Free Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood Page A

children, being herself a minor, as France set twenty-five as the age of legal majority for women. But the young widow argued that in Cognac, where François was born, women were allowed to exercise rights of guardianship at fourteen. The royal council decided more or less in her favour, with the Duc d’Orléans (provided Louise did not remarry) given merely a supervisory role.
    Louise of Savoy settled down in Cognac to administer her extensive lands. There she set about bringing up her two children in the strong-minded and scholarly tradition she had learnt in Anne de Beaujeu’s household. ‘Also, my daughter, if at some point in the future God takes your husband, leaving you a widow, then you will be responsible for your children, like many other young women; have patience, because it pleases God, and govern wisely’, Anne wrote in her Enseignement s. Louise’s motto (borrowed from Lorenzo de Medici and written on the wall of her room at Angoulême) was ‘ libris et liberis ’: books and children.
    Her daughter, Marguerite, had the same teachers as her son. Both learnt Spanish and Italian from their mother, and Latin and biblical history from two humanist scholars, while a miniature shows Marguerite and her brother playing chess. But there was no doubt which of the two children occupied more of their mother’s attention.
    Louise of Savoy has been blamed for her focus on François but Marguerite herself would share that obsessive interest. And perhaps it was inevitable, as the childlessness of successive short-lived French kings brought François ever closer to the throne. When, in 1498, Charles VIII suddenly died, after hitting his head on the lintel of a doorway, the throne passed to Louis, Duc d’Orléans, the cousin of Louise’s husband Angoulême. And Louis was still childless, the cynical predictions about his marriage to the crippled Jeanne having proved all too accurate. 4
    After Charles VIII’s death, his widow Anne of Brittany threw herself into hysterical mourning but also immediately took steps to resume her rights in her duchy. Her first marriage contract stipulated that if King Charles died, the only person she could remarry was the next King of France; a way to continue France’s annexation of Brittany. The new king Louis XII accordingly took steps to set aside his existing wife, the barren Jeanne, on the grounds of non-consummation. Jeanne was asked to undergo a humiliating physical examination, a papal decree was granted and Jeanne retired to a convent, eventually to be canonised.
    While the marriage of Louis and Anne of Brittany was politically necessary for both sides, this was no guarantee it would solve the problem of the succession. The groom was thirty-six and in poor health, while Anne’s repeated pregnancies by Charles had not yet produced an heir.
    Unless or until a son was born to King Louis and his new queen, Louise of Savoy’s boy François was heir presumptive. Under these circumstances, Louise had to battle to be allowed to bring up François herself. She did have to bring her son rather more closely under Louis’s eye, to Amboise on the Loire, where François and the gang of young men placed around him could enjoy the hunting and mock tournaments that were so much to his taste. She had also to submit to the surveillance of Louis’s trusted man, the Seigneur de Gié, whose aggressive concept of his duties made the family feel like prisoners at times. Louise’s children slept in her bedroom and an officer had to be present at the lever , the ceremonial rising of the young heir. One day, when Louise declared her children were still sleeping, an official went so far as to break down the door.
    Anne of Brittany endured repeated pregnancies and Louise’s journal makes no bones about her feelings. In 1502, ‘Anne, Queen of France, on the twenty-first of January, Saint Agnes Day, gave birth at Blois to a