According to John Knox, Mary Stuart had thus been sold to the devil, and dispatched to France ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm, and for her final destruction’.22 In the eyes of Mary of Guise, whatever her personal unhappiness, her ewe-lamb had thus been snatched from danger in ever-changing and ever-perilous Scotland, and sent on her way to the glorious future which awaited her at the French court. Of Mary herself, nothing is known of her feelings beyond her high spirits on the journey itself. As she was five years and eight months at the time of her landing in France, it may be conjectured that Scotland, Scottish life and all it stood for, for better or for worse, must quickly have faded from her mind, in favour of new and vivid French impressions. Some memories there were which must have remained, and the visit of her mother to France two years later brought them back to the surface. But in general her recollections were at the mercy of the tales told to her by her Scottish attendants in France, since stories, often repeated, soon achieve the status of memories in the minds of young children. Presumably Mary’s remembrances of her native land became rapidly formalized. The next thirteen years of her life, from the age of six to nineteen, were to be spent in France. The development of her character is therefore predominantly a French creation. Up till now, vague events of violence, political intrigue and flight have swirled above her unconscious head. From the moment of her arrival in France, the career of Mary Stuart embarks on a more positive course.
* ‘Ane callit Guthrie loosit done his ballops’ poynt and pischit in his mouth that all the pepill might sie’ – Pitscottie.7
* It was Roscoff which Henry 11 named as the landing-place, when he reported the news in a latter written from Turin. Since de Brezé wrote to Mary of Guise from S. Pol de Leon on 15th August, the royal party may have travelled on to the port by sea; W. M. Bryce suggested that de Brezé decided to date his letter from the larger town for the better information of the dowager.20 At Roscoff, two hundred years later, another Stuart landed, this time in flight – Prince Charles Edward, after the battle of Culloden.
CHAPTER THREE
The Most Perfect Child
‘The little Queen of Scots is the most perfect child that I have ever seen’
King Henry II of France
From the moment of her arrival in France, and indeed for the next twelve years, Mary Stuart was the focus of excited happy interest. The eulogistic poems and formal epithalamia which poured forth from the pens of French poets such as du Bellay and Saint-Gelais on the occasion of her marriage in 1558 were not more laudatory than the enthusiastic descriptions which were now penned by the entire French court as well as her Guise relations. Henry II himself set the tone. When asked what precedence Mary should be given, he ruled that ‘ma fille, la Royne d’Ecosse’ should walk before his daughters, the princesses of France, first of all because the marriage with the dauphin had already been decided on, and secondly because she was herself a crowned queen of an independent country. ‘And as such,’ he wrote, ‘I want her to be honoured and served.’1 In marked contrast to her childhood treatment in Scotland, where she was considered at first a sickly child, unlikely to live, and later a pawn in a dynastic game, even at five years old Mary was hailed as a figure of romance in France, a brave little queen who had been forced to flee the barbaric Scots, the cruel English, for the safe arms of all-embracing France. The stage was already set in French minds for the appearance of a childish heroine; to their satisfaction, Mary Stuart with her charm, her prettiness and the natural docility of youth, was ideal material to be moulded into the playing of this golden role.*
The first stage of her two-month journey towards the French court took Mary merely to Morlaix, where she was received by the lord of Rohan, accompanied by the nobility of the country, and lodged in a Dominican convent. She was then taken to the church, where a Te Deum was sung in honour of her safe arrival, which appears to have had but a limited effect, since on her route past the town gate, the drawbridge broke and fell into the river under the weight of horsemen. The Scottish lords in her suite, their natural suspicions of the foreigners unassuaged after a week in France, immediately started to shout ‘Treachery! Treachery!’, at which the lord of Rohan shouted out indignantly, ‘No Breton was ever a traitor!’ However, for the few days Mary remained at Morlaix, to pacify the Scots all the gates of the town were taken off their hinges and the chains of the bridges were broken.2
From Morlaix, Mary’s route lay overland to the Seine, and she then proceeded up the great river by boat towards the castle of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the royal children were then in residence. King Henry himself was absent from his family throughout the summer and autumn campaigning. A request for M. de Brezé to join him meant that Mary’s companion during her sea voyage now handed her over in turn to the care of her grandmother, Duchess Antoinette of Guise, who, it was planned, should smooth over the next period of transition before she reached Saint-Germain. Although we learn from de Brezé’s report to Mary of Guise, made many months later, that the whole journey was punctuated with tragedy – both guardians, Lords Erskine and Livingston, were severely ill, and one of the queen’s train ‘le petit Ceton’ (young Seton) died at Ancenis3 – this decimation of Mary Stuart’s suite seems to have passed comparatively unnoticed, since into her life now swept the formidable lady who was to exert one of the strongest influences on her childhood.
The kindly interference of Antoinette of Guise in her daughter Mary’s Scottish affairs, at the time of her marriage to James V, has already been noticed. Alone of Mary Stuart’s close relations, she was blessed with longevity, dying only in 1583, four years before her granddaughter’s execution, at the age of eighty-nine, though perhaps she herself did not view her longevity as such a blessing, since in the course of her life she was fated to witness time’s sickle cut such terrible swathes in her family that she in fact outlived all of her twelve children except one. The daughter of Francis, count of Vendôme and Marie of Luxembourg, she was married to Claude, duke of Guise at the age of sixteen. The birth of twelve children, between 1515 and 1536, was not a particularly remarkable feat by the standards of the time, but the vigorous strain of the Guises appears to have resisted the inroads of infant mortality with unusual vitality and of the twelve, ten survived; the mother of this remarkable brood was, in herself, a remarkable woman. She exhibited considerable administrative talent, which she handed on to her daughter Mary of Guise – not only at domestic economy, a subject at which she was considered to excel, but in the running of the vast and increasing Guise dominions, surrounding their palace of Joinville. Unlike her sons, she seems to have had a genuine streak of austerity in her disposition, and the great life of the court, the magnificent but insubstantial rewards of human glory, seem to have plucked no chord of sympathy in her nature. Her family pride, on the other hand, was enormous, and her sense of her sons’ destiny on a similar scale. Much later in her history, when Charles IX offered her a choice of rank as a princess of the blood, to which in spite of the pretensions of the Guises, she was not strictly entitled, she replied loftily that no rank could be more honourable to her than that of her husband.
Traditionally, she kept her coffin in the gallery which led the way to Mass, dressed herself in black and with a proper sense of her own end, reminiscent of Philip II of Spain, surrounded herself with objects necessary to her own funeral.4
Antoinette of Guise also possessed a vein of wry humour which doubtless enabled her to endure the many stresses to which a matriarch is subject, and maintain her health and courage intact. At Joinville, for example, her famous charity was dispelled with a certain amount of common sense. When a convent of nuns applied to her for funds for building, she is said to have remarked dryly: ‘Edifiez vos moeurs, et j’édifierai vos murs.’ Masculine frailty met with an equally practical approach: on one occasion Antoinette discovered that her husband was having a liaison with a village-girl, and that their trysting place was a c
ertain little hut on the edge of the estate, called ‘La Viergeotte’. Without raising the subject of the girl with the duke, Antoinette merely asked him to meet her also at this particular hut; with some embarrassment, the duke agreed, only to find that the hut had been transformed into a luxurious nest of pleasure, decorated in palatial style, and now in his wife’s opinion worthy of his ducal position. Subsequently Duke Claude built a little castle on the spot, with the significantly interlaced initials, A and C, and the motto: ‘Toutes pour une: là, et non plus’.
Duchess Antoinette was in ecstasies at the appearance of her granddaughter, and wrote immediately to Mary of Guise in Scotland to express the measure of her approval; she also assured her that she would see about the little girl’s wardrobe, which, coming from Scotland, Mary of Guise obviously suspected might not be up to the elegant standards of the French court. The duchess was, however, a great deal less enthusiastic over Mary’s Scottish train, whom she described as thoroughly ill-looking and farouche, and with the exception of the captivating Lady Fleming, not even, in her opinion, properly washed. The duchess clearly shared the general desire of the French, whether on the part of the Guises or the court, to have the complete education of this child, and thoroughly expunge from her all traces of her Scottish past, which it was felt would ill equip her for her glorious future role as queen of France. The possibility that she might also one day have to act as queen regnant to her native land of Scotland was felt to be definitely subordinate. No qualms were therefore felt at the prospect of cutting the little Scottish queen off immediately from her Scottish attendants. Mary of Guise, however, with superior foresight, had sent instructions that Lady Fleming was to continue as her governess, despite the claims of a French woman, Mlle Curel. The duchess wrote back to say that her daughter’s wishes were being respected. Mary Stuart also retained a Scotswoman, Jehane St Clare (or Jean Sinclair), as her nurse; de la Brousse hinted to Mary of Guise that the nurse was difficult to please, for which he blamed her Scots blood (‘You know that nation,’ he wrote. ‘I need say no more.’), but Jean Sinclair was presumably merely grumbling at novelty, in the universal tradition of her profession, when finding herself in a foreign land.5
Antoinette has left us a physical description of Mary as she appeared to French eyes on her first arrival, in a letter to her son written in October. She is described as ‘very pretty indeed’ as well as being extremely intelligent, and her grandmother hastens to prophesy that she will actually be a beauty when she grows up, especially as the little queen is also graceful and self-assured in her movements. With the help of this letter, which as it was not written to the child’s mother seems candid enough, and the earliest picture of Mary Stuart, dating from July 1552, when she was nine and a half years old, it is possible to form a definite impression of her childish, preadolescent appearance. This drawing, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly, was done in response to a request from Catherine de Médicis for portraits of all her children, to include her future daughter-in-law, Mary; as the French queen was apparently weary of endless identical stylized profiles of her children, she asked that the picture should be done swiftly in crayon, to give some sort of genuinely child-like impression.6 The charming oval of Mary’s girlhood face is well captured: it is evident that her features were of the type inclined to be hawk-like in later life, which had a special attraction when still enveloped by the softness of youth. Her complexion was glowingly white, and the texture of the skin, as her grandmother noted, especially fine. The nose, which was to lengthen considerably as Mary grew older, was now still delightfully balanced in the contours of her face and Duchess Antoinette also commended her mouth and chin as being particularly well formed. The deep-set eyes of which her grandmother wrote were prettily set like two almonds beneath her high forehead; and their bright golden-brown colour contrasted with the fair, almost ashblonde, hair which Mary enjoyed as a young girl. All in all, it was not surprising that the French court and Mary’s doting relations were alike well satisfied with what they saw.
Duchess Antoinette now set in train the second part of the journey to Saint-Germain, which she reported to her son on 9th October she was making by slow stages. The care of the Guises for their nursling was more than matched by the solicitude which King Henry himself was showing, by letter, from a distance.7 So thoroughly were the cleaning operations of the castle of Saint Germain taken in hand on his instructions, that the children of France were still at the medieval fortress of Carrières when Mary arrived there on 16th October. Two months from her arrival on the soil of France, she was now propelled into the royal nursery. It is difficult to believe that any set of young princes in the history of Europe had been so fussed over, so lavished with care and attention, as the children of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis. The letters of their mother are replete with maternal anxieties of the sort most generally associated with mothers who have no nurses, rather than with a queen, who might be supposed to have at least the duties of the court to distract her. This devotion, this concentrated attention to the minutiae of a child’s existence, was fully shared during her childhood by Mary, who received in addition the extra care of her Guise relations: so concerned were they over her welfare that her uncle the cardinal, that great prince of the Church, appeared as worried over her toothache and her swollen face as about matters of national policy. Her grandmother, dedicated to the cause of her moral welfare, and her uncle, bestowing on her in youth the tenderness of a father, combined with the king of France himself, and the governors of his children, to make Mary Stuart’s upbringing one of rigorous supervision.
The solicitude bestowed in such rich measure on the royal nursery of France arose to some degree from the special circumstances of the children’s birth. Catherine de Médicis, a woman who has gone down to history as a mother before all else, and to whom much has been forgiven on these grounds, was for many years denied by fate the very role she most craved. Married off to a dauphin, Henry of France, with nothing to commend her but her relationship to the Pope and her dowry, lacking birth in the strict aristocratic sense, and lacking beauty in even the most prejudiced eyes of her allies, her early years at the French court were made still more unbearable by the additional torture of sterility. By 1538 there were rumours that she was to be sent back to Italy, to make room for some more nubile bride for the dauphin, one who would at least have achieved the state of puberty, unlike the wretched Catherine. What potions, what prayers, what magic arts Catherine summoned to her aid in her struggles with her cruel destiny will never be fully known. By 1540, with the help, it was said, of pills of myrrh given her by the famous Jean Fernel, she finally reached the state of puberty; by April 1543 she was at last pregnant. Finally, in 1544, Francis of Valois was born. He was sickly from birth, it was true, a weakness generally attributed to the many remedies his mother had taken both before and during her pregnancy, but for all that he represented security – he was a child, and he was an heir. The royal children of France followed in quick and satisfying succession. Elisabeth, later to be the third wife to Phillip II of Spain, in April 1545, Claude, who married the duke of Lorraine, in 1547, the future Charles IX in 1550, the future Henry III in 1551, Francis, duke of Alençon, in 1554, and Marguerite, the bride of Henry of Navarre, in 1553. Three other children died at birth. The princes and princesses thus made up in numbers what they lacked in rude health: none of them was robust and together they gave Catherine ample material for concern, from the right clothes for little Henry in hot weather, to the correct amount of food which each child should consume to make it either thinner or fatter.
Tenderness towards the royal children was not the sole prerogative of their mother. The constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, was also deeply involved in their welfare – it was indeed to the constable that Queen Catherine broke the moving news of her first pregnancy, saying that she knew that he desired to see her with children just as much as she did.8 Another powerful force in the royal nursery was that of Henry II’s mistress, the legendary Dia
ne de Poitiers. The enemies of Mary Stuart, in her later career, have sometimes suggested that she was debauched in early childhood by the corrupting influence of this woman, who although already aged forty-eight when Mary arrived in France, exerted and continued to exert till his death the most total fascination over her royal lover. Diane de Poitiers, as her letters show, was a woman who, quite apart from her attractive interest in the arts, took an enormous interest in every part of the kingdom’s affairs. This was indeed a considerable part of her attraction for the king: she interpreted the role of mistress in the true Renaissance sense, rather than in the nineteenth-century style of a grand voluptuary. She herself had been married at the age of fifteen to a man much older than herself, Louis de Brezé, by whom she had two daughters, and with whom, as historians now agree, she led a blameless life. She has also now been acquitted of the accusation that she subsequently sacrificed her honour to Francis I, in order to save the life of her father, the Seigneur de Saint-Vallier; it was this smear which gave rise to the story that she acted as the mistress of two kings in her lifetime.9 Diane should be judged as the mistress of Henry II only, a position which she undertook as though she felt it her duty to exploit her undoubted assets – the beauty which age could not dim, intelligence, energy, and abounding health to support it all, health over which she took great trouble.
Her flagrant adultery with the king may contrast paradoxically to our notions with the excellent upbringing which she gave to her own daughters – Françoise who married the duke of Boillon in 1547 and Louise who married Duke Francis of Guise’s son in the same year – but to the age in which she lived, the paradox was not apparent. Equally, she exhibited, without any sense of impropriety, strong maternal instincts towards the king’s own children, and even on occasion towards his wife – for stories were told that she actually hustled the king towards the royal marriage bed, so seriously did she take the role of mistress. Certainly, she took infinite trouble to make both the Dame and Seigneur d’Humières her allies; she recommended a nurse for the royal children, and actually trained her at Anet first, to make sure she would give satisfaction; she inquired ceaselessly over Mme Elisabeth’s measles and other domestic matters; the subject of Charles d’Orleans’s wet nurse, and her suitability or otherwise for her task, runs through a whole summer of letter-writing. As Mary Stuart arrives at Carrières, we find that it is Diane who passes on the king’s request that Mary and Elisabeth should share a room, since it is the king’s dearest wish that they should become friends; again it is Diane who expresses Henry’s desire that the Scottish suite should be sent away, and the situation is accepted as perfectly natural.10