But the negotiation at Bayonne between Catherine and the duke of Alva was all too serious. The king of Spain, it turned out, was not interested in world peace. Instead, Philip viewed the rise of Protestantism as the greatest threat to his rule and wanted the reformed religion stamped out in France before it had a chance to infiltrate his kingdom. Furthermore, Philip had no problem with the violence in France—in fact, he had every reason to encourage it, as it was obviously in his interest to have the battle over religion fought on somebody else’s territory. Already heresy had taken root in England, where the Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, ruled; so, too, in large parts of Germany, where Lutheranism prevailed; and now the reform movement had spread to the Netherlands, which was part of Philip II’s own dominion, causing significant unrest. The queen mother’s earlier flirtation with the possibility of conversion and her continued reliance upon the Huguenots as political allies had earned her the deep distrust of the pope, the cardinals, and Catholic monarchs across Europe and harmed her even more with the Spanish king than with her domestic opponents, a consequence that Philip II’s ambassador now demonstrated by treating her pleas for an alliance with contempt. Spain was perfectly willing to aid Catherine in a war against the Huguenots, the duke of Alva informed the queen mother coldly, but there could be no thought of marriages until heterodoxy was obliterated in France.
That her son-in-law might hold a conflicting position or have interests contrary to her own seems not to have occurred to Catherine prior to this meeting. Certainly she had no backup plan. Faced with Alva’s intransigent opposition, the queen mother resorted to the few weapons in her diplomatic arsenal. First she appealed to her daughter to help her. But Elizabeth, whose behavior was no doubt under close scrutiny by the duke of Alva and whose words in any event carried absolutely no weight with her intimidating older husband, could not have influenced Spanish policy in Catherine’s favor even if she wanted to. In fact, she had clearly been instructed to use her relationship with her mother to promote Philip’s agenda, because she tried to introduce the subject of the state of religion in France in casual conversation. By forcing Elizabeth to choose between France and Spain, Catherine was putting her daughter in a very difficult position, but this had no effect on the queen mother, who was perfectly willing to sacrifice Elizabeth’s interests in pursuit of her own. “So your husband suspects me?” Catherine demanded. “What makes you suppose, Madame, that the King suspects Your Majesty?” Elizabeth replied, evidently startled by this response. “My dear daughter, you have become very Spanish,” Catherine observed bitterly.
When family ties failed, the queen mother fell back on repetition. Throughout her career, Catherine seems to have believed that simply by reiterating her demands over and over she could either convince her opponents of the correctness of her position or overwhelm them until they conceded to her wishes. The queen mother, the duke of Alva later reported to Philip, was “extremely cold about religion and really attentive to nothing except the matter of the marriages of her children. She kept saying that to help the troubles of religion there is nothing better than to unite the two crowns and the two houses by new bonds.” Alva tried to circumvent the queen mother’s approach by appealing to Charles IX directly, only to discover that the fifteen-year-old king had no opinions of his own on matters of state. “I perceived that they kept him fettered, and so I passed to other subjects,” he concluded in yet another illuminating missive to his sovereign.
The duke of Alva remaining obdurate, Catherine felt she had no choice on the last day of the conference but to fall back on her final negotiating tactic, one she had employed with varying degrees of success in the past—weeping. She wept not only in the presence of the duke of Alva but also, apparently, in front of a goodly number of ambassadors and members of her own court. Naturally, when the queen mother started crying, her son the king cried as well, and when the king cried, his younger brother the duke of Anjou cried, and when her mother and brothers cried, Elizabeth cried also (although this was probably because she was going to have to go back to Madrid and explain all this to her terrifying husband). “At St. Jean de Luz the tears of Her Majesty’s mother and brothers began to flow and certainly they were many,” one of the Spanish envoys reported as tactfully as possible. “The Constable finally went into the King’s room and told him he ought not to cry for it would be much noticed by strangers and his vassals, because tears were very unbecoming to the eyes of a King.”
Alas, even the combined sobs of the royal family had no influence on the steely duke of Alva. Faced with the prospect of coming away from so public a negotiation empty-handed, Catherine did what she always did when confronted by strength: she told the duke of Alva what he wanted to hear. In exchange for the marriages she so desperately desired, she agreed at the very last moment to destroy or banish the Huguenot leadership and root out heresy in France. “If the agreement which the Duke of Alva will tell your Majesty was made here is carried out, it is all that can be desired for the service of God and Your Majesty,” the Spanish ambassador to the court, who was a witness, assured Philip in his report of these proceedings.
The fiasco of this poorly conceived and amateurishly conducted foreign policy summit would have far-reaching consequences. Because even though it is highly unlikely that Catherine meant what she said even at the moment she said it and probable instead that she was only stalling, as usual, in an attempt to buy time, her craven capitulation to the Spanish at Bayonne immediately negated all the work she had put into enforcing the Edict of Toleration over the course of the previous two and a half years. When the exhausted members of the Grand Tour finally straggled back into Paris in May of 1566, religious tensions in France were, if anything, even more pronounced than they had been before they had left. The Huguenots feared that the queen mother would betray them, and the Catholics suspected that she would renege on her pledge to Spain. The realm was impoverished: the crippling cost of the Grand Tour had only added to the deficit, and Catherine had to borrow even more from Italian bankers and raise taxes, which did nothing to improve her popularity. “I know that many in France blamed this expense as being superfluous,” the courtier Brantôme observed delicately. Anger and frustration permeated the capital, the various factions began to arm themselves, and intrigues and plots were surreptitiously organized. The kingdom once again stood poised on the precipice of destruction, with only the slightest provocation necessary to push it over the edge.
And it was precisely at this dangerous juncture that thirteen-year-old Margot was at last deemed old enough to abandon her childhood nursery and was commanded instead to remain with her mother at the court in Paris. The political education of the youngest Valois princess had begun.
PART II
Catherine’s Daughter Marguerite de Valois
6
The Flying Squadron
Experience shows that there have been very many conspiracies, but few have turned out well.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
OF ALL THE STAGES OF human development, adolescence—the process of becoming an adult—is perhaps the most challenging. In addition to the obvious physical changes, there is the struggle to interpret the various and often confusing values associated with grown-up conventions. Even the most perceptive teenager can have difficulty appreciating the nuances of interaction, the unspoken rules and customs, of polite society.
But to be a young princess attached to the curious court of Catherine de’ Medici, as Margot was, magnified the pressures of puberty tenfold. For the queen mother’s coterie reflected her own peculiar moral standards, the product of the twisted circumstances of her earlier married life. The decades-long nuptial charade imposed on Catherine by Henri and Diane had taken its toll on her character. Forced to accept abject public humiliation on a daily basis, it seems from her subsequent behavior that Catherine coped with the trauma by mentally separating the concepts of love and sex, of private and public demeanor. Although Henri had treated her shamefully, in Cath
erine’s mind it was unacceptable to blame him for the unsatisfactory nature of her marital relations. Her one protection, the rampart to which she had clung through the degradation of all those years, had been her status as Henri’s legitimate wife. Consequently, her love for him was as vocal and determined as it was pure. It was Diane upon whom Catherine focused all her anger and shame. Diane represented sex—unlawful, profane, indecent sex. Sex wielded as a weapon to secure advantage or information. Sex as a means of control. Sex as a path to wealth and political power. “Never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore,” Catherine would later write bitterly of Diane. “For one cannot call her otherwise, although the word is a horrid one to us,” she amended virtuously.
Compelled to accept Diane’s ascendancy while Henri was alive, the queen mother made no secret of her feelings after her husband’s death. She deplored licentious behavior. Sex outside the bonds of marriage was sinful. It would not be tolerated. To the end of her days, Catherine was as respectable and irreproachable a matron and grieving widow as could be found in Christendom.
But soon after Henri died and the requisite period of mourning had passed, Catherine did a very strange thing. She reinstituted what had been known in the days of her mentor, François I, as la petite bande—the cadre of beautiful women attached to the court.
La petite bande had not survived the death of its original, highly enthusiastic sponsor. Henri II had been indifferent to it, and Diane, who was getting older and did not relish the competition, had actively opposed it. So, on Henri’s ascension to the throne, the bevy of lovely young things who had faithfully followed François I from hunting ground to hunting ground, laughed at his jokes, soothed his ego, let him win at games, and slept with him when the occasion demanded had been collectively dismissed and sent home to their respective duchies.
All this changed when Catherine became regent. Suddenly, at the queen mother’s invitation, the royal entourage was once again home to the most stunning women in France. “Usually her Court was filled by at least three hundred ladies and damoiselles,” the contemporary chronicler the abbé de Brantôme remembered fondly. “Beauty abounded, all majesty, all charm, all grace; happy was he who could touch with love such ladies… Ladies and damoiselles who were beautiful, agreeable, very accomplished, and well sufficient to set fire to the whole world. Indeed, in their best days they burned up a good part of it, as much us gentlemen of the Court as others who approached the flame,” Brantôme concluded knowingly.
This was an odd choice for a self-proclaimed inflexibly virtuous widow in her late forties, the mother of young children. It cannot be that Catherine simply craved the company of women, because the ability to physically attract men was a requisite for inclusion, as it had been during the days of François I. But François’s motivation had been merely the fulfillment of his own pleasure. He was a healthy heterosexual man who was fortunate enough to have the power to surround himself with beauty. Catherine had a far more complex agenda. She had not forgotten that Diane had once employed her to spy on her enemies and how effective her rival’s methods had been as a means of securing and consolidating power. The queen mother now appropriated these techniques for her own use. Her troupe of sirens was in the nature of a lure, a way to glamorize the French court and maintain the kingdom’s reputation as an inviting destination in Europe. But the presence of so many femmes fatales also represented a blatantly cynical attempt to undermine her masculine adversaries. So obvious was the women’s mission that they were publicly referred to as Catherine’s L’Escadron Volant, or her Flying Squadron.
Their instructions were understood rather than explicit. They were there to beguile the queen mother’s male political opponents, extract information from them, keep them off balance, and retain them at court, where Catherine could keep an eye on them. Those who succeeded in these tasks were rewarded with royal favor and became intimates of the queen mother. The queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, was horrified by the overtly seductive nature of Catherine’s court. “Although I knew it was bad, I find it even worse than I feared,” she admonished after a visit. “Here women make advances to men rather than the other way around.” But there was a catch: the outward impression of propriety had to be maintained at all times. This meant that if, in the ordinary course of events, a member of the Flying Squadron found herself pregnant, as inevitably sometimes occurred, she would immediately forfeit all privileges and standing and be exiled from the court in shame. This was how Catherine continued to justify herself as an upright, moral woman and how she separated herself in her own mind from the harlot Diane: by publicly punishing those who reaped the wages of the sin she tacitly encouraged them to commit in the first place.
The result was an ethos that was at once dissolute and sanctimonious, salacious and prudish. Jealousy and competition were rampant, and the behavior of the group as a whole frequently descended into backbiting, spitefulness, and bullying: these were the mean girls of the sixteenth century. And it was at this court that Marguerite spent her formative teenage years. “She is beautiful, discreet, and graceful,” Jeanne d’Albret would write later of Margot. “But she has grown up in the most vicious and corrupt atmosphere imaginable. I cannot see that anyone escapes its poison.”
Further complicating Marguerite’s passage to adulthood was the focus upon, and the conflicting signals emitted in regard to, her future marriage. At least from the time she was eight and was seated beside him at an official banquet, Margot was aware that she was engaged to her cousin Henry, heir to the throne of tiny Navarre. But Catherine’s marital ambitions for her younger children, egged on by Nostradamus’s predictions, were far more grandiose. As the queen mother was undeterred by mundane considerations of age, religion, and general suitability, this often led to the serious contemplation of almost comically inappropriate matches. After Elizabeth I rejected Charles IX’s suit, offering as a further excuse that the king of France was unlikely to spend much time in England, Catherine immediately countered by substituting his younger brother Henri, duke of Anjou, as the prospective bridegroom and later, when that fell through, put forward her youngest son, François, duke of Alençon, twenty-two years Elizabeth’s junior, as the most desirable candidate. Catherine proposed Margot repeatedly to Philip II, king of Spain, as an excellent bride for his son, Don Carlos, until Catherine’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Philip’s wife, died unexpectedly in childbirth in 1568, at which point fifteen-year-old Marguerite was immediately offered to the grieving forty-one-year-old widower instead.
So Margot’s engagement to Henry was by no means a settled affair, and she understood this. Frankly, as a potential suitor, she found her cousin disappointing. Henry was not Margot’s idea of a romantic hero at all. He was not classically handsome, nor was he particularly chivalrous. Uncertain of his position at court, he compensated for his insecurities by clowning and drawing attention to himself. He was only seven months her junior, but he looked younger and was far less sophisticated in demeanor and outlook. Exposure to the values of her mother’s court, which was preoccupied with physical perfection and sensuality, had not made Marguerite hard and cynical, as Jeanne d’Albret feared, but it had accelerated her emotional development. Even in her early teens, Margot had very definite ideas about love. She wanted a strong, daring man, a man who risked everything for passion. She wanted a man whose good looks turned heads, a swordsman who laughed at danger, a knight who knew his way around the boudoir as well as the battlefield. She wanted to be swept off her feet, to lose herself completely—spiritually, intellectually, and physically—to the man she loved.
Her cousin Henry fell somewhat short of this ideal. He had been with the royal court six years, since he was eight years old, and probably suffered from too much close exposure. Henry was more like a particularly annoying little brother than a valiant, ardent lover.
Margot also knew that her cousin and his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, along with the rest of the Huguenot leadership, were not in favor at cour
t. In January 1567, a month after Henry turned fourteen, Jeanne had finally succeeded in engineering her son’s escape from the royal entourage. Through subterfuge, the pair, along with others of the Huguenot movement, decamped to the safety of Protestant Navarre. To add insult to injury, Jeanne tricked the queen mother into financing this flight. The Spanish ambassador noted that Catherine expressed herself “very much surprised” when notified of Jeanne and Henry’s desertion and added that “she was all the angrier because she had just loaned the Duchess [Jeanne] 2,000 écus because she was pleading poverty!”
But the queen of Navarre’s departure turned out to be merely the prelude to a confrontation that would result in a bitter rupture between Catherine and the Huguenot leadership, a divide so profound that it would naturally lead her youngest daughter—and, indeed, the preponderance of the court—to reject as ludicrous the notion of a marriage alliance between Margot and her Protestant cousin. For by the fall of 1567, Catherine had become so estranged from her former allies, particularly Admiral Coligny and the prince of Condé, that she not only considered them partisan adversaries, she was actively seeking their destruction.
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