MARY’S EDUCATION WAS meticulously planned. The old medieval assumption that book learning was irrelevant to kings and nobles had been shattered in France when Louise of Savoy prescribed a course of study for her son, Francis I, modelled on the best practice of the Italian Renaissance. Francis studied biblical history, rhetoric, and Greek and Latin literature. He learnt to speak Italian and Spanish with reasonable fluency. He grew up to be a keen artistic connoisseur who built a unique collection of paintings and antique sculptures, and a patron of writers and musicians. At his invitation Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini took up residence in France, each for several years. Among his many treasures, Francis owned the Mona Lisa, which he kept with other prized paintings from his collection in his bathroom.
The status of women at the French court had been transformed by the traffic between France and Italy. Women in Italy were essential contributors to courtly society, valued especially as conversationalists. Women’s education had been championed in Europe by the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives and the Englishman Thomas More. In Mary’s case, her family believed it essential to her courtly training to prescribe a course of study that followed their ideals. A key element was to be a knowledge of languages, followed by rhetoric, history, and poetry. Although these subjects seemed to be relatively esoteric, in reality it was said that they were almost entirely practical.
The art of politics and of governing well, as the theorists believed, could be taught from the examples of history. Next, the art of speaking well and of political persuasion – rhetoric or eloquence – were studied from the texts of classical and modern languages and from poetry. The leading advice books, among them Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, held that ‘the arts of speaking and of ruling well’ were closely related and best acquired from studies of antiquity. A ruler or councillor unable to mould language ‘like wax after his own mind’ would be sure to fail. The ‘greatness and gorgeousness of an oration’ was that ‘at the first show’ of the words, their dignity and brightness would appear like ‘tables of painting placed in their good and natural light’. Governors had to be able to speak confidently in public: their audiences, whether select groups of advisers or parliaments, could be ‘moved’ by the skilful use of oratory, hence they should be taught the best of the models and techniques that the Greek and Roman rhetoricians had perfected.
The most striking thing about Mary’s education is that she followed an almost identical curriculum to that of her male counterpart, the Dauphin. This was unusual for a girl. It cannot have been solely because she was a Queen, because Henry II’s daughters and those of a number of his leading councillors also took their places in the schoolroom. But without her royal connections, Mary could not have hoped for the calibre of tutors or the unrestricted access to books and rare manuscripts that she enjoyed.
Her set texts included Cicero’s On Duties, Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Training of an Orator, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Most Famous Greeks and Romans. In studying them, Mary would have progressed from acquiring a basic knowledge of Latin grammar to a more intensive study and imitation of the leading authors, reading Greek writers in Latin translations at first. When she had mastered Latin, she would have moved on to Greek and Italian, and possibly Spanish. Her vernacular was, of course, already French.
Like all students who followed this curriculum, Mary was expected to make translations from her own language into Latin, and to write prose compositions imitating the techniques for which Cicero and others were famous. Along the way, she would have been introduced to texts, notably by Plato and Aristotle, that had an ethical and philosophical content, to Ptolemy’s standard work on geography, and to histories such as those of Plutarch and Livy.
Taken together, these elements were regarded as a vocational course of study: the equivalent (for a prospective ruler) of a degree in Business Administration. The final stage, more or less akin to graduation, was for Mary to deliver an oration in Latin in front of her family and the entire royal court in the great hall at the Louvre. Most of those present would have understood it, depending on how grammatically fluent her oration was and how quickly she spoke.
Mary’s education was overseen by Catherine de Medici, Diane de Poitiers, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, who were together responsible for choosing her tutors. Diane’s role was crucial: she was herself exceptionally well educated. She was a renowned patron of artists, writers, and poets, the most influential purchaser of classical and Italian works of art after Francis I’s death, and the connoisseur who did more than anyone else to establish the taste of Henry II’s court.
Mary studied elementary Latin and general subjects under Claude Millot and Antoine Fouquelin. Nothing is known about Millot beyond his glowing reports on her progress and the fact that she awarded his brother a pension; but Fouquelin was the author of a celebrated treatise on rhetoric, La rhétorique françoise, published at Paris in 1557 with a dedication to his young pupil in which he enthused over her abilities and potential.
When she had mastered the rudiments, Mary joined the Dauphin for more advanced Latin lessons under Jacques Amyot, a classical expert whom Henry II had appointed as a tutor to his sons. While Amyot was teaching the royal children, he was preparing his new edition of Plutarch’s Lives, finally published in 1559. He may have assigned Mary written exercises based on his own translations, but it is more likely she was first introduced to Plutarch in the concise edition or crib made by Georges de Selve, a former student of Pierre Dane`s, her Greek tutor.
Danès was a leading scholar specially chosen by Henry II to teach Greek to the Dauphin. He served on a commission to reform the University of Paris and had been a student of Guillaume Budé, the foremost French intellectual under Francis I and a linguist so brilliant he had learnt Greek in weeks without a teacher. Danès tried to imitate his mentor’s inspirational methods, and Mary carefully studied L’Institution du Prince, Budé’s classic advice manual for rulers, which was based on his distillation of the works of ancient authors. She owned a handsome copy in manuscript, which she brought back to Scotland with her possessions on the death of Francis II.
Her Latin compositions, written when she was eleven and twelve, are still extant in a leather-bound exercise book in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She was required to write a series of sixty-four short essays in Latin on the ‘themes’ prescribed by her tutors. They reveal the range of her reading, which was far from comprehensive, but included Aesop’s Fables, the works of Cicero and Plato, the plays of the Roman comic author Plautus, and above all Plutarch’s Lives.
Mary often cited the Colloquies of Erasmus, the best-selling anthology of essays by the pre-eminent Dutch humanist. Written in smooth and eloquent Latin with brilliant flashes of wit and irony, the Colloquies were designed to entertain and instruct students in ways that led them back to primary texts of Scripture and the classical tradition. She also owed a copy of Erasmus’ masterpiece, The Praise of Folly, which included biting satires on monarchy and flattery, and may have left Mary with a keen sense of her duty to balance luxuries and pleasure with her role as a guardian of her people.
Mary’s own essays are disappointing in view of her later ebullience: stilted and moralistic, they reflect less her own opinions than the views her tutors wished her to express. Many appear to be little more than her own translations of existing model answers, and most are in the form of ‘letters’, since an epistolary style was considered to be the easiest to acquire and the best way for a student to begin studying oratory.
A majority were to her best friend Princess Elizabeth, Henry II’s eldest daughter. Other ‘correspondents’ included the Dauphin, Princess Claude, and her uncles. Doubtless the other royal children read the essays ‘addressed’ to them over Mary’s shoulder, but the purpose of the themes was to practise a rhetorical style. None of the ‘letters’ was ever sent.
One to the Cardinal of Lorraine began, ‘Many people in these days, my uncle, fall into errors in the Holy Scriptures, because they do not read them with a pure and clean heart.’ This was typical of the banality of Mary’s schoolroom exercises, but a few to Elizabeth and Claude lapse into informality. ‘I am going to the park to rest my mind a little.’ ‘The King has given me leave to take a deer in the park with Madame de Castres.’ ‘The Queen has forbidden me to go to see you, my sister, because she thinks you have measles, for which I am very sorry.’
About the time that Mary was writing her ‘themes’, she was studying Ptolemy’s pioneering textbook on Geography, a work first written in the second century AD and rediscovered in the 1400s. Ptolemy had mistakenly claimed that the earth is the centre of the universe and that the sun, planets, and stars revolve around it. But he was the first cartographer to project the spherical surface of the earth onto a flat plane and to superimpose a grid of lines of latitude and longitude over it. He placed north at the top of his maps; and he, or perhaps his editors, provided pithy comments on the different countries and cities, offering a thumbnail sketch of them and their inhabitants.
Mary possessed a fine copy of the Geography printed at Rome in 1490, which had once belonged to the leading Florentine banking family of the Frescobaldi. From her studies, she would have learnt that Scotland was much further north than France, though further south (and therefore warmer) than it really is relative to the equator. She would have read that in summer, Edinburgh had a maximum of nineteen hours of daylight as against only sixteen in Paris. According to Ptolemy, much of Scotland was flat, the exception being the dense forests and high mountains of Caledonia (his name for the Highlands), a region that he compressed into too small a space between Glasgow and Inverness. While accurate as to the hours of daylight, Ptolemy’s depiction of Scotland was spoilt by an elongated and inaccurate projection, and by his ignorance of the mountainous border region between England and Scotland. Mary, nevertheless, was fascinated by geography and kept this volume into her adulthood.
When she was nearly thirteen, she delivered an extempore Latin declamation in the great hall of the Louvre to an audience including Henry II, Catherine de Medici, and her uncles. Her speech defended the education of women and refuted a courtier’s opinion that girls had nothing to do with learning. It was a topic she had chosen herself, reflecting her conviction that the Italian view of learning as fundamental for both sexes was fully justified.
The near-contemporary description of the oration, by Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, is rapturous. ‘Only think’, he wrote, ‘what a rare and wonderful thing it was to see that learned and beautiful Queen declaiming thus in Latin, which she understood and spoke admirably.’ Unfortunately, Bourdeille’s fulsome praise cannot be taken at face value. At the time he was only two years older than Mary, was almost certainly not present at her declamation, and is notorious for his hyperbole.
Her oration was competent but no more. And she was heavily coached. No fewer than fifteen of her essays had already been on the same topic, and although she crammed in a formidable number of references to the achievements of learned women, it turns out nearly every one is taken from a single source: a letter by the admired Italian writer Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano, as edited for publication with a commentary by François Dubois. Mary either owned a copy or had borrowed one from the royal library at Fontainebleau, because the slavish repetition of these citations cannot be a coincidence.
Her forte lay elsewhere. According to her tutors and the reports of her governess Parois, she was attentive and industrious, more so than the Dauphin, whose inability to concentrate and lack of motivation earned him a homily from Mary in one of her essays. But she was never a born classicist: she could understand Latin better than she could speak it, and was much more attracted to French vernacular poetry, which she studied under Pierre de Ronsard, the chief writer of the Pléiade.
This was a circle of seven poets at Henry II’s court who wrote verses and panegyrics in return for patronage. They were in the vanguard of a literary movement that aimed to show that nationhood could be shaped by a common language and that the French language could stand on equal terms with Latin, Greek, and Italian. They also wanted to prove that poetry on secular topics such as love, friendship, prowess in arms, or the individual self could equal that on religious subjects. To this end, Ronsard had to show that the French language could satisfy the demands of the most elevated literary genres, such as Greek and Roman epics and lyrics, or the latest and most fashionable Italian sonnets and canzoni.
An intense rivalry developed between the adherents of the Pléiade and those rhetoricians, classicists, and historians whom Ronsard held to be stuffy and old-fashioned and to write in barbarous French. It was a battle that pitched the ‘young Turks’ of the Pléiade against the ‘Old Guard’, a clash of styles that quickly captivated the young Mary, who fell in line behind the Pléiade. Whereas the ‘Old Guard’ used complex metaphors and convoluted pedagogic constructions that their rivals likened to the tower of Babel, the ‘young Turks’ followed Dante’s advice to write using clear, elegant, simple words based on colloquial speech: language so lucid, graceful and perfect, it sparkled, achieving an effect so sublime it could melt people’s hearts.
Ronsard came to Mary’s attention because he knew Scotland. He had first served there as a page in the household of Madeleine, James V’s first wife, staying on for over two years. Mary was impressed by his campaign for vernacular poetry; if given the choice, she would always sooner read French literature than the classics, and as she was already a Queen, it was only natural that she would be offered the choice.
‘Above all’, remarked Bourdeille, ‘she loved poetry and poets, but especially M. de Ronsard, M. du Bellay and M. de Maisonfleur, who wrote charming poems and elegies for her, including those on her departure from France, which I have often seen her reading to herself in France and in Scotland, with tears in her eyes and sighs in her heart.’ Her selection of authors is easily explained, because du Bellay was the leading member of the Pléiade after Ronsard, and Maisonfleur was a soldier-poet attached to the Duke of Guise. But whether Mary wrote verses on the theme of her return from France to Scotland is a moot point.
She herself was never much of a poet. Her extant output is small, although she did attempt a few sonnets in French and Italian during her long years of captivity in England. After her trial and execution, poems were attributed to her that were written in her honour, but which she did not write herself. Most blatantly, the verses she is said to have composed as she began her return voyage to Scotland are an outright forgery:
Adieu, plaisant pays de France!
O ma patrie,
La plus chérie!
Qui a nourri ma jeune enfance!
These lines, first appearing in the Anthologie Françoise of 1765, are not Mary’s, but were the work of an eighteenth-century French journalist eager to publish a scoop. If she made a significant contribution to French poetry, it was as a patron and not as an author.
Ronsard’s bid for patronage came in 1556, the year in which his circle began to call itself the Pléiade. He had first vied to catch the attention of Mary’s uncles, and when this failed he turned instead to her. It was almost a year after her oration at the Louvre; she was nearly fourteen. He first apostrophized her as the Roman goddess of dawn, the ‘beautiful and more than beautiful and charming Aurora’. His poem ‘A La Royne d’Écosse’ was a personal and a political eulogy. He offered his services ‘to you, to your nation, and to your crown’.
Mary agreed to be Ronsard’s patron and afterwards helped him to publish the first edition of his works. In return, he and his followers became a compassionate presence in her life, sending her verses and providing her with some of the emotional reassurance and support she needed at her bleakest and most anxious moments. The writers of the Pléiade lined up behind the monarchy in the political and religious crises that afflicted France during the Wars of Religion. They remained loyal to Mary, whose reputation they considered it their duty to defend. Ronsard admittedly hedged his bets by dedicating poems to Elizabeth I, whom he flattered by saying she was Mary’s equal in beauty. But such lapses apart, the Pléiade poets behaved honourably and retained Mary’s lifelong affection.
Even if her own proficiency as a writer was comparatively modest, Mary’s love of poetry tells us something about her. She revelled in the imaginative, the romantic, the thoughtful. She had also become idiomatically and culturally French: as immersed in the language, its mental patterns and associations, as any native speaker.
It was no longer simply that Mary spoke fluent French; her identity was altered, if not completely transformed. Although her tastes and leisure preferences centred on music, dancing, and embroidery, the pastimes of aristocratic women throughout Europe, the types she preferred were quite different from those a native Scotswoman would enjoy. They were qualitatively different from her mother’s, even though she was born a Frenchwoman, since they were as much Italian as French, reflecting the latest styles at Henry II’s court, where cultural imports from Florence, Milan, and Mantua became the rage. In singing and dancing, Mary tended to prefer styles developed in Mantua and Milan, whereas in embroidery she valued most the opulent designs of Florence and Venice.
Her singing voice was soft but clear, and she was trained like a Mantuan singer to modulate her tone to suit the declamation of the text, the acoustics of the building, or the timbre of the instrumental accompaniment. Sometimes she sang while accompanying herself on the lute. At other times she played the clavichord or the harp.
As a musician she was nothing out of the ordinary, but as a dancer she had real flair. She was agile enough to master the complex routines of the latest and most fashionable dances, and rhythmic enough always to appear graceful. By the use of simple gestures, it was said, she could conjure up emotions to match the music.
Henry II knew talent when he saw it as well as the potential for theatre. He went to great lengths to find Mary a suitable Italian dancing master, and she and the Dauphin practised regularly together in anticipation of the balls that would follow their betrothal.
Mary adored dancing. She sought out every opportunity to perform, appearing at the family festivals organized by her Guise relations at Joinville and Meudon as well as attending court events. At Holyrood, after her return to Scotland, she danced almost every night with her four Maries. Often she danced until after midnight, for which she was castigated by the Calvinists, who saw it as ‘depravity … attending the practice of France’, an invitation to ‘idolatry’ and sexual transgression.
Mary also loved embroidery. It was thought to be an ideal form of relaxation when it was too cold or wet to go outdoors; and when she was nine, two pounds of twisted woollen yarn were ordered so she could begin her training under the expert eye of Pierre Danjou, Henry II’s personal embroiderer. She gained lifelong satisfaction from what she learnt, and in Scotland she often sat sewing during meetings of the Privy Council or while receiving ambassadors. Later, when she was in exile in England, her needlework would give her a comforting, calming way of spending the long years. ‘All the day’, she was reported then as saying, ‘she wrought with her needle, and that the diversity of the colours made the work seem less tedious, and [she] continued so long at it till very pain did make her to give it over.’
Catherine de Medici encouraged Mary’s interest. She was herself a skilled amateur embroiderer, trained as a child at the Convent of the Murate in Florence, where the nuns were famous for their needlework. Mary began with knitting and plain sewing, after which she progressed to the more decorative work of needlepoint: the minute stitches of petit point as well as gros point. The aim was to make gifts or to ornament the heavy, dark-panelled rooms with tapestry-like wall hangings, valances, or table and cushion covers. The outlines of the intended design would be sketched out first on canvas from a pattern taken from an emblem book, then filled in as delicately as possible with a variety of coloured wools or silks.
Even as a child, Mary had a taste for luxury. She had a passion for brodures – the most sumptuous and expensive ‘embroideries’ – and especially the jewelled or enamelled sort used for head-dresses or as strapwork on bodices or sleeves. Such accessories were greatly coveted, but were too difficult for amateurs to make, as they involved stitching directly onto silk or satin, using thread of fine metal or else silk yarn onto which the tiny pearls or other small jewels were attached. When Mary found as a teenager that she could not live without these items, she purchased them indiscriminately, ignoring the protests of Parois.
On a more mundane level, Mary adored making cotignac, a type of French marmalade, putting on an apron and boiling quinces and sugar with powder of violets in a saucepan for hours before laying out the slices of crystallized fruits. The four Maries were all required to help her, and a special ‘kitchen’ was created in their apartments so that they could play at cooking and housekeeping, pretending to be servants or bourgeois women organizing their domestic routine and doing their own shopping. It was a game that Mary always remembered and sometimes played in Scotland, usually in St Andrews, where she had a house near the Abbey.
She loved pets and wanted as many as possible around her. Dogs, especially terriers and spaniels, were her favourites and she let them romp around freely as was the custom in royal and aristocratic households. At one time she kept sixteen, and her kitchen staff were given standing instructions to keep back food for them.
Her second favourite animals were ponies. When she was about fifteen, she sent a request to her mother to send her ‘some good haqueneys, which I have promised to Monsieur and the others who have asked me for them’. By this, she meant she wanted Mary of Guise to send ponies from the Shetland Isles at the northern tip of Scotland as presents for the Dauphin’s younger brothers, Princes Charles, Henry, and Francis, then aged eight, seven, and four. These ponies were ideal for children to learn to ride, renowned for their small size, gentle temperaments, and shaggy coats.
When she first arrived in France, Mary was too young to hunt, but she could watch and showed visible excitement each time the hounds were let loose from their kennels. Falconry was, however, within her grasp and within a few weeks of arriving at St-Germain, she astonished the ladies of the court by dressing her own pet falcon, casting the bird off, and fearlessly reclaiming it on her arm without help from the falconers.
Later, she watched while the Dauphin learnt to hunt and joined in herself when she was twelve or thirteen. Her two favourite horses, given to her by Henry II, were called Bravane and Madame la Réale. (Bravane was perhaps Mary’s nickname for a fearless filly and la Réale for a Spanish mare – literally the ‘royal’ one.) She loved riding and soon relished hunting, for which she adopted the daring habit of wearing breeches of Florentine serge underneath her skirts. The fashion was introduced by Catherine de Medici from Italy, and was risqué because it allowed the wearer to ride astride her horse and not side-saddle as female protocol required, a habit for which Mary would be greeted with suspicion in Scotland.
On wet days or candlelit evenings in the royal apartments, Mary liked to play cards with the Dauphin, whom she beat more often than not, although on the occasions when she lost, her stakes were characteristically higher than his. Already Mary was prepared to take risks. Her other indoor amusements included chess, backgammon, and playing with a set of Italian puppets.
By the time she was fully fourteen, Mary was much taller than average. In an age when a woman was considered tall if she reached five feet four inches, Mary finally grew to almost six feet, perhaps five feet ten inches or so, which, along with her delicately formed breasts, slim waist, soft white skin, marble-like complexion, high forehead, and auburn hair crimped into ringlets, made her an instantly striking figure. One potential flaw was her posture, because as a child she refused to hold herself up straight. It was probably laziness rather than embarrassment at her height. Either way, it was a fault corrected by Parois, if only after a struggle. In consequence, Mary’s deportment in her prime lacked any trace of the rounded shoulders and slight stoop that were her hallmark in middle age.
A series of chalk portrait drawings, the equivalent of modern snapshots, illustrates her growing up.4 She had been sketched as soon as she arrived at St-Germain so that Henry II could greet her by name. This drawing has been lost, but others survive from when she was between the ages of nine and sixteen.
When the Dauphin was eight and Mary nine, Catherine de Medici commissioned portraits of the royal children that she asked to be sent to her as soon as possible. When they arrived, she complained that the artist had not caught their features adequately. So she called for improved likenesses, even if these were only done in chalk.
The new portraits were ready by December 1552. Mary’s was sent to Henry II, who liked it so much he refused to part with it. This finished version has not survived, but a preparatory sketch in red and black chalk shows her aged nine and a half.
Despite her tense expression, perhaps the result of being required to sit still for the artist, her almond-shaped eyes are unmistakable. Her ears are disproportionately large. Her nose is childish and snubbed, and not yet aquiline. Although perhaps less attractive to us, the high forehead, imperceptible eyebrows and tight lips were considered elegant at the time. To smile for a portrait was then the height of rudeness.
She was dressed in the latest couture: a close-fitting outer bodice with slashed sleeves, puffed at the shoulders and clinging to the arms. Her crimped hair, centrally parted, was fitted into a richly embroidered caul, banded with jewels. She sported ear-rings, a gold necklace with rubies and diamonds, a string of pearls that looped up and down across the shoulders, and a large jewelled pendant. As a Queen keen to maintain her status at the royal court, she would have regularly dressed this way despite her youth.
When Mary was twelve or thirteen, a more detailed drawing was commissioned from François Clouet, one of the leading court artists. More than any other portrait, it is a mesmerizing image of the young woman known in France as ‘la plus parfaite’. Her face and lips are fuller, her gaze less anxious, her nose snubbed no longer, her eyebrows more in evidence and delicately pencilled, her charm and vivacity signalled by her escaping curls and the gleam in her eyes.
A third and final drawing shows Mary shortly before her first marriage. She was little more than fifteen and yet looked twenty. She is slim, confident, and poised, her expression purposeful, even assertive, radiating charisma and savoir-faire. This is a drawing of someone who knows what she wants and is used to getting it.
When Mary reached the age of fifteen, her uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise, were satisfied that she was ready to take on the duties her momentous role entailed. Statecraft was the benchmark the Cardinal had in mind. ‘Discretion sur tout’ was a maxim he had always tried to teach her. She had been trained to keep her letters safe and not to leave them lying around or in unlocked cabinets, where they could be purloined or read by the servants. ‘I can assure you’, she had knowingly informed her mother, ‘nothing that comes from you will ever be disclosed by me.’
She had learnt to mark the most confidential passages of her letters for encoding in cipher. This was done by her private secretary after she had written or dictated her draft, although when she was excitedly trying this out for the first time, her secretary advised her there was no need as he was already sending her mother all sensitive information in code.
Despite these concerns, Mary could sometimes be too trusting. When she needed to reply as Queen to certain letters and petitions delivered in Scotland, she sent her mother thirty-five blank sheets with her signature at the foot. Fourteen, simply signed ‘Marie’, were for general use. Fifteen signed ‘La bien votre Marie’ were for more favoured or important recipients, and six signed ‘Votre bonne soeur Marie’ were exclusively for sovereign rulers, to be used when covering letters were required for diplomatic credentials or other special purposes.
Another distinctive trait arises from this period. Mary was taught to write in a near-perfect italic script in the newly fashionable Italian (or roman) manner rather than in the gothic-style handwriting of the later middle ages, using a formulary to ensure her letters matched the norms of this most elegant style. When she put her mind to it, Mary could write impeccably: her best writing is indistinguishable from that of Henry II’s own daughters or her young aunt, Anne d’Este, who also learnt to use italic script in her teenage years.
What so often happened in practice was that Mary began neatly enough, but on the second or third page started to rush. Her tutors were on the whole tactful: ‘she formed her letters elegantly and, what is rare in a woman, quickly’ was a typical comment. In reality, she found herself constantly apologizing for her untidiness. In a postscript to her mother, written at the age of fourteen, Mary urged her to ‘excuse please my terrible handwriting, because I was in a great hurry’. And about a year later, ‘You must forgive me if my writing is so bad, but I’ve had no time to do it properly …’
Mary was, therefore, no academic genius. She was vivacious and quick-witted, an increasingly sophisticated and confident pupil who accepted, even relished, her royal status. Precocious as a personality, if less so in her studies, she followed her instincts and concentrated on what she liked best. But she disliked pedagogy and did not agree that ancient literature was the best training for queenship. When assigned written exercises, she would try to finish them as quickly as possible.
According to Rabelais, the most celebrated French author of the early sixteenth century, one of the main functions of an education was to enable young aristocrats to grow like plants in the sun. Mary liked this idea so much, she took it as her emblem. She chose the marigold, a flower that always turns to face the sun, and the motto ‘Sa Virtu m’Atire’ (‘Its virtue draws me’), a near-perfect anagram of the name MARIE STVART as spelled in roman letters where the ‘u’ is represented by ‘v.’
In Henry II’s France, the game of anagrams was greatly in vogue. It was played with letters like Scrabble and often linked to pictorial puzzles from Italy in which badges or imprese were drawn. Mary based her personal monogram on the Greek letter ‘M’ (or mu), which she wrote twice in an interlaced form: once the right way up and once upside down, so it could be read either way. She surmounted her monogram with her anagram, which was then illustrated with a drawing of the marigold.
Mary could hardly have chosen the marigold without knowing the reference to Rabelais, because it was one of the examples in the emblem books she used for her embroidery. The motto given there was different: ‘non inferiora secutus’ (’not following lower things’) was the original Latin version, which she decided to rewrite.
It seems to be an instance of her intellectual ingenuity, until one realizes that the very same emblem had already been chosen by Princess Marguerite, Henry II’s youngest daughter, who was also in the schoolroom. She had retained the Latin version of the motto, but altered the flower from the marigold to the daisy or ‘marguerite’ to suit her name, whereas Mary kept the flower but changed the motto, transposing her friend’s idea.
No sooner had Mary lighted on the marigold as her impresa than her uncle, the Duke of Guise, entered Calais and the spotlight turned again to her family’s political and dynastic ambitions. She was only too well aware that her uncles had set their sights on acquiring the throne of England for her and the Dauphin, so making themselves indispensable at the heart of the Valois state.
It would not be long before a quite unintended effect of Mary’s education began to surface. She started to think independently of her uncles and to question what they told her. Under the curriculum they had chosen for her, she had acquired the same skills as a male student and was taught to think for herself. However unimpressed she may have been by classical rhetoric, it had trained her how to argue a case and then how to spot the strengths and flaws in the reasoning of others.
For the moment, this tension was latent. It was still hidden when, as a reward for their recapture of Calais from the English, the Guise family at last attained their goal. At a public ceremony held in the great hall of the Louvre on Tuesday, 19 April 1558, Henry II announced the date of Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin. She was still fifteen and Francis fourteen. The Cardinal of Lorraine joined the hands of the couple, who plighted their troths and exchanged a ring, promising they would give themselves in marriage, each to the other, on their wedding day.
Within three days, the city magistrates of Paris had been invited to the wedding. It was to take place almost immediately. Once Henry II had made up his mind, nothing was allowed to stand in his way. His son’s marriage, he avowed, was to be the most regal and triumphant ever celebrated in the kingdom of France. The secret preparations had been under way for a month: the ceremonial officials, stewards, wardrobe staff, purveyors, carpenters, dressmakers, embroiderers, and pastry-cooks had been working night and day to be ready in time.
After she was married to the Dauphin, Mary altered her monogram so that the Greek letter mu was inscribed within the letter phi, to be transliterated as ‘M’ and ‘F’ for Mary and Francis. When her copy of Ptolemy’s Geography was rebound by the royal bookbinder, she chose front and back covers of olive morocco leather on which palm branches were embossed in gold leaf with the newly intertwined monograms at the centre. She kept her anagram ‘Sa Virtu m’Atire’ the same – but with one important difference. No longer adorned by the marigold, it was emblazoned with the crown of France.