IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO overstate the degree of Huguenot paranoia and mistrust that were engendered by Catherine’s disastrous meeting with the duke of Alva. Pointedly excluded from the negotiation, the Protestants were reduced to relying on spies and innuendo for intelligence. The information collected by these methods was frustratingly vague, but the complacent attitude of the Spanish in the weeks following the summit indicated that something of import had been decided between the queen mother and her son-in-law and, knowing Philip, that this could only be detrimental to their cause. Rumors of an agreement between the French and the Spanish to exterminate those of the reformed religion abounded and spread quickly through the kingdom.
These fears only escalated when, following the Bayonne meeting, Protestant worshippers in the Netherlands, who were supported in their quest for religious freedom by their Huguenot counterparts in France, rebelled against Spain, whereupon Philip announced his intention of sending a huge military force under the leadership of the duke of Alva to put down the revolt. Because it was difficult to get to the Netherlands from either Spain or Italy (where the duke of Alva was busy recruiting troops) without going through France, Philip asked Catherine to authorize a safe passage for his army so they could expedite the march north. This was all the corroboration the Huguenots needed of a conspiracy against them. To them, it was obvious that Philip’s request was just a trick to catch them off guard—that the real Spanish military objective was to invade France and wipe out their movement. Although Catherine denied Philip’s petition, she unfortunately also hired a contingent of six thousand Swiss mercenaries to supplement the royal guard. Even more disturbingly, she restored the Guises, and in particular the cardinal of Lorraine, the head of the Catholic party, to favor. The Protestants saw this as confirmation of a coordinated scheme against them, and so they, too, began plotting and mobilizing for war as a defensive measure.
Catherine’s recall of the cardinal of Lorraine to court is often cited as evidence of the queen mother’s sophisticated Machiavellian strategy, the deliberate playing off of one political faction against the other as a way of securing her own position, but in fact it was nothing of the kind. Catherine did not want to restore her old enemy to power, but she had no choice. She was desperate. The duke of Alva’s army scared her as much as it did the Huguenots. She couldn’t be sure Philip wasn’t intending to use it against her. While the Spanish soldiers—all sixteen thousand of them—would not be marching through France, they would be passing right along its eastern border, and of course there would be the enormous temptation, so long as they were in the vicinity anyway, to stray over into French territory and take what they could get. That’s why she’d hired the pike-wielding Swiss mercenaries, recognized as the fiercest warriors in Europe—not to use them against the Huguenots but as protection against the Spanish.
Problem was, she couldn’t pay them. The kingdom was so impoverished as a result of the Grand Tour and the previous war that not even Catherine’s Italian bankers would advance her another écu. There was only one entity in Europe wealthy enough to finance the military expenses of a kingdom the size of France: the Church. And there was only one individual in the realm with the authority to marshal those funds together quickly: the cardinal of Lorraine. “Her majesty knows that no one is better fitted to find means of raising money and that no one has more credit in the city of Paris,” the envoy from Venice wrote of the cardinal of Lorraine. “For this reason he was recalled and entrusted with the burden of affairs.”
So Catherine gritted her teeth, put a smile on her face, and invited her old adversary the cardinal, along with his bank balance, back to his former position of power on the royal council. With him came his tall, golden-haired, exceedingly handsome eighteen-year-old nephew Henri, the new duke of Guise.
Marguerite hadn’t seen Henri in almost three years, not since she had acted opposite him in the opening ceremonies of the Grand Tour. If he had been impressive at fifteen, he was now downright irresistible. A soldier like his father, he had just returned from fighting the Turks in Vienna. He excelled at combat, and his reputation for athleticism preceded him to court. It was alleged that, to prepare himself for future skirmishes, he had once plunged into a river and swum across to the opposite bank—while wearing his chain mail.
His effect on the women of the court was electric. In an atmosphere that prized beauty and bearing above all, this Adonis—with his dangerous good looks, six-foot frame, and lordly manner—stood out. Nor was he impervious to female attention. On the contrary, he reveled in it. He was aware of his powers of attraction; when it came to romance, he confessed himself a “tyrant.” Seduction, like other competitions, was a sport at which he was wildly successful, either “by love or by force.”
It was inevitable that he and Marguerite would be drawn to each other. Even at fifteen, Catherine’s youngest daughter was rapidly emerging as the acknowledged belle of the court. Her figure was filling out. Her grace on the dance floor was conspicuous. She was beginning to develop the sense of chic that would propel her to the upper echelons of fashionable society and maintain her ascendancy there for decades. And to all these natural attributes was added the incomparable advantage of pedigree: as a member of the royal family Margot offered a potential entrée to the throne. There would have had to be something seriously amiss for these two not to fall for each other.
As far as Marguerite could tell, the dashing Henri was a completely appropriate choice as a suitor. After all, her older sister Claude had married into the Guise family. And Henri’s uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, was being very helpful—he had, as requested, underwritten the cost of the imported Swiss troops. More than this, he was also taking an interest in and advising her older brother the duke of Anjou, who had reversed his religious orientation completely in his teens and was now as enthusiastic and intolerant a Catholic as he had once been a Huguenot. This confusing turnaround was no doubt the result of their mother’s insistence on at least outwardly adhering to orthodox practices to ward off accusations of lax piety. “To keep up her [Catherine’s] Interest among the Catholicks, and convince them of her Constancy to their Party, she went frequently with her Children to their publick Assemblies and Processions,” the courtier Michel de Castelnau remembered in his memoirs. “This won the Hearts of the Clergy and Nobility as well as the People, and reduced the Huguenots almost to a State of Despair, especially when they saw the Cardinal de Lorrain gain Ground at court.” The prince of Condé issued a statement that “the reason why the King’s subjects cannot live in peace and liberty of conscience as he wants them to do, is the friendship between the Duke of Anjou and the Cardinal of Lorraine.”
In the fall of 1567, convinced that it was only a matter of time before Spain and the French Catholics struck in concert, the Huguenots took the initiative and launched a surprise raid on the royal family. Their goal was to capture Charles IX and separate him from his counselors, particularly his mother and the cardinal of Lorraine. The operation was planned for September 28, but the intrigue was betrayed to the court on the twenty-fifth. The royal family was at Meaux, about thirty-four miles east of Paris. At midnight on the twenty-fifth, Catherine sent urgently for the Swiss mercenaries, who arrived early the next morning. It was decided after some discussion to make a run for the capital. The court left in the dead of night, surrounded by the Swiss. The Huguenot army, taken by surprise, was not yet at full strength and numbered only six hundred or so light cavalry. They were equipped with neither heavy armor nor artillery and were unable to penetrate the ranks of the Swiss guard, who outnumbered the Protestants by a factor of ten and who marched in formation around their charges and burnished their pikes in tandem like a gigantic porcupine when challenged.
“I freely confess never to have seen a more disreputable canaille [band of hoi polloi],” the Venetian envoy, who made up one of the displaced royal party that memorable evening, reported of these unconventional warriors. “They looked like a lot of porters… but when they ranged
in battle, they seemed to me to be other men. Thrice they turned and faced the enemy; and threw at them whatever came to hand, even bottles; and, lowering their pikes, they ran at them like mad dogs at full speed… yet no one outstripped his fellow; and they did it with such a show of readiness and desire for the fight, that the enemy dared not attack.” After a few pro forma skirmishes, the Huguenot officers prudently decided that this might not, after all, be the best time to kidnap the king and retired from the field. The weary court reached the safety of Paris later that afternoon.
However, so agitated were the Protestants that even after the failure of this first attempt, they did not give up. Led by Coligny and the prince of Condé, the insurgents simply regrouped their forces and formulated a new plan—to cut off the supply routes to the capital and starve Paris. In a series of written communications addressed to Charles IX, the Huguenots justified their rebellion not only on the grounds that the Crown had made a “promise a long time ago to the King of Spain to seize the leaders of the religion and to exterminate all those who profess it” but also because the king’s subjects were suffering from the deplorable effects of excessive debt and taxation “brought about by the greed and avarice of certain strangers, more particularly Italians, because of the credit and influence which they enjoy in this kingdom.” In other words, it was all the queen mother’s fault.
Catherine was livid. After all she had done for them! Where would they be without her and her Edict of Toleration? There were no good, law-abiding Huguenots: they were all “vermin!” The moderate chancellor L’Hôspital, upon whose advice Catherine had relied since she first seized the regency, was demoted on the spot and eventually forced out of the government altogether. In his place, the queen mother, determined to punish her former allies and dispense with the Protestant faction as a political force once and for all, substituted the cardinal of Lorraine and his extreme Catholic followers, and the kingdom found itself once again at war.
The royal army was mobilized, and a battle in November forced Coligny to retreat, but the Huguenots seized other towns across France. The handsome duke of Guise was sent to defend the eastern border, while at court Catherine, who had lost her commanding general in the November skirmish, used the vacancy as an excuse to promote her favorite son, Henri, duke of Anjou, to lieutenant-general, the highest military position in the realm, a preferment that effectively put a sixteen-year-old in charge of all the kingdom’s armed forces.
Even among the most loving and well-adjusted siblings, family dynamics can sometimes be tricky. In the royal household, they were a blood sport. Charles IX was intensely envious of this appointment. As head of the royal army, his younger brother Henri was now in a position to win fame and cover himself with glory. Charles wanted to lead his own troops, but his mother wouldn’t let him because of his poor health and because he was king. Having submitted to her will since childhood, he did not yet have the courage, even at seventeen, to override her decision, although he did marshal the presence of mind to object. “Young as I am, Madame, I feel that I am strong enough to bear my own sword, and if it were not so, would my brother, who is younger than I, be any more suitable?” he cried passionately.
His brother Henri, duke of Anjou, was not without his own demons. Two powerful factors shaped Henri’s personality as he got older: the certainty that his elder brother was ill—and that if Charles died without issue, he, Henri, would be king—and the growing realization that his own sexual preference was in favor of men, perhaps not the optimal orientation for a devout Catholic living in the 1500s.* The psychological conflict engendered by these realities pushed Henri to emotional extremes that in turn influenced his behavior. He was aware of his mother’s partiality and relied upon it; the two were very close. But he was also competitive with his older brother, the king, and jealous of Charles’s superior social and political standing. This made him cunning and frequently cruel.
Although Henri reveled in his new title, being lieutenant-general meant frequent absences from the court, as he was now at least nominally responsible for military affairs and had to physically inspect the troops and help to organize sieges, battles, and the like. It worried Henri to be away too long. Not only did he fear what might be said about him, he was also concerned that Charles would get the upper hand while he was gone. Having learned from his early brush with abduction by the Guises to pay attention to court intrigue, the duke of Anjou was already an experienced political tactitian at the time of his appointment, and he recognized the need for a highly placed covert agent to provide him with reliable intelligence while he was away in the field. The problem was to find someone he could trust who could penetrate the most confidential circles and still not arouse suspicion. It would take him some time to settle on just the right intermediary. In the interim, he had a war to fight.
THE MILITARY CHALLENGE THAT confronted the novice lieutenant-general was daunting. The Huguenots were better prepared and, initially at least, better funded than the royal troops. This was because, as a result of the legalization of the reformed religion through the Edict of Toleration and the aggressive proselytizing of its ministers, the ranks of the Huguenot faithful had swelled over the years, particularly in western and southern France. Although Paris and the peasantry remained stalwartly orthodox, which ensured that the kingdom as a whole remained overwhelmingly Catholic, the Huguenots could now claim majorities in such important regional cities as La Rochelle and Orléans as well as pockets of control in Gascony, where Jeanne d’Albret ruled, and Provence. Even more significant, the movement now included members of the merchant class as well as skilled laborers, who were already organized into guilds. The guilds gave the Protestants the advantage in terms of money and coordination, and they were able to muster an army much more quickly than the Crown, which was so impoverished that even the financial wizardry of the cardinal of Lorraine was sorely tested. (In the end, Catherine had to fall back on the old-fashioned stratagem of pawning the crown jewels to her Italian bankers.)
The Huguenots also had the upper hand in terms of military leadership. Admiral Coligny was without question the most experienced and respected cavalry commander in the kingdom, and he and the prince of Condé made good use of their contacts abroad among other sympathetic Protestant countries, such as England, Germany, and the Netherlands, to round up additional support. Within three months of sixteen-year-old Henri’s ascension to his post, he found himself facing a massive Huguenot army of some thirty thousand soldiers, including a significant contingent of German mercenaries who rivaled their pike-wielding Swiss counterparts in their reputation for fierceness.
Luckily for him, his mother was paying attention. Unnerved by the size and strength of the Protestant battalions and concerned that, for all her fond pride and faith in the abilities of her second son, he might not yet be quite up to the job she had so confidently assigned him, in March 1568, Catherine hastily intervened and arranged a peace. The Spanish ambassador threw up his hands and accused the queen mother of duplicity, upbraiding her for “really wanting what she said she didn’t want,” but in this case he was wrong. Fed up with their demands and ingratitude, Catherine wanted the Huguenots defeated and their leadership annihilated as much as the king of Spain did—probably more, as she took their betrayal as a personal insult. She just wanted better odds. The queen mother remembered how conveniently the duke of Guise had once been dispatched by an assassin’s bullet and how much easier it had been for her after his demise. So she attempted to replicate this scenario by appearing to agree to a peace and even acceding to some of the Protestant demands. This in turn induced the Huguenot army to disperse, which was her real goal. Once the enemy troops were scattered and her son no longer had to face the uncertain prospect of a pitched battle, she surreptitiously put out a contract on the lives of the admiral, the prince of Condé, and as many of their supporters and family members as could be gunned down without too much trouble.
The problem with a conspiracy of this nature is that success is m
ore or less predicated on absolute secrecy, and of course absolute secrecy is difficult to achieve when everybody is spying on everybody else. The Huguenots were informed of Catherine’s plot so long in advance that they even had time to work out a fancy code phrase to warn the potential targets that the assassination attempts were about to be set in motion. And so, on August 23, 1568, when a messenger delivered a letter to the prince of Condé, who was staying in Noyers, about 150 miles southeast of Paris, that included the obscure but otherwise innocuous sentence “The stag is in the net, the hunt is ready,” the prince understood that he did not have a moment to waste. Without another word, he picked up his family and all the other Protestants in the vicinity, and together they began a race across France to the safety of La Rochelle, a securely fortified city already under Huguenot dominion some three hundred miles away on the western coast of the kingdom. At the same time, the warning was delivered to Admiral Coligny and Jeanne d’Albret, and they, too, with all their families, servants, and supporters, dropped what they were doing and made a mad dash for the same stronghold. The Huguenot leadership was followed by the Huguenot rank and file; the Huguenot rank and file were followed by as many of the recently dispersed Huguenot troops as could be mustered at such short notice; and by year’s end the Protestant army that had been disbanded by Catherine’s sham truce was back at half strength. With some seventeen thousand Huguenot men-at-arms ready for action, the kingdom was once again at war, and a head-on battle between the Protestant and royalist combatants was inevitable.
The Rival Queens Page 11