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Overview
Mary, Queen of Scots continues to intrigue both historians and the general public—but the story of her mother, Marie de Guise, is much less well known. A political power in her own right, she was born into the powerful and ambitious Lorraine family, spending her formative years at the dazzling, licentious court of François I. Although briefly courted by Henry VIII, she instead married his nephew, James V of Scotland, in 1538.
James’s premature death four years later left their six-day-old daughter, Mary, as queen, and presented Marie with the formidable challenge of winning the support of the Scottish people and protecting her daughter’s threatened birthright. Content until now to remain in the background and play the part of the obedient wife, Marie spent the next eighteen years effectively governing Scotland—devoting her considerable intellect, courage, and energy to safeguarding her daughter’s inheritance by using a deft mixture of cunning, charm, determination, and tolerance. This biography, from the author of Marie Antoinette: An Intimate History, tells the story and offers a fresh assessment of this most fascinating and underappreciated of sixteenth-century female rulers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781473848399 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 547,483 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Death of a King December 1542
The windows of Linlithgow Palace, an imposing royal residence with the look of a French château about 17 miles to the west of Edinburgh, were shrouded in darkness as the messenger, dressed in the scarlet and gold livery of the Stuart royal family, rode through the gates and dismounted from his horse in the courtyard. He had ridden through the snow and sleet of a wintry night from Falkland Palace, another royal residence over 40 miles away, and was in no mood to do anything other than bark an order to be taken directly to the Queen, who was recovering from childbirth and asleep in her sumptuous rooms overlooking the loch.
As he raced up the stone staircase to the royal apartments, the messenger would have been aware of the shocked faces of the courtiers and servants who had tumbled out of bed as soon as word went round that news had arrived from Falkland, where the King lay mortally ill. After his resounding defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss by the forces of his uncle Henry VIII twenty days earlier, the King had either been felled by dysentery or by an emotional breakdown. The arrival of an official messenger so late at night was not suggestive of good news and they would have watched him nervously as he made his way through the rooms of the royal apartments, with their tapestry covered walls, intricately painted ceilings and polished and gilded wood panelling, to the Queen.
Marie de Guise, Queen of Scotland, an unusually tall woman in her late twenties, with long chestnut red hair and clear grey eyes, would have been woken by her ladies-in-waiting as soon as news of the messenger's arrival reached her rooms, and it is likely that she hastily dressed and received him beside the blazing fire in her closet, surrounded by her household and with her infant daughter, just 6 days old and named Mary after both her mother and the Virgin Mary, upon whose feast day she had been born.
As expected, the news from Falkland Palace was not good. In fact, it was disastrous. James V, the 30-year-old King of Scotland, had died a few hours earlier of his fever, raving to the very end about his ignominious defeat and lamenting the fact that he had no legitimate sons to succeed him. The tiny baby, less than a week old, who lay asleep in her beautifully carved wooden crib at the side of Marie de Guise, was now Queen of Scotland.
As the now Dowager Queen listened carefully to the messenger's report of her husband's final hours, her mind would have been working fast, weighing up the unenviable situation that she now found herself in. Although she and her husband were more or less estranged, she must have felt sorrow for a life prematurely snuffed out, thankful for the happiness they had shared at the beginning of their marriage and profound regret for the loss of his support.
However, regardless of whatever she felt privately, it was not in the nature of Marie de Guise, strictly raised by those austere great ladies, her mother Antoinette de Bourbon and grandmother Philippa of Guelders, to lose control of her emotions. After thanking the messenger, she would have retired further into her rooms to take proper stock of what lay ahead, while snow fell outside her windows and covered the great park that surrounded Linlithgow, further isolating it from the world.
Once safely ensconced in private with the infant Queen and her most trusted attendants, many of whom had come with her from France in the spring of 1538, Marie would have considered her next move, only too aware of the storm clouds brewing beyond the thick stone walls of Linlithgow. As far as royal successions went, this one involved the worst possible scenario for an already beleaguered Scotland: instead of the desired adult male heir, the new ruler was both an infant and female which, in the sixteenth century, was considered an ominous and undesirable combination.
There was an unfortunate precedent too in the fact that her dead husband had succeeded to his own father's throne in similar circumstances at just 17 months old after James IV had been slaughtered, along with thousands of Scottish soldiers, by the forces of his brother in law, Henry VIII, at Flodden. His mother, Margaret Tudor, had learned the news of her husband's death in the very same rooms at Linlithgow, but there, Marie de Guise determined, the similarity between their situations would end. The feckless Margaret had quickly proved herself to be an inadequate regent for her infant son, having fled back to her brother in England within two years of her husband's death, leaving her son behind.
As she shivered in her fur-lined robes and stared out across the snow covered landscape, it no doubt crossed Marie's mind that, according to the terms of the marriage contract, she was now free to return to France and her own close-knit family, which included her beloved 5-year-old son, the Duc de Longueville, product of her first marriage. However, tempting though this idea might have been, she resolutely pushed it from her mind. From now on, her place was in Scotland with her baby daughter, who could not possibly be entrusted to the Scottish nobles, whom Marie already suspected would not waste an instant before brokering a deal with the hostile English.
After all, it was too convenient that the heir to the English throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, was, at just 5 years old, close enough in age to the baby Queen of Scotland to be considered an eligible contender for her hand. Marie was no fool and it would have occurred to her that as soon as the news of her husband's untimely death arrived in London along with the news of his defeat in battle, the indomitable Henry VIII would start moving heaven and earth in order to secure the little Queen for his son and by extension, Scotland for himself.
However, if he thought that the widowed Queen Marie was going to be a pushover like his sister Margaret had been during her own brief period of regency thirty years earlier, he had underestimated her. It would not take long, however, before events showed him that here, in this member of the noble Lorraine family, was an opponent worthy of respect and it was not for nothing that her personal emblem was a crown set on top of a rock surrounded by a turbulent sea, surmounted by the motto 'Adhuc stat' – 'And yet it stands'.
CHAPTER 2One for All
Squabbles over succession were not unusual within Marie's family – after all, her great-great-grandfather, Good King René d'Anjou, had famously squandered his family's fortune on pursuing his claim to the thrones of Naples and Jerusalem, while his youngest daughter, Marguerite, as the wife of Henry VI, became one of the main protagonists in the dynastic row commonly known as the Wars of the Roses. However, it was not from the formidable firebrand Marguerite, but rather from her meek and more dutiful elder sister, Yolande, Duchesse de Lorraine, that Marie would claim descent.
The 1445 marriage of Yolande d'Anjou and her cousin, Frédéric, Comte de Vaudémont, put an end to yet another dynastic argument over the fate of the vast Duchy of Lorraine, which had been fought over by the young couple's respective fathers for years and was currently held by the bride's mother, Isabelle. However, when Yolande inherited the duchy in 1473, she immediately passed it over to her pugnacious and extremely ambitious 22-year-old son, René, whom she felt was better equipped to deal with the predatory advances into their territory of both Louis XI and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
René's subsequent attempts to secure his Lorraine inheritance embroiled him in a long and arduous conflict with Louis and Charles, which at one particularly low point in November 1475, lost him his capital city of Nancy, the very heartland of the Lorraine territory. However, the war eventually ended in triumph for René after his forces defeated and killed Charles of Burgundy in the battle to regain Nancy in 1477. Although his dispute with King Louis would grumble on for a few more years, this victory against the powerful Duke of Burgundy would serve to boost and underline the previously rather tenuous prestige of the Lorraine family, and also secure what had hitherto been an unstable inheritance.
Of course, after securing the family lands, it was inevitable that the victorious René's thoughts, like those of many a conquering hero, should immediately turn to founding a robust dynasty to inherit the fruits of his labours. After the annulment of his first childless marriage to Jeanne d'Harcourt, Comtesse de Tancarville, René took as his second wife Philippa of Guelders, the twin sister of the Duke of Guelders. A noblewoman of impeccable lineage, Philippa of Guelders also had crucial dynastic links to the French kings, the dukes of Burgundy, the kings of Scotland (her aunt Mary had married James II of Scotland) and also the Hapsburg emperors, who coveted her family's vast domains in the Netherlands and would eventually take them over after the death of her brother.
This exceedingly grand marriage took place in Orléans on 1 September 1485 and formed the basis of the new, much stronger and less vulnerable Lorraine dynasty, which would go on to dominate European politics for the next 300 years thanks to a mixture of charm, cunning, judicious marriage and single-minded ambition, eventually becoming Holy Roman Emperors themselves in the eighteenth century.
While their eldest son, Antoine, inherited the duchy of Lorraine in December 1508 following the death of his father in a hunting accident, it was with the fortunes of her second son, Claude – the future father of Marie de Guise – that Philippa most interested herself; he was acknowledged by the rest of their family, with some resentment, to be her favourite child. Certainly, there was concern over the legitimacy of Antoine, the elder Lorraine boy, because his father's first wife, Jeanne, was still alive and well at the time of Antoine's birth. The Papal bull that formally ended the first marriage did not arrive in France for several years, although fortunately, it did materialise before Claude was born.
Born on 20 October 1496 at the Château de Condé, in what is now modern day Custines, Claude de Lorraine, Comte de Guise, was the epitome of the accomplished, charming and erudite Renaissance nobleman, equally at home on the ballroom as he was on the battlefield. He demonstrated courage and skill at war and on the jousting and hunting fields and was also known for his enjoyment of more decorous courtly pursuits like music, tennis, gambling and dancing. However, his unusual height and fair-haired good looks, which would be inherited by both his daughter and granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots, gave rise to malicious whispers around court that the Lorraine family were more Germanic than French.
Thanks to his own experiences of battling for Lorraine, Claude's father was all too aware of the issues that a disputed inheritance could provoke and so he determined to ensure that his own affairs were fully in order before he died. His will, therefore, divided his property between his two elder sons; Antoine inherited Lorraine, while Claude was to receive the sizeable family lands in France, which included Guise, Aumale, Mayenne, Joinville, Elbeuf, Lambesc and a whole host of other fiefdoms. To ensure that there could be no doubt about the younger boy's right to hold territory in France, and no opportunity for him to attempt to seize his elder brother's lands using the doubts about his legitimacy as an excuse, he decided that 9-year-old Claude and his younger brother, Jean (who had been earmarked for a career in the church and was, in fact, made Bishop of Metz at the age of 7), should be raised as naturalised French men by their mother's cousin, Louise de Savoie, Duchesse d'Angoulême, at her court at Blois in the Loire Valley. The two youngest Lorraine boys, Louis and François, would have to fend for themselves.
This happened to be a fortuitous arrangement in more ways than one because Louise's son, François, who was two years older than his cousin Claude, was heir presumptive to the French throne should Louis XII die without any legitimate sons. As might have been expected (and as the ambitious René and Philippa very probably hoped), the boys became close friends, bonding over their mutual love of jousting and hunting and sharing the same charming, chivalrous manners. When François took up residence with the court in Paris, it was naturally assumed that Claude would accompany him and it was here that he really began to make his mark, impressing everyone with his sporting prowess and friendly. It was even rumoured for a while that he might be engaged to Louis XII's younger daughter, Renée, but this seems unlikely to have been true.
François, Duc d'Angoulême, had been betrothed to Madame Claude, the eldest daughter of Louis XII and Duchess of Brittany in her own right, since 1506; the match being seen as a way of keeping her enormous inheritance as part of France and of strengthening François' own claim to the throne, Madame Claude herself being unable to inherit due to the Salic Law, which stipulated that the French crown could only be passed on to male heirs.
In 1512, when the 16-year-old Claude de Lorraine first arrived at court, the marriage still seemed to be quite far off due to the youth of the bride to be, but François still paid courtesy visits to his affianced in her apartments in the Hôtel de Tournelles in the Marais district of Paris. It was during one of these visits, while loitering around the Princess' apartments as he waited for his friend, that Claude first met the 19-year-old Antoinette de Bourbon, daughter of the Comte de Vendôme and Princesse Marie de Luxembourg, Comtesse de Saint-Pol.
Antoinette was not a beauty, but she was pleasing to look at with long auburn hair and sharp blue eyes and was also strong willed, intelligent and affectionate. Although her dowry of 40,000 livres was rather on the small size, her lineage was more impressive even than that of Claude's intimidating mother, Philippa of Guelders, with close links to several royal and notable families across Europe and a line of descent from Saint Louis himself, as well as several Holy Roman Emperors on her mother's side of the family. Furthermore, her great aunt Charlotte de Savoie had been married to Louis XI, while another, Bona, was married to the Duke of Milan and her great grandmother, Anne of Cyprus, Duchesse de Savoie, claimed descent from the infamous Melusine de Lusignan, who was allegedly able to transform into a sort of mermaid when she came into contact with water. Marriage to Antoinette de Bourbon would mean marrying into royalty.
It was a dazzling match for an ambitious young nobleman and Claude apparently wasted no time in urging his friend François to use all his influence to seal the deal, keenly aware that as the younger son of a family, and despite the efforts of his father, he would never be regarded as entirely French and might not be as tempting a prospect to his future in-laws as might be hoped. However, all went to plan and Claude and Antoinette were married in front of the royal family and all of the court on 9 June 1513, in a splendid ceremony at the beautiful royal church of St Paul in Paris.
Although the new Comte and Comtesse de Guise were great favourites at court, the latter at least seems to have preferred country living and was keen to set herself up as chatelaine of her husband's estates. While her formidable mother in law, Philippa of Guelders, kept a tight control on the Lorraine family domains, the young couple were unable to set up home at Joinville, which would otherwise have been their main seat, and took up residence in the charming town of Bar-le-Duc in northern France instead. It was in the medieval fortress there on 20 November 1515, that their first child, a daughter, was born. The baby was baptised Marie twelve days later in the château chapel with her two grandmothers, Philippa of Guelders and Marie de Luxembourg, who were both present at her birth, standing as godmothers, while her uncle Jean, the Cardinal de Lorraine, acted as godfather.
During the sixteenth century, childbirth was regarded as a great female mystery and a time when women would retreat to a hushed feminine world to await the arrival of their baby, attended only by close female family members, maid servants and midwives. Male doctors would be admitted only in emergencies and even the baby's father would find himself excluded until his child was safely born, relegated to a lengthy and tense waiting game elsewhere. However, while Claude was almost certainly close at hand for his wife's subsequent labours, unfortunate circumstances meant that he was far away in Italy when she gave birth to his first child.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Scourge of Henry VIII"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Melanie Clegg.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dramatis Personae 6
Chapter 1 The Death of a King 10
Chapter 2 One for All 13
Chapter 3 Dynastic Ambitions 28
Chapter 4 Mademoiselle de Guise 40
Chapter 5 The Auld Alliance 53
Chapter 6 A Farewell to France 67
Chapter 7 Queen of Scots 80
Chapter 8 The Baby Princes 94
Chapter 9 Solway Moss 106
Chapter 10 The Little Queen 119
Chapter 11 The Rough Wooing 132
Chapter 12 The Defence of the Realm 147
Chapter 13 The Homecoming 160
Chapter 14 Queen Regent 174
Chapter 15 And Still it Stands 188
Afterword 200
Bibliography 202
