The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  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.

  Taking over their rivals’ churches would only have been icing on the cake anyway, for on January 17 the Protestants got what they had come for: the assembly issued the Edict of Toleration, by which for the first time the Crown of France granted the Huguenots the legal right to establish public places of worship in the kingdom and to travel to and from religious services without fear of harassment or persecution. And although Catherine insisted that the edict also specify that reparation must be made for any Catholic property stolen or destroyed during the unrest of the previous years and that Protestants should not be allowed to set up new meeting houses inside the walls of predominantly Catholic cities, her subjects were not deceived by these concessions. This was not toleration. This was choosing sides.

  It was inevitable that so radical a change would be tested on the ground in towns and villages all over France, and that faced with the reality of hundreds of Huguenots meeting publicly, preaching in French, and singing hymns as loudly as they could, the traditional Catholic majority would mount a challenge to the new policy. It was similarly obvious that the candidate most likely to lead the pushback would be the duke of Guise. And yet the duke initially tried not to interfere. After the bungled kidnapping attempt, he had retired to his estates in eastern France and attempted to play the role of a nonpartisan, immensely wealthy landowner. He rode out and surveyed his estates. He looked over the accounts. He went hunting. He visited friends. He hosted a small family party in honor of his forty-third birthday. He seemed to have sworn off politics. “My talk is of nothing but dogs and hawks,” he reported with resolute if somewhat resigned virtue in a letter to a friend.

  Then he went to visit his mother, Antoinette.

  The duke of Guise might have been feared throughout France for his warlike demeanor, but he was a rank amateur compared to his mother. An austere widow of sixty-eight, Antoinette ran the ducal finances, raised ten grandchildren, terrorized her various daughters-in-law, and presided over an annual family meeting at which she ordered her grown sons around as though they were still in swaddling clothes. Her eldest son, the duke of Guise, was no exception. Antoinette, a devout Catholic, was having none of this newfangled reformed religious toleration business. Was her eldest son aware, she demanded, that the Protestants had moved into the neighboring town of Vassy and were brazenly conducting their heretical meetings within earshot of the local church? That they rang the bell to call their worshippers to sermon at unauthorized hours? That the local authorities did nothing to deter them? That if they weren’t stopped the Huguenots might spread their vile doctrine to her very doorstep? Must she, who had borne a dozen children and all the commensurate cares of life, be burdened with this filth in her old age? What kind of a son was he, anyway? Go do something about it!

  So he did. He rode into Vassy on March 1, 1562, accompanied by an entourage of two hundred armed knights and found the local Huguenot congregation, numbering some five or six hundred people, including many women and children, conducting its Sunday morning meeting not outside the city walls, as was specified in the Edict of Toleration, but right in town—and, worse, on his property in one of his very own buildings, which they had appropriated without his permission, an unimaginable insult. An altercation between the duke’s people and the Protestants promptly ensued. Being for the most part unarmed, the Huguenots had to improvise. Rocks were thrown. Members of the lower classes were not supposed to throw stones at their superiors from the upper classes. The duke’s soldiers retaliated by shooting and stabbing as many of the dissenters as they could (which was quite a few, as their opponents were trapped inside the building attending a church service), accompanied by rousing shouts of “Kill! Kill! By God’s death kill these Huguenots!”

  An hour later the Massacre of Vassy, as this infamous incident would later be dubbed, was over. Fifty Huguenots lay dead, another two hundred were wounded, and a flaming torch had been thrust into the tinderbox of religious controversy that would blaze up into the bonfire of the Wars of Religion.

  4

  A Short War…

  A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study, but war and its order and discipline, for that is the only art that is necessary to one who commands.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  FUELED BY THE PERVASIVE ATMOSPHERE of fear and mistrust, news of the slaughter at Vassy spread quickly through France. In response, the prince of Condé and the other Huguenot noblemen called for their coreligionists, most of whom resided south of the Loire River, to arm themselves and prepare for civil war. The die thus cast, the duke of Guise followed suit, raised an army, and marched on Paris, where the gates of the city were thrown open to him and he was treated as the reincarnation of Charlemagne by the grateful Catholic population. “All the Chief Citizens went out to meet him, and congratulate his Arrival, and upon his Entrance into the City, the People received him with great Acclamations, and some particular Marks of Honour… which pleased the Duke exceedingly, and gave his Family no small Hopes of Increasing their Power,” noted a highly placed official of the court. Nor did the inhabitants of the capital confine their appreciation to ceremonial outpourings of affec
tion. City officials informed the duke of Guise that he could count on them to muster twenty thousand Catholic soldiers and two million livres in support of a war against the Edict of Toleration and the Protestants.

  Unnerved by the swift success of the Guises’ revolt, Catherine appealed to her Huguenot allies. She wrote in secret to the prince of Condé, entreating him to “save the [royal] children, the mother [herself] and the realm” (by which she meant that she wanted him to take back Paris from the duke of Guise), adding that “she was not more certain of herself than she was of him and that he could look upon her as if she was his own mother.” Since it wouldn’t do to have the news get out that the regent had ordered an attack on her own subjects, Catherine thought to add a telling postscript to this document. “Burn this instantly!” she instructed.*

  But with the Huguenots so outnumbered in the capital, the prince of Condé “could no more fight Guise in Paris than a fly could attack an elephant,” as one of his own military commanders snorted. It was decided instead to fall back on the walled city of Orléans and establish this outpost as the Huguenot base. Coligny wrote at once to Catherine and recommended that she and her son the king drop everything and flee to Orléans for their own protection. Everyone understood that the duke of Guise would march on Fontainebleau, where the court was then in residence, and forcibly remove the young king to Paris so that any subsequent action taken against the Protestants would appear to be by royal command.

  But by this time the queen mother had discovered that the duke of Guise had achieved yet another disconcerting victory, this one of a political nature—he had induced the almost comically irresolute Antoine to abandon the cause advanced by his younger brother and Coligny and come over to the Catholics. This was achieved with the aid of the king of Spain, who was at this point openly supporting the Guises and who had been encouraged to bribe Antoine with the possibility of the return of that portion of his home kingdom of Navarre currently under Spanish control. Without Antoine’s active acquiescence, Catherine knew she could not hope to remain regent; the Estates General would without question endorse Antoine should he seek to challenge her position. The king of Navarre’s alliance with the Guises was the first step in an overall strategy that the queen mother understood would end with her inevitable disenfranchisement.

  And now, seemingly for the first time, the folly inherent in the ambitious program she had championed, and the risks she had incurred as a result, broke upon Catherine. Her alliance with the reform movement, meant to isolate her political enemies and keep her in control of the government, had actually served to empower the Guises and jeopardize her position. For if, as Coligny urged, she and Charles IX openly split with the Catholic majority and abandoned Fontainebleau to seek the protection of the Huguenots in Orléans, the duke of Guise would undoubtedly pursue her there with a substantial army. There would be a great battle or a siege. If the Huguenots emerged victorious, well and good; but given the strength of the Catholic numbers, that was not an outcome Catherine could depend on. If, on the other hand, Antoine and the Guises won (as the queen mother now understood was likely), she would immediately be removed from power and might even have to answer charges of treason.*

  Her only hope was to try to convince the Guises and their ally Philip II, king of Spain, that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that she had never intended to convert, and that it was in their interest to keep her involved in the government, as only she had enough influence with the Huguenot leadership to avert all-out war. A truce negotiated at her insistence and by her hand was her sole recourse, the one alternative whereby she might yet retain a degree of authority and justify her previous actions. “Peace! Peace!” became the queen mother’s mantra.

  And so she did not flee to Orléans but instead remained with her son and the court. When the duke of Guise and a sizable retinue arrived at Fontainebleau at the end of March and insisted that she and Charles return to Paris, Catherine again relied on her personal negotiating skills and attempted to reason with her nemesis. But the duke of Guise was impervious to her diplomacy and, over the objections and tears of both the twelve-year-old king and his mother, forcibly escorted them to the capital, where they remained under house arrest. Catherine, stripped of all power and once again under the thumb of her archenemy, backpedaled furiously, publicly denying any connection to the Huguenots. “I have been anxious that all the Lords should write to the King of Spain in regard to my attitude toward religion, not that I need any testimony before God nor men in regard to my faith nor my good works, but because of the lies which have been told of me. For I have never changed in deed, will, nor habits, the religion which I have held of forty-three years, and in which I have been baptized and brought up,” she was reduced to imploring pathetically.

  The Huguenots, meanwhile, faced with the prospect of fighting a Guise-led Catholic army augmented by a formidable contingent of Spanish troops and Swiss mercenaries, had turned to Protestant England for aid. Elizabeth I drove a very hard bargain and demanded the port city of Le Havre, in northwest France, in exchange for money and soldiers. This noxious deal, to which the desperate Huguenot ambassadors agreed, devolved into a public relations nightmare, as it forever branded their cause in the minds of Frenchmen with a craven betrayal of sovereignty. By June, bitter fighting had broken out all over the kingdom. “It would be impossible,” one observer reflected sadly, “to tell you what barbarous cruelties are committed by both sides. Where the Huguenot is master, he ruins the images and demolishes the sepulchers and tombs. On the other hand, the Catholic kills, murders, and drowns all those whom he knows to be of that sect, until the rivers overflow with them.”

  One of the earliest casualties of the conflict was Antoine, who was mortally wounded in the fall of 1562 while besieging the city of Rouen. The king of Navarre remained consistently inconsistent even in extremity, being unable to make up his mind whether to die as a Catholic or a Protestant; in the end, just to be on the safe side, he both accepted last rites and confessed to a priest and had his Huguenot physician read to him from the Gospels, a compromise that admirably covered all the bases. He died on November 10, leaving behind his fervidly Protestant widow, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, and an impish, russet-haired eight-year-old son, Henry.

  Despite the loss of Antoine, Rouen fell to the Catholics. Catherine, by now avid to prove her worth—the Guises, fully in control of the government, were already openly considering her removal from office, and there were rumors at court that she would be separated from her children and shipped back to Italy—begged again in the wake of the Protestant defeat to be allowed to negotiate a peaceful settlement.* The queen mother promised again to use her leverage with the Huguenot leadership to convince the Protestants to unilaterally lay down their weapons and withdraw. There being nothing to lose, the duke of Guise shrugged and allowed his prisoner to meet the prince of Condé, who seems to have at first accepted the deal but soon thought better of it and, to Catherine’s bitter disappointment, reneged.* With his reversal the stage was set for a final decisive encounter between the two armies. On December 19, 1562, the warring sides met outside the town of Dreux, about fifty miles west of Paris.

  The armies that clashed in the woods that bleak winter’s day were surprisingly well matched. The Catholic forces held the advantage in cannon and foot soldiers but the Protestant battalion, augmented by German mercenaries paid for with English money, numbered a very respectable twenty thousand and was the superior force in horsemen. Coligny, who despite his official title of admiral was at the head of the cavalry, led charge after charge for the Huguenots with such ferocity that even his opponents’ much-admired Spanish troops turned and fled. The main portion of the Catholic army followed suit, and it seemed that victory was assured, so much so that initial reports filtering back to Paris gave the day to the Protestants. This must have provided Catherine no small satisfaction, because the queen mother, although ostensibly on the side of orthodoxy, could not resist a dig at her Guise
oppressors when presented with the news. “In that case we shall have to learn to say our prayers in French,” she was reported to have observed coolly.

  But Coligny’s triumph was short-lived. His former companion in arms the duke of Guise, who was every bit the admiral’s equal in tactics and valor, had kept his third of the Catholic force hidden behind the trees. When he saw the Huguenot knights turn their horses and break out of formation in an attempt to chase down the retreating Catholic army, leaving their artillery and infantry unprotected, he and his men suddenly appeared at the crest of a hill. “Now, friends, the day is ours!” he cried before thundering down the small slope and into the fray.

  The duke’s strategy worked. Coligny managed to turn his men around and resume fighting, but by that time he had lost his guns and the main portion of his army to the Catholics. The prince of Condé was surrounded and taken prisoner. The slaughter was terrible: eight thousand Frenchmen died in the course of five hours. Meanwhile the Spanish contingent, after its initial disbursement, had regrouped and was threatening to hem in the Protestant cavalry from the other side. The duke of Guise was in his element. “Courage, my friends; he who rallies last bears off the fruits of victory!” he roared as he led his soldiers forward again. Coligny, thinking to save what was left of his force to fight another day, called a retreat and left the Catholics in command of the field.