work on Valois entertainments designed to heal domestic sectarian conflicts reveals how, in the context of a political culture that presumed a disjuncture between appearance and intent, such spectacular gestures of conciliation only served to encourage paranoid interpretations of the concealed agendas that lay beneath them. Similarly, for adversaries of the crown, the image of Bayonne as a friendly, family affair prompted speculation about the political dealings hidden behind the curtain of “caresses and pleasures.” Protestant chronicler Jacques-Auguste de Thou claimed that the Duke of Alba came to Bayonne with the Order of the Golden Fleece “in order to better cover up the secret plans that he had to convey to the king and queen.”91 He further interpreted Catherine’s expressions of joy and love toward her daughter as a distraction technique: “It seemed that the king had only invited his sister Elisabeth to offer her all sorts of pleasures. The queen mother was at ease with everyone having this idea.”92 In fact, Protestant commentators saw the entire royal tour as a “voyage to Bayonne,” an excuse to conspire with Spain for the eradication of the reformed faith in Europe.93
Although Protestant observers expressed the most virulently suspicious interpretations of the entertainments’ meaning, France’s Catholic diplomatic rivals also displayed an apprehensive, mistrustful approach to reading the events. The exuberant visuality of the entertainments and of their subsequent descriptions provoked anxiety about what could not be seen. Observers had good reason to wonder about what was being hidden from view: according to the conference’s highest-level participants, the most meaningful negotiations took place behind closed doors. As the Duke of Alba reported in an undated letter written at Bayonne, Catherine de’ Medici would only speak to him about religious matters in her house, where presumably she had most control over who could listen to their conversations.94 In one letter to Philip, he complained that he tried to engage the queen mother in a discussion about religious policy one evening but could not continue because they were in a small room and “we couldn’t speak without being heard as there was a crowd of people in it to go out to the celebration in the plaza.”95 Charles conducted several meetings in private, including some at a convent located a few miles outside the city. These secret interviews did not escape the notice of other guests. The anonymous Spanish chronicler, for example, remarked: “The king of France made many people jealous because he invited them to dine one by one at his house each night.”96
In the context of the highly public, theatrical culture of the court, privacy and intimacy were powerful alternative forms of performance. Exclusive proximity to a monarch conferred favor on an individual.97 For those excluded, the private meetings constructed restricted, forbidden spaces and an attendant desire to penetrate them. Finding out what happened behind closed doors was a major part of diplomats’ jobs.98 Diplomatic correspondence reveals that secrets at the Bayonne conference did not last long. Charles’s meeting with the Ottoman envoy, for example, was not officially disclosed to the Spanish delegation. The royal family reserved lodgings for the envoy under a false name and Charles met with him at some distance from the site of the summit. Nevertheless, Spanish envoys learned of the meeting and the Spanish ambassador in London confirmed it to Philip in a June 25 letter.99 From a diplomat’s perspective, a secret’s importance lies not only in the information being withheld but also in the information implied by choices regarding its concealment and discreet revelation. The measures taken to hide the Ottoman envoy from Spanish attendees constituted another kind of performance to be interpreted.
Diplomats and nondiplomatic commentators occupied space on a “continuum of suspicion” with regard to their interpretations of the events at Bayonne. French Protestants, situated on the extreme edge of this spectrum, remained deeply mistrustful of the Catholic monarchs’ motives and fixated on signs of secrecy and concealment. Protestant historian De Thou described the architecture of Bayonne, especially the royal family’s dwelling arrangements, as a mise-en-scène of secrecy. He explains that Catherine took over the bishop’s palace and had a new wooden house built “in haste” (à la hâte) right next door and richly furnished for her daughter. A gallery connected the two dwellings such that “the queen mother often went to see the queen her daughter during the nights … and she was only seen by those in her confidence. There, she conferred in secret with Elisabeth and the Duke of Alba who had the full powers of the king of Spain.”100 Immediately after this description, he recounts Protestant suspicions that at Bayonne the French and Spanish monarchs pledged mutual support in suppressing Huguenots in France and the Low Countries, respectively. Those speculations appear authorized by the analysis of invisibility and concealment that precedes them.
The Protestant discourse on Bayonne demonstrates—albeit in extreme form—how the very ambiguity that ensured the festivities’ utility for diplomatic purposes ultimately escaped French monarchal control. The capacity of the entertainments to restrict particular interpretations to particular viewers was to some degree canceled out by the abundance of other possible forms of reception. In other cases, it gave rise to speculation and a degree of paranoia that ran counter to the French agenda. The performance of concord, in other words, not only glossed over discord but in fact allowed discord to proliferate through suspicious interpretations of the polysemous event.
Conclusion: Analyzing Concordant Discord
This fragmented reception of the Bayonne festivities is itself concealed from the most famous traces of the event: the spectacular tapestries discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Created several years after the Bayonne meeting, years even after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre that its most paranoid commentators saw as its ultimate result, the tapestries present a remarkably unified portrait of the entertainments. The composition draws all eyes to the wondrous spectacles at their center, testaments to the Valois family’s splendor.101 As Roy Strong suggests, they also serve as “tangible monuments” to the culture of court spectacle itself.102 In monumentalizing court entertainments, the tapestries depict them as singular, experienced in the same way by all observers. As this discussion reveals, this retrospective image does not completely correspond to the complex practices of observation, mediation, and interpretation mobilized by the entertainments in their own time.
The Bayonne festivities and their publication across Europe illustrate some of the diplomatic uses of the performing arts in the political and aesthetic contexts of the mid-sixteenth century. The strong cultural and familial ties among the aristocracies of western European countries, the continued importance of Catholic traditions, and the predominance of neo-Platonic theories and belief in the universality of the arts all conspired to make performances a powerful ritual affirming the unity of neighboring kingdoms despite their political differences. Yet alongside this feeling and image of community, spectators hailing from different countries and different social positions, armed with different linguistic and cultural competencies, could derive varying political interpretations from the festivities’ pompous displays. These diverse interpretations gained solidity and force in post-event accounts, particularly those distributed by the French royal family, carefully tailored to enhance political relations with each reader. The staging and mediation of the entertainments involved a complex balancing act of concealing and revealing, consolidation and dispersal. Analyzing performance in a diplomatic context requires a similar balancing act, as well as a level of comfort with uncertainty, obscurity, and multiplicity of meanings. Ambiguity is not (or not only) an assumed quality of art but a pragmatic strategy and a complement to diplomatic negotiation.
Recognizing the diplomatic multiplicity of entertainments such as those staged at Bayonne also entails imagining a more active role for spectators. Diplomats in the audience made strategic choices in interpreting entertainments and in recounting them to their sovereigns and secretaries. They exercised discretion even in the way they attended or participated in performances, conscious of the symbolism inherent in each act of sociability. The specificity of the diplomatic spectator’s point of view and the possibility of theorizing an active, “diplomatic” mode of spectatorship are the focus of the next chapter.
Chapter 2
