Marguerite d'Angouleme (later: de Navarre)

Marguerite de Navarre (1492 –1549), also known as Marguerite of Angoulême. Her brother became king of France as Francis I and they were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court of their day in France. Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king (he is probably he King of Navarre in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost: see that play's bibliography). An author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman" and she illustrates why Shakespeare was so interested in the boldness of Frenchwomen in his plays:beginning with the Countess of Auvergne, Joan of Arc, and Marguerited'Anjou in 3HVI). Marguerite was the eldest child of Louise of Savoy and Charles, Count of Angoulême. Louise was considered one of the most brilliant feminine minds in France. Soon after Marguerite's birth, the family moved from Angoulême to Cognac, "where the Italian influence reigned supreme, and where Boccaccio was looked upon as a little less than a god". Marguerite was given a classical education and wrote many poems and plays, and the classic collection of stories, the Heptameron, which was a source for many translated stories in popular collections of short stories favored as sources by Shakespeatre.

However, perhaps Marguerite's most remarkable achievement was to free her brother, King Francis I, held prisoner in Spain by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor after being captured in the Battle of Pavia, Italy, 1525. During the negotiations, Queen Marguerite rode horseback through wintry woods, twelve hours a day for many days, to meet a safe-conduct deadline. When Marguerite was ten, Louise tried to marry her to the Prince of Wales, who later would become Henry VIII of England; but this was "declined with thanks". Shakespeare mentions this possible marriage in his play Henry VIII. At seventeen Marguerite married Charles IV of Alençon by decree of King Louis XII (who also arranged the marriage of his ten year old daughter, Claude, to Francis). After the death of her first husband in 1525, Marguerite married Henry II of Navarre. Her son, Jean, was born in Blois when Marguerite was thirty-eight. The child died on Christmas Day the same year. Her grief probably motivated Marguerite to write an intense religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse or Mirror of the Sinful Soul.

Another figure in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, later Queen to Henry VIII of England, was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude in France before returning to England and Anne may have been in service to Marguerite rather than Claude, becoming a disciple to Marguerite with her radical views about Christianity. A letter from Anne Boleyn expresses her affection to Marguerite, who perhaps gave Anne a manuscript of Miroir de l'âme pécheresse - for in 1545, after Anne Boleyn's execution, her daughter, later Queen Elizabeth I, translated this poem into English at twelve years old and presented it, in her own hand, to the English Queen Katherine Parr. This literary connection among Marguerite, Anne, Katherine Parr, and the future Queen Elizabeth I suggests a direct mentoring link between the legacy of reformist religious convictions in England and Marguerite. There are also links between her Heptameron and such plays as Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. Marguerite protected artists and writers in many of whom Shakespeare was interested: François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and Pierre de Ronsard, and mediated between Catholics and Protestants (including John Calvin). Although Marguerite espoused reform within the Catholic Church, she was not a Calvinist. She did her best to protect reformers and dissuaded Francis I from intolerant measures. After her death, six "Catholic Wars" occurred, including the "St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre" of 1572. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (Wikipedia).