Eleanor the foreign queen

In Scenes From the Marriage of Louis XIV, Abby E. Zanger analyses the ways in which two “simultaneously existing systems,” or states, come together in dynastic marriage but retain their tensions.

joins two bodies or two nation-states, absorbing the difference, which it cannot erase. To do so would defeat the purpose of the symbolic event. Maintaining a trace of difference offers a reminder that there has been an exchange of kin, an interaction between two groups. Keeping that difference in sight also empha­sizes the power of the group that triumphs in the exchange process. Marriage... is an activity that underlines its process of incorporation, although there is a price to pay for needing to incorporate foreign elements.^[648]

Marriage, she goes on, produces “nuptial fictions,” which “continue the adju­dication of tensions between two regimes..”^[649] Such fictions are an essential component of the king’s image and therefore of power and the monarchy more generally.

Francois I and Eleanor’s nuptial fiction told a different story from the one that the authors of the Treaty of Madrid and Eleanor had anticipated. Far from the most Christian prince whose great wish was to “obviate the sufferings of Christendom,”^[650] as Francois I claimed to be, the role that he played in his mar­riage fiction was that of a jealous and ambitious monarch who humiliated and marginalized his enemy’s sister to symbolically assert his mastery over his rival.

As for Eleanor, the fiction made her into the first “foreign” queen. In an earlier time, she would not have been considered an outsider. French was her native language, and, after growing up in Brussels, she “became” Portuguese and then Spanish only as an adult, when she left Brussels to marry the King of Portugal, and, after his death, to join her brother in Spain.

What had happened? Eleanor’s difference, rendered visible through her fab­ulous Spanish entourage and her own dress, became an affront impossible to integrate into the marriage when war broke out between her husband and brother in 1536. As we have seen, the meeting between the king and emperor at Aigues- Mortes in the summer of 1538 raised the king’s hopes that the emperor would return Milan to France, Montmorency and Eleanor assuring Francois I that the emperor would come through. But Francois I waited in vain. In April 1540, the emperor abruptly changed course. In October, he invested his own son Philip with Milan.

Eleanor was unable to complete the nuptial fiction that she had so unrea­sonably been tasked with enacting. The king turned to his competent, politically savvy, and, above all, French, therefore loyal, mistress.

Although French queens had at times come from different lands, the concept of foreignness seems not to have been attached to them to marginalize them. And yet, the concept of foreign was available and ready to be put to use. Claude de Seyssel, for example, warns in 1515 against women ascending the throne, because French queens were at times foreign, which meant the throne might fall to a for­eigner. He praises the Salic Law,

for by falling into the feminine line [the throne] can come into the power of a foreigner, a pernicious and dangerous thing, since a ruler from a foreign nation (“homme d’estrange nation”) is of a different rearing (“nourriture”) and condi­tion, of different customs (“meurs”), different language, and a different way of life from the men of the lands he comes to rule. He ordinarily, therefore wishes to advance those of his nation, to grant them the most important authority in the handling of affairs, and to prefer them to honors and profits. Moreover, he always has more love for and faith in them and so conforms more to their customs and ways than to the customs of the land to which he has newly come, whence there always follows envy and dissension between the natives and the foreigners and indignation against the princes, as has often been seen by expe­rience, and is seen all the time.^[656]

Eleanor, brother of the French king’s enemy, was never fully accepted into court life by her husband. But it would be Eleanor’s successor, Catherine de Medicis, who would be cast still more forcefully as a foreign queen. In 1561, the expression was not yet used with real hatred, although it was certainly not flattering.

As for the queen, suffice it to say that she is a woman, a foreigner, and, on top of that, Florentine, born of a private house and not corresponding at all in gran­deur to the French kingdom. Because of this, she lacks in the authority that she might have possessed had she been born French or to a more illustrious house. Still, one cannot deny that she is a woman of great merit and intelligence; and if she had more experience in matters of state and if she were a bit more forceful one could expect great things from her.^[657]

As the Religious Wars blazed on, Catherine’s status as foreigner was evoked with increasing viciousness. The vituperative Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et desportemens de Catherine de Medicis of 1575 begins by mentioning the queen’s Florentine birth, because “natural qualities are hidden in the home­land.”^[658] Italians are gifted in “finesse” and “subtilite,” the pamphleteer claims, which become deceit when incarnated in a bad person.^[659] Venetian ambassador Giovanni Michieli observes, also in 1575, that the queen “is accused of all the

Eleanor of Austria: The Foreign Queen | 185 evils desolating the kingdom. Foreigner and Italian, she is little loved; at the moment she is detested.”^[660]

The foreignness of Eleanor and then Catherine, would have aroused little interest in earlier centuries, judging by the ways in which their Capetian pre­decessors were treated. But both of these women were clearly perceived as for­eign queens, the first little loved, although not detested, the second becoming an object of genuine hatred as the Religious Wars continued. French queenship, incarnated in these women, comes to represent the imperfect and temporary transformation of a powerful enemy into an ally; queens are therefore irreme­diably Other, mother of the royal children, emblem of peace, but potentially traitorous and therefore carefully contained. Eleanor, a perfectly typical French queen, became the first foreigner to occupy the office, cast in the role through no fault of her own.