The Rival Queens (40 page)

The cardinal was consequently in no mood for conciliation. Even worse, despite Catherine’s vehement denials of having participated in the crime, the churchman refused to believe her. (That’s the trouble with setting a precedent like that of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. One little massacre and you’re tainted for life.) “
Oh madame, madame!
” he decried during his audience with Catherine, “this is your doing! This is your device! Oh, madame, it is you who have slain us all!” Still very weak and unwell, and highly indignant at being accused of a crime that (for once) she had not committed, Catherine broke down. “
O God, this is too much!
Take me away; I have no strength left!” the queen mother moaned in reply. Catherine was hurriedly removed to her own rooms, where she took again to her bed.

The next day, attended by the king and queen and her granddaughter Christine of Lorraine (daughter of Claude), Catherine made her will. Although unable to leave her couch, she nonetheless summoned what was left of her strength and demonstrated a considerable degree of concentration. She was extremely generous to her granddaughter and other extended family members, leaving them jewels and property. The queen mother was also careful to make appropriate bequests as a reward to her many loyal servants. She was equally scrupulous in her punishment of those deemed unworthy of her largesse. As a final act of revenge, she made a point of disinheriting Marguerite, her only surviving daughter, completely.

By January 3 her fever had returned, and that evening it spiked. She was sinking fast. The next day she was able to confess and received the last rites.

Finally, on January 5, 1589, Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France in her own right, the mother of three kings and two queens and the woman who had effectively ruled the realm for three decades, died at about one in the afternoon in the arms of her son. An autopsy conducted that evening revealed that the venerable queen mother of France had succumbed to pleurisy. It seems likely that she would have survived her illness had she not insisted upon getting out of bed prematurely in the height of winter in order to deal with her son’s fiasco. Her physician certainly believed this to be the case. Based on the results of the autopsy, the “
condition of health in her
bodily organs, if the grace of God had kept her from [the disease], would have given her many years of life,” he noted gravely in his journal.

M
ARGUERITE COULD NOT HAVE
attended her mother’s funeral even if she had managed to obtain an official safe conduct to do so (which, given her brother’s overt hostility toward her, was unlikely). The assassination of the duke of Guise had thrown the kingdom once again into turmoil. Like the cardinal of Bourbon, the distraught inhabitants of Paris were convinced that Catherine had been behind
the murder of their beloved duke. Rather than mourn the queen mother, they publicly threatened to disrupt her funeral procession and sling her corpse into the Seine if the king attempted to bury her at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, as was her due.
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Henri III was forced instead to inter Catherine in the decidedly less illustrious provincial church of Saint-Sauveur. Immediately upon her death, the magnificent furnishings that had adorned the queen mother’s rooms in Paris were seized by her many creditors and sold at auction as recompense for the massive indebtedness incurred by the Crown’s extravagance.

Henri III also felt the wrath of the Catholic League. The king’s image was defaced; he was vilified by priests and municipal officials alike, and enraged mobs attacked the gilded sepulchers that he had erected to honor his favorite murdered
mignons
. The masters at the University of Paris issued a learned treatise effectively deposing Henri on the grounds of immorality and absolving the inhabitants of the realm from their collective vows of loyalty. The pope excommunicated him.

On January 30, 1589, a memorial service was held in honor of the slain duke of Guise in Paris. In direct contrast to the queen mother’s relatively low-key requiem, held in out-of-the-way Blois, the Mass commemorating the assassination victim was held in the vast, awe-inspiring Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which was filled with weeping, somberly clad mourners. All the churches of Paris were similarly draped with black cloth, a special fast was decreed, and the next day a procession of barefoot penitents paraded through the streets of the city. By February, the last remaining Guise brother, the duke of Mayenne, was in control of Paris, and the Catholic League held the majority of the realm, including Rouen, Orléans, Lyon, Toulouse, and nearly all of northern and eastern France.
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Henri III was left with no choice but to approach his brother-in-law
the king of Navarre for aid. “
Five months ago I was condemned
as a heretic unworthy to succeed to the crown and now I am its principal supporter,” Henry crowed in a letter to his mistress Diane. By April the two kings had formally agreed to join forces and had raised a not insignificant army to combat the operations of the Catholic League, whose militias were commanded by the duke of Mayenne. There were still some royal companies, jealous of the Guises’ authority, that had remained loyal to Henri III, and the duke of Épernon, recalled to his master’s service, brought still more troops with him. To these were added Henry’s twelve hundred cavalry and four thousand Huguenot foot soldiers and marksmen, supplemented by the usual German and Swiss mercenaries.

Henry, who had been fighting and leading his men for years, was in his element, and his ferocious participation proved invaluable to the king. The duke of Mayenne, on the other hand, lacked both his dead brother’s military skills and his commanding presence. Beginning in May, Henri III saw his prospects brighten considerably as town after town, city after city that had been pledged to the Catholic League was retaken in the name of the Crown. By July, Paris itself was surrounded and under siege.

Then, on July 31, 1589, an obscure Jacobin monk appeared at the royal camp, located at Saint-Cloud, about six miles west of Paris, insisting that he had a secret communication for the king from high-ranking supporters within the capital. He implied that these citizen patriots were in a position to open the gates of the city to their sovereign. With him he had letters of recommendation (obtained under false pretenses, as it turned out) from two royalists who had been captured and were being held in the Bastille. He arrived too late in the evening to obtain the desired audience with the king—Henri III had already retired for the night—but the next morning, August 1, he was admitted into the royal presence. When the king inquired into his business, his visitor pulled out a letter and handed it to him. As Henri was attempting to read it, the monk suddenly darted forward and, flashing a stout blade that had been concealed
beneath his robe, stabbed the king full in the stomach. The assailant was immediately set upon and killed by the royal guard, but the damage had been done. Although at first the king’s surgeons believed their patient would recover, it was soon clear that the wound was mortal. A chronicler recorded that, having been informed that it might be expedient for him to receive the last rites after all, Henri III took the time to call the king of Navarre to his bedside in order to formally recognize him as his legitimate heir. “
May my crown flourish
on your head, and may your reign be prosperous as that of Charlemagne our puissant ancestor!” the king was reputed to have exclaimed weakly. “I have commanded all the great officers of the crown to take the oath of allegiance to you.”

The next day, in the dim, dark hours before dawn, less than two weeks after his thirty-eighth birthday, Henri III, mercurial monarch of France and Poland, followed his mother and the duke of Guise to the grave. Having failed to provide a male heir, by right of succession the throne fell to the first prince of the blood, Henry of Navarre. And in France, when a king ascended to a throne, his wife ascended with him.

Which meant that, legally, Marguerite de Valois was the new queen of France.

O
F COURSE JUST BECAUSE
Henry had a lawful right to the throne, and Henri III had recognized the king of Navarre as his legitimate successor, didn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the kingdom concurred with this arrangement. Quite the opposite. By long-standing convention stretching back to the reign of Charlemagne, French sovereigns were supposed to be emphatically Catholic, and the vast majority of the population was in favor of maintaining this conservative tradition. Even many of the Crown’s “great officers” who had fought side by side with Henry over the course of the previous few months and taken the vow of loyalty to him at the dying king’s request reneged as soon as they discovered that the king of Navarre had no intention of abjuring Protestantism.

Despite Henry’s somewhat vague promise to consider seeking Catholic instruction at some unspecified date in the future and his far more forceful and tempting assurances that those who remained constant to him would be rewarded with high state appointments and great wealth—which would be theirs just as soon as he finished conquering the kingdom—he lost fully half his army within a week of Henri III’s assassination. For their part, the Catholic League refused even to consider the prospect of an unrepentant heretic on the throne and instead immediately recognized Henry’s relation the old cardinal of Bourbon, still under house arrest in Blois, as the new king of France. In fact, extrapolating from known population figures and the proportion of Catholics to Protestants in France at the time of Henri III’s death, it has been conjectured that five out of six French subjects were adamantly opposed to the idea of a Huguenot as ruler of the realm.

Having five-sixths of the population against you is not a helpful ratio. With so many of his captains and soldiers defecting, Henry was forced to lift the siege of Paris. He and his modest army spent the next three years fighting to assert his claim to the throne. Although Elizabeth I provided badly needed money and troops and he won some significant military victories—mostly in Normandy—Paris and the Catholic League held out strongly against him. Even worse, Philip II sent Spanish soldiers to supplement Mayenne’s forces. By the early spring of 1593, even Henry had to admit that he was no closer to ascending to the throne of France than he had been while Henri III was still alive.

Then the Spanish ambassador arrived in Paris with a seductive proposition for the members of the Catholic League. The elderly cardinal of Bourbon having passed away in 1590, Philip II proposed to marry his daughter Isabella, child of the French princess Elizabeth de Valois, to an appropriate Frenchman (presumably a member of the Guise family), then have her crowned queen of France.
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Although this violated the Salic law, which forbade the French throne to pass to a candidate through the female line of succession, the Spanish ambassador silkily suggested that, in these difficult and dangerous times, this small technicality might be overlooked.

The envoy’s proposal, which the Catholic League seemed poised to accept, represented a far more serious threat to Henry’s prospects than if Philip II had sent a second armada to France just to eliminate him. One of Henri III’s former courtiers, who did not wish to see his once great kingdom fall under the subjugation of the hated Spanish, sat down with the king of Navarre in May and read him the riot act. Henry’s window of opportunity was closing fast, the counselor informed him brusquely. The kingdom was about to proclaim a new sovereign, and it wasn’t going to be Henry. To realize his birthright, the king of Navarre must make up his mind to publicly convert to Catholicism, and he must do so immediately. Otherwise he might just as well pick up his precious Huguenots and go home for the duration. Personally, the counselor remarked, he couldn’t see why Henry wouldn’t want to be “
king of all France
, gaining more in an hour at Mass than you have in twenty victories and twenty years of perilous labors,” but of course that was up to him.

The heavy weight of religious conviction and the touching loyalty of his Huguenot followers, thousands of whom had died for him in battle, vied with ambition in Henry’s breast. Ambition won handily.

On May 17, less than a week after this conversation took place, Henry let it be known through a spokesman that he had been “
in secret a Catholic
” all this time and now felt the need to officially convert. He invited representatives of the Church to meet him in Saint-Denis in July with the object of instructing him in the ways of Catholicism in preparation for his return to orthodoxy. In honor of this joyful occasion, Henry invited all Paris to witness his rehabilitation.

And so, on the morning of July 25, 1593, a great procession composed of some one hundred priests and clerics, and nearly a thousand knights, courtiers, and aristocrats, solemnly escorted the king of
Navarre through the streets of Saint-Denis. Their destination was the sacred abbey where the crypts of all French sovereigns and their spouses (with the recent exception of Catherine de’ Medici) were interred. Once arrived at the church, Henry read a prepared statement acknowledging the ascendancy of the Catholic religion and the pope on earth and asking for forgiveness and to be received once again into the community of the faithful. Then he confessed, received absolution, and very publicly participated in the ritual observance of Mass.

When he emerged from the abbey, the crowd roared its approval. Although his official coronation would not take place until February 27, 1594, in that moment Henry became sovereign of France.

Eight months after his return to Catholicism at Saint-Denis, on March 22, 1594, King Henry IV made his triumphant entry into Paris. As his first official act, he made sure to attend Mass at Notre-Dame. Philip II’s ambassador, attended by a large contingent of Spanish soldiers, was still in the city, having fought Henry’s candidacy to the bitter end. Gracious in victory, the new king not only granted the ambassador and his military companions a safe conduct out of the capital, he acknowledged their departure with a highly respectful tribute. “
What a great king!
” the Spanish ambassador was overheard to exclaim under his breath as he paraded past his benefactor’s quarters. “
My respects to your master
, but don’t come back!” Henry hollered from his window.