An Accidental Tragedy (16 page)

Royalty had probably the least privacy of any people in the kingdom, and since the lives of the royals were of constant interest to the court, rumours of their ill-health abounded. Mary was well past puberty and the frequency of her menstrual cycle would have been known to the whole court, all of whom were, against all probability, eager for signs of pregnancy. By December, Ralph Sadler in Scotland was writing ‘we understand the Scottish Queen is not like to have any children’.

Mary was an enthusiastic gourmand, and at this time Catherine was introducing Italian recipes to the French kitchen, thus providing the basis for what we today think of as French cuisine, but Mary’s weight at this time was never a matter for concern.
It was controlled by exercise and by occasional severe diets. Add all this to her savage depressions when attempts were made to thwart her and the litany of fainting fits and periods of bed rest become more understandable. Some of the wilder speculations about the royal couple’s health were pure fabrication, such as a rumour on 15 November that François had contracted leprosy, although this probably arose from his occasional, but violent, bouts of eczema.

There were, however, very real fears over the health of Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, who was seriously ill in Edinburgh, where she had been fighting what was, to all intents and purposes, a civil war with the Lords of the Congregation. Marie de Guise had imported French troops – since Mary’s wedding agreement had given the French Scots nationality, she could claim, somewhat speciously, that these troops did not represent a foreign intrusion – but was losing the struggle. In February 1560 the Lords had gained the assistance of Elizabeth through the Treaty of Berwick. Elizabeth was all too keen to help men who might not wholly support Mary’s seeming usurpation of her titles and quartering of her arms. In England, Elizabeth’s involvement with the Lords of the Congregation became known as ‘The War of the Insignia’. Elizabeth would ‘never assent that the realm of Scotland shall be knit to the crown of France otherwise than as it is already, only by marriage of the Queen to the French King’. Earlier in the month the Duc de Guise had written, hypocritically, to Marie, urging her to pull her French troops out of Scotland, and when Mary met Throckmorton on 27 February she asked him to assure Elizabeth that she, Mary, her cousin, would be a better neighbour than the rebels. The statement sounds like a piece of Guise sleight of hand. The Guises knew that Marie would ignore the letter, thus allowing Mary to make her assurance of friendship to Elizabeth. Neither Elizabeth nor Cecil would have given any credence to so obvious a ploy, but they would have been flattered that the Guises felt it necessary to make it.

In the event, Elizabeth had no time for such subtleties and in March she demanded that Mary ‘utterly cease’ quartering
her arms, and order the withdrawal of French forces by 2 April. Elizabeth also called for a total recognition by all Scots that Mary was their sovereign; all principal offices were to remain in ‘the natural manner of Scotland’ and all bishoprics and estates of the Church to be conferred on native Scotsmen. In other words, Elizabeth demanded the removal of all French placemen.

Then, on 23 March, Cecil, via the Privy Council, sent a memorandum to Elizabeth. ‘The Queen of Scots, her husband, and the house of Guise are mortal enemies of her person . . . their malice is bent against her person and they will never cease as long as she and the Scottish Queen lives’. Cecil, who understood his queen’s fears, was moving from political advice to warning his queen of a personal threat to her life.

At the same time, François and Mary had come under direct threat themselves from the plot that had been formed at Hugues. The court was in residence at Blois on the Loire, where François could hunt in safety while Mary and Catherine heard sermons and attended Mass together. It was a peaceful interlude, but under the direction of the Seigneur de la Renaudie the plotters aimed to capture the Guise brothers, persuade the king to grant toleration to the Huguenots and then to set up a regency under Louis de Condé and the Bourbons. It was a hopelessly badly organised
coup d’état
: with 500 agents sent to recruit help from as far afield as England there was no possibility of the plot remaining secret. Once knowledge of the plot reached the court, the Duc de Guise ordered that they move immediately to the château of Amboise, fifteen miles downstream. This was on a cliff overlooking the river and practically impregnable to what was now in danger of becoming a rebel force. The rebels, many of whom were simply disgruntled countrymen, had no unified command but roamed the countryside while approaching Amboise, occasionally meeting and joining together, although never forming a coherent force. The rebel forces did include more than a few disaffected nobles from the growing number of anti-Guise elements in the country and, concerned that the rebels might find a
significant leader in France’s senior Huguenot, Louis de Condé, who was in attendance in the château, Catherine simply appointed him as chief of the king’s bodyguard. In this new role, his presence inside the château was required to be constant.

In early March the first group of rebels had been captured and put to the rack. The main force was thenceforth taken piecemeal as it arrived to encircle the castle, while de la Renaudie himself was fortunately shot by an arquebusier – fortunately, because when the remainder were captured they were sadistically tortured before being executed in batches. To the surprise of the royal faction, many of the insurgents were German, Swiss, Savoyard, English and even Scots, acting not as mercenaries but as ‘soldiers of the word of God’. There were so many prisoners that, for considerations of speed and economy, the Duc de Guise ordered many of them to be either sewn into sacks or tied together in groups of ten and thrown into the river to drown. Fifty-two more eminent rebels of noble blood were beheaded on a hastily built scaffold. The Duc and Catherine watched every execution in person and the corpses were then hung on the battlements for the citizens to see, while their heads were impaled on the balustrade outside the royal dining room: ‘The streets of Amboise ran with blood, the river was covered with corpses, and all public places had gibbets.’ Mary now had her first view of the bloody deaths caused by religious divisions, and she could not avoid having full knowledge of what was taking place. François wrote to the Bishop of Limoges that ‘the death of a small number of unfortunates will be salutary for the good and peaceful order throughout all the kingdom’. Mary’s friend Anne d’Este wept at the slaughter and it equally horrified Louise de Montmorency, the sister of the former constable. Eleanore de Condé and Mme de Crussol – described as a mainspring of the Huguenots – were also close to Mary, and Mary might well have been influenced by the political involvement of these powerful ladies. However, Mary herself took no part in the religious factionism affecting France. Since it involved less intellectual effort, Mary simply believed what her Guise uncles told her to believe.

The Duc de Condé attempted to draw the two sides together and made a personal appeal to François for greater toleration and for a meeting of the Estates General (the nearest thing to a national parliament existing at the time), but on advice from the Guise brothers, François had Condé arrested and sentenced to death. The power of the brothers was now becoming intolerable to all outside the very tight circle surrounding the king, and even inside that circle Catherine felt that she had stood aside for long enough. She had realised from the moment Henri had died that she had no chance of asserting her personal power in the face of the Guise brothers and their total control of the king through Mary. Catherine had also realised that it was fruitless to fight a war she would inevitably lose and, therefore, stood aside while they gathered more power to themselves and made more enemies. She had never directly assisted those enemies – many were Huguenots and Catherine was a devout Catholic – but negotiations with Elizabeth and with Philip of Spain were taking place. Philip, married to Catherine’s daughter, was now very worried at the growing pride of his northern neighbour and of its open encirclement of England, therefore he was more than willing to clip the Guise wings. If Elizabeth could be persuaded to act on behalf of the Protestant lords in Scotland, then Marie’s rule as queen regent would be over and the first crack in Guise hegemony would appear. Thus, a Catholic monarch could support a Protestant one, if state interests demanded it.

By 25 April, having been queen for less than a year, even the politically naïve Mary realised that the intransigence of her uncles might lose her the kingdom of Scotland and ‘wept bitterly and said that her uncles had undone her’. More bad news was coming from within Scotland itself. In Edinburgh, on 26 April, Marie herself was thought to be in danger of being captured by the Lords of the Congregation, and on receipt of the news, Giovanni Surian, the Venetian ambassador, reported that Mary ‘shed most bitter tears incessantly and at length from anguish and sorrow and has taken to her bed’.

Marie, exhausted by her constant battles with the Scots nobles,
with English forces threatening her capital, and severely swollen with dropsy, died on 11 June 1560. In April she had told the French ambassador Henri Cleutin, Seigneur d’Oysel, who had become her chief adviser in Scotland, ‘I am still lame and have a leg that assuageth not from swelling. If any lay his finger upon it it goeth in as into butter.’ Dropsy is a morbid accumulation of fluid, often a symptom of vascular disorder, and the queen regent most probably died of cardiac failure. Her corpse was ‘lapped in lead’ and sailed for France on 19 October, to be buried in the Convent of St Pierre in Rheims where the abbess was her sister, Renée de Guise.

The news was kept from Mary for over two weeks, until 28 June, at which point, understandably, she fell into a severe depression. The news was broken to her by her uncle Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, who had also been the brother of the dead queen regent, and ‘she [Mary] passed from one agony to another’. The Venetian ambassador wrote to the doge, ‘Your serenity may imagine the regret of these Guise lords, her majesty’s brothers, as also of the most Christian Queen who loved her mother incredibly, and much more than daughters usually love their mothers.’ After Mary’s own death one of her most prized possessions was found to be a miniature of her mother.

Marie de Guise had had an unhappy life. The Protestant George Buchanan in his
History
said that ‘she possessed an uncommon genius, and a mind strongly inclined to justice [but] was much under the influence of the Guise clan who marked out Scotland as the private property of their family’. Like all of her family she never learned to bend with the wind. With her death the Scottish civil war was all but over and Elizabeth could now dictate terms for withdrawal of her forces in what was to become the Treaty of Edinburgh.

After a month of bargaining, the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed on 6 July 1560, and Mary found that her uncles had indeed undone her, although Charles, Sieur de Randan, the French ambassador in Scotland, had begged Catherine to make peace before the cost of the French garrisons brought about ‘the ruin and desolation of France’. Under the terms of the treaty, the
French forces would leave Scotland, the fortifications at Leith would all be dismantled, debts incurred by the French troops would be paid, a general amnesty would be given for all warlike deeds, Elizabeth would be implicitly recognised as the rightful queen of England, François and Mary would renounce all claims to the English throne, and a council of nobles would rule Scotland in Mary’s absence, sending ‘some persons of quality to remonstrate to them’ concerning religion. Then, finally, ‘The French King and Queen are by a special clause bound to the Queen of England to keep and perform the said covenants with the Scots’. The treaty was to be ratified by Mary and François within sixty days. In other words, Mary and François were free to do whatever Elizabeth wanted, otherwise she was authorised to invade. It was a total reversal of Guise policies, a denial of all the claims put forward by Henri and maintained by Catherine.

Throckmorton met Mary on 9 August and, for the first time, she asked to speak to him in Scots. It was not something she had done in public for many years and, apart from discomfiting an ambassador – always a favourite sport of royalty – Mary may have been rehearsing her tongue for a possible return to Scotland. On 22 August she met Throckmorton again, this time alone. Mary sat under her cloth of state and Throckmorton was placed on a low stool while she assured him that she would conform to whatever her husband resolved, ‘for his will is mine.’ These two meetings show Mary exercising her role as a sovereign queen in full charge of her own policies. The effect of the humbling terms imposed by the treaty had been to stiffen her pride and treat Throckmorton as an unimportant envoy from a minor supplicant. Much to his credit he was amused by this, but Mary’s childish attitude was not lost on Cecil, who was most certainly not amused by it.

A rumour that Mary was pregnant arose again, but Throckmorton presumed the reason to be ‘menstruum retentio’. With his normal sceptical view of court gossip he commented, ‘It is a sport to see how this farce is handled.’ The date for ratification of the treaty came and went with further bland assurances that until
the wishes of the Scottish Estates were known and emissaries were sent from them no formal agreement could be expected from Mary and François.

The young couple had more pressing matters to deal with when, on 16 November, the king returned early from a hunt near Orléans with dizziness and ringing in his right ear. On Sunday he collapsed in church, and the pain in his head became chronic as he suffered discharges of fluid from his ear. François had always suffered from eczema, with florid patches appearing on his face, and respiratory infections, giving rise to foul-smelling breath, weakened his resistance to such complaints. The new inflammation caused a swelling ‘the size of a large nut’, and when doctors examined his left ear they discovered an open fistula from which pus was seeping. It seemed clear that the king was dying. In a letter of 4 December, Catherine acknowledged this unhappy fact while pointing out that France had a good supply of legitimate successors – ‘all of whom are mine’. However, since François’s brother Charles was only ten years old, the question of the inevitable regency had to be solved. Catherine did this brilliantly by summoning the feeble Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, now himself a Huguenot but the nearest adult by blood to the throne. She immediately accused him of plotting treason. With his brother Condé already under sentence of death, and being ‘naturally pliant and tractable’, he offered Catherine the regency if she spared his life, and she agreed instantly. She made the Guise brothers embrace Antoine as a sign of forgiveness and ordered the release of Condé, thus neutralising her enemies at no cost to herself.