valid with respect to French spectators, this reading leaves out the experience of foreign viewers loyal to sovereigns other than Charles. How were they supposed to react to such enactments of his singular power? Eyewitness accounts suggest that, for some spectators, the most blatant affirmations of the French king’s supremacy simply did not register. It is important to recall that in the mid-sixteenth century the French language did not yet hold a privileged stature in Europe. Although French was becoming a “second lingua franca” after Latin, it was far from universally spoken.76 Even the Duke of Alba, Spain’s foremost diplomat, had a poor command of French.77 By choosing to feature exclusively French-language poetry and song lyrics, therefore, the creators of the Bayonne festivities excluded a significant part of its audience from full comprehension.78 This fact becomes obvious in a Milanese account of the entertainments whose author claimed that the canto sung by Heroic Virtue (cited above) lauded Philip rather than Charles.79 While the language barrier caused some misunderstandings, nationally specific iconologies obscured other politically charged meanings from foreigners’ view. The fact that Charles participated in the first joust dressed as a Trojan, for instance, had a particular resonance for French courtly viewers: a commonplace in royal imagery, the reference to Troy evoked a specifically French version of translatio imperii that traced the monarch’s ancestry to the founders of ancient Rome. Not primed to look for this allusion, foreign observers only noted that the king wore an “ancient” or “ornate” costume, while the visual assertion of French supremacy apparently passed them by. In this way, the Bayonne festivities navigated between imageries and sensory pleasures accessible to all its guests with specific verbal and visual signs legible only to a restricted portion of its audience. The entertainments revealed content to some while concealing it from others—and often they did not even realize they were missing something. This “something for everyone” quality of the festivities made them ripe for manipulation in post-event mediation by politicians.
Before the French court could pack up their affairs and move on from Bayonne to the next stop on their tour, Catherine de’ Medici and her son began writing letters reporting on the recently completed summit. Their correspondence dispersed an array of slightly varying images of the event to sovereigns and diplomats all over Europe. Catherine herself took charge of authoring the version of the festivities presented to Philip II of Spain. In a July 6 letter, she profusely thanked her son-in-law for allowing Elisabeth to come to Bayonne and further assured him that her reception was evidence of the “will and zeal that we have for our religion.”80 The letter’s highly idiosyncratic spelling and grammar bolster the impression that this was a personal missive issued directly from the hand of the Florentine queen without the intervention of secretaries. Her personal authority as organizer of the summit and its festivities guarantees the interpretation given to Philip. Through this document, in other words, Catherine rhetorically links her actions at Bayonne to her own deep desire and “zeal” to join Philip in defending the Catholic faith.
She projected a different version of events, however, to other audiences. On the same day that she wrote her letter to Philip, Catherine also wrote to François de Montmorency, Marshal of France and governor of Paris and Ile de France. In this document, she attested: “During our interview we spoke of nothing but caresses, festivities, and good feasting, and in general terms of our mutual desire to continue the friendship between their Majesties and to conserve peace between their subjects, also in truth the chief reason and occasion for the interview was simply to have this consolation of seeing the queen my daughter while we were close to the border and not to lose such a chance.”81 Here Catherine understates the political alliance highlighted in her letter to Philip, figuring it as mere “continued friendship” construed in only the most “general terms.” Meanwhile, she buries the summit’s diplomatic goals in an abundance of references to family life and intimate affections. Bayonne was not so much an international event as a family reunion. Its festivities represented so many “caresses,” demonstrations of a mother’s love and joy at seeing her daughter again.
Montmorency, a moderate Catholic and supporter of Catherine’s conciliatory policies toward French Protestants, may have been receptive to this vision of the Bayonne events. More important, this interpretation was suitable for circulation within Montmorency’s Parisian jurisdiction. The idea that the conference was a nothing more than a party for the queen’s daughter would reassure Protestants and supporters of toleration who feared the consequences of a closer alliance with militantly Catholic Spain. The three separate pamphlets on Elisabeth’s reception and entry into Bayonne published in France reinforce this image of the meeting, narrating events as gestures of familial hospitality saturated in motherly love. One pamphlet, for example, depicts Catherine de’ Medici greeting her daughter with “much joy and caresses”: “The aforementioned lady grandly honored the queen her mother, and bowed deeply to kiss her hands, which the queen mother would not allow or stand for, and raising her up kissed her and embraced her, feeling her fondness redoubled, as a mother.”82 Building on ubiquitous portrayals of Catherine de’ Medici as a maternal figure, the intensely emotional language of this account of her reunion with her daughter leads its readers to see the Bayonne festivities as a personal rather than political meeting. The images of generosity, concord, joy, and affection that abounded in the live ceremony acquired new importance in these textual re-creations of the royal encounter.
The French and Spanish governments both projected an image of personal affection and harmony to their wider European audience.83 In a June 21 letter to Philip, the Duke of Alba explained that he worked to publicize the “good relations” between the two monarchs “such that everyone understood it and no one could doubt it.”84 Philip aided this effort in an August 24 letter to Cardinal Pacheco in which he explained: “The interviews … aimed to satisfy the desires of Catherine and Elisabeth to see each other and to enjoy the affectionate tenderness that must exist and that is ordinarily found between a daughter and a mother.”85 On the French side, Charles wrote to Arnaud du Ferrier, the French ambassador in Venice, that the “pleasures and recreations” given to his sister constituted a lavish display of affection which
will serve to strengthen more and more the perfect friendship already established by this alliance between us and the Catholic king her husband and to conserve and perpetuate the good peace of the neighborliness of our States and subjects which is in truth the chief reason and occasion for which we have sought this interview from one and the other side…. Throughout the entire interview one spoke only of caresses, pleasures, and good feasting and nothing more than the continuation of our mutual friendship in those general terms customarily used between friends who have nothing to demand of one another.86
The uncanny echoes between this letter and Catherine’s missive to Montmorency suggest that they both resulted from a coherent diplomatic strategy devised by the royal family and their advisors. Both documents downplay the conference’s political import in favor of a narrative of familial affection.87
The obvious rhetoric of understatement in Charles’s letter to his ambassador—particularly in phrases such as “nothing more than”—paradoxically awakens the reader to the very possibilities it denies. What might constitute that elusive “more than”? What kind of “demands” are being forsworn? In his instructions to Du Ferrier, Charles anticipated that his account of the Bayonne events would give rise to such speculation: “We mustn’t doubt that there will be many false rumors conceived and produced about it, or suspicions and denials that anyone could have taken the interview lightly.”88 He implies that his ambassador should work to counter suspicious rumors with a reassuring portrait of the Bayonne meeting as a joyous family occasion. This exchange exemplifies the politics of “incertitude” masterfully analyzed by Denis Crouzet as a defining feature of the Valois style of rule.89 The untenable conjunction of utopianism and realism in Catherine de’ Medici’s program of conciliatory measures led observers to presuppose that all public displays of royal intent were designed to deceive or conceal a hidden agenda.90
If France’s diplomatic partners throughout Europe seemed to harbor doubts about the aims of
