Free Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood

stripped of the letters of legitimacy that gave him, a bastard, the right to his property.
    Her motives may have been political; she had her family’s interests to follow, or they may have been personal. Perhaps past experiences had soured her of (usually masculine) authority. Perhaps, even, she had seen in her sister-in-law Juana’s fate what happened when a royal wife abnegated public responsibility. Either way, the Bastard was declared a traitor. He took refuge in France, where he was welcomed by his half-sister Louise of Savoy.
    While Philibert hunted, Margaret of Austria took up the reins of government, effectively telling him not to worry his pretty head. She summoned the council, appointed officers, discussed foreign policy with her brother when he visited and approved his plans for a continued rapprochement with France. She never neglected the parties or the hunting; there is an account of her appearing at one masque as Queen of the Amazons, with a crimson headdress and jewelled cuirass and with (one thinks of Isabella of Castile) a naked sword in hand. But her experience in Savoy was the final stage of her political apprenticeship; a rehearsal for activities on the wider European stage, to which fate was about to return her.
    The summer of 1504 was scorchingly hot. Even Philibert was unable to hunt. So in the first days of September he returned to his avocation with even more enthusiasm. After a frenetic morning pursuing a wild boar, he flung himself down in the shade, gulping from a fountain, only to be seized by a sudden chill. At the palace, doctors were summoned but despaired. Margaret ordered her valuable pearls to be ground up for medicine but to no avail; Philibert died on the morning of 10 September. The story goes that Margaret’s attendants had to restrain her from flinging herself from the window.
    She did fling herself into the rebuilding of the family church at Brou, where Philibert was buried, causing her self-invented motto: ‘ FORTUNE. INFORTUNE. FORT. UNE ’ to be carved all over it. This can be translated to imply that ‘fate is very cruel to women’ or, conversely, that ‘Fortune. Misfortune. Strengthens. One’. The ‘e’ of ‘ une ’ makes it clear that it is a woman in question. 3 In the years ahead Margaret of Austria’s palace at Mechelen was to feature wooden busts of herself and Philibert, in which Margaret, although she commissioned them after his death, wore the loose hair of a bride, rather than the widow’s cap. At twenty-four, she was cheated of married life for yet a third time. Her father and brother were at first anxious to marry her off yet again but after three such ill-fated attempts at matrimony, Margaret declared herself ‘much disinclined to make another trial’.
    But as well as her husband, she had lost her new-found role. Or had she? Philibert was succeeded by an eighteen-year-old half-brother whose youth made it seem, for a while, as though Margaret might manage to hold on to a measure of power. The new young duke, however, reneged on the deal, leaving Margaret furious. If he thought ‘that by such unmannerly treatment he can reduce us and put his intentions through, he has the wrong idea’, she wrote later. ‘For all that we are a woman, our heart is of a different nature . . .’ *
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    In France, Louise of Savoy was also now a youthful widow. The little dauphin, the son that Anne of Brittany had borne to Charles VIII of France at the start of their marriage, had died in 1495. Louise’s husband Charles d’Angoulême fell sick of a fever and died on his way to the dauphin’s funeral. Resisting, like a striking number of these women, any attempt to marry her off again, Louise concentrated on keeping control of her son, François.
    As the boy’s leading kinsman, the Duc d’Orléans had claimed that Louise of Savoy could not take guardianship of her two