So friendly did Margot become with her ex-husband and his family that a mere five months after her arrival, her château in the Bois de Boulogne was deemed too remote for the comfortable exchange of the many social visits between the two households. Accordingly, in December she moved into the center of Paris, to the magnificent Hôtel de Sens, the former residence of an archbishop, less than half a mile from the Louvre. She was forced to vacate this address only a few months later, however, when on April 5, 1606, one of her attendants was murdered just outside her front door as he was in the act of helping his mistress down from her coach.
The victim had been a particular protégé of Marguerite’s; although he had been born into the laboring class (his father was a carpenter), she had ennobled him and brought him with her to Paris from the château of Usson. He was young and good-looking, and for this reason it was assumed that he was the queen’s lover and that the slaying had been a crime of passion, but as the murderer’s family had been implicated in the recent conspiracies against the Crown, the more likely motive was revenge for having passed along damaging information. Marguerite, both frightened and incensed, dashed off a letter to Henry. “Monseigneur,” she wrote, “an assassination has just been committed, at the door of my hotel, before my eyes, opposite my coach, by a son of Vermont, who has shot with a pistol one of my gentlemen named Saint-Julien. I beg your Majesty very humbly to order justice to be done… If this crime is not punished, no one will be able to live in security.” It is a measure of just how far Margot had advanced in his opinion that the king had the gunman immediately apprehended, tried, and sentenced to be hanged the following day outside the Hôtel de Sens so that his ex-wife could watch from her window.
But this morbid incident represented an anomaly; on the whole Marguerite enjoyed her time in Paris immensely. The following month, on May 30, 1606, she won a great victory when the lawsuit she had originated challenging her mother’s decision to disinherit her in favor of Charles de Valois was decided in her favor. The verdict, based on her parents’ wedding contract, which very strictly decreed that royal estates could be handed down only to the couple’s legitimate offspring, reversed Catherine’s deathbed instructions. Margot, as the sole surviving member of her family, inherited all her mother’s property. Among other projects, the queen used her newfound wealth to begin work on a splendid villa located directly across from the Louvre. The building was completed in 1608, at which point Marguerite took up residence.* So she and Henry, who as king and queen of Navarre had spent as little time as possible in proximity to one another, were now affectionate next-door neighbors.
Once established in her new palace, at the age of fifty-five, Margot fell easily into the role of grande dame. As Henry had never been particularly fond of dressing up, and his wife had limited experience of French customs, Marguerite added some much-needed glamour to the capital. Possessed, finally, of a queenly income (which she managed nonetheless to outspend at an alarming rate), she was able at last to indulge her love of music, culture, and fashion in as opulent a manner as she liked. A young English aristocrat, later ambassador to France, left a description of one of her entertainments: “I also betook myself to the Court of Queen Margaret in the palace which bears her name,” he reported. “There I witnessed many ballets and masquerades, during which the queen did me the favor to place me near her chair, not without arousing the astonishment and envy of several of those who were wont to enjoy that honor.”
An eminent Parisian attorney who also attended some of Margot’s parties remarked on what an able hostess she was and on the quality of the philosophical debates, in which she often took part, at her salons. “After these distinguished gentlemen finished their discourses, there would follow music of violins and singing, and finally the lutes. All played with a marvelous art, bringing pleasure to the royal mistress and as much to her guests, who felt greatly honored to be of the company,” he recalled. When the new king of Spain, Philip III (Philip II having died in 1598), sent ambassadors to Paris to try to promote better relations, it was Queen Margot who organized the ball in their honor. The meal was both “magnificent and sumptuous… which they say cost her four thousand crowns,” the impressed envoy reported back to Madrid. “Among the strange confections were three silver dishes whereon were displayed a pomegranate tree, an orange tree, and a lemon tree, so cunningly made that not one person present but thought them natural.”
Marguerite was no less extravagant in her donations to charity than she was in her secular life. She dispensed hundreds of thousands of livres annually to the holy orders, to hospitals, and to the indigent. She heard Mass three times a day, and the poor knew to gather on her doorstep, as she always distributed alms on her return from church. Similarly, she took the occasion of handing out a hundred gold coins and an equal number of loaves of bread on every holiday, including her birthday. In 1608 she built a chapel and two years later began work on a church. For these acts of kindness she was beloved in Paris.
But it was her political altruism that represented her true contribution to the kingdom. By her background and family allegiance she could easily have sowed dissent and made it far more difficult for Henry to rule. Instead she became his helpmeet. Her support, as the last surviving member of the Valois dynasty, was of inestimable advantage to the king in healing the realm of the wounds of the religious wars, and Henry recognized this. He who had shunned her advice while they were married now frequently ambled over to her court to consult her on matters of state. There was no greater evidence of Marguerite’s graciousness than her participation at the coronation of Marie de’ Medici, held at Saint-Denis on May 13, 1610. Informed that Henry’s seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, would take precedence over her in the procession and that she could not wear a fleur-de-lis mantle similar to Marie’s, she nonetheless attended the enthronement of her replacement with good grace (although she did insist on wearing a crown and an immense cloak of purple velvet, symbol of royalty).
The value of this symbolic gesture of goodwill was immediately apparent when, the next day, May 14, a Catholic fanatic leaped out of the crowd and accosted Henry’s carriage as it attempted to negotiate a busy city street. Clinging to the coach door, dagger in hand, the zealot stabbed the king three times in the neck and chest through the open window. “It’s nothing,” said Henry, veteran of countless battles, just before he lost consciousness, the blood pouring from his severed aorta. Minutes later, he was dead.
MARGOT WAS AT A party celebrating her fifty-seventh birthday when she received the news of the king’s assassination. She left immediately and went straight to the Louvre to be with Marie and the children. She made an effort in the days following the tragedy to be of assistance to the widowed queen of France. Marguerite’s was one of the few dinner invitations Marie accepted on her rare sojourns out of the Louvre. Margot also made a point of publicly honoring her ex-husband and seemed genuinely grieved at his loss, not just for the kingdom but privately as well. “Queen Marguerite caused a beautiful service to be sung at the Augustines, for the repose of the soul of the deceased King, whose affectionate wife she had been for twenty-two years, and who voluntarily agreed, with the dispensation of the Pope, to the dissolution of the marriage, chiefly because the Lord had not blessed her with happy offspring, which was greatly desired by good Frenchmen,” admitted a Huguenot chronicler who had not always been so charitable in his descriptions of the former queen of Navarre.*
The Parlement of Paris acted swiftly in the wake of the stabbing, confirming the dauphin as the rightful heir to the throne and according Marie de’ Medici the regency of France until her son came of age. At the coronation ceremony, held at Rheims that October, Marguerite stood sponsor, along with the prince of Condé, at the confirmation of the nine-year-old king, Louis XIII. Marie also appointed Margot as godmother to her second son, Gaston, born in 1608.
As regent, Marie de’ Medici actively pursued an alliance with Spain. She arranged to wed Louis XIII to Philip III’s daughter Anne o
f Austria and to marry her daughter Elizabeth to Philip’s eldest son. When, two years into her regency, a group of noblemen used these nuptial alliances as a pretext to revolt, Marguerite, who knew all the parties well, attempted to mediate, urging the leaders of the group to abandon the rebellion and return to obedience. She further allied herself publicly with the regency by hosting a lavish engagement party for Elizabeth on August 26, 1612.
It was again in the Crown’s interests that she attended the opening of the Estates-General in December 1614. A dispute had arisen over the levying of a new tax, and Marguerite helped to work out a compromise solution. But it was a very cold winter, and she caught a chill. Over the next three months, the chill gave way to fever, and she became seriously ill. On March 26, 1615, she was told the end was near and heard last rites. Louis XIII sent his own physician to attend the queen, but the surgeon was unable to help her. Sometime between eleven and midnight the following evening, Marguerite de Valois, once queen of Navarre and princess of France, succumbed to infection at the age of sixty-one.
“On March 27, there died in Paris Queen Marguerite, the sole survivor of the race of Valois; a princess full of kindness and good intentions for the welfare and repose of the State, and who was her only enemy,” the count of Pontchartrain, minister of state under Marie de’ Medici, reported. “She was deeply regretted,” he added sadly.
Epilogue
IN CONTRAST TO THEIR HOSTILITY toward her mother, the citizens of Paris grieved openly over Marguerite’s passing. The queen’s body was placed on public display, and throngs of visitors came to view her remains and pay their respects. “There is a crowd as great as at any ballet,” observed an eyewitness. The entire royal family went into mourning, and when, as had happened with Catherine, Margot’s creditors descended upon her château demanding payment, Marie de’ Medici undertook to settle the deceased queen’s debts. This was only fitting, as in a last act of generosity Marguerite had left her entire estate, with the exception of a few small bequests, to Henry and Marie’s son, the thirteen-year-old king of France, Louis XIII. Margot was buried at Saint-Denis, in the abbey where her father, Henri II, and her four brothers were interred. Catherine’s remains had also been quietly moved from Blois to the same sanctuary in 1610 after Henry’s assassination, so the family that had been so bitterly divided in life was finally reunited in death.
Over the centuries, Catherine de’ Medici’s reputation has slowly recovered from the disapprobation with which she was generally regarded in Europe at the time of her demise. There is even a movement afoot to rehabilitate the queen mother as a skilled chief executive who negotiated the turbulent era in which she lived as well as could possibly be expected. At the very least, Catherine is today universally considered to have been an able disciple of Machiavelli, expertly playing off various factions to her own and her family’s advantage. The evidence for this is usually based on Machiavelli’s well-known assertion that “a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist,” and that to be successful a prince must be able “to be a great feigner and dissembler.”
Certainly Catherine de’ Medici was a noted feigner and enthusiastic dissembler, but unfortunately these traits alone do not satisfy Machiavelli’s criteria for leadership. A careful reading of The Prince reveals that honor and what Machiavelli called virtù—ability, strength of character, and vision—were as necessary to the state as the pragmatic deceit he recommended; also, he stressed many times how vital it was that a ruler take great pains to avoid being despised. Catherine prevaricated so consistently and artlessly that she soon lost all credibility, a situation that only created more problems for the kingdom. She almost never planned ahead but reacted moment by moment to varying stimuli. This meant that the Crown rarely anticipated events and so was frequently caught by surprise. In addition, Catherine’s fear of losing her position forced her to make increasingly unsustainable compromises. Finally, her authorship of the atrocities committed at the time of her daughter’s wedding absolutely excludes her from being elevated to the rank of elite, or indeed tolerable, leadership. Even today, after more than four centuries and a revolution, the wound from the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre lingers in France—run a finger down that scar and the country still shivers.
The standing of Marguerite de Valois, on the other hand, has suffered from the reverse treatment. Respected and admired at the time of her death, over the centuries Catherine’s youngest daughter has come to be regarded as a sensual dilettante who put her own romantic inclinations ahead of her duty to the kingdom. Today she is remembered—if she is known at all—as the sympathetic but ultimately tragic heroine of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel La Reine Margot.
But even Dumas’s portrayal, favorable though it may be, fails to give Marguerite’s intelligence and courage their due. It has become commonplace to suggest that a historical figure anticipated modern attitudes, but in Margot’s case this happens to be true. Here, hundreds of years before the advent of the feminist movement, was a strong, spirited, resolute individual unafraid to confront sexual mores. It is for this reason more than any other that her reputation has been systemically denigrated. Her desire to love and be loved—her willingness to engage in a series of passionate affairs—has overshadowed every other aspect of her life. This is especially ironic considering the licentious nature of her surroundings. By any measure the carnality attributed to her brothers and her husband dwarfs the queen of Navarre’s sensual experiences. And although Catherine de’ Medici cannot be accused personally of wanton behavior, she clearly encouraged it in others in order to gain political advantage. Alone among her family, Margot refused to use sex as a weapon and searched only for love.
But the queen of Navarre was so much more than the sum of her affairs. Acutely aware of the vulnerability of the position forced upon her by her marriage, Marguerite nonetheless steadfastly refused to accept victimhood and instead strove throughout her life to carve out a measure of independence and influence for herself. To an astounding degree, considering the variety and potency of the forces ranged against her, she succeeded. The political ascension of her brother François may be traced directly to his sister’s participation in and sponsorship of his interests. Although painted as a scapegoat for the kingdom’s woes by her family, Marguerite in fact consistently counseled peace between Catholics and Huguenots and presided over one of the very few courts in Europe where, at least briefly, religious tolerance was officially sanctioned. She only took up arms as a last resort when compelled to do so in her own self-defense. And she was invaluable to Henry IV, both as a political symbol and an advocate, in helping to secure his rule and that of his successors after the death of her brother Henri III.
But for her inability to conceive a child, Marguerite might well have gone down in history, as Henry IV did, as one of the great French rulers. Instead she is simply Queen Margot, who saved her husband—and, by extension, the kingdom. “I have no ambition and I have no need of it,” she once wrote, “being who and what I am.”
Three in a Marriage
Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici as a young wedded couple…
… the bewitching Diane de Poitiers at her toilette.
Catherine de’ Medici’s outsized father-in-law, François I, king of France.
Antoine de Bourbon, indecisive king of Navarre, father of Henry IV.
Jeanne d’Albret, leader, with Admiral Coligny, of the Huguenot movement and mother of Henry IV.
Catholic Versus Huguenot
The Massacre of Vassy, March 1, 1562, the beginning of the French Wars of Religion.
François, duke of Guise, murdered outside Orléans by a Huguenot spy, February 1563.
Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, target of a botched assassination attempt by Catherine de’ Medici that resulted in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, August 1572.
Catherine de’ Medici, queen mother of Fran
ce, in her omnipresent black widow’s weeds.
Catherine de’ Medici’s eldest son, François II, briefly married to Mary Stuart before his premature death at the age of sixteen on December 5, 1560.
Catherine’s second son, Charles IX, king of France at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Charles subsequently died of tuberculosis on May 30, 1574, at the age of twenty-four.
Marguerite de Valois, Catherine de’ Medici’s youngest daughter, as a child.
Catherine’s third and favorite son, Henri III, king of France and Poland.
François, duke of Alençon, Catherine’s youngest son and Marguerite’s political ally, before his face was ravaged by smallpox.
Marguerite de Valois after her marriage, as queen of Navarre.
Marguerite’s husband, Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV, king of France.
Marguerite’s first love, Henri, duke of Guise (son of the murdered François, duke of Guise), later the leader of the Catholic League.
The Rival Queens Page 40