The Rival Queens (6 page)

Although Antoine had eluded their snare, the arrest of the prince of Condé, who even as a younger brother outranked them in the all-important sixteenth-century category of lineage, represented an undisputed triumph for the Guises. They were at the very height of their power. Catherine had been present and wept when the prince was arrested, but this was perhaps as much for the deterioration in the kingdom’s affairs and her own lost influence as it was for the victim. Certainly when the thirty-year-old Condé was subsequently removed to Amboise for safekeeping, she evinced little sympathy for the prisoner, writing in a letter, “
I have [come] back this morning
from my journey to Amboise where I have been visiting a little gallant [the prince] who has nothing in his brain but war and tempest. I assure you that whoever finds himself there will not get out again without leave, for the place is already strong and I have been adding to the fortifications. I have also had a good many doors and windows walled up and have had strong iron grating put to others.” The prince of Condé was duly tried and condemned to death. The date of execution was set for December 10.

But fortune has a way of upending even the best-laid plans. Francis, as was his wont when visiting Amboise, insisted on hunting despite the foul weather. On November 17 he came down with a bad cold and complained that his ear hurt. He was put to bed. A week later he rallied just long enough to receive a visit from the Spanish ambassador, who was so shocked by the king’s appearance that he took it upon himself to lecture the Guises and Catherine on the dangers of prolonged exercise in cold weather, a piece of helpful
medical advice that was validated less than two weeks later, when, on December 5, two months short of his seventeenth birthday and a mere five days before the scheduled execution of the prince of Condé, Francis II, king of France, succumbed to a raging bacterial infection and died.

T
HERE ARE MANY PARENTS
who find the death of a child to be an event of unspeakable agony, a grief so profound as to be unsupportable, dwarfing even the decease of a spouse. To have outlived a son or daughter whom it was your duty to protect, soothe, and cherish is a loss from which few recover.

Catherine de’ Medici was not one of these. The queen mother displayed no emotional paralysis, no excessive tears, and no whispery little voice at the passing of the eldest son she had worked so hard to conceive and for whose birth she had prayed for nearly a decade—the son whose arrival had solidified her position as queen of France. She was not even with poor sad Francis the night he died but had to be woken up with the news. Unlike her behavior at the time of her husband’s death a mere eighteen months earlier—Catherine did not even have to change her clothes, as she was already in black—she did not spend the requisite weeks mourning in darkness beside his body. This humble task was left to his now redundant widow, Mary Stuart. His mother’s attitude did not go unnoticed, particularly by those favoring the Huguenot cause. “
The Queen was blyeth of the death
of King Francis hir sone, because she had no guiding of him,” observed an English emissary to the court.

Perhaps. But it was far more likely that Catherine’s profound instinct for self-preservation had again asserted itself, as it always did whenever a change in power was about to take place. Only this time, instead of trying to protect herself by fading agreeably and noiselessly into the background, as she had so often done in the past, she seems to have suddenly realized that the best way to ensure her political survival was to take the reins of government into her own hands. This was the direct result of the months she had just spent
investigating and then prodding, haggling, and campaigning for a peaceful settlement to the religious question. She had come so close with the assembly at Fontainebleau, only to have it spoiled by the bitter rivalry between the Guises and the Bourbons. But she had learned from the experience. She now knew she could count on the backing of moderates such as L’Hôspital and Coligny. There would never be a more propitious moment to strike. It was only a matter of will.

And so, following the coup d’état blueprint so thoughtfully provided by the Guises at the time of her husband’s death, forty-one-year-old Catherine began plotting to take over the government as soon as Francis fell ill, while there was yet hope of his recovery, then put her plan in motion several days in advance of her son’s death. Because he had failed during his brief marriage to conceive an heir, with Francis’s last breath the succession would pass to her second son, Charles. But Charles was only ten years old—too young to rule. That meant that a regent would have to be named to govern the kingdom until Charles matured and was declared of age.

The Guises, whose influence was linked to the fortunes of their niece, Mary, would have no legitimate claim to the regency unless they could contrive to marry the soon-to-be-widowed queen of France to her dead husband’s younger brother Charles, the new king. But this would take time. If Catherine moved quickly she could outmaneuver them and beat the despised Guises at their own game. That left only one other potential challenger to her authority: Antoine de Bourbon.

As the next in line to the throne after Catherine’s own family, Antoine was the expected choice to serve as regent. Indeed, by law he was the only legitimate candidate. But the Guises had demonstrated at the time of Henri’s death that Antoine’s claim could be circumvented by enterprise and simple bravado. Catherine might have previously found herself intimidated by the commanding and contemptuous Guises, but insipid Antoine was quite another matter. She
knew
she could take him.

On December 2, 1560, while her eldest son lay suffering the excruciating agonies of his ear infection, Antoine was summarily called into a meeting with the queen mother in her chamber. The Guises were also present. There, Catherine confronted Antoine with the precariousness of his situation. His brother, she reminded him, was scheduled for execution in little more than a week’s time, and he himself was still under suspicion of treason. Without Francis’s protection, which would end with his life, Antoine could at any moment find himself again accused of sedition, and this time he would be arrested and face the same fate. She was prepared to help him, but only if he surrendered his legal claim to the regency and stepped aside in her favor. To buttress her position, Catherine presented him with evidence, gathered by her lawyers, of precedent for her action—all the previous cases in French history in which the queen mother had been lawfully installed as regent for an underage son.
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If Antoine did as she asked she would see to it that the prince of Condé was released with his head still attached to his body. To help Antoine save face, she promised to raise him to the title of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and to marry his only son, six-year-old Henry, to her youngest daughter, seven-year-old Marguerite, an alliance that would cement Antoine’s family’s claims to the succession and inch them ever that much closer to the throne of France. Antoine, who was not a man to stand up under pressure and whose one thought at this point was to put as much distance between his brother and himself and the royal court as possible, agreed almost immediately to her terms. In that instant, Catherine became regent. The formerly all-powerful Guises, who thought they had been invited to this interview to help counsel the queen mother and who were taken aback by Catherine’s initiative, suddenly found themselves occupying an unfamiliar and uncomfortable position of subordination. (“
She thought of herself
before thinking of others,”
the aggrieved cardinal later somewhat hypocritically complained.) Their disconcertedness increased when, faced with the prospect of Condé’s unexpected exculpation, they considered that they themselves might be called to account for their role in having had a prince of the blood condemned in the first place. (“
No man has ever attacked
the royal blood of France without finding himself the worse for it,” a member of the duke of Guise’s extended family had recently observed with prescience.)

When Catherine subsequently offered them a way out—she knew, she said sweetly, that the Guises had only acted at the king’s command (it had been quite the other way around, of course, but poor Francis was luckily dying, so his mother could safely lay the blame on him)—they took it. In so doing they acceded to her regency and sentenced themselves to political exile. The cardinal acknowledged as much the next day to the Spanish ambassador in an interview. “
We are lost
,” he moaned. The queen mother’s utter triumph was then underscored when at her urging the vanquished parties, Antoine and the duke of Guise, were forced like two naughty children to bestow upon each other a warm hug and the kiss of peace as a symbol of their reconciliation and restored good feeling. Then they were dismissed.

This masterfully efficient coup, conceived, designed, and orchestrated by Catherine, represented as brilliant a piece of politicking as there was in all Europe. Overnight, the servile woman once scorned for her petty bourgeois lineage was transformed into one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, on a par with—in fact exceeding, in terms of territory, population, and revenue—her contemporary Elizabeth I of England. When the kingdom of France awoke on the morning of December 6, 1560, its subjects discovered that its young sovereign had died in the night and been replaced by one even younger, and that Mother was now in charge.

T
HE PERIOD BETWEEN THE DEATH
of Henri II, in July of 1559, and that of Francis II, in December 1560, had been one of bewildering loss for seven-year-old Margot. She was bereaved not only of her father and eldest brother but forced also to say good-bye to her sisters. Elizabeth, the eldest, had been wed at fourteen to Philip II, king of Spain, a cold, severe man more than twice her age. Kindhearted Claude, who had unfortunately inherited her mother’s looks in addition to what appeared to be a clubfoot, had exchanged the comfortable safety of the nursery for the regional court at Bar-le-Duc and her new position as the wife of the duke of Lorraine, a member of the extended Guise family. At least Claude’s husband, at sixteen, was only four years older than she and not nearly as terrifying as the king of Spain was to poor Elizabeth.

And following hard upon the death of her eldest brother, Francis, was the additional loss of Marguerite’s sister-in-law, Mary Stuart, who had been a member of the royal children’s circle for as long as she could remember. Although Margot could not know it at the time, Mary’s exile to Scotland was the queen mother’s work.
Catherine disposed of her former daughter-in-law by following the same unyielding step-by-step pattern she had used against Diane de Poitiers. Within hours of Francis’s death, Mary was obliged to return the crown jewels, and as soon as her official period of mourning was over, she was encouraged to leave the court and go to live with her Guise relatives. As Mary was young and beautiful, the names of several potential marriage partners, including (as expected) the new king of France, ten-year-old Charles IX, as well as Don Carlos, the unstable son and heir of Philip II, king of Spain, were put forward. Through clandestine channels Catherine made a point of quashing each of these possible alliances, all the while professing her warm affection for the widowed Mary.
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The effect of Catherine’s opposition was to relentlessly winnow down her former daughter-in-law’s alternatives until at last only the questionable refuge of her native Scotland remained to her. “
Our Queen [Mary], then Dowager of France
, retired herself by little and little farther and farther from the Court of France; that it should not seem that she was in any sort compelled thereunto, as of truth she was by the Queen Mother’s rigorous and vengeable dealing; who alleged that she was despised by her good daughter, during the short reign of King Francis her husband, by the instigation of the House of Guise,” later recalled one of Mary’s Scottish subjects. Barely nine months after Francis’s death, Mary accepted her fate and sailed from Calais. As her ship crossed the Channel, the eighteen-year-old girl wept uncontrollably, as though her heart were breaking, transfixed by a coastline that became ever more distant with each passing moment and choking on the words, murmured, like a prayer, “Adieu
France!
Adieu France!
Farewell dearest France… I think I shall never see you again.” The queen mother’s response to this poignant retreat was far more prosaic and along the lines of “good riddance.” She duly reported Mary’s departure in another letter to Elizabeth. “
If the winds are favorable
, [she] should be in Scotland within the week,” Catherine observed with satisfaction.

Nor did Marguerite have the sympathetic intervention of her mother to help her make sense of these changes. Catherine’s attention was focused entirely on the regency and consequently on the new king, Charles IX, as the source from which all of her power flowed. “
Since it has pleased God
to deprive me of my elder son, I… have decided to keep [my second son] beside me and to govern the State, as a devoted mother must do,” she informed the royal council on the afternoon following Francis’s death. Apparently, being a devoted mother entailed having all letters and other official government documents addressed to her rather than to the king; transacting all business; taking possession of the royal seal (even though Antoine had the clear legal right to it); and even sleeping in her ten-year-old son’s bedroom at night in order to ensure that no one had access to the king without her prior knowledge and approval.

Charles, like his recently deceased older brother, Francis, was a sickly child prone to fevers and a persistent cough (although he at least seems to have escaped the dreaded paternal curse, as there was never any mention of irregularity associated with his genitals). One of the Venetian envoys observed worriedly of the young Charles that “
he is not very stron
g; he eats and drinks very little and as regards physical exercise it will be necessary to handle him carefully… he enjoys riding [and] arms, all exercises no doubt worthy of a king but too strenuous; and as soon as he tires himself he needs a long rest for he is weak and very short of breath.” As he grew older, Charles became increasingly prone to frenzied, maniacally violent rages that left him exhausted and remorseful, but this behavior did not begin until after his ascension to the throne, when he coincidentally
became the victim of his mother’s suffocating solicitude. It is worth wondering what the effect of having a mother like Catherine hovering incessantly nearby, never ceding even the semblance of control and cloaking all her actions under the rationale that she was doing this for his own good, would have had on the psychological development of even the most mentally stable adolescent boy.

Adding to the pressure on Charles was the competition from his clever brother Henri, who was only a year younger and next in line for the throne. All the royal siblings, Margot included, understood that Henri was Catherine’s favorite child. He alone among her sons was healthy and attractive and precociously intelligent. Catherine was drawn to him—she could not help loving him—and made no secret of her pride and affection for this son over the others. Henri was aware of his mother’s partiality and returned and encouraged her affection, as children will, as much as a means of one-upping his older brother the king as for its own sake.

Margot also had a third brother, François, two years her junior and the most tormented member of the family. François had been a relatively happy and good-looking little boy until a bout with smallpox left his face hopelessly scarred and his nose “
swollen and deformed
”; he was diminutive in stature, even as an adult, and his complexion, in addition to being hideously pockmarked, was unfashionably swarthy. His looks did not improve with age; when he was fully grown a contemporary described him as “
one of the ugliest
men imaginable.” François would labor under this triple-pronged adversity—stunted, disfigured, and consequently despised and dismissed by his more fortunate older brothers—his entire life. Not unreasonably, his physical appearance colored his perceptions about himself and the world. As he grew older he turned sullen, was quick to feel insults, and wholeheartedly returned his male siblings’ enmity.

Because the royal children grew up in luxury, many scholars have asserted that they were spoiled and that this accounts for their future narcissism and overtly hedonistic behavior. But this was evidently
not the case with Margot, as she would write later of this period that she had been “
so strictly brought up
under the Queen my mother that I scarcely durst speak before her; and if she chanced to turn her eyes towards me I trembled, for fear that I had done something to displease her.” Nor did she participate in her brothers’ rivalry as a child. She did not live with her mother and siblings but was instead left at the castle of Amboise or Blois in the care of a governess and a tutor, being deemed too young to live at court.

For solace at this time of sadness and confusion, Marguerite turned to a source that would remain a refuge to her throughout her life: books. Alone among Catherine’s children, her youngest daughter demonstrated a passion for reading that would later mature into an impressive aptitude for scholarship. In this Margot was the beneficiary of François I’s legacy; her erudition was only made possible by his wholesale importation of Italian Renaissance culture. She was fluent in both Italian and Spanish at an early age. Fueled by her grandfather’s extensive additions to the royal library, Margot’s education, which included knowledge of history, poetry, art, and philosophy, was supervised by her tutor, Henri Le Meignan, later bishop of Digne. Marguerite was the only member of the royal family able to master Latin, to the point where as an adult she was sufficiently comfortable conversing extemporaneously in the language that she dazzled the ambassador from Poland.

In addition to finding refuge in her books, Margot sought stability and enlightenment through religion. Such scant attention did Catherine have time to pay to her younger offspring that the queen mother did not bother to replace Marguerite’s staunchly Catholic governess, Madame de Curton, when she came to power. A holdover from the days of Henri and Diane, Madame de Curton provided Margot with the affection she craved and earned her young charge’s love and trust; naturally, she encouraged the girl to adopt her own religious beliefs. From Madame de Curton, strong-willed, passionate Marguerite learned to embrace Catholicism and develop a
spirituality that would prove to be deep, genuine, and unchanging—and, as such, a problem for her mother.

N
O SOONER HAD
C
ATHERINE
successfully maneuvered herself into the regency than she discovered how difficult it was going to be to hold on to it. To placate Antoine, she had been forced to make good on her promise to release the prince of Condé from prison, and once his brother was safely away from the court Antoine suddenly awoke to the fact that he had voluntarily surrendered his legal right to the highest office in France to a foreign-born, middle-aged woman whose only allies were the chancellor, L’Hôspital, and the admiral, Coligny, two men of significantly lower birth than he. With considerable prompting from his brother, Condé, who had emerged from his brush with the death penalty more determined than ever to take power in the cause of the Huguenots, Antoine demanded the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, another of Catherine’s promises. This would give him command of the royal army, a position currently held by the duke of Guise.

The duke of Guise was naturally loath to hand over so critical a resource as the nation’s fighting force to someone whose younger brother was the acknowledged head of the French Protestants and who (despite Catherine’s insistence on the kiss of peace) might use the troops against him and Catholics in general. He adamantly refused to resign the post. Additionally, there was the small problem that the royal government was completely bankrupt and that when Catherine tried to solicit funds from the kingdom’s representative assembly, the Estates General, they not only declined to provide the necessary money but also
negated her claim
to the regency altogether, throwing their support behind Antoine instead. Even her son Charles, in whose name she governed, managed to humiliate the queen mother during those first few critical months in office. As the great crown of France was lowered onto his brow at his coronation, hastily arranged for May 15, 1561, at the cathedral at Reims,
the eleven-year-old burst into tears, crying out that it was “
too heavy
.”

Not a good omen.

But Catherine still had what she considered to be her trump card—the convocation of the all-important general council, which, she was convinced, would resolve the kingdom’s religious differences. The conference was scheduled to begin at the end of July in the town of Poissy, about fifteen miles northwest of Paris. Civil unrest rose precipitously in the months preceding the event, which would be known as the Colloquy of Poissy. The violence was perpetrated by both sides. “
In twenty cities
, or about that number, the godly [Huguenots] have been slaughtered by raging mobs,” Calvin noted grimly to his chief disciple, Théodore Beza, in a letter written in May 1561. In Provence, enraged Protestants ransacked Catholic churches and destroyed relics in retaliation. The court itself was divided just as bitterly between the Catholic faction, represented by the Guises, and the Huguenot party, which looked for leadership to Coligny and the prince of Condé and to a lesser extent Antoine (or at least to Antoine’s wife, Jeanne, a much more formidable personality than her husband).

For Catherine, this was an easy choice. Coligny was helpful and respectful, and he wanted her to remain in power. Antoine listened to him and became much more malleable in his demands. The Guises, on the other hand, had soon recovered from the setback she had given them when Francis II died and were rapidly becoming their old arrogant, insufferable, ambitious selves. When they saw their influence ebbing, they gathered their allies against her and went behind her back to complain to the king of Spain and the pope. Catherine was forced to defend herself in a letter to her daughter Elizabeth. Decades of pent-up fury burst forth in this communiqué. “
I want to tell you plainly
what is the truth, that all this trouble has been for no other cause except for the hate which this entire realm has for the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise,” the queen mother fumed. “You know how they treated me during the time of
the late King, your brother… if they had been able to do it, they would have appointed themselves to power and would have left me to one side.” Antoine got his lieutenant-generalship, and the Guises quit the court in disgust.