Marguerite de Navarre

• 1. Introduction

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  Marguerite de Navarre was born in Angoulême on the 11th of April 1492, and by the time she died on the 21st of December 1549, she had sheltered religious reformers from the stake, negotiated with emperors on horseback, written works that influenced a future queen of England, and earned the title "The First Modern Woman" from the American scholar Samuel Putnam. She was a princess, a duchess, a queen, a poet, and a patron. She stood at the hinge point between the Renaissance and the Reformation in France, and nearly everything that followed her in the Bourbon dynasty traces a line back through her daughter. What drew artists and heretics alike to her court? What did she actually believe? And how did a poem she wrote after the death of an infant son end up in the hands of the young princess who would become Elizabeth I?

• 2. A Princess in Cognac

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  Louise of Savoy was only nineteen years old when she was widowed, and she threw her energy into the education of her two children. Marguerite received a classical curriculum that included Latin, a rare gift for a girl of any era. Two years after Marguerite's birth the family moved from Angoulême to Cognac, a court where, as one account put it, the Italian influence reigned supreme and Boccaccio was regarded as nearly a god. That atmosphere of humanist learning shaped Marguerite for the rest of her life. Her household also included half-siblings born of her father's relationships outside his marriage. Two girls, Jeanne of Angoulême and Madeleine, were daughters of his long liaison with Antoinette de Polignac, Dame de Combronde, who later became Louise's own lady-in-waiting. A third half-sister, Souveraine, was born to another of her father's mistresses, Jeanne le Conte. When Marguerite was ten, her mother attempted to arrange a match with the Prince of Wales, who would later become Henry VIII of England, but the alliance was politely refused. The one man who may have been a genuine love was Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours, nephew of King Louis XII. Gaston went to Italy and died a hero at Ravenna, where the French defeated Spanish and Papal forces, and that was that.

• 3. Married to a Dolt

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  At seventeen, Marguerite was handed to Charles IV of Alençon, aged twenty, by decree of King Louis XII. The same decree arranged the marriage of Louis's ten-year-old daughter Claude to Marguerite's brother Francis. Marguerite was not consulted. Contemporary description left little sympathy for the groom: the radiant young princess with violet-blue eyes, in one account, had become the bride of a laggard and a dolt. The political purpose was stark. Marguerite was married to preserve the County of Armagnac within the royal family, and there were no children from the union. The marriage did not extinguish her ambitions or her intellect. When Francis acceded to the throne as Francis I in 1515, Marguerite became the most influential woman in France. Her salon was known internationally as the New Parnassus. After the death of Queen Claude, Marguerite took in Claude's two daughters, Madeleine and Marguerite, and continued to care for them into her second marriage.

• 4. Horseback Through Wintry Woods

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  Ferdinand II of Aragon had invaded the Kingdom of Navarre in 1512, leaving Henry II of Navarre to rule only Lower Navarre and the principality of Béarn. After Charles IV of Alençon died in 1525, Marguerite married Henry in January 1527 at St. Germain-en-Laye. The most dramatic episode of her political life came from that same period. Francis I had been captured at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and was held prisoner in Spain by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Marguerite rode to negotiate his release. A Venetian ambassador of the time noted that she knew all the secrets of diplomatic art and was to be treated with deference and circumspection. To meet a safe-conduct deadline during a critical phase of the negotiations, she rode horseback through wintry woods, twelve hours a day for many days, writing her diplomatic letters at night. Her only son, Jean, was born at Blois on the 7th of July 1530, when Marguerite was thirty-eight. Jean died on Christmas Day of the same year. Scholars trace her grief over that loss to the composition of her most controversial work, Miroir de l'ame pecheresse, written in 1531.

• 5. Heresy and the Sorbonne

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  Sorbonne theologians condemned Miroir de l'ame pecheresse as heresy. A monk proposed that Marguerite be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Seine. Students at the College de Navarre staged a play portraying her as a Fury from Hell. Francis I intervened directly. He forced the charges to be dropped and extracted an apology from the Sorbonne. The poem itself is a first-person mystical narrative in which the soul, figured as a yearning woman, calls out to Christ as father, brother, and lover. It is an intensely personal document, and its reach extended well beyond France. The work was passed to the royal court of England, carrying Marguerite's reformist religious thinking with it. In 1544, nine years after the execution of Anne Boleyn, Anne's daughter, the future Elizabeth I, was eleven years old. She translated the poem into English prose under the title The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul and presented the manuscript, written in her own hand, to her stepmother Katherine Parr. Scholars conjecture that Marguerite had at some point given the original manuscript to Anne Boleyn herself, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude and may have served Marguerite as well. A letter from Anne Boleyn to Marguerite exists in which Anne expresses strong personal affection.

• 6. A Court for Free Spirits

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  Francois Rabelais, born around 1483, was among those Marguerite sheltered and befriended. So was Clement Marot, born in 1496, along with Claude de Bectoz, Pierre de Ronsard, and Julian Iniguez de Medrano. She served as mediator between Roman Catholics and Protestants and for a time kept Francis I from adopting harsher measures against reformers. Her theological position was her own. She supported reform within the Catholic Church but was not a Calvinist. Leonardo da Vinci died as a guest of Marguerite and her brother, Francis I, having come to Chateau Amboise in December 1515. He lived and worked at the nearby Clos Luce, connected to the chateau by an underground passage. Leonardo had served as architect for a large chateau for the family among many other projects, and the king provided him with a comfortable stipend. Following the expulsion of John Calvin and William Farel from Geneva in 1538, Marguerite wrote to Marie Dentiere, a Walloon Protestant reformer. The two had personal ties beyond letters. Marguerite was godmother to Dentiere's daughter, and that daughter later composed a French guide to Hebrew to send to Marguerite's own daughter. Dentiere responded in 1539 with the Epistre tres utile, addressed directly to Marguerite, urging her to press for wider scriptural access among women and to act against Catholic clergy in France.

• 7. Legacy and the Line She Left

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  Marguerite died on the 21st of December 1549. One year later, a tributary poem was published in England by the nieces of Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. Will Durant wrote that in Marguerite the Renaissance and the Reformation were for a moment one. Jules Michelet, the most celebrated French historian of his time, addressed her directly in prose: "Mother of our Renaissance! Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart the nest of our freedom." The Dutch humanist Erasmus had written to her during her lifetime praising her prudence, piety, chastity, and what he called an invincible strength of soul. Pierre Bayle, the French philosopher and critic whose 1697 Dictionnaire historique et critique influenced Voltaire and Diderot, called her protection of people persecuted for their beliefs an heroic magnanimity that has hardly any precedent. Will Durant also recorded that she called herself The Prime Minister of the Poor, walked unescorted through the streets of Navarre, and that her husband Henry financed a public works system that became a model for France. Her daughter Jeanne d'Albret became Queen regnant of Navarre from 1555 to 1572 and the acknowledged spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenot movement. Jeanne's son, Henry of Navarre, became Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. After Marguerite's death, eight religious wars broke out in France, including the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.