The new episode this week is on Anne of Brittany – thanks to Melita from Tudor Times for sharing her insights with us!
Check out the Tudor Times feature on Anne of Brittany.
http://tudortimes.co.uk/people/anne-of-brittany
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Episode Transcript:
Heather:
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a member of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible, because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our connection to our own humanity. This is Episode 101. It’s another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times on Anne of Brittany.
First I want to thank the lovely patrons of the show who keep it independent. Thank you to Elizabeth, Kathy, Cynthia, Juergen, Sarah, Megan, Melissa, Lady Anne aka Jessica, Olivia, Al, Ashley, Kendra, Cynthia, Judith, Renee, Katie, Mara, Emily, Celayne, Laura, another one, Barbara, Sharkiva, Amy, Allison, Joanne, Kathy, Christina, Anetta, Susan, Andrea, Katherine Rebecca from Tudors Dynasty, Sharon, Philip, and John. To learn more about how you can become part of this intelligent and discerning group for as little as $1 an episode, go to patreon.com/Englandcast. Also remember, you can support the show in two other ways. First, you can leave a rating on iTunes which is free and makes a huge difference. Second, you can do all of your Mother’s Day holiday shopping at Tudorfair.com which is the place for Tudor swag and fun products, like the T-shirt that says “Keep calm and be grateful Henry VIII isn’t your husband,” which I am every day.
So now let me introduce you to Melita. Melita is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at Tudortimes.co.uk. Melita, who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970’s series Elizabeth R with Linda Jackson also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
Melita:
So I’ve just been refreshing myself on Anne of Brittany.
Heather:
Yeah, well, I would like to know more about her because I know very little, I mean, I know absolutely nothing. So I started reading a little bit about her for our call and I realized that I just don’t know anything. So maybe we can just jump right in. And you can tell us about Anne of Brittany.
Melita:
Yeah, well, really, I’m going to sort of start off with the reason I wanted to research her and why we wanted to put her on Tudor Times. She’s the first person we’ve done outside England and Scotland. So she’s a bit of a foray into, well we’ve got a biography of Isabella of Castiel, but not a person of the month feature. And just sort of interested in expanding our reach, because so much of Tudor and Stuart politics is about the relationship with the rest of Europe. So you can’t really understand the whole background of the different countries without seeing how they were all interrelated, politically. And Anna Brittany is particularly interesting.
She was Duchess of Brittany in her own right, not many women were rulers in their own right. But she’s also the only woman to have been twice crowned as Queen of France. Yes, so she was, I mean, in many ways, her life was actually very, very sad, and perhaps, is a sort of a microcosm of the position of young women who found themselves as rulers. So Brittany, at the time was separate from France. It was not a part of the Kingdom of France, it was an independent duchy. And it was ruled by Anne’s father Francis, who was not a particularly effective Duke, although he had rather cleverly maintained his position of independence by playing England and France off against each other because France was forever trying to capture Brittany. I mean, that was the idea. But Duke of Brittany, Francis had protected Henry VII when he was Earl of Richmond. He protected Henry and his uncle Jasper Tudor, when they were exiled. And so he was always saying he’d hand them over to the English or hand them over to the French. He was using them. So Anne probably knew Henry VII although she was only a little girl when he invaded England. She was about eight when he left. But Francis, he had lots of sort of troubles in his own duchy. There was quite a wide feeling that he put too much power into the hands of his minister, Pierre Landais. Many of his nobles resented that and at the same time, the regent to France Anne de Beaujeu, she was obviously undermining Francis as fast as she could by supporting his rebels.
Heather:
You know, that rings a bell for me just from Tony Rich’s book, his series on Henry and the part where they were exiled. Yeah, he talks a little bit about that. So now that you’re saying that it’s like, okay I remember that.
Melita:
Yes, and it ended in something called the Mad War, which is where the King of France, Charles VIII then his sister Anne de Beaujeu, who was his Regent, was supporting Breton rebels. And then on the other side, there was Louis of Orléans, who was the heir to the French crown, supporting the Bretons. So it was all very complicated and as they call it the Mad war. And Francis, who was in declining health, he just had his two daughters, and he was desperate to find a husband for Anne who would be able to protect his duchy against the French. So there were various people mentioned, a few whom Louis of Orléans was one and you have a few other sort of, like-looking noblemen including the Alain d’Albret whose brother was married to the Queen of Navarre. Then in the Mad war, Anne de Beaujeu was successful. There was a treaty between France and Brittany in which it was agreed that Anne’s marriage would need to be approved by the French. The Bretons would not be able to marry Anne to anybody without French consent. And shortly afterwards, Francis died.
So there was Anne, she was just about 12 years old. She was Duchess of Brittany. Her claim wasn’t 100% because there was another branch of the Breton royal family as well. So there are all sorts of complications, but she was recognized as duchess by the Breton parliament. And then of course, the big question came, who was she going to marry? So the French were saying, “Well, she can only marry somebody we choose.” And the Breton nobles were quarreling amongst themselves. And at 12 years old, it’s difficult to know how much influence she had. But she was clearly involved in discussions about the future. And she was very much in favor of marriage with Maximilian I who was King of the Romans, later, the Emperor, and he was recently widowed. So that was agreed that she would marry Maximilian. There was a proxy marriage. So she was officially now Queen of the Romans as well as Duchess of Brittany. But the French objected, funnily enough, and, yeah, as they as they were bound to do, and they invaded again. And Maximilian, as always let his allies down. He had a history of doing that. There was no sign of him, Anne was surrounded by French troops. And she was given a couple of choices. Charles VIII said, “Well, if you hand over the duchy to me, you can go off. I’ll give you an escort, and you can go and marry Maximilian, and give me your duchy. You can marry one of my men, you can choose which one, or you can marry me and be Queen of France, and stay as Duchess of Brittany.” So there she was, 14 years old and that was the choice that she had to make. It was rumored that Charles had raped her. But she denied that and chose to marry him. So whether he did or whether he made it clear that that was another possible outcome, or whether that was just a slander, we don’t know. But she accepted to marry Charles. And then surprisingly, the English and Maximilian and Spanish rulers are all very surprised. Don’t you think well if they only had kept to the treaties and helped her then she wouldn’t have been in that position. So poor girl.
Heather:
Yeah. So how? I mean, why were they surprised? What did they think–
Melita:
Yeah, they thought, “Oh, my goodness, we never thought the French would really do that. We never thought. We thought that she was safely married to Maximilian but Maximillian hadn’t turned up and France had turned up.” So yes, it was never going to end well for poor Anne. But she obviously made a sensible choice in the circumstances she found herself in.
So she married Charles and she became Queen of France. She was a woman who enjoyed magnificence and just reading about the dowry she took with her or her trousseau that she took into France with her, she had a coach with the horses trapped in black velvet, her gown that she wore cost over 60,000 francs, and she had a velvet cloak with 139 sable pelts. So she was a pretty impressive sight. She took with her a couple of fancy beds, draped in violet damask and cloth of gold. All sorts of beautiful things. Her wedding dress was of cloth of gold at 7350 francs per yard. I mean, you just can’t imagine such magnificence, right? I suppose Meghan Markle’s is going to cost me.
Yeah, she must have been a glittering sight and she was crowned as Queen of France at St. Denis. She and Charles, it’s very difficult to get to the bottom of what their personal relationship was like. Personally, I don’t think he can have started very well. I mean she didn’t have much choice in marrying him. He was certainly not a physically attractive man. He was described in quite scathing terms “in his looks as small and ill-formed, an ugly face with large light eyes sees rather badly and aquiline nose much out of proportion to the rest of his face, his lips are big, and he keeps them constantly open”.
Heather:
Oh, wow.
Melita:
Yeah. What you bet, he snored. But there she was. She was married to him. She was described about the same time, this is a few years after her marriage, “as small and thin in person, lame in one foot with using a false heel, very determined for her age so much so that if a wish enters her head by smiles or tears at any cost, she will obtain it.” So a determined young woman. So she and Charles, they had numerous children, all of whom died young, apart from one Dauphin Charles who died actually as a young child. So yeah, very, very sad history of childbirth. So none of them survived.
So Anne and Charles, they lived together as King and Queen of France. He wouldn’t let her have any say at what was going on in the Duchy, he completely ruled Brittany, for her. She had no independence at all. Charles was very, very determined to increase French influence. And in 1494, he invaded Italy, conquered the Kingdom of Naples, and set in train what was known as the Italian Wars. For 60 years, the French and the Spanish argued over who would have the most power in Italy. And Charles, he managed to conquer Naples, but actually within a very short time he lost all the possessions and the Spanish took it over.
Heather:
What was the relationship like with England at that point, then? Because you’ve got the new Tudor dynasty. And I had read, was it true? Had she been betrothed to Edward V?
Melita:
Yup. That was one of the matches that Francis tried to organize for her. But of course, well we know what happened to Edward V, we know that. Obviously, he was deposed by his uncle and never seen again. But this was in the period before while Anne’s father was still alive. So during the 1490’s, Henry VII had invaded France. This was before the marriage had finally taken place between Anne and Charles. And Charles had effectively paid Henry off. So he agreed in a nice fat pension for Henry and Henry agreed to accept the marriage between Brittany and France. And this gave Charles the opportunity to turn his thoughts towards Italy, because he could then be sure that England wasn’t going to invade because Henry VII, although he was actually very effective when he did go to war, it was not his preferred policy. Yeah, he was more peaceful inclined.
Heather:
Sure. Sure. Okay, so there wasn’t much going on with England.
Melita:
No, no. England was quiet. There was the old alliance with France and Scotland, which was ticking along, but nothing in particular was happening during that period. And the main rivalry was with Spain in Italy, and then in 1499, oh a little bit before that, 1498, I think it was, Charles and Anne we’re going to a tennis match. I mean, he wasn’t a very faithful husband, to put it mildly. So I don’t think Anne had a particularly happy life from that perspective, but he did still, treat her publicly as his queen. And one day he went to see Anne in Amboise where they were living at the château in Amboise and took her hand and they were going off to see a tennis match. And Charles hit his head on the doorway.
Heather: Oh!
Melita:
Yeah, and didn’t think anything of it. But they watched the game and then he said to one of his bishops, that he hoped never to commit another sin as long as he lived. And fortunately for his word, he was dead within 12 hours. Presumably, the blow on the head gave him a brain hemorrhage. Yeah, so completely shocking. Gets that one day, hits his head on the doorway and is dead by nightfall.
Heather:
Wow. That’s something.
Melita:
Yeah, that was must have been a complete shock for Anne, because her little Dauphin had died. So they had no children. And according to the treaty, she could now return to Brittany. But she still had to marry in accordance with French wishes. And it had been agreed as part of the marriage treaty that if Charles died, Anne would marry his successor if they had had no children themselves. So that was still Louis of Orléans, who had previously been a possible suitor and who had been her father’s ally. From Anne’s perspective, well that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Louis was already married. So, what was he going to do about that? And his heir, he had no children of his own, was a four-year-old. So possibly, Anne thought “Great. This is my way out.”
She completed her 40 days of mourning that the French queens have to do when they’re all dressed in white and hidden away. But while she was doing that, she was busy sending orders off to Brittany, she was appointing her officers. She was preparing to return home. And as soon as she could, she took herself off back to Brittany, had her own coinage minted, and began to take up Breton rule. But while she was on her way back, she met with Louis who said, “Oh well, you remember that treaty where you’ve got to marry me? And she obviously said, “Well, you’re already married.” And he said, “I’m going to get an annulment. I’ve been married for 22 years to my cousin Jeanne. But I’m going to tell the Pope that we never consummated the marriage because Jeanne was so deformed. I couldn’t do it.” That’s very, I mean, he could have at least come up with one of those stories of being cousins that they all knew about. After 22 years, he humiliated his poor wife by saying she was too deformed to sleep with. Oh, Jeanne came quite well out of it because she became the Duchess of Berry and had a nice fat income and founded an order of nuns. So, it wasn’t all bad.
But Anne was then presented with the fact that Louie had managed to attain an annulment and she had marry him. She was in a better position than she had previously been. And the treaty was more favorable to Brittany than the one when she married Charles. And while she was married to Louie, she did have much more independence in the duchy and was given much more opportunity to rule herself but it was always Louis behind it, she could never completely control her duchy. And then the other point in the treaty, she was very, very keen to keep Brittany separate from France. And it was agreed that if she had two children or two sons that the second child, whether a son or a daughter would take Brittany as their inheritance, it would remain separate from France.
And she tried very hard during the 1500’s to sort of arrange another fate for Brittany. She agreed on the marriage of her daughter, Claude, she and Louie had two daughters eventually. And she wanted Claude to marry the Archduke Charles, later Emperor Charles V and Louis was not keen, he did agree to begin with, but then he changed his mind. And Claude was betrothed to his heir, François. Again, it’s difficult to know what the personal relationship between Anne and Louis was. I think it was probably better than the one she had with Charles. He was more respectful of her position as a Duchess and he’d been her father’s ally, and there was sort of less coercion involved in the whole marriage. And he certainly seems to have been very attached to her.
As Queen of France, she was obviously a very wealthy woman. She was a great patron of arts and one of her prayer books, The Great Hours of the Duchess of Brittany, Anne of Brittany, one of those beautiful, illuminated manuscripts of the period. So she was a very religious woman, she went on a number of different pilgrimages. One of the interesting things she did of which I can find very little information, but she founded an order of chivalry for ladies.
Heather:
Oh, wow.
Melita:
Yeah, I know, I would really like to go to France and try and find out more about it. Obviously, there was the Order of the Garter in England, which was open to, there were Ladies of the Garter as well. There was the Order of Saint Michel in France, the Order of the Golden Fleece in Burgundy. And Anne began an order called the Order of the Cordelière and sometimes this is represented as a chivalric order for ladies, but it’s also sometimes thought to be a religious order. So not quite clear on which it is and could do with more research but it’s interesting.
Heather:
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Melita:
Yeah. So the Order of the Ladies of the Cord or Cordelière and the motto was “J’ay le corps délié”, which is “I have an unbound body.” And there’s been quite a lot of speculation about what the motto represented. Was it the scourge from The Passion of Christ? Was it the belt of the Franciscan Order, which was one of Anne’s favorite orders? Or was it about delivery from the bonds of matrimony is another suggestion. But yeah, very, very interesting that.
And many of her …her beautiful tapestries. There’s a series of tapestries, not the famous Lady and The Unicorn Tapestries, but another series called The Hunt of the Unicorn, I think, which is a beautiful series and it shows Louis and at Anne, and it’s embroidered with A’s for her name and these little cords that she puts on everything. So some beautiful artifacts. So she spent most of her time in the château of Bloise and Ambloise, and was living a very sort of beautiful Renaissance life.
There was one occasion when Louis was thought to be dying, and we can perhaps gain a sense of what her views were because she started packing up her jewels, and she was ready to head for Brittany. She’d ordered the barges, the furniture was being piled on. And then one of Louis’ ministers prevented her leaving, pointing out the king wasn’t dead yet. And in fact, Louis survived. And then they had another rupture a bit later, where they quarreled about the marriage of their daughter, as I said, she wanted Claude to be married to Charles of Burgundy and Louis wanted her to be married to his cousin François and Anne took herself off to Brittany for five or six months. Toward the duchy, generally made her presence felt. Eventually, she was persuaded to go back to Louis. But yeah, I think you can sort of detect a bit of marital tension there.
Heather:
Yeah, interesting. So she died quite young. Was she quite young when she died?
Melita:
Yeah, she was just she was 37. So as well as all the stillbirths and loss of children Anne had with Charles, the same pattern repeated itself with Louis. So she had Claude in 1499. And then she didn’t have another living child till 1512. But she had a whole series of infant deaths and stillbirths. I mean, you’d guess there was something she had, some health issues, perhaps? Something that today could be quite easily–
Heather:
Yeah. Hormonal or something like that?
Melita:
Well, perhaps anemia? Yeah, yeah. So she never really recovered from Renée’s birth in 1512. And she died in January 1514, just a few weeks before her 38th birthday. By the end of May, François had recognized Claude as Duchess of Brittany instead of the second child as the treaty had said, and married her to François. So Brittany was subsumed into the Kingdom of France and remained there ever since.
Heather:
Wow. Interesting.
Melita:
Yeah, and Louis appeared to mourn Anne’s death that he had a most magnificent funeral. One of the superb, if you like that sort of thing, black horses and velvet and trappings and ermine and procession, torchlight and things. But he was reconciled in the October of that year by marrying the Princess of England, Mary. So, he got over it. And in fact, he died within a year of her, he died the following January and was buried with her.
Heather:
That’s quite sad. So kind of what sort of legacy did they leave? Why is it important to learn about her?
Melita:
There is a strong legacy in Brittany that they still commemorate her as their last Duchess. She’s much talked off there still. As a Renaissance Queen, she certainly promoted the arts and culture. But I think it’s, you can see within her a woman who could have been an extremely, whether she would have been a good ruler, one doesn’t know, but she was certainly prepared to rule in the same way that she just didn’t manage to pull it off as Isabel of Castiel did, possibly because Isabella was five or six years older and more able to take control. Anne at the age of 12, or 13 just couldn’t, had she been five years older, when her father died, things might have been very different. And Brittany might have remained as an independent state for a lot longer. You can sort of see the kind of frustration. She wanted to rule, she could have done, she had the right to, but the French kings wouldn’t let her on. And of course, that was a matter of her gender had she been a boy none of this would ever have arisen.
Heather:
Right. That’s really interesting, because she was in that period. Like I’m thinking about Sarah Gristwood’s Game of Queens in that period where women were starting to step into their role as ruler, but it seems like it was just she was just a little bit too young to have that.
Melita:
And you funnily, her big opponent was Anne de Beaujeu who Sarah Gristwood writes about and she was Regent to France or her husband was officially Regent, but Anne wore the trunk hose, so to speak, there’s no doubt about that. So yes, her great opponent was another woman. But yeah, had she been five years older, she would probably, her father would have arranged marriage for her by then. And she would have perhaps married Maximilian and have been Empress. But Maximilian although he didn’t generally observe his word, his county, Burgundy, which had come to him from his first wife went to her heirs, their children. He didn’t try to keep it. And perhaps he would have done the same with Brittany. They might have had children, of course, because Charles had no children obviously by Anne. In fact, Louis, other than the two daughters, he’d had no sons, no children by his first wife in 22 years of marriage. So, perhaps there was a whole raft of health issues in the French Royal family.
Heather:
Surely they were all related and everything by that point.
Melita:
Well, they were. Although perhaps Anne not quite so closely related. But they were all cousins.
Heather:
So if there was some kind of a genetic issue, they might have all had it as well.
Melita:
They might, yes.
Heather:
Yeah, interesting. So where can we go to learn more about her? What kind of books are there? Are there any portrayals of her like in popular culture or anything like that, like in any of the historical fiction series that people would know?
Melita:
Well, not that I’ve really come across. I mean, I haven’t found a good modern biography of her in English. There may be some in French, but I haven’t come across any. There’s a couple from the early years of the 20th century, quite well-researched stuff, although perhaps a little romantic in tone. There’s a lot of the letters of Louis XII survived, and there’s a collection of those, so you can find out the political information that’s going on from Louis letters’. There’s correspondence between in Louis’ letters from Margaret of Austria, who was then Regent to the Netherlands, so mentioned things.
Oh, just as an aside, when in 1513, when England invaded France, Henry VIII invaded France, Anne encouraged James IV of Scotland to invade England. She sent him a turquoise ring and asked him to be her knight, which was her duty as Queen of France, she was doing that. So yeah, I mean, if you go to Brittany, I think there’s probably plenty to find about her, but sadly, I couldn’t justify a trip to Brittany.
Heather:
That’s funny. Well, maybe you can write the next biography of her.
Melita:
Oh, yeah. I would quite like that. It would be interesting, but it would need a lot of time in the bibliotech francais. I think there’s probably quite a lot of stuff though that hasn’t been brought out yet. So interesting, very interesting woman.
Heather:
So how did you research her for the Tudor Times feature?
Melita:
Well, a lot of it was the letters I mentioned. And the two biographies, there’s various histories of France, information about St. Denis, there’s a French treatise on the coronations of the kings and queens of France, which describes her coronation, there’s the book about her funeral, which Louis commissioned. So that’s the copies of that is still extant you can you say but yeah, there’s quite a bit of digging around and inferring from other events. So the Mad War is known about the Italian wars. Very, very good book about the Italian Wars, the name of which I can’t remember off the top my head. It’s in the bibliography that’s on the Tudor Times websites, and there’s a bibliography on there of where we got the information from. Yeah, but I’d like to know more.
Heather:
Interesting. Well, thank you for sharing as much as you could on her. Thank you again Melita for taking the time to tell us about Anne. For more information, go to Tudortimes.co.uk or see the resources available on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com. Also remember, if you like the show, the biggest ways you can help is to leave a rating on iTunes and tell a friend about it. And you can also do your shopping on tudorfair.com. So I’ll be back in another two weeks. And I hope you have a great time until then. Okay, talk with you soon!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.