Plenary I: Stories

Abstract: "And then she fell on a great laughter":
English Diplomats Read Marguerite de Navarre

Presented by: Anne Lake Prescott, English and French, Barnard College.

English diplomats working for Henry VIII in France well understood the importance of Marguerite de Navarre--piously evangelical sister of King François I, wife first of the duc d'Alençon and then of the king of Navarre, and a brilliantly clever author of verse, farces, and short fiction--as the leader of a pro-English faction at the French court. Their dispatches show, always intriguingly and sometimes amusingly, how they tried to "read" her. Impressed by her intelligence and good will, they were also wary, alive to the ambiguity of her position and the complexity of language in the upper reaches of diplomatic life. They were also, on occasion, conscious or even afraid that her gender affected her language and behavior. The dispatches quoted or paraphrased in the *Letters and Papers* for Henry VIII show how the king's envoys reacted to Marguerite as, for example, she flirted with the duke of Norfolk while attempting to undercut the reputation of her Habsburg sister-in-law Eleanor, played the gender card when begging the female Regent of the Netherlands to help her liberate her brother from Spanish captivity. When Marguerite traveled to Madrid, one worried English diplomat read this as suggesting a hidden agenda, a planned narrative, whereby this rich and attractive widow might seduce the Emperor Charles V and "cackle" together with the emperor's widowed sister. There were a number of powerful female rulers and regents in early modern Europe. For the most part diplomats took this fact in their stride, but every now and then it affected how they "read" the always semi-opaque world of Renaissance diplomacy and converted "fact" into story.