Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ dauphin then arrived, looking younger than his fourteen years, stunted in growth and with the frailty and pallor of a lifelong invalid.

      Of greatest interest was his young bride, a queen in her own right. The French had taken her to their hearts ever since she had been sent as a child to their shores for safekeeping from the English. She arrived that Sunday morning escorted by the king himself and another of her uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine. Mary had grown up with an unwavering sense of destiny and a natural flair for the theatrical: she knew what was expected of her and to what she had been born. But she had not learnt from her uncle a respect for the power of the people. As a prospective queen of France, she did not need to. The French monarchy was so rich and self-confident that it sought to remove itself still further from its subjects and advertise to all, particularly its competitor monarchs abroad, the extent of unassailable wealth and the power of the crown.

      Although only fifteen, the young Queen of Scots was already tall and graceful; she and her uncles towered over the young dauphin and were all taller and more impressive than even the king and queen themselves. Mary’s much vaunted beauty was not just a construct of the conventional hyperbole of court poets and commentators, but a beauty that had as much to do with her vitality and vivacity as the symmetry of her features. She had a fine complexion, chestnut brown hair and intelligent, lively eyes beneath prominent lids and fine arched brows. She had a strong active body and was good at sports, loving to ride hard and to hunt the wild animals with which the royal forests surrounding the châteaux of her youth were stocked.

      Dressed in white for her wedding, Mary confounded the usual tradition of cloth of gold; white was more usually the colour of mourning. She trailed a pearl-encrusted cloak and a train of grey velvet. Neither did her jewels disappoint for on her head was a specially commissioned crown studded with gemstones (the canny Scots had refused to let their crown jewels leave Scotland) and round her throat was a grand diamond necklace. This diamond was most probably the ‘Great Harry’ which she had inherited from her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, to whom it had been given by her own father, Henry VII of England. The importance of her Tudor inheritance was embodied in this priceless jewel.

      Magnificence was the order of the day. Sublimely present, but far removed, Mary made her marriage vows elevated in front of the crowds pressing towards the great doors of Notre Dame. As a symbol of imperial munificence, inviting too perhaps a reciprocal generosity from heaven, the heralds took handfuls of gold and silver coins and threw them amongst the people crying, ‘Largesse! … largesse!’ So desperate was the rush that many were trampled, some fainted and others scrabbled and fought savagely for a salvaged ducat or sou. Fearing a riot, the largesse was prematurely dammed and the heralds’ moneybags stowed away. The young Queen Mary of Scotland and her even younger husband, now known as the King of Scotland, were shown again to the surging crowd.

      It was the first time Mary was to experience the hysteria of a crowd whose energies were focused wholly on herself. Although this time they were benign and wished her well, there was always something potentially terrifying in the sheer force and power of the mob, crying out, shoving each other, sweating, straining to touch her hand or grasp a passing fragment of her robe, to catch her eye and elicit some recognition or blessing.

      But the grandeur of French ceremony was aimed at distancing royalty, projecting them to god-like proportions, not just to their subjects but to themselves. It was an inflation that could only make the young dauphin and dauphine think of themselves as close to divine. The populace was excluded from the archbishop’s palace where the extravagant wedding banquet was held. On a day fraught with symbolism, and exhausting in its demands, Mary’s fifteen-year-old head was beginning to ache under the weight of her crown and she was permitted to relinquish it to the king’s gentleman of the bedchamber. Then once the feast was cleared away the ball began, with the king leading out his new daughter-in-law, taller than he was, altogether more regal in her mien and a notably graceful dancer.

      However, the highlight of the celebrations was yet to come with the removal of the wedding party and guests to the Palais de Justice for a series of fantastical pageants. Twenty-five wicker horses arrayed in cloth of gold, with the young Guise sons and Valois princes on their backs, entered pulling coaches filled with people dressed as pilgrims, singing in praise of God and the young bride and groom. A dozen bejewelled unicorns, the heraldic and mythical symbol of Scotland, more carriages filled with beautiful young women dressed as the Muses, and more celestial music all captured the imaginations of the glittering wedding guests.

      The pièce de résistance was kept for last as six gauzy ships, their sails filling with an artificial breeze, appeared to float across a painted, billowing sea. In each was a prince, brilliantly attired in gold and wearing a mask, with an empty throne beside him. As the ingenious fleet approached the great marble table at which the wedding party sat each masked prince disembarked to choose his princess and place her on his throne, to the evident pleasure of both the participants and the spectators. The smallest of them all approached one of the tallest of the young women, as the Dauphin François claimed his young dauphine. He and the young Queen of Scots sailed away in a make-believe ship to a fantasy land.

      These were purposefully extravagant fun and games, full of symbolism and self-indulgent conceit, and executed with peculiarly French stylishness and wit. The country had been brought close to bankruptcy by wars with England and Spain, and riven with religious and political factions. Such pomp was a necessary reassurance to themselves and assertion to their neighbours that the imperial greatness of France remained undimmed. But at heart it was a fairytale confection, an entertaining froth for the diversion of a complacent, self-regarding court. The focus of all this fuss was the fairytale princess herself, undeniably beautiful, intelligent and robust but disabled by the fantasy, and burdened with vain pride.

There were many epithalamia written in France and Scotland in praise of the marriage of Mary and François, of Scotland with France. The French, not surprisingly, stressed the supremacy of France in the union, some getting carried way with the vision of empire extending into Britain and throughout Europe. More modestly, Michel l’Hôpital, in his famous wedding poem of 1558, described proud Scotland as, ‘a kingly crown, a subject land./Light in its weight, in truth, with ours compared’.⁵ Another song, published by one of the Pléiade^* group of poets, Jean de Baïf, celebrated Mary’s legitimate claim on the English throne: ‘without murder and war, France and Scotland will with England be united’.⁶

      Back in Scotland, the local poets saw the marriage as a union of equals. Sir Richard Maitland characterized the relationship as fraternal, ‘Scots and French now live in unity/As you were brothers born in one country … Defending other both by land and sea’.⁷ The celebrations too were inevitably a more muted and frugal affair. Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, regent since 1554, ordered the great cannon, nicknamed ‘Mons Meg’, to be fired from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. But then, with suitable economy, she dispatched a body of men to retrieve the monster shot so that it could be dusted down and used again. When France exacted a tax on the Scottish people to finance the nuptials of the queen who had left their shores as a small child, more than ten years before, there was some muttering. When France then came back for an even larger contribution, resentment became more entrenched. The independent-minded nobles and lairds had largely put up with the influx of French courtiers and advisers around Mary of Guise, particularly if a strong French presence threatened their old enemy England, but no true Scotsman could stomach any sense of their country being annexed in some unequal alliance.

      Monarchies when women or children inherited were notoriously susceptible to powerful factions and self-seeking ambitions amongst their subjects, and Scotland had had more than its fair share of premature royal deaths and restive noblemen. During Mary Stuart’s minority and absence in France, the reformed religion had flourished with little real curb under the eleven-year СКАЧАТЬ