Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 7
1525–1530.
QUEEN OF NAVARRE.
Scarcely had Margaret returned with her mother to Lyons, on their slow progress from the frontier to the capital, when they were joined by another fugitive from the Emperor's prisons. Henry d'Albret, the young King of Navarre, had been taken captive with Francis; and since February he had been imprisoned in the fortress of Pavia. Despairing of any deliverance, one moonlit December night he dressed himself in his page's clothes and let himself down from his window into a dried—up moat, leaving his servant sleeping in his bed. The next morning a feeble voice behind the curtains answered the turnkey, whom a second page assured that the King was ill that day; nor till the night was the farce discovered, when the gaoler generously pardoned the two devoted pages. Meanwhile their master, a daring lad of two-and-twenty, escaped as best he might towards France, "intempeste noctis silentio, et lune claritatis favore proadjuvante," as a contemporary narrated to Wolsey. On Christmas-eve he reached St. Just-sur-Lyon. It was nearly a year since he had breathed freely, and now he was safe in France.[1] He rested there two days, whence he wrote to his chancellor to announce his escape; and then he made his way to the court of Louisa. He knew the Regent well; for on his mother's death, in 1519, the young King of Navarre had been sent to the French court, where Francis had shown great favour to the spirited and clever lad. There, too, he must often have seen Duchess Margaret, then a charming young married woman, the centre of a brilliant court, whom he should now meet in her widowhood, mournful and sick at heart.
But if he found her no longer the star of a court, he found her the heroine of Europe. Her embassy, though seemingly fruitless, had at least established her devotion and her address. Charles V. declared he had not thought it possible a woman could speak so well. Young Henry d'Albret, impetuous, and always ready to fall in love, gave the reins to his admiration for this brave and tender woman. They had many adventures to tell each other; many an instance of the Emperor's perfidious coldness. Margaret, who ever since her journey into Spain hated Charles with a vigorous hatred strange in that kindly heart, found ample sympathy in Henry d'Albret, to whom the Emperor was not merely an ungenerous captor, but the usurper of his kingdom.
Another occasion for friendship lay in the tolerance with which the young King viewed the new ideas of reform. Béarn had never been a narrowly Catholic state; Margaret, often sorely grieved by the cruel intolerance of her brother and the Cardinal do Tournon, must have turned for sympathy to this young Béarnois who, like herself, dreaded the Inquisition as the deadliest blight that could fall on any kingdom.
Thus they had two essential points in common: unity of interests and religious sympathy. For the rest, Duchess Margaret was a charming woman of the world, socially and intellectually the superior of Henry; and she was the sister of the king whose influence was most necessary to him. He was an impetuous, brave, ambitious youth; sufficiently resembling her knightly ideal to attract her interest, unfortunate enough to command her compassion. He was poor and valiant, he was kind and just to his subjects; and these would be great merits in the eyes of Margaret. That he was headstrong, fickle, and violent was scarcely apparent; and he was so young. He had, indeed, much in his favour. "Had he not been so given to women as he was," says Bordenave, "he would have been irreprehensible. He loved his people like his own children." Margaret, listening to all his generous plans on behalf of his subjects, became warmly interested in their ardent and unfortunate young king. And he wished nothing more than to marry the only sister of the King of France.
But in this early spring of 1526 Margaret had much to do beside talking with Henry d'Albret. In February Anne de Montmorency returned to France, his ransom paid, with the news that Francis was concluding a treaty with Charles, to whose sister Leonor he had been formally betrothed on the 12th February. The approaching release of the King gave great satisfaction in France, but not the joy, the outburst of thanksgiving with which she would have hailed it on the morrow of Pavia. The King's deliverance meant poverty and dismemberment to France; meant the imprisonment of the Royal princes. And it was barely four months since Francis had sworn that he would rather die in prison than subject her to such disgrace! The King was to be the King again; but no longer Ogier, no longer Roland. A note of satire pierces through the songs which the people made about their prince in his hard captivity:
Courrier qui porte lettre,
Retourne-t-en à Paris ;
Et va-t-en dire à ma mère
Va dire à Montmoreney.
Qu'on fasse battre monnoie
Aux quatre coins de Paris
S'il n'y a de l'or en France
Qu'on en prenne à Saint-Denis,
Qui la Dauphin on amène
Et mon petit fils Henry,—&c.
There is no condition he will not grant for freedom's sake.
It was not only gold, not only the Royal children that Charles demanded; he required the province of Burgundy. And those that surmised the contents of the peace could not know that the King in prison had signed before witnesses two secret protests, whereby he declared that a prisoner under lock and key is in no wise constrained to keep a forced obligation.
In this month of February, when Montmorency brought the news of the treaty into France, the children who were to be exchanged as hostages for their father were themselves very ill with measles (or so Margaret calls their illness, probably scarlatina) accompanied with long and severe fever. "Monsieur d'Angoulême," she writes, "took it with a very bad fever; and then M. d'Orléans, but he was not so ill; and then Madame Madeleine, but very slightly; and lastly, for company's sake, M. le Dauphin, without either pain or fever. And now they all are quite cured and very well. And M. le Dauphin is doing wonders at his lessons, mixing with his schooling a hundred thousand other occupations; and there is no more question of flying into passions, but rather of all the virtues. M. d'Orléans (Henry) is nailed to his books, and says he will be good; but M. d'Angoulême (Charles) knows more than the others, and does things which seem rather prophecies than childish play; so much so, my lord, that you would be astonished to hear them. The little Margot is like me: she will not be ill. But here everyone tells me of her wonderful grace; and she becomes prettier than ever was Mademoiselle d'Angoulême."
As February passed away and the children recovered, Margaret had to prepare them for the change to come—for the price the two elder boys, Francis and Henry, were to pay for their father's freedom. She must have spoken to them of the ardent and chivalric Queen, the betrothed of their father, whose wards they were to be. On the 17th of March the exchange was made. The two children were taken to Bayonne, and thence to the river Bidassoa, between Fontarabia and Andail, near Saint Jean de Luz. They and their attendants embarked from the banks of Navarre at the same moment as the boat of Francis left the Spanish header. One moment's glimpse in passing, and the two melancholy children (one eight years old, one seven) were in a hostile country, in the hands of the Constable of Castile. One happy, careless glance, and Francis was on the friendly shore, had leapt on his horse and made it prance and curvet as he cried: "Now, at last, I am a King again!"
Francis was not yet actually in his own kingdom, but in the territory of that young King, Henry d'Albret, who, with Margaret, was so anxiously waiting his arrival. Francis was at first indignant when he heard of the match that he was required to sanction; for Margaret, at this moment, was half-promised to the Emperor of Germany, to the King of England, and to Constable Bourbon. But, in the first moment of his return, he would not show himself ungrateful. Many friends awaited him at Bayonne, eager to clasp his hand again—Margaret, happy and well, whom he had last seen so miserable in his prison at Madrid, and Henry d'Albret, his fellow-captive at Pavia, now his host. There were also Louisa, his mother, the faithful and politic regent; and Montmorency, who had concluded the negotiations that Margaret had begun. Two women, moreover, eager and fearful beyond the rest, watched the King, and watched each other, to see which he first would greet. Francis turned at last; and, passing by Madame de Chateaubriand without a word, went up to a blonde and handsome Norman lady, Mademoiselle Anne du Heilly de Pisseleu, a maid of honour to his mother, a talkative, lively creature, suspected of Huguenotism, to whom he had written a letter in verse from Madrid.
Now Francis had recovered kingdom, freedom, mother, sister, mistress, and friends; but the price was still to be paid—not only the ransom of two million golden crowns, but the province of Burgundy. As for Burgundy, Francis intended to leave that debt unpaid. He displayed to his Parliament the two secret protests that he had made in prison; he called a Council of Notables at Cognac, who voted unanimously against the separation of their province from the realm of France. The Pope, the Parliament, France at large, approved the non-execution of the treaty. "A captive in bondage," cried Francis, "has no honour, and can bind himself to nothing." But, if the province was not ceded, a paladin surely would have returned to his prison, even as John of Burgundy returned to London.
"Nay," cried Francis; "John found in Edward a generous conqueror, who lodged him in his palace, admitted him to his table, and to all the amusements of his Court; therefore, John treated Edward as an equal and a friend. But the Emperor, forgetful of our kinship, forgetting that prisons were made for criminals and not for kings, made me feel all the horrors of a dungeon, and barbarously caused me to despair. How many times have I not told him that I had but the usufruct of my realm, and could not act without my subjects and my laws? But his blind cupidity has taken himself in his own net."
The indignation of Charles availed little. Rome, England, Turkey, all sent expressions of their sympathy to Francis. All that Charles could do was to take the French attendants of the little princes and send them to the galleys. As for the children themselves, they were safe in the charge of Leonor.
Francis, at home, was King of France again—King of France, but no paladin of chivalry. Perhaps the worshipping eyes of Margaret, who had so praised him for his deed of abdication, perplexed him now in his royal state at Fontainebleau: or perhaps he only wished to reward the devoted sister who had dared so much for him. For some reason, Francis withdrew his opposition to the marriage of the Duchess Margaret with the King of Navarre. He showered presents and royal promises on his sister and her lover, assuring them that he would reconquer the lost province of Navarre from Spain for Henry d'Albret. The other pretenders to Margaret's hand had all withdrawn. A chill enmity separated Charles from France; Henry of England, preferring the maid to the mistress, had set his lustful heart upon Anne Boleyn; Constable Bourbon, in this very year, was killed while leading his victorious armies on to the sack of Rome; and on the 24th of January 1527, Margaret was married to the young King of Navarre.
It was a strange, impoverished, beautiful kingdom to which Henry d'Albret took his bride, in the autumn of the year, when they were weary of the festivals of France—a new and almost a foreign country. "I have been here five days," says Margaret, writing in October from Béarn, "and I scarce begin to understand the language." In the north, all round the capital of Nérac, stretched the dreary Landes, wastes of ash-coloured sand, purpled here and there with heather, streaked with dark lines of pinewood and forests of cork-oak, ended only by the horizon of the sea; miles of undulating, desolate heath, with here and there, cropping the scanty herbage, a flock of sheep, guarded by a shepherd rudely clad in skins—a strange figure against the sky as he strode over the sand and over the bushes on the enormous stilts the peasants use there. And Pau, the southern capital, was no less different to the placid and splendid courts of France—a high-lying, steep little town, with a small fortress-like castle, and beyond, the white serrated peaks of the Pyrenees, full of robbers then, and of bears and wolves, with all round, in the lower hills, villages, where lived those poor and swarthy peasants whose language Margaret could not understand. For some years she did not love this harp, foreign, mountain country; she stayed there but for a month or two in the year, fleeing gladly back to Fontainebleau, where her brother was turning the great hunting-lodge of the French kings into a summer-palace more magnificent than dreams.
For home was still to Margaret in France. She had no children in her Castles of Béarn. Her little son had died soon after birth. Her daughter, Jeanne, was not quite two years old when Francis placed the poor solemn baby in a castle of her own at Plessis-les-Tours, afraid to leave her with her parents, lest Henry d'Albret should betroth her to a prince of Spain. Margaret was childless, and her husband was unfaithful. Still, after a few years' marriage, her thoughts began to turn towards her distant subjects of Béarn.
For there was no great need of her at the Court of France. Leonor had come from Spain, bringing back the two little princes; but she came home to find her husband fickle and unfaithful, and no disappointment is so embittered as that of the disillusioned idealist. The ardent, chivalrous Leonor was a disappointed woman. Still, she had a certain hold upon her husband, though infinitely less than belonged to pretty Anne de Pisseleu, now Duchess d'Estampes and the King's acknowledged mistress. Francis had these two women; Louisa had her son, her political ambition, and her grandchildren; the very children themselves had a new mother. So Margaret began to listen to the impatience of her husband; eager to be back among his own people, dumbly enraged with Francis who had taken his infant daughter from him. Thus, in the end of the year 1530, it happened that the King and Queen of Navarre went back into their own country, and ruled their kingdom from their Court of Nérac.
- ↑ The traditional date of this escape, 11th April 1525, followed by Génin, must be inexact, since in a letter to Helié André, dated 27th December 1525, at St. Just-sur-Lyon, Henry d'Albret narrates his escape as having happened a few days before.