A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [37]
Bohemian artists scorned monogamy, and the aristocracy agreed with them. To the ladies in the Nérac court of Marguerite of Angoulême, queen of the independent medieval kingdom of Navarre and the sister of France’s King Francis I, extramarital sex was considered almost obligatory. Those wives in the noblesse d’épée who remained faithful to their husbands were mocked by the others. To abstain from the pleasures of adultery was almost a breach of etiquette, like failing to curtsy before royalty. Some of Marguerite’s remarks at the baths of Cauterets have survived. At a time when “love” was a synonym for casual sex, one young madame la vicomtesse asked her, “You mean to say, then, that all is lawful to those who love, provided no one knows?” The reply was, “Yes, in truth, it is only fools who are found out.” Marguerite never mentioned any intrigue of her own. As a patron of humanists and an author in her own right, she was one of the outstanding figures of the French Renaissance, and was far too shrewd to risk weakening her influence. Besides, women who dropped names were not invited back to Nérac; they had compromised their lovers, thereby eliminating them as candidates for future dalliance. However, according to Seigneur de Brantôme’s Les vies des dames galantes, Marguerite did advise the young comtesses and marquesas around her to take their marriage vows lightly: “Unhappy the lady who does not preserve the treasure which does her so much honor when well kept, and so much dishonor when she continues to keep it.” Rabelais, enchanted, set aside his misogyny and dedicated Gargantua to her.
By the time they had mastered the sophisticated techniques of seduction, mature lords and ladies were unafflicted by pangs of conscience. However, their youthful married children did not lightly break a solemn, unambiguous commandment, even though many a petit seigneur must have been aware of his parents’ intrigues. The first lapses of the youthful, once one of them had been attracted to a third party, were made easier by the elaborate embroidery of romantic love, now popular. Aware that infidelity was sinful, young men and women who were married, but not to one another, forswore sex. Sublimated courtship followed. The infatuated couple exchanged gifts, lays, madrigals, sonnets, odes, billets-doux, meaningful glances, and met, their hearts pounding, in secluded trysts. Their platonic fiction was encouraged by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, the arbiter of aristocratic manners during the Renaissance. Castiglione assured them that although they aroused one another’s passions, they could remain just friends, scrupulously chaste. Of course, they couldn’t. Il cortegiano was a fraudulent work, its author a civilized pied piper. The period was not one of restraint; boys were sexually aggressive, and girls liked them so. Both wrote poetry, but their object was mutual possession; in the end he always settled in between her thighs.
LUBRICITY FLOURISHED in all its various forms. “Sodomy was frequent,” a chronicler observes; “prostitution was general, and adultery was almost universal.” Contemporary records suggest that extramarital sex was most flagrant in France. Although wives were committing a capital offense, “illicit love affairs,” a historian writes, “were part of the normal life of French women of good standing.” Yet it appears to have been no different in England, where, historian James Froude later wrote, “private life was infected with impurity to which the licentiousness of the Catholic clergy appeared like innocence”—which, as we shall see, was saying a great deal. “There reigned abundantly,” Raphael Holinshed noted in his chronicle, “the filthie sin of lechery and fornication, with abominable adulteries, speciallie in the king.”
Holinshed probably had Edward VI in mind, but a number of other