The Rival Queens (19 page)

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.
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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!
”

B
Y 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 mother
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.
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“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 killed 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.

Once inside, Henry had been confronted with a choice. To justify the murderous rampage he’d ordered, Charles—or, rather, his mother—had invented a fictitious plot on the part of Henry, Coligny, and the other Huguenot leaders against the Crown. Henry had to sit there and listen as he and his coreligionists were accused of conspiring to murder Charles and all his family. There was nothing to be done about Coligny and the majority of his followers, Charles informed Henry. They had been condemned to death, and the sentence was at that moment being carried out. But as his new brother-in-law, Charles was willing to overlook Henry’s treason and allow him to live—
if
he would give up Protestantism and return to the Catholic faith. This, coincidentally, was exactly what Catherine and Charles had promised the pope would happen if Henry married Marguerite.

Henry was eighteen years old and alone in the world, king of a minor principality whose most prominent subjects were in the process of being massacred. Both his parents were dead, he was married to a woman he didn’t know or trust, and he was at the mercy of a royal family whose ruthlessness was matched only by its mendacity. He had no choice but to acquiesce. (His cousin the prince of Condé was offered the same deal and originally put up a small fight, refusing
to convert, but soon thought better of it.) The Venetian ambassador, again demonstrating an uncommon degree of candor, reported that “
in birth and rank
the chief [Huguenot] leaders are Condé and the king of Navarre, but they are boys who have no followers. What’s more, they are in the king’s power and might as well be in prison.” Two days after his interview with Charles, Henry very publicly accompanied him and the rest of the royal family to Mass. They had to wind their way through decaying corpses to get to the church.
The queen mother made a point of rising
from her pew in order to have an unobstructed view of the king of Navarre piously receiving the sacrament and guffawed outright at the tableau.