Before the birth of her first, the little Jeanne D’Albret of the brave heart and strenuous life, Margaret wrote the following letter to Francis: “I hope, nevertheless, that God will permit me to see you before my hour arrives; but if this happiness is not to be mine, I will cause your letter to be read to me, instead of the life of Sainte Marguerite” (the patron saint of pregnant women), “as having been written by your own hand it will not fail to inspire me with courage. I cannot, however, believe that my child will presume to be born without your command; to the last, therefore, I shall eagerly expect your much-desired arrival.” The little lady, who was always to prove of an independent spirit, did apparently presume to be born without Francis’s command.
The relation between Margaret and her daughter is the least satisfactory part of Margaret’s life. She was upon one occasion actually cruel to the child—a thing incomprehensible from a heart so motherly and kind. Francis was the reason but not the excuse for Margaret’s behaviour. There were rumours that she and her husband were negotiating to marry the child to a prince of Spain. Navarre—held in fief from Spain—would then be free once more, which Francis, for personal political reasons, did not desire. When Jeanne was two years old, therefore, he took her from her mother and placed her in the gloomy castle of Plessis Les Tours, where Louis XI. had shut himself up behind bolts and bars during the last years of his life. It was like educating a child in prison. In all her writings Margaret has not left one word of protest, and yet at two years old a child to its mother is a miracle and an intoxication.
Later, when Francis promised the child in marriage to the Duke of Cleves, Margaret was really cruel. The marriage could only have been bitter both to her and to Henri of Navarre. But Francis desired it, and that was sufficient for Margaret. The duke was a heavy, unattractive person; and Othagaray says that Francis originally “named the lady to the Duke of Cleves without the consent of father and mother.” When he named him to the lady herself—not quite twelve years old—a supreme surprise occurred for her elders. The child became passionate with disgust. She would not marry him—a hideous foreign creature, whose language she did not even understand. There were many scenes with the disobedient child at Plessis. Her father, who would have helped her if he could, had not the power to do so, and Margaret remained like ice to the appeals of her sickened daughter.
Now, Margaret had once written to Montmorency in reference to some woman Francis wished her to persuade into a marriage for her daughter which the lady disliked: “You know that my disposition and hers are so different that we are not fairly matched; for to vanquish the will of a woman whom no one has yet been able to persuade through the medium of one who is persuaded by everybody, seems to me to promise little except that she will conduct herself in her usual manner towards me.” This “who is persuaded by everybody” had its heart-sprung quality, but in the matter of Jeanne’s marriage it showed a colder and more weak-willed element. She wrote to Francis an almost frantic letter, expressing her “tribulation” at her daughter’s “senseless” appeal that she might not be married to the Duke of Cleves. Then, as Jeanne continued rebellious, Margaret wrote to her governess that she must be beaten into obedience. True, a child of twelve years old could not very well be in a position to select a suitable husband, and whipping was a recognized and much-used discipline at that period. But Margaret of Navarre should have known better: she had been brought up in a different school of feeling.
Presently Francis—afraid that Henri might save his daughter—gave orders that the betrothal and marriage should take place immediately. It was under these circumstances that the child wrote her well-known protest, signing it with her own brave, childish hand, and having it witnessed by three members of her household. This is what she said: “I, Jeanne de Navarre, persisting in the protestations I have already made, do hereby again affirm and protest, by those present, that the marriage which it is desired to contract between the Duke of Cleves and myself is against my will; that I have never consented to it nor will consent, and that all I may say and do hereafter by which it may be attempted to prove that I have given my consent, will be forcibly extorted against my wish and desire from my dread of the king, of the king my father, and the queen my mother, who has threatened me, and has had me whipt by my governess, the Baillive of Caen. By command of the queen, my mother, my said governess has also several times declared that if I did not give my consent, I should be so severely punished as to occasion my death, and that by refusing I might be the cause of the total ruin and destruction of my father, my mother, and of their house.”
Jeanne was married, notwithstanding, but happily the sequel showed an unusual quality of mercy. She never really became the wife of the Duke of Cleves after all. After the marriage ceremony had taken place, she was left for two years with her mother, pending the time when she should be old enough to join her husband. At the end of the two years the Duke of Cleves surrendered to the emperor, and abandoned all claims to his bride, the marriage, therefore, being at once declared non-existent.
Jeanne did not, in fact, marry until the next reign; but there is one story of her after life so charming that it is a pity not to tell it here. Her father promised her a golden box he wore on a long chain round his neck, if she would sing an old Bearn-folk song while in the pains of child-birth. She agreed, and kept her promise, singing with brave persistence at a time when most women wish that they were dead.
Margaret’s own marriage had proved unhappy some time before her daughter’s futile first wedding. She had written long ago, in one of her letters to Montmorency, concerning her husband: “As you are with him, I fear not that everything will go well, excepting that I am afraid you cannot prevent him from paying assiduous court to the Spanish ladies.” It comes as a digression; but there is, about the same period, an interesting appeal from Margaret to Montmorency, concerning her brother: “It strikes me it would be advisable for you to praise the king in your letters for the great attention he pays to affairs.” The suggestion holds the essence of the relationship of a woman to the man she loves. No woman but manages and cajoles the creature cared for, like a mother trying to coax a child into good behaviour.
Margaret and her husband disagreed upon religious questions as well as about the subject of other ladies. Jeanne, who lived with them for the two years she was waiting to join the Duke of Cleves, wrote, many years after her mother’s death, that her father grew very angry and beat her if she showed any interest in the new doctrines, and that she remembered on one occasion, when a Protestant teacher had been with her mother, his coming furiously to drive him out. Margaret having been warned, had already got rid of the man; but Henri, too angry instantly to abstain from violence, went up and boxed Margaret’s ears, saying passionately, “You want to know too much, madam.” His conduct became so undesirable that Brantome says, “Henri D’Albret treated the queen, his wife, very badly, and would have treated her worse, had it not been for her brother Francis, who rated him soundly, and ended by threatening him because he had been disrespectful to his sister, in spite of her high rank.”
Margaret, happily, was many-sided; one unhappiness did not render her obdurate against the entry of the rest. Probably she went through an interval of supreme heart-sickness. But a middle-aged woman has under every circumstance a painful phase to go through. There is one period in every woman’s life hard to face and hard to bear—the period of relinquishments. The sweets of youth are over; for the future there is only the swift, chill journey into old age to front with calm and dignity. Margaret’s face in middle age suggests that she made her relinquishments with completeness and courage.