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Historical person
1476–1531
Louise was widowed young after her marriage to Charles of Angoulême and devoted herself to advancing her children, Francis and Marguerite. When Francis became king in 1515, she remained a major political adviser and served as regent during his campaigns and captivity.
Her diplomacy culminated in the 1529 Peace of Cambrai negotiated with Margaret of Austria. She is central to fiction about the succession after Louis XII, the court of Francis I and the political education of Marguerite de Navarre, but should not be reduced to the conventional role of an overbearing royal mother.
In Rozsa Gaston’s The Queen’s Maid, the ambitions of Louise of Savoy and her son Francis, the conduct of Anne’s sister Mary and the sudden death of Louis transform the court around her. Rozsa Gaston’s Marguerite and Gaston places Louise of Savoy within a narrative shaped by court politics and dynastic power, military command and battlefield decision-making, and family, marriage and personal loyalty.
Series
The Anne Boleyn Chronicles reconstruct Anne Boleyn’s formative continental years before her emergence at the English court. Beginning in 1513 in Margaret of Austria’s household at Mechelen, the sequence follows Anne through the courts of Louis XII, Claude of France and Francis I, where language, ceremony, patronage and…
All books in this series
Standalone books
