The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  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.

  NO SOONER HAD CATHERINE 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.

  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 pronounc
ed 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.”

  AT CATHERINE’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.

  THE 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 Char
les 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.”