Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots (12 page)
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It is noticeable that the French love affair with Mary Stuart has been gallantly continued by many French historians; this point of view may be summed up by the words of the eminent chronicler of her childhood, Baron de Ruble, who, writing in 1891, describes:
‘les belles années qu’elle passa en France, jusqu’à la date néfaste où elle fut obligée d’échanger le sejour de son pays d’adoption, un riant climat, la cour galante, et polie des Valois, l’espérance d’un règne glorieux, contre l’Ecosse, un ciel brumeux et le commerce plein d’aigreur et de perfidie des laird presbyteriens’.
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One charming tradition concerning the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots is not founded on fact: there is a story that the word ‘marmelade’ originated when a chef in the royal kitchens stirred and stirred his oranges muttering over and over again the words:
‘Marie est malade’
, until the oranges turned into a delicious golden mixture. Unfortunately, the word marmelade was already in use in 1480, deriving from the Portuguese
marmelo
(a quince).
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The editor of Mary’s Latin themes, A. de Montaiglon, suggested that Mary might have heard the name of Calvin often mentioned since an edition of his Institutes was published in Paris in 1553. But there is no record of any such edition in France, either in French or Latin, before 1562. An edition of the Institutes was published in Geneva in 1554.
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Her Scottish library contained Greek books.
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Plaid of a sort was already known at this date, and Mary later wore it in Scotland; but tartan, in the form we know it today, was not, and nor was the kilt.
4 Betrothal‘How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, o kingdom of Scotland, to be favoured fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most magnanimous King of France …’
ESTIENNE PERLIN, 1558
By the end of 1553, when she entered her twelfth year, Mary Stuart’s charmed childhood was drawing to a close, in favour of a more troubled adolescence. As the princesses of France grew older, Queen Catherine decided that they should spend more time at court in order that she should supervise their development personally. The question therefore arose whether Mary should not at this point be awarded her own household since, with the departure of the princesses, her domestic arrangements seemed on occasion almost threadbare. The main drawback to the establishment of such a household was that it would entail an extra financial burden on the Estates of Scotland, who were scarcely in the mood to find still further funds for the maintenance of their young queen in France, while the budget for the French troops in Scotland remained high. The cardinal of Lorraine was obliged to write a series of letters to his sister before the final permission was granted. One of his arguments was the keen desire of Mary Stuart herself to be thus set up since at present she felt herself to be shabbily treated – the first hint of a rebellious character in this otherwise docile little paragon.
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The pleadings of the cardinal prevailed. On 1 January 1534 Mary Stuart entered into her new estate, and to celebrate the occasion she invited her uncle to supper that evening.
The choice was significant. Up till now the Guises had been content to let their nursling spend much of her time in the royal household: but from now onwards it was important that her character should be formed in accordance with their wishes, and that she should receive her early lessons in statecraft from the people who stood to gain so much from her future high position in France – the Guises. On her mother’s side, Mary formed
part of one of the most fascinating family nexus in French history, and it is impossible to understand the extremes of hostility and popularity which the Guises aroused during this period without considering briefly their antecedents. The family of Guise only entered France at the beginning of the sixteenth century when the widow of a younger son of the duke of Lorraine (then an independent duchy) applied to the French king to become naturalized French, along with his family of twelve children. The eldest of this family was Claude of Guise, grandfather of Mary Stuart, who was not only a highly successful general himself, but was supported on the secular flank by his ambitious brother the Cardinal Jean of Lorraine. But with success inevitably came jealousy. The Guises were accused of being foreigners by their enemies – Lorrainers rather than true Frenchmen. The Guises riposted by claiming that the royal blood of Charlemagne flowed in their veins, which, they said, entitled them to the highest place at the French court. This in turn led their detractors to accuse them of aiming at the very throne of France.
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In truth nothing as thin as the last
fainéant
drops of Charlemagne’s blood flowed in the veins of the Guises: they possessed something infinitely more potent – a furious life force and an admirable feeling of blood brotherhood. It is possible that the manner in which they upheld each other may have tempted Mary Stuart later in Scotland to suppose that all relatives supported each other as the Guises had done – a theory which the behaviour of the Stewarts sadly disproved. At all events, contemporary historians began to refer to the Guises as the Maccabees.
Mary’s future was affected politically by the power of the next generation of Guises at the court of Henry
II
, principally the two eldest sons of Duke Claude’s enormous family – Francis, second duke of Guise, and Charles who followed his uncle into the Church, and became first cardinal of Guise, later cardinal of Lorraine in his turn. During her childhood Mary also formed deep attachments to some of her Guise aunts and their children. For lack of any brothers and sisters she came to regard these young Guises as her own intimate family, especially once she was grown up, and back in Scotland, no longer in such close touch with the French royal family. Her gentle and cultivated aunt, Anne d’Esté, wife of Duke Francis, she loved with an especial warmth. The attachment was reciprocated: Duchess Anne wrote rapturously to Mary of Guise that her nine-year-old niece was ‘the most beautiful and prettiest little Queen that anyone could want’,
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and she only hoped that her own daughter Catherine would be allowed to serve her when she grew up. When Mary was older, she used to dance with her aunt in front of the court, a sight which Brantôme romantically compared to the two suns of Pliny appearing together in the heavens to astonish the
world – Mary being all grace and slenderness, and Anne having the statelier, fuller figure and the more apparent majesty of bearing. One effect of Mary’s friendship with her aunt was to throw her together with her little Guise cousins, despite the disparity in their ages. The future Duke Henry of Guise was eight years younger than Mary, a handsome, blond, curly-haired little boy, whom Marguerite de Valois, his contemporary, considered arrogant and overbearing. Mary Stuart, however, from the vantage point of superior age, described Henry and his brothers more sentimentally as the best-looking little boys in all the world.
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The three main centres of Guise family life were the palace of Joinville in the north-east of France whose gardens and parks were much beloved of Mary and her cousins, the palace of Meudon, close to Paris, and the Hôtel de Guise in Paris itself. Meudon was in the course of construction under the direction of Primaticcio and his pupils in the 1550s, at the cardinal’s behest to include an exquisite grotto: Mary boasted of its coming marvels in a letter to her mother. The magnificent Hôtel de Guise occupied the site of four previous hotels: on the vast quadrangular space, the duke and duchess of Guise built a splendid new hotel, in which the chapel, decorated by Niccolo del Abbate from drawings by Primaticcio, showed them to be patrons of the arts, and the staircase, decorated by their emblem of the Cross of Lorraine, signified their conscious pride in their family. In each of these three magnificent homes, Mary was welcomed as the young and promising member of the Guise connection, from whom much could be expected.
The influence of the Guise family was marked at the very outset of the reign of Henry
II
: at his coronation, the new king received his crown from the hands of Charles of Guise, who was created cardinal five days later. At the royal tournament in celebration of the event, it was Francis of Guise who made a particularly brilliant appearance. The glamour of Duke Francis was indeed such that anti-Guisard historians like de l’Aubespine, the courtier, could not bring themselves to condemn him totally, but were inclined to ascribe his actions, of which they disapproved, to the ambitions of his brother Charles.
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The spell which he cast over his contemporaries was, however, due not only to his pre-eminent generalship, but also to the fact that he was fortunate enough to be able to come to his country’s rescue on two dramatic occasions. The history of Europe in the early part of the 1550s was dominated by the rivalry between the house of Austria, personified by the Emperor Charles
V
, who included Spain in his vast dominions, and the house of Valois under Henry
II
. When the Emperor Charles handed over Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1556, this
struggle narrowed to a rivalry between Spain and France. In this rivalry both England and Scotland were involved as pawns – England was linked to the side of Spain by the marriage of the English queen, Mary Tudor, to the Spanish King Philip; Scotland was linked to France by the planned marriage of their queen, Mary Stuart, to Henry’s son Francis. But at the beginning of 1552, by making an alliance with the federation of Protestant German princes, who applied for help against the emperor, which allowed him to occupy the key border fortresses of Metz and Verdun, King Henry had brought to an end the uneasy peace which existed between France and the Empire. In reply, the emperor massed his troops with a view to regaining possession of Metz; and it was Francis of Guise who gallantly held the fortress during the prolonged siege which followed. In February the next year, the duke of Guise was solemnly thanked by the French Parliament for saving his country; he seemed indeed to justify the verdict of his brother, that he was ‘the most valiant man in the whole of Christendom’.
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The character of the cardinal is both more complex and less outwardly attractive than that of his brother. He certainly possessed intelligence, erudition and statecraft, amply illustrated in his letters, but there was also another side to his character on which anti-Guisards loved to dwell: he was accused of avarice, probably with truth (despite the fact that he died deeply in debt and did not show much skill in managing his own financial affairs or those of Mary) since he was in perpetual need of funds to keep up his army of couriers bringing him political news from every corner of Europe. His ecclesiastical career certainly provided an example of pluralism: however, as even in youth he showed sufficient precocity to present King Francis
I
with a thesis on morals and theology, perhaps his ecclesiastical advancement was not totally unjustified. His sermons aroused the general admiration of the French court; in Holy Week 1560 the Venetian ambassador reported that no one could think of anything else except these uplifting discourses, which were attracting huge audiences – although at the same time the cardinal’s enemies were busy in the streets pinning up scurrilous placards against him.
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In his career the cardinal of Guise summed up most completely of all his brothers the dichotomy in the Guise character: on the one hand lay their superb endowment of natural gifts, to grace the public life which they craved; on the other side of the balance lay their remarkable family ambition, which was capable, under certain circumstances, of vitiating all their services. This dichotomy is seen in the two contemporary explanations of the family emblem – the two-barred Cross of Lorraine. At the funeral oration of Duke Claude of Guise, it was pronounced that the cross meant that the Guises would die twice for Christ,
once in France and once in the Holy Land. But at the time of the Holy League, under Duke Henry, it was cynically suggested the double cross meant that Christ had been crucified twice, once by the Jews, and once by the Leaguers.
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It is difficult to estimate the true nature of the cardinal of Lorraine’s religion, since by modern standards his determined persecution of the French heretics arouses abhorrence, and by the political standards of the day they led not to peace but to the disastrous civil wars of the next ten years. The word tolerance has a mellifluous ring in modern ears. To us, tolerance of another’s beliefs has become a touchstone of liberalism, and intolerance is considered, by many, to be the final crime in a civilized society; but in the sixteenth century tolerance was certainly not among the public virtues expected in a ruler. As Father Pollen pointed out, what to us may seem like defence of the weak, seemed to them more like allowing vice to flourish; liberty of conscience was scarcely worthy of discussion, let alone worth fighting for. Sufferers on both sides of religious issues certainly did not expect to find that their ordeals had resulted in the spread of religious tolerance; they merely bore witness to their faith. The question of how far diversity of religion could be tolerated was indeed largely a question of public order: the Guises believed that French Catholicism was strong enough to eliminate Calvinism altogether, whereas in the next decade, Catherine de Medicis was obliged to exhibit political tolerance because she found that on the contrary neither religion was strong enough to drive out the other. In neither case can true conclusions be drawn about their private qualities of mercy. It is an interesting fact that Mary Stuart, whose religious views, as well as her views on statecraft, were formed with such care by the cardinal during her adolescence, showed throughout her career a quite remarkable clemency and lack of bigotry towards her subjects of a different religion, marking her off from almost all her contemporaries, except possibly her own mother. Every letter to her mother bears some sort of witness to the detailed supervision which her uncle was now giving to her upbringing: deeply impressionable as she was by nature, Mary Stuart’s admirable innate quality of mercy could certainly have been tempered by the teachings of the cardinal, had he so wished. On the contrary, it was allowed to flourish, and guide her actions as ruler of Scotland in her later career, for better or for worse.