MARY’S WEDDING WAS spectacular. The service took place on Sunday, 24 April 1558 at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the spiritual heart of Paris. The cathedral stood at one end of the Cité, the slender island in the middle of the Seine. The excited citizens packed into the Place du Parvis, the square in front of the building, or else leaned out of the windows of neighbouring houses determined to catch a glimpse of the ceremony, largely held outside. A temporary gallery or covered walkway, twelve feet high, connected the starting-point of the grand procession, the palace of the Archbishop of Paris nearby, to Notre-Dame itself. The gallery, in the shape of an arch, was decorated in the antique classical style and led to an open pavilion on a stage across the west front of the cathedral, surmounted by a canopy of azure blue silk embossed with gold fleurs-de-lis. It continued into the church along the nave to the chancel, ending in the royal closet where the bride and bridegroom were to hear mass. The sides of the walkway were open, so everyone could watch the procession as it passed by. This was doubtless Henry II’s idea, with his marvellous grasp for the glorifying ability of spectacle to consolidate power.
The nobles and foreign ambassadors were seated outside on the stage, close to where the bride and groom were to be married. At ten o’clock, the Swiss halberdiers led the procession, marching in their smart uniforms while showing off their weapons to the sound of tambourins and fifes. They entertained the crowd for half an hour, until the bride’s uncle and head of the Guise family, Francis Duke of Guise, appeared on the stage.
He struck an imposing figure: tall and handsome like the rest of his family, his skin tanned by sun and war. He strode forward purposefully with his head carried high, his fair golden hair cut short beneath a black velvet cap festooned with a plume of white feathers, and his beard and moustache neatly trimmed. Officially the master of ceremonies, he had been temporarily promoted, if only for this special day, to the post of Grand Master of the King’s Household, the highest court office and a position usually held by his absent rival Montmorency, still a captive in Brussels.
At a signal from the Duke, troupes of musicians emerged, playing trumpets, bugles, oboes, flutes, viols, violins, and more. Clad in lavish red and yellow costumes, they astonished the crowd by their virtuosity. Then came a hundred gentlemen of the King’s household in their finery, then the princes of the blood, then the mitred abbots and bishops bearing their croziers. Next were the senior Church dignitaries: the archbishops; the cardinals including Mary’s uncle, Charles Cardinal of Lorraine; and the papal legate, Cardinal Trivulzio.
In pride of place were the royal party. The bridegroom was flanked by his younger brothers Charles and Henry, and by Anthony of Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme and titular King of Navarre, who had married one of Henry II’s cousins. Mary walked between Henry II and her own cousin, Charles Duke of Lorraine, head of the branch of the Guise family whose lands lay in Lorraine and Bar on the eastern border of France. Catherine de Medici brought up the rear, escorted by Anthony’s brother, Louis Prince of Condé, and attended by a dozen or so princesses, duchesses, ladies, and maids of honour.
The crowds had eyes only for Mary. They virtually ignored Francis, whose short, weedy build must have presented a strange contrast with her height and womanly beauty. They craned their necks to catch sight of her, cheering and waving their hats in the air. She looked radiant in her shimmering white dress, itself a daring and unconventional choice because white was the traditional colour of mourning for royalty in France. Mary, however, was not going to be bound by convention on her wedding day. She meant to make a dramatic gesture. She knew that white suited her delicate skin and auburn hair, and insisted on it. Her dress was ‘sumptuously and richly made’, lustrous with diamonds and jewelled embroidery, its long, sweeping train carried by two maids of honour. From her neck hung a magnificent jewelled pendant, the one she called ‘Great Harry’, a gift from her father-in-law, and engraved with his initials, that she valued so much she later placed it with the Scottish crown jewels. Her hair hung down loose – another bold choice – and on her head she wore a gold crown studded with diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. A huge gemstone at its centre flashed in the sunlight and caught everyone’s gaze: the rumour went round that it cost half a million crowns.
We have a good idea of what Mary was thinking as she walked in the procession towards the stage. Early that morning, she had written to her mother to say she was so excited, ‘All I can tell you is that I account myself one of the happiest women in the world.’
The Archbishop of Paris greeted the royal family as they reached the cathedral’s great doors. Henry II drew a ring from his finger. He gave it to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Rouen, who performed the marriage there and then upon the stage. After a short sermon from the Archbishop of Paris, it was time for the bride and bridegroom to withdraw to the royal closet for the nuptial mass.
Before going inside, the Duke of Guise, eager to win popularity and seeing the crowd’s view was obstructed, with a gesture of his hand ordered the heralds to shunt the guests off the stage and into the overflow seating in the church. The spectators roared their approval, the Duke acknowledging their cheers.
No ordinary Parisian was likely to forget the day. As the royal family turned to enter the church, heralds cried out three times ‘Largesse’ and began throwing gold and silver coins of all types and values into the crowd. Money showered down like confetti, causing something of a riot. People jumped or dived for the coins, pushing and elbowing their neighbours to grab a share of the spoils. Several people were knocked over, receiving cuts and bruises. Others fainted in the crush, while those nearest the stage were jostled or had their clothes torn. The mêlée was so intense, there was a risk of a serious accident: those within earshot of the stage begged the heralds to stop before someone was killed.
The royal family withdrew to the closet, where the bride and bridegroom knelt on cushions of cloth of gold to receive the sacrament. During the offertory, heralds once again threw money, this time inside the church from one side of the nave to the other. After the mass, the royal party reappeared, but before they retraced their steps to the archbishop’s palace, Henry II ordered the bride and bridegroom to make another circuit of the stage to please the crowd. Another roar of approval went up, louder than before and audible a mile away.
The procession returned to the archbishop’s palace, where a private banquet was held. During the meal, Mary found her solid gold crown had become too heavy to wear. She signalled to Henry II, who ordered one of his gentilshommes to hold it over her head. A magnificent ball followed at which she danced without her crown, letting her hair flow freely. She took to the floor with her father-in-law, revelling in everyone’s delight and admiration.
At five o’clock, there was a new procession to the Palais, the official residence of the Parlement of Paris, where the state banquet was to be held. Henry II and the Dauphin rode on horseback and Mary and Catherine de Medici travelled in a golden litter. As the Palais was only at the other end of the Cité, a mere few hundred yards away, the procession took an indirect route. It crossed the main Pont Notre-Dame into the business and residential districts of Paris and returned by the Pont au Change, a small wooden bridge lined with goldsmiths’ shops and money-changers. As the master of ceremonies, the Duke of Guise had planned this route to maximize the numbers able to catch a glimpse of his ravishing niece.
The state banquet was designed to impress foreign ambassadors and the magistrates of the Parlement and the Hôtel de Ville. It was followed by masques, revels, dancing, and entertainments on a breathtaking scale. The banquet sprawled across several different halls, and as no fête was complete without exotic floats or clockwork devices, six mechanical ships had been constructed. They were decked with cloth of gold and crimson velvet, with silver masts and sails of silver gauze that billowed in an artificial wind created by hidden bellows. The ships rocked from side to side and moved backwards and forwards. Painted canvas had been laid on the floor of the great hall to imitate the waves, which was made to undulate gently to complete the effect. On each deck there were two seats of state, one empty, the other occupied by the ship’s captain, who was in each case played by a male member of the royal family or a prince of the blood.
The ships made several circuits of the hall until each in turn stopped by the lady of the captain’s choice; she was then lifted into the vacant seat of state. Henry II chose Mary, the Dauphin Catherine de Medici, and the Prince of Condé took Anne d’Este, Duchess of Guise. The festivities lasted all night and the fête continued the next day at the Louvre, culminating in a spectacular three-day tournament at the Tournelles, the most important royal palace in Paris and the one Henry II used most often as a family home.
Mary was exultant. She had made what seemed to everyone to be the ideal dynastic marriage and the mise-en-scène was choreographed to reflect this. As the clockwork ships navigated their way round the hall, a narrator explained how the scene depicted Jason, the Greek hero who led the Argonauts in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Henry II, he announced, was Jason. By capturing the Golden Fleece, he would conquer an empire and create a universal monarchy. His son Francis was already Dauphin of France: the wedding made him King Consort of Scotland and therefore a King-Dauphin. But that was only the beginning. The King-Dauphin and Queen-Dauphine would unite the crowns of France, Scotland, and England, and this dynastic theme of triple monarchy was the leitmotif of the poems and anthems specially composed for the occasion.
Ronsard, the Pléiade’s inspiration and Mary’s poetry tutor, began with an epic poem in honour of the Guises, eulogizing the Cardinal of Lorraine as a master-strategist and explaining how the Dauphin, by choosing the most perfect Queen alive, had subordinated Scotland and England to France. Mary was the bearer of a magnificent dowry: she was herself the heir to two kingdoms. By her marriage she had helped to shape a dynasty that would dominate not only the British Isles, but eventually the whole of Europe.
Michel de l’Hôpital, the president of the Chambre des comptes and an amateur poet, then boasted of a time when the ‘gallant heirs’ of Henry II would each take their place among the crowned heads of Europe: in France, northern Italy, and the British Isles. ‘So shall one house’, he foretold, ‘the world’s vast empire share.’ Only through Mary’s marriage could the Valois monarchy subjugate England ‘without war and murder’. Or to use the metaphor of the pageant, she was herself the Golden Fleece.
Lastly, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard’s chief collaborator in the Pléiade, rhapsodized in an ode to Mary: ‘Through you, France and England will change the ancient war into a lengthy peace that will be handed down from father to son’.
The core assumption of these celebrations was the idea that the British Isles were part of an emerging French ‘empire’. Scotland and England were to be the provinces that France had subjugated by the Dauphin’s union with Mary. This notion was more tangibly expressed in July, when Henry II instructed the Parlement of Paris to register an edict granting French citizenship to all Scots on account of Mary’s marriage. It was a contentious demand. To smooth its passage the royal lawyers stressed that Henry intended to safeguard French sovereignty throughout all his provinces and dominions: the purpose of the new edict was to allow him to exercise an ‘imperial’ monarchy over Scotland modelled on the example of the Roman Empire.
Within two years, Henry II’s ‘imperial’ vision would damage the ‘Franco-British’ project as irreparably as Henry VIII’s ‘Rough Wooings’ had the ‘Anglo-British’ one. In Scotland, nothing was more important than the idea of national independence. When Henry II had first announced the date of Mary’s marriage, the Scottish Parliament sent a delegation of eight commissioners to Paris to discuss terms. The Scots still very much approved of the dynastic alliance, which they saw as a guarantee of stability and security against England, but asked that their ‘laws and liberties’ be confirmed to comply with the treaty of Haddington.
Henry referred them to Mary. Now that she had been declared ‘of age’, the obligation was hers. She turned for advice to her mother, who in her absence appointed her grandmother, Antoinette of Bourbon, to represent her. And Antoinette turned to her sons, in particular the Cardinal of Lorraine, even though they had no experience of Scotland and its political and cultural traditions.
Two mutually contradictory sets of undertakings were given. First, Mary promised to observe and keep faithfully ‘the freedoms, liberties and privileges of this realm and laws of the same, and in the same manner as has been kept and observed in all Kings’ times of Scotland before’. It was an unequivocal declaration of national independence, signed and sealed with her own hand and binding on her successors. A copy was taken back to Edinburgh, where it was kept with the registers of Parliament.
That was nine days before the marriage. But at Fontainebleau on 4 April, eleven days earlier, Mary had signed three secret documents to a quite different effect. The first was a conveyance or deed of gift, made, as she noted in its opening clause, ‘in consideration of the singular and perfect affection that the Kings of France had always had to the protection and maintenance of the kingdom of Scotland against the English’. In the event of her death without an heir, the King of France and his successors were to inherit Scotland, also succeeding to all her rights and title to the throne of England.
Next, Mary acknowledged that should she die without heirs, the King of France should have full rights to all the revenues of Scotland until he was repaid one million pieces of gold, this sum being a necessary reimbursement of his investment in the country’s defence and in Mary’s education. The sheer size of this debt was yet another guarantee that Scotland would remain a French province for a very long time.
The final document was a letter of renunciation or ‘protestation’ signed jointly by Mary and Francis, in effect a combined oath and prenuptial agreement, whereby she affirmed as Queen of Scots and he confirmed as her fiancé that the dispositions and gifts she had secretly made were valid and effective in law, and would remain so irrespective of her marriage and of any other assurances she had formerly given or might give in the future. The document also nullified any future contract or agreement made by the Scottish Parliament on the strength of the previous contract that she herself made with the commissioners.
It is impossible to believe that in asking her to sign these documents, the Guises acted out of ignorance or naïvety. They knew what they were doing; but did Mary?
The secret documents were extremely clever. They were written in the most florid and high-flown language to create the illusion that Scotland’s national interests were indeed protected – but by Henry II and the Valois dynasty. Mary was only fifteen: she was not a constitutional lawyer. Her identity was shaped in France and bound up intimately with Henry II and the Valois dynasty. No one had told her that the secret documents, and especially the third, were illegal by Scots law. Mary was inclined to be too trusting. She had already signed thirty-five blank sheets of paper for her mother’s convenience. She trusted her other Guise relations in exactly the same way, and might very well have been prepared to sign documents presented to her without studying them properly.
Mary was now a Queen in her own right. Perhaps she should have been more careful, but then, she did not expect her uncles to act illegally. Her adolescence suggests she was uneven in her precocity. She was both older than her age and no more than her age. Diane de Poitiers noticed that she spoke to the Scottish commissioners ‘not as an inexperienced child, but as a woman of age and knowledge’.
What Mary lacked was direct experience of Scottish politics and of the different expectations of the nobles in that country. In most respects, Scotland and France were in parallel universes. The Kings of France were almost untrammelled rulers: they got their way even over the Parlement and the law courts. In contrast, the Scottish Lords saw themselves less as the ruled, and more as co-rulers. Their code of honour was closely linked to their belief that they were the national ‘guardians’ of the realm and the ‘commonwealth’. It was on this basis that they justified their volatile shifts of allegiance. They saw themselves as the protectors of Scottish interests, the repository of ancient Scottish values. Mary of Guise had taken twenty years to get to grips with them, and even then d’Oysel, her chief minister, was constantly by her side. Since the Rouen fête, moreover, her authority had been buttressed by Henry II’s seemingly inexhaustible flow of pensions, a gravy train of patronage to keep the nobles malleable and compliant.
It was almost seven years since Mary had last seen her mother. Despite the strong bond between them, she had become dependent, emotionally and politically, on her Guise relations. This had positive and negative aspects. Antoinette of Bourbon and Anne d’Este treated her with genuine love and affection: they were her guardian angels. Against this, her uncles were impassive and detached. Beneath their amiable and emollient exterior, they could be cold-hearted, even cruel. To them, Mary was a dynastic asset to be exploited, not an adopted daughter to be cherished. At this stage, she was mostly susceptible to her uncle Charles, who, although a brilliant courtier and diplomat, was full of grandiose schemes and prone to overreach himself, his fertile imagination brimming with fresh intrigues.
The true extent of the Guise deception before Mary’s marriage was not proved until the reign of Louis XIV, a century afterwards, when the secret documents were found. This does not mean that the Scottish commissioners did not smell a rat, because as well as attending Mary’s wedding, they were invited to the state banquet and so witnessed the pageant of the ships and what that symbolized. Mary’s half-brother, Lord James Stuart, now aged twenty-seven, had been in the crowd outside Notre-Dame watching his sister’s wedding. He disliked everything he saw, partly from jealousy, partly because many of his friends came from the close circle of Scottish and English Protestant exiles in Paris who hated the idea that there were still French (Catholic) troops in Scotland and were determined to expel them if they could.
The Protestants later accused Mary and her family of a plot to murder the eight Scottish commissioners on their way home. Since four of them died of a mystery illness before they had even returned to their ships, it was easy to claim that they were poisoned. But there is no evidence of such a plot: in her letters to her mother, Mary spoke generously of the dead commissioners and mentioned the plague epidemics ravaging France at the time, in particular near Amiens and the Channel ports.
More credible is a report that the Cardinal of Lorraine had lobbied the commissioners to surrender the ‘crown imperial’ of Scotland to France (the same one with which Mary had been crowned at Stirling). He wanted the crown kept at the Abbey of St-Denis, the royal mausoleum and the holiest shrine in France. If Francis and Mary had no children, Scotland would be held by each successive Dauphin as an appanage or duchy of France. A central tenet of the Guise dynastic plan was that every future Dauphin would be King of Scotland whether Mary’s heirs or not, establishing the country’s subordination for ever.
No one in Scotland knew about this. Mary’s marriage was celebrated in Edinburgh with bonfires and processions, and when the four surviving commissioners returned to submit their report, Parliament of its own accord offered the Dauphin the ‘crown matrimonial’, a considerable accolade and Mary of Guise’s greatest achievement as regent, because as well as making Francis lawfully King of Scots with the prospect of a future coronation at Stirling, the grant implied he had the right to retain the throne for the Valois dynasty should Mary have no children.
No sooner had Francis been given this honour than the Hamiltons, the family and followers of the Duke of Châtelherault, the heirs apparent to the Scottish throne if Mary did die childless, joined with the Protestants to oppose it. As a result, the crown was never sent. Parliament’s grant was not officially revoked, but neither was it fulfilled. What dictated this reverse was the Lords’ determination to maintain their own rights and privileges. Hitherto, the French alliance had not threatened these, because the regent’s power was limited by the terms of the treaty of Haddington. But when Mary married Francis, the mood began to change. The Lords realized that her position as the future Queen of France could mean she would always be an absentee Queen of Scots. This was a major step change. Scotland might for ever become a French province, as indeed Henry II and the Guises positively intended it should; and unlike the French tributes in honour of the wedding, all those written by Scots stressed their country’s equality with France.
Amidst this dynastic turmoil, sudden shock waves reverberated around Europe. Mary Tudor, the English Queen, fell mortally ill at the age of forty-two. She had long suffered from severe headaches, abdominal pains, and palpitations of the heart. In her final months she was almost blind. Her life had been ruined by the false pregnancy she suffered in 1555, when her womb swelled and her breasts spontaneously lactated. She went excitedly to her confinement chamber, only to emerge over three months later a broken woman. Philip II had come to resent the fact that his wife was eleven years older than he was. He found her sexually unattractive, joking that she was his ‘aunt’. But he badly wanted a son by her, and decided to put up with her until he knew she would never bear one. In August 1555, he left abruptly for Brussels to resume command of the war effort against France, only to return for a single brief visit in 1557 to bring England into the war.
Mary Tudor died on 17 November 1558, and from this moment a Valois dynastic project that might otherwise have seemed to be little more than a fantasy – a romantic flight of fancy expressed through pageants and poetic allegories, but without any prospect of political success – had real potential.
In London, Elizabeth – Mary Tudor’s younger sister and Mary Stuart’s cousin – was proclaimed Queen. She was twenty-five years old. Her education had closely paralleled her cousin’s; but whereas the young Queen of Scots was not noticeably academic, Elizabeth was a natural scholar. She spoke French and Italian fluently and had a smattering of Spanish. She could converse ‘readily and well’ in Latin and ‘moderately’ in Greek. She could keep pace with the ablest of her tutors, and could still denounce an ambassador in extempore Latin when she was over sixty. Her favourite subjects were scripture, history, classical literature, and music, and whereas Mary could play competently but not brilliantly on the clavichord or the lute, Elizabeth was something of a virtuoso on the virginals.
Elizabeth was attractive with bright eyes and long golden hair. But she was less tall and therefore less striking than Mary, at most about five feet four inches. And her complexion was olive: the Venetian ambassador used the word ‘olivastra’ or ‘swarthy’. This was something of a disadvantage at a time when a perfect white skin mattered so much to a woman. Unlike Mary’s marble-like features, Elizabeth’s were said to be ‘comely’, and whereas Mary’s delicate breasts and tight slim waist were legendary, her cousin’s were merely ‘well formed’.
Elizabeth’s first surviving portrait depicted her at the age of thirteen, immaculately dressed in a crimson robe with an embroidered kirtle and sleeves of cloth of gold, her head-dress and the strapwork of her gown bedecked with pearls. Her image was always carefully projected, and in this portrait she was holding a book of devotions complete with a marker peeping out to prove she had been reading it. On the lectern beside her, another book, perhaps the Gospels, stood open. None of this was accidental. Elizabeth was a Protestant. But she was a moderate in religion: more a Lutheran than a Calvinist, unlike the man she chose as her chief minister. This was William Cecil, who had first entered politics as Somerset’s secretary and then become Elizabeth’s steward. In Edward VI’s reign, he was promoted to Secretary of State, playing a leading role in bringing about the Protestant revolution that brought him closely into contact with John Knox and in forming the ideas that were to pit him so vehemently against Mary in later years.
In Paris, Elizabeth’s accession was greeted with unconcealed scorn. The Guises swiftly proclaimed their niece to be ‘Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland’, challenging Elizabeth’s right to succeed her elder sister on the grounds of bastardy and Protestantism. As she had indeed been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament in 1536, and since Mary Tudor’s most vaunted policy had been to restore Catholicism, returning England to the papal fold after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and burning over three hundred Protestants at the stake for their faith, the Guise claim was not so outrageous.
In order to reinforce and publicize it, the Cardinal ordered the heraldic arms of England to be blazoned with those of France and Scotland on all the plate and furniture belonging to the household of the King-Dauphin and Queen-Dauphine. This was highly provocative, tantamount to establishing a rival monarchy in exile. It was to taint the relationship of Mary and Elizabeth for the rest of their lives.
In the New Year, the Guise campaign intensified. Letters and official documents were sent out to the rulers of Europe styling Francis and Mary as the ‘King and Queen Dauphins of Scotland, England and Ireland’. At the wedding of Princess Claude, Henry II’s second daughter, to the Duke of Lorraine, Mary’s heraldic arms were quartered with those of England on the coat armour of her servants.
By the summer, ushers clearing a path for Mary on her way to chapel cried out: ‘Make way for the Queen of England!’ Her heraldic arms were further embellished. Above the dynastic symbols of England, Scotland, and France was placed a closed or ‘imperial’ crown to represent Mary’s ‘Franco-British’ empire. Beneath (in French) was the legend:
The arms of Marie, Queen-Dauphine of France,
The noblest Lady in earth. For till5 advance
Of Scotland Queen. And of England also,
Of Ireland also. God hath provided so.
A young and fiery Protestant called Nicholas Throckmorton, whom Elizabeth had appointed as her special ambassador to France, translated the verse into English, then sent it to Cecil with a drawing of the heraldic arms. Cecil filed it carefully away in his already fast-growing archive on Mary, where it became one of the documents he most often referred to over the next thirty years when preparing memos for Elizabeth about her.
Meanwhile, the Cardinal of Lorraine strenuously lobbied the Pope to rule against Elizabeth and in favour of Mary. He was incensed to discover that he was opposed by Philip II’s agents. France and Spain were still at war, which made Philip keen to make terms with Elizabeth, to whom he also made a speedy proposal of marriage. Philip wanted to preserve the dynastic alliance between England, Spain, and the Netherlands first envisaged by his father, Charles V. It was his guarantee that his agglomeration of territories in Europe and the New World would never be successfully challenged by France.
As a loyal Catholic, Philip saw the logic of Mary’s dynastic claim. Spain had never forgotten the insult it had received when Henry VIII had divorced Philip’s great-aunt Catherine of Aragon. Philip had no wish to alienate the young Queen of Scots, who as the leading Catholic claimant might be useful to him in the future. But when Mary Tudor unexpectedly died, his instinctive reaction was to try to marry Elizabeth, who was shrewd enough to entertain his overtures until he had committed himself to support her against Mary.
Just when it had seemed that the English throne might be within Mary’s reach, it was snatched away. The Pope refused to declare in her favour, making it impossible to justify the claim that Elizabeth was illegitimate. The Pope simply could not afford to offend Philip, whose forces held the balance of power in Italy. Philip’s support was also essential to the success of the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation assembly that the Pope had summoned to rejuvenate the ideals of Catholicism and take a firm stand against the Protestants.
If this were not enough, a volte-face had taken place in France itself. Henry II, taking stock of the likely consequences of the Guise dynastic project, decided to draw back. He began to realize the magnitude of what it involved, and had started to resent the ambitions of Mary’s uncles. When their arch-rival the Constable Montmorency was finally released from his prison in Brussels, royal policy began to change. The Constable had worked on a peace plan with Spain while in captivity. He and his chief ally, Diane de Poitiers, were now vigorously countering a dynastic policy that they both knew could lead to an endless war. Mary’s claims and personal prestige would have to be sacrificed for the greater good of France.
Montmorency was reunited with Henry II at Amiens on 10 October 1558, where he proceeded to lay all the problems since the resumption of the war at the door of the Guises. The King listened, and signed a truce with Philip. The threat of the war spreading to Scotland, England, and northern Italy was just too great. France was almost bankrupt. Spain, too, was exhausted and anxious for peace. Elizabeth also wanted peace, which would enable her to move forward and enact a Protestant religious settlement without the fear of a French invasion.
When negotiations opened between the three countries at Cercamp, a consensus quickly emerged. The talks were suspended on 1 December, once the news of Mary Tudor’s death was confirmed. They were then resumed on the neutral territory of Cateau-Cambrésis, where, on 2 and 3 April 1559, two treaties were signed: one between France and England and the other between Spain and France.
The treaties involved dynastic and territorial clauses. Philip II, whose offer of marriage Elizabeth politely declined, would marry Princess Elizabeth, Henry II’s eldest daughter, and Henry’s sister Marguerite would marry Philip’s ally, Duke Emmanuel-Philibert. The French abandoned their claims to Savoy and northern Italy, but were rewarded with the return of St-Quentin and its hinterland. France was to retain Calais for eight years, after which the town was to be returned to England or an indemnity paid in lieu. Lastly, Henry II undertook to ‘pacify’ Scotland.
Such terms struck at the heart of Guise power. Montmorency and Diane had staged a spectacular comeback. They and their clients again dominated the conseil des affaires, the nerve centre of power-broking at Henry II’s court. When a suit by the Duke of Guise to obtain the office of Grand Master of the King’s Household permanently as a reward for his victory at Calais the previous year was rebuffed, he read the signals and left for Joinville to lick his wounds.
While the Duke sulked and his brother plotted, a disappointed and bewildered Mary tried her best to appear regal and composed. Although Scotland was not strictly a party to the diplomacy, a subordinate treaty had been made with England at the Berwickshire village of Upsettlington. On 28 May 1559, in a chapel beside the Louvre, Mary and Francis ratified this treaty, closely observed by Henry II and Catherine de Medici.
Since Francis had a stutter, Mary did the talking. She said, ‘as the Queen of England was her cousin and good sister, she and the King her husband were glad of the peace’. They would do everything in their power to preserve it. She spoke confidently and with apparent conviction; her words were taken as an olive branch. No claims were made to the English succession. Mary had been forced into a U-turn. The dynastic ambitions of the Guises, previously the main aim of Henry II’s foreign policy, now stood in the way of French interests.
At the reception at the palace of the Tournelles that followed the ratification of the treaty of Upsettlington, the Guises were nowhere to be seen. Mary was attended not by her uncles, but by the Constable. He took the opportunity to reassure the English ambassadors that he had always been a friend of England, and was now so more than ever. Elizabeth, he continued, was ‘a virtuous and worthy Queen’. This was the new official line in French foreign policy and Mary had to stick with it whether she liked it or not. When she wrote to Montmorency afterwards, she referred to his ‘good and happy enterprise’.
As Mary gained in experience, she began to see how fickle her allies could be, and how she could quickly become the victim of a change in the balance between the factions. To her uncles in 1559, the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was a sell-out; but if Henry II had approved it, Mary had to take it or leave it. Directly after the ratification ceremony at the Louvre, the King disappeared to the houses of the Constable and Diane de Poitiers for a week’s holiday, more than satisfied that his policy was once again in safe hands.
When Mary came under pressure, the first thing to suffer was her health. Exactly this happened in the spring of 1559, when she found herself caught between the policy of her uncles and Henry II and the Constable.
In March, a report reached Cecil, now firmly entrenched in his position as Elizabeth’s chief minister, that Mary was seriously ill. Four days before the ratification ceremony, Throckmorton, one of the English representatives and Cecil’s intimate friend and confidant, said Mary looked ‘very pale and green, and withal short breathed and it is whispered here among them that she cannot long live’.
On 18 June, she was seen to be ‘evil at ease’ in church and ‘they were fain to bring her wine from the altar’ to prevent her from fainting. Three days later, she collapsed. A week afterwards, she was ‘suffering from a certain incurable malady’.
Whether this illness was caused by stress or was perhaps Mary’s first attack of the condition known as acute intermittent porphyria, a worse calamity lay in store. At the end of June, another three-day tournament was held at the palace of the Tournelles. At five o’clock on the 30th, the forty-year-old King returned to the lists. He had insisted on a rematch with the captain of the garde écossaise, Gabriel de Lorges, the Count of Montgommery, whom he had beaten in their joust, but who had gained points for striking him with his lance.
Diane and Catherine did their best to dissuade Henry. But he refused to listen. Montgommery was ordered to re-arm. At the first blow, his lance hit the King’s chest, then slid up the length of his body armour to his helmet, where it shattered, allowing fragments to slip under the visor. A large fragment hit the King’s forehead, lacerating the flesh; another pierced his left eye. Henry was carried indoors, the finest surgeons summoned. They hoped at first to save him, but the brain had been touched. One moment he was coherent and talking normally, the next he was paralysed or seized by convulsions.
Mary and the Dauphin watched day and night with the rest of the royal family at the foot of Henry’s bed. He died on 10 July of a massive stroke. The Constable stood guard over the corpse while Mary’s exultant uncles brought her and Francis from the Tournelles to the Louvre in a carriage. The Guise brothers were suddenly back in power.
Francis was proclaimed King of France, after which the court went into mourning. Then everyone dispersed. The new King was taken by Mary’s relatives to Meudon, the Guise château near Paris. She herself went straight to the royal apartments at St-Germain. She was just five months short of her seventeenth birthday. She was also now Queen of France.