Marie Stuart in France: Women who shaped the early life of the Queen of Scots

by Linda Root

In spite of the volumes written about  Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots, even the most accomplished historians leave perplexing questions about the queen’s personal relationships with the women who shared her youth.  Ironically, the end of her life at age forty-four mirrored its beginning.  She spent her first five years of childhood being moved from one sanctuary to another, just ahead of Edward Seymour’s army in the operation known in history as The Rough Wooing, when Henry VIII sought to kidnap her to enforce a marriage contract with his son.  During the last two decades of her life,  she was forced from one rural estate to another at the will of the English Queen.  In neither case was she empowered to select her surroundings or her friends. The Inchmahome Priory of her early childhood was not that different from Fotheringhay where she died.  Marie Stuart's personal freedoms were determined by the English.

THE FOUR MARIES:

During her early childhood, Marie Stuart’s playmates and companions were four little girls selected by the little queen’s mother, the Scottish Dowager,  Marie de Guise. 
They were daughters of the Dowager’s ladies in waiting, most of whom were French. Many notable historians assert all of the Four Maries other than Flemyng had French mothers, but that is inaccurate.  Livingston’s mother was Lady Agnes Douglas. The other exception in the predominantly French household of Marie de Guise was Princess Janet Stewart, Lady Flemyng, an illegitimate sibling of Marie’s father James V, who died when the queen was six days old. At the time of their selection, they became part of the queen’s movable household.  They and their families joined the nomadic existence of the queen while her mother negotiated her daughter's exodus to France. 

The queen's final Scottish refuge during the Rough Wooing was Dumbarton Castle,  on a rocky crag where the Firth of Clyde empties into the Irish Sea. From there, she sailed from Scotland on a French flagship in the midst of violent storms. The queen's fraternal aunt Lady Flemyng served as her governess. Lords Seton and Livingston accompanied the queen to France as her co-guardians.  

The Four Maries were seasick during most of the voyage.  They were Marie Flemyng (Flamie), Marie Livingston (Lusty),  and the two staunch Catholics with French mothers,  Marie Seton (Seton) and Marie Beaton (Beton). All were between ages five and six,  and all four were named Marie. Although numerous sources assert Livingston’s given name was Mary, surviving documents show she signed her names on court documents and is referred to in the queen’s will as Marie.  The will, of course, was signed by the testatrix as 'Marie R'. During her lifetime, there was no such person as Mary Queen of Scots.  According to modern Marian historian Jane Lewis, the English insistence on calling the Scottish Queen  'Mary'  is a manifestation of the national tendency to lay claim to a queen who brought the Stuart dynasty to England. It is from Marie Stuart that all English monarchs descend through the female line of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, Marie Stuart's granddaughter, the Winter Queen. 

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia - The Winter Queen

How much information we are given about the four little girls who were Marie Stuart's conscripted playmates depends on who is writing the history.  As long ago as when I was in college, and first became interested in the Queen of Scots, I realized insofar as primary sources are concerned, there are two separate queens with very different stories, depending upon the religion of the author.  As to the Four Maries, numerous historians regard Marie Flemyng as the chief among them and the only one with the courage to call the queen to account when she was over-bearing.  Those who write of her after she married the statesman Maitland of Lethington color her as a devil or an angel, depending on their view of Maitland's politics. Marie Livingston was the first to marry. Writers with a Catholic bias would canonize Marie Seton if they could. And even though she was the niece of a murdered Catholic Cardinal, Marie Beaton was not as morally upright as her best friend Seton. She later earned the queen's disfavor by establishing an unspecified relationship with the English ambassador. 

In any case, once they arrived in France in 1548, the Four Maries were culled from the queen’s entourage and sent to Poissy while Marie Stuart was ensconced in the Royal Nursery at Saint Germain en Laye, separating her from the Scottish influence of her Four Maries.  The excuse given was to force the Queen to speak nothing but French, which makes no sense since her governess Lady Flemyng’s French was marginal. 

Nevertheless, King Henri Valois sent glowing praises to the Scottish Dowager about the governess, no doubt referring to talents other than linguistic.  Within three years, she was sent home in disfavor, having given birth to a bastard son of the King of France, conceived while the Royal Mistress Diane de Poitiers was home at her estate nursing a broken ankle.  It was one occasion when Queen Consort Catherine d’Medici and Royal Mistress, Diane d’ Poitiers joined forces and brought the governess’s pregnancy to the attention of Marie de Guise, who was more outraged than either of them.
 Lady Flemyng’s conduct was a smudge on her daughter’s reputation. The king did not get to vote when his wife and his mistress sent Lady Flemyng packing for her home in Biggar. Her best friend the Dowager did not speak to Lady Flemyng until the Dowager was on her deathbed, but it was Janet who was the chief mourner at her funeral and who accompanied her casket to Rheims for interment.

Even before Lady Flemyng was sent home in disgrace,  her Scottish influence over her royal ward had been challenged by the Dowager Duchess of Guise, Antoinette de Bourbon, who had wanted a French governess at the outset and had been overruled by her daughter, Marie de Guise. Antoinette instigated the dismissal of the Four Maries from the Queen’s household and supported the king and queen when they sent most of the Scottish suite home.  The only Scots Lady Flemying had been able to retain were a cook and a physician.

During the years of the queen’s separation from her Four Maries, she formed four notable relationships with females. The first was with her nursery playmate and new best friend, Princess Elisabeth. Marie often chose the astute royal mistress Diane de Potier for a mentor, favoring her over her future mother-in-law Queen Catherine d'Medici.  Her relationship with the Queen Consort was not always warm and friendly.  The formidable Duchess of Aumale, soon to become Duchess of Guise, Anne d’ Este, was the fourth.  Marie Stuart was being groomed to become the Queen of France. Her success in the role required her to behave like a French princess, not a Scottish queen.  

Although historians often cast the dismissal of her playmates in a harsh light, Poissy was only a few miles from Saint Germain.  The Four Maries often visited the palace on weekends and holidays. They had not been exiled to an austere convent in a backwater location. The convent school at Saint Louis Priory provided a high-quality liberal education to its aristocratic students. Even religious policies were flexible to a degree. Marie Livingston, whose family embraced the new learning, was encouraged but not forced to attend Mass. By the time the Four Maries reached puberty, they were well educated and highly polished French girls, ready to be integrated into the life at the French court.  Nevertheless, their place in the life of the Queen had been taken by the Princesses Elisabeth and Claud, and their brother Francois, the Dauphin. 

By the time she was eleven, the Queen of Scots might well have been homesick for her mother, but there is no reason to think she missed or even remembered the land of which she was sovereign.  

Of the four female relationships formed during her early years in France, three were among those with whom she corresponded in the months before her execution.  Diane de Poitiers was dead, but her elegance and style left a lasting impression on the queen, who like Diane, knew her stage craft.  She did not wear a crimson petticoat to her execution by accident.  She knew it was the color of martyrdom. 

THE PRINCESS ELISABETH VALOIS:

Elisabeth Valois, school of Clouet

The Princess Elisabeth Valois:  One might develop a distorted impression of the relationship between the Queen of Scots and Henri and Catherine’s oldest daughter Elisabeth if they merely surveyed the queen’s correspondence without knowing the background in which they were written.  A portfolio of letters written by the Queen to her new best friend survives.  They were not components of a private communication between close friends, but letters produced in the classroom as a part of the curriculum.   They were designed as exercises in penmanship and self-expression, and would have been read by a language tutor and possibly by Queen Catherine or Diane de Poitiers, but they were not meant to be sent to the recipient.   While Elisabeth was a frequent addressee of the queen’s letters, she was not the only one. Sometimes Marie wrote to her little friend and future fiancé, the Dauphin Francois, who was also a student in the royal nursery, and adored Marie. 

The tone of the queen’s letters to Elisabeth is often pedantic, not unusual in an exchange between a girl of eleven to a friend almost two and a half years her junior.  The queen lectures Elisabeth as if she were a younger sister, and in many respects, she was. There was a difference in status of the girls.  Marie was an anointed queen, and thus took precedence in the protocols.  Marie also treated Francois very much as if he were a sickly younger brother. Throughout her life, she was drawn to nurse the needy. However, it is an error to paint her as always compassionate and kind to those who stood between her and her goals.

From a letter written circa 1553, when Marie Stuart was eleven:
"It is not enough, my beloved sister, that at the commencement of your studies you should invoke the help of God. For He wishes, besides, that you should work with all the force you possess. For, my dearest friend and sister, the ancients have said that the Gods do not give their blessings to idle folk, but sell them for labor. Farewell, and love me as I love you."

In another letter, eleven-year-old Marie Stuart writes to her younger friend Elisabeth as follows:
"I read, yesterday, one of (Aesop’s)Fables which is as profitable as it is agreeable. During the winter the ant was engaged in making a good meal of the grain which he had collected in the summer, when the grasshopper came to him, very hungry, and begged for something to eat. But the ant said, " What were you doing in the summer?" " Singing," was the answer. " If you sang in the summer, you may dance now in the winter," answered the ant. The fable signifies, dearest sister, that while we are young we should take pains to study learning and virtue, to guide us in later years."

The friendship between the two royal girls did not fade with the years, although they were separated in their teens when Elisabeth was sent to Spain to become the third queen of King Phillip after Mary Tudor died.  In a letter written to Elisabeth in later years, from one of her English prisons, the Queen of Scots writes:
"I do not know how to describe to you the pleasure which your kind and comforting letters have given me at a time so unfortunate for me; they seem sent from God for my consolation in the midst of all the troubles and adversities that surround me! I see well how much I am bound to bless God for our having been (fortunately for me) brought up together in friendship."

Some histories of the queen infer she received her education at the convent school at the Abbey of Saint Pierre les Dames du Rheims where her Aunt Renee de Guise was abbess. It is true that the queen visited her mother’s oldest sibling at the convent and spent some time there in the company of her aunt Renee, but she did not reside there for any protracted length of time. Her principal education was received at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and when she grew older, she moved with the court.  Her mother’s family,  however, participated in her care and education and as she approached the age of majority, assumed a principal role. . The family matriarch Antoinette d’Bourbon, the Dowager Duchess of Guise, was not shy in providing input. The image one receives of the young Marie Stuart was that of a serious student who aimed to please and who worked hard at her lessons and was obedient.


 Because Marie was already a sovereign, she sometimes found herself the object of power struggles in the nursery and at court.  She also was a pawn in the rising fortunes of the House of Guise. There is no question that the Dukes of Guise and their ecclesiastical siblings were intimidating.  Francois, Second Duke of Guise, and his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine rivaled the king in both wealth and power. A major rift erupted when the Dauphin was given his establishment and withdrawn from the nursery.  At Antoinette Bourbon’s instigation, her sons Francois and Charles demanded the same treatment for their niece Queen Marie, who was a year older.  The problem was getting someone other than themselves to pay for it, preferably the Scottish parliament.  Financial accommodations were reached between Henri II and the Scots, and Marie Stuart moved into her own suite at Saint Germain,  One of her first acts was to free her Four Maries from their exile and restore them to her household. Another was to entertain her Uncle Charles at a lavish dinner.  By then, the adolescent queen had learned to assert herself.  She embarked upon a struggle with her formidable grandmother Antoinette to rid herself of the governess the Dowager Duchess of Guise had selected to replace Janet Stewart, Lady Flemyng.   Marie took her complaints directly to her mother in Scotland, and the governess was sacked, but not without first spreading tales inferring Marie Stuart was a spoiled, manipulative brat.  During the dispute over the governess, Marie maintained the woman’s abuses had caused her to take to her bed with severe pains in her side.  Whether real or feigned, the pains were a recurring device displayed by the queen throughout her life when she did not get her way. And of course, the governess was sent back from whence she came, a bitter woman who did not live long.

QUEEN CATHERINE d' MEDICI:

There is much truth to the governess’s accusation.  Marie was indeed manipulative, and her first great success was with her prospective father-in-law, the king.  When adolescent Marie and Queen Catherine disagreed,  Marie sometimes took her complaints directly to the king, who was enchanted by his little ward and often arbitrated in her favor.  There is no definitive point where relationships between Queen consort Catherine and the Queen of Scots are noted in the histories.  At the time of Marie’s arrival in France, Catherine d’Medici was herself an outsider, the Italienne.  The female personage of power and influence at the Valois Court was not the queen but the royal mistress, Diane dePoitiers.  It was she who convinced Henri to begin occasionally sleeping with his wife, in order to secure the dynasty.  Diane was the one who set the tone at court.  When in 1551 the Dowager of Scotland Marie de Guise came home to France for a visit, it was Diane she consulted on matters of protocol and wardrobe. But the Duchess of Valentinois was more than a fashion plate. She was one of the king’s principal advisers on such heady matters as international diplomacy and military affairs.

The Queen of Scots was friendly with the Duchess and considered her a mentor and friend.  At one point, some of Marie Stuart’s distractors suggested a painting by an unknown artist of two topless women in the bath produced late in the 16^th century was of Diane and the Queen of Scots, although it is far more likely of the French King Henry IV’s beloved mistress Madame d’Estrees and her sister. While Diane had frequently posed nude, there is no evidence the Queen of Scots did.  Also, Diane was forty-three years older than Marie, obviously not the case of the women in the painting.

 It is worthy of note that Catherine d’Medici had only been Queen of France a year when anointed Queen Marie Stuart arrived in France.  From the time of Catherine’s  marriage to Henri in 1533,  she had remained in the background. The marriage contract was negotiated while her uncle Clement VII was the pope, but he died shortly after the marriage.  The contract had been negotiated by Henri’s father Francois I, anticipating the political benefits he would reap by being an in-law of the Pope.  The marriage occurred at a time when Francois was competing with Charles V for the favor of the  Roman Church. For that reason, the bride’s dowry was hardly a factor in the negotiations.  With Clement’s death, Catherine was relegated to the background. She spent her energies staying in the good graces of the king’s mistress the Duchess of d’Etampes and her husband’s beloved Diane de Poitiers. At the time Henri succeeded his father, Catherine was far from an important force in French court politics, and the Queen of Scots apparently sensed her lack of popularity at the court.  There is no evidence of precisely when the queens displayed a mutual dislike of one another, but at some point while Marie was growing up, she referred to Queen Catherine as ‘the Florentine shopkeeper’s daughter.’ Her use of the demeaning label made its way to  Catherine, who did not forget the slight. 

DIANE d' POITIERS:

Diane dePoitiers, the Duchess of Valentinois, was not the trollop the Scottish Protestant Kirk made her out to be.  She had been a loyal and loving wife to her much older first husband, Louis de Breze, Seigneur d’Anet.  According to romantic legend, Henri II had been infatuated with Diane since he was a boy on his way to captivity in Spain,  and while that may be true,  whatever the adolescent Henri’s feelings for her might have been, she was an exemplary wife to Louis while he lived.  While the court of Henri’s father Francois I was licentious, Henri Valois was of a different ilk.  He and Diane were deeply devoted to one another, and the tone of their court was conservative. When sensuous dances such as the Volta became popular at court, they were favored by Queen Catherine, not the Duchess.  In some respects, she was more prudish than Catherine.

 Diane was 19 years the king’s senior, and her judgment was astute.  If she was unpopular with the Guises and its rivals in  the Montmorency faction, it was for her competence in maintaining the balance of power between them, not her status as a mistress.  She, not Catherine, held the ear as well as the heart of the king.  But, Catherine was an intelligent young woman whose life experiences had taught her to be cautious.  She knew better than to be confrontational in her dealings with Diane.  She was also circumspect about her relationship with her designated future daughter-in-law.  The Italian shopkeeper’s daughter was wise enough to avoid battles she could not win. Once she began giving birth to Henri’s children, she was content to bide her time.

ANNE d' ESTE, DUCHESS OF GUISE, DUCHESS OF NEMOURS:

When the Queen of Scots arrived in France, her grandfather Claud was Duke of Guise, the second son of the Duke of Lorraine, which had been an independent Duchy.   The House of Guise had brought Lorraine into the kingdom, and its scions were considered princes of France, claiming precedence over the Bourbon princes of the blood.   Until 1528, only princes of the ruling house were awarded the title of Duke. Thus, when Duke Claud’s daughter, the Scottish Dowager, began negotiations aimed at sending her daughter to France to escape a forced betrothal to Henry VIII’s son Prince Edward, there were political benefits in welcoming the Queen of Scots to France.  Although Henri Valois disagreed with his father’s position on many issues, bringing Marie Stuart to France under contract to become betrothed to his four-year-old son Francois was not among them.  The French crown was locked in armed conflicts with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and the House of Guise contributed both its military might and incredible wealth to efforts to hold Charles at bay.  Marie had been in France for two years when Claud died at the Guise estate in Joinville where she had visited, but by the time of her arrival, the Duke had passed the leadership of the Guise faction to his sons Francois and Charles. 

Anne d'Este

Francois de Guise

In 1550, both the Duke and his brother John, Cardinal of Lorraine, died, leaving the new Duke of Guise Francois the most important of France’s generals, and his brother Charles, the most important European ecclesiastic behind the Pope, and the richest man in France.  Their mother, the redoubtable Antoinette deBourbon, Dowager Duchess of Guise, retained her position as the family matriarch,  but the new Duchess of Guise, Anne d’Este, was formidable in her own right, and a person of influence in the wife of her niece, the Queen of Scots.   Like Elisabeth Valois, Anne d’Este remained close to the Queen of Scots long after she returned to Scotland.

Of the women who influenced Marie Stuart’s early life, I find Anne d’Este the most enigmatic.  My debut novel sees her through the eyes of Janet Stewart, Lady Flemying’s daughter whom the French called La Flamina because her surname hinted at a Flemish heritage.   My protagonist did not like Anne and viewed her as a puppet of Antionette d’ Bourbon, a rather stiff-necked moralist who wore a hair shirt and a celice under plain, coarse clothes.  However, as she matured, Anne became a leader of the militant Catholic faction in the French Wars of Religion and the epitome of a woman who stepped far outside of the role of the typical aristocratic noblewoman of her day.  It is difficult to extract from the several versions of Anne e’Este to isolate the one who influenced the Queen of Scots during her years in France. 

The woman who succeeded Antoinette de Bourbon as Duchess of Guise was the daughter of the Duke of Ferrera, Ercole II, which gave her shared heritage with Queen Catherine d’ Medici. However, Anne was also the granddaughter of a King of France, and the niece of Francois I’s revered first wife Claud.  Her mother was Renee of France, one of the two daughters of the Valois king Louis XII, his only children to survive infancy.  The crown then passed to his relative Francois I, Henri II’s father. Thus, Anne e’Este and the French king were related.  She traveled from her father’s duchy to Saint Germain en Laye where she was married and never again set foot in Italy.  Her marriage to the son of the high-flying Duke of Guise was a political match of high value to both.  Whether out of genuine affection or a shared political ambition, the marriage was a strong one.  From the time of her marriage to Francois, who at the time was Duke of Aumale, Anne d’Este became an enthusiastic member of the House of Guise.  In 1550 when the old Duke died, she became Duchess of Guise, and with the aid of her mother-in-law Antoinette managed the vast wealth of the Guise while her husband became one of France’s most accomplished warrior princes.  She apparently shared her mother-in-law’s enthusiasm for removing the pre-pubescent Queen of Scots from the control of  Catherine and Diane.  She developed a friendly correspondence with her husband’s sister Marie de Guise, informing her that at the age of nine, the little queen was too advanced to be treated as a child.  She and her brother-in-law Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, were instrumental in convincing Mare de Guise to pursue the funding necessary to establish a separate household for the Queen of Scots.  

According to a very recent scholarly analysis by Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge Press, 2015, it was after the queen’s eleventh birthday when her sovereignty was established that her classical education actually began.  The strict regimen imposed by the hand-picked governess Madame Parois, as unpopular as it was with Marie, introduced the queen to a level of study of more substance and less glitter.  According to author Pollnitz, her education to that point, while impressive, was superficial, aimed more at showmanship than deep understanding. Contrary to the reports of other historians who compare her facility with Latin to Edward VI, Polnitz maintains the queen’s  performances were orchestrated by her tutors and were well rehearsed.  Her celebrated dissertation at the Louvre in 1554-or 1555 so gloriously applauded by the French scholar Brantome was more a recitation than an expository declamation. Nevertheless, Mary Stuart was educated well above the standard of most female royals of her day, no doubt with the encouragement of her aunt Anne, who had received an exemplary liberal education while growing up in Ferrera.

The success of her Guise relatives in giving the Queen of Scots her household paved the way for acknowledgment of her majority, a move that allowed her to appoint her own Regent.  Guided by her Guise relatives, Marie ousted the Regent James Hamilton, erstwhile Earl of Arran and Duke of Chatelherault, and replaced him with her mother.  It was a move popular in France, but not in Scotland, where the move was perceived as an assault against the Scottish Reformation and a reaffirmation of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France.  It was a victory for the Guises and the Royal House of Valois, but one for which Marie de Guise ultimately paid dearly. 

Notre Dame du Paris

After Marie  Stuart’s marriage to Francois II in April 1558 when she became the Dauphiness, it seemed apparent she would someday become Queen of France.  Her training shifted to what was appropriate for a queen consort. For elegance and taste, she would have looked to Anne e’Este as well as Diane de Poitiers. She had already estranged herself from Catherine by insisting on wearing white at her wedding, which Catherine considered the color of mourning.  The austerity of the Dowager Antoinette de Bourbon was ill-suited to a nominated Queen of France. Thus,  Anne Este emerged as an ideal mentor.

For all of her love of elegance, Anne d’Este was an exemplary wife to Francois.  She never appeared in public without the Duke, or if he was on a military campaign, without his brother the Cardinal as her escort.  While the Queen of Scot’s enemies in Scotland later tried to cast the Duchess as a loose woman who had engaged in an affair with her second husband, the Duke of Nemours while Francois still lived, there is no credible evidence that Anne was anything but a loyal and loving wife, one of the several victims of the poison pens of Marie Stuart’s enemies Buchanan and Randolph, and the polemics of John Knox. When Francois d’ Guise was assassinated in 1563, Anne d’Este is said to have supervised the execution of the man who shot him, standing watch while his extremities were tied to bent saplings,  which when released tore him limb from limb.  Some stories have her cutting the rope herself.

Throughout her life, the Queen of Scots and her Guise family remained close, at times to Marie Stuart’s detriment.  During her years of detention in England, she looked to Anne’s sons to launch a rescue, and she stayed close to her aunt.  Among their preserved  correspondence,  at the eve of Marie Stuart’s period of personal rule, letters were exchanged regarding Anne’s remarriage to the handsome and younger Jacques de Savoy, Duke of Nemours,  at a time when the Queen was imprisoned at Loch Leven.  The Queen of Scots sent Anne d’Este wishes for the happiness Marie would never realize. It was Anne’s second successful marriage. She presented Nemours with three more children to match the seven survivors of her union with Francois de Guise.  She also supervised diplomatic exchanges between Nemours, France and the independent  Duchy of Savoy.

Henri IV as Mars (PD Art)

Anne d’Este remained a political force to be reckoned with after her second husband died. The last of Catherine d’Medici’s sons to rule France, Henri III, had her two older Guise sons murdered, and Anne arrested, although she was soon released. While there is a lack of conclusive evidence, Anne is a prime suspect in Henri III’s assassination the following year. After personally supervising the resistance in Paris to the armies of the Huguenot heir to the throne, Henri of Navarre during the Wars of Religion, when Henri IV submitted to a mass and recanted his Protestant faith, Anne persuaded her sons to  acknowledge him as King of France.  When he divorced his flamboyant wife Marguerite of Valois (Queen Margot), the Dowager Duchess of Guise and Nemours, a consummate survivor, became superintendent of his bride Maria d’ Medici’s  household.  When Anne d’Este died, her heart was buried at Joinville with Francois and her Guise children, and her body was sent to Annecy to be buried with her second husband and his family.  She would have been a good role model for the Queen of Scots, whom she outlived by twenty years.  She was refined and educated, flexible when warranted, and hard of heart when required.  

CONCLUSION:

Execution of the Queen of Scots, {{PD Art}}

During the last days of her life, the Queen of Scots still looked to France for her salvation. Her last letter was written to Charles IX, King of France, Catherine’s son. It was Anne’s son Henri, third Duke of Guise whom she had expected to lead a military expedition to England to save her, unfortunately at a time when the Guises had problems of their own. She petitioned Elizabeth to allow her to retire to the Guise controlled convent of Saint Pierre les Dames du Rheims where her Aunt Renee was the abbess, and where the last of the Four Maries to leave her service, Marie Seton, had gone to spend her final years. Elizabeth refused. Ironically, the Queen of Scots,  who was happiest as Queen of France,  is buried in Westminster Abbey in a country she never ruled, across the aisle from the Queen of England, who signed her death warrant.  Even in death, she did not choose her own company.

Thank you for joining me in this brief look at the women in Marie Stuart's France. ~ Linda Root

Linda Root is the author of six historical novels set in the late 16th and early seventeenth century, The First Marie and the Queen of Scots, (2011) and The Last Knight and the Queen of Scots (2013), both large historicals, and the Legacy of the Queen of Scots Suite consisting of four books to date and the fifth coming in early 2016.  Visit her author’s page: She also writes historical fantasy under the name J.D. Root.  Root is a former major crimes prosecutor living in the high desert above Palm Springs with husband Chris and two Alaskan malamutes Maxx and Maya.  Visit her author page on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0053DIGM8

Nostradamus, Dee, Agrippa: The Secrets of the Tudor-Era Seers

By Nancy Bilyeau

On January 12, 1559, Elizabeth Tudor entered the Tower of London to prepare for her coronation as Queen of England. Her half-sister, Mary I, had died on November 17th and Elizabeth seized the reins of power immediately, but the all-important coronation was not set to take place until nearly two months later.

The date when Elizabeth would ride through the city of London to Westminster Abbey was January 15th. At the suggestion of Robert Dudley, Elizabeth consulted Dr. John Dee, the astrologist and scholar who later served as Shakespeare's inspiration for Prospero in The Tempest. Dee chose the date as most favorable to a successful reign.

Elizabeth's years of reliance on Dee puzzles some people today. How could the Tudor queen, educated, enlightened and brilliant, known for saying, "I would not open windows into men's souls," make decisions based on an astrologer? But to wonder that misreads the importance of men like John Dee in the 16th century. The more well versed in the Renaissance the ruler was, the more he or she favored the educated seers and wizards.

The career of Dee echoes that of Nostradamus in France and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Germany. By looking at them together, the life of a seer comes into focus.

Nostradamus

Of all the mystics who exerted influence in the 16th century, Nostradamus is the most notorious today. He has been the subject of hundreds of books and several recent television documentaries and is even portrayed by Rossif Sutherland (Donald's son) in a key role in the popular TV series Reign.

Catherine de Medici advised by Nostradamus (Sutherland) in Reign

Historians believe that Michel de Nostredame came from a family of Provence forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity. After years of censure, taxation and increasing acts of violence against Jews in both Spain and France, King Louis XII ordered the exile of all Jews from Provence in an edict published in 1500. The Gassonet family did not leave; they had already converted to Christianity, with their name changing from Gassonet to Nostredame, arguably one of the most Catholic names imaginable. Michel was born on December 14th in Saint-Remy-de-Provence.

Birthplace of Nostradamus in Saint-Remy

Michel definitely showed academic promise, learning Greek, Latin, Hebrew, logic and mathematics as well as medicine. At the age of 15 he entered the University of Avignon. But he was also drawn to the study of astrology, a respected practice in the 16th century, and herbal medicine. In his 20s, he achieved fame as a physician whose patients survived the plague more than average. In a time when medicine hurt more than it helped, Michel believed in fresh air, clean water and hygiene for patients--most unusual concepts--and prescribed a pill made of crushed rose petals. But after his own wife and children died of the plague despite his efforts to save them, he seems to have moved away from medicine and toward the arts of the occult. He wandered through Europe for years, and unfortunately became of interest to the Inquisition, who persecuted both conversos and those who dabbled in heresy. Somehow he managed to survive his Inquisitors, and subsequently became more--not less--interested in prophecy and mysticism. He Latinised his name to "Nostradamus."

In 1555, the first of Nostradmus's collections of prophecies foretelling the history of the world were published. The Queen of France, Catherine de Medici, who has gone down in history as a conniver and a poisoner, was also a passionate supporter of the arts, particularly architecture, and like other Renaissance patrons, was intrigued by prophecy. Many 16th century seers studied the philosophy of the ancient Greeks (as well as the Kabbalah and Arabic texts). The Queen summoned Nostradamus to the French court, and he advised her, on and off, until his death in 1566.

In the 16th century the most famous Nostradamus prophecy was a published quatrain:

"The young lion will overcome the old,
In a warlike field, in single combat,
In a cage of gold, he will pierce his eyes;
Two wounds being one he then dies a cruel death."

Based on contemporary sketch

In 1561, France's King Henry II died after being injured in a tournament joust. He was struck in the face, through his visor, by an opponent whose coat of arms included a lion. The lance drove into his brain just above his eye and he died days later, in agony. (In recent years, this chilling prediction has come under fire, as some say the quatrain came to light after the death of the Valois king, not before.)

Many of Nostradamus' prophecies seem to have been drawn from ancient end-of-world writings by Livy and Plutarch, among others, with astrological twists. Believers credit him with predicting everything from the French Revolution and American Civil War to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and World Trade Center attacks ("earth-shaking flames from the world's center roar"). But critics say his writings were vague enough to allow for just about any interpretation. Whether Nostradamus obscured his sincerely-meant prophecies to protect himself from the Inquisition or because they were cynically concocted wholesale inventions, we can never know.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

In 1818's Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes of an impressionable young medical student's fateful moment of discovery:

"In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with antipathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into great enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind, and bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery..."

And so Victor Frankenstein was lost to his obsession--the creation of life.

Frankenstein: The man and his creation

The name Agrippa was not a fictional one but belonged to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, a 16th century German theologian, alchemist, philosopher and magician. Shelley's use of Agrippa's beliefs to fuel her tale is not as strange as it may seem at first glance. He also played an important part in a nonfiction book written by her journalist-philosopher father, William Godwin: Lives of the Necromancers. It's clear that this group of mystical thinkers--Godwin's list includes  not only Agrippa and Nostradamus but also Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon,  and a dozen others--proved fascinating to the poets and philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Godwin wrote of Agrippa:

"He was one of the most celebrated men of his time.... It is more than probable that Agrippa was willing by a general silence and mystery to give encouragement to the wonder of the vulgar mind. He was flattered by the terror and awe which his appearance inspired. He did not wish to come down to the ordinary level." 

Like Nostradamus, Agrippa was a precocious student. Born in Cologne in 1486, he mastered six languages and studied medicine and law as well as the work of the Humanists. Alchemy was his passion rather than astrology, and he believed "magic comprises the most profound contemplation of the most secret things, their nature, power, quality, substance and virtues." He published De Occulta Philosophia, three volumes on magic, an influential collection still in print.

Page from Agrippa's book

Contradictions abound in the life of Agrippa. He served the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian in various capacities--as secretary, soldier and perhaps spy--and dedicated a book to the Hapsburg Emperor's respected sister, Margaret of Austria. Eustace Chapuys, the erudite Imperial Ambassador to Henry VIII, was Agrippa's student, friend and correspondent.

And yet the aura of the black arts clung to Agrippa. Godwin repeats the oft-told tale that a black dog accompanying Agrippa on all his travels was "a devil attendant." And it is in Lives of the Necromancers that a bizarre story is told, of Agrippa meeting Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Germany and showing him, in a "magic glass," the image of his far-away mistress. For other noblemen, Agrippa summoned up the images of Ovid and "the whole destruction of Troy in a dream."

Despite his writings on magic and being a vocal critic of witchcraft trials, Agrippa was never persecuted for his beliefs, perhaps because he was protected by the Hapsburgs. He died in Grenoble in 1535.

Dr. John Dee

If Agrippa is tainted with black magic, Dr. John Dee is associated with white magic--angels, to be specific. He spent years of his life trying to decipher the language of the angels.

Of all of his mystic contemporaries, Dee was perhaps the most brilliant. Along with his spiritual studies, he is believed to have coined the phrase "British Empire" and urged both Tudor queens to create a national library (they both said no, so Dee built up the finest private library in England, if not all of Europe).

Born in 1527, Dee attended Cambridge and studied mathematics and the sciences as well as astrology and alchemy. In his twenties, he worked as a tutor and advisor for the Herbert and then the Dudley families, two powerful Protestant clans in the reign of the boy King, Edward VI.

But on the death of Edward and accession of Queen Mary, the power structure turned inside out, and Dee received a chilling lesson in loyalty. He was arrested in 1555, charged with casting the horoscopes of Queen Mary, her new husband, Philip of Spain, and Mary's half-sister Elizabeth. To look into the future of the royals, forecasting their deaths, was treason, and people had perished for such acts in the reign of Henry VIII. Moreover, Dee, a Protestant, was suspected of sympathy with the Princess Elizabeth, held in prison for her possible involvement in the Wyatt Rebellion.

Elizabeth Tudor

Informers were found who said Dee "endeavored through enchantments to destroy Queen Mary." He was interrogated, found wanting, and referred to the Star Chamber. Though he defended himself well, Dee was then charged with heresy and delivered to the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, one of the most diligent persecutors of heretics, later dubbed "bloody Bonner" by John Foxe.

Edmund Bonner, bishop of London

Things couldn't have looked bleaker for John Dee. Yet somehow he survived, not only convincing Bonner of his innocence and becoming a Catholic chaplain but even assisting Bonner in some of his interrogations of other Protestants. (He took on the "Dr." honorific because he was ordained by Bonner.) When Elizabeth took the throne, Dee rapidly switched back to the Protestant side, becoming Elizabeth's cherished special advisor, while Bonner, holding fast to his Catholic beliefs, ended up dying in prison.

Throughout his long, colorful, often controversial career, Dee would need to show nimble survivor tactics time and again, though perhaps none quite so extreme as this. Nonetheless, Dee, despite his partnership with necromancer Edward Kelley (see below), is a benevolent figure in today's pantheon of seers. In fact, it is his tall, thin, white-bearded visage and scholarly, mentorish demeanor that seems to have inspired the wizards created by J.R.R. Tolkein and J.K. Rowling.

John Dee

It is a legacy that, one feels, John Dee would have entirely approved of.


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This is the latest in a series on magic in history:

From Homer to the Hobbit, the History of the Necromancer

Henry VII and the Curse of Prophecy

The Strange Life of Edward Kelley

Nancy Bilyeau is the author of the award-winning historical thriller trilogy The Crown, The Chalice and The Tapestry.

The Crown and The Chalice have been published by Simon & Schuster in North America, Orion in the United Kingdom, and DTV in Germany. The Crown was an Oprah pick for 2012 and The Chalice won the RT Reviews Award for Best Historical Mystery of 2013. The Tapestry was published this year in North America and the United Kingdom by Simon & Schuster. Follow Nancy's updates and tidbits on the world of Tudor England on Twitter @tudorscribe. For more information, go to www.nancybilyeau.com

The Tapestry goes on sale 3/24/15

Snuff, the habit of five centuries

By Deborah Swift

Collection of snuff boxes from 18th -20th century (Hanson's auctioneers)

Christopher Columbus was responsible for bringing snuff, or ground tobacco, back to Europe in 1496 when one of his party noticed the native people of Haiti using it. It quickly became fashionable among the French and Spanish, and the frenchman Nicot (from whom we get the term 'nicotine') imported larger quantities to France during his travels abroad in the mid 16th century. Initially unpopular with the french monarchy, its fortunes were revived when Catherine Di Medici was given snuff by Nicot as a treatment for migraine. The resulting 'cure' popularized snuff amongst the french aristocracy.

Snuff was expensive as it had to be imported and the grinding process was laborious. Originally the tobacco plug was dried in an oven and then ground by hand in a hand mill by your servant to your requirements. This meant it was mostly available only to the rich. A whole culture grew up around the habit in the following centuries with the manufacture of snuff boxes and bottles and elaborate 'mouchoirs' or handkerchiefs. In England, snuff was made even more fashionable in the 17th century when Charles II returned to England from his exile in France and brought with him his snuff habit. 




Many different snuff mills grew up next to watercourses in London, Sheffield and Manchester to supply the habit. Retailers soon set up shops solely dealing in snuff and snuff accoutrements.

Kendal's snuff factory in the 19thC, click picture for history of snuff in Kendal

Morden Hall snuff grinding mill

Tiny, decorative boxes were popular, because prolonged exposure to air causes snuff to dry out and lose its scent. Snuff boxes were so small because they were designed to hold only one day's worth of snuff.

Carved wooden snuff bottle with hare
courtesy of Wikipedia

Snuff was brought over to America when the colonies were formed and was an essential part of early American life. America produced it’s own unique snuff that had a more smoky aroma than it’s European counterparts and a sweeter taste. Snuff is usually scented or flavoured in unique blends, and a typical blend would be floral, mentholated or spicy. Ingredients used to scent the snuff would include things such as cinnamon, nutmeg, sandalwood or camphor. Nowadays you can even get Cola scented or Cherry scented snuff!

In the coffee houses of the 17th century people took tobacco in three forms - as nasal snuff, inhaled into the nose, as chewing tobacco, and by 'drinking' it, i.e. by smoking it through a pipe.

Advertisement from circa 1700

The use of snuff was at its height in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was recommended by doctors as a general cure-all, ironically as a treatment for coughs, colds or headaches.

Another interesting video on the history of snuff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNFIYByVXCE

Professor A. Phillips Griffiths, of http://www.snuffbox.org.uk/ has been a regular snuff user since the 1940's. He  says the habit is catching on with a new generation since the ban on smoking here in the UK.  But if you are writing about a period any time between the 16th and the 20th century, chances are at least one of your characters would be familiar with the stuff.

My new novel, A Divided Inheritance, which will be out in October features a snuff factory, and I think it must have been wonderfully atmospheric with the ground particles of tobacco floating in the atmosphere and the scent of all the ingredients.

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Next week I am one of the few Brits at the Historical Novel Society Conference where I will be talking about my publication journey, blogging, and my other books: The Lady's Slipper and The Gilded Lily. 
If you are there and see me looking lonely, please come over and say hi! Picture should help you find me!