The Rival Queens (18 page)

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 Huguenot 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.”

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.