Taking advantage of their monarch’s gratitude for the success of the Calais campaign and riding on a wave of popular euphoria, the Duc de Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine agitated for the marriage of their niece to the youthful heir to the French throne. The fortunes of the girl queen and the triumphant family of her mother, Mary of Guise, were fatally intertwined. At this time, the Guises seemed to be so much in the ascendant that many of their fellow nobles resented and envied their power, fearing that it was they who in effect ruled France.
Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots had always been aware of each other, of their kinship and relations to the English crown. As cousins, they were both descended from Henry VII, Elizabeth as his granddaughter, Mary as his great-granddaughter. European royalty was a small, elite and intermarried band. As the subject of the English succession loomed again, Elizabeth was acutely conscious of the strength of the Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne. Certainly she knew that if her sister Mary I’s repeal of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was allowed to stand then her own parents’ marriage would remain invalid and she could be marginalized and disinherited as a bastard. To most Catholics Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn had always been invalid and Mary Queen of Scots was legally and morally next in line to the English throne. If Mary united the thrones of Scotland, France and England then this would ensure that England remained a part of Catholic Christendom.
However, if the Acts of Mary Tudor’s reign should be reversed then Elizabeth’s legitimacy was confirmed and she, as Henry VIII’s legitimate daughter, had not only the natural but the more direct claim. She also had popular, emotional appeal. Her tall, regal figure and her reddish gold colouring reminded the people, grown nostalgic and selective in their memory of ‘Good King Harry’, of her father when young. Her surprisingly dark eyes, an inheritance of the best feature of her mother Anne Boleyn, were not enough to blur the bold impression that the best of her father lived on in her.
In fact, despite the stain on her mother’s name, it was to Elizabeth’s credit that she was not the daughter of a foreign princess, that unadulterated English blood ran in her veins and that she had been born in Greenwich Palace, at the centre of English royal power. In early peace negotiations with France, Elizabeth had Cecil point out she was ‘descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister was’. This meant she was ‘a free prince and owner of her crown and people’.1 She was an English-woman, and she knew this counted for much in this island nation of hers. ‘Was I not born in the realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?’2
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a Venetian ambassador noted the insularity and self-satisfaction of the English even then:
the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’, and that ‘it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman’.3
In early 1558 this pride seemed rather misplaced. As the French celebrated their victory over the English at Calais, it was clear that the greater power was with them, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and soon to become Dauphine and eventually Queen of France, basked in this radiance. Meanwhile England was impoverished and demoralized by unpopular government and wasteful war, and the Lady Elizabeth, hopeful successor to the throne, remained sequestered in the country. Both she and the English people seemed overcast by a cloud of stasis and failure, fearful of the past and uncertain of the future. A historian and near contemporary expressed it thus:
For every man’s mind was then travailed with a strange confusion of conceits, all things being immoderately either dreaded or desired. Every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truths suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. Invasion of strangers, civil dissension, the doubtful disposition of the succeeding Prince, were cast in every man’s conceit as present perils.4
The triumphalism of France and the pre-eminence of the Guises were publicly enacted in the spectacular wedding celebrations of the youthful Mary Stuart and François de Valois. Both Catherine de Medici, the dauphin’s mother, and Diane de Poitiers, Henri II’s omnipotent mistress, argued that the marriage need not be hastened, that these children should be given more time. There may have been some concern at their youth and the dauphin’s sickliness, but both women were more exercised by the growing influence of the Guises whose power as a result of this union threatened to become insurmountable.
Objections were put aside, however, and the day was set for Sunday 24 April 1558. It had been two centuries since a dauphin had been married in Paris, and the streets around the cathedral of Notre Dame were thronged with an excited and expectant crowd. A large stage had been erected so that as many of the public would see the proceedings as possible. Blue silk embroidered with the arms of the Queen of Scotland and gold fleur-de-lis arched above the scaffolded platform to suggest a star-studded sky. The magnificent Gothic cathedral dwarfed the fluttering silk and national flags, its magisterial presence adding spiritual gravitas to the carnival spectacle. The people’s hero, the Duc de Guise, was master of ceremonies. He played to the crowds and waved the bejewelled noblemen aside so that the common people might better see. It was Guise policy always to court the Paris mob even at the expense of their popularity with their fellow noblemen.
And what the mob craned to see was the arrival of the wedding procession with Mary Stuart as its cynosure. Leading the assembly was the ubiquitous Duc de Guise closely followed by a band of Scottish musicians dressed in red and yellow, the colours of their queen. Then came a vast body of gentlemen of the household of the French king followed by the royal princes, the bishops, archbishops and cardinals, as brilliantly plumed as parrots. The sumptuous clothes and jewels were a spectacle in themselves. The diminutive figure of the 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