The news of the death of Mary of Guise was known in France on 18th June, but was kept from her daughter until 28th June – with good reason, as it turned out, for Mary Stuart’s grief when she finally did receive the news was heart-rending, and she underwent one of the physical collapses which inordinate sorrow was apt to induce in her. Michiel, the Venetian ambassador, had already paid tribute to Mary’s devotion to her mother, saying that ‘she loved her mother incredibly, and much more than daughters usually love their mothers’. Now he reported: ‘The death of the Queen Regent of Scotland was concealed from the most Christian Queen [Mary Stuart] till the day before yesterday, when it was at length told her by the Cardinal of Lorraine; for which her Majesty showed and still shows such signs of grief, that during the greater part of yesterday she passed from one agony to another.’*16 Nor were poor Mary of Guise’s earthly troubles entirely terminated by her death, for even her wretched dropsical corpse proved a source of dispute. A funeral oration was made for her in Notre Dame on 12th August, six weeks after her death, but it was not until October that her lead-lined coffin was allowed to be conveyed to France, because the Scottish preachers disapproved of the superstitious rites which they feared during her obsequies. In March 1561 her body was removed to Fécamp in Normandy and in July taken to Rheims, where it was finally buried in the church of the convent of St Pierre of which her sister Renée was abbess.
Mary’s love for her mother spurred her forward in her knowledge of Scottish politics; her appreciation of French and English politics was spurred on by her own increasing estimation of her position as queen of France and heiress – or rightful possessor – of the English throne. A few days after Henry II’s death, Throckmorton commented that everything was being done by the queen of Scotland, who took a great interest in all matters around her. Mary was also acute enough to send for an inventory of the crown jewels, many of which had passed into the hands of Diane de Poitiers, immediately after the death of her father-in-law, with a view to acquiring what were now her rightful property as queen of France. Throckmorton’s view of Mary Stuart has a particular interest. As English ambassador he had a definite motive for noting the twists and turns of her character as it developed; not only did she claim the English crown for her own, but she was also more plausibly the heiress to the throne. Life was uncertain, and Elizabeth was childless and unmarried; if Mary did not actually acquire the English throne by force, she might easily do so by inheritance. It thus behoved Throckmorton to keep a watchful eye on the nature and qualities of this young girl, whom the random chance of fate might one day establish as his own mistress.
It is significant that the Mary Stuart of Throckmorton’s dispatches is a more intelligent and mature girl than the beautiful wilful delicate creature of, for example, the Venetian ambassador’s reports to his own Italian court. Mary showed a hint of imperiousness in her words to Throckmorton concerning her refusal, with Francis, to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. ‘My subjects in Scotland do their duty in nothing,’ she told him, ‘nor have they performed their part in one thing that belongeth to them. I am their Queen and so they call me, but they use me not so … They must be taught to know their duties.’17 Earlier when Throckmorton was taken to have an interview with the royalties in February 1560 the preponderance of the conversation was had with the Queen Mother Catherine, but at the end of the interview when Catherine made an observation to the effect that she wished to be on good terms with Elizabeth, Mary did intervene. ‘“Yes,” she said, “the Queen my good sister may be assured to have a better neighbour of me being her cousin, than of the rebels, and so I pray you signify.”’18 The point may not have been a good one in terms of power politics – since Elizabeth might well prefer rebels across the border to an active young queen, however friendly, however cousinly – but it was one worth making from Mary’s point of view, and shows that her political intelligence was beginning to emerge from the cocoon of the cardinal’s tutelage.
The cardinal had been the instructor of her youth, but as queen of France, Mary had a new mentor in the art of politics – her mother-in-law Catherine de Médicis. It was no coincidence that Throckmorton had found the two queens sitting beside each other in February 1560. The records show that during the seventeen months in which Francis II reigned as king of France, Queen Catherine and Queen Mary were constantly in each other’s company, and in fact Queen Catherine, far from being excluded from the source of power by the death of her husband, formed a royal triumvirate at the top of the pyramid of the court; as the mother on whom the king depended emotionally, and as the queen dowager who had authorized the Guises to assume power, she was now of infinitely more account in the counsels of the kingdom than she had been during the reign of Henry II. There has been much speculation concerning the relations of Catherine de Médicis and Mary Stuart: it has been suggested that Catherine disliked her daughter-in-law so intensely that she was finally capable of poisoning her son Francis, in order to bring to an end Mary Stuart’s reign as queen of France. A great deal has been made of the story that Mary openly despised Catherine for her lowly birth, and described her contemptuously as nothing but the daughter of a merchant, the story resting on the word of the Cardinal de Santa Croce, the papal nuncio in France.19 Whether or not Mary, with the imprudence of youth, made this highly unwise remark, it is certainly easy enough to imagine that an unattractive older woman should be jealous of an exceptionally attractive younger one, with the additional complications of a throne to exacerbate their feelings, quite apart from the traditionally trying relationships of mother and daughter-in-law. Yet the fact is that whatever her private feelings, outwardly Catherine exhibited positively maternal kindness towards Mary during her period as queen of France, and gave Mary no reason to suppose that she was anything but most amicably inclined towards her.
In December 1559 the English envoys reported that Catherine and Mary listened daily to a sermon in the chapel, or in their mutual dining-chamber. The interviews which ambassadors held with the royalties throughout this period generally found both queens together, with Mary sitting on Catherine’s right hand. Often Mary and Catherine would be installed in one palace while Francis was away hunting based in another. In April, Mary was deeply depressed by the bad news from Scotland and it was Catherine who took it upon herself to comfort her, just as the previous year Mary had taken to heart Catherine’s own grief over the death of Henry. When Throckmorton had an interview with Mary on 6th August, Catherine was present and Mary requested Throckmorton to speak to the queen mother first.20 Catherine was also present at the interview which Francis and Mary granted to Throckmorton on 15th September at Saint-Germain, and she was together with the young couple when Condé was arrested on 31st October. The natural trend of court life was to throw the two queens together in conditions of extreme intimacy, a state which appeared to be accepted by both women with perfect satisfaction.
Catherine had indeed been so sternly schooled in the previous reign in the art of maintaining friendly relations with those in positions of power that it would have been inconceivable for her to have displayed any sort of jealousy of Mary in public, while Francis remained on the throne. But to understand the true feelings of Catherine de Médicis towards Mary, it is necessary to appreciate that despite all her cunning, Queen Catherine was fundamentally not a political woman but a mother. The instincts of motherhood, gratified at long last after a hideous period of infertility, remained her strongest emotions. Thus she judged every situation from the point of view of how it might affect the welfare of her children; her desire for political strength sprang from her conviction that the more power she possessed, the more help she could give them. Mary, as ally or rival, was judged primarily from the point of view of Francis. While Francis lived, while Mary was his wife and as such a necessary adjunct to his life and happiness, Catherine would treat her with all the warmth and consideration which was her due; but once Francis was dead, once Mary was no longer the helpmeet of one child but a potential threat to the happi
ness of another, the picture was liable to be very different. As Regnier de la Planche truly observed of Catherine after the death of Francis, when she finally became the official regent of France: for the past twenty-two years she had plenty of leisure to consider the humours and fashions of the whole French court, so that she understood very well how to play her hand so as to win the game at last.21
Mary in her turn did not fail to be influenced by the personality of her mother-in-law. Not only did she imbibe a thoroughly dynastic approach to the business of being a queen, but from Catherine she learnt also that intrigue was a necessary, even enjoyable part of politics. These two thoroughly feminine lessons – that the considerations of the child or unborn child, the continuance of the dynasty, should be placed above all others, and that the most effective weapons in a queen’s hand were those of diplomatic intrigue – were impressed on Mary consciously or unconsciously during the seventeen months in which she virtually shared the throne of France with Catherine de Médicis. The second lesson did not fall on particularly fertile ground: Mary, unlike Catherine, was not by nature a talented or adept intriguer. Yet she was to become an enthusiastic one. The effect of Catherine’s early lessons can certainly be discerned in Mary’s later career in Scotland and England.
Despite the temporary victory of the Catholic party at Amboise, the internal situation in France remained riven with economic difficulty and religious crisis. In France’s desperate financial situation, it was generally agreed by August, by Huguenots such as Coligny as well as Catholics such as the Guises, that the only hope lay in trying to establish some sort of civil unity. But it was easier to call for unity than to achieve it. Both sides had their own notions of what was necessary. At a meeting of the Grand Council, Coligny spoke out boldly in favour of the return of the Estates, and the diminution of the king’s guard, which he claimed was dividing Francis from his people. On 26th August, the Estates were convoked for the following December, and a date in January was chosen for a national synod of the French Church, provided the Pope should not have already announced an ecumenical council. But the lost tranquillity of France was not so easily restored. Still fearing for his life, Francis left Fontainebleau and went first to St Germain-en-Laye for safety, and then on to Orléans, which, with his wife and mother, he reached on 18th October. Here, surrounded by his army, he felt his person to be more secure, unaware that in his case the ravages of disease were more to be feared than the cold steel of the assassin. As the Spanish ambassador reported gloomily to his master that the religious situation in France was going from bad to worse,22 the prince of Condé decided to gamble on a personal appeal to King Francis, whom he trusted to wean from the side of the Guises by the magnetism of his own physical presence. His trust was misplaced. On Condé’s arrival in Orléans, Francis, on the instructions of the Guises, reproached him tearfully with his enterprises against the government. The prince of Condé was arrested, and on 26th November condemned to death.
But as the Guises’ own fortunes had been transformed by the sudden death of Henry II, so Condé in his turn was to be saved by the workings of providence. The danger of ambitious hopes founded on the frail life of a solitary human being was once more demonstrated. King Francis announced his intention of setting off from Orléans to a prolonged hunting expedition, in the forests of Chenonceaux and Chambord, which would last him until the end of the month. But on Saturday 16th November, while still at Orléans, he returned from a day’s hunting in the country, and complained of violent ear-ache. On the Sunday he fell down in a faint while at vespers in the chapel of the Jacobins. The weather had turned unexpectedly icy that November, and the Guises were criticized by the Spanish ambassador for letting the king hunt when the weather was so cold. Nevertheless at first neither the watchful ambassadors, the vultures of the sixteenth-century court, nor the anguished adherents of Condé had any idea how serious the situation was.
Francis’s health had always been the Achilles’ heel of the Guises’ plans: his breath was foetid; his physical appearance was so alarming, with red patches on his livid cheeks, that it actually gave birth to sinister rumours that he had leprosy; from this rumour spread the still more disgusting gossip that Francis needed to bathe in the blood of young children, in order to cure himself. The peasants thus hid their children from the king as he passed, convinced that otherwise this young Herod would avail himself of their bodies. Subsequently both Catholics and Protestants accused each other of having invented this nauseating calumny: the cardinal was said to have invented it in order to pave the way for the Guises to ascend the French throne, and the Huguenots were accused of trying to blacken the reputation of the Catholic king. The true explanation of Francis’s facial condition was probably eczema, caused by the continual irritation of a purulent discharge from his ear; this originated from a chronic inflammation of the middle ear, arising from the constant respiratory infection of his childhood. When the king fell down in a faint on the Sunday, a large swelling appeared behind his left ear, caused by this inflammation spreading to the tissues above and below it.23
The Guises, whatever their private fears, were desperate to hide the gravity of his condition, and suspended the posts; they announced to the court merely that the fogs of the Loire had given the king a cold in the ear. The Venetian ambassador was sufficiently hoodwinked by the story to report that the two queens Mary and Catherine were fussing over the king, who was not actually ill. On 19th November the Spanish ambassador asked for, and got, an audience of the king, but was stopped at the door by the cardinal, who said that the king was suddenly worse. Chantonay immediately felt suspicious, and now noticed troubled glances among the Guises. Ridiculous rumours began to fly round the court: that a Huguenot valet had thrown a mortal powder into the king’s nightcap, or that an Orléans barber had poured poison into his ear, while doing his hair. Once more the occult art of astrology was called into play to cast light on the situation, and it was recalled that it had been predicted that Francis should not live long – a prophecy, incidentally, which had been made by doctors as well as astrologers, on the grounds of Francis’s health by the former, and of his horoscope by the latter. But the Venetian ambassador personally believed that much of Catherine’s sorrow was caused by her recollection of these predictions.24
The intense interest of the court in the illness of their sovereign was heightened by the fact that the fate of Condé hung in the balance. If Francis died, he would be succeeded by his brother Charles. As Charles was only eleven, there could on this occasion be no question of withholding the regency from the man generally believed to have the best claim to it – the first prince of the blood, King Antoine of Navarre – who was, of course, Condé’s elder brother. King Antoine’s first act as regent was certain to be the reprieve and release of Condé. If Francis lived, Condé would die. If Francis died, Condé would live. In face of such interest, it was impossible for the Guises to continue to cast a cloud of obscurity over the nature of the king’s disease forever. By 20th November, the Venetian ambassador was able to write off a full and accurate description of the king’s symptoms. On 27th November, Throckmorton informed Elizabeth that the king’s illness was now sufficiently serious for his doctors to doubt his ability to survive it; in any case it was thought that he could not expect to live very long, having wrecked his health in the first place by too much riding and exercise even before this ‘evil accident’. The Venetian ambassador now learnt from someone who had been in his chamber that the king was almost delirious. Even so, there were those who still believed that the illness was nothing more than a device of the Guises to prevent the supplication of Condé being put before Francis.25
Alas, the wretched little king, far from being the victim of a Guise plot, was the infinitely more tragic victim of his own constitution. He alternated between fevers and violent crises, followed by bouts of speechlessness. In addition to the natural sufferings of his condition, he also endured purgations and bleedings. On 28th November, a massive dose of rhubarb br
ought him some relief, but two days later the headaches and sickness redoubled. The watch in his bedroom was maintained ceaselessly by Mary and Catherine, whose joint role in his agony was to act endlessly as nurse and comforters. On 3rd December, it was reported to Venice by their ambassador that Queen Mary, Queen Catherine and the king’s brothers were taking part in processions to the churches of Orléans, to solicit divine aid for the king’s health.26 Otherwise Mary spent the last weeks of her husband’s life in patient, silent nursing in his darkened chamber. Unlike their niece the Guises bore the king’s affliction with little patience: their mental agonies at the prospect opened before them by his illness seemed almost as acute as the king’s physical sufferings. In their frenzy, they attacked the doctors for doing no more for the king than they would have done for a common beggar; and in their pursuit of remedies they even turned to the stone of alchemy.
Neither Mary’s patient nursing, nor that of Catherine, nor the rages of the Guises, nor their manifold remedies, affected in any way the ineluctable process of the king’s illness. The inflammation was now spreading upwards into the lobe of the brain, above the middle ear: on Monday 2nd December, there was an apparent improvement in his condition due to the temporary release of tension when the tumour was pierced. But the inflammation, having now reached the brain, formed an abscess within it. With the formation of the abscess, nothing could save the French king from death. By the evening of 3rd December, Francis was in extremis. On Thursday 5th December, he fell into a swoon. At some point in his agonies, he is said to have murmured a prayer taught to him by the cardinal: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my ministers have committed in my name and in my authority.’ But on the Thursday, at a time variously reported to be five, eleven or ten, by La Planche, Throckmorton and Chantonay, the king’s ordeal was at an end. A month off his seventeenth birthday, Francis II was dead.