The Rival Queens (7 page)

With the departure of the acknowledged head of the Catholic party, the Protestants gained a degree of influence over the royal family completely out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. The Huguenot leadership could hardly believe its luck. The reform movement had become fashionable! A number of the queen mother’s ladies-in-waiting openly avowed the new religion. Protestant preaching was allowed at court, Coligny was continually at the side of the young Charles IX, and Huguenots were admitted to the royal council. Catherine herself gave every indication that she was actively considering conversion and was sufficiently confident of success at Poissy to bait the duke of Guise in his own castle during an impromptu visit a short time prior to the scheduled colloquy. “
What would you do
if the King my son were to change his religion?” she inquired coyly of her adversary. “Madame, consider well what you do, you may meet with some surprises,” the duke answered coldly in return.

Catherine’s flirtation with Protestantism was so pronounced that it penetrated even the children’s quarters, where it made a strong impression on eight-year-old Marguerite. “
The whole Court was infected
with heresy, about the time of the Conference of Poissy,” Margot later wrote in her memoirs. “It was with great difficulty that I resisted and preserved myself from a change of religion at that time. Many ladies and lords belonging to the Court strove to convert me to Huguenotism.” Her older brother Henri was her chief tormentor. “He often snatched my ‘Hours’ out of my hand, and flung them into the fire, giving me Psalm Books and books of Huguenot prayers, insisting on my using them,” she remembered. “
My brother added threats
, and said the Queen my mother would give orders that I should be whipped.” But Margot stood up to him. “When he used those menaces, I… would reply to him, ‘Well, get me whipped if
you can; I will suffer whipping, and even death, rather than be damned,’ ” she wrote.

These words would prove prophetic. In her stubbornness to yield on an issue that touched her core, eight-year-old Marguerite voiced the resistance of the vast majority of the inhabitants of France to Catherine’s more cynical attitude that deeply held beliefs could be readily altered by committee. Or, as a Venetian diplomat present at the royal court would later note of the queen mother in a somewhat bemused tone of frustration, “
I do not believe
that her majesty understands what the word ‘dogma’ means.”

A
T
C
ATHERINE’S INSISTENCE, THE
colloquy of Poissy began with a private meeting in her chambers to which the chief spokesmen for each side—the cardinal of Lorraine for the Catholics and Théodore Beza, Calvin’s trusted lieutenant, for the Huguenots—were summoned. As a result of her initial triumph in the days just prior to Francis II’s death, when in her pursuit of the regency she had managed by similar face-to-face diplomacy to steamroll over both Antoine and the unsuspecting Guises, Catherine had developed a great faith in her own powers of persuasion. For the rest of her life she was convinced that she could bend opposing viewpoints to her will if only she could get the people holding them alone in a room with her, a position not always supported by reality.

This was the first time the two men had met, and Beza, who believed himself on the verge of converting the entire French royal family to Protestantism and who consequently had everything to lose if he seemed unreasonable in Catherine’s presence, in particular was on his guard. When the cardinal of Lorraine interrogated him on some of the more divisive issues separating the two faiths, he answered so blandly and nonconfrontationally that his adversary was deceived into believing that the differences between them were not substantive after all. The cardinal was pleasantly surprised to find in his opposite number not the doctrinaire fire breather he had expected but a slick politician like himself. Here was a Huguenot he could
work with! At the end of the audience, to Catherine’s immense satisfaction, the pair even shook hands, and the cardinal became expansive. “
You will find that I am not as black
as they make me out to be,” he confided affably to Beza.

But it turned out that Beza had merely been saving himself for the main event. He was far more of a zealot than the cardinal realized, a disposition that became immediately apparent the next morning, when he stood up before the main body of the assembly and delivered the keynote address outlining the Huguenot agenda. Although he did his best to stress areas of potential agreement between the two religions, he was unable to contain himself when it came to the subject of the observance of Mass and slipped in a direct barb at his Catholic adversaries. “
We say that His [Christ’s] body
is as far removed from the bread and wine as is heaven from earth,” Beza explained helpfully.

If he had suddenly turned a blazing scarlet from head to toe and sported pointy ears, horns, a tail, and a pitchfork, Beza could not have shocked his audience more thoroughly. The aged cardinal of Tournon shuddered so violently that he nearly had a stroke on the spot. Even Catherine had a sense that this was perhaps taking the notion of reform a shade too far—the outraged cries of “
Blasphemy! Blasphemy!
” that greeted this unfortunate pronouncement no doubt alerted her to the problem—and she made haste to distance herself and her son the king from so revolutionary a perspective.

But the damage was done. Although the participants would continue to meet for several weeks, with first Protestants and then Catholics taking turns constructively pointing out the hideous errors inherent in each other’s doctrines, the experiment in finding middle ground was in fact over the instant these artless words dropped from Beza’s mouth. Only Catherine, who had too much invested in this strategy to abandon it, failed to recognize this.

It is important to understand that the modern concept of tolerance—the idea that people of differing religious beliefs can live side by side in peace within a single kingdom—did not exist in the
sixteenth century. It was assumed by all—and this included the queen mother, who was nothing if not conventional—that
one
religion would eventually predominate and the worshippers of the losing sect would be forced more or less into hiding. They would not necessarily be sought out for persecution if they agreed to practice their rites secretly, but by not adapting to the beliefs of the monarchy, followers of the opposing denomination would tacitly accept a form of second-class citizenship. This was already the case in Elizabeth I’s England, where that portion of the population who still clung to Catholicism knew to do so in private and comprehended fully that the price of maintaining their faith meant exclusion from power.

But Elizabeth was only able to rule in this fashion because her father, Henry VIII, a
very
strong king, had paved the way for her. When Henry decided to put himself rather than the pope at the head of the Church of England, he shrewdly recognized the need for ruthlessness. He forced both the clergy and all his courtiers to submit to his will and accede to a series of royal acts, and if anyone rebelled—as Sir Thomas More so famously did in 1535—he destroyed them. He further smashed the power of the opposition by looting the monasteries and appropriating their wealth. Then, during his short reign, Henry’s young son, Edward VI, fell under the influence of his Cambridge tutor and adopted an even more radical form of Protestantism. Although Elizabeth’s older half sister, Mary I, nicknamed Bloody Mary for her habit of burning the reformers, tried to reinstate Roman Catholicism, she died too soon to overturn her father and brother’s legacy. By the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne, the population of England had had twenty-five years to get used to the idea of Protestantism, and the English version was an accepted form of worship.

This was most definitely not the case in France. The Huguenots might have made inroads into the aristocracy and the royal court, but they were hugely outnumbered in the ordinary population. The Guises were well aware of this discrepancy. Unbeknownst to
Catherine, they had taken the hiatus offered by Poissy to quietly conduct a house-by-house count of religious preferences and discovered that for every one hundred Catholics living in Paris there were only three Protestants. Fueled by this evidence, and by his conviction that Catherine intended to maintain power by relying on her allies the Huguenots and converting—“What would you do if the King my son changed his religion?”—the duke of Guise answered her by launching a daring two-part plan: first he would kidnap her younger son Henri in order to maintain him in the Catholic faith and set him up against Charles IX as the legitimate sovereign of France; and second he would separate Antoine, who according to tradition and the Estates General was the legitimate regent, from his Huguenot allies and in so doing isolate the queen mother.

T
HE SCHEME TO ABDUCT
Catherine’s middle son, Henri, was relatively straightforward. On the day before the conference was set to end, one of the duke of Guise’s closest allies took ten-year-old Henri aside and asked him if he was a Huguenot or a Catholic. This turned out to be a difficult question. Henri wasn’t sure. To be on the safe side, though, he piped up that he believed he was whatever his mother was. His interrogator admonished him that the Huguenots were about to take over the kingdom, and that once they did Antoine and his brother the prince of Condé were intending to assassinate Henri and his brother Charles IX and set themselves up to rule in their place. The Catholic ally advised the boy that, luckily, the duke of Guise was on his side and was willing to rescue him from this cruel fate by whisking him away to the safety of the duke’s castle in Lorraine. He then indicated that further instructions would be forthcoming and warned Henri not to mention the intrigue to anyone. “
If they ask you what it is
that I have been talking to you about, say that I was talking to you about the comedies,” the conspirator recommended.

Having laid the groundwork by frightening the young prince, the duke of Guise followed up by sending in his ace in the hole to
close the deal: his eldest son, who (to the despondency of the many future historians attempting to explain these incidents to the general public) was also named Henri. The duke of Guise’s Henri was twelve years old.
^*
He had known Catherine’s sons almost since infancy and took his lessons with them. Unlike his royal companions, however, the duke of Guise’s Henri was tall and healthy, and even at this early age his face and physique gave promise of the devastatingly good looks for which he would be known later in life. Because he was so well made, he was a better athlete than either of Catherine’s sons, a fact of which he was also aware. Although he knew to show deference to the king, he was somewhat less successful when it came to masking his superiority in front of the king’s younger brother, who was, after all, only ten. “
I hear that the Queen means
to send you… into Lorraine, to a very beautiful château, to take the air,” the duke of Guise’s Henri began knowingly after cornering his prey and making sure no one else was listening. (The allusion to the queen mother was a coded reference to the initial conversation with the Catholic ally.) “So make up your mind, if you wish to travel with us, we shall treat you well.” Intimidated, Catherine’s Henri managed to stammer out, “
I do not think
the Queen my mother wishes me to leave the King.” But the older boy, who was under strict orders from his father to prevail, brooked no dissent. “
You will be carried off at midnight
and passed out of a window near the gate of the park, and then you will be placed in a coach,” he instructed. “You will be in Lorraine before anyone knows that you are gone.”

This did not sound like such a great plan to the younger Henri. Although he did not have the courage to confront his schoolmate directly, he was sufficiently alarmed at the prospect of being bundled out the window like a basket of laundry and relayed to a remote
location that he took action. Despite the enjoinder for secrecy, he went straight to his mother and tattled.

Catherine was incensed, but as the duke of Guise, who had taken the precaution of using surrogates throughout, categorically denied any involvement, there was not much she could do about it. Nor could she follow him when he left the court soon afterward, as it would have taken an army to pursue so powerful an antagonist to his home duchy of Lorraine, where he would most certainly be well protected. The queen mother had to content herself with having her son repeat his version of events in front of the royal council. Venting her feelings in a letter to the king of Spain under the pretext of asking for political advice in handling the matter, she again railed against the treachery of the duke of Guise.

The revelation of this intrigue against her and her son only deepened the queen mother’s already intense hatred of the Guises and confirmed her decision to maintain power by allying herself and her family with the far more deferential Coligny and his loyal band of Huguenots. But her new confederates labored under a significant handicap: although many aristocrats such as the prince of Condé and Antoine’s wife, Jeanne d’Albret, had already openly converted, technically Protestantism was illegal in France. Its worshippers could not attend services in public or purchase or build their own churches. It would be difficult to rule in company with—let alone convert to—an outlaw sect. To remedy this predicament, Catherine called for yet another conclave, this one comprised of regional leaders, the royal council, and the highest-born princes. The purpose of this new assembly, which convened on January 3, 1562, was to strengthen the political standing of her new allies—and by extension her own position—by officially legitimizing the Protestant religion in France.

With the Catholic majority again hugely underrepresented and deprived of its most influential and charismatic leadership (the Guise family pointedly refused to participate), the Huguenot faction held sway. As a result, the majority of the delegates favored implementing
policies far more radical than the queen mother had anticipated; for example, they voted to wrest a portion of the existing churches away from the Catholics and award them instead to the Protestants. Catherine, who understood that such an extreme measure would only provoke more violence and make it that much more difficult for her to rule, refused to support this action and spoke out against it. The queen mother was much lauded by the Catholics for this response, which is ironic, as it was only through her aggressive promotion of their cause that the Huguenots had been encouraged to even dream of such an ordinance in the first place.