An Accidental Tragedy (11 page)

Less formally, Henri, accompanied by only a few body servants, would visit the spectacular château of Chenonceau, the personal gift he had made to Diane de Poitiers. Bought by François I in 1535, Chenonceau stood beside a mill at the foot
of a bridge on the banks of the River Cher, a tributary of the Loire. Diane de Poitiers stamped her personality everywhere, Primaticcio’s portrait of Diane as Diana the Huntress having pride of place in the royal bedchamber. Diane commissioned a garden to be laid out in the French style, although later Catherine added a garden in the Italian style and built a long gallery supported by a bridge across the river. This is the palace we see now, but, even with those changes of Catherine’s, Chenonceau is still emphatically Diane’s.

Henri had the reputation of being uneasy in conversation with ladies, but Diane spoke to him as a man, and it was to Chenonceau he would come to visit his mistress and listen to her advice. He was also a frequent visitor to the Château d’Anet, Diane’s own property, some fifty miles north-west of Paris. It was designed to her personal specifications by Philibert de l’Orme and was, at the same time, both a temple to Diana and a Renaissance country mansion. The surrounding estate was laid out with equal care, and according to Brantôme it was ‘for the king a terrestrial paradise – mysterious wooded nooks for the secrets of love, a vast carpet of verdure for the hunt or for riding and a barrier of hills against indiscretions and importunates – a veritable fairy castle’.

Mary and her Dauphin frequently visited the Château d’Anet to be free from the rigid formality of the court and act out the trysts and assignations they had read about in
Amadis
. Here also Diane would supervise Mary’s formal studies while gently introducing her to the art of maintaining her own personality as a woman in the aggressively male world of Henri’s court. It was essential that men were seen to be in complete control and that all initiatives were theirs alone. Thus, all major topics had to be approached from a tangent, avoiding direct confrontation by praising a man for an idea which he had not yet dreamt of, or for his firmness when he was clearly vacillating. Promises of sex to be given or withheld were the weakest of weapons in the royal court, as the exiled Lady Fleming had discovered. Diane’s power lay not in her bed but in her brain, and she stressed to the young
princess that it was more with her intellect than anything else that Mary could take power when she came to rule as a queen consort. Mary could maintain her own court and exercise a measure of control over her husband, avoiding an existence as a mere breeder of princes and princesses. As a queen regnant she would no longer need to rely on manipulating men to do her bidding but could command them directly. Since the idea of being a queen regnant would have meant contemplating a return to Scotland which was very far from her teenage mind, Mary, sadly, received this excellent advice with an eager smile and deaf ears.

Catherine, not unnaturally, wanted more and more to bring the care of the royal children under her sole control and Henri, quite naturally, resented the cost of maintaining Mary’s court at his own expense. The Scots had similar reservations over paying for the upkeep of an absent queen whose annual expenses were in the region of £12,000 Scots, almost half the entire royal revenue. Even these sums did not include Mary’s expenditure on horses, ponies and stabling.

The Scots were eventually persuaded to continue these payments by Marie de Guise, and on 1 January 1554 the twelve-year-old Mary wrote to tell her mother that she now had her own household and had invited her uncle Charles, the Cardinal of Lorraine, to dinner. He became a crucial influence in her education and was also her spiritual mentor. She would hear him celebrate Mass in his private chapel accompanied by the exquisite sacred music of Jacques Arcadelt. However, Mary received no practical advice on politics from her uncles. They regarded her simply as a key which would one day open the sluice gates of influence for the Guise family, a
carte d’entrée
to royal power.

The Guise faction, especially François, Duc de Guise, was already united with Catherine in their dislike of the constable, Montmorency, Diane’s ally and a favourite of Henri’s. Now that Mary had her own court they could start to use her to bring their feuding into the open. The Cardinal of Lorraine was always at
her elbow with advice and, through her, the Guise family set about strengthening their already powerful position. Mary blithely hoped to ride both horses and assured her mother that all her uncles were as solicitous for her comfort, as was Diane de Poitiers. Having managed to have his niece declared to be of age, ‘at eleven years and a day’, the cardinal put into motion his scheme to extend Guise power in Scotland. It was very simple: since Mary was a sovereign queen, there was now no need for Châtelherault to share the regency with Marie de Guise, who could become the sole regent on her daughter’s behalf. As Henri, wisely, did not trust Châtelherault at all, he encouraged the scheme, and in April 1554 Marie became sole regent. On the cardinal’s advice Mary sent her mother several sheets of paper, blank except for her signature, ‘
MARIE
’. This was the signature she used for the rest of her life, always in block capitals and always in French.

In France, Mary was now able to choose her own guardians, and, to no one’s surprise, she opted for her Guise uncles along with the king, thus putting the Guise family next in importance to the ruling Valois dynasty. She told her mother, ‘I can assure you, Madame, that nothing which comes from you shall be known through me.’

Mary’s spending continued to increase, however, and as she grew she needed new dresses, some of cloth of gold. Then, to the horror of her housekeeper, Mme de Parois, she intended to give some old dresses to her aunts, the abbesses of St Pierre and Farmoutiers, to be cut up and used as richly-embroidered altar frontals. This crisis came at the end of 1555 and Mary told her mother of it in a letter on 28 December. De Parois had exploded in fury, since the disposition for sale of cast-offs was one of the fringe benefits of royal service, and she accused Mary of trying to impoverish her. Mary might have been persuaded by the cardinal or her mother that she was, as a thirteen-year-old, exceeding her authority, but Mary knew that as a sovereign queen she could not be overruled, so she maintained her position that she had been maligned by a servant and de Parois, under a
certain amount of duress, resigned. Mary’s first display of power was an act of petty malevolence against a defenceless servant.

In his picture of Hollywood,
Adventures in the Screen Trade
, William Goldman tells us that one of the distinguishing marks of a star is that they know that from the moment they awaken until they go to sleep, no one will ever disagree with them about anything they say, no matter how outlandish. Four hundred and fifty years previously, Mary Stewart had just discovered this extremely dangerous power.

Mary had reacted to de Parois’s complaint by insisting on exerting her power as a queen, but, had she been overruled, she would have left herself no room in which to manoeuvre. Diane de Poitiers’s tactics would have been to persuade the cardinal that her wishes were also his and he would then have removed de Parois on her behalf. Catherine de Medici would simply have had an already well-prepared alternative in case of opposition. Mary’s direct approach verged on a childish tantrum and the effect on her was a physical collapse. This happened frequently when she was challenged and her collapses consisted of vomiting, dizziness, acute depression and bouts of crying, lasting anything from a few days to several weeks. Her normally robust physical health nearly always gave way when reality intruded upon her fantasy existence as a fairy princess, although, on this occasion in 1556, it seems that she had contracted the ‘quartan ague’, actually a recurrent summer fever similar to malaria. Later, she certainly did contract smallpox and thus was at a serious risk of death. Even if she survived, there was a grave possibility of extreme disfigurement, but Catherine put her daughter-in-law-to-be in the hands of her own Dr Fernel, who masterminded Mary’s recovery with her looks unimpaired.

Mary would have taken little interest in the shifting of the tectonic plates of diplomacy when, on 6 July 1553, the sickly boy-king of England Edward VI died, probably of tuberculosis. The threat to France by England lessened as Mary Tudor succeeded him, and the new queen, devotedly Catholic, set about putting a severe brake on the progress of the Protestant Reformation.
However, when Mary Tudor married Philip II of Spain, son of Charles V, France was again surrounded by hostile powers. The threat of invasion became a reality when, in 1557, Philip II mobilised his forces in the Netherlands. His ally, the Duke of Savoy, invaded and was met by Montmorency with the French forces at St Quentin, later the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. This earlier battle was equally bloody, resulting in a total defeat for the French, with Montmorency and his sons among the 400 French noblemen taken prisoner and marched off to Brussels. Henri immediately sent for the Duc de Guise and gave him sweeping powers of retaliation. Freeing his enemy Montmorency was not seen as a priority by the duke. However, acquiring glory for the name of Guise was, and he made a raid on the fort of Calais, poorly defended by the English. On 1 January 1558, the town fell to France. Mary Tudor felt the loss of England’s last foothold in France keenly, declaring that if her heart were to be opened after her death, people would find the word ‘Calais’ engraved on it. Henri held an
entrée joyeuse
into Calais and the Duc de Guise was made Lieutenant-General of France. The final link binding the king and the house of Guise was now ready to be forged.

A marriage between Mary, as a daughter of the house of Guise, and François de Valois would form the strongest bond possible, as well as answering Henri’s need to encircle England. In Scotland, Marie de Guise, who was trying to stem the tide of the Scottish Reformation, was enthusiastic about having the next king of France as her son-in-law. A significant number of the Scottish nobility had rejected her government and signed the First Band (or Bond). They were later known as the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, and, although Marie de Guise had effectively stalemated these men, there were growing signs of an alternative, Protestant, government beginning to come into existence. It was still nascent, and indeed its spiritual leader, John Knox, had travelled to Dieppe, only to be sent back into exile at Geneva, with John Calvin, having been told that the time for his return was not yet ripe.

Prior to the capture of Calais, and easily foreseeing what was to come, Marie de Guise sent nine commissioners to France to negotiate the terms of the marriage. With the diplomatic skill instinctive to the Guises she was careful to include Lord James Stewart, Mary’s half-brother; Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis; and John Erskine of Dun, all three men Protestants, but totally reliable in their defence of Scotland’s liberties. They were all enthusiastic about the marriage since it might very well mean that Mary would live out her life in France, leaving Scotland open for their own exercise of power in a council of regency. At this time Mary certainly had no plans to return.

The terms of the marriage agreement were largely what had been agreed at Haddington and came as no surprise to the commissioners, but what did come as a shock was that the French negotiations were supervised by Diane de Poitiers. These men had dealt, reluctantly and unsatisfactorily, with the queen regent, Marie, and here was another Frenchwoman, neither a queen nor a regent, but in their Protestant eyes, simply the king’s whore. There were no ministers of state or chancellors attending and the negotiations were to be very straightforward. In fact, Henri could afford to be as generous as the Scots requested since he had put into action plans for an alternative, secret, treaty.

Once the Scots lords had recovered their composure after meeting the haughty beauty Diane, negotiations began. The agreement on the table reiterated Mary’s pledge to preserve the freedom, liberties and privileges of Scotland; on marriage the young couple would be the King-Dauphin and Queen-Dauphine, but François would be King of Scotland until he succeeded to the French throne, when he would become king of both nations. All Frenchmen would be naturalised Scotsmen and eventually all Scotsmen would, similarly, be naturalised Frenchmen,
²
but in the meantime Scotland would be governed on
behalf of the absent royal children by Marie, Queen Regent. If Mary died without heirs, then the crown would revert to the next heir by blood. Since this was the Duc de Châtelherault, both sides prayed fervently that this would never happen. If François died first, which seemed likely, Mary would receive a payment of 600,000 livres, and her male issue would inherit both crowns, while, under the Salic laws of France, her female issue would inherit only the Scottish crown.

The only disputed point was that François would not receive the Scottish crown for his coronation as had been requested, but instead would be given all the powers of the crown matrimonial, that is to say, he would rule as monarch of Scotland and would sign state papers with Mary, his signature taking precedence. The French did not ask that Mary, although a queen, bring a dowry to France and the Scots were not asked to distribute lands to French nobles. Throughout all these negotiations the French behaved with surprising docility. Mary was awarded the duchies of Touraine and Poitou as a wedding portion.

Mary was at Fontainebleau and took no part in any of the negotiations. Under the benign eye of her mother-in-law to be, Catherine de Medici, she was, like all young brides, beset with tailors and dressmakers. The situation in Scotland was too fragile for Marie de Guise to attend her daughter’s wedding, but Antoinette de Bourbon was appointed to attend as her proxy. This was disappointing, as Mary had seen so little of her real mother, but aside from this, all the wedding arrangements proceeded calmly.

At Fontainebleau, on 4 April 1558, Mary signed three documents unknown to the Scots negotiators. The first document was a ‘Gift made by Mary Stewart to King Henri II’. It declared that the gift was being made in consideration of ‘the singular and perfect affection which the kings of France have shown in protecting Scotland against England’, and thanked Henri for keeping Mary in France and for paying her considerable expenses. As recompense, if Mary should die without heirs then Scotland and any other titles which were hers would fall to the
king of France. This ‘donation’ was witnessed by the cardinal – to make sure Mary’s nerve held – flanked by the secretary of state, Côme Claussé and by Monsieur Bourdin, a notary. The second document, also a ‘donation’, was made after counsel from ‘the most reverend and most illustrious Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise’. This stipulated that, should Mary die childless, the king of France would continue to enjoy the income of Scotland until a payment of 1 million livres d’or, or, more outrageously, such a sum as would repay France for the cost of its garrisons in Scotland and of Mary’s upkeep and education in France, was made. It would be all but impossible for Scotland to raise such a vast sum for many years and simply meant that Scotland would become a debtor département of France. Mary also gave total possession of the kingdom of Scotland to the King of France and his successors. In the third document she abrogated any other agreement made in her name that might have prejudiced the two new agreements. This last document was signed by François as well. Mary had blithely given Scotland to France and renounced the agreement made by the Lords of the Congregation. The reason for a low-key negotiation, lightly supervised by Diane de Poitiers, was now quite clear. Henri knew that the real agreement would be engineered satisfactorily by the Guise family, so he could safely ignore the Scotsmen. It was totally scandalous for a Scottish monarch to sign away the future of her kingdom – even a kingdom that she never intended to rule.