Anne of France and Anne of Brittany: Jealous rivals?
Brantome’s assessments of Anne of France (1461—1522), daughter of Louis XI and regent for her younger brother Charles VIII, and Anne Duchess of Brittany (1477—1514), queen of Charles VIII and Louis XII, both praise these royal women in generic terms and undermine them with nasty particularities.
The particularities have often been accepted as straightforward truths. Georges Minois’s 1999 French biography of Anne of Brittany relates that in the spring of 1492,[a]t court, the young queen [Anne of Brittany] was well accepted, except by her sister-in-law, Anne, now Anne of Bourbon or France.... Still young, 31, [Anne of France] had not reacted well at first to her brother's attempts to emancipate himself from her guardianship. Intelligent and authoritarian, she still claimed an important political role for herself. In this area, she didn't have much to fear from the young queen, who was awarded no political authority. It was more in the area of honor, worldly vanity, that the two women were jealous of each other.[384]
Minois brings his commentary to a close by asserting that “the constant rivalry occasioned a multitude of incidents.”[385]
Minois derived his characterizations of the two Annes from Brantome. Brantome lauded both of the Annes, but, following Minois's footnote, we find that he also undermined that flattery, writing of Anne of France that she
wanted to exercise her prerogative and authority regarding Queen Anne; but she met her match, as they say; because Queen Anne was a true Breton, very proud and haughty towards her equals, to such a degree that Madame de Bourbon had to yield and allow the queen, her sister-in-law, to maintain her status and majesty, as was right; it must have bothered her greatly, because, as regent, she clung fiercely to her status.[386]
These particularities have been extremely influential.
Minois is not alone in relying on them. Another historian writes that Anne of Brittanysaw in the Regent [Anne of France] the organizer of French victory, and she hated her on that account from the bottom of her Breton heart and with all the fervour of her Breton patriotism. As a wife, as a queen, and as a woman, she disliked [Anne of France's] influence, coveted her authority, and resented her position.[387]
To become queen in the first place, writes another, “the little duchess had been vanquished by the regent; therefore she was her inferior, in debt to her.”[388] Another historian claims that Anne of France, for her part, was angry that she had “to cede precedence to her sister-in-law, who reigned in intimacy, over her royal
Unpacking Brantome’s “Particularitez” ∣ 117 husband.”[389] The dislike was mutual, according to still another: “Fifteen years younger than Anne [of France], Anne [of Brittany] was equally ambitious and even more self-willed. While the Regent acted with calculated ruthlessness, the Breton heiress was passionate and unpredictable.”[390]
At first glance the descriptions of the women and their relationship seem entirely plausible. After all, in 1491 the French under Anne of France had forced Anne of Brittany to surrender her duchy to them; even worse, Anne of France had forced Anne of Brittany, betrothed to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, to marry Charles VIII to guarantee that Brittany would remain in French control. But if Anne of France had won a victory over Anne of Brittany, the duchess’s marriage to Charles VIII elevated her rank over the regent’s. Certainly Anne of France might have resented losing her priority.
What is objectionable on reflection, however, is the way in which the women’s presumed rivalry is cast, as petty squabbling. If the Annes were genuinely rivalrous, the object of their jealousy would not have been “wordly vanity” but power, access to the king. Early modern Europe offers any number of examples of male rivals: Francois I and Henry VIII, Francois I and Charles V, Maximilian I, and Charles VIII to name a few.
However, historians do not represent these men in anything like the terms they apply to the Annes: these men are not haughty; they do not hate from the bottom of their hearts; they are not little; they are not strong-willed, passionate, or unpredictable.The long-term effect of Brantome’s diminishing of the Annes is evident in Minois’s conclusion that “the constant rivalry occasioned a multitude of incidents.” In fact, Minois presents only one example of such an incident, writing that relations between the two Annes over the winter and spring of 1492 were “deteriorating” to the point that a group of men—ministers and the Duke of Orleans—stepped in on 5 July to convene a family meeting “to settle things.”[391] The family appealed to the women’s Christian sentiments, explains Minois, and took the matter very seriously: before the True Cross, Archbishop Georges d’Am- boise, principal minister, had the two Annes swear to “lend mutual aid and help, with good love, union and intelligence, to safeguard the king and bring to a finish the great disorder that reign in his House.”[392]
A search through histories and collections of documents related to 5 July 1492 does indeed turn up a treaty recounting that on that date, “seeing the great disorder that reigns in the House of the said King,” Anne of Brittany, Louis of Orleans, Pierre of Bourbon and Anne of France found it necessary with “good love, union and intelligence” to protect the king against his enemies, and, “in the presence and between the hands of the Archbishop of Narbonne [Georges d’Am- boise], holding the True Cross,” swore to each other to ally against the king’s enemies. But the document has nothing to do with a squabble between the women.
Instead, the document shows the Annes, Louis of Orleans, and Pierre of Bourbon allying in a league to bring to a stop the great disorder being caused by the king’s enemies. The document begins:
We, Anne by the grace of God queen of France, and Louis Duke of Orleans, and Pierre and Anne Duke and Duchess of Bourbon, seeing and considering the great affairs and damnable actions that enemies of Monseigneur le Roy perpetrate daily against the king and his kingdom and the great disorder reigning today, also in the house of the king, which could cause great trouble for his subjects; for this reason we, who want only the good of the king and his kingdom, as those closest to the situation, find it necessary that we share love, union and intelligence in order to better serve the king and his kingdom and prevent, resist and prevail against those who wish the contrary....[393]
The document goes on to specify that the principal enemy against whom they were uniting was the Admiral Louis Malet de Graville.
The reference to the “great disorder that reigns in the House of the king” seems to have caught Minois’s attention, and, his view colored by the long tradition via Brantome of the Annes’ cat fighting, the historian concluded that this “disorder” referred to supposed rivalry between the two haughty females.
It is certain, however, that the alliance was in no way motivated by Louis of Orleans’s desire to “settle things” between the Annes—as if he would have had the authority to intervene in such a way, in any case. The document targeted by Minois as evidence of a cat fight, then, turns out to be just the opposite, a snapshot of the women pursuing a common political goal. As such, the document further authorizes a revised interpretation of Brantome’s particularity: it reveals a degree of anxiety about female power on the part of the memoirist. This seems clear when we examine another notable particularity that Brantome attributes to Anne of France. She was, he writes, “filled with dissimulation and a great hypocrite, who, because of her ambition, hid and disguised herself in all ways.”[394] The positive contemporary assessments of her conduct and her own writings suggest that, as an adult, she continued to conform to conventional modes of behavior. Although she apparently knew how to impose her will, she seems to have done so quietly. We might note, for example, her strategic absence from the gathering of the Estates General in 1484, which had met to decide, among other things, who would have regency of the young king. Only her husband Pierre appeared before the delegates.[395] This appearance of submission that both masked and made possible her power is what Brantome refers to as dissimulation and hypocrisy. In contrast with Brantome, we might think of such behavior as enabling her exercise of power.As for Anne of Brittany, we find the lingering effects of Brantome in many modern interpretations of her. In his portrait of the queen in the Vies des dames illustres, Brantome begins by praising the queen, but, abruptly, just after claiming that, according to what he has heard from his sources, Anne was “very good, extremely merciful and very charitable,” he announces that it is also true that she was very quick to vengeance and could not forgive.[396] He offers two examples of her avenging nature: her treatment of Pierre de Rohan, the Marechal de Gie, and Louis of Orleans.
Bernard Quilliet picks up on Bran tome’s assessment, writing that, on the positive side, Anne had “a sense of duty,” “quick wit,” and “at times demonstrated great finesse.” On the negative side, she was “dry of heart and cold-headed,” and had a taste for “torturous intrigue, tenacious resentments, the most opulent splendour, and the most ostentatious devotion.” She was “ferociously jealous,” “vindictive,” “selfish and haughty,” “monomaniacal,” “hateful,” and prone to “Breton sulking;” her devotion was “almost pagan.”[397] Minois cites Quilliet, claiming that the judgement, if harsh, is mostly true. Minois then goes on to analyse Anne’s character in a section with the heading “An authoritarian, hard, rancorous, and humorless woman.”[398]
Recent work on Anne of Brittany eschews these old stereotypes.[399] However, Brantome’s particularities about Queen Anne can be usefully unpacked and reprocessed as evidence of her political engagement. Anne’s treatment of Gie, which is often cited by modern biographers as evidence of her vengeful nature, is by no means transparent.[400] Several contemporary sources attest that Anne, believing King Louis XII to be at death’s door, was ready to return to her duchy of Brittany with her daughter, Claude. Gie, however, prevented the boats from departing. With Louis dead, Anne rightly feared that Claude would be married to Franpois of Angouleme, heir to the throne, later Franpois I. Anne fought against this marriage, knowing that Brittany would be fully absorbed into the French kingdom if it took place. She worked instead for a marriage between Claude and the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, a marriage that would guarantee Brittany’s continued existence as an independent duchy. As Lucien Bely observes, for Anne, the French kingdom was “familial, feudal, or dynastic,” and she wanted to marry Claude to the heir to the Holy Roman Empire to ensure her duchy’s continued independent existence, whereas Louis XII's vision was “national and sought to defend at all costs the integrity of the [French] territory.”[401] Anne’s case against Louis XII and his men and her fury at Gie, then, should not be regarded as the grudge of a petulant child, but as a sign of her desire to keep her duchy free from French rule.
That she failed should not be taken as a sign of her weakness or the unworthiness of her cause but recognized as the inevitable result of the overwhelming power against her, a centralizing power that was slowly eroding the power of the kingdom’s great seigneurs.As for the Louis of Orleans example, Brantome writes that Anne took offense at Louis’s gaily dancing at a masquerade at Amboise shortly after the death of her son, because she believed him to be rejoicing that he, Louis, was now the heir to the throne. In the face of her anger, Louis was forced to flee to Blois. If the story is true as Brantome relates it, it is understandable that Anne was furious to see Louis dancing for joy because he stood to gain politically from her terrible loss: this does not mean that she was vengeful.