LITMIR.BIZ

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the household and visiting Catherine Ashley on her deathbed in July 1565, mourning her deeply.

      Elizabeth and her servants escaped further punishment but the Lord Admiral Seymour was tried for treason, found guilty and beheaded on 20 March 1549. The whole lethal business had taken just three months. Through this treacherous time Elizabeth had learned some lessons as to the value of circumspection over spontaneity, the necessity of will and intellect ruling the heart. She also learnt about loyalty, the depths of her own, and how her very life could depend on the loyalty and love of her servants, her people. Nothing would make her join in the vilification of Seymour even when she was still under some suspicion herself. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop,’ the disliked Mrs Tyrwhit noted when Elizabeth heard that Seymour’s lands were being divided up and dispersed, but she then added, ‘She can not hear him discommended.’³¹ However, at fifteen, Elizabeth already had absorbed a wisdom that at forty had eluded the ambitious, swaggering Seymour. On the day of his execution she is reputed to have made the possibly apocryphal comment, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’³² From that day on, Elizabeth would ensure that no one could ever say that of her.

      While Elizabeth, exiled from safety, protection and power, endured her baptism of fire, her cousin Mary was embarking on her own more literal exile with a cheerful heart. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had got her way at last: her daughter was to be taken to safety, contracted to marry the dauphin to become eventually Queen of France. The marriage treaty was signed on July 7 1548 and with it the alliance with France was strengthened. Mary hoped that now the French would give her much-needed aid in her struggles to protect her daughter’s kingdom from the English.

      These marauding English had seized the town of Haddington, John Knox’s birthplace, in the eastern Borders. The Scottish troops, reinforced with some five thousand or more Frenchmen, were attempting to wrest it back again when Mary, intrepid as ever, just two days after signing the marriage treaty for her daughter, rode to the town to exhort the troops to greater resistance. Accompanied by her entourage of lords and ladies she headed for the nunnery on the edge of town, from there to gain a better vantage point. But unfortunately her party arrived just as the English gunners were perfecting their range. In an immense explosion of dust and smoke sixteen of her accompanying gentlemen and others of her party were mown down, along with their horses, in a scene of terrible carnage. Even for a woman of her fortitude and experience this horror was too much to bear; the dowager queen fainted with shock. Nothing could have convinced her more graphically of the wisdom of the imminent dispatch of her daughter.

      The French fleet sent to spirit the young Queen of Scots away had sailed around the north coast of Scotland to elude the English and finally came to moorage at Dumbarton. To accompany her to her new life in France she had a bevy of Scottish children, among them the subsequently celebrated ‘Four Maries’ – Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, Mary Seton and Mary Beaton – all daughters of noble Scottish families. Her adult court included the lords Erskine and Livingston and Lady Fleming, her stepaunt and governess. Also accompanying the young queen was her eldest illegitimate half-brother James Stewart and two younger, Lord Robert and Lord John. Seventeen years old, educated and adventurous, Lord James was to spend some time at the French court in the entourage of his young sister, and it is quite probable that during this time Mary forged her strong affection for this brother, a trust she found hard to relinquish even when he, as Earl of Moray, was made regent in her place years later. Mary’s mother was grief-stricken at sending her only daughter from her, on a journey which was inherently hazardous, and made all the more so by the threat of intervention from the aggressive English fleet.

      By the beginning of August the French galleys bearing their important cargo eventually sailed down the Clyde and out to sea. There was every evidence that the Queen of Scots was blessed with an adventurous spirit which was to be one of the main motivating characteristics of her life. While others faded with homesickness or seasickness, Mary thrived. The journey around the west coast of England was plagued with storms and fears of an English attempt at ambush and kidnap, but nothing seemed to sap her robust health and merry temperament. Her mother meanwhile was overcome with sadness: ‘The old Queen doth lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvels that she heareth nothing from her.’³³

      The French commander de Brézé had in fact sent a series of letters to console the grieving queen mother and in them consistently asserted that Mary, alone of all the party, remained cheery of temper and free of seasickness, despite the terrible storms that almost overwhelmed them off the coast of Cornwall. ‘Madam,’ he wrote on 18 August 1548, ‘in the belief that it will be a comfort to you to have news of the Queen, your daughter … she prospers, and is as well as ever you saw her. She has been less ill upon the sea than any one of her company, so that she made fun of those that were …’³⁴ In these leviathan seas they had broken their rudder but Providence, he claimed, came to their aid and the essential steerage was mended without loss of life. After almost a week at the mercy of the sea, the royal entourage arrived at Roscoff on the dramatic coastline of Finistère. There were members of that party whose suffering would have made them think it well named as ‘the end of the world’.

      Mary’s charm, high spirits and adventurousness had already impressed the whole company who had shared her eventful voyage. The kind de Brézé wrote again on 1 November, ‘I believe, madame, that [the king] will find her as pleasing and as much to his fancy as all those who have seen her and found her pretty and of clever wit.’³⁵

      In the middle of the sixteenth century, the French court was the most magnificent and sophisticated in Europe. When Mary arrived in 1548 it was dominated by two women, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, and Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. These women were indeed powerful but it was power exercised covertly, through influence and manipulation, through persuasion and pillow talk, bribery and possibly even poison. While Henri lived, Catherine appeared to be eclipsed by the phenomenon of Diane de Poitiers. Preternaturally beautiful, seductive and socially skilled, she was nearly twenty years his senior, a woman whom age could not diminish. But it was Catherine who was the more remarkable. Patiently willing to bide her time, wily, pragmatic, treacherous, she was to prove herself the ultimate stateswoman in utter control of herself and the dynasty through control of her children.

      Diane had been the king’s mistress since he was about nineteen. The story went that François I, in despair at the death of his eldest son, had been complaining to Diane, widow of the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy, of the melancholic nature and uncouth manners of his second son, who had so tragically become dauphin and heir to his throne. Diane had laughingly replied ‘he must be made to fall in love, and that she would make him her gallant’.³⁶ Her plan worked so well that not only did she civilize him but, in introducing him young to the charms of her company, she ensured he was incapable of ever replacing her as the most influential woman in his life. For the following twenty-one years until his death Henri spent up to a third of each day in Diane’s company.

      Catherine had none of her advantages of beauty or facile personality. She was a neglected scion of the Florentine merchant family of Medici, and had never been popular in France. Married at fourteen, she had to countenance very early her husband’s evident preference for his mistress and faithfulness to her until death. After ten miserable years of barren marriage, Catherine became sullen in her unhappiness and sinister in her superstitions and suspected occult powers. It had seemed to Catherine only supernatural intervention could save her from humiliation, and the threatened repudiation by her husband. The fact that she then managed to produce ten children, four of them sons, in a twelve-year flurry of miraculous fecundity explained some of her preoccupations with the occult and her subsequent absolute control over her family. Once Henri II died in 1559, however, the true power of the Medici sprang forth from its long incubation.

      Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded

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