Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy

• 1. Epitaph at Sea

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  Margaret of Austria wrote her own epitaph during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. It was late 1496, and she was sailing to Spain to marry the heir to the thrones of Castile and Aragon. The ship was battered by the weather, and she composed the lines in haste in case she never reached land. She did reach it, and she went on to govern the Habsburg Netherlands.

  Her name is a puzzle. She belonged to the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family, yet she hardly ever went to Austria. She probably neither spoke nor read German, and the German texts in her library were French translations. Her real worlds were French, Castilian and, above all, the Low Countries.

  Her early life passed from treaty to treaty. Marriages were arranged for her, relatives died young, and she was moved between courts like a diplomatic gift. Yet this same woman later steered a patchwork of provinces for her father, Emperor Maximilian I, and then for her nephew Charles V.

  How does a child promised to a French king end up defending her family's lands against France? How did she keep peace among rival powers while the rulers she served were far away? And what did she gather inside her palace at Mechelen?

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• 2. Promised to France

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  Margaret was born on the 10th of January 1480 in Brussels, the second child and only daughter of Maximilian of Austria and Mary of Burgundy. The couple ruled the Low Countries together. Her mother died in 1482, when Margaret was two. Her four-year-old brother Philip the Handsome became sovereign, with their father acting as his regent.

  In that same year, King Louis XI of France signed the Treaty of Arras with Maximilian. Under it, Maximilian promised his infant daughter to Louis's son, the Dauphin Charles. The engagement took place in 1483, and Charles became King Charles VIII later that year, aged thirteen. Margaret's dowry was Franche-Comté and Artois. She passed into the guardianship of Louis XI until he died in August.

  The plan was to raise her as a fille de France, ready to become Queen of France. Her upbringing was entrusted to the household of the Queen Mother, Charlotte of Savoy, mostly at the Château d'Amboise. Charlotte died in December 1483.

  Charles's sister Anne de Beaujeu, who was regent of France, then took charge, together with a governess named Madame de Segré. Margaret received a fine education alongside several noble children. Among them was Louise of Savoy, who was four years older and would later become her sister-in-law.

  The match was political, yet Margaret grew genuinely fond of Charles. In the autumn of 1491 he renounced the treaty. For political reasons he forcibly married Anne, Duchess of Brittany, who was Margaret's former stepmother. The French court stopped treating Margaret as its future queen. Her situation was only settled in June 1493, after the Treaty of Senlis was signed the previous month.

  As a young teenager she met her father in Maastricht. She had not seen him since leaving for France at the age of two. The two got on well, which was more than could be said of Maximilian and his son Philip. That bond would matter when Maximilian later needed someone he could trust.

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• 3. Two Marriages, Two Widowhoods

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  Before Margaret ever stood in Spain, she was married there by proxy at Mechelen. In the ceremony she symbolically lay on a bed beside Francisco de Rojas y Escobar, who acted as Spanish ambassador. Maximilian wanted an alliance with Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. So he negotiated two matches at once. Margaret would marry their only son and heir, John, Prince of Asturias, and their daughter Juana would marry Philip.

  In February 1497 her entire fleet was still waiting in Southampton, England, for the weather to clear. She finally married Prince John on the 3rd of April 1497 in Burgos Cathedral. He died of a fever after only six months, on the 4th of October. Margaret was pregnant, and on the 2nd of April 1498 she gave birth to a premature stillborn daughter.

  She stayed in Spain until September 1499. During those months it was suggested that she teach her teenage sister-in-law Catherine of Aragon to speak French.

  On her way home, news arrived that her nephew, the future Emperor Charles V, had been born. Philip sent a messenger "begging her to hasten back so that she could hold the child in her hands at the font during the baptism." Margaret pressed Philip to name the boy Maximilian, after their father. Philip chose Charles instead, after their maternal grandfather Charles the Bold. Margaret became the child's godmother, and she would later play the main part in raising him.

  In 1501 she married Philibert II, Duke of Savoy. He was the same age as Margaret, and it was his second marriage. Savoy sat in the Western Alps, and that position made it central to the rivalry between France and the Habsburgs in Italy. The couple spent their three stable years mostly in Bresse, a Savoyard territory on the eastern edge of Burgundy.

  When Margaret arrived, Philibert's illegitimate brother René held the government. She fought hard to strip him of his powers and possessions. She even asked Maximilian, as overlord of Savoy, to nullify the letters that gave René legitimacy. René was declared a traitor and fled to France. There his half-sister Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I, welcomed him.

  Margaret then took hold of the government herself while Philibert pursued private hobbies such as hunting, which she shared. She summoned councils and appointed officers. When Philip visited, she discussed and approved his plan for a continued rapprochement with France.

  In September 1504 Philibert died of pleurisy. Grief-stricken, Margaret threw herself out of a window, but she was saved. After being persuaded to bury him, she had his heart embalmed so she could keep it with her forever. Her court historian and poet Jean Lemaire de Belges gave her the title "Dame de deuil", meaning Lady of Mourning.

  She remained in Savoy for two years and began the long construction of the lavish Royal Monastery of Brou in Bresse. It was meant to house the tombs of Philibert, his mother Margaret of Bourbon, and eventually Margaret herself.

  In 1505 Maximilian and Philip tried to arrange a match with Henry VII of England, who was then 48 years old. Margaret refused, and a portrait, probably five years old, was sent to England instead. In September 1506 her brother Philip died suddenly, and at her father's request she returned to the Netherlands.

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• 4. Governor of the Low Countries

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  In 1507 Emperor Maximilian I, preoccupied with German affairs, named Margaret governor of the Low Countries and guardian of her nephew Charles. Isabella of Castile had died in late 1504, and Philip and Juana had gone to Castile to claim the crown. Philip's son Charles inherited the Low Countries at the age of six. His mother Juana could not act as regent because of her unstable mental state. Her Castilian subjects also would not let their ruler live outside the kingdom.

  Margaret received more than one child to guard. Her nieces Eleanor, Isabella and Mary were also placed in her care, all still children, and all destined to marry foreign monarchs. Only her nephew Ferdinand was raised elsewhere. He grew up in Spain in the charge of his grandfather Ferdinand II of Aragon, and as an adult he was sent to govern Austria. He would become Holy Roman Emperor some fifty years later.

  The representative assembly of Franche-Comté elected Margaret as its ruler in a unique honour for a woman, and her title was confirmed in 1509.

  Some accounts say the Netherlanders saw her as a foreigner because she had grown up at the French court. Blockmans and others disagree. In their view Margaret, Philip and Charles V were all considered native, and only Maximilian was always an outsider. From her newly built palace at Mechelen, she served as the go-between for her father and her nephew's subjects. She was the first of many female regents in the Netherlands.

  Charles later made her his governor-general in gratitude for her services, in 1520. She was the only regent he ever re-appointed indefinitely, from 1519 until her death. Tupu Ylä-Anttila argues that Margaret acted as a de facto queen consort in the political sense. Both Maximilian and Charles were "absent rulers" who needed a dynastic presence at home. In letters, Maximilian called the young heirs in her care "our children" or "our common children". She had more power with Charles than with her father, who treated her cordially but sometimes acted in a threatening manner.

  The authors of The Promised Lands: The Low Countries Under Burgundian Rule, 1369-1530 credit her with keeping the provinces together and answering the Estates' demands for peace. Cooperation between the regent, the Privy Council and the Estates General preserved the Burgundian inheritance.

  Margaret also had a head for business. She negotiated the restoration of the Intercursus Magnus, a trade agreement with England dating from 1496. It favoured Flemish textile interests and brought huge profits. The wealth of the regions she oversaw made the Low Countries an important source of income for the imperial treasury.

  In 1524 she signed a trade agreement with Frederick I of Denmark. It secured a regular grain supply for the Netherlands, on the condition that Holland would not support Christian II. Christian was married to Isabella of Austria, Charles's sister, and he later won Charles's backing through the efforts of the secretary Cornelis de Schepper. Margaret still refused to follow even Charles's order. She insisted that the economic interests of the Netherlands outranked dynastic ones.

  She also supplied funds and war material for Charles's troops, especially against Francis I and the German Protestants. Her years in power were mostly peaceful, with one exception. In 1523 the first Protestant martyrs, Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, were burnt at the stake in Brussels.

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• 5. War and Peace

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  Flanders caused Margaret's first war. The county lay outside the Empire, but legally it still belonged under the French crown. France therefore demanded that Charles pay homage to its king for it. Margaret persuaded Maximilian to end the fighting with King Louis XII. In November 1508 she travelled to Cambrai to help form the League of Cambrai. For a time it removed the threat of a French invasion of the Low Countries and turned French attention toward northern Italy.

  Guelders proved harder. Charles of Egmont, the de facto lord of Guelders, kept causing trouble, although the Estates preferred peace with France and with Guelders. In 1511 Margaret allied with England and besieged Venlo. Egmont invaded Holland, and she had to lift the siege. When she asked her father for help, he suggested that the Estates in the Low Countries defend themselves. That forced her to sign the 1513 treaty recognising Egmont as Duke of Guelders and Count of Zutphen. In 1514 he marched into Arnhem, a clear breach of the agreement. The Habsburg Netherlands would absorb Guelders and Zutphen only under Charles V.

  The historian James D. Tracy judges that Maximilian and Margaret were reasonable to demand sterner measures. Their critics in the Estates General had continuously voted against funds for wars on Guelders. Tracy says those critics naively believed peace with the French king, Egmont's patron, would keep Egmont in check. Egmont's Black Band mercenaries then left a trail of destruction through Friesland and Holland.

  Tracy also notes that humanists such as Erasmus and Hadrianus Barlandus unreasonably mistrusted the government. They suspected the princes of scheming to expand Habsburg lands and extract money. At the sacking of Tienen in Brabant, the commander Rudolf von Anhalt did not engage. Barlandus suspected a sinister motive, but in Tracy's account Margaret had ordered von Anhalt to avoid direct fighting until more troops arrived.

  By 1512 Margaret had told her father that the Netherlands lived on peace and trade. So she would declare neutrality and use foreign armies and funds to wage wars. She played the key role in bringing together the Holy League: the pope, the Swiss, Henry VIII, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Maximilian. Maximilian joined as Emperor rather than as guardian of Charles, so Low Countries neutrality held. The league targeted France.

  In 1513 Maximilian, at the head of Henry VIII's army, defeated the French at the Battle of the Spurs. It cost him and his daughter little. By Margaret's own account, the Low Countries made a profit of a million in gold from supplying the English army. Maximilian also ordered the walls of Thérouanne demolished, because that stronghold had often served as a back door for French interference.

  After Maximilian died in 1519, Margaret began negotiating with eighteen-year-old Charles for his election as Holy Roman Emperor, despite opposition from the papacy and France. She herself preferred her younger nephew, Archduke Ferdinand, but Charles refused to withdraw. Through diplomacy and bribery she played a crucial part in his victory over King Francis I of France. From that day Francis became Charles's great rival for pre-eminence in Europe.

  Charles's victory at Pavia in 1525 captured Francis, who was freed in exchange for his sons as hostages. Once safe, Francis reneged on his promises to renounce overlordship of Artois, Flanders and Franche-Comté, and France invaded the Low Countries again. Margaret held off the forces of the League of Cognac from 1526 to 1529. She then went to Cambrai a second time and met Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis. Together they negotiated the Paix des Dames, the Ladies' Peace. The Habsburgs lost Burgundy proper forever, but France gave up its claims to legal overlordship of Flanders, Artois and the Free County of Burgundy.

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• 6. Court and Collection

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  Erasmus, Adrian of Utrecht, who later became Pope Adrian VI, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa all visited Margaret's palace at Mechelen. It became known as the Court of Savoy, and she raised her nephew and nieces there. Once she was declared governor, she bought the Hof van Savoye on the Korte Maagdenstraat, meaning Short Virgins Street, as her main residence. She found the building too small and began an ambitious expansion in 1507. From 1517 to 1530 the architect Rombout II Keldermans extended it along the Keizerstraat, Emperor Street, and remodelled the rear wing that faces the Palace of Margaret of York.

  Agrippa dedicated to her his arguably feminist work, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Sir Thomas Boleyn's charm impressed her so much that she offered his daughter Anne Boleyn a temporary place in her household. Anne was there from the spring of 1513 to the late summer of 1514, when she moved to Paris. Margaret told her father the girl was "so presentable and so pleasant, considering her youthful age, that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me, than you to me."

  A 1523-24 inventory of the Mechelen palace counted 385 paintings, sculptures, tapestries and embroideries, not including prints and drawings. It also listed 132 exotic natural objects and artefacts, such as Aztec feather work and carved coral. Hernán Cortés had presented Charles V with treasures received from the Aztec king Moctezuma in 1519. Charles sent several to Mechelen as a gift in 1523, making hers one of the earliest collections of New World objects.

  There were also 47 clocks, board games and curiosities, plus 380 items in her library. Inventories survive from 1499-1516 and 1523-24. The last records the room and sometimes the exact position of works. It includes frank opinions on the quality of the major pieces, which suggests Margaret wrote them herself. The collection was laid out like a proto-museum, and she often gave notable visitors guided tours.

  Portraits filled the rooms. There were Burgundian ancestors, Habsburg contemporaries, her two husbands and their relatives, seven members of the Tudor dynasty, Louis XII of France and his daughter Claude, and some of her officials. Most were probably gifts from the sitters, just as Margaret gave copies of her own portraits.

  Bernaert van Orley became her court artist in 1518. Seven versions survive of his portrait of her in the white veils of widow's mourning, painted around 1515-1520. The prime version is believed to be the one at Brou. The German sculptor Conrad Meit worked for her for many years and carved several portraits of her, including intimate small busts in pearwood.

  The most famous painting she owned was the Arnolfini Portrait, a 1434 oil on panel by Jan van Eyck. It is a full-length double portrait, believed to show the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in their home in Bruges. It was the first item in the 1516 inventory, described as "a large picture which is called Hernoul le Fin with his wife in a chamber, which was given to Madame by Don Diego, whose arms are on the cover of the said picture; done by the painter Johannes." A marginal note adds that a lock was needed to close it, and that Madame had ordered one fitted.

  The identification of the sitter rests entirely on that note and a similar one in the 1523-24 inventory. The painting passed to Mary of Hungary and then to Philip II of Spain. It stayed in the Spanish royal collection until the French looted it in the Napoleonic Wars, and the British then apparently looted it from them. It now hangs in the National Gallery, London.

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• 7. Books and Music

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  The Italian canon Antonio de Beatis visited in 1517-1518 and described Margaret's "highly decorated library for women. The books are all written in French and bound in velvet with silver-gilt clasps." Like other women in the royal houses of France, Spain and Burgundy, she owned a very rich library for the period. It included illuminated manuscripts that rank as masterpieces in several styles. She was an important patron of the Ghent-Bruges school of manuscript painters, then at the peak of its achievement in the first years of the 16th century.

  Much of the library came to her by inheritance. She received most of the books of her step-grandmother Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. From her mother she received others, including the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, now in the National Library of Austria. She came back from Savoy with the famous Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. It had belonged to Charles I, Duke of Savoy, who died in 1490 and was the father of Philibert's first wife, and he had added to it.

  The 1499 inventory already recorded six books of hours, a missal and a breviary. She also collected poetry and historical and ethical treatises, among them the works of Christine de Pizan.

  Bona of Savoy, the widowed Duchess of Milan, gave her the incomplete Sforza Hours, which Bona had commissioned around 1490. It is now in the British Library. Margaret had her court artist Gerard Horenbout complete it, probably in 1517-20, several years after she received it. The Spinola Hours, now in the Getty Museum, was very likely commissioned by her in the 1510s.

  Music mattered to her as well. She owned several chansonniers with works by Josquin des Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht and Pierre de la Rue, who was her favourite composer. She ordered splendid music manuscripts from Pierre Alamire and sent them as gifts to relatives and political partners.

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• 8. Death and Memory

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  On the 15th of November 1530, Margaret stepped on a piece of broken glass. She thought little of the injury at first, but gangrene set in and her leg had to be amputated. Before the operation she arranged all her affairs. She named Charles V her sole heir and wrote him a letter asking him to maintain peace with France and England.

  On the night of the 30th of November, the doctors came to operate. They gave her a dose of opium to dull the pain. It was reportedly so strong that she never woke again. She died between midnight and one o'clock.

  Mary of Hungary, also known as Mary of Austria, succeeded her as governor. She was 25, another widow, recalled after her husband Louis II of Hungary was killed fighting the Turks at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526.

  Margaret was buried beside her second husband at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the mausoleum of the Royal Monastery of Brou that she had commissioned. Conrat Meit, her court sculptor of many years, made the elaborate tomb. It has two reclining effigies. The upper one shows her in formal regalia as Duchess of Savoy, and the lower shows her as if asleep, with her hair down.

  In the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, a standing bronze statue of Margaret stands in the group around the cenotaph of her father Maximilian I. The church also holds a relief panel of her return from France after the French marriage plan collapsed. Clive Holland remarks that placing this scene beside the father's triumphs must have taken courage, since the rejection had been bitter for them both. A statue of 1849 stands beside St. Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen, Belgium.

  Margaret has also reached the screen and stage. The Spanish actress Úrsula Corberó plays her in the television series Isabel, and Zazie Hayhurst plays her in The White Princess. In Catharine Trotter's play The Unhappy Penitent she appears as the character Margarite, in a wildly inaccurate version. Margarite loves René II, Duke of Lorraine, though nothing suggests the two ever met. The Duke of Brittany also loves her in the play, but he died in 1488, when the real Margaret was eight.

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