While Charles was no doubt listening open-mouthed to this surreal confession, the duke of Retz smoothly transitioned to the real objective of the meeting: securing Catherine and Henri’s safety by transforming them from the treasonous plotters they were into unselfish guardians of the king’s person. The duke of Retz, said Marguerite (and she was in a position to know by the time she wrote this), “concluded with observing that the original intention to make away with the Admiral… having been so unfortunate as to fail… and the Huguenots becoming desperate enough to resolve to take up arms, with design to attack, not only M. de Guise, but the Queen his mother and his brother [Henri], supposing them, as well as his Majesty, to have commanded Maurevert to make his attempt, he saw nothing but cause of alarm for his Majesty’s safety.” In other words, the wicked, ungrateful Huguenots were turning on him, just as his mother and brother had predicted they would, and Charles’s life and throne were now at stake.
But of course the duke of Retz was only the warm-up act. While Charles was still struggling to comprehend the enormity of this betrayal, his mother appeared to make her own impassioned plea for survival.
There are no records of this conversation, but it appears that Catherine followed the same guilt-inducing script that she had utilized with such success in the past. She reminded her son how she alone had preserved his throne for him against enormous odds when his older brother Francis had died and he was but a child of ten. How she had for more than a decade sacrificed herself completely to his honor and welfare, working tirelessly to promote his interests. She spoke of the many dangers she had faced for him and how she had never for a moment considered her own gratification, being only consumed with anxiety for his safety and security.
Then she went to work on the Huguenots. Charles thought he understood Coligny, but she, Catherine, knew better. The admiral, she said, was not the heroic character her son took him for. For example, he had cravenly assassinated one of her own household, an extremely loyal and honest attendant, years earlier, while she was still regent. At the time “she had vowed to avenge his death”; the recent assassination attempt was retribution for that crime, “which rendered him [Coligny] deserving of the like treatment.” And now she had it on good authority that the Huguenots meant to rise up and kill the king and all his family in their quest to take over the realm. He must listen to her and follow her counsel or they were all doomed.
Now, Charles was not an imbecile, and he knew that this last bit in particular was ludicrous. Coligny was not part of a grand conspiracy to overthrow and kill the royal family. On the contrary, Coligny was patently the most honorable and trustworthy man among Charles’s acquaintance. “The King had so great a regard for the Admiral… and Teligny [another Huguenot commander], on account of their bravery, being himself a prince of a gallant and noble spirit, and esteeming others in whom he found a similar disposition,” Marguerite explained. But the parameters of the predicament in which the king now found himself precluded compromise. To his horror he realized that in order to behave honorably, stand by his word and his principles, and uphold truth by defending Coligny, he would have to condemn his mother and forever cut himself off from her.
It is testament to just how clearly he saw this choice and how repugnant the implications of his decision were that it took her several hours to break him down. In the past she had only to confront him and he would immediately beg her pardon and promise to follow her advice from then on. In the aftermath of what seems to be a string of inexplicable events, Charles has often been portrayed as psychologically disordered, prone to irrationally violent fits of temper, and this label has stuck with him through the centuries. But it is worth noting that mental illness is not something that can be turned on and off at will and that the king never demonstrated disturbed or destructive behavior when he was in the presence of Coligny.
Far from being insane, it was Charles’s acuity that caused him to react with such hysteria. Otherwise he would not have struggled so with the moral burden—he would have just given in. In the whole of Shakespeare’s brilliant oeuvre no character demonstrated a more heartbreaking tragic flaw than did Charles IX on that wretched night, or one that yielded more shattering repercussions. It was his body as much as his nerve that seems to have betrayed him; never strong physically, the king had been further weakened by a parade of late nights and frivolity. He was exhausted mentally as well as physically, as Catherine well knew. She and Henri and a small coterie of advisers kept hammering at him until the small hours of the morning. Poor Charles was like a political prisoner being relentlessly interrogated in a cell. Catherine had in her hand a list of the principal Huguenots surrounding Coligny. She insisted that the Crown act preemptively against this group.
In the end her son was no match for her. The king could not find the mental or emotional strength to reign without his mother’s approval. In fairness to Charles, even the great Saint Louis, thirteenth-century king of France, had been in his thirties before he dared defy his indomitable mother, Blanche of Castile; Catherine’s son had only just turned twenty-two.* It might have been a different story if Coligny had been in the room, but Coligny was asleep in bed a few blocks away, recuperating from his wounds.
Suddenly, like a man under the wheel, the king broke. “Kill them!” Charles shrieked at his mother and her list. “Kill them all!”
BY HER OWN ADMISSION, Marguerite was kept far away from these nefarious deliberations. The new queen of Navarre was of course aware of the atmosphere of heightened tension at court, but she had no notion of the coming holocaust taking shape in the king’s study. She, like everyone else, believed the assassination attempt on Coligny to have been revenge on the part of the duke of Guise for his father’s death. “I was perfectly ignorant of what was going forward,” Margot affirmed. “I observed every one to be in motion: the Huguenots, driven to despair by the attack upon the Admiral’s life, and the Guises, fearing they should not have justice done them, whispering all they met in the ear.” The bride was, however, only too aware of the untenable position she inhabited by virtue of her marriage. “The Huguenots were suspicious of me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I was married to the King of Navarre, who was a Huguenot. This being the case, no one spoke a syllable of the matter to me,” Margot stated flatly.
But by midnight or soon thereafter, nearly every high-ranking member of the Catholic faction at court, including Marguerite’s sister Claude (in town for the wedding), was fully cognizant that the king had secretly ordered a mass slaughter of Coligny and his adherents to be carried out at dawn. Because so many Huguenots had accompanied Henry of Navarre to Paris for the ceremony, the royal guard was considered insufficient on its own to conduct the assault, and so Catherine had been forced after all to throw in with the duke of Guise, whose extensive entourage was already armed and primed for a fight. “They [the queen mother and the duke of Retz] called in the duke of Guise and gave him… and the king’s natural brother [Henri] the assignment of murdering the admiral, his son-in-law Teligny, and any followers who were with him,” the Venetian ambassador reported. “You can imagine how delighted the duke of Guise was to be given this task, and how enthusiastically he carried it out,” the envoy added mordantly. In addition, other important Huguenots, including those staying at court, were to be cut down by royal troops under the direction of Gaspard de Tavannes, Henri’s chief military adviser. Significantly, Charles, who had yearned for the glory of battle all his life, did not participate in the combat, another indication that this decision was forced on him by his mother.
The French court regularly kept very late hours. That same Saturday evening (or, rather, as it was past midnight, early Sunday morning), Marguerite wandered into her mother’s bedroom to visit with her sister. It was at this point that she first understood that something very grave indeed was brewing. “I placed myself on a coffer, next my sister Lorraine [Claude], who, I could not but remark appeared greatly cast down,” Margot remembered. “The Queen my mo
ther was in conversation with some one, but, as soon as she espied me, she bade me go to bed. As I was taking leave, my sister seized me by the hand and stopped me, at the same time shedding a flood of tears: ‘For the love of God,’ cried she, ‘do not stir out of this chamber!’ I was greatly alarmed at this exclamation; perceiving which, the Queen my mother called my sister to her, and chid her very severely. My sister replied it was sending me away to be sacrificed; for, if any discovery should be made, I should be the first victim of their revenge. The Queen my mother made answer that, if it pleased God, I should receive no hurt, but it was necessary I should go to prevent the suspicion that might arise from my staying.”
There was no refusing Catherine’s command. Claude continued to sob but could do nothing further to try to save her sister. Marguerite, by this time thoroughly frightened, retired to her own rooms, “more dead than alive,” as she put it, to ponder the meaning of this cryptic threat. What did Claude know that she did not? Clearly the danger was real—and potentially deadly—or her sister would not have wailed so. “As soon as I reached my own closet, I threw myself upon my knees and prayed to God to take me into his protection and save me; but from whom or what, I was ignorant,” she related. “Hereupon the King my husband, who was already in bed, sent for me. I went to him, and found the bed surrounded by thirty or forty Huguenots, who were entirely unknown to me; for I had been then but a very short time married. Their whole discourse, during the night, was upon what had happened to the Admiral, and they all came to a resolution of the next day demanding justice of the King against M. de Guise; and, if it was refused, to take it themselves.”
Impossible from the distance of so many centuries to fully appreciate the dread that gripped Marguerite during those long, terrible hours while she waited for she knew not what to make its appearance. “For my part I was unable to sleep a wink the whole night, for thinking of my sister’s tears and distress, which had greatly alarmed me,” she confessed. And yet, despite her vigilance, she was unable to penetrate the mystery of the peril facing her. No crisis materialized; no alarm sounded. The room in which she lay, surrounded by her husband and his compatriots, remained quiet, and certainly Henry, also unable to sleep, perceived no special menace, as Marguerite testified that “as soon as day broke, the King my husband said he would rise and play at tennis until King Charles was risen, when he would go to him immediately and demand justice. He left the bedchamber, and all his gentlemen followed.”
But the danger was only too real. By the time Henry of Navarre and his men left the safety of the bedroom and headed for the tennis court, as the first faint light of dawn approached, the duke of Guise and his men had already overrun the gates of the residence where Coligny was quartered. From his second-floor bedroom, the admiral could hear the clanging of swords and the shrill screams of pain on the stairs as the gentlemen of his entourage tried desperately to hold off the Catholic attack and knew that his execution was imminent. He was helped to his feet by a servant so as not to die helplessly in bed, but he was too weak to wield a weapon. The first of Guise’s men (including a captain of the royal guard who, in a cruel irony, had just two days before been assigned by Henri to protect the wounded man) burst through the door. “Are you not the Admiral?” demanded the soldier. “I am; but, young man, you should respect my grey hairs and not attack a wounded man,” Coligny was reported to have appealed.
But his plea was ignored. The defenseless warrior, a veteran of more than thirty years of combat and service to the Crown of France, was bludgeoned repeatedly by swords and axes, his body ultimately thrown from the window to land at the foot of the duke of Guise, who had remained in the courtyard to supervise the raid. The admiral’s visage had been so mutilated by blows that the duke reportedly had to mop the blood away to confirm the identity of the victim. Having established that the grisly mound of flesh at his feet was, in fact, the remains of the man he sought, he viciously kicked at the corpse of his nemesis to emphasize his family’s superiority and give vent to the nobility of his feelings.
With the confirmation of Coligny’s murder, broadcast by the ringing of the bell at the Palais de Justice, horrific, uncontrollable violence suddenly erupted all over the city. The Parisian civilian militias, whose twenty thousand or so Catholic members had been surreptitiously forewarned of the coming attack and mobilized within hours by the provost of Paris under direct orders from the king, sprang into action. “Well done, my men, we have made a good beginning!” the duke of Guise cried out to his troops. “Forward—by the king’s command!” “Kill, kill!” Gaspard de Tavannes bellowed as he rode. A house-by-house search was conducted, and wherever a Huguenot was suspected to be hiding a mob would break in, “cruelly butchering those they encountered, without regard to sex or age,” an eyewitness account confirmed. “Carts filled with the dead bodies of aristocratic damoiselles, of women, girls, men, and children were conducted to and discharged into the river, which was covered with corpses and all red with blood, which also ran in diverse places in the city, like the courtyard of the Louvre.” The Venetian ambassador reported that every Huguenot nobleman of significance who lived near the court was assassinated at daybreak before the common people were even aware of what was occurring. “But then… the king gave the order that all the other Huguenots in Paris should also be murdered and robbed,” he continued, “and things began to happen with fury.”
Marguerite had only just fallen asleep after her long night of wakefulness when the brutality suddenly burst upon her. “As soon as I beheld it was broad day, I apprehended all the danger my sister had spoken of was over; and being inclined to sleep, I bade my nurse make the door fast,” she recalled. But “in about an hour I was awakened by a violent noise at the door, made with both hands and feet, and a voice calling out, ‘Navarre! Navarre!’ My nurse, supposing the King my husband to be at the door, hastened to open it.”
Instead of Henry, however, an unknown stranger, bleeding profusely, staggered in. To Margot’s utter bewilderment, the man “threw himself immediately upon my bed. He had received a wound in his arm from a sword, and another by a pike, and was then pursued by four archers, who followed him into the bedchamber. Perceiving these last, I jumped out of bed, and the poor gentleman after me, holding me fast by the waist. I did not then know him; neither was I sure that he came to do me no harm, or whether the archers were in pursuit of him or me. In this situation I screamed aloud, and he cried out likewise, for our fright was mutual,” she recalled. “At length, by God’s providence, M. de Nançay, captain of the guard, came into the bedchamber, and seeing me thus surrounded, though he could not help pitying me, he was scarcely able to refrain from laughter. However, he reprimanded the archers very severely for their indiscretion, and drove them out of the chamber. At my request he granted the poor gentleman his life, and I had him put to bed in my closet, caused his wounds to be dressed, and did not suffer him to quit my apartment until he was perfectly cured.” This was the first of her husband’s Huguenot subjects that Marguerite would save that day.
And then, at last, she was made acquainted with the ghastly events of the previous few hours and understood the extreme danger in which her mother had placed her. Her sister Claude had been correct; if the Huguenots had discovered the Catholic intrigue in time, her husband’s entourage would have assumed she was a spy and would have in all likelihood taken their revenge on her.* “I changed my shift, because it was stained with the blood of this man, and whilst I was doing so, De Nançay gave me an account of the transactions of the foregoing night, assuring me that the King my husband was safe, and actually at that moment in the King’s bedchamber. He made me muffle myself up in a cloak, and conducted me to the apartment of my sister,” Margot said. But even here, in the guarded hallways of the Louvre, the terror caught up with her. “As we passed through the antechamber, all the doors of which were wide open, a gentleman of the name of Bourse, pursued by archers, was run through the body with a pike and fell dead at my feet. As if I had been kil
led by the same stroke, I fell, and was caught by M. de Nançay before I reached the ground. As soon as I recovered from this fainting-fit, I went into my sister’s bedchamber, and was immediately followed by M. de Mioflano, first gentleman to the King my husband, and Armagnac, his first valet de chambre, who both came to beg me to save their lives. I went and threw myself on my knees before the King and the Queen my mother, and obtained the lives of both of them.” This from Margot, who only the week before had wept and pleaded with Charles and Catherine to be extricated from marriage to the Huguenot king of Navarre.
But it was not only her husband’s servants who needed Marguerite’s intervention. Henry himself was in grave danger. There had been no tennis match that morning; the king of Navarre never reached the court. No sooner had he left his wife’s bedroom than he had been summoned to Charles’s chambers. His entourage accompanied him but was refused admittance to the king of France; this was Henry’s first inkling of Charles’s reversal, and he understood immediately what it meant. Just before the door slammed shut behind him, he turned to address his friends. “God knows if I will ever see you again,” he said presciently.
The Rival Queens Page 17