AFTER MARY’S MOTHER had returned to Scotland, her uncle Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, the boldest and most experienced politician at Henry II’s court, took over as her mentor. Within a few years, he was exercising more authority over her household and upbringing than anyone else. The reorientation was gradual, but it had begun even as Charles disarmed his sister by urging her to allow ‘no one except yourself, or those to whom you delegate your authority, to have control over your daughter’. The member of the Guise family most constantly by Henry II’s side as the royal court travelled on its regular circuits from palace to hunting lodge to palace through the Loire valley and then to and from Paris and its hinterland, Charles was ideally placed to exert influence. It was an arrangement designed to work to everyone’s advantage, and he kept his sister informed in regular reports about his niece’s health, education, and finances.
In the 1550s, the Guise family built up an unparalleled ascendancy. At a strategic level they were the champions of French dynastic claims in the British Isles and of war against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. They worked indefatigably together and built up their networks at court and in the provinces. After the Rouen fête, they turned their attention to monopolizing power at court, seeking to ingratiate themselves with Catherine de Medici, whose dislike of the Constable Montmorency, the premier nobleman and chief office-holder of France, was unmistakable.
The Constable was appointed for life. His duties were almost exclusively military, and in wartime he commanded the army in the King’s absence and the vanguard in his presence. On ceremonial occasions, he walked in front of the King carrying his sword of state. In the early stages of their rise to power, the Guises had been Montmorency’s close allies, but this started to change after the fête. As their confidence and ambition grew, the Guises sought to oust and replace him. In attaining their goal, their trump card was the betrothal of Mary, their niece, to the Dauphin.
Francis Duke of Guise, Charles’s brother, was ideally placed to lead the family to victory. He was a brilliant military commander who had distinguished himself on the battlefield and was idolized by his troops. He saw himself more as a man of action than a courtier, and when not on the battlefield was usually at Joinville or else at the château of Meudon, just one of the numerous properties the family were busily acquiring near Paris. He invited Mary there, and treated her as if she were his own daughter. He became a surrogate father to her, and she would always love him.
But it was her uncle Charles who advised her about protocol, about the letters she should write, to whom she should send them, and what she should say. If, however, Charles was unavailable, away on royal business or in retreat during Lent at a monastery, she consulted the Duke. She deferred without question to their opinions, and after the scandal of Lady Fleming’s affair with the King it became Charles’s habit to make unannounced monthly inspections of her household, ‘so as to find out in detail all that is going on’. From that moment his grip was secure: Mary could be allowed to grow up, to pursue her studies and her pleasures almost as she chose, but only within the limits of his advice.
Mary was fast approaching adolescence. She was outgrowing her household, but the reorganization of the royal children’s living arrangements sprang in the event from Fleming’s disgrace and Henry II’s decision to create an independent household for the Dauphin. Mary’s new governess was Françoise d’Estamville, Lady Parois, an older woman incapable of threatening Catherine de Medici or Diane de Poitiers. She was sexually safe and correspondingly dull. To the young Mary she must have seemed stultifyingly boring. Her appearance was unremarkable, her morals irreproachable. She was known to be devout, an attribute mentioned by Charles in one of his reports. ‘I mustn’t forget to tell you’, he told Mary’s mother in a postscript, ‘that Lady Parois is doing so well, she could hardly be expected to do better, and you may be sure that God is well served according to the old fashion.’
With this remark, the Cardinal gibed at Fleming, whose sympathy for the Huguenots, as the French Calvinists were called, was notorious. It was an isolated comment, often since misunderstood to mean that Mary was to be educated according to the most rigorous principles of the Catholic faith, to prepare her to rule as a Catholic icon. More generally, it is said that the Guise family were ‘ultra-Catholics’ who aspired to win control of the politics of France and Scotland in order to save the Valois and Stuart monarchies from the threat of Protestant subversion.
This is a misapprehension. In the 1550s, and for most of the 1560s, the Guises put their own interests above the cause of religion. It was only after 1567, when Charles V’s son and heir, Philip II, ordered Spanish troops into the Netherlands to crush a militant Protestant revolt and when a crusading Catholic League against the Huguenots began to take shape in France, that the family became synonymous with the absolute defence of Catholicism. By then, it was clear to them that their interests could only be preserved with Philip II’s support, and since he was a loyal Catholic with an unshakable vision of his divine mission to reunite Christendom under the papal banner, it was essential for them to do all they could to crush the Protestants.
This metamorphosis influenced Mary after her flight into exile in England. She would reinvent herself in the 1580s as a good Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. But in the 1550s, the Guises were politiques or moderates, equally opposed to Protestant or Catholic extremism. Where religion mattered most to them was in relation to their dynastic project, because only the Pope could make a definitive pronouncement on Elizabeth Tudor’s illegitimacy, and so on Mary’s claim to the English throne.
As the Dauphin approached his ninth birthday, Henry II decided that his son should leave the consolidated household created for the royal children and live in his own independent establishment. This made little difference to his movements, as the new household, like that of the other children, continued to follow the court. It did, however, have a sudden and dramatic impact on the personnel and finances of the other children’s household, because not only were the Dauphin’s officers and ancillary staff hived off, but their budgets were also transferred. In particular, it raised the question of whether Mary, herself a crowned Queen and already almost ten, should have her own separate establishment.
The Dauphin’s new household came into effect in March 1553. It had been much discussed over the previous winter, and on 25 February was the main item of a report from the Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother. He began with good news of Mary, whom he had just seen at Amboise. She ‘has grown so much and continues every day to grow in height, goodness, beauty, wisdom and virtues that she is as perfect and accomplished … as is possible’. No one could be found in France to match her qualities. The King now liked her so much, ‘he spends much of his time in chatting with her, sometimes for the space of an hour’. She ‘is as well able to entertain him with pleasant and sensible talk as if she were a woman of twenty-five’. Anne d’Este, the Cardinal’s sister-in-law, had made a similar observation a few months earlier. From this point onwards, as Mary was herself beginning to discover, her charm and conversational skills were to be among her greatest assets.
Charles’s letter then turned to the business at hand. Catherine de Medici had chosen not to give her daughters, Elizabeth and Claude, separate households. The lack of staff meant they would sleep temporarily in her own dressing-room with Lady Humières in attendance. It was a mean decision. And it was embarrassing for Mary, who was about to leave the Loire and travel to St-Germain, where the court had preceded her. She was bringing her usual attendants, but the matter of what ‘state’ she ought to maintain with the Dauphin gone from the children’s household, and which rooms she should occupy within the court, had urgently to be resolved.
Charles did not simply have the interests of his niece in mind. His own reputation and that of his family would be adversely affected if Mary’s ‘state’ were to be diminished. As always, protocol was of the highest importance. He also had a political plan, one fully visible in August, when Henri Cleutin, Seigneur d’Oysel, the first resident French ambassador in Scotland and Henry II’s lieutenant-general there, filed a report on English affairs. Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, had died of pulmonary tuberculosis on 6 July at the age of fifteen. Despite an attempt by his leading Protestant adviser, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to exclude the Catholic Mary Tudor from the throne and replace her with the Protestant Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor had triumphed. Jane was Queen for just a few days before Northumberland’s plot collapsed. On 3 August, Mary Tudor processed into London to the cheers of the welcoming crowd.
This news was deeply disturbing to France. Mary Tudor was the cousin of Spain’s Charles V, with whom Henry II had been at war for two years on the frontier of the Netherlands and in Italy. Moreover, she intended to marry Philip II, in whose favour his father intended to abdicate. At the age of fifty-three, Charles was white-haired and exhausted. The arthritis in his hands was so bad, he could hardly open a letter: the pain was so great that he prayed for death. His son, Philip, was young and energetic. He was keen to continue the war with France, where it was feared that he would use England as a military and naval base. Such alarm was justified, because when he married Mary Tudor in 1554 and assumed his role as King, he was heard to boast that for every fort built by the French in Scotland he would construct three on the English side of the border.
The Cardinal’s plan was simple but audacious. He proposed that his niece should be declared fully ‘of age’, able to rule her realm as Queen of Scots in person or through an appointed deputy. Whereas the usual age of majority for a royal minor was between fifteen and eighteen years, Mary should ‘take up her rights’ as Queen ‘at the age of eleven years and one day’. To this end, the existing regent, the Earl of Arran, now better known by his empty title of Duke of Châtelherault, should be dismissed. His self-serving duplicity and constant vacillation had worked against the French interest in Scotland, and with Mary Tudor on the English throne, no further risks could be taken.
It was quintessentially a Guise plan, because once Châtelherault had been removed, Mary of Guise was to be appointed sole regent to rule in her daughter’s name. At a stroke, the Guise family would extend their hegemony to Scotland, improve their status at the French court as the relatives of a reigning Queen, and win the gratitude of Henry II, who was deeply sceptical of Chˆtelherault and his allies, suspecting perfidy and the imminence of an Anglo-Scottish rapprochement at their hands.
D’Oysel, who made the journey to France for the debate, opposed the plan at a three-hour meeting of the conseil des affaires attended by the King and Mary’s uncles. He suspected the motives of the Guise brothers. But the King overruled him and the plan was put into effect. Mary’s mother was declared to be sole regent, her appointment confirmed in April 1554 by a Parliament summoned to Edinburgh. One of Mary’s earliest official acts was to write to congratulate her mother. As a reigning Queen, Mary also had the right to choose her own guardians, and she squared the circle by naming Henry II and her uncles to the posts, thereby binding the Guise family even closer to the Valois monarchy.
Mary now wrote her very first letter to a foreign ruler. Addressed to Mary Tudor, it recommended d’Oysel to her on his return journey and offered reassurances of friendship and ‘amity’. ‘May it please God’, penned the young Queen of Scots in her very best handwriting, ‘there shall be a perpetual memory that there were two Queens in this Isle at the same time, as united in inviolate amity as they are in blood and near lineage’. Mary Tudor was addressed as ‘Madam, my good sister’, and the letter ended with the standard valediction used in correspondence between sovereigns, ‘Your good sister and cousin, Marie.’ Her letter, written in French, is neatly copied out between lines carefully etched into the paper by a stylus, which can still be detected in the original document.
None of this resolved the question of Mary’s ‘state’ at St-Germain, Amboise, Fontainebleau and elsewhere, where the court had removed on progress and where confusion increasingly prevailed. Part of the problem was caused by illness. Claude d’Urfé, the officer in charge of the children’s households, was genuinely sick. Lady Parois was unsympathetic, suggesting to Mary of Guise that he was merely overwhelmed by ‘feebleness’. She could get nothing done as a result. The Cardinal, meanwhile, chivvied his sister, reminding her that as soon as the Dauphin’s budgets were transferred, someone else would have to pay the salaries of Mary’s staff. ‘I have had a list drawn up’, he observed in a faux gesture of aid. It detailed everyone in Mary’s service together with the estimated yearly expenditure. ‘I think that in this list as it stands, there is nothing either superfluous or catchpenny.’
What Charles never volunteered was money. Mary’s mother was expected to foot the bills, which Henry II refused to share because his Scottish expenditure was already at unprecedented heights. Mary was herself a complication. She was beginning to assert herself through lavish spending, partly on clothes and ponies, but mainly through her generosity, never more evident than in dealings with her servants, for whom she sought promotions, improved conditions of employment, and pay increases. Janet Sinclair, her old nurse, was an early beneficiary, obtaining a recommendation for her son and a promotion for her husband. Money and gifts were showered on the small army of actors, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, balladeers, and clowns who kept Mary and her companions entertained, and she maintained a steady stream of rewards for the keepers of her dogs and ponies and the keepers of the royal bears.
Despite the escalating estimates, Mary’s uncles continued to press their case. Their niece, said the Cardinal, was a Queen ‘already possessed of a high and noble spirit that lets her annoyance be very plainly seen if she is unworthily treated’. Her ‘grandeur’ had to be respected. She wished to be grown up and ‘to exercise her independent authority.’ On the basis of her current spending, she would need around 24,000 livres tournois or between 50,000 and 60,000 francs a year to maintain her ‘state’. True, this excluded the stables, themselves by far the biggest single item of expenditure; but economies could possibly be found.
It was a substantial sum, less so by French than Scottish standards, where it was equivalent to half the regular annual income of the crown. It was only possible for Mary’s mother to contemplate such a huge commitment because she had independent assets left over from her first and second marriages.
The negotiations dragged on for nine months, a delay that severely tested the morale of Mary’s existing staff. Many were not paid in the interim, and most were owed money from the previous year. Tempers were rising, exacerbated by the insensitivity of Lady Parois, a jealous and greedy woman whose tactless demands and bad attitude led to friction. Her feud with Madame de Curel, one of Mary’s most senior ladies-in-waiting and the candidate whom Antoinette of Bourbon had originally backed in preference to Lady Fleming as Mary’s governess, ended with Curel’s resignation. She walked out after a fight, shockingly conducted in Mary’s presence. Others showed their frustration through straightforward absenteeism. Writing to Mary’s mother, Parois grumbled that there were very few attendants left above stairs and no one to do Mary’s hair except herself.
At last Mary secured her household. It was inaugurated on 1 January 1554, when her officers, attendants, and domestic staff were put onto the roster. They included most of her previous servants, reinforced by some new faces to reflect her more exalted status. That evening, her uncle Charles was her first guest. As she wrote rapturously to her mother, ‘Madam, I’m thrilled … to tell you that today I entered into the household that you’ve been pleased to create for me; and this evening my uncle, the Cardinal, comes to sup with me. I hope through your careful planning, everything will be well conducted.’
But fresh quarrels and money problems quickly arose, especially in the stables, where corners had been cut. Since the court migrated so often from place to place, horses, mules, coaches, carts, and litters were essential. Three baggage mules were needed to carry Mary’s bed alone, and others were required for wall hangings, plate, kitchen utensils, bottles of wine and so on. Mary’s establishment could not afford its transport costs, for which the Cardinal sought to compensate by curtailing the number of ‘removes’ (as they were called) that it made. Instead of shadowing the main royal court at every stage, he wished Mary to make fewer journeys and have longer stops at each one, omitting certain of the intermediate châteaux visited by the King and the Dauphin to limit costs. On this the young Mary asserted herself, adamantly refusing to be detached from the main body of the court for very long.
Within a year, the Cardinal’s estimates were shown to be woefully inadequate, and Parois was up in arms. Her litany of complaints was endless. For example, more baggage animals were needed because Mary’s bed often arrived late at its destination. She had been forced to borrow beds, which was humiliating. On top of this, valuable objects had been damaged because, in the absence of sufficient mules to which her coffers could be securely strapped, they had been thrown onto carts, where they were jolted.
Mary, continued Parois, had nothing to wear. New fashions were in vogue, and she was in danger of being left behind. She urgently needed outfits for a wedding, and because she was growing so quickly, her touret (the jewelled frame on which the high collar at the back of the neck was stretched) needed lengthening. A pair of diamond settings mounted on thin metal would do the trick, but she lacked the money to buy them.
Mary was also pleading to have ciphers (most likely the monogram ‘M’ or ‘MR’ for ‘Marie la Royne’) sewn onto her dresses in the style that had lately become all the rage. But money was too tight.
One result of Parois’ incessant complaints was a growing rumour that Mary’s credit was bad. This was scandalous, and also highly inconvenient, since it meant suppliers would not deliver anything or accept further orders unless paid first in cash. Regular supplies on credit were essential to the smooth operation of a royal court, but the merchants argued that if Mary defaulted, they would be forced to sue for compensation in Scotland, an unacceptable commercial risk.
Soon the staff were in revolt again. In the financial year 1555–6, salaries fell into arrears and absenteeism was rife. There were accusations of corruption and misappropriation, seemingly confirmed when a gift of cash that Henry II had given Mary to spend at the fair at St-Germain went missing, allegedly stolen.
Parois was unable to cope and took sick leave, forcing Antoinette of Bourbon to step in and maintain basic services in Mary’s suite. Antoinette took stock of the position. She did not believe Parois was up to the job; her resignation was desirable. Unfortunately, it was one of the few occasions when both Mary’s uncles were absent simultaneously. Antoinette considered replacing Parois unilaterally, but thought the matter too important and delicate to be handled on her own. She even hinted that Mary’s mother might have to make a special visit to France.
The crunch came at Blois, straight after Christmas while the Cardinal was on a mission to Italy and unable to intervene. Mary, now aged thirteen, gave away some of her old dresses to two of her aunts. In performing this seemingly innocent gesture, she followed, as she afterwards claimed, her mother’s advice, since these aunts, her mother’s younger sisters, were abbesses and the gifts were deeds of charity. The clothes, made of the most luxurious and costly fabrics, were to be cut up and turned into altar coverings. Such gifts, following hard on the heels of others to Mary’s servants, had sparked Parois’ jealousy. She spitefully snapped, ‘I see that you’re afraid in case you enrich me! Obviously you mean to keep me poor.’
This was no way to address a Queen, but Mary answered regally. She was trying hard to control her emotions, something she always found difficult but could usually manage at least in the opening stages of a confrontation. ‘How sad,’ she replied, and then excused herself.
Yet this was no isolated skirmish: it marked the culmination of a clash of personalities. Mary was precocious and vivacious, able to conduct herself in ways far older than her age, still barely a teenager but one who expected to get her own way. Parois was a much older woman burdened by self-importance and an inflated sense of duty. She was at best fussy, at worst a killjoy and a prig. She had already reported Mary to her mother for insubordination, when Mary had insisted on wearing too much jewellery.
Mary wrote to her mother putting her side of the story and pouring out her heart. ‘Madam, I most humbly beseech you to believe that there’s nothing in any of this, since … I’ve never stopped her from exercising authority over my wardrobe, because I knew very well that I shouldn’t.’ However, she admitted: ‘I did tell John, my valet de chambre, that when she wished to remove anything he should inform me, because, if I wanted to give it away, I might find it gone.’
The clash of wills had been expressed through a battle to control Mary’s wardrobe. Now it was in the open, Mary saw no reason to yield. ‘As to what she told you of my intransigent wilfulness, Madam, I’ve never had of her the credit of giving away a single pin, and thus I’ve acquired a reputation for being mean to the point where quite a few people have said to me how little I resemble you.’
Mary meant this last remark to hit home, since her mother always prided herself on her generosity to her own servants. She then vented her indignation against Parois. ‘I’m actually quite amazed’, she continued, ‘that she could tell you anything so far removed from the truth.’
It was an impasse, and when the Cardinal of Lorraine returned from Italy, there was no more prevarication. As he warned his sister, Parois was ‘ill’ in Paris. She had left Mary’s household after the scene and it was unlikely she would return. Her ‘indisposition’ was serious, possibly fatal. In any case, she wished to resign. The young Queen of Scots had got her way.
Mary herself, added the Cardinal inscrutably, had been ‘sick’, mainly because of ‘things she had discovered towards the end that were scarcely possible to bear’. She had now fully recovered and was just as she was before, her looks and conversation holding everyone enthralled. But clearly some damage had been done.
A year later, Mary herself revisited the affair when she told her mother, Parois ‘had almost been the cause of my death for the fear I had of falling under your displeasure’.
This was the first of several occasions in her life when Mary said she had been close to death or wished she were dead. This was not simply teenage melodrama. Mary really had been seriously ill. Not the least of the enigmas about her is her medical history. In many respects, her health was robust. She rode her ponies every day and was able to meet extreme physical demands. But her good health was punctuated by episodic illnesses, often triggered by anxiety or stress, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which acute physical pain and sickness were followed by rapid recovery. In her adult life, Mary complained of rheumatism and ‘spleen’, the former common in an age without central heating and the latter caused by a gastric ulcer that eventually burst. But that does not fully explain her mood swings, which we know she felt, because in later life she wore a ring, an amethyst, that she believed had magical properties ‘contre la melancholie’.
The symptoms were always the same. She would vomit, suffer abdominal pain, feel overwhelming sadness or depression, and burst into tears. A surfeit of ‘black bile’3 was blamed, for which she was given medicines that, not surprisingly, failed to work. During one of her severest attacks in Scotland, witchcraft was blamed and a search instigated for the culprits and their charmed ‘bracelets’.
A modern, but disputed, explanation is that Mary had inherited an illness known as porphyria. An over-production of purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicates the nervous system, and in cases of acute intermittent porphyria, the commonest type, the victim suffers sudden bouts of vomiting, abdominal pain, weakness or paralysis of the limbs, and psychogenic changes resembling hysteria. Despite the severity of these symptoms, the patient recovers speedily afterwards.
Porphyria was first suggested when medical historians, claiming that George III was among those suffering from the disease, tried to trace its descent back to his Stuart ancestors, in particular to James VI and I. Their diagnosis of George III is still controversial. Many experts believe that his symptoms could easily have been caused by manic depression, and even if James, Mary’s son, could be shown to have had porphyria, it does not automatically follow that he acquired it on his mother’s side.
The riddle cannot be resolved. From the viewpoint of her biographers, it does not greatly matter, since what she herself experienced were her symptoms, which are fully documented. As to the illnesses of her youth, there is more than enough evidence that they were quite unrelated to porphyria.
When Mary was nearly eight, she was laid low by a bout of gastroenteritis. Between the ages of ten and twelve she was sick a number of times, once with a palpitation of the heart, but in each case the doctors blamed excessive eating. Once they prescribed a diet of rhubarb, a general remedy for patients thought to have an imbalance of the bodily ‘humours’ as stipulated in the medical textbooks and especially for over-excitement.
At the age of eleven, Mary had toothache. Much more seriously, at an unknown date she was struck down by smallpox. Henry II lent her his own personal physician, Jean Fernel, a doctor with a legendary reputation who had first come to his attention as Catherine de Medici’s gynaecologist. Mary recalled her treatment in a letter to Elizabeth I, who was herself attacked by the disease in October 1562. ‘He would never tell me’, she said, ‘the recipe of the lotion that he applied to my face having punctured the pustules with a lancet.’ Although Elizabeth was her rival for the English throne, Mary’s heart went out to her, as every noblewoman feared the ravages of smallpox even more than plague or childbirth. In the event, both women’s skin was unmarked.
When Mary was thirteen and a half, she succumbed to an illness lasting several months. The symptoms included recurring attacks of fevers and chills, vomiting, headaches, and abdominal pain. But this was not porphyria: it was a well-known viral disease prevalent in the summer called the ‘sweat’ or ‘quartan ague’. Mary caught it in August 1556, during a particularly hot spell. Her attacks were ‘wonderfully severe and sharp’, and they were followed by remissions lasting between eight and ten days. ‘It is one of the maladies of this year which are affecting many’, the Cardinal reassured her worried mother. The Dauphin had also fallen victim, as had the Duke of Guise’s eldest son, Henry.
This was the illness to which Mary referred when she told her mother that Parois ‘had almost been the cause of my death for the fear I had of falling under your displeasure’. Her sickness and Parois were firmly connected in her mind. Parois, the classic aggrieved ex-employee, had been smearing her reputation in Paris, insinuating that she had spoken ill of Catherine de Medici to Diane de Poitiers. The result was that Catherine froze her out. It was a setback, because the Guise family had been making steady progress in their efforts to win over Catherine, despite her privately expressed doubts about the feasibility of their ‘Franco-British’ project.
No permanent damage was done. When Mary’s uncles declared their niece to have reached the age of majority and arranged for her to have her own household, they had run a calculated risk. Overall it had worked out well, but after the débâcle over Parois they were taking no chances. From this point onwards, Mary’s establishment was overseen from Joinville and Meudon, with Anne d’Este playing a leading role. No new governess was appointed, and soon Mary could describe her aunt and uncles as equally responsible for her.
When war with Spain was resumed, the Guise family got their biggest opportunity so far. In February 1556, the truce of Vaucelles with Spain broke down. Although meant to last five years, it did not hold, and by the summer of 1557 Philip II had brought England as well as Spain, Savoy, and the Netherlands into the war against France. In August, an army led by Duke Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy invaded northern France and laid siege to the market town of St-Quentin in Picardy, close to the frontier. A smaller French army under the Constable Montmorency marched to the relief of the town, but was crushed, and six hundred nobles were captured, including the Constable himself and four of his sons, who were imprisoned.
It was the most humiliating French military defeat of the sixteenth century. In a panic, Henry II sent for the Duke of Guise, then in Italy, and appointed him lieutenant-general of the kingdom. The Duke became the royal viceroy at the stroke of a pen. Not only did he have full command of all French military and naval forces, he also received the signet seal, enabling him to issue directions to the secretaries of state concerning such matters as foreign affairs, finance, and the royal household.
Henry II wanted to launch a counter-attack, especially against England. Having recaptured Boulogne in 1550, he now wished to liberate Calais and its surrounding forts, the last enclave of the English occupation of France left over from the Hundred Years War.
The Duke instantly saw the possibilities. He led a masterful attack on Calais on 1 January 1558, when a severe frost made it possible for his troops almost literally to walk on water. The weakness of the town was its old-fashioned castle. The English garrison was complacent and there had been defectors, but this scarcely mattered because the Guise assault was so rapid and precise. The surrounding forts were taken after a brief bombardment, and on the 24th Henry II made a ceremonial entry into the town to the sounds of the anthem ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’. The King was elated by the reconquest, which in his view more than compensated for the catastrophe of the Constable’s defeat at St-Quentin.
As Henry walked in procession with his nobles and councillors through the streets of Calais in his azure and gold robes trimmed with ermine and wearing his ‘imperial’ crown, the Guise brothers were poised to capitalize on their momentous victory. They had monopolized politics in 1557–8. Their success lay in their effective collaboration, meticulous planning, and intelligence gathering; their command of technical detail was unsurpassed. To recover Calais from its English occupation had been the aim of the French monarchy for over a century. Previous attempts had come to nothing. Suddenly the goal had been achieved. It seemed to be a miracle, one entirely due to the genius of the Guises.
The Constable was still a prisoner in Brussels, and to underline the internal realignment of power, the Cardinal of Lorraine clapped his nephew into irons on a charge of heresy. The Guise family were at the pinnacle of their power. They seemed to be invincible. If ever there was a moment for them to reap their due reward, this was it.