The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  Catherine trembled. An unequivocal military conquest led by the duke of Guise was the worst possible outcome for the queen mother; it denoted subjugation or banishment as much for her as for the Huguenot leadership. To prevent this eventuality, she pleaded yet again for a negotiated peace, but this time it was to no avail. The duke of Guise, knowing himself to be on the threshold of triumph, ignored her and pushed on to Orléans, the Huguenot stronghold, to demolish what was left of the enemy. Coligny, understanding that collapse was imminent without additional recruitment, left the city to beg for reinforcements from England. But these were late in coming, and by the beginning of February 1563 the duke of Guise had surrounded Orléans and established a siege. By the middle of February the suburbs immediately adjacent to the city had all fallen to the Catholics. With this, the Huguenot position became untenable. The duke of Guise went in for the kill. On the morning of February 18, confident of victory, he ordered an all-out attack for the following day. And then…

  And then, on the evening of February 18, just a few hours before the inevitable surrender of Orléans, a low-level Huguenot nobleman by the name of Jean de Poltrot, sieur de Méré, who had successfully infiltrated the duke’s entourage by pretending to be a Catholic, shot the duke of Guise from behind by hiding in the bushes as the commander was returning to camp from inspecting his troops. Four days later, the duke was subjected to an agonizing operation during which his surgeons searched fruitlessly for the bullet. And a mere four days after that, on February 26, 1563, the august duke of Guise, zealous defender of the faith and perhaps the kingdom’s greatest warrior, died.

  With his death everything changed again. The Catholic army, deprived of its general, called off the attack. Under torture, Jean de Poltrot implicated Coligny in the murder of Guise, claiming that the admiral had paid him to assassinate his rival. The duke’s family screamed their fury and demanded justice. Coligny admitted to paying Poltrot, but only to spy on the Catholics, not to kill their commander; the admiral did, however, feel the need to mention in passing that “this death is the greatest good which could have happened to this kingdom and to God’s Church, and particularly to me and my entire house,” an unfortunate comment that did nothing to improve his relationship with the dead man’s family.*

  Coligny’s sentiments may have been accurate, but the true beneficiary of the effects of Poltrot’s well-aimed bullet was Catherine. Overnight, seemingly out of nowhere, the queen mother was delivered from her oldest and most immutable enemy. She must have barely credited the news when she first heard it—the despised, the malevolent, the fiendish duke of Guise, dead! Dead before he had time to force the surrender of Orléans! Dead before the Catholics could claim overwhelming, unconditional victory! But most important, dead before he could usurp her throne and dispatch her to a nunnery in Florence! This was Catherine’s first experience of surgical political assassination, and the technique recommended itself to her highly.

  With the Catholic leadership in disarray, Antoine already in his grave, and the prince of Condé captured, the queen mother moved quickly to reestablish her authority. She understood now that she and her son must always take care to conform strictly to the trappings of Catholicism; the kingdom would never follow her otherwise, and there was too much danger of Spanish intervention or even attack, if Philip II believed her personal religious commitment to be wavering. From this moment on, and throughout her long reign, there would never again be even a whisper of the possible conversion of the royal family—no Huguenot tutors for her sons, no reformed ministers in her entourage, no Protestant sermons heard at court. And, of course, everybody went regularly to Mass.

  But despite this the deferential, moderate Huguenots remained the queen mother’s first choice as political allies. She had a long memory, and she identified the Guise family and their followers as the same people who had demeaned her time and again, who had participated in spreading lies about her (as she saw it), and who would have happily consented to her exile and perhaps even to her death. The Catholic faction had therefore to be kept in check if she hoped to remain in power.

  One of the first victims of her revenge was the cardinal of Lorraine, who had been away representing France at a religious council in Trent when his brother the duke of Guise was assassinated. By the time he returned, the cardinal had lost all influence in the royal council and was forced to retire from court. (It is a measure of how far the once all-powerful Guises had fallen when, asked out of the barest civility to deliver the inaugural sermon for Lent the following year, the cardinal arrived at court only to find that the ornate seat set aside for his use during the service had been desecrated by a large pile of human excrement. The cardinal took the hint and beat a hasty retreat.) And, although Catherine wrote tender letters of condolence to various members of the Guise clan, praising the murdered man for his service to the kingdom, and complied with his widow’s request to transfer all the dead duke’s titles and honors to his eldest son, she did not prosecute Coligny for instigating the crime, as the family demanded. The Guises, nursing their resentment, had to be content with having Jean de Poltrot publicly tortured with red-hot pokers and then wrenched apart by four strong horses, the standard punishment for treason and a ghastly episode that unfortunately in no way appeased their thirst for vengeance.

  And then, on March 19, 1563, the day after the hapless assassin had been dispatched, to the utter disbelief and rage of the Catholics, who believed they had won the war, Catherine met with the prince of Condé, representing the Huguenots, and his aged uncle the constable representing the Catholics, and negotiated a peace that, with some limitations, restored her signature legislation, the Edict of Toleration. This compromise, predictably, satisfied no one, as the Protestants, too, were dismayed by the new restrictions.* To mollify both sides, the queen mother fell back upon the agreeable tactics favored by her original mentor, François I, whose restless wanderings and lavish entertainments she remembered so fondly. “I have often heard your grandfather say that two things are necessary to live in peace with the French, and to make them love their King: to keep them happy [with feasts and parties] and to occupy them in some athletic exercise,” she told her son, and so, following this sage advice, she organized a little holiday.

  5

  … And a Long Trip

  One who wishes to obtain the reputation for liberality among men, must not omit every kind of sumptuous display, and to such an extent that a prince of this character will consume by such means all his resources and will be compelled… to impose heavy charges on his people, become an extortioner, and do everything possible to obtain money. This will make his subjects begin to hate him.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  THE VOLUMINOUS CAVALCADE THAT LUMBERED slowly out of Paris the following January 1564, was unique even by the grandiose standards of its age. Some eight hundred members of the royal court, including but not limited to family members, high-ranking aristocrats (accompanied, naturally, by their own vassals and servants and advisers), key administrators, government officials, secretaries, notaries, physicians, senior household retainers, ladies-in-waiting, cooks, grooms, maidservants, manservants, knights, minstrels, trumpeters, members of the royal guard, a contingent of dwarves (Catherine loved dwarves), priests and confessors (all Catholic, of course), and a number of foreign dignitaries had been summoned to accompany the king and his mother on an extended journey through France.

  Snaking behind this venerable company, like the long, sinewy tail of a lizard, were hundreds of extra horses (eight thousand horses in all, necessary for the all-important exercise of hunting and jousting, would be called into service on this journey) and an interminable train of carts comprising the luggage: boxes of court dress, formal state attire, receiving gowns, ball gowns, costumes for playacting and tableaux, furs, jewels, gifts, money, food, wine, kitchen utensils, cookware, fine table service, tapestries, bedding, props for grand entrances, painted scenery for backdrops, extra cloth of gold for draping,
fireworks, coaches for inclement weather—everything that could possibly be required for the comfort of the travelers or to present an impressively regal facade. The procession stretched so far that those at the front of the line often reached the next day’s destination before those at the back had had a chance to pack up and depart from the previous night’s resting place. No sultan from the pages of The Arabian Nights could claim an entourage more extravagant than the one Catherine de’ Medici put together to introduce the widely dispersed citizens of France to her son.

  Because the escort was so vast, and because she planned to be away for such a considerable length of time, even the queen mother’s youngest children were brought along for the journey. And so ten-year-old Marguerite and eight-year-old François joined the rest of the royal family on what became known as the Grand Tour.

  The first stop was Fontainebleau, where the carefully staged brilliance of a series of inaugural fetes was clearly intended to set the tone for the rest of the trip. Despite the financial burden imposed on the royal treasury by the war—according to figures compiled by the Parlement of Paris the previous spring, the kingdom’s indebtedness stood at a hair-raising fifty million écus—Catherine was determined to bring back the sense of glamour and magnificence she had experienced during the reign of François I.* A glittering tournament was held, at which His Majesty (thirteen-year-old Charles) and the duke of Anjou (his twelve-year-old brother, Henri) participated. Later, Catherine hosted an afternoon garden party where everybody had a wonderful time dressing up as charmingly rustic members of the lower classes and listening to the serenades of a series of attractive young women provocatively clothed as sirens. This outdoor excursion was followed by a sumptuous feast and more entertainment in the form of a theatrical offering composed by Pierre de Ronsard, Catherine’s favorite poet, at which Margot was allowed to play a role beside her older brother the duke of Anjou and his handsome former schoolmate, fourteen-year-old Henri, now duke of Guise. The evening’s program continued with a lavish ball that lasted until the small hours of the morning, at which much of the cloth of gold carted in from Paris was in evidence.

  On the last day, to mark the conclusion of this particular round of festivities, Catherine outdid herself with a grand finale: she sent the company, led by Charles and his brother Henri, into the garden, where, according to an eyewitness, “they perceived a large Inchanted [sic] Tower, with a great Number of fine Ladies, that were kept Prisoners by the Furies, and guarded by two Porters of Gigantick Size.” Charles and Henri immediately determined to rescue the unhappy maidens. Taking the precaution of arming themselves, and with the aid of some of the adult members of the party, the royal siblings overcame the ladies’ oversized jailers with ease and went on to commit a few more acts of derring-do on the stairway leading up to the room in which the appealing gentlewomen were confined. Once they managed to “dispel the Magick, and to set the Captive Dames at Liberty” (and everybody moved safely out of the way), the tower dramatically caught fire, the Renaissance equivalent of a cinematic special effect.

  And on that thrilling note, the extended court, with its adolescent king and his middle-aged mother in the lead, commenced a journey through France that would take more than two years and would lead them as far south as Provence and as far west as Bayonne, through blizzards, downpours, and blinding heat; over rough roads and rolling hills; into midsize cities, local seats of government, large provincial towns, and picturesque villages. Catherine’s objectives in undertaking this monumental itinerary were threefold: to bolster the authority of the Crown and ensure the enforcement of the revised Edict of Toleration through personal contact with regional authorities; to demonstrate in each locale, through conspicuous and highly orthodox religious display, her irreproachable personal piety and steadfast commitment to Catholicism; and, most important, to justify her previous actions and reach an understanding with her powerful son-in-law Philip II, king of Spain, through the medium of a private interview.

  It was an ambitious plan, exactly in keeping with the charismatic diplomacy François I had practiced and at which he had excelled. But what Catherine did not understand, or could not see, was that this sort of visceral statesmanship hinged entirely on the magnetic appeal of the sovereign. François I had stood over six feet tall; his personality was expansive, mercurial, imposing. French to his core, he had embodied the kingdom. When François I made a ceremonial entrance into a provincial city or town his subjects looked at him and saw themselves—or, more accurately, the way they wanted to see themselves.

  But when Catherine and Charles IX entered in procession, many of the townspeople looked right past the cloth of gold and the triumphal arch and the jeweled crowns and saw a very short, corpulent older Italian woman dressed all in black who ate and talked and walked incessantly accompanied by an unhealthy-looking, puerile boy who obediently parroted her commands. They were not a pair who inspired confidence.

  IT WAS AN EVENTFUL two years on the road. The pope, frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of progress on the part of the French government in responding to the threat posed to international Catholicism by the new reformed religion, first excommunicated and then tried to kidnap Antoine’s widow, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, who had assumed the leadership of the Huguenot party and was becoming more and more militant with each passing day. (“You’ll see,” Antoine had once dolefully warned the female members of his acquaintance upon hearing of an impending visit to court by his wife. “She’ll convert you all.”) As an incentive to the faithful, the pope promised the kingdom of Navarre to whoever succeeded in ousting its heretical sovereign. Catherine, who needed Jeanne as a counterpoint to the Catholics and who understood that a papal initiative condemning and dethroning a queen was not a precedent she wanted to encourage, warned her friend and took her under her protection.

  But she, too, worried about Jeanne’s increasing belligerence. Catherine still divided the reformed party into good, loyal, peaceable Huguenots and bad, violent, troublemaking Huguenots. She was willing to tolerate Jeanne’s religious views provided she didn’t make a public fuss about them, just as François I had previously indulged his sister’s (Jeanne’s mother’s) unorthodox leanings so long as she kept her activities quiet. But Jeanne was a far more difficult and argumentative person than her mother had been. She passionately believed that Protestantism was the only righteous path and tried to convert not only her own subjects but also anyone else with whom she came into contact. She wrote long, hectoring letters to the court complaining that the revised Edict of Toleration did not go far enough and that Catholic officials discriminated against members of her party. She was even worse in person, combining an unpleasantly prickly temperament with a self-righteous, grating manner. “It is not an unalloyed privilege to have to deal with the Queen of Navarre,” a French ambassador to Jeanne’s court pointed out glumly in a letter to Catherine.

  To keep Jeanne in line, Catherine resorted to a subtle form of blackmail: she kept the queen of Navarre’s only son, Henry, with her as a quasi hostage to ensure his mother’s good behavior. Henry was seven months younger than Margot. His capricious father, Antoine, had separated from Henry’s proselytizing mother a year before his death, and Henry had stayed with his father in Paris to be raised as a Catholic. Then Antoine had died, and Catherine had kept the boy.

  Although well cared for, Henry was not happy at court. He had spent the first years of his life reveling in the rough, backcountry charms of scenic Navarre, with its emphasis on plain outdoor living. His manners lacked polish, and one of his first foods was apparently garlic, of which in later life many people complained he smelled. He adored his difficult mother and had been brought up by her as a Huguenot. He was eight when his parents separated, just old enough to understand that Jeanne had been sent away from him because she refused to attend Mass. He missed her terribly and stubbornly refused to change his religion, enduring the collective disapproval of his father, his cousins, the queen mother, and the rest of
the court for a full three months before he finally broke down and attended a Catholic service with Antoine. “He shows himself very firm in the opinions of his mother,” the Spanish ambassador informed his master, Philip II, with distaste.*

  But then Antoine had died, and Henry had been left rudderless at court. It must have been very difficult for him. An early letter home during this period shows a lonely little boy terrified that he will lose both parents. He had been informed that his mother was ill, and he was writing to a member of her household. “Write me to relieve my anxiety about the Queen, my mother; because I am so afraid that some evil will befall her… that the greatest pleasure anyone could give me is to send me news often,” he scrawled in his own hand. His distress must have been so palpable that Catherine took pity on him and, against her own policy, reinstated his Huguenot tutor so that he could have a familiar face about him at court. But her sympathy did not extend so far as to return the bereaved child to his mother. Instead, explaining to Jeanne that familiarity with the royal court could only benefit the boy—who was, after all, in line to inherit the throne after her own sons—Catherine took Henry with her on the Grand Tour.

  So along with Catherine’s other children, Margot and Henry were thrown together for the next two years. They could not have helped getting to know each other as they rode or walked in procession in the sunshine or bumped along the uneven roads in the large, nausea-inducing carriage the royal family used to get from town to town during the frequent bouts of inclement weather. They stood in close proximity to each other during the regular ceremonies at which the queen mother introduced her son to the local authorities and took meals together at the many venues in which Catherine stopped to listen to the unending complaints engendered by her revised Edict of Toleration. They were snowed in together, shivered together, sweated together. And they were together on the afternoon of October 17, 1564, when the Grand Tour trundled into the small town of Salon-de-Provence to be met by a delegation of local luminaries—the official consul, another resident magistrate, and an assorted menagerie of awestruck bourgeoisie and lesser nobility. Thrilled to have been singled out for so great an honor—the queen mother’s procession included “more princes than Salon had seen in its entire history,” an eyewitness noted—the welcoming committee began a series of highly laudatory prepared remarks. But Charles IX, riding forward under his purple-and-white canopy (unpacked from the baggage carts specifically for entrances like this one), unceremoniously cut them off.