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For Larry and Lee, with all my love
Dear native land! And you, proud castles! Say
(Where grandsire, father, and three brothers lay,
Who each, in turn, the crown imperial wore),
Me will you own, your daughter whom you bore?
—From “On Marguerite De Valois, Queen of Navarre” by George Buchanan (1506–82)
The lady left alone in power,
The first one in the bed of honor having been extinguished,
For seven years shall be racked with grief,
Then long life in power with great good fortune.
—Prophecy by Nostradamus, reportedly referring to Catherine de’ Medici, published in 1557, two years before the death of her husband
Introduction
Paris, the Church of Notre-Dame, August 18, 1572
DESPITE THE OPPRESSIVE HEAT, A vast crowd had gathered, pushing and sweating their way into the wide plaza in front of the entrance and spilling over into the boulevards leading to the venerable, centuries-old cathedral. The focal point of the spectators’ attention was a long, high platform, recently constructed and ostentatiously hung with cloth of gold, that jutted out incongruously from the western facade of the church. It was on this grand stage that a seminal event would take place, the repercussions of which would be felt all over Europe: the marriage of the French king’s sister Marguerite de Valois, Catholic daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, to her Protestant cousin, Henry de Bourbon, king of Navarre.
A royal wedding was always a sure source of fascination for the Parisian citizenry. Celebrations of high spectacle, these occasions were deliberately fashioned to confer prestige and authority through magnificence, and the mob of onlookers sweltering under the sun that Monday in August were not disappointed. At three o’clock in the afternoon the doors to the Louvre opened, and the king of Navarre’s extensive entourage appeared, beginning the stately procession to the church. The bridegroom wore a doublet and cape of rich yellow satin conspicuously embroidered with diamonds and pearls; he was escorted on either side by the bride’s brothers, the dukes of Anjou and Alençon, whose costumes were, if anything, more elaborate. The duke of Anjou, who was particularly conscious of his position and wardrobe, had requisitioned twenty-three thousand écus from the royal treasury just for the purchase of his bejeweled cap.
But it was to obtain a glimpse of the bride, nineteen-year-old Marguerite (affectionately known by her childhood nickname Margot), that the populace had turned out in such numbers. The French princess was generally acknowledged to be one of the most exquisite women in Europe. The renowned poet Pierre de Ronsard, a contemporary of Margot’s, compared her to Venus; a Neapolitan ambassador rhapsodized that she was “the greatest beauty in the world” and declared that if he had left the kingdom without seeing her, “On my return… if I were asked had I seen France and the Court, [I] could scarcely say I had.” Her biographer and sometime correspondent, the abbé de Brantôme, devoted several pages of a manuscript to her ravishing personal charms, observing finally of her décolletage that “never was seen the like in form and whiteness.” Less flattering but more telling, perhaps, was the opinion of the Spanish grandee, Don John of Austria, illegitimate son of the emperor Charles V. “The beauty of that queen is more divine than human,” he was reported to have remarked after staring at her for some time at an official state reception. “She is made to damn and ruin men rather than to save them.”
But it was not just her glamour that drew the inhabitants of Paris out into the streets. The population, overwhelmingly Catholic themselves, adored the princess, who was generous as well as charming, and felt betrayed by this wedding. It was well known even among the common people that Margot was in love, and had been for years, not with her intended but with Henri, the handsome duke of Guise, and that this dashing young nobleman reciprocated her passion. A marriage between these two would have been a cause for wild celebration in Paris, for the duke of Guise, as the head of the powerful Catholic faction at court, was so venerated throughout the capital that he was treated as a hero, and his prestige exceeded that of the king, Charles IX, himself. But the queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici, had no intention of encouraging the ambitions of the Guise family, whose influence and popularity threatened her government, by granting them so great a prize. Henri had been summarily expelled from court and forced to marry another woman. “If he should ever cast his eyes upon her again I will proclaim him renegade and miscreant and make him bite the ground with a dagger in his heart,” Marguerite’s brother the duke of Anjou had hissed after Henri was safely wedded.
Deplorable enough that Margot had been prevented from marrying the public favorite, but far worse that she was now to be allied to the king of Navarre, leader of the Huguenot party, as the French Protestants were called. The majority of the Parisian populace loathed and feared the Huguenots. Huguenots attacked Catholic churches, destroying precious relics and statues that they claimed were evidence of idolatry; they refused to attend Mass and worked openly to abolish sacred ceremonial processions. Parisians had no doubt that, should the Huguenots succeed in seizing power in France, as it was obvious they were trying to do, the Catholic population would be either forced to convert or suffer annihilation.
But the queen mother had inexplicably insisted upon this marriage, had pushed relentlessly for its consummation for over a year, until at last she had overcome all objections. The king of Navarre and his Huguenot entourage refused to enter the cathedral or partake of the traditional nuptial Mass? Very well; the ceremony would be performed outside the church, on a specially constructed open-air platform. The pope declined to grant a dispensation to allow Margot to marry her heretical cousin? At the last minute, Catherine de’ Medici claimed to have received the necessary permission, and as proof she waved a bit of parchment in the air. Although the union was portrayed publicly as an attempt to heal the wounds of religious conflict, the queen mother’s urgency hinted at other, less altruistic motives. The eighteen-year-old king of Navarre’s principal military adviser and mentor, Gaspard de Coligny, was known to be actively pursuing a marriage between his protégé and Elizabeth I, the Protestant queen of England. Such an alliance was unthinkable for France; it would have given the English a strong foothold on the Continent from which to launch an assault against the western border of the kingdom. Catherine de’ Medici had other plans for Elizabeth I. Coligny was called to court, where he was made the beneficiary of a series of royal favors and privileges, including an outright payment of one hundred thousand livres. He dropped his objections to Margot, and the marriage went forward.
In due course the groom’s procession arrived at the palace of the archbishop, near the cathedral, from which emerged the bride and her entourage, led by her eldest brother, Charles IX. Magnificently attired—“I blazed in diamonds,” Margot remembered—the princess, wearing an ermine-trimmed gown of royal blue silk, complete with a fifteen-foot train carried reverentially by three ladies-in-waiting, joined the wedding party as it made its way to the makeshift stage at Notre-Dame. The bride was very pale. When the cardinal of Bourbon, who officiated that day, asked the princess if she would take Henry of
Navarre as her husband, she refused to answer. After a moment’s hesitation, Charles IX, who was standing behind her, brusquely pushed his sister’s head forward, as though she had nodded. The cardinal took this for an assent and sanctified the union.
The marriage ceremony concluded, the bride and her party went inside the cathedral to hear Mass, as had been stipulated by the nuptial contract. The king of Navarre and his Huguenot entourage remained outside, talking and laughing. An ominous murmur ran through the legion of onlookers, who had heretofore maintained an uncharacteristic silence. Their resentment was palpable.
Five days later Coligny was assassinated, and the streets of Paris ran with blood as the entire Huguenot wedding party was hunted down and slaughtered in one of the most infamous episodes in French history, known today as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. But this horrific mass murder, which claimed more than five thousand martyrs over the course of a week, was no spontaneous bloodletting. Rather, it was the denouement of a carefully constructed plot that utilized the unsuspecting Margot as both victim and bait to lure Coligny and his faction to their doom, an intrigue planned, instigated, and executed by the one individual in France powerful enough to ensure its success: Marguerite’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY MAY arguably be classified as the Age of the Queen. In no other period in European history did a handful of seemingly indomitable women exercise such extensive sovereign power over so wide a dominion for so many years. The best known of these is of course Elizabeth I, monarch of England, the magnificent Virgin Queen, whose astoundingly long-lived and prosperous reign was threatened any number of times, particularly by her far more beautiful and tempestuous cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Theirs is a famous tale of cat and mouse, of intrigue and struggle, commitment and pathos, which has been told and retold by historians and novelists.
But at the very same time, across the Channel, sat another pair of queens of equal importance and influence whose fascinating history rivals that of their more celebrated neighbors to the west. Like Elizabeth and Mary, the saga of defiant, dazzling Marguerite de Valois and her unscrupulous mother, Catherine de’ Medici, is one of passion and power set against a gripping background of espionage and deceit. Catherine, the relentlessly calculating power broker who ruled France almost single-handedly for thirty years; Margot, intelligent and courageous, a free spirit trapped in a loveless marriage, the resilient opponent whom her mother could neither intimidate nor control.
Because they were bound by ties far more profound and intimate than those of Elizabeth and Mary, it is impossible to appreciate the role and character of either woman without the other. Together, their lives spanned one of the most thrilling centuries in history.
Theirs was an age of breathtaking adventure and astonishing events, of vile treachery and valiant swords. It was also an age of extraordinary women—and this is the story of two of them.
PART I
Margot’s Mother, Catherine de’ Medici
1
“The Queen, My Mother”
Fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but she allows the other half or a little less to be governed by us.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
MARGUERITE DE VALOIS WAS BORN on May 14, 1553, at the royal palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, about ten miles northwest of Paris. She was her parents’ sixth surviving child and the youngest of their three daughters. Her father was Henri II, stern ruler of turbulent, profligate, sublime Renaissance France; her mother, his meek, plain, afterthought of a wife, Catherine de’ Medici. Although the king was a fond parent who made a point of spending time with his children, at Margot’s birth Henri was distracted by war with his perennial nemesis, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose vast realm, which included Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and large portions of Italy, dwarfed and surrounded Henri II’s, and so his youngest daughter’s entry into the world was muted. Her mother, an inveterate and enthusiastic letter writer, did not even bother to mention the event in her correspondence.
For the first years of her life, the infant princess lived with her two older sisters, Elizabeth, eight years her senior, and gentle Claude, six at the time of Marguerite’s birth, as well as her exotic ten-year-old future sister-in-law, Mary Stuart, who had recently arrived from Scotland, and all their various nurses and governesses at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Her brothers—the dauphin, Francis (engaged to Mary); followed by Charles and then Henri (also known as the duke of Anjou)—were schooled elsewhere, although they, like the rest of the royal court, visited frequently. The last of the royal offspring, François, duke of Alençon, Marguerite’s younger brother, also spent his infancy and early childhood with the girls at Saint-Germain.*
Life at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was very pleasant for Marguerite and her siblings. The magnificent royal palace was one of her father’s preferred residences—he had been raised there himself as a child—and upon his ascension to the throne, Henri II had undertaken substantial renovations, including the addition of two new wings. There were wonderful gardens, a forest for hunting, and even a tennis court. Some two hundred servants, not counting the kitchen staff, were attached to the royal nursery.
From an early age, Marguerite demonstrated a quick intelligence, a light heart, and a spirited temperament. Her jet-black hair was not in fashion—the royal court prized blond curls above all others—but alone among Catherine de’ Medici’s children, who were known generally for their frail constitutions and unattractive physiques, this youngest princess, with her creamy complexion, joyful good health, and delicate features, stood out.
She certainly seems to have been one of her father’s favorites. Her only written recollection from this happy childhood period was about him. “I was then about four or five years of age,” Marguerite recounted, “when the King, placing me on his knee, entered familiarly into chat with me.” Teasing her, her father asked her which of the two young sons of the nobility playing boisterously in the room with her—one of them, significantly, was the future duke of Guise; the other was the marquis de Beaupréau—she liked best. His small daughter firmly named the marquis. Her father was amused. “The King said, ‘Why so? He is not the handsomest.’ ‘Because he is the best behaved; while the Prince [the duke of Guise] is always making mischief, and will be master over everybody,’ ” little Marguerite explained solemnly.
But of her mother there is no fond memory from childhood, no similar episode of affectionate teasing or warm physical contact or even scolding. The queen of France is as absent from Margot’s life as though she did not exist. Which, given the reality of Catherine de’ Medici’s circumstances at court during the years prior to and immediately following her youngest daughter’s birth, was not far from the truth.
IT IS AN ASTONISHING irony that the woman whose will would dominate the fortunes and government of the mighty realm of France for more than a quarter century began her residence in the kingdom as an insecure foreigner and social pariah.
Catherine de’ Medici arrived on the shores of France in 1533, unloved and disdained, at the age of fourteen. Her mother, a French countess descended from royalty, had died at the heartbreakingly youthful age of seventeen, struck down, it was uncharitably rumored, by the syphilis given to her by her husband, a scion of the powerful Medici family of Florence, who six days later chivalrously followed his wife to the grave with the same ailment.* Luckily for the orphaned Catherine, barely three weeks old, the Medici family held positions of authority elsewhere in Italy. Responsibility for her care and upbringing fell to her uncle the pope, who seems not to have entirely relished his role as adoptive parent. “She comes bearing the calamities of the Greeks!” he is reputed to have moaned when he first saw her.
Poor Catherine’s Job-like existence persisted through childhood, where her fortunes rose and fell with those of her father’s family. When the Medici were in power and controlled both the Vatican and their hometown of Florence, Catherine lived with relatives in opulent splendor a
t their sumptuous Florentine palace. But when the family subsequently fell from favor with a breathtaking rapidity, as occurred when Catherine was eight, she was forced into one dreary convent after another. As opposition to Medici rule grew stronger, violence surged around her, the city was besieged, and the defenseless Catherine became an easy target for enemy wrath. She lived in fear of her life; Florentine citizens openly debated whether she should be driven into a bordello, debauched by the army, or merely shackled naked to the city walls. At the height of the crisis, to protect herself, she cut off all her hair and assumed a nun’s habit. She was eleven years old.
Thrown back on her own resources and keenly aware, even at this early age, that her survival depended upon the goodwill of others, Catherine strove to accumulate allies, hiding her anger and unhappiness behind a mask of excessive docility. She concentrated first on the unsophisticated women who were her only defense against the malice of the outside world and succeeded in ingratiating herself with the members of the convent. One of the nuns charged with caring for Catherine wrote that she was “so gentle and pleasant that the sisters did all they could to ease her sorrows and difficulties.” Catherine was similarly described during these years of girlhood by an Italian courtier as “very obedient.” But underneath her servility ran a deep current of resentment. An envoy sent to the cloister to check up on her observed, “I have never seen anyone of her age so quick to feel the good and the ill that are done her.”
By the time she was twelve, however, Italian politics being what they were, the Medici were back on top, and she was recalled to Rome by yet another cousin who had succeeded to the papacy, Clement VII, who recognized her value as a means of cementing a military or diplomatic alliance through an advantageous marriage. As her parents’ only heir, Catherine had family connections and a claim to Florence that could be exploited by her future husband to yield considerable territory in Italy. It was Clement who arranged for her espousal to Henri, second son of the exuberant if somewhat overweening French king François I.
The Rival Queens Page 1