Diane de Poitiers’s charm and her interest in the young queen attracted Mary’s confidence and affection. Writing to Mary’s mother in Scotland, Diane recognized the young girl’s pre-eminent status and promised to extend to her a motherly care: ‘As to what concerns the Queen, your daughter, I will exert myself to do her service more than to my own daughter, for she deserves it more.’39 This seductive and cultivated courtesan was to become one of the poles of female influence on the growing girl.
The other was Mary’s austerely devout and authoritative grandmother, Antoinette, Duchesse de Guise. A few of her letters to her daughter, Mary’s mother, remain and in their psychological insights and human responsiveness they speak across four and a half centuries of timeless affections and concerns:
‘I was more glad than I can say to learn of the arrival of our little Queen in as good a health as you could wish her to have.’ The duchess wrote to Mary of Guise on 3 September 1548, just before introducing her granddaughter to her new family.
I pity the sorrow that I think you must have felt during her voyage, and I hope you had news of her safe arrival, and also the pain that her departure must have caused you. You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that methinks you hardly know now what pleasure means. But still you must hope that at least this absence and loss of your child will at least mean rest and repose for the little creature, with honour and greater welfare than ever before, please God. I hope to see you yet sometimes before I die … But believe me, in the meanwhile I will take care that our little Queen shall be treated as well as you can desire for her. I am starting this week, God willing, to meet her and conduct her to St Germain, with the Dauphin. I shall stay with her there for a few days to arrange her little affairs, and until she grows somewhat used to the Dauphin and his sisters. Lady Fleming will, if the King allows it, remain with the child, as she knows her ways; and Mademoiselle Curel will take charge of her French education. Two gentlemen and other attendants are to be appointed to wait upon the little Queen, and her dress and appointments shall be fitting for her rank.40
To her son, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Antoinette conveyed her first impressions of her little granddaughter, ‘I assure you, my son, she is the prettiest and best at her age you ever saw.’41 And when Henri II eventually met his prospective daughter-in-law in early December, he was as charmed as everyone else: ‘I have no doubt that if the Dauphin and she were of age, or nearly so, the King would soon carry the project [of their marriage] to completion. They are already as friendly as if they were married. Meanwhile he has determined to bring them up together and to make one establishment of their household, so as to accustom them to one another from the beginning. He has found her the prettiest and most graceful Princess he ever saw, as have also the Queen and all the court.’42
The conversion of this charming Scottish girl into a French princess was considered the overriding purpose of her education from this point on. Apparently she had arrived speaking Scots and not much else – although very soon was speaking French with great facility and learning Latin. As French culture was universally judged to be far superior to Scottish, and her Scottish entourage already had attracted some unfavourable comment for their roughness and lack of personal hygiene, it would be unlikely that there was much attempt by her new family and tutors to keep the young Queen of Scots’ own culture alive. Her sovereignty over Scotland was always considered to be secondary to her potential as consort to the King of France. Although Mary retained some of the original household who had accompanied her from Scotland, within two years all but Lady Fleming were superseded by French men and women.
The ‘Four Maries’ remained part of the young Queen of Scots’ circle of acquaintances in France and were to return with her to Scotland in 1561, where their association with her continued more intimately. There is not much evidence, however, that they were included in her immediate life at the French court. It was possible that for a time they were educated in nearby convents or visited occasionally other French noble families, in the peripatetic way of aristocratic life then. All of them, apart from Mary Fleming, had mothers or stepmothers who were French, and therefore some connections already of their own in France. Mary’s mother, Lady Fleming, added French zest to her thoroughly Scottish blood by becoming a mistress of Henri II and, rather scandalously, bearing his child. The four Maries, although of Scottish noble families, were not of high enough social status to be considered ideal companions for Mary now that she was being groomed as a princess of France.
Almost immediately, Mary was sharing the bedchamber of the dauphin’s young sister, Elizabeth de Valois. Such was the importance of precedence and hierarchy these girls invariably were given the best room on the strength of Mary’s pre-eminent status. They were both prizes in the European marriage stakes. England was to continue to press both the Scots and the French for the return of Mary to fulfil the marriage treaty with Edward VI. The last formal offer of marriage was made in the presence of Henri II and Mary herself in June 1551, when Mary was not yet nine but already happy with the idea of marrying her French prince instead. Failing Mary, it was suggested that her newly adopted sister, Elizabeth de Valois, would make a substitute bride for the English king. But this young woman was to end up married at fourteen to an even greater potentate, Philip II of Spain, only to die at twenty-three giving birth to her third child.
In years to come, both she and Mary were to exhibit individually to their supporters a kind of tragic glamour that was to fuel rumours and fantasies which confused and inflated the posthumous reputation of each. Physical beauty helped, but prerequisite were extreme circumstances and strange congruities in life or death. For the young Queen of Spain, to die so young in childbirth was a common enough occurrence in the sixteenth century, but her tender (and almost certainly chaste) affection for her stepson – exactly her age – the physically deformed and psychologically tormented Don Carlos, inspired through the centuries a profusion of rumours and tragic romances.*
Despite Catherine de Medici’s reliance on the prognostications of astrologers and fortune tellers, these two girls as yet knew nothing of the lives they were to live as women. There were, however, the immutable facts that one was already a queen and the other might well, through marriage, become one. At the end of 1548, Mary was six and Elizabeth de Valois was nearly four. Their interest in each other had been cemented in a court and at a time when royal children were most pampered and lavishly entertained. Mary’s Guise grandmother, writing to her daughter in Scotland, gave a lively picture of a happy and attractive young girl, revelling in the attention and affection that surrounded her: ‘It is impossible for her to be more honoured than she is. She and the King’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, live together, and I think that this is a great good thing, for they are thus brought up to love each other as sisters. It is not enough to say that they do not trouble each other in the least, for she [Mary] never works at night or sleeps in the daytime, and is very playful and pretty, and the two children are as fond as they can be of each other’s company.’43
Not just a doting grandmother but even her prospective father-in-law, Henri, King of France, set apart by pomp and the amour-propre of one chosen by God, indulged the little Scottish queen as readily as everyone else. He declared he had never seen a more perfect child, a remark reported back to Mary’s anxious mother in Scotland, and he and his courtiers smiled on benignly as the diminutive dauphin danced with his intended bride at the wedding in December 1548 of Mary’s eldest uncle, François, Duc de Guise.
Surrounded by doting adults, Mary had her own instant family of brothers and sisters. Apart from the Dauphin François and his sister Elizabeth,