A few weeks later, in January of 1572, the duke of Guise, intent on seeking justice either in the form of a private duel with Coligny or, failing that satisfaction, a court of law, entered the capital accompanied by an entourage of five hundred soldiers. Although he eventually backed down, this show of force delighted the city’s Catholic majority, with whom the handsome duke (in contrast to Charles and Catherine) was immensely popular. Emboldened, a celebrated priest gave a rousing sermon at Notre-Dame that Easter, during which he proclaimed that “if the king ordered the Admiral killed, it would be wicked not to kill him.”
But Catherine could not afford to have the admiral killed—at least not yet—because if she did so she knew she would forfeit her much-desired goal of wedding Henry of Navarre to Marguerite. Jeanne d’Albret would never agree to the alliance if Coligny was assassinated or even removed from power. The Huguenots would have gone right back to Elizabeth I, and that would have been the end of poor little François’s chances. As it was, it had taken the queen mother nearly a year to coax Jeanne to court to discuss the matter. The queen of Navarre finally gave in and came to Blois in February 1572. She brought her thirteen-year-old daughter with her, but, significantly, left her son behind; she was still highly suspicious of Catherine’s motives and wished to interview her prospective daughter-in-law before approving the final terms of the marriage.
If Jeanne was hoping to convince Marguerite to convert, or even have a genuine conversation with her, she was destined to be disappointed. Margot was rigidly correct throughout the course of her visit, having no doubt been threatened if her behavior or attitude was found to be lacking. The queen of Navarre wrote a series of letters home to her son chronicling the negotiations for the marriage that evidence her ever-increasing frustration with the royal family’s obvious dissembling. “Madame [Marguerite] has paid me great honor… assuring me that she favors your suit,” Jeanne wrote at first. “Given her influence with the King and her mother… if she embraces the Religion, we can count ourselves the luckiest [persons] in the world, and not only our family but the whole kingdom of France. But if, with her caution and judgment, she is determined to stick stubbornly to her religion—as I am told—I fear this marriage will be the ruin… of our friends and domains, and such an aid to the Papists… that we and all the churches of France will be destroyed.”
Within a few short weeks this less-than-optimistic attitude had descended into outright gloom: “I am being obliged to negotiate quite contrary to my hopes—and to their promises,” Jeanne wrote grimly. “I am not free to talk with either the King or Madame, only with the Queen Mother, who goads me… Monsieur [Henri] tries to get around me in private with a mixture of mockery and deceit; you know how he is. As for Madame [Marguerite], I only see her in the Queen’s quarters, whence she never stirs except at hours impossible for me to visit her.”
Then a little later: “My son, since writing this letter, I have told Madame the contents of yours to her… she replied that when these negotiations began we well knew that she was devout in her religion. I told her that those who made the first overtures to us represented the matter very differently, giving the impression that religion would be no problem as she had already shown some inclination toward ours, and that, had this not been so, I would not have proceeded thus far… I think she says what she is told to say. I also believe that what we were told—about her alleged inclination to our religion—was a trap for us… Last evening I asked whether she had a message for you. At first she said nothing, then, when I pressed her, admitted, ‘I can send nothing without permission.’ ” Her prospective mother-in-law was correct in assuming that Marguerite had been rigorously coached; months before Jeanne’s visit, a Florentine envoy reported that “the Queen of Navarre wishes to examine and tempt Madame… but Her Highness [Margot], already warned of the very words that will be used, will answer in a certain way.”
But Catherine would brook no dissent; she steamrolled over every difficulty and objection and was perfectly willing to use threats to get her way. The queen of Navarre was made to understand that if she did not approve the marriage of her son, Catherine would have Henry declared illegitimate by the pope and written out of the French succession. At the end of March 1572, Jeanne finally bowed to pressure and agreed to the alliance.
The Florentine ambassador recounted the final encounter between Jeanne and Marguerite. The strain on the princess was obvious. There was no going back. Catherine and Jeanne had come to terms. The marriage would take place. Margot knew she had to yield to her family’s will, but she also refused to dissemble. She had to find an honorable way to serve as queen to a Huguenot husband and kingdom and yet save her soul. Her future mother-in-law continued to thrust the knife in deeper by her unrelenting insistence that her son’s fiancée convert. “Two days ago,” the Italian envoy reported, “Navarra [Jeanne] said to [Marguerite] that, since the marriage could from now on be considered a fait accompli, she wished to know whether she would be content to follow the religion of the Prince.”
This was the question Margot most dreaded.* She was conscious that she risked the wrath of both sides by remaining true to herself and that the punishment for failing to give satisfaction to either party would be great. And yet this was a point on which she could not compromise. She had evidently turned the matter over in her mind and come up with, if not a solution to her problem, at least a moral imperative by which to navigate the treacherous road that lay ahead. “Madame replied with great wisdom that if it pleased God she would not fail in obedience to her and the Prince in all reasonable ways, but that even if he were King of the whole world she would never change her religion.”
If Jeanne had been able to see into the future she might perhaps have been grateful for the younger woman’s resolute commitment, despite her deep religious misgivings, to her sovereign duty. But the queen of Navarre was not a fortune-teller. She found Margot’s response unbearable and, according to the diplomat, flew into a passion. “Thereupon [Jeanne] said, ‘The marriage shall not take place.’ Then Madame said she would do as the King wished… So they parted with little satisfaction on either side.” Marguerite clearly loathed her prospective mother-in-law. “Since then, Madame has pretended to be indisposed,” the Italian observed pointedly.
But Jeanne knew when she was beaten and wrote soon after this to both her son and Elizabeth I, announcing that she had resolved to go through with the alliance. Her final words of advice to Henry reflected her understanding of the values of the court to which she was consigning him: “Every enticement will be offered to debauch you, in everything from your appearance to your religion… I know it is their object because they do not conceal it,” she wrote. “This is all I have to say… except this: try to train your hair to stand up and be sure there are no lice in it.”
PLANS FOR THE WEDDING then proceeded in earnest. But for the fact that the groom fell severely ill in April and was unable to travel for two months Marguerite would have been a bride before her nineteenth birthday. Although unintended, the delay worked significantly to the Catholic advantage, for on June 4, while shopping in the unseasonably oppressive heat of an early summer’s day in Paris for her son’s ceremonial apparel and other gifts appropriate for the bridal party, Jeanne d’Albret suddenly collapsed, complaining of an intense pain under her right shoulder. Less than a week later, the queen of Navarre was dead.
An autopsy was conducted, and Jeanne’s Huguenot physicians concluded that she had died a natural death caused by the rupture of an ulcer aggravated by an underlying case of tuberculosis. Later, in the light of subsequent events, Catherine would be accused of murdering the queen of Navarre through the medium of a pair of poisoned gloves provided by an Italian merchant operating in Paris, but this seems unlikely, as an abscess would not have had time to form that quickly. Still, Jeanne’s death was an unqualified boon to the queen mother, as she had promised the Catholic faction that if they supported the alliance she would see to it that Henry converted, and this he w
ould never have done while his mother was still alive. And certainly once she had agreed to the marriage, the queen of Navarre had outlived her usefulness to the royal family and could only cause trouble in the future. There is also the disturbing evidence that Catherine exhibited absolutely no grief at the demise of her former friend. “The Queen of Navarre lies without hope of life… whom the Queen-Mother, the King and all his brothers and sisters have visited and departed without any hope of seeing her again,” reported an English envoy in Paris, so perhaps Catherine had managed to find a subtle way to help this death along after all.
Jeanne’s passing brought only relief to Marguerite, who even decades later behaved as though she had been delivered of a mortal enemy. In her frustration at the royal family’s tactics during the negotiations, the queen of Navarre had lashed out not only at her future daughter-in-law but also at many members of the Catholic constituency at court, including those très chic ladies of the Flying Squadron allied to the Guises. In a letter to Brantôme, Marguerite described the scene at which the royal court paid its last regards to Jeanne’s corpse. “Whilst the Queen of Navarre lay on her deathbed, a circumstance happened of so whimsical a nature that, though not of consequence to merit a place in history, may very well deserve to be related by me to you,” she wrote. “Madame de Nevers [widow of the murdered duke of Guise, remarried to duke of Nevers]… attended by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Madame de Guise, the Princesse de Condé, her sisters and myself to the late Queen of Navarre’s apartments, whither we all went to pay those last duties which her rank and our nearness of blood demanded of us. We found the Queen in bed with her curtains undrawn… after the simple manner of the Huguenots; that is to say, there were no priests, no cross, nor any holy water. We kept ourselves at some distance from the bed, but Madame de Nevers, whom you know the Queen hated more than any woman… approached the bedside, and, to the great astonishment of all present, who well knew the enmity subsisting betwixt them, took the Queen’s hand, with many low curtseys, and kissed it; after which, making another curtsey to the very ground, she retired and rejoined us.”
The profound enmity illustrated by this story between the religions at the very top of French society was magnified a thousand times in the general population, particularly among the overwhelmingly Catholic citizens of Paris. To them, the Crown and Coligny’s single-minded pursuit of the Navarre marriage could only mean that the royal family, in combination with the Huguenots, intended to force a theological solution on the kingdom that in all likelihood would entail the renunciation of their most cherished rites and symbols. Already the king had insisted that a huge cross, which had been erected to commemorate the notorious execution of a Protestant for heresy, be torn down because it was considered offensive by those of the reformed religion. When city officials, responding to an impassioned public outcry against the proposed demolition, refused to comply with the royal command, they were threatened with removal. “You must decide whether to obey me and whether to tear down this pyramid [the cross],” Charles had written summarily to the provost of Paris. “I forbid you to come before me until such time as it has been torn down.”
But the open hostility of the capital city to the marriage had no effect whatever upon either Catherine or the admiral, who, each for separate, conflicting reasons, continued to press for its accomplishment. As the day of the ceremony drew closer, the competition between these two for the king’s soul intensified, until at last it boiled over into a public confrontation. The queen mother had taken advantage of one of Coligny’s brief absences from court to hold a tearful interview with her son (unlike the duke of Alva, Charles was susceptible to Catherine’s tears) in which she had accused him of conspiring with the admiral to wage war in the Netherlands behind her back. The scene was choreographed to elicit maximum guilt: “After all the pains that I had to bring you up, and to preserve your Crown… after having sacrificed myself for you and run a thousand dangers, how could I ever have dreamed that you would reward me thus miserably?” Catherine had wailed, according to a courtier familiar with the episode. “You hide yourself from me, from me who am your mother, in order to take counsel of your enemies; you wrench yourself from my arms, which have guarded you, to lean on the arms of those who once desired to kill you. I know that you hold secret counsels with the Admiral—that you wish to plunge us rashly into war with Spain… and send away also your brother [Henri], who may call himself unhappy in that he hath spent his life to preserve yours.”
Unable to resist his mother, Charles had sworn never to keep anything from her and to obey her unconditionally in the future, a promise he kept until Coligny returned to the court in July. The admiral then promptly returned the favor by taking advantage of one of Catherine’s brief absences from court—the queen mother had been called to the bedside of her daughter Claude, who was seriously ill—to hold a military council to approve French intervention in the Netherlands. Informed by spies that the king was wavering in the admiral’s favor, Catherine was forced to abandon her daughter’s sickroom; she just made it back in time to squelch Coligny’s initiative. Her last-minute intervention infuriated him, and he vowed to accomplish his military objectives with or without approval. Then he lashed out at her in front of Charles and the council. “His Majesty refuses to adventure the war,” he pronounced, staring at her with cold contempt. “God grant that he be not overtaken by another from the which he will have no power to retreat.”
If Catherine had been undecided prior to this outburst whether to dispense with the admiral altogether or simply banish him from court, this brief speech sealed his fate. She understood that he had rejected the council’s recommendation as the last word on the Netherlands intervention and would continue to work privately on Charles until he had his way, and that his influence over her son was very strong. For the first time she recognized that his political authority might overtake hers. If it did, she would be cast aside, and with her would go her adored Henri, whom she knew Charles hated and feared and would like nothing better than to be rid of. For these reasons, then, Coligny had to be eliminated.
But not just yet. First she had a gala wedding reception to host.
9
Queen Margot
It cannot be called a virtue to kill one’s fellow-citizens, betray one’s friends, be without faith, without pity, and without religion, by which methods one may indeed gain an empire, but not glory.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
THE FINAL WEEKS LEADING UP to her marriage must have comprised a particularly exquisite brand of torture for Marguerite. She was forced to smile and pretend to participate as her mother bustled around, organizing the last-minute details of the ceremony. In honor of Margot’s exalted rank as a princess of France, Catherine behaved as though her daughter was about to be united in nuptial bliss to the Holy Roman Emperor rather than to the neophyte overlord of a petty vassal state. Marguerite’s dowry was set at 550,000 livres (which, unfortunately, the Crown did not have readily available, being still pretty much bankrupt from the recent civil wars), and she was to receive from her future husband additional income from his estates in Navarre. To prime the bride’s enthusiasm for the match, which was obviously somewhat lacking, Margot was further showered with jewelry valued at approximately thirty thousand livres, including a magnificent diamond engagement ring. “The Comte de Retz and I are attending to it in such a way that you will see her as honorably provided for as her sisters,” the queen mother clucked complacently of Marguerite’s trousseau. “And with less expense,” she added virtuously, mindful of the drain on the royal treasury.
The arrival of her intended on July 8, 1572, only added to the bride’s desolation. The king of Navarre entered Paris accompanied by an entourage consisting of eight hundred Huguenot followers, all dressed in mourning for Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret; they must have resembled an ominous parade of black beetles infesting the city. In such a polarized environment, reports of the bridegroom’s appearance were naturally skewed dep
ending upon the religious affinity of the observer. To the Protestants, Henry “had the graces of a courtier… women lost their heads over him” (although even his mother admitted he was short, about the size of Marguerite’s younger brother, François, who was routinely described as stunted), while Catholic commentators sounded a slightly different note. The king of Navarre was “crude beyond the pale,” a high-ranking government official involved in the nuptial negotiations despaired flatly.
It is highly probable that, like Marguerite, Henry dreaded the impending ordeal of his marriage. He had not been at court since he was thirteen. He’d spent the previous five years out in the provinces, tramping around in the outdoors and relishing the sort of traditional rural lifestyle that repudiated ornate manners, clothing, and etiquette (to say nothing of hygiene). To add to his discomfort, his mother, who had guided him from the time he was small and whom he had trusted implicitly, had just died, and he was forced to rely upon other advisers, such as Coligny, to reassure him of the usefulness of this alliance.
The Rival Queens Page 15