The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  It was a cunning move, for by seeming to compromise with Coligny’s (and Catherine’s) more tolerant position, the cardinal won agreement on the all-important point that whoever took up arms in the cause of religion must be prosecuted. And no sooner had this rule been established than the Guises sprung their trap. On the final day of the assembly one of the prince of Condé’s servants, having been previously suspected and kept under surveillance, was captured and brought to Fontainebleau with documents incriminating both his master and Antoine de Bourbon as leading conspirators in a new revolt planned to take place in Lyon. The duke of Guise laid this evidence before the king and the queen mother like a maître d’ presenting a particularly large and unpleasant bill and demanded that both the king of Navarre and his younger brother be summoned to court and arrested for treason.

  The stratagem worked. Both Francis and Catherine were shocked and indignant, particularly as a Protestant insurrection did materialize in Lyon soon after the Guises made this disclosure. The court again summoned Antoine and the prince of Condé. “If he [Antoine] refuses to obey, I am capable of teaching him that I am King,” hissed Francis. To allay suspicions and ensure that this time the wayward conspirators accepted her son’s invitation, Catherine dissembled. The queen mother affectionately entreated Antoine and his younger brother to hurry to Orléans for a family visit. “You cannot arrive soon enough to please me,” she cajoled.

  Antoine, caught, sought frantically for a way out. Remaining at home was no longer an option as word filtered south that the Guises had amassed a large army and had also recruited their Catholic ally, Philip II, king of Spain (who always had his eye on Navarre anyway), to send additional troops to be used against him. Antoine, never much of a fighter, was certainly in no position to wage a two-front war. He was advised by a trusted emissary that the best policy would be for him and his brother to go to Orléans, where the court was then in residence, and for both of them to humbly refute the charges and then throw themselves upon the mercy of the king. It was implied that if this was done quickly they would be forgiven. Antoine seized on this (as it turned out) not particularly good advice, and he and his brother arrived at court on October 30, whereupon the prince of Condé was immediately imprisoned pending trial. Antoine only escaped the same fate because he denied the charges so vehemently that Francis backed down, prompting the cardinal of Lorraine to moan that the young king “is the most cowardly soul there ever was!”

  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.

  THERE 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.* 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.

  3

  The Queen and the Colloquy

  It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  THE 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.*

  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 strong; he eats and drinks very little and a
s 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.