The Rival Queens (20 page)

Although the genocide that occurred that Sunday would forever be remembered as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (for having commenced on August 24, 1572, the official Church holiday associated with the apostle), the killings in fact continued unabated for days afterward, and the violence spread through France to other major cities, such as Orléans. It is estimated that some five to six thousand people perished in Paris alone. Not all the victims were Huguenots. Many ordinary residents took advantage of the carnage and atmosphere of general lawlessness to settle old scores or simply butcher wealthy citizens for profit. (Catherine’s favorite goldsmith, for example, was among those slain, and his shop was ransacked.) Nor did the Crown succeed in exterminating the Huguenot movement. Some of the Protestant wedding guests, including the count of Montgomery, a high-ranking member of Coligny’s inner circle, escaped death by having had the foresight to lodge on the far side of the river. The head start allowed him and his party to outride the duke of Guise and his men, who nonetheless pursued them relentlessly far into the countryside.

The most obvious beneficiary of the debacle was Philip II, who, without having to lift a finger or spend a single Spanish
real,
succeeded in ridding himself of both the threat of Huguenot intervention in the Netherlands and any possible future competition by France for international dominance. “
As I write, they are killing them all
,
they are stripping them naked, dragging them through the streets, plundering the houses, and sparing not even children. Blessed be God who has converted the French princes to His cause! May he inspire their hearts to continue as they have begun!” the Spanish ambassador wrote joyfully to his sovereign that Sunday. A few days later, the same envoy had a chance to congratulate the queen mother personally on her triumph. The slaughter was in its last stages; the Seine was choked with dead bodies; the gory remains of disembodied limbs, trunks, and even heads lay strewn in the gutters or piled high in carts. “
She has grown ten years younger!
” the Spaniard chortled after the audience. In Rome, the pope echoed the Spanish exuberance and ordered a Te Deum sung.

But in fact, France’s standing in Europe was severely weakened by this episode. Elizabeth I did not break off relations, but neither did she ever accept Catherine’s explanation that the massacre had been necessary to ward off a Huguenot insurrection, and from this time on she never seriously considered working with her French counterparts. The same was true of Germany. And for all his satisfaction with the outcome, Philip II viewed Catherine with even more derision than before, especially when it came out later that her action had not been planned but had instead been the impromptu result of a failed assassination attempt. The mighty kingdom of France, which had dominated the continent in the glory years of her mentor and father-in-law, François I, only a few decades earlier, dwindled at Catherine’s hands that Sunday in August and would not return to its former prominence until well into the next century.

But the queen mother was unconcerned with anything but the security of her own position and that of her son Henri. To this end she was unresolved about her initial decision to allow the king of Navarre to survive. Catherine knew it was a risk to keep Henry alive, especially after the count of Montgomery resurfaced in Protestant England and the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle refused to submit to the king’s authority. Even with his conversion
(which everyone knew was forced anyway), so long as the king of Navarre drew breath, the Huguenot movement would have a royal figurehead around whom they could coalesce. She had succeeded in underscoring her political victory and bolstering her own Catholic credentials by forcing Henry to publicly attend Mass. Now he was superfluous, and a danger besides. Caution dictated that he be eliminated.

And so a new intrigue was hatched in the immediate aftermath of the violence. Marguerite was again to be the innocent mechanism by which this latest treachery was sprung. “
Five or six days afterwards
,” she recalled, “those who were engaged in this plot, considering that it was incomplete whilst the King my husband and the Prince de Condé remained alive, as their design was not only to dispose of the Huguenots, but of the Princes of the blood likewise; and knowing that no attempt could be made on my husband whilst I continued to be his wife, devised a scheme which they suggested to the Queen my mother for divorcing me from him. Accordingly, one holiday, when I waited upon her to chapel, she charged me to declare to her, upon my oath, whether I believed my husband to be like other men. ‘Because,’ said she, ‘if he is not, I can easily procure you a divorce from him.’ ”

Catherine was asking if the marriage had been consummated. If it had not—and she likely suspected this was the case, as Margot and Henry had made no secret of their emotional indifference to each other—then she would help her daughter obtain an annulment. This was the bait, and a stronger lure could not have been proffered to Marguerite. To be done with this marriage, the marriage she had fought against from the very beginning. To be free from a man she did not love and so perhaps have the opportunity to find real passion with one whom she did.

But Margot was a very intelligent woman, and she understood that her emancipation would come at the price of Henry’s life. Now that the king of Navarre had agreed to return to Catholicism and her own soul was no longer in jeopardy, she recoiled at the thought
of being the cause of further villainy. Although Marguerite had been ignorant of the conspiracy surrounding her marriage and had been as much a dupe as her husband and his followers, she felt keenly the moral burden of the atrocities committed in its wake. The Huguenots who had been murdered had been guests at
her
wedding. She had spent the evening before the massacre listening to them debate the assassination attempt on the admiral, and she
knew
that they were innocent of the charges against them, that there never was a Huguenot plot to harm the king, that on the contrary, they had believed in the king. They had come in good faith to partake of her hospitality, to celebrate her investiture as their queen, and they had been hideously, treacherously betrayed by her family.

Every now and then there comes a moment in history when an individual not previously credited with any particular integrity is elevated to a position of authority and unexpectedly assumes the character of the office and rises to a higher purpose. Although it meant sacrificing her personal happiness, Marguerite, appalled by all she had witnessed and understanding that, as queen of Navarre, she was all that stood between her husband and annihilation, refused to participate in the bloodshed and elected to save Henry.

“
‘Madame,’ she answered her mother, ‘since you have put the question
to me, I can only declare I am content to remain as I am;’ and this I said because I suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him.”

At that moment, by her courage and compassion, Margot truly became a queen. The question was, queen of what?

W
HEN
M
ARGUERITE DECLINED HER MOTHER’S
offer of an annulment, she understood that she was not simply saving Henry’s life but tacitly guaranteeing his continued submission to the Crown. No semblance of independence at Catherine’s court came without a price tag, and this was Margot’s. The queen of Navarre had thrown a net of protection around her husband, and from this point on she was responsible to her family for his good behavior. Although he had chosen to recant and been officially pardoned by Charles, Henry was still considered a threat and was treated with contempt and suspicion, especially by her mother and older brother Henri, duke of Anjou. Marguerite knew that if Henry disobeyed a ruling, relapsed into Protestantism, or attempted in any way to assert his prerogative against her family’s wishes, she as well as he would be punished.

And so she did her best to help him. It was important, for example, that Henry’s adoption of orthodoxy be at least outwardly convincing in order to reassure Spain and the papacy, the two world powers Catherine was trying most to impress, that the Huguenots were no longer a factor in French politics. Of course, as a devout Catholic herself, Marguerite was hopeful that her husband’s conversion would
be genuine. She tried to encourage him to listen to the teachings of his uncle the cardinal of Bourbon (who had officiated at their wedding), and she introduced him to a particularly persuasive Jesuit confessor. Henry, who was still feeling his way through this new and treacherous environment, docilely accepted the proffered religious instruction and went to Mass regularly. In October, he and his cousin the prince of Condé, who also found it expedient to feign devotion, even sent a toadying letter to the pope expressing remorse for their previous transgressions and begging to be reinstated as good Catholics. To demonstrate his pleasure at the return of two such important princes to the Church, the pontiff finally issued an official dispensation legitimizing Henry and Marguerite’s marriage.

But despite the outward appearance of harmony, marital relations between the king and queen of Navarre were no more intimate than they had been on their wedding night. Henry simply did not trust Marguerite. He did not know she had saved him by rejecting an annulment, and her devotion to Catholicism prejudiced him against her.
^*
His position at court was miserable; he was under constant watch and was humiliated as a matter of sport. The dashing duke of Guise, in high favor with the royal family as a result of his enthusiastic participation in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, made a point of persecuting the unhappy husband of his former love. “
On All Hallows’ Eve
,” a courtier observed, “the King of Navarre was playing tennis with the Duc de Guise, when the scant consideration which was shown this little prisoner of a kinglet, at whom he threw all kinds of jests and taunts, as though he were a simple page or lackey of the Court, deeply pained a number of honest people who were watching them play.” (The duke of Guise had been extremely disappointed by Marguerite’s unwillingness to abandon her husband.
Displeased with his own wife, he had evidently been hoping for a double annulment. Certainly he was the catnip behind Catherine’s plan to rid herself of Henry: one of Margot’s handmaidens later revealed that “
many a time I have heard
Queen Marguerite say that after she had given her affections to the King of Navarre, the Queen Mother spoke to her of loving the Duke of Guise, and that she invariably replied that she had not a heart of wax.”) There were also rumors swirling about that, should Marguerite be delivered of a son, Henry would be considered superfluous and could then be eliminated. Understandably, this intelligence did not have a rousing effect on Henry’s desire to have sex with his wife. For all these reasons, then, the king of Navarre regarded Marguerite as just one more serpent in a court packed with deadly predators and did not pursue an amorous relationship with her.

Which is too bad, because at least in the beginning, once the religious issue was settled in her favor, Margot seems to have been open to establishing normal conjugal relations and even demonstrated a degree of tenderness toward her husband. After all, she was only nineteen and very romantic by nature, and she
wanted
to be swept up by the passion that other young brides reputedly experienced during the first few months of wedded bliss. And Henry was in a tough spot, which made him appealingly vulnerable; she probably couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. But she was also extremely proud, and his rejection of her overtures, however subtle, hurt. She drew away from him, and the emotional distance between them grew and hardened over time.

It must therefore have come as something of a relief when in November, less than three months into her marriage, the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle refused to pay taxes to the Crown or accept the Catholic magistrate appointed by the king to govern the city, and Charles sent the royal army, led by his brother Henri, the lieutenant-general—along with the duke of Guise, the king of Navarre, the prince of Condé, and Marguerite’s younger brother, François, duke of Alençon—to bring the rebels to compliance.
Freed momentarily from the responsibility of guiding her indifferent husband and from the no-longer-desired attentions of the duke of Guise (not to mention the malicious schemes of her older brother Henri), the lovely queen of Navarre was left in Paris with the rest of Catherine’s Flying Squadron to entertain herself.

A
ND THEN, AT LAST,
for the first time since she was sixteen, Marguerite perceived the intrinsic advantage of being a married woman, particularly one whose husband promised to be away for an extended period. Suddenly there were no restrictions on her movements. No one was telling her what to say or pressuring her to change her mind or go against her instincts or making odious plans for her future. She had always possessed rank and beauty, and to this was now added a measure of independence. When it came to her own amusement, provided she remained discreet, she could do as she liked.

To be young and alluring and royal in Paris is fabulous in any era, and the sixteenth century was no exception. Marguerite immediately fell in with the most glamorous crowd in town. Her two closest friends were Henriette de Clèves, duchess of Nevers, and Claude-Catherine de Clermont-Dampierre, duchess of Retz, the acknowledged chieftains of haute society.
^*
Both women were in their thirties, highly educated, very sophisticated, and filthy rich. The duchess of Retz, who was fluent in Latin and Greek (languages she had acquired as a result of her first husband’s frustrating lack of sociability, which had obliged her to live like a hermit out in the countryside for years, with only her books for company), was especially interested in the literary arts. She was a great patron of poets and hosted fascinating soirees in her rooms at the elegant, exclusive, centuries-old Hôtel de Dampierre, another vestige of her challenging but ultimately rewarding first marriage. In the duchess’s Green
Salon—a witty reference to both a line in a sonnet by the fourteenth-century Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch and Claude-Catherine’s taste in interior decoration—graceful courtiers mixed with artists, writers, and dramatists. The most famous bards of the period, Pierre de Ronsard and Philippe Desportes among them, were to be found at the duchess of Retz’s parties, alongside wags like the wickedly entertaining court gossip Brantôme and other suave gentlemen and charming ladies of Claude-Catherine’s acquaintance. Marguerite was an adored member of the duchess’s inner circle, which numbered nine women collectively known as
the Muses or the Nymphs of Paris
. Philippe Desportes was so smitten by Margot that she became the inspiration for his masterwork,
Les Amours d’Hippolyte,
in which he described the queen of Navarre as the world’s “
unique pearl and everlasting flower
.”

It was at the duchess’s Green Salon that Margot met Joseph de Boniface, seigneur de La Môle. She’d known him before, of course; he was a member of her younger brother François’s household. La Môle was in his forties, polished, elegant, and urbane. He was a peculiar mix of devout Catholic and equally devoted ladies’ man—Charles IX used to laugh that he could always tell how successful La Môle had been the night before by the number of times he attended Mass the next day. So practiced was La Môle in the art of seduction that it was he who had been delegated as François’s nuptial ambassador to England, charged with sweet-talking Elizabeth I into marrying his homely master.

La Môle would never have dared to approach Marguerite while she was still single—the penalties associated with deflowering a maiden princess were severe, as this compromised her value as a potential negotiating chip for international alliances—but now that she was a married woman, well, that was a different story. Infidelity was not simply prevalent at court, it was expected.
Everyone
had a mistress, starting with Charles IX. Before her death, Jeanne d’Albret had reported to her son, Henry, “
The king spends much
of his time making love, but he thinks nobody knows it. At nine in the evening
he goes to his study, pretending to work on a book he is writing. His mistress’s room adjoins the study.” Marguerite’s closest friend, Henriette, duchess of Nevers, was having a torrid affair with Annibal de Coconnas, another of François’s noblemen. Even Margot’s brother Henri adhered to standard court practice and made surreptitious love to the prince of Condé’s wife.
^*

La Môle was everything Henry of Navarre wasn’t. He knew exactly what to say to a woman like Marguerite and, more important, how to look and sound while he was saying it. The duke of Guise had been her first crush. La Môle was a seasoned man of the world. She was two decades his junior, her husband was away for an extended period, and anyway he didn’t want her, and all around her were the coquettes of the Flying Squadron urging her to just let go and experience the intoxicating pleasures of love. She never had a chance.
^*

W
HILE
M
ARGOT SPARKLED IN
Paris, her husband was suffering miserably along with the rest of the royal army outside the walls of La Rochelle.

Despite the potency of the Crown’s forces—Charles had allocated his brother more than thirty thousand soldiers with whom to besiege the city, supplemented by a battery of heavy artillery, consisting of twenty mounted guns—the Huguenot stronghold proved difficult to conquer. Dissension arose almost immediately among the French commanding officers. Henri, as lieutenant-general, was nominally in charge, but he was continually challenged by his younger brother, François, duke of Alençon (whom he loathed), as well as by the arrogant duke of Guise (of whom he was also none
too fond). The king of Navarre and his cousin the prince of Condé, while wielding no real authority, were also annoying to the lieutenant-general because they had to be watched carefully lest they defect to the Huguenot side.

It’s never fun to slog out the frigid winter months in an exposed military camp plagued by hunger and disease and surrounded by legions of sullen, shivering, unwashed companions at arms, but it is even less appealing to have to endure these conditions while obviously losing. The Huguenot militias entrenched behind the stout walls of the city were well armed and used to defending themselves; when the royal cannons were fired, they shot back to devastating effect. The siege persisted dispiritingly and without prospect of ending through the winter and into the spring. Thousands died, and thousands more deserted. The discontent evidenced among the rank and file was echoed by a number of the aristocracy who found the entire exercise pointless and self-defeating. Increasingly, the Crown—which included not only the king but also the queen mother and the lieutenant-general—was viewed as incompetent by this group of moderate Catholics, disgruntled knights, and opportunistic noblemen, and they looked about them for a candidate around whom to rally their support, one who could force a change in policy. It had to be someone of royal birth or almost-royal birth, as no sixteenth-century political opposition movement could succeed without the participation of a leader of exalted rank. There being very few aspirants available who met this all-important qualification, by process of elimination they eventually settled on the lieutenant-general’s ambitious younger brother, François, duke of Alençon, and the equally disaffected first prince of the blood Henry, king of Navarre. This was the beginning of what would become known as the Politique movement.

Not that Henry and François particularly liked or trusted one another. Nor did they have the same goals. François was motivated by wounded pride and an overriding competitiveness with his older brothers. He felt he was routinely overlooked and slighted, and he seethed over these perceived insults. Just eighteen, François yearned
for wealth and honors in accordance with his rank but was unable to persuade either his mother or the king to grant him additional favors. The lieutenant-general thought so little of his younger brother’s opinion that he didn’t even bother to include him in the military planning sessions, where the battle preparations were discussed.