Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 11
(1539–1540.)
A FALSE STEP.
At this time the Emperor's good town of Ghent revolted against him, and beseeched the King of France to grant his protection to Flanders. Here was a brilliant opportunity for Francis. By espousing the cause of Protestant Flanders he would virtually conclude a league between himself and the great schism of Northern Europe, while in defying Charles he would give a pledge to Soliman. This was the dread of Montmorency, the dear desire of Margaret. All through the winter of 1539, the spring of 1540, she is busy with the English ambassadors, trying to win her brother to make a league with Henri VIII., trying to estrange from the influence of Montmorency.
But Montmorency was all in the ascendant now, and the Turco-Huguenot alliance had lost some of its first attention to the volatile mind of the King. Francis, under Montmorency, began to think again of Milan, to wish again for the friendship of Charles. Therefore, to the surprise of those who believed themselves his real allies, Francis refused the offer of Flanders. He even promised Charles a safe passage through France if he chose to go that way to reconquer his dominions.
No doubt the Emperor in return promised many golden things. We know that he had sent a messenger to Francis, earnestly beseeching the right to pass through France, and hinting at rewards too great to specify. Francis believed him, and he came—came, to the bitter disgust of the Queen of Navarre, the evident displeasure of Madame d'Étampes, the fiery indignation of Prince Henry, who remembered those French attendants who, accompanying him into captivity, had been sent by the Emperor to the galleys. But Francis insisted on a noble reception for his guest; a certain chivalry of instinct forbade him to recall the dungeon of Madrid. So the Emperor came, to the disgust of France, to the bewilderment of the Protestants, and Soliman, and Venice.
"These men are not a litil astonied," writes Harvel from Venice in November 1539, "to undirstonde of the Emperoure's journey to Flanders by the wais of France, with few horsis. And certeinly they are matters of grete admiracion and exciding the reasons of men to consider, so grete and perpetual enemies have so grete confidence together."
Not only Harvel but all Europe believed that the Emperor, afraid of the power of Francis should he join the League, preferred to grant him Milan and keep him as a friend. The Venetian, thinking themselves forsaken, were in great distress and bewilderment. Soliman said, "These Christian princes know not how to keep their word." Henry of England sent his ambassador to Margaret to learn if Francis will in truth incline towards the Emperor. "I fear," says Margaret at Easter-time in 1540, "I fear the Legate Farnese is trying to draw him from King Henry to the Emperor."
Margaret made as brave resistance as she could. "Never think," she cries to Wallup, "my brother will so lightly lose so faithful and assured a friend!" But in her heart she feels herself powerless to turn the current of her brother's thoughts from Milan. In February she tells Norfolk, "If you would have anything of importance done, seek to win over Madame d'Étampes, who can do more with the King than all the rest. Only she," went on Margaret, "can impress a thing in his head against the Constable; and I myself, when Montmorency had turned the King against me, I had to seek the help of Madame d'Étampes."
"This good Quene is a faythfull frende to your Highness," writes Wallup to Henry VIII. But with the cowardice of her tremulous adoration, Margaret did not dare boldly to oppose the folly of the King. She worked on him vaguely and indirectly, by chance speeches, by the faint contagion of her own convictions, and through the influence of Madame d'Étampes. Even for that she so firmly thought the right and the best, Margaret could not openly remonstrate with her brother's weakness. "These things can only be wrought by Madame d'Étampes," she declares to Wallup. "I will not speak myself. I should be noted partial, and also suspected." And, miserable at her own lack of influence, she cries, with a pathetic denseness, "My brother is of this sort, that a thing being fixed in his head it is half impossible to be plucked away." Poor Queen Margaret!
She could not believe her brother fickle, much less wrong. In the end of spring she declares to Wallup, "The Emperor is a good man." But she goes on, seeing the truth in one supreme moment of disgust, "The King is too light of credence, and trusteth things willingly." Not only Margaret now began to see how little worth were the golden promises of the Emperor, who, having conquered Ghent, sent word to Francis that he could not give him Milan without the consent of the German Electors. This was a quit for Burgundy, which Francis would not yield without the consent of the Notables. By July there was a coolness between the King and the Emperor, and Francis again remembered the Protestant-Venetian-Turkish League. He sent the Royal Order to the King of Denmark. He sent an Embassy to Venice. "But the Venetians now begin to hate the French," says Harvel. He sent an envoy to the Turk; and for some while offended Soliman would not so much as see the envoy. Francis and Margaret occupied themselves with the making and seasoning of certain wild-boar pasties which they sent to the King of England. But Henry, mindful of the fickleness of Francis, would promise now no help against the Emperor.
Francis, nevertheless, was determined to redeem his slip. It seemed natural to redeem it at Margaret's expense. In order to reassure the German princes, he offered his niece of Navarre in marriage to the Duke of Cleves, a Protestant at heart, and avowedly an enemy of the Emperor. "Flanders I can get at any time," said Francis, refusing to accept the Netherlands in lieu of Milan; and probably he thought it well to have a friend so near at hand. But the alliance, though good for France, would be disastrous to Navarre. It could do nothing for the poor confiscated little kingdom. It would secure neither France nor Spain. And the future Queen would be an absentee living on her husband's German territory. Henry d'Albret deeply resented the betrothal. But he was too feeble to oppose the imperious brother-in-law, whose pensioner in some sort he was; powerless, although the Estas of his dominions more than once appealed against this peremptory order of the King of France.
It is only at this moment that we fully appreciate the intense and all-absorbing devotion of Margaret to her brother. This whim of his ran counter to every interest of her husband, of her subjects, even of her child. They are all nothing to her. She cannot conceive that they should oppose their will to that of Francis. Even the passionate anger and grief of the little princess did not touch her mother's heart. Jeanne, still ailing, frightened, not yet twelve years old, wept bitterly at the thought of being given to the care of a stranger, different in language and manners. Her proud and sore little heart rebelled at leaving France to marry a simple Duke. Yet she had been very dull and lonely at Plessis. "She filled her chamber with complaints; the air with sighs. One of the fairest princess of Europe is fading away in tears; her locks hanging loose, undressed; her lips without a smile! And when King Francis heard this thing, he named the lady to the Duke of Cleves without the consent of her father or her mother," declares Olhagaray.
But it was not because of Jeanne's desolation that the King desired to marry her. She was only a glove to fling down in the face of the Emperor; merely a note of defiance to sound in his hearing. She was a pledge to the Netherlands, and to the Lutherans who were favoured and sheltered by the Duke of Cleves. The little princess must not expect the privileges of a woman. Jeanne could not resign herself to this political necessity. Her father dared not, her mother would not help her. So, taking her case into her own defence, she appealed herself to the uncle whose favourite she was, and whom she knew more nearly than either parent. Having seen the Duke of Cleves, she felt she could never love him; she beseeched her kind uncle not to press the marriage. Francis was very wroth at this questioning of his decision. He imagined, perhaps, that the King of Navarre had urged his little daughter to revolt. His anger came to Margaret's ears. Alarmed and horrified at Jeanne's indiscretion, she wrote to intercede for her rash little daughter.
"But," says Margaret, in a later letter to the King, "if the said Duke of Cleves had been to you all that he ought and that I desired, I would never have spoken against him; we would rather have seen our daughter die, as she told us she should do, than we would have stayed her from going to the place where I deemed she could do you a service." This is no court parlance. Margaret considered that the noblest lot on earth was to live or to die for her brother, the King. Jeanne's revolt, her claims for independence, filled Margaret with something akin to disdain and indignation. She had no pity for the strange proud little girl who, forsaken by father and mother, beaten and coerced, still declared in her weak childish treble that she would never love the Duke of Cleves. Her brother was Margaret's religion; and Jeanne's determination seemed to her as, impious as it was disobedient. St. Felicitas might have felt the same had one of her children refused to die for the Cross. She was resolved that her daughter should not fail the King in his need. Indignant that her daughter, hers, should shrink from so honourable a sacrifice, she was determined to subdue that uncompromising and stubborn spirit; indignant, and with the despotic anger of the worshipper whose idol is outraged.
But Jeanne was no silent martyr. She was a decided, brusque, and valiant nature, very French in type. Under the exterior of a charming and espiégle brunette she concealed an immense resolution. The day before her betrothal to the German Duke she called the three principal officers of her household into her presence and bade them witness her protestation. She then read aloud:
"I, Jeanne of Navarre, continuing the protest I have made and in which I persist, say and declare and protest again before these present, that the marriage to be made between me and the Duke of Cleves is against my will; that I never have consented to it and never will consent; and that, whatever I may do or say hereafter wherefrom one may argue my consent, it will be done by force against my will and desire and through fear of the King, as of the King my father, and of the Queen my mother, who has threatened me, and has had me whipt by my governess, the wife of the Bailiff of Caen; and several times my governess has exhorted me, by the command of the Queen my mother, threatening me that should I not do, in the matter of this marriage, all that the King of France requires, and should I not consent, I shall be so flogged and so maltreated that I shall die of it, and that I shall be the cause of the ruin and destruction of my father, my mother, and all their house; and all this has put me in such fear—especially the destruction of my said father and mother—that I know of no one who can succour me but God, seeing that my father and my mother have forsaken me; and these know well what I have said to them and that I can never love the Duke of Cleves, and that I will none of him. For I protest that should it come to pass that I be affianced or married to the Duke of Cleves, in any sort or manner that may come about, it will be, and will have been, against my heart and will; and he shall never be my husband, and never will I hold him for such, and the said marriage shall be null, and I call God and you to witness that you sign with me my protestation and recognize the force, the violence, and constraint which is used towards me in the matter of this marriage.
"Jehanne de Navarre.
"J. d'Arras.
"Francès Navarro.
"Arnaul Ducquesne."
There is no cause without its martyrs. Little Jeanne, sorely against her will, was now to be tied to the rock. The dragon was invited to come and take her; a heavy German dragon, growling an uncomprehended and barbaric jargon. Jeanne regarded him with loathing and aversion. But no Perseus appeared. Jeanne was sent to her mother at Alençon, and the Duke of Cleves followed her there. To Jeanne, young, high-spirited, brilliant, made by her confined and dreary childhood only the more eager for splendour and for Paris, it appeared a cruel lot to wed this German Duke, twelve years older than herself, whose father was a madman, whose manners disgusted her, whose tongue she could not understand. Her mother had no sympathy with this aversion. Remembering her own first marriage, she did not think her daughter unfortunate. Margaret appears to have liked the Duke of Cleves; and he was at least an earnest against the Emperor. He was gallant in battle, wealthy, tolerant, and a protector of the oppressed. Above all, he could serve her brother Francis. She had small pity for Jeanne.
Nevertheless, having gained considerable influence over Duke William, she managed to ease her little daughter of the most intolerable portion of her burden. She induced the Duke, out of consideration to the childish age and fragile health of Jeanne, to submit to a purely formal marriage, and then to return to Germany, leaving his little bride with her parents for at least another year. Even this respite did not appease Jeanne. The day after her betrothal she signed another protest.
At last the King became impatient. He sent a peremptory message to Margaret, requesting her to bring her daughter at once to Châtellerault, where the Court had removed. The meadows of Châtellerault were overbuilt with palaces and arches made of greenery; jousts and tourneys were held the whole day long. At night they were continued by torchlight, a thing which never yet had been seen in France. Nymphs, dryads, dwarfs, knights, and ladies arrayed after the fashion of Amadis and La Belle Dame sans Merci, hermits in robes of green and grey velvet, all manner of gay and strange masquers inhabited the palaces of boughs. Little Jeanne herself, on her wedding morning, was clad so heavily in cloth-of-gold and silver, so studded and heavy with gems, that she could not walk under the weight of her finery. The King himself was to have led her to the altar. Finding her so weak, a brilliant thought struck him. Here, in the face of France, in the hearing of Europe, he would exalt the bride of the Emperor's enemy at the expense of the dupe of the Emperor.
The King called Montmorency to him. He told the Constable to pick up the little girl and carry her on his shoulders into the church. Montmorency dared not disobey. The Court looked on and marvelled. Indeed, it was a strange sight; that pale childish figure, stiff with gold, and laden with gems like some barbaric idol; and the Constable of France, the highest dignitary of the realm, turned into a porter for a tired child. Montmorency understood the insult. He was angry and in sore despite; he knew that he served as a spectacle to all as he walked in the triumph of his enemies. "My day is done," he began to murmur. "Good-bye to it, I say!" But the Queen of Navarre was glad, and whispered to those near to her:
"That man tried to ruin me with the King. And now he serves to carry my daughter to church."
Jeanne was married then and there, among all those whispers of envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, married, among the splendour that a country groaned to pay for. The Duke of Cleves at once retired to Germany, and the little bride set out for Pau with her parents.
The jealousy of Francis had not hitherto allowed her to visit her dominions. But now the Infant of Spain could not marry her. On the last day of the festivities, the King sent for Montmorency, and dismissed him from his favour. The Emperor was defied.