Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Dressed in blue with ‘all the jewels of the Crown’, Margot took refuge in a passive resistance; going through the motions as she knelt beside Henri but making no answer when the cardinal asked if she took Henri as her husband. Finally, Charles IX stepped forward and pushed her head down, as though she were nodding agreement. (Later, she would use this lack of consent as grounds for an annulment; shades of Jeanne d’Albret and the Cleves match, some thirty years before.) There were to be four days of parties, with the king’s masked ball boasting, as its centrepiece, a pantomime tournoi which saw Charles and his brothers first dispatching Navarre and his companions to hell, then rescuing them again.

  By 22 August, the festivities were at an end. As Admiral Coligny walked back to his lodging from a council meeting at the Louvre, business having resumed that morning, he found a binding on his shoe was loose, and bent over to adjust it. Just as he did so came the sound of a shot. The bullet meant to kill him instead broke his arm and almost tore off a finger.

  Catherine de Medici had just sat down to dinner with Anjou when the news was brought to her. Not even the watching Spanish ambassador could tell from her impassive face that it was not the assassination attempt but its failure that spelled disaster for her. Charles IX was on the tennis court when word came; finding himself confronted by his new brother-in-law Henri of Navarre and other senior Huguenots, he promised a full investigation and ordered that the citizens should not take up arms.

  When Charles went to visit Coligny that afternoon, Catherine and Anjou went with him but Coligny indicated that he had words for the king’s ears alone. As Anjou put it later: ‘The Queen my mother has since acknowledged that never had she found herself in a more critical position.’ They could not discover what Coligny had said but on the journey back to the Louvre it was clear that Charles was furiously angry with them.

  No wonder Anjou, visiting his mother early the next morning, found she had not slept. They were desperate, he himself said later, to ‘finish the Admiral by whatever means we could find. And since we could no longer use stratagem, it had to be done openly, but for this purpose it was necessary to bring the King around to our resolution.’

  In the streets, people cried out against the king and Catherine de Medici; not on suspicion of murder but for allowing themselves to be surrounded by Huguenots. The Huguenots were already armed, having intended to go straight from the wedding to the fight in the Low Countries. Many Catholics now decided that they too needed to be prepared.

  Opinions, contemporary and modern, vary wildly about who was to blame for the attempted assassination of Coligny. The Venetian ambassador wrote that, ‘Everyone supposed it had been done by order of the Duc de Guise to avenge his family, because the window from which the shot was fired belonged to his mother’s house’. But later he changed his mind, having learnt from various conversations ‘that from start to finish the whole thing was the work of the queen. She conceived it, plotted it, and put it into execution, with no help from anyone but her son the duke of Anjou.’

  Catherine’s daughter Margot seemed to agree: at first the Guises were blamed but then it was revealed to Charles that his brother and mother ‘had their shares in it’. At the lowest, Catherine de Medici and her sons (and the royal council with them) came to support the idea of Coligny’s assassination once it had been introduced but it is unclear whether the Guise family were their evil geniuses or their scapegoats. Was Catherine Machiavellian enough to reflect that if the Guises suffered all the blame of these events then she would be rid not only of the Huguenot/Bourbon threat but also of the other great noble house that challenged her position as the power behind the throne?

  On the evening of 23 August, Catherine sent one of her supporters to the king to tell him not only that his mother and brother had been aware of the attempt on Coligny’s life, but that the entire royal family was now in danger. Charles was told also that the Huguenots were planning an attack that very night.

  Catherine entered the fray, urging again and again that the Huguenots had brought nothing but trouble. Though he at first refused to believe them, finally the feeble young king was won over. ‘Then kill them all’, he is said to have cried. ‘All’, that is, of the senior Huguenots on a list Catherine had drawn up and which he now ratified, not all the Huguenots in Paris, or indeed in France.

  At 3 am, the bell of the Palais de Justice was to toll to signal the start of the attack. By that time the militiamen had been alerted, all exits from the city closed, and chained barges linked cross the Seine. The Duc de Guise himself led the party which went to Coligny’s house, stabbed the admiral to death and threw his body out of the window.

  It was obvious from the first that no one was grand enough to be immune from this violence. The new bride Margot had been in her mother’s apartments, together with her sister Claude, just arrived in Paris for the wedding, when it became obvious some sort of preparations were being made. But ‘as for me no one told me anything about this’, she wrote in her Mémoires. ‘The Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I had married the King of Navarre’:

  I was at the coucher of the Queen my mother, sitting on a chest with my sister of Lorraine [Claude], who was very depressed, when my mother noticed me and sent me to bed . . . My sister said that it was not right to send me away like that to be sacrificed and that, if they [the Huguenots] discovered anything, no doubt they would avenge themselves on me. My mother replied that, God willing, I would come to no harm, but in any case I must go, for fear of awakening their suspicions . . . I left the room bewildered and dazed without knowing what it was that I feared.

  In the quarters where the Protestant royal party lodged, her new husband Henri of Navarre sent Margot to bed. Woken by someone banging at the door and crying out for her husband, she found it was a stranger, one of Henri’s gentlemen, wounded, pursued by four archers:

  To save himself, he flung himself on my bed, and I, with that man holding me, rolled into the passage and he after me, still hugging my body. I did not know who he was nor whether he meant to outrage me nor whether it was him or myself whom the archers were pursuing. We both screamed and were equally terrified.

  The captain of the guards arrived just in time to grant Margot’s request to spare the man’s life before escorting her to Claude’s apartment, where she ‘arrived more dead than alive’, ordered the man’s wounds tended and changed her bloodied shift.

  If none were too high to be troubled, none were too low as to be spared. The Huguenots, all too easily recognisable by their black and white clothes, were slaughtered. Violence against women featured heavily in the dreadful tales: of pregnant women with their wombs ripped out, of baskets of small children flung into the Seine.2 Protestant, and admittedly partisan, sources told of a woman leaping out of a window to avoid capture, breaking both her legs in the fall, being dragged through the streets by her hair and having her hands slashed off at the wrists for the sake of her gold bracelets. Another woman, about to go into labour, was stabbed in the abdomen and hurled into the street below, where she died along with the child, its head protruding from her body. The killers then looted the house.

  Even the Duc de Guise was so appalled by the scale of the killing (and by the fact that Catherine was according him the blame) that he could be seen defending Huguenots in the streets, and opening his house to give them sanctuary. The Spanish ambassador saw the mounting pile of bodies:

  While I write, they are casting them out naked and dragging them through the streets, pillaging their houses and sparing not a babe. Blessed be to God, who has converted the Princes of France to His purpose. May He inspire their hearts to go on as they have begun!

  Priests encouraged the bloodshed but of the three or four thousand people killed in the capital not all were necessarily Huguenots. Some were killed in personal vendettas rather than for their religious faith, as the orgy of bloodletting took on a dreadful momentum.

  Those on the list of high-profile victims,
compiled by Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, were largely killed within the first two hours. But once kindled, the flame could not be put out. This was something the royal group had not foreseen. That afternoon Charles sent orders for the killing to cease but he was ignored.

  It was another three days before Paris was quiet; by then, despite fresh orders from the king, the violence had spread to the provinces. It would be October before the storm cleared southern France, and across the country (although estimates vary wildly) some suggest as many as thirty thousand died. The royal family sheltered inside the Louvre while the slaughter was going on. Later (according to two sources) Catherine had recovered enough that on being presented with the head taken from Admiral de Coligny’s disfigured and emasculated body, she had it embalmed and sent as a gift to the pope.

  There could be, from this, no going back. ‘You must clearly see that you cannot govern too wisely with kindness and diffidence’, Anne de Beaujeu said three-quarters of a century earlier. This explosion of violence had ripped Europe apart, and left its divisions exposed all too clearly.

  The French ambassador to Spain reported that Philip literally danced for joy when he heard the news. He certainly wrote to congratulate Catherine de Medici on ‘this glorious event’, admitting to the French ambassador that ‘he owed his Low Countries of Flanders’ to the French action. In the Netherlands, the Spanish general Alba’s actions were becoming ever more brutal. That October, he allowed his men to sack and massacre the town of Mechelen, where Margaret of Austria had once lived in luxury. The pope ordered Te Deums sung, until he was informed that the massacre had never been intended and that the original assassination attempt had been a political rather than primarily religious story.

  By contrast, the Queen of England was appalled. As Elizabeth wrote to Walsingham, the murder of the supposed Huguenot conspirators, without ‘answer by law’, was bad enough:

  We do hear it marvellously evil taken and as a thing of a terrible and dangerous example . . . But when more added unto it – that women, children, maids, young infants and sucking babes were at the same time murdered and cast into the river . . . this increased our grief and sorrow.

  When Elizabeth at last consented to receive the French ambassador Fénelon, not a courtier would speak to or look at him as he approached the presence chamber. There, so the story goes, he found the queen, her ladies, and her privy councillors all dressed in mourning black. What the queen said to Fénelon was mild compared to the reproaches of the councillors. Cecil told him it was the greatest crime since the crucifixion. No one on the English side could now think of a marriage with the French royal family. If the French king had been ‘Author and doer of this Act, shame and confusion light upon him’, Leicester wrote to Walsingham. And the same would naturally be true of his mother.

  The other marriage that had sparked the dreadful affair was completed. Henri of Navarre (and his cousin Condé) had been taken from the apartment where Margot was so rudely surprised and brought to the king, who assured them of their safety. Margot claimed she was asked by her mother whether the marriage had been consummated, since if not it could be dissolved. Margot, fearing Henri’s life would be in danger, refused to comply with the clear suggestion, and said it had. The two Huguenot princes had, however, formally to be received back into the Catholic church. Catherine, perhaps overstrained, burst into rude laughter as they made the sign of the cross before the altar. Henri had, moreover, to return Béarn to Catholicism. Jeanne d’Albret was truly dead.

  But Catherine de Medici too had lost; lost in reputation. She soon realised how much blame she would have to shoulder for the affair. Pamphlets against Catherine attacked the rule of women along with her other supposed iniquities; others harked back to her Florentine roots and recalled that Machiavelli’s The Prince had been dedicated to her father.3

  Her ambassador to Venice wrote that the massacre not only of the Huguenot leaders ‘but against so many poor and innocent people’ meant that the Venetians (though themselves Catholic) nevertheless ‘cannot be satisfied with any excuse, attributing everything that has been done to you alone and Monsieur d’Anjou’.

  She had moreover lost the chance of peace in France. Huguenots, believing the whole marriage had been a trap, now faced stark choices; driven now, as Elizabeth of England said ‘to fly or die’. Those standing out in La Rochelle called on the protection of Elizabeth, now their ‘natural sovereign princess for all eternity’. As royalist forces embarked on a long and bitter siege, the women of La Rochelle mustered on the walls to throw rocks at them.

  Elizabeth’s support of the continental Protestants remained partial and hesitant for some time to come. Not until 1585 was she finally persuaded to send an army to the support of the Dutch Protestants. Elizabeth even, although not without lengthy comment about the strangeness of the request, agreed to stand godmother to the daughter Charles IX’s wife bore him that autumn. She found it politic now to seem to believe French assurances that the king had merely acted against a Huguenot plot and that what followed had been a tragic accident. But talk of her possible marriage to Catherine’s youngest son d’Alençon was off the table, for the moment, anyway.

  Like her enemy and ally Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth Tudor (and Mary Tudor before her), was forged by fear. It was one reason they and Mary Stuart, the child who grew up the darling of the French court, would never be sisters in any real way.

  For another queen had lost, here. Amid the fallout from the massacre, one thing that could be seen was a new consensus among Elizabeth’s ministers as to the danger represented by the Scottish queen, Mary. In March 1571, Mary’s agent the Bishop of Ross had written that the Queen of Scots’s life was in great danger, with Cecil and others urging she should be put to death.

  Elizabeth’s councillors were almost united in believing that Mary (so recently the Catholic focus of internal rebellion) should be excluded from the succession, if not actually killed. It would be another fifteen years before the tussle between Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart reached its climax, but the end was plain to see.

  PART VII

  1572 onwards

  And nothing is firm or lasting in the gifts of Fortune; today you see those raised high by Fortune who, two days later, are brought down hard.

  Lessons for my Daughter, Anne de France (Anne de Beaujeu) published 1517–1521

  43

  Turning points

  England, France, 1572–1587

  The early to mid-1570s represented a turning point in the history of women’s rule in Europe. The question of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage had retreated somewhat, only to have one final resurgence before finally it went away. The ‘princely pleasures’ of Elizabeth’s 1575 visit to Leicester’s house of Kenilworth signalled the last gasp of his long courtship, as well as promoting his bid to be allowed to help the beleaguered Netherlands Protestants. Elizabeth Tudor had turned forty; old for childbearing by the standards of the day. Her councillors must have been resigned to her determined virginity.

  But an heir, however important, was not the only point of a royal marriage. The increase in Catholic activity on the Continent could only leave England more anxious for allies. The mid-1570s saw the start of the great Catholic infiltration of England itself, and of Philip of Spain eyeing opportunities in Ireland. And there had long been the idea of an alliance with a son of Catherine de Medici.

  For a time after the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, and amid the massacre of her reputation, Catherine was preoccupied with the election of her favourite son Henri, Duc d’Anjou, to the vacant throne of Poland (shades of Louise of Savoy and the election to the Holy Roman Empire), a throne he would in due course abandon when that of France fell vacant. Her dying son, Charles IX, as he became ever more feeble, accused her: ‘Madame, you are the cause of everything! Everything!’ But nevertheless, on his deathbed, he ordered a new document to be drawn up, securing the regency to his mother until Henri could return from Poland. Charles died on 30 May 1574, holding h
er hand. As Catherine later said, ‘After God, he recognised no one but me.’

  The accession of her best-beloved Henri to the throne of France was at once a triumph and a problem for Catherine. She wrote that if she lost him, too, ‘I would have myself buried alive’, and that his return ‘will bring me joy and contentment on contentment’, while he wrote that he was her ‘devoted servant’. The secretary of the English ambassador, in the first days of the new king’s reign, wrote that Catherine’s authority ‘was as ample as ever’. But not everyone agreed. When Henri’s dawdling journey home finally brought him back to France, Catherine found a young man whose ideas did not always match her own. She advised that in his new role as Henri III he should show who had the upper hand: he promptly put an end to the practice by which state papers might be shown first to her, although mother and son still held joint audiences and observers could still report that the queen mother ‘commandeth very much’.

  The religious divisions showed no sign of abating. As Henri III’s younger brother François, the Duc d’Alençon, toyed with joining the Huguenots, Henri of Navarre escaped from the French court and back to his own lands in the southwest, where he abjured the Catholic religion to which he had been forced to convert after St Bartholomew’s Day. The Huguenots were acting with virtual autonomy in several of the southern provinces of France. It was Catherine de Medici who, after a fragile peace was signed, had to carry the king’s message into what was effectively enemy territory. She was still needed but also marginalised by the dissent within her family.1

  Henri’s accession left his brother François, long at odds with his family and long debating the idea of marriage as a way to bolster his position, more disaffected than ever.* In 1578 he allied with rebels in the Netherlands, accepting from the Protestants the title of ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’.