Unfortunately it was also unlivable, as its owner soon discovered. Grand residences required large sums and regular upkeep, not to mention protection from looters, and no one had actually resided in Carlat for many years. The once opulent palace had fallen into considerable disrepair. Margot arrived to find her new quarters picked clean of all their former luxury, right down to the holes in the windows where the panes of glass had been removed.
Again her royal status saved her, or at least mitigated her suffering. The citizens of Agen, anxious to honor their commitment to Matignon, treated her ladies-in-waiting and the rest of her household staff with considerable solicitude. Those who served the queen of Navarre but had been left behind in her escape were allowed to pack up and follow their mistress, but in a much more decorous and comfortable fashion. In addition, all her belongings, including her couch, bedding, and gowns—even her carriages and jewelry—were carefully wrapped and transported to Carlat. It took more than two months, until the beginning of December 1585, but eventually Marguerite was reunited with her retainers and was even able to sleep once again in her own bed.
But her situation remained extremely precarious. She had spent all her money in anticipation of the promised fifty thousand crowns from Spain and so lacked the financial resources necessary even to support her household. Her secretary, who apparently did not enjoy living in a ruined castle in a remote mountainous region in the middle of winter, attempted to improve his circumstances by trying to extort money from her. When she refused to pay, he lashed out at her in a very rude fashion and was consequently discharged from her service. In retaliation, he went straight to Paris with some of the confidential letters he had been entrusted with prior to his dismissal. These were missives from Marguerite to the duke of Guise confirming her participation in the Catholic League. The secretary put them directly into the hands of the king.
Both Catherine and Henri III had already known that Margot had joined the Catholic League—she had made no secret of it—but now they had irrefutable proof. Not that this was any longer a crime. By conceding to the terms of the peace treaty signed at Nemours the previous summer, the king was now technically on exactly the same side of the succession conflict as his sister and the duke of Guise. Of course, in reality, Henri III despised and feared the popular duke and was only waiting for a chance to avenge himself on his supposed ally. But so far the duke, an exceptional general, had proved far too formidable for Henri III to confront directly. When on February 15, 1586, soon after Marguerite’s secretary had betrayed her, the duke of Guise entered Paris at the head of a large procession, the citizenry thronged the pavement to catch a glimpse of the celebrated warrior. “Very few or no courtiers rode in front of us, but a great host of the nobility that I guess there to have been five or six hundred,” recounted the cardinal of Guise, who accompanied his brother on this excursion. “We did not see the king that day, and on our way to the Hôtel de Guise along the few streets one has to travel I have never seen such acclamation by the people, for all the houses and streets were crammed with men.”
The duke of Guise might have been too intimidating to oppose publicly, but Margot was a different story. When the queen of Navarre fell seriously ill in her drafty, ramshackle castle that February and March, both Henri III and Catherine openly hoped for her death and were disappointed to hear of her recovery in May. Catherine in particular had a reason for wishing her daughter harm. The king of Navarre had put together a substantial army and was threatening to employ an additional twenty thousand German and Swiss mercenaries, financed by Elizabeth I. The queen mother, desperate to stop this invasion, had determined to solve the succession problem and so end the conflict by coaxing her son-in-law back to orthodoxy. Catherine planned to pull this off by bribing Henry with a brand-new, very attractive bride on the condition that he break his ties with the Huguenots and formally renounce the reformed religion. Obviously this happy marital project could not be consummated while Marguerite still lived. If the queen of Navarre didn’t see fit to die of her own accord from illness, both Catherine and Henri III believed that she should be hurried along to the grave. “If I were to repeat all that is being said, Sire,” hinted the Tuscan ambassador ominously in an official report home, “it would indeed be materia tragica.” The Crown’s attitude toward Margot and the plots against her life were so public that even the duke of Guise was aware of them. Catherine and Henri III had “tragic designs [for Marguerite],” he informed an envoy from Spain with whom he was in regular contact, “the details of which would make the hair of your head stand up.”
The queen of Navarre was aware of her family’s animosity and consequently feared capture by the king’s forces above all else. True, the stronghold of Carlat could withstand a frontal assault, but her experience at Agen had taught her to fear betrayal from within. And, as had recently been made manifest by her secretary, she had no money with which to purchase the loyalty of her servants, while it was clear that Henri III would reward handsomely those who undertook to deliver his sister into his hands. This made her even more vulnerable to treachery. Soon after receiving her letters to the duke of Guise, the king had sent his sister a sinister message commanding her to leave Carlat or face “the most rigorous punishment.”
The strain imposed by external forces was exacerbated by the solitary nature of her confinement. Marooned under desolate conditions, frightened at the prospect of eventual retribution by the king, the inhabitants of the fortress of Carlat, in their collective search for a way out of a rapidly deteriorating situation, appear to have turned on one another. Although no detailed account of the turmoil has survived, subsequent events would indicate that a power struggle took place among the various military officers for control of the castle—and, by extension, the queen. The first cracks appeared that summer, culminating in a murder that took place in Marguerite’s presence. “I hear it said that the Queen Mother has lately been lamenting with Silvio that Monsieur de Lignerac had stabbed to death the son of an apothecary in the bedchamber of the Princess of Béarn [Marguerite],” the Spanish ambassador observed in a letter to Philip II on July 19, 1586. “So close to her bed was it that she was all stained with blood, and they say that this was done through jealousy, which makes the matter worse,” he recounted with obvious relish, the implication being that Margot was sleeping with one or perhaps both the participants.
This slur on her daughter’s reputation was Catherine’s work. Anyone with any knowledge of the queen of Navarre’s somewhat exalted views of love, and of her own rank, would view with great suspicion the notion that she had suddenly decided to become intimate with the boy who delivered her potions.* Nor, it would soon be made clear, was she at all enamored of Lignerac. But the episode occurred at exactly the time that the queen mother was promoting her scheme to convert Henry by tempting him with a new wife. To broadcast that Marguerite had brazenly descended into utter depravity lowered her value to both her husband and the Catholic League and so served Catherine’s purposes very well.
By fall the gloom at Carlat had deepened to despair. In September, Lignerac’s brother, who had been the senior authority representing the Catholic League, died suddenly from undisclosed causes. His death created an opening at the top level of command for which both Lignerac and the young red-haired cavalry officer Jean d’Aubiac competed. At almost the same time, Mary Stuart was condemned for treason and sentenced to be executed by Elizabeth I. This blow sent ripples of outrage throughout the league in France, which had been a strong supporter of the Scottish queen’s right to the English throne. If Marguerite had believed that her rank protected her from a similar fate, Elizabeth’s action quickly disabused her of the notion. And the English queen was a model of tolerance next to Henri III.
Then came the news that the royal army, led by the king’s second-favorite mignon, the duke of Joyeuse, another of Marguerite’s particular enemies, had descended upon the region around Auvergne, where Carlat was situated. The implication was clear. Henri III intended
to use crushing force to capture—or kill—his sister.
THE ARRIVAL OF JOYEUSE and his soldiers precipitated a crisis among the queen of Navarre’s company. Unhappy with Lignerac’s leadership and questioning the older man’s loyalty to his mistress, Jean d’Aubiac, who had apparently succeeded in his quest to win Marguerite’s affections, challenged his superior for command of the fortress—and lost. According to a Huguenot commander serving the king of Navarre who later recounted these events, after his victory over his rival Lignerac brusquely informed Marguerite that “d’Aubiac must leap the rock [die].” To save her lover, Margot was forced to hand over all her remaining jewelry to the commander. But even so, she only succeeded in having the prisoner’s sentence commuted from execution to banishment. Weighing her situation carefully, the queen of Navarre then took a calculated risk and, despite the alarming proximity of the royal troops, joined Aubiac in fleeing the fortress. “She would rather go away and change her abode than abide here without him,” the Huguenot commander sneered, intimating that infatuation had overwhelmed her judgment. It may have been simple passion that prompted Margot—she did throw herself body and soul into her love affairs—but in this instance, self-preservation might also have played a crucial role in her decision to leave. After all that had happened, to remain alone and unprotected with the greedy Lignerac, who had already demonstrated a certain degree of murderous vindictiveness in the incident with the apothecary’s son, could easily have appeared the more perilous alternative. Additionally, Margot seems to have feared (with good reason, as it later turned out) that Lignerac intended to betray her by opening the castle to Henri III’s forces. The Tuscan ambassador reported in a letter home that it was “certain that the King was the cause of the flight of the Queen of Navarre.”
Accordingly, Marguerite and Aubiac, along with a small number of trusted retainers, decamped by horseback on October 14, 1586. Their object was to reach the castle of Ibois, which lay north of Issoire, where Joyeuse’s army was quartered. As Ibois belonged to Catherine, Marguerite may have had the idea of throwing herself on the queen mother’s mercy, hoping to persuade her to use her influence to blunt the king’s wrath. Inexplicably, the hostile Lignerac, far from trying to stop the queen of Navarre from leaving Carlat, instead helpfully arranged to have a nobleman of his acquaintance, the seigneur de Châteauneuf, meet her party halfway to guide her safely to her destination.
For three days Marguerite rode through the countryside, trying to reach Ibois. When Châteauneuf failed to rendezvous with the queen’s party as planned, she and Aubiac were forced to find their own way to the castle. It was a rough passage. With Henri III’s knights and foot soldiers stationed at all the main municipalities and thoroughfares, Margot could not take the risk of revealing her whereabouts by taking shelter in a town. She and her retainers traveled mostly under cover of darkness, an imperative that made the journey even more treacherous. Compelled to cross the Allier River in the dead of night, she nearly drowned.
Finally, in the predawn hours of October 17, she and her weary party located the haven they sought. But no sooner had the queen of Navarre achieved the presumed safety of Ibois than an intimidating regiment of royal cavalry galloped up to the walls of the château and loudly commanded that the doors to the villa be opened so they could search the premises. Châteauneuf, it seemed, was an informer. Acting on his intelligence, Joyeuse had sent a large company under the direction of the marquis de Canillac to apprehend the king’s sister.
Resistance was futile—Ibois had neither the armaments nor the fortifications of Carlat—but Marguerite nonetheless did her best to forestall, or at least delay, their entry. She knew Canillac; he was the son of her childhood governess, Madame de Curton, who had taught Margot to love Catholicism and had replaced her book of hours those many years ago when her brother Henri had teased her by throwing it into the fire. While the queen negotiated, she searched desperately for a way to conceal Aubiac. Familiarity with Henri III’s methods indicated that her lover was in as much trouble as she was. She could bear the pain of her own punishment but not his. Margot must have done a good job of keeping the king’s soldiers at bay, because she had time to have Aubiac’s telltale red hair shaved off and to find a secret compartment in the chimney for him to hide in. But all her precautions turned out to be useless. Châteauneuf’s information had obviously been very precise. Canillac knew all about Marguerite’s lover and found him easily as soon as he and his men entered the castle, which they did later that day.
Having identified Aubiac, Canillac had him dragged from his hiding place and sent to a nearby prison. Then he turned to Marguerite, who was tearfully pleading for her chevalier’s life, and pronounced her under arrest in the name of the king.
THE RIGHTEOUS SATISFACTION BOTH Henri III and Catherine experienced upon being informed by urgent messenger that the marquis de Canillac had succeeded in apprehending the queen of Navarre is evident from the tone of the instructions that the king dashed off in response. “Tell Canillac not to budge until we have made the necessary arrangements,” Henri wrote in his own hand to one of his ministers. “Let him convey her to the Château of Usson. Let, from this hour, her estates and pensions be sequestrated, in order to reimburse the marquis for his charge of her. As for her women and male attendants, let the marquis dismiss them instantly, and let him give her some honest demoiselle and waiting-woman, until the Queen my good mother orders him to procure such women as she shall think suitable. But, above all, let him take good care of her. It is my intention to refer to her in the letters patent, only as ‘my sister’ and not as ‘dear and well-beloved.’ The Queen my mother enjoins upon me to cause d’Aubiac to be hanged, and that the execution takes place in the presence of this wretched woman, in the court of the Château of Usson. Arrange for this to be properly carried out. Give orders that all her rings be sent to me, and with a full inventory, and that they be brought to me as soon as possible,” he added.
Canillac received these instructions on November 8, but before he had a chance to act on them, a second royal missive arrived. Henri III had evidently had time to reflect and decided he had been too lenient. “The more I examine the matter, the more I feel and recognize the ignominy that this wretched woman brings upon us,” proclaimed the king. “The best that God can do for her and for us, is to take her away… As for this Aubiac, although he merits death, both in the eyes of God and men, it would be well for some judges to conduct his trial, in order that we may have always before us what will serve to repress her [Marguerite’s] audacity, for she will always be too proud and malignant. Decide what ought to be done, for death, we are all resolved, must follow. Tell the marquis not to budge until I have furnished him with Swiss and other troops.”
The king’s orders were carried out with dispatch. Marguerite was conveyed under heavy guard to the massive fortress of Usson, outside Issoire, on November 13. Several days later a hasty tribunal was organized, and Aubiac was declared guilty of an unspecified crime (no record of the trial has survived) and sentenced to death. Although he was of sufficient rank to merit beheading, he was instead hanged as a common criminal. Margot, who was en route to her new prison, was at least spared the sight of his execution. This was an act of kindness on Canillac’s part, especially as Aubiac’s punishment was reported to be exceptionally gruesome. Apparently it took the vital young man so long to die that his hangman got bored and flung him still breathing into his grave.
The forbidding château of Usson, where Marguerite, surrounded by her Swiss Guard, was held prisoner, had been employed for centuries by a series of French monarchs as the equivalent of a state penal institution. It was considered to be absolutely secure, a vast emptiness into which criminals and traitors were deposited and never heard from again. The queen of Navarre was utterly desolate, “treated like the poorest and most abandoned of creatures,” lamented the envoy from Tuscany with rare compassion. In a surviving letter to her mother and brother, Margot “threw herself at their feet and begged
them to have pity on a long misery.” To Catherine, “who had brought her into this world and wished to take her out of it,” Margot wrote in anguish that she hoped to find the courage “to kill herself before she would fall into the hands of her enemies and face degrading ruin.”
Prolonging her agony was her brother’s decision not to render a final verdict on her transgressions until Twelfth Night—January 7, 1587. Marguerite well understood that, precedent having been so recently set by Elizabeth I’s condemnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, Henri III would find it far easier to hand down a sentence of death in her own case.
The two-month delay in Marguerite’s judgment—from early November of 1586, when Henri III had first been informed of his sister’s capture, to January 7, 1587—was not arbitrary. Catherine was scheduled to meet with the king of Navarre on December 13, 1586, at a villa outside Cognac. With her came her granddaughter Christine of Lorraine, daughter of Margot’s gentle sister Claude.* Christine was intended as an inducement to Henry to agree to disband his Huguenot army and return to Catholicism. If he did so, Catherine and Henri III would see to it that Marguerite was disposed of so he could marry the young, unsullied Christine in her place. It was a typical Catherine solution: in Christine she had found a marital candidate who would link Henry to both the royal family and the Guises, and this, in her mind, would be sufficient to end the succession conflict.
The Rival Queens Page 36