Game of Queens (28 page)

There is no doubt who Wolsey himself saw as responsible for his downfall, speaking of ‘a continual serpentine enemy about the king'. Later, he urged his supporters that everything should be tried in order that ‘the displeasure of my Lady Anne be somewhat assuaged . . . this is the only help and remedy. All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour'.

On 3 November Henry opened what would come to be known as the Reformation Parliament. A month later Thomas Boleyn was made Earl of Wiltshire, and at the banquet which followed the ceremony, Anne was given precedence over all other ladies (even the king's sister Mary).

Katherine of Aragon, though still queen, cannot have looked back with any satisfaction as this momentous year came to an end. But neither, altogether, can Anne Boleyn. When, at the end of November, Henry and Katherine had an open confrontation about Anne, Anne's furious response made her insecurity clear:

Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand? I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and that you will cast me off . . . alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.

It was a stalemate.

21

Exits and entrances

The Netherlands, France, Italy, 1530–1531

In continental Europe, neither of the protagonists of the ‘Ladies’ Peace’ lived long to enjoy their triumph of diplomacy.

In February 1530, after a triumphal progress through Italy, Margaret of Austria’s nephew Charles V was formally crowned by the pope’s hands as Holy Roman Emperor. It was Margaret’s triumph. The children she had nurtured, her brother Philip’s progeny, and their offspring, held the reins of power across Europe, from Valencia to Vienna, Lisbon to Louvain.

A letter she wrote to Charles in the months after Cambrai, concerning the state of the Habsburg Empire and her advice for his dealings with it, shows she was still active. But Margaret was nearing fifty. She had already thought of relinquishing her responsibilities and retiring to a convent near Bruges. She wrote to the mother superior, putting in place her financial provisions for the convent and adding that ‘the time approaches, since the emperor is coming, to whom with God’s help, I will render a good account of the charge and government which he has pleased to give me . . .’ But she was not to have the opportunity.

According to the account of one Augustinian monk, in November 1530 a maid dropped a glass goblet near her bed and Margaret got a splinter in her foot. The tiny wound became infected, then gangrenous, and an amputation was decided on. Agreeing to it, she shut herself up for four days in prayer and preparation, receiving the Sacrament and revising her will. But the dose of opium given to her was so strong that, on 1 December 1530, she died before the operation.

Her work on behalf of her nephew Charles – she proudly wrote to him in a final letter – had been such that she might hope for ‘divine remuneration, contentment from you, monseigneur, and the goodwill of your subjects’. Her last wish was that Charles should keep peace with France and England. Her heart was briefly placed in the tomb of her mother, Mary of Burgundy, before being taken south to join that of her last husband Philibert, at Brou, in the mausoleum she had so carefully rebuilt.

For Louise of Savoy, meanwhile, the Ladies’ Peace meant the return from long captivity of her grandsons, the French princes. During their four-year captivity the conditions in which they were kept had become more and more miserable, held in a poorly furnished cell, without entertainment or French-speaking company. Margaret of Austria, as well as the French royal women, had become concerned about it and had written to her nephew to expostulate. But at the start of the 1530s, Louise’s trinity set out towards Bayonne, where the boys were to be handed over to François, together with the emperor’s sister Eleanor, now François’s bride by the terms of the Ladies’ Peace.

Marguerite of Navarre, pregnant once again, had to be left behind at Blois; ‘banished’, as she put it, because of her ‘massive and too heavy belly’, while the other two who made up the ‘perfect triangle’ went on without her. This time she was convinced that the child would be a boy but the thought did not seem to bring her joy, as witness some of the poetry she addressed to her absent brother: ‘You tell me to take comfort / in my child, but I cannot . . . it is he who keeps me from doing my duty / to those I love a thousand times more than him’.

Another poem, to her mother, resentfully recalled how much she, Marguerite, had done to bring about the release first of François and then of her nephews; and now she could not be present at the consummation. ‘How vexing it surely is, for a brave heart / that is unvanquished, / to be brought low by a mere baby.’

Perhaps, as so often, guilt played a part in her complex tangle of emotions. Guilt at what the boys had suffered, or possibly about the way she was now divided from her brother by the interests of her husband, Henri of Navarre, whose infidelities added to her distress. On 15 July she gave birth to a boy, Jean, only for the child to die on Christmas Day. Marguerite wrote of the will of God but from that time on she wore only black.

Early in 1531 she was (most unusually for a woman, and a royal woman) preparing the text of one long poem she had written for publication; not only that, but publication by an evangelical publisher, Simon du Bois. Marguerite’s lengthy religious
Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
(Mirror of a Sinful Soul) was later translated by Elizabeth Tudor as a gift for her reforming stepmother, Katherine Parr.

In it, as Elizabeth paraphrased, Marguerite ‘doth perceive how of herself and of her own strength she can do nothing that good is or prevaileth for her salvation, unless it be through the grace of God’. Its description of the sinful soul redeemed by grace may have spoken of something in Marguerite’s nature but salvation by grace alone (rather than devotional rituals or even good works) would also become the central piece of Protestant doctrine. This was dangerous territory: in 1530 the Diet of Augsburg had tried and failed to settle the divisions within the church. The next year, 1531, saw the formation of the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of the Lutheran princes within the Holy Roman Empire.

Marguerite’s health continued to give cause for concern. Pregnant again, she miscarried the baby. Her failure to provide more male babies to serve her brother seems to have been yet another arrow in the quiverful of guilt she carried. March 1531 saw the French royal family celebrate the coronation of François’s new queen, Eleanor. But Louise of Savoy’s health was failing fast.

Louise had long suffered from painful and debilitating bouts of gout and ‘the gravel’ (kidney stones). Marguerite had been her nurse as much as her advisor at Cambrai. By the end of the summer it was obvious Louise’s condition was serious. Marguerite wrote frantically to her brother François, begging he should come (‘because she is not content with me’) but to her distress, and that of Louise, he stayed away. Only Marguerite was present when, on 22 September, Louise died at the age of fifty-five. Saying – or so Marguerite later wrote in
Les Prisons
– that the sight of Marguerite caused her to feel pleasure and attachment to this world, when she needed to think only of God and the next, Louise sent Marguerite out of her presence at the last.

Meanwhile, three hundred miles away in Florence, a convent had not long disgorged a frightened young girl. For Catherine de Medici, the repercussions of the Ladies’ Peace had not been happy. Charles V, eager to confirm his position as the dominant influence in the Italian peninsula, had entered into negotiations with the pope, whose pre-occupation was to restore his Medici family’s influence in Florence. The results would be terrifying for the eleven-year-old Catherine de Medici.

Catherine had spent the last three years tranquilly and happily in the Murate convent, where the aristocratic nuns treated her with every show of affection. The Florentine authorities ‘would gladly see her in Kingdom Come’, noted the French ambassador, who (Catherine’s mother having been a Frenchwoman) kept a protective eye on her. He added – interestingly, in terms of Catherine’s future – ‘I have never seen anyone of her age so quick to feel the good and ill that are done to her.’ And on 20 July 1530, great ill seemed to have come.

Charles V had placed at the pope’s disposal an army, which in October 1529 began what would prove a ten-month siege of the city, with the aim of restoring Medici rule. Catherine’s male relations had fled when the city established a republic two years before. Now came that danger of which the French ambassador had warned, a hammering in the middle of the night on the doors of the Murate. The child inside the thick walls, however, had herself already decided how to combat this new threat. While the mother superior persuaded the men to come back in the morning, Catherine – convinced the summons could only be to her execution – cut off her hair and donned a nun’s habit, shouting that no one would dare take a bride of Christ from her monastery.

She was wrong. As one of the nuns wrote, such force was used ‘that we had to give her up’. But in the event, the city authorities did nothing worse than to set her astride a donkey and escort her through the baying crowds back to the convent where she had first been placed three years earlier. There had been calls for the child to be stripped naked and suspended from the walls, or placed in a military brothel for the amusement of the soldiery. Even after the city surrendered a few weeks later, contemporaries noted that she never forgot – could not stop talking about – her ordeal. It is something to remember when, in Paris four decades later, Catherine de Medici would once again be faced with the fear of violence ripping through her city.

When peace, and the Medici, were restored to Florence, Catherine went back to visit the nuns of the Murate, and celebrate with them. She would send them money and letters for the rest of her life. But her uncle the pope had plans for her beyond convent walls. Moving her to Rome, and placing her in the house of a relative instructed to give her a cosmopolitan gloss, he managed (with the promise of half a dozen Italian cities, Pisa among them, as her dowry) to betroth her to the French king’s second son Henri, to cement the mood of all-round accord.

The ‘greatest match in the world’, the pope called it, and he was something of a connoisseur, having also betrothed the new young Duke of Florence (his nephew or illegitimate son) to Charles V’s illegitimate daughter, Margaret ‘of Parma’. In the spring of 1533 the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici would have the duty of welcoming the ten-year-old Margaret of Parma into Florence.

Catherine de Medici and Margaret of Parma were perhaps the first representatives of another generation of women; the one that would be associated with the latter half of the sixteenth century. But of course the generations did not divide so neatly. In the Netherlands, in 1531, Margaret of Austria was succeeded by another female regent: her twenty-five-year-old widowed niece Mary of Hungary.

After successfully holding Hungary for her brother Ferdinand, King of Hungary, Mary had refused his offer of a second regency in 1528. Such affairs needed ‘a person older and wiser’, Mary said. Her reluctance was understandable: it was the turbulence in Hungary that encouraged the Ottoman Empire to launch the campaign that culminated, just weeks after the Ladies’ Peace, in the Siege of Vienna. That campaign almost cost Ferdinand all he had won and struck a terrifying blow deep into Habsburg heartland.

But Mary was undoubtedly able. A Hungarian correspondent had written to Erasmus: ‘I wish that . . . the queen would become the king: the fate of the homeland would then be better.’ And the Habsburg Empire was ever greedy for loyal lieutenants. ‘I am only one and I can’t be everywhere’, Charles V would later complain to Mary. As Ferdinand said, telling Mary of their aunt Margaret’s death in December 1530, her life might now ‘take a different course’. The next month, Charles did indeed ask Mary to assume the regency of the Netherlands.

Family duty impelled agreement. Mary was now ‘Mary, by the Grace of God, Queen of Hungary, of Bohemia, etc., governor of the Netherlands for His Imperial and Catholic Majesty, and his lieutenant’. Like Margaret of Austria before her, she was determined not to allow her family to marry her off again. But neither did she wish to remain as a queen without kingdom, income, role or offspring. Margaret of Austria herself had once, before she found her role as regent, lamented that she might ‘be left to wander about the world like a person lost and forgotten’, or so her father recalled.

Mary of Hungary continued, however, to display a more ambivalent attitude towards responsibility than her aunt Margaret, complaining a few months into the Netherlands job that it felt like having a rope around her neck. She did not, she said, perhaps pointedly, wish to act ‘like those women who interfere in many things which are not demanded of them’. Conversely, it was said of her that she ruled by rigour whereas Margaret had done it by charm.

The Venetian ambassador to the Hungarian court had written that ‘by reason of her natural volatility and from too much exercise’ – Mary was notoriously obsessed with hunting and falconry – it was generally assumed she would never have children. He added a description; that she was ‘of diminutive stature, long and narrow face, rather comely, very spare . . . lively, never quiet either at home or abroad’. The late sixteenth-century writer Brantôme described her as ‘
un peu homasse
’ (a little mannish), adding that ‘she made war well, sometimes through her lieutenants, sometimes in person, always on horseback, like an Amazon’.