatetic court, just as it had been in the Middle Ages, on the move between a series of châteaux, driven as much by the royal passion for hunting and the desire for new forests and new animals to kill, as by the more pragmatic need to clean the residences every few months or so, find new sources of food having exhausted the immediate hinterland, and display the king to his people.

To give an example of the logistics involved during François I’s reign, stabling was required for somewhere in the region of 24,000 horses and mules needed for transportation and recreation alone. His son’s court was no less prodigal. Wagons carried the plate, tapestries and furniture and when the roads became too difficult the court and all its entourage and equipment took to the water. Most of the favourite royal châteaux sat beside the mighty River Loire basking in its pleasant, hospitable climate, bordered by lush forests filled with animals, often artificially stocked for the king’s pleasure, sometimes even with imported exotics. Mary was a fine horsewoman all her life, as was her mother, and Diane de Poitiers looked particularly picturesque acting out one of her many roles as Diana the huntress. But it was Catherine de Medici who was the most fearless of all the court women. She rode as fast and recklessly as any man, and in order to facilitate her speed and manoeuvrability, had invented a way of riding side-saddle that was much closer to the modern technique, and much more effective than the old-fashioned box-like affair in which women were meant sedately to sit.

Everywhere was evidence of François I’s passion not only for hunting but for building, and the appreciation of art. This he had expressed actively, acquisitively, by collecting masterpieces for his royal palaces, particularly for Fontainebleau. Excellence in all things was the mark of an extrovert Renaissance king. Naturally, it was to the Italian masters that he turned. The king’s greatest coup was to persuade Leonardo da Vinci at the end of his life to come and live at court. He arrived in 1516 with La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa), The Virgin with Saint Anne, and Saint Jean Baptiste in his luggage, and settled at Amboise.

The great sculptor Benvenuto Cellini also spent some time at court and sculpted for François in 1544 his Nymph of Fontainebleau. On the walls of the bathhouse, situated immediately under the library, François hung his da Vincis and Raphaels and a magnificent portrait of himself by Titian, portraitist of the age to popes and kings. Although by the time Mary arrived in France, the first François was dead, the visual richness and cultural diversity of his legacy lived on in every royal palace. She would grow up amongst these treasures and then, as queen to the second François, a pygmy shadow of his grandfather, she would fleetingly inherit it all.

However, aged not yet six and newly arrived in her adopted country, Mary first had to meet the royal children, among them the dauphin, and her own Guise relations. She had been placed by her mother under the guardianship of her maternal grandmother, the remarkable Antoinette de Bourbon, Duchesse de Guise. Antoinette and her husband Claude de Lorraine had founded the Guise dynasty with their brood of ten, tall, strong and mettlesome children. Antoinette had proved a wise and rigorous mother and adviser to her impressive daughter: she would endeavour to pass on the same family pride and courage to her granddaughter.

The little Scottish queen was welcomed into this rich and glamorous court with sentimental excitement: had she not just been rescued from their mutual enemy, the brutal English? Had not French courage and nobility of purpose snatched this innocent child from the ravening beast? But there was real fascination too. She was their future queen, a pretty and spirited girl with the novelty of her Scottish tongue and the mystique of her distant mist-wreathed land to charm them. Although there was a long historic relationship between Scotland and France, and some intermixing of the countries’ nationals, Scotland was still considered by the French to be barbaric in climate, terrain and the character of its people. Mary’s beauty and charm of manner was celebrated all the more because of this piquant contrast.

Most important for the development of Mary’s character was the fact that her future father-in-law, Henri II, decreed pre-eminent status for the Queen of Scots. She was to grow up with his own sons and daughters but on any official occasion she was to precede the French princesses, a visual reminder to her companions and to the child herself of her unique importance even among the elite of the French court.

Two months after her arrival on the smugglers’ coast of Brittany, Mary was introduced to the grandeur of the French monarchy, which was now to become her own. By easy stages her party proceeded via Morlais and Nantes to St Germain-en-Laye, once a medieval fort but subsequently domesticated and decorated by François I to befit a great renaissance king. King Henri was away on progress through his kingdom and so at the palace she was greeted by his children, the family amongst whom she was to live until she was an adult. They were all younger than she was, and with her Guise inheritance she would remain taller and handsomer, even as they grew.

Her own betrothed, the Dauphin François, was not yet five and having been rather sickly since birth was much smaller and frailer than the Queen of Scots, but their friendship seemed to be forged immediately. Montmorency, the Constable of France, writing to Mary’s mother reported, ‘I will assure you that the Dauphin pays her little attentions, and is enamoured of her, from which it is easy to judge that God gave them birth the one for the other.’

(#litres_trial_promo) François’s sister Elizabeth, just three and a half years old, was to become a real friend and as close as a sister to Mary. Claude, another sister, was just a baby, while Catherine de Medici was pregnant again with her fourth child, due the following February. Mary was entering a nursery full of much-doted-on children, to whom Catherine was to add another seven, her last pregnancy in 1556 producing twin girls, who died almost immediately.

Given Catherine’s unhappy decade of childlessness and the rigours she had gone through in attempting to conceive, these children were not just precious, semi-miraculous creatures, they were immutable proof to her enemies of her own fitness to be queen. No minutia of their health and wellbeing was too trivial for her concern. They were fussed over and indulged, the darlings of their parents and the court. Due to this odd conjugation of circumstance, Mary was introduced into, what was for the time, an unusually child-centred world, in which she was the star. Even the king, the most important personage in the land, was interested in meeting this five-year-old. He congratulated the Duc de Guise on his niece and said how much he was looking forward to seeing her: ‘no one comes from her who does not praise her as a marvel’.

(#litres_trial_promo)