The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  The field having been so helpfully cleared of rivals, the two eldest Guise brothers proceeded to split the government of France between them. The duke of Guise, in his capacity as the soldier of the family, took over the management of the kingdom’s military affairs, while his brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, who was very good with money and property, having applied himself assiduously throughout his career to the collection of bribes and preferments, shouldered the responsibility for fiscal policy. The late king’s ruinous wars against the empire had left the treasury heavily burdened with debt, so the cardinal prudently instituted a strict austerity program, cutting back on military wages and back pay, calling in long-term debts, foreclosing on properties, and eliminating royal subsidies and grants to various recipients. He also significantly stepped up the campaign against heresy, which in this case meant rooting out and exterminating the Protestant Huguenots, building on an ideology initiated by Henri and Diane.

  It is a sad political truth that reducing wages and incomes during a period of challenging economic conditions attributable to the lingering effects of a previous war tends to make people grumpy, and grumpy people are more likely to find fault. The cardinal very quickly found himself the most detested man in the kingdom. Most of those affected by the cuts assumed that the monies due them had been diverted not to the accounts of the royal treasury but to the pockets of the avaricious cardinal. They called him Tiger of France and rearranged the letters of his name in clever anagrams such as “Raked up from the gold of Henri” and “A bold thief hides himself.” Angry retainers converged on the capital seeking redress. “The court,” the Spanish ambassador observed, “will go ten miles from here to Amboise, the King meanwhile hunting for twelve or fifteen days to escape the importunities of captains and others, to whom one owes much and does not pay.” Adding to the general dissatisfaction with the cardinal’s policies was the unfortunate tendency of the new regime to publicly execute people on a monthly basis. “One is continually burning someone of the lower class,” the Florentine envoy complained glumly.

  At this stage, by best estimates, only a very small segment—less than 3 percent—of the population of France had been persuaded to accept Protestantism, but that 3 percent included some very high-ranking members of the nobility. In particular, Antoine de Bourbon’s wife, Jeanne d’Albret, and his younger brother, the prince of Condé, were known to favor the Huguenot cause. Unlike the Protestants of Germany, who were inspired by the life and work of Martin Luther, Jeanne, the prince, and the other Huguenots were guided by the significantly more severe Church reforms advocated by John Calvin, a Frenchman then living in exile in Geneva, who in addition to rejecting the sacrament of Mass and insisting that the service be conducted in the vernacular preached the doctrine of predestination. Even Antoine seems to have toyed with the idea of converting to Protestantism (although at the first sign of disapproval by the court he hurriedly changed his mind).

  Another important recruit to the Calvinist movement was Gaspard de Coligny, who held the title of Admiral of France, which gave him control over the northern coastline and the administration of the French navy. Like the duke of Guise, Coligny was one of the kingdom’s most experienced and successful warriors. He embodied the spirit of the professional soldier. During a campaign, Coligny was involved in every aspect of command. He fought harder, and slept less, than any man under his authority. It was Coligny who penned the ordinances governing military behavior, who set the punishment for every infraction from brawling to desertion, and who insisted that the civilian population be protected against the time-honored practice of plunder and violence commonly and enthusiastically perpetrated by the national armed forces. He was related to Antoine de Bourbon’s family through marriage; his niece was wedded to the prince of Condé. The admiral had grown up with the duke of Guise and had formerly been one of his closest friends, but the pair had subsequently fallen out over ambition and religion, these two concepts being pretty much indistinguishable at the royal court during this period.

  The furor over the government austerity program gave the Huguenot faction the opening they needed to contest the Guises’ leadership. With financial help from Elizabeth I—“Now is the time to spend money and it will never have been better spent,” declared the English ambassador, Throckmorton, in a letter to his sovereign—a daring plan to murder the Guises and take over the court was conceived. Bands of armed Huguenots, supported in many cases by formerly loyal French soldiers who had been deprived of wages and back pay by the cardinal of Lorraine, were set to converge on the royal hunting lodge at Amboise, where the king and his court had taken refuge.

  Unfortunately for the conspirators, their plan was betrayed almost from the beginning. Espionage was so prevalent in France that it might well have been considered the national pastime. One of the duke of Guise’s servants bribed an informant who in turn alerted the family to the plot. The brothers took appropriate precautions, which naturally caught the attention of the spies for the opposing party. The Guises “are in such feare… [that they] are in night garded with pistoleers and men in arms,” fretted Throckmorton on March 7, 1560, some two weeks before the main attack was launched. Adding to the eventual disaster was the total lack of skill and organization displayed by the Huguenot forces. There appears to have been no active chain of command or communication between regiments. They simply straggled along in groups, some as small as two dozen or so, others numbering in the hundreds, making no effort whatever to disguise their movements.

  The first set wandered into Amboise on March 13, were quickly rounded up, and a few of its members selected for interrogation. Francis himself questioned them, offering them coins in exchange for information. Under this happy stimulus, the former malcontents volunteered all sorts of useful intelligence, including how many Huguenot troops were estimated overall and when they might be expected to arrive. As a consequence, most of the rebels were picked off in the forests surrounding the palace before they even had a chance to prepare for action, and the one battle that did take place, on March 20, was a complete rout, owing to the superiority of the royal army. “The Duke [of Guise] himself set out with a Train of Noblemen and other Servants of the Household to reconnoiter the Enemy, whom he found without a Head, and in such a Consternation, that most of the poor Country Fellows, not knowing what to do, threw away some old rusty Arms which they had, and begg’d for Mercy,” observed a member of the French court.*

  The Guise brothers, who understandably did not appreciate having been singled out for assassination in this way, took their revenge on those who were implicated in the scheme or who had had the misfortune of being captured rather than killed in battle. Dozens were hanged, and as many were sewn into sacks and drowned in the river. Those of higher rank were subjected to show trials before being condemned to death. The entire court gathered to watch the mass execution, by decapitation, of fifty-two men who had been identified as the principal seditionists. “I know nothing about disputations,” the duke of Guise was reported to have observed acidly, “but I fully understand the cutting off of heads.”

  Catherine’s active relationship with Coligny dates from this period. Clearly concerned that events were reflecting badly on her son’s regime, the queen mother was as helpless to influence the Guises as she had been during her husband’s reign. In the one instance where it was recorded that Catherine did lower herself to beg for the life of a prisoner, she was curtly rebuffed. The admiral, who seems not to have had advance notice of the Huguenot conspiracy (and it is difficult to believe that he would have countenanced so amateurish a military operation if he had been in on the plot), was aghast at the degree of bloodshed. In what would evolve into one of history’s grimmest jests, it was Coligny who, on the lookout for allies, first put it into Catherine’s head that she should be running the government.

  There is apparently no more efficacious tonic for a grief-stricken widow than the prospect of accumulating political power. No sooner had the queen mother absorbed Colig
ny’s advice than she left off crying, reverted to her normal speaking voice, and began inserting herself cautiously—Catherine was nothing if not cautious—into the policy-making process. At first she confined herself merely to the collection of information. What, exactly, did the Huguenots want? Were they advocating treason against her son the king, as the Guises insisted? Or were the Guises alone to blame for the crisis within the kingdom?

  She had her answer from, among others, the royal chancellor, Michel de L’Hôspital, who himself leaned toward the Protestant beliefs, albeit in a more moderate form. The vast majority of Huguenots supported the king and the royal family and wished to live in peace, he explained. The problem was that the Protestant movement had been more or less hijacked by extremists who desired political power. This radical element was using the general unhappiness with the Guises’ governance, and especially with their vicious policy of persecution, to forward their own ambitions. L’Hôspital’s solution was to convene a general council charged with reconciling the Catholic and Protestant doctrines—something that could easily be done, he argued—and thereby deprive this opportunistic minority of its principal grievance and, by extension, its support. “Till that is arranged we must try to deal gently with one another,” he advised.

  The notion that the religious conflict could be resolved simply by calling a general council appealed greatly to Catherine. Despite having been brought up in a convent, the queen mother was not well educated when it came to religious doctrine, nor was she particularly devout. When it came to matters of faith, although she of course conformed outwardly to convention, Catherine held no strong convictions. If convention changed—if, for example, to appease the Protestants, the service was in the future to be conducted in French rather than Latin—well, this seemed a small price to pay for peace.

  Moreover, L’Hôspital’s idea had the advantage of widespread support among moderates on both sides of the issue. Even the cardinal of Lorraine professed himself amenable to referring responsibility for solving the religious controversy to a general council, expressing the sentiment that he “would give his life to bring these poor lost sheep back to the fold” (although not too loudly, lest one of the Huguenots take him up on it). There was also precedent to suggest that such councils could be effective—the German states had recently resolved their disputes over doctrine in this manner. Of course, the German reformists were Lutherans and the Huguenots were Calvinists, but that distinction was not particularly well understood by the Catholic majority at the royal court, who found most of the reformist demands incomprehensible anyway and so tended to lump all Protestants together.

  With the unquestioning zeal of the political neophyte, Catherine latched on to the council idea. Working with Coligny and L’Hôspital, she began bustling around between the various factions at court, urging the measure forward and mediating between the hostile parties. Although she had occasionally intervened in government matters while Henri was still alive, it had always been at her husband’s behest, and she had in effect been acting as his surrogate. This new lobbying represented Catherine’s first independent foray into national politics, and she discovered how much she enjoyed it. She was also remarkably successful, an outcome that she naturally attributed to her diplomatic skills but which in reality had far more to do, once again, with her perceived lack of ambition and reputation for humble docility. The queen mother had been such an unassuming, indeed almost invisible, fixture at court for so long that it was simply taken for granted that she would remain so. There could be no harm in listening to short, round, motherly Catherine, as she could be pushed aside or easily forced to back down if necessary.

  And so they did listen to her, and by degrees she won over even the Guises, at least in theory, to this plan. A preliminary assembly that would formally introduce the idea of calling a national conclave to address the religious conflict was scheduled for Fontainebleau in August. In the meantime, to prevent the toxic atmosphere within the kingdom from further deteriorating (until it could be alleviated altogether by the magic pill of the general council), it was decided to call a halt to religious repression, which seemed to be the cause of all the unpleasantness anyway. This expedient would have the additional advantage of separating L’Hôspital’s “right” sort of Huguenots—the benign, law-abiding ones—from his “wrong” sort of Huguenots, the radical ones who insisted on noisily practicing their religion in public, proselytizing, and generally challenging the status quo. The troublemakers could then be more easily identified, rounded up, and charged with the sedition of which they were no doubt guilty.

  This policy of trying to distinguish between private (acceptable) and public (treasonable) religious dissent made perfect sense to Catherine because it was precisely the way her father-in-law, François I, had dealt with pious divisions during his reign. So long as the Protestants had behaved themselves and did not flaunt their views, François, a pragmatist, had been willing to look the other way. After all, his own sister, Marguerite, had been one of the leading figures in the early days of the Huguenot movement. Far from disowning her, François had attempted to protect Marguerite as much as he could, and she, understanding this, had always taken pains to be discreet. It was only when the dissenters crossed an invisible line of conduct that François took action—as when, in the first year of Catherine’s married life, a group of radical Protestants had distributed a militant broadsheet and had even had the gall to attach one of these obnoxious handouts to the door of the king’s bedroom at Amboise while François was in residence. Catherine could not have helped but remember this incident, which was instantly labeled treason, because it had unleashed all the king’s fury. There had been public burnings of Protestants for months afterward. Then everything quieted down again, and those reformists who had survived the persecution took care to keep their religious opinions to themselves. The fact that the Affair of the Placards, as this episode was called, had occurred a quarter century earlier, when the reform movement was still in its infancy, and that in the interim the Huguenots had become far more organized and committed was perhaps not sufficiently appreciated by the queen mother.

  As it was, Catherine, proud of her political accomplishment, blithely issued invitations to all the most important noblemen in the kingdom to come to the assembly in Fontainebleau in August, which, as a signal of her enthusiasm, was to be held in her chamber. The guest list of course included Antoine de Bourbon and his far more assertive younger brother, Louis de Bourbon, the prince of Condé, which was exactly what the Guises had hoped for and why they had so suddenly and inexplicably yielded to Catherine’s influence and played along with her plan.

  WHILE THE QUEEN MOTHER had been occupied with overcoming objections to a general council, the cardinal of Lorraine and his brother the duke of Guise had been busy furthering their own agenda. Unbeknownst to Catherine, Catholic spies had uncovered evidence strongly linking the prince of Condé, and (less obviously but still damagingly) Antoine de Bourbon himself, to a new Huguenot plan for an outbreak of civil disobedience. Thus, under the policy of limited religious tolerance urged by Catherine and accepted by the cardinal of Lorraine for just this reason, both men could now be charged with treason for breaking the peace and, if convicted, sentenced to death, thereby conveniently ridding the Guises of the greatest threat to their political power. The only question had been how to lure the king of Navarre and the prince out of their home territory in the south of France, where they were safe, to Paris or some other Guise-friendly royal location, where they could be outnumbered and arrested. Catherine’s August Fontainebleau assembly provided just the excuse the Guises had been looking for, particularly as the summons to attend issued from her and not from them.

  Antoine de Bourbon might have been vain, weak, and untrustworthy, but he was not a complete fool. Upon receiving Catherine’s invitation to the assembly at Fontainebleau, Antoine, his wife, Jeanne d’Albret, and his brother the prince of Condé all instantly suspected an ambush. To disobey a royal summons wa
s tantamount to a confession of guilt, so Antoine, responding by letter to both the king and the queen mother, prevaricated. The rumors of civil unrest resulting from religious differences were spurious, Antoine assured the queen mother. He had investigated the matter thoroughly and was satisfied with the obedience and loyalty of the king’s subjects. Consequently there was no reason for him to attend the conclave.

  Catherine, forced to hold the meeting she had taken such pains to organize without two of the kingdom’s key participants, was furious at the snub. “If they see that affairs are going badly, why do they not come and prove it, so that measures may be taken, instead of provoking so many troubles by their absence?” she grumbled.

  The Guises did not press the issue but allowed the assembly at Fontainebleau, which began on August 21, 1560, to unfold as the queen mother had planned. When, early in the proceedings, Coligny unexpectedly asked the king to allow the Huguenots to practice their religion in public places, he gave the cardinal of Lorraine the opening he had been looking for. Although he did not go so far as to agree to Coligny’s proposal—that would have been tantamount to legitimizing the Protestants and putting the religion on the same footing as Catholicism—the cardinal nonetheless demonstrated a sudden, very surprising degree of conciliation. Experience had taught him that it was pointless to try to bully misguided but peaceful worshippers out of their heresy through extermination and persecution, proclaimed the man who had spent the last few months doing just that. These people should be coaxed back into the fold through reason and enlightenment. Only those of the king’s subjects who resorted to violence to try to force the government to accept their religious views should be punished, the cardinal enunciated carefully.