And although Henry loved pretty girls, Marguerite was no more to his taste than he was to hers. Her beauty, education, and rank were intimidating. Although passionate, she required a more complex wooing. The groom’s taste ran to more easily available conquests. (Or, as a future scholar would tactfully put it, “Henry needed much affection, openly expressed.”) Having grown up under the highly discriminating influence of the Flying Squadron, Margot had developed into a rarefied species, a hothouse orchid that bloomed only under specific romantic conditions that Henry couldn’t be bothered with. Henry was a quick-roll-in-the-clover kind of guy.
But whatever misgivings the king of Navarre may have had were overruled by Coligny. The admiral was convinced that he would be in a much stronger negotiating position once the marriage took place and the royal family was irrevocably allied to the Huguenot movement. The arrival of Henry and his extensive black-clad entourage buoyed his spirits and served to renew his confidence. He wrote exultantly to Elizabeth I that he believed that, in the aftermath of the ceremony, for which more guests were pouring into the capital every day, he would “be able to get the king [Charles] to agree to anything.”
The only potential stumbling block that remained was the procurement of a papal dispensation, for the bride and groom were related within the prohibited bands of consanguinity. But any hopes Margot may have nurtured of being rescued by Rome were dashed when her brother Charles announced that he intended to go through with the marriage with or without the approval of the pope and set a date of August 18 for the ceremony.
And now it broke upon Marguerite that she was trapped, that she was going to be forced to unite herself permanently to the leader of the Huguenot party, whose members she viewed as heretics and traitors to France, and to take vows she found abhorrent and that could only be broken at the risk of eternal damnation. In her desperation, she made one final bid for deliverance. This beautiful princess, one of the loveliest women in Europe, spent the long sweltering night before her wedding on her knees at the feet of the king and the queen mother begging through anguished tears to be released from so impious a commitment.
Despite her own preference for just such an approach, Catherine remained impervious to her daughter’s sobs. The queen mother’s chambermaid, who witnessed this scene, later testified that Catherine vindictively threatened “to make her [Marguerite] the most wretched lady in the kingdom” if she did not go through with the marriage. Margot’s brother Charles was equally obdurate. The king was very publicly tied to the Navarre alliance. It represented his signature initiative; there was too much at stake to repudiate it. Besides, he wanted it—it enabled the tempting Netherlands campaign, in which Charles still hoped to participate.
And so at last the clock ran out, and it was the afternoon of August 18. In the stifling heat, Marguerite, pale and wan, put on her many glittering diamonds, an impressively jeweled crown, and her appropriately sweeping, ermine-trimmed robe, symbol of royalty, and proceeded woodenly to her fate. There were no more tears. Her pride demanded that she publicly conquer her demeanor, and she succeeded in holding herself rigidly correct throughout the ceremony. Nonetheless she made no secret of her aversion to this alliance. Even the sweating crowds observing the rites at a distance were aware that the princess was being coerced into this union. But the officiating cardinal, who was the bridegroom’s uncle and an enthusiastic supporter of the match, overlooked the bride’s evident distress. Margot and Henry became man and wife.
There followed four full days of brilliant merrymaking celebrating the joyous occasion. Charles loved court amusements and threw himself wholeheartedly into the party planning. This might have been a backhanded attempt to placate Marguerite, who also delighted in balls and fetes, or a way to further legitimize the marriage, as many important Catholics and foreign ambassadors had boycotted the ceremony. But more likely the king just wanted to use the occasion of Margot’s wedding as an excuse to carouse to his heart’s content. His mother encouraged him to give full vent to his creativity, and he so consumed himself with aesthetic details that he had no time for anything else. “So great was the magnificence of the banquets and shows, and the king so earnestly bent to those matters, that he had no leisure… to take his natural sleep,” a Protestant eyewitness later reported.
In honor of the admiral, the wedding feast and formal ball immediately following the awkward services at Notre-Dame had a seafaring theme, with a company of mermaids and dolphins and other decorative ocean life presided over by Neptune; this affair went on so long that the entire court overslept until the late hours of the afternoon and nearly missed the opening banquet preceding the next day’s soiree.
On the third evening, the king hosted an elaborate ballet staged in the great hall of the Louvre, which had been decorated as “a garden, filled with greens and all sorts of flowers, arched over with an azure heaven where shone a huge wheel of zodiac, seven planets, and a multitude of tiny stars, all gleaming with artificial brilliance.” This was intended to represent heaven. A little farther down was a man-made river offering passage to another chamber that had been designated as hell. This room was not nearly so nicely adorned and was moreover populated by annoying fiends costumed with horns and tails, who chattered constantly. As good Catholics, Charles and his brothers, Henri and François, dressed in armor, rigorously guarded the entrance to heaven. Henry of Navarre and his party were initially consigned to hell, a none-too-subtle reminder of the court’s aversion to their religious affiliation, and barred passage to the garden, although Charles eventually relented and the groom and his men were allowed to join the rest of the party. This elaborate morality play was succeeded the next day by a grand tournament followed by yet another raucous ball that lasted into the early hours of the morning.
The whirling nights of dancing and feasting and frolicking did not bring the newly married couple closer together. Rather, the bride and groom seem to have used the extended revelry as an excuse to stay away from each other. The sometimes overly harsh judgments children form in adolescence frequently have an obstinate way of persisting into adulthood, and these two evidently took one look at each other and decided that neither had improved much since they had last met at thirteen. They shared common rooms and even the same bed, but according to Marguerite’s later testimony they did not at this time consummate the marriage. And anyway, when they did retire to their quarters, they were rarely alone—Henry generally had his closest advisers with him. His bedroom was one of the few places at court where the Huguenots could huddle in private and discuss their plans, and even then they spoke in whispers for fear of Catholic spies. Nor was the king of Navarre reliant upon his queen for sex; Catherine’s court was full of sex. “So great is the familiarity of men and the women of the queen mother’s train, as… may seem incredible and be thought of all honest persons a matter not very convenient for preservation of noble young ladies’ chastity,” the same Protestant witness observed drily.
But all the hilarity and the drinking and the riotous late hours and the indiscriminate flirting and lovemaking that followed the ceremony distracted the court, and particularly the king, from another, much darker purpose. For Catherine, along with her favorite son, Henri, had come up with a bold scheme to dispose of their common enemy Coligny once and for all, and the commotion surrounding the nuptial festivities served this pair well. The queen mother had only been waiting for the marriage to be solemnized before launching the attack. On the morning of Friday, August 22, just four days after Margot’s wedding, she struck.
THE PLAN WAS REASONABLY straightforward. Hire a sniper to kill the admiral. Have the assassin hide somewhere close to where the target was sure to pass, and then, when the Huguenots least expected it, have him shoot Coligny from this strategic position. The great advantage of this method was that it exactly replicated the manner in which the previous duke of Guise had been murdered all those years ago. The motive for the crime would therefore appear to be personal rather than political. As a result, susp
icion would fall immediately upon the present duke of Guise, who had already very publicly vowed to punish the admiral for his father’s death and who was conveniently in town for the wedding, and not on Catherine and Henri, the true perpetrators.
The queen mother was aware that Charles was likely to be enraged by Coligny’s death and might be intent on bringing all the culprits, including the aristocratic masterminds behind the attack, not just the lowly paid killer himself, to justice. Consequently it was very, very important to have a highly placed fall guy to take the blame. Catherine was no longer regent; Charles had been declared of age long before. To so openly flout his wishes and authority in this manner constituted treason, and the punishment for treason was death by all sorts of profoundly uncomfortable methods. Obviously, it wouldn’t do at all for the king to find out that his mother and younger brother, working in concert, had deliberately gone behind his back and basically staged a coup d’état by butchering the man he called father. If that happened, he might just find the strength within himself to punish them.
No, it had to look like the Guises had done it. Fortunately for mother and son, the duke of Guise had already badly compromised himself with the king by falling in love with Marguerite, so Charles was already prone to think the worst of him. And neither Catherine nor Henri had any problem giving up the duke; he was as much a nuisance to both of them as was the admiral. In fact, it was part of the beautiful symmetry of their plan that, if they were lucky, they might get rid of both their political rivals—Catholic and Huguenot—with the same well-placed shot.
Of course, the difficulty lay in the logistics of this daring operation, in particular ferreting out an appropriately talented subordinate to execute the project. But as luck would have it, both Catherine and Henri were already personally acquainted with a hit man who met all their requirements. Just after Henri’s signal victory at Moncontour three years earlier, a minor Catholic nobleman, the seigneur de Maurevert, who had been assigned to infiltrate the Huguenot camp as an undercover agent, had suddenly appeared before the queen mother at court claiming to have assassinated Coligny’s second in command. He had meant to kill the admiral, but the opportunity had not presented itself, so he had settled instead for Coligny’s first officer.
Upon confirmation of this intelligence, Catherine had shared the happy news with Charles, who had written specifically to Henri to recognize Maurevert’s achievement. Henri, in his capacity as lieutenant-general, had called Maurevert in, praised him for his service to king and country, and dubbed him an honorary member of the Order of Saint-Michel. Even better, the Guises had been so impressed by Maurevert’s initiative that they had demonstrated their gratitude by further rewarding the helpful assassin with the gift of a priory located in their home duchy of Lorraine, so Maurevert was now very publicly associated with the family. Catherine and Henri could not have hoped to secure the services of a candidate better fitted to the task at hand; even if he were caught, everyone would naturally assume that he had been employed by the Guises!
The prospective killer having been sounded out in advance and found willing, it became only a matter of finding an appropriate venue for the stakeout. There being very few bushes in Paris to hide behind, it was decided instead to install the gunslinger in an official court residence used frequently by the Guises (a nice touch) located on the main thoroughfare near the Louvre. Coligny, who was ensconced in apartments a short distance from the palace, was almost certain to use this route on his way to and from court.
And that is exactly what happened. On the morning of Friday, August 22, with the wedding festivities for the most part over, Coligny attended a meeting of the royal council. The conclave adjourned around noon, and the admiral, accompanied by a large number of his Huguenot compatriots, decided to go home for lunch. The whole group walked out of the Louvre and took the main boulevard, the admiral continuing to work by reading letters as he strolled along. The sharpshooter could see them approaching from his hiding place in the adjacent building. He went to the window, took aim with his long-barreled harquebus (the Renaissance equivalent of a shotgun), and fired.
Just at the moment he squeezed the trigger, one of those peculiar accidents of history occurred. The admiral, who was used to tromping around in his riding boots, had had to wear his fancy official court shoes to the council meeting. He’d been in them all morning: they pinched, they were difficult to walk in, and he’d had enough of them. He suddenly put down his letter and bent over to take them off. As a result, the assassin’s bullet, intended to be a full-body, point-blank frontal assault, instead winged Coligny in the left hand and the right elbow. “If he had simply walked straight ahead,” confirmed the Venetian ambassador, who was in Paris for the wedding and wrote a detailed report of the shooting and subsequent events to his government, “it would have hit him in the chest and killed him.”
Old soldier that he was, Coligny concentrated less on his injuries and more on securing the immediate territory by pinpointing the source of the attack. “The shot came from the window where the smoke is,” he observed and instructed his entourage to investigate.
A Huguenot messenger ran to tell Charles what had happened. The king happened to be playing tennis at the time with, of all people, the duke of Guise. For once both Protestant and Catholic accounts of Charles’s reaction agree in describing the king as being absolutely outraged by the news. “ ’Sdeath!” the king swore. “Shall I never have a moment’s quiet? Must I have fresh troubles every day?” a Huguenot official recounted. “His face [the king’s] turned pale and he appeared to be shocked in the extreme. Without another word he retired to his rooms,” the Venetian envoy concurred. Although he would later be the subject of venomous attacks charging him with conspiracy, there is nothing at all in his history to indicate that Charles was the sort of person who was adept at dissembling. It is clear that he had no idea that this was coming.
Initially, as Catherine had anticipated, suspicion fell fully upon the Guises. “Everyone supposed it had been done by order of the duke of Guise to avenge his family, because the window from which the shot was fired belonged to his mother’s house, which had purposely been left empty after she had gone to stay in another,” the official Venetian report confirmed. But the ambassador was an experienced politician, and he knew to dig deeper. After consulting various high-ranking officials of his acquaintance, he discovered “that from start to finish the whole thing was the work of the queen [mother]. She conceived it, plotted it, and put it into execution, with no help from anyone but her son the duke of Anjou [Henri].” The ambassador further revealed darkly, “But in a whisper (and it would be best if we kept it to ourselves)… there was no Frenchman they trusted for the job, so they had it done by a Florentine officer named Piero Paolo Tosinghi.” Publicly, however, the court continued to maintain that Maurevert had committed the crime. “But nothing was seen of him and he never turned up as one would have expected.”*
This was exactly what Catherine most feared. If a Venetian diplomat could discover her secret so easily, others would as well. Already Charles had called for a full investigation into the ambush and that very afternoon had taken the unprecedented step of visiting the injured man in his own chambers. Catherine and Henri had hastened to accompany him; they could not take the chance of leaving Coligny alone with the king. They were therefore present when Charles, after first reassuring himself that the patient was in stable condition and that his wounds were being cared for appropriately, declared his firm intention of getting to the bottom of the conspiracy. “You bear the wound, but I the smart [insult],” Charles asserted fiercely. “I swear that I will take such terrible revenge, that it shall never be forgotten.”
Catherine and Henri’s first reaction was to try to cover up by pretending to be as shocked and upset as the king. After all, the admiral had sustained two reasonably serious injuries, including losing a finger. He was not young; there was always the risk of infection. He might yet die from his wounds, in which case the Hugu
enot leadership would be in turmoil and they could reevaluate the situation. Accordingly, Henri curried favor with Charles by immediately ordering that members of the king’s own guard be assigned to Coligny’s bedside to protect him in the event of a second attempt by the vile traitors. He even suggested that those Huguenots lodged at a distance (Paris had been so packed for the marriage celebrations that some of the Protestant wedding guests had been forced to rent rooms in the suburbs) be called in to help assure the wounded man’s safety and peace of mind.
But by the next day, a change of the admiral’s bandages revealed that his wounds were healing and his prognosis optimistic. The royal investigation was only just getting started, and the Guises were still considered the chief suspects. The duke, fearing that the Huguenots might attempt to ambush him in retaliation, drew his many supporters together and took the precaution of stockpiling weapons as a defense against a possible assault.
It is likely that at this point it became clear to Catherine that she had botched the operation and that she had better fix it or she and Henri were going to be found out. Every hour that passed worked against her influence with the king and in favor of Coligny’s. She was going to have to convince Charles that what she and Henri had done was in his service, and she was going to have to do it fast.
She began by breaking the news to him that the duke of Guise, whom Charles, like everyone else, believed to be the culprit and wanted to arrest, might not have been the principal perpetrator after all. So volatile was this piece of information that Catherine did not have the courage to impart it herself but instead sent in her trusted Italian surrogate, the duke of Retz, Charles’s chief attendant. According to Marguerite, who knew nothing about the intrigue at the time but made it her business to find out afterward, the duke of Retz “went to the King in his closet, between the hours of nine and ten [Saturday night], and told him he was come as a faithful servant to discharge his duty, and lay before him the danger in which he stood, if he persisted in his resolution of punishing M. de Guise, as he ought now to be informed that the attempt made upon the Admiral’s life was not set on foot by him alone, but that his (the King’s) brother… and the Queen his mother, had their shares in it.” (Even this was only a partial truth, as the duke of Guise likely had nothing at all to do with the assassination attempt. It defies reason that either Catherine or Henri, who both detested the duke, would have chosen to take him into their confidence.*) This intervention, the duke of Retz continued, had been initiated only with the king’s best interests in mind, as “the Admiral must be ever considered as dangerous to the State, and whatever show he might make of affection for his Majesty’s person, and zeal for his service in Flanders, they must be considered as mere pretences, which he used to cover his real design of reducing the kingdom to a state of confusion.”
The Rival Queens Page 16