An Accidental Tragedy (10 page)

It was during her mother’s visit that Mary, while staying at Amboise, had her first whiff of danger. Robert Stewart, one of the archers of the Garde Écossaise, was an escaped prisoner from those taken at St Andrews after the siege of the castle. He had changed his name and now had access to the royal apartments at Amboise. He attempted to poison Mary’s food but was discovered. He fled to England and was captured and returned to France, where, under torture, he confessed and was executed. The actual facts were kept from Mary, but the increased security
and heightened palace gossip would have intrigued and excited the young queen.

A more sombre note was struck when Mary’s half-brother, the fifteen-year-old François, Duc de Longueville, who had sent his mother Marie the knotted string showing his increase in height, died in Amiens. Marie had nursed him at his end and was heartbroken when he died. Mary was now her only surviving child, and she knew that she would have to leave France and her daughter very soon. Heavy hints were being dropped about the expense of keeping her and her Scottish attendants in the royal household, and she left in the late autumn of 1551 after a tearful parting with her daughter. She could have remained in the family home at Joinville and she even considered joining a convent, but she knew that her duty lay in governing Scotland as regent for her daughter. Mary and her mother would never meet again.

CHAPTER FOUR

The most amiable Princess in Christendom

Mary’s life as the Dauphine was peripatetic in the extreme, constantly moving around the royal palaces. But principally now for Mary the Palace of St Germain formed all her memories of childhood as Scotland faded into the distance. St Germain was near enough to Paris for Henri to attend to business, but far enough away from the capital to allow rural relaxation, much as, in Scotland, Linlithgow Palace sat at a convenient distance from Edinburgh. Mary appeared enthusiastically in masquerades at St Germain, where she, as the Delphic Sybil, prophesied love and happiness for the Dauphin when she became Queen of Britain, to the polite applause of the indulgent court. Her education in dynastic ambition was beginning at a young age.

The Louvre in Paris, very much a working palace used by Henri II for business, was being thoroughly rebuilt and so was seldom visited by the royal children. Outside Paris, the country palaces nearly all owed their existence to the royal passion for hunting and the nearest to Paris was Fontainebleau, thirty-five miles to the south. It had been a hunting lodge since the eleventh century, but François I transformed it into a Renaissance jewel. Francesco Primaticcio, the Mantuan painter and architect, decorated the great rooms, installed exact replicas of classical statues and looked after the royal collection of pictures, although François I had himself acquired the Mona Lisa directly from Leonardo da Vinci. It was as lavishly Renaissance as François’s liberal purse would allow. The beautiful Linlithgow Palace of Mary’s birth would have fitted neatly into one of its courtyards.

To the south-west of Paris the River Loire swings westwards to
the sea, and it was along its banks that a string of palaces hung like jewels on a necklace. Nearest to Paris was Chambord, the grandest of them all and a favourite of Henri’s. This vast palace, covered by innumerable turrets and spires, sits beside the River Cossen; François had wanted to divert the Loire but was dissuaded, although, even then, building the palace nearly bankrupted him. It was elaborately decorated without and within, containing over 400 rooms, all fashionably plastered and painted. In the central great hall was a double helix staircase said to have been designed by Leonardo himself. Even the roof was a fairyland fantasy with crocketted towers, lanterns and intricately carved dormer windows. The thousands of nooks and crannies invited the confidences, intrigues and assignations which played a great part in the life of glittering society. Mary and the Dauphin were watched affectionately as they played games where she was the damsel in distress and he her gallant knight. There was a special terrace from which the ladies could watch the gentlemen returning from hunting or look down on the pageants and jousts on the forecourt below.

As soon as she was able to read it, Mary was introduced to the best-selling book of the time,
Amadis de Gaul
. This was a French translation of a Spanish romance by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, telling of the adventures of Amadis, the flower of chivalry, who rescues his love, Oriana, from her captivity while defeating all the enemies of her father. This book had an enormously wide readership among the romantically minded courtiers of the day and had a powerful influence on its female readers. Diane d’Antouins, who was to become the first mistress of Henri IV, even changed her name to Corysande, one of the heroines of the book. It was a highly romantic flashback to the days of Arthur and his knights, though here the quest was not for the Grail but for pure love. Standing on the terrace of Chambord, the impressionable Mary saw this fantasy made reality as armoured knights rode in the lists with their mistresses’ colours on their lances. Since careful nurses removed their charges in time, she would not have seen how, as the heat of the afternoon grew and
exhaustion inflamed tempers, the gallantry of the joust was often replaced by vindictive violence: lances were cast aside to be replaced with axes and maces, and the exhausted knights-errant of the morning were carried off on blood-stained stretchers.

At Chambord Mary and the Dauphin would ride through the vast parkland – armed guards and ladies-in-waiting keeping a discreet distance – and hunt enthusiastically for the game obligingly driven towards them. One of the innovations Catherine de Medici had imported from Italy was the practice of wearing a pair of serge drawers under her skirts that allowed her to ride astride without affording a view of the royal limbs, and Mary soon adopted the fashion. She had two horses as gifts from Henri, Bravane and Mme la Réale, and, with the Dauphin mounted on either Enghien or Fontaine, she had some of the most carefree times of her childhood.

Mary also received the formal education suitable for a royal princess. On orders from Henri, Catherine saw to it that Mary was taught with her own children under their schoolmasters, Claude Millot and Antoine Fouquelin, while her spiritual education was undertaken by Pierre Lavane and Jacques Amyot. Mary’s own chaplain, Guillaume de Laon, had charge of her communion vessels, which travelled with her wherever she celebrated Mass, in case she should contract any infection from vessels shared with others. The close-knit court of Catherine displayed a strict morality, at least in contrast to the licentiousness of François I’s day, and casual amorous intrigues were officially frowned upon. After marriage, the maintenance of a mistress was deemed acceptable, as in Henri’s case, but unofficial and temporary liaisons came under the heading of vulgar immorality.

In the cosmopolitan court Mary now spoke French fluently and, with the facility of children, easily learned some Italian and Spanish, as well as, with some difficulty, Latin. She is credited with having written Latin ‘themes’ when she was twelve years old in the form of letters of a hundred or so words each, to her ‘sister’ and best friend Elisabeth, the eldest of Henri’s daughters. These
letters are packed with classical allusions and read as if they come from a scholar of the time who had read all of Cicero, Plato and Plutarch, and Erasmus’s colloquy
Diliculum
, as well as the more obscure Politian. They even included a letter to Calvin recommending that he study Socrates’s view of immortality. Overall, their underlying theme is to praise classical education for women. But the Latin, in Mary’s clear handwriting, appears on the recto, with the French text written in another hand on the verso. It has been suggested that the French text was written by a tutor and that Mary had simply translated it into Latin as an exercise; it seems very unlikely that any child, except a precocious genius, could have achieved that breadth of reading by the age of twelve.

Mary delivered a Latin oration ‘of her own composition’ to the court, for which she was certainly heavily coached. Here her chosen subject, or, more likely, the subject chosen for her, was a plea for the access of women to the liberal arts. The arch-flatterer Brantôme found it wonderful to ‘see that learned and beautiful queen declaiming thus in Latin, which she understood and spoke admirably’; though it is very unlikely that he was actually present. In later life, when forced into conversations in Latin, she had to use an interpreter, and she had no enthusiasm for scholarship as such. Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth Tudor, enjoyed a facility with Latin, and she spoke both it and Greek freely. By contrast, scholastically, Mary Stewart was a dutiful plodder.

Mary was, however, a patron of poetry and supported the young poets who inhabited the court in the hope of commissions. They rejected the classical styles of the Latin and Greek poets and championed the use of French as a language flexible enough for secular as well as spiritual subjects, and one capable of carrying a powerful emotional message to the common people. This circle of seven poets, calling themselves the Pléiade (the astronomical group of seven stars) was led by Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Given their rejection of the classical modes, it is curious that they took the same name as a group of
Greek poets flourishing in Alexandria in the third century
BC
. Ronsard had been a page at the court of Madeleine, the tragic queen to James V, and du Bellay had accompanied Mary on her voyage from Scotland. Now both men dedicated poetry to the young queen. Having poets worshipping her was simply something she grew to expect.

Mary was learning to embroider – a pastime that she often turned to throughout her life. She could now sew and knit, and in 1551 there was an order for 32 sols’ worth of wool. She learned music, played the guitar and sang the songs of Marot with her sister princesses. Clément Marot was a poet and the translator of the Psalms into French, set to music by Claude Goudimel and Loys Bourgeois. Mary also learned ‘genteel’ cooking – the making of preserves and sweetmeats, above all a pâté of sugar, cinnamon and powdered violets – and she was joined by the other princesses in pretending to be simple bourgeois housewives busying themselves in their kitchens.

The seventeenth-century French historian Mezeray summed up what the French court and people thought of Mary: ‘Nature had bestowed upon her everything that is necessary to form a complete beauty. And beside this she had a most agreeable turn of mind, a ready memory and a lively imagination. All these good natural qualities she took care likewise to embellish, by the study of the liberal arts and sciences especially painting, music and poetry insomuch that she appeared to be the most amiable Princess in Christendom.’ By 1551 this amiable princess had sixteen dresses, ranging from cloth of silver to mere satin, six cotton aprons, three skirts of differing materials, three caps, two farthingales, two overskirts, a cloak and a fur muff. Jehan du Chauvrais, her furrier, looked after her sable and wolf skins, while Pierre Daujon, the embroiderer, sewed on the goldsmith Mathurin Lussault’s 22-carat gold buttons enamelled in black and white – the heraldic colours of Diane de Poitiers – and assorted chains and collars, as well as looking after her gold belts enamelled in white and red. She had so many jewels and costumes that three brass chests were especially made to hold
them while she was travelling. The other princesses were less splendidly provided for, but since they were of lower rank they did not seem to be jealous. When indoors she occasionally played cards with the Dauphin and on one occasion won the trifling amount of 79 sols 6 deniers, while on another, remembering Diane de Poitiers’s advice, she wisely lost 45 sols 4 deniers.

Mary’s household, now administered by Claude d’Urfé, had expanded since Jean d’Humières’s death on 18 July 1550. For her personal use were eight grooms and eight stable boys, thirty-six maids of honour, eleven honorary receptionists, eight secretaries, nine ushers, twenty-eight valets, four porters, four lodging directors, four wardrobe masters, the treasurer Jacques Bochetel, two comptrollers-general, five doctors, three apothecaries, four surgeons and four barbers. There were fifty-seven kitchen staff and forty-two to look after the cellars, but only one porter to carry water to be used for toilet purposes as well as drinking, which was much ‘to the detriment of the general sobriety and toilet care’. There was also a floating population of court musicians, poets, jesters and dancers, as well as jugglers and acrobats.

On one day, 8 June 1553, the court ate twenty-three dozen loaves, eighteen sides of beef, eight sheep, four calves, twenty capons, one hundred and twenty pigeons, three kids, six geese and four hares – at the cost of 152 livres, 4 sols 12 deniers, or £2,736 in today’s currency. Unsurprisingly, Mary occasionally suffered from faintness due to over-eating. Henri II’s accounts show an annual expenditure of 74,982 livres for his personal domestic costs in one year, although this represents only a fraction of the royal expenditure. When the court, or even a single member of it, moved – which it did frequently – then the entire household moved as well, in a vast train of closely guarded carts, with the king’s entourage carrying all the apparatus of justice and administration.