Mary Queen of Scots (8 page)

MARY OF GUISE’S FRENCH VISIT

After the Treaty of Boulogne ended the Anglo-French war in 1550, Mary of Guise began planning a trip home. Both personal issues and official business prompted her visit; she longed to see her family again, especially her children, and needed to inspect her dower estates. She also hoped to persuade Henry to aid war-torn Scotland and to discuss plans with him for its governance when her seven-year-old daughter reached her majority. While preparing for the journey, she was saddened to learn of her father Claude’s April death.

Attended by numerous Scottish subjects, including the earl of Huntly and Gilbert Kennedy, third earl of Cassilis, she reached France in September 1550 and joined the royal family and her children on the 25th at Rouen, Normandy, where the king’s entry was scheduled for 1 October. Her delighted daughter, who had been looking forward to greeting her, had just recovered from a ten-day bout of the flux, a form of dysentery. Perhaps it was her second illness in France, since rumors claimed she contracted measles in March 1549.

Besides Fleming’s disgrace, several other significant events occurred during Mary of Guise’s sojourn, which began on a sad note. Her godson Louis died of smallpox in October 1550. At Blois the next February, Henry seems to have decided to appoint her as her daughter’s regent when she reached her majority. The queen dowager apparently expressed a desire to return to France permanently, but after the Scottish noblemen in her train informed Henry that they preferred her to any other French regent he might select, she agreed to remain in Scotland to protect her child’s interests.

In April 1551 she was horrified to learn of Robert Stewart’s plot to kill Mary. An ally of Cardinal Beaton’s murderers, he had, after serving as a galley rower, become an archer in the French Scottish Guard. While on leave in England, he was imprisoned for trying to generate support for a plan to poison Mary with the aid of friends in the nursery kitchen. After successfully demanding his extradition, Henry authorized his execution at Angers in June.

That same month on a happier note, William Parr, marquess of Northampton, headed an embassy that reached Châteaubriand with a proposal for Mary to wed King Edward, but anticipating failure, his instructions provided that if she were unavailable, Elizabeth of Valois could be substituted for her. An agreement was reached concerning the French princess, but Edward’s death in 1553 ended that possibility. Northampton visited Catherine’s chamber and witnessed the two Scottish queens dancing together.

After enjoying her children’s company for almost a year, the queen dowager left them at Fontainebleau to condole with her widowed mother at Joinville. Then in early September 1551 she began her return trip to Scotland, traveling to Amiens with her son who became ill and died suddenly on the 22nd, about a month before his 16th birthday. On 18 October, having lost her fourth son as well as her father and her godson, the mourning queen departed for Scotland by way of England, leaving her daughter, whom she had seen for the last time, to continue her education in France.

FRENCH EDUCATION

From October 1548 when Mary reached the royal nursery, besides learning court etiquette, she began to acquire language and dance skills. In December after she had studied French only two months with her tutor, Mahault des Essarts, demoiselle de Curel, diplomats were spreading rumors that Mary was gifted and able to speak the language very well. They were, of course, greatly exaggerating her talents, but she may have acquired a child’s French vocabulary more quickly than had been anticipated. Probably to prepare her and his children for the festivities at Francis of Guise’s wedding, Henry appointed Paul de Rege as their dance instructor. Among other steps, Mary learned the galliard, which reportedly she performed as well as anyone.

Acting as her mother-substitute, Catherine monitored both Mary’s academic and domestic training, initially correcting her Latin exercises and also teaching her how to embroider. In Latin letters of 1554, which, like the one to the dauphin, formed part of a classroom assignment, Mary referred to Catherine several times: they attended vespers together and the French queen advised her to follow her tutors’ directions because it was only by learning to obey that she could learn to command. During that same year, under Catherine’s direction, Mary, acting as Sybil, the oracle at Delphi, joined with other Sybils, among them Mary Fleming and Mary Livingston, in reciting quatrain verses, composed by Mellin de St Gellais, Henry’s favorite poet, to welcome the king back to St Germain.
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Besides these pastimes, Mary played chess, wrote poetry, composed emblems, painted, and enjoyed sports, such as tennis, horseback riding on two favorite horses, Bravane and Madame la Réale, and hunting with dogs and falcons. In 1554 she noted in another Latin letter that Henry permitted her to hunt deer in the park with his illegitimate daughter, Diane, duchess of Castro.

In addition, Mary had lessons in geography, history, music, and languages. She sang with a pleasant voice and played the lute, virginals, and other instruments. Besides gaining fluency in French and Italian and studying Latin, she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish and possibly a smattering of Greek and Hebrew. Books in these languages appear on a 1573 inventory of her library.

When Mary was eleven, her tutor required her to render some French letters into Latin, a few of which were cited above. In a neat Italic script, she wrote 64 translations in a small red leather volume now at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She left blank the pages next to the Latin epistles, which she entered in the book on various days from July 1554 to January 1555. Later a scribe copied on the blank pages the French versions, which it has been assumed her tutor composed because of their references to Plutarch, Aesop’s Fables, the Scriptures, and Erasmus’s colloquies. Since they were mostly addressed to her acquaintances, especially Elizabeth, and contained personal data, it is more likely that Mary created them. After returning home, she drafted her speeches in French before rendering them into Scots, a procedure she learned in the schoolroom. That the epistles referred to classical literature is not surprising since Jacques Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, a copy of which Mary owned, and Pierre Danès, Greek professor at the Collège de France, resided at court.

Her letters represent the conventional Renaissance education of children, who were instructed in the classical pagan and Christian writings on the Erasmian model. Humanists believed that by relating ancient experiences to the issues of their day, they could educate rulers to cure social ills. Mary’s epistles confirm she was taught that princes should be better read than their subjects to demonstrate that learning was the root of virtue. They should not, she warned, read for entertainment but for knowledge and self-improvement. In a letter to Lorraine, she related a story that condemned flatterers. Its author pointed out that royal children often learned nothing well except horsemanship because their high rank led their tutors to overrate their achievements. In contrast, the horses, unaware of their riders’ status, tossed off those with inadequate skills. Teachers favored the letter-writing genre to keep their pupil’s hands busy, since idleness was considered the
mere de tous vices
(mother of all vices). Among her epistles is one to John Calvin in which she argued for the existence of purgatory, but a copy of it was probably not forwarded to him, and perhaps none of her addressees actually read her compositions.

As they were schoolroom exercises, her translations do not display a profound knowledge of Latin, but they do indicate a solid grounding in the language. In 1562 in Scotland although she understood the Latin oration of Nicholas de Gouda, a Jesuit, she indicated a preference for responding in French or Scots. She must have been a better classicist than the other royal children, as apparently only she had the opportunity to deliver a Latin oration before Henry and Catherine at the Louvre in early 1555. For her speech responding to detractors who denied women should be taught Latin, she drew upon her letters, 15 of which extolled learned women. The Ramist rhetorician, Antoine Fouquelin, claimed in the
Rhètorique Française
, which he dedicated to Mary in 1557, that her oration elicited praise for its eloquence. On returning home in 1561 she must have carried a copy of it with her. In her 1573 inventory was listed “Ane Oratioun to the King of Franche of the Quenis Awin Hand Write.”
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Although several individuals supervised Mary’s upbringing, the person ultimately most responsible for it was the cardinal of Lorraine. According to governess Parois in 1554, he loved and honored Mary like a daughter. Later, Parois revealed to her mother his assiduous care for his niece’s well-being. One important lesson he imparted was the value of family solidarity in achieving public and private goals. Lorraine and his brother, the duke of Guise, possessed somewhat different personalities. The cardinal, a skilled diplomat, was quite comfortable at court, while the duke, the realm’s premier general, was at ease on the battlefield. Despite these differences, they successfully cooperated together to advance Guise interests and seemed never to have disagreed about how to accomplish their objectives, but if they did, they kept their quarrels private. Besides maintaining their family’s honor and prestige, they also sought to enlarge and preserve their fortune and estates for transmission to the next generation. One of their greatest achievements was their young relatives’ excellent marriages. In 1552 at the birth of Guise’s daughter Catherine, future duchess of Montpensier, Lorraine observed that although he would have preferred a boy, he had already been considering several splendid matches for her.
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Romanticists have characterized Mary’s French upbringing as carefree and happy, but while she may have been happy, her childhood was not carefree. She was taught several survival tactics for residing at royal courts, which were criticized for housing gossips and spies who sought data about others to advance their self-interests. Lorraine especially warned her of the dangers. In February 1553 he explained to her mother in a note written in his hand that because of the rumor-mongers, he often reminded his ten-year-old niece to speak with a guarded tongue. The ubiquitous prying forced the aristocracy to adopt various strategies to keep their personal lives secret in order to prevent the spread of information that might reflect adversely upon their reputations and honor. In short, courts were highly artificial communities in which individuals learned to suppress their personal feelings and to follow prescribed etiquette rather than to act spontaneously or naturally.

Mary’s letter to her mother in 1552, dated a year earlier than Lorraine’s, proves that she was learning about Scottish governance and the need for maintaining secrecy about her business affairs. She confessed that despite her mother’s warning to keep the documents forwarded to her private, she had asked the duke of Guise to read them. Otherwise she would not have understood them. The reason she failed to send the letter in cipher, she also explained, was because her secretary assured her it was an unnecessary precaution. As an adult, she routinely used ciphers or symbols that stood for the letters of the alpha-bet to communicate sensitive material. The ciphers were placed on a wheel which could be shifted to rearrange the 26 letters that they represented. She also created codes to represent the names of individuals. Finally, in this letter to her mother, she revealed that she was denying strangers access to her household officers, remembering perhaps the foiled poisoning plot of 1551.

Lorraine regularly kept his sister informed about her progress. In February 1553 at Amboise, he was gratified to see his beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished ten-year-old niece attract the attention of Henry, who occasionally spent up to an hour chatting with her. She entertained him, Lorraine boasted, with discussions on sensible topics, as though she were 25 years old. Others extolled her maturity, including Anne, duchess of Guise, who explained that Mary could no longer be treated as a child because her conversation was not that of a child.

As Mary matured, she became increasingly aware of the material requirements of her rank. In 1554 after learning that she was to witness the marriage of her cousin, Nicholas of Lorraine, count of Vaudémont, to Jean, daughter of Philip of Savoy, duke of Nemours, Mary asked for a new gown of cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver like those Elizabeth and Claude recently wore to a wedding. This plea demonstrated her realization that she should dress in accordance with her royal position. It was inappropriate for females of lesser status, even princesses, to possess richer or more stylish clothes than she. At the time of her request, she did not lack gowns, for in 1551, alone, she acquired 16 new ones.

HEALTH ISSUES

Lorraine also monitored her physical well-being. In April 1554 Mary visited his palace at Meudon near Paris when his nephew, Charles, Guise’s second son, the future duke of Mayenne, was christened with Valentinois acting as godmother and the duke of Ferrara and the cardinal, who named the child after himself, serving as godfathers. Afterwards, Lorraine assured his sister that Mary was healthy and expressed surprise that she had heard her daughter was sickly. Because her daughter possessed a strong constitution, he continued, the doctors had predicted a long life for her. Conceding that she sometimes suffered a little faintness or indigestion after overeating, Lorraine planned to supervise her diet more carefully. This eating disorder, first mentioned when she was 11 years old, was probably an early symptom of later, more serious health problems, but it did not inhibit her physical development since she became a large woman like her mother and grew to be about six-feet tall.

Perhaps the worried queen mother was reacting to a September 1553 letter from Claude, seigneur d’Urfé, the successor of de Humières, revealing Mary’s recent recovery from an illness. Another message from Parois in 1553, lacking a more specific date, could have cited the same sickness, which lasted one day only, although it may have described a separate attack. Except for these reports and two complaints about toothaches, all other references to her during the years 1551 through 1555 rated her healthy. In 1554, for example, Lorraine revealed that Catherine was at Rheims with Mary, who was well and who was visiting Renée of Guise, their sister, at the convent of St Pierre-les-Dames.