Margaret of Parma, the governor of the greater Netherlands from 1559 to 1567, was (like the Puritan Anne Hutchinson in chapter two) a rare woman in this all-too-patriarchal history of the Lattin family. As Hutchinson was to the American colonist Richard Lettin, Margaret reigns as the historical character who could have crossed paths with the multi-generational family of Jean Lettin I, II and III.
Margaret was the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. That makes her the older half-sister of Philip II, the king whose Spanish Inquisition henchmen would chase Jean Lettin III from his Flemish homeland.
Margaret was born in Flanders in the summer of 1522, nine months after the young Holy Roman Emperor had his way with a younger servant girl at a chateau near the French border. Philip, her half-brother, was born five years later to a young woman in a very different sort of family. In those intervening years, Charles had secured a key alliance by marrying Isabella of Portugal, the granddaughter of the Queen Isabella who sponsored Christopher Columbus’ journey to the New World. The younger Isabella’s marriage to Charles made her both the Queen of Spain and the Holy Roman Empress, and put Philip in line for the Spanish throne — setting the stage for the invasion that would force my ancestors to flee Flanders in the 1560s.
Margaret and Philip’s father, Charles, had been born in Ghent in 1500. His Flemish birth made Charles V a relatively popular monarch to rule over the Burgundian Netherlands. He reigned as Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556, and always looked kindly upon his inherited and otherwise acquired dominions across the Low Countries. Early in his tenure, he respected the pre-existing charters and agreements that gave many of these cities and provinces an extraordinary degree of political autonomy. At least for a time, he found a way to meld the centralized and unified administration of the Spanish empire with the ramshackle political system in the seventeen provinces of the greater Netherlands.
Charles had vast powers as the King of Spain, Germany and Italy, Archduke of Austria, Lord of the Netherlands and Duke of Burgundy. The royals of medieval and Renaissance Europe collected these titles in order to secure vast territories across Europe. They continued their lineage by thinking ahead, always having heirs to marry off to the sons and daughters of the other royal houses of Europe.
Parental pride or affection had nothing to do with Charles’ decision to claim the illegitimate Margaret as his own child. Minor houses were so eager to marry into such great dynasties as the House of Hapsburg that the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor could be of value even if her mother was a mere servant girl. Charles knew he would someday need his bastard daughter to cement a future alliance.
Margaret was snatched at birth from her mother’s womb, taken from that chateau on the French border and sent to Malines, where she was raised for eight years in the home of a trusted royal associate. This is the exact time, in the 1520s and 1530s, when Jean Lattin I was passing on his post at the Grand Counsel de Malines to his son, Jean Lettin II. So there’s a real possibility that Margaret and the Lettins may have crossed paths.
Margaret was raised with no awareness of her birth mother, the servant girl Jeanne van der Gheynst, who’d been compensated for her lost child with a royal pension and married off to a minor Flemish lord, allowing her instant access into the Burgundian aristocracy. Charles didn’t even meet Margaret until she was eight years old, when Margaret left Malines and was was sent off to Italy to be educated and married as a young teen bride to Alessandro de’Medici. This union enabled Charles, the Hapsburg king, to strengthen his ties to that great Italian lineage.
In some ways, Margaret and Alessandro seemed destined to marry. Alessandro was rumored to have been the illegitimate son of Giulio de’ Medici, who would later become Pope Clement VII. Alessandro was the child of a union between the future pope and a Moorish slave, Simonetta da Collevecchio. The pontiff would later claim that Alessandro was the child of his brother, acknowledging him as a nephew, albeit an illegitimate one.
But the marriage between the illegitimate children of the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor was brief and ill-fated. Alessandro, the first duke of Florence and one of Michangelo’s great benefactors, was infamous for using his power to seduce the leading ladies of that great Italian city. He was assassinated by a cousin who lured him away from his bodyguards by setting up a sexual liaison as a trap. While he was not a popular ruler, some historians cite the Medici prince’s African ancestry to claim him as the first black head of state in the modern Western world.
Margaret was only thirteen years old when she was married off to twenty-five-year-old Alessandro. They had no children, and it’s unclear if the marriage was even consummated. For Margaret was just fourteen when Alessandro was assassinated a year after the wedding, giving her a very brief reign as the duchess consort of Florence.
Alessandro’s murder turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Holy Roman Emperor, allowing Charles to use his bastard daughter to forge another papal alliance.
Margaret’s second marriage was to Ottavio Farnese, the grandson of Pope Pius III, the pontiff who succeeded Clement VII. The young widow was only fifteen years old when she married a second time. Ottavio was fourteen and the soon-to-be Duke of Parma. That Northern Italian town is remembered more for its hard, granular cheese than as the home base of Margaret of Parma, the woman who would later rule over the Burgundian Netherlands during eight of the province’s most turbulent years.
This marriage was longer, but not happier.
Margaret of Parma — a stout, handsome woman — was more interested in hunting than staying home to decide what tapestries to hang in her castles. Margaret seemed to quietly prefer the company of women. She and Ottavio often lived in separate fiefdoms. Their holdings stretched from the Italian alps to the Flemish lowlands, allowing them to live a continent apart for much of their lives.
“If she had her druthers, I think she would have been with a woman,” said historian Charlie Steen, the author of Margaret of Parma: A Life.” “When she was in Italy, she clearly despised her husband for more than just his gaucheness.”
Margaret and Ottavio had at least one sexual coupling, a union that produced two sons.
Margaret was twenty-two years old when she gave birth to the twins, the only children she would ever conceive. That made her the same age Charles V had been when she was born to her mother, the lowly Flemish servant.
In November of 1545, on the anniversary of the papal coronation of Alessandro Farnese, also know as Pope Paul III, Margaret and Octavio presented the twins to their pontifical great grandfather and announced they would be named Alexander and Charles. The seventy-seven-year old pope rejoiced at this auspicious sign, which seemed a divine confirmation that his legacy would continue well into the next century.
God and the Holy Roman Emperor had other plans.
One of the twins, Charles, died just before his fourth birthday. Six years later, Margaret was forced to give up her remaining son, Alexander, as part of a deal her father was putting together to transfer his Spanish domain to his son, Philip, and forge an alliance with England. Philip would be named King of Spain and married off to Mary Tudor, the Queen of England. She would become known as “Bloody Mary” for her campaign to crush the Protestant Reformation launched by her father, Henry VIII.
Margaret would return to her native Flanders to serve as her half-brother’s regent and governor of the Burgundian Netherlands. Young Alexander would be sent to Madrid to be raised with Philip’s family, and to serve as a kind of hostage to keep his parents, Margaret and Octavio, under control.
Charles V was using his son and grandson as pawns in his power game, just as he’d used Margaret to seal his Italian alliances. Ten-year-old Alexander was sent off to Spain just as eight-year-old Margaret had been shipped to Italy. Nearly three decades later, an older, wiser and childless Margaret was returning to Flanders just as a Calvinist insurrection was gathering force.
In 1559, Margaret installed herself in Coudenburg Palace, which stood outside Brussels as the crowning symbol of the Dukes of Burgundy. She was determined to establish a lavish court as a sign of her success, which was both extraordinary and always tainted by her mother’s lowly roots. She commissioned art, tapestries and stained glass from some of the finest artists in the land.
But Margaret would always be half servant, half sovereign. Her dismay about the Protestant insurrection in the Low Countries is expressed in a letter she wrote to one of the Flemish noblemen in her court.
“The sectarians are not content only to spoil and infect, having their own way, but they must go on to corrupt and despoil others, traveling in groups of great number from place to place to spread their errors, showing that they intend to infect and contaminate all, leaving nothing exempt from the contagion of heresy, tumult and sedition…Still more outrageous and intolerable are the sacrileges, abominations and execrable deeds of these perverse heretics about which I have been alerted over the past few days…They entered a convent and flung to the ground all the images, altars, and sacrament vessels, even casting down the bread…along with holy oil, the baptismal font, church ornaments, and all sacred things.”
Nevertheless, Margaret would be removed from power by her reigning half-brother, who was convinced she was not ruthless enough to respond to the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566. She’d live out the rest of her life in Italy, surviving as a footnote in the Wars of Religion and a speculative ally to Jean Lettin II.
Margaret of Parma’s biographer told me that the Lettin family — at least until Jean III — must have been extremely loyal to the Catholic powers-that-be in Flanders for most of the sixteenth century. “If your loyalty was good and the regent liked you, you become your office,” said Charlie Steen. “The proof is that you can pass your post onto your son. It’s hard to break that — traditional is everything in archaic politics.”
Thus, it is noteworthy that Jean III did not get the position, and that he fled to England. “One of the prime reasons to flee,” Steen said, “was if you were accused of being a Calvinist.”
Steen, a professor of European history at the University of New Mexico, urged me not to make too much of the fact that Jean II became a priest when he retired as the registrar at the Grand Council. “It may have had nothing to do with faith,” he said in a phone interview. “Joining the church then was like joining a huge corporation today. It was a kind of retirement plan, like moving into the old folks’ home.”
At the same time, Steen said, it was entirely possible that “Jean II could have been left behind as a spy” for forces loyal to King Philip and the papists.