The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  But by this time Catherine had found an experienced general, Gaspard de Tavannes, to function as her son’s military adviser and had so augmented the Crown’s forces that Henri now found himself master of some twenty-eight thousand men. Moreover Tavannes, an excellent strategist, was able to anticipate the enemy’s movements. In the hours just before dawn on the morning of March 13, 1569, he, the duke of Anjou, and the rest of the royal army caught the admiral and the prince of Condé and their troops by surprise near the town of Jarnac, about a hundred miles southeast of La Rochelle.

  Both sides fought bravely. The Apollo-like duke of Guise, recalled from the eastern border, distinguished himself in an early skirmish and cut down an entire squadron of Protestant horsemen before they had a chance to catch up with the main body of cavalry. For their part, the Huguenots, confronted by a marked numerical superiority on the part of the Catholics, still chose to give battle. The prince of Condé led the charge from the center with Coligny anchoring to the left. “For Christ and country!” exhorted the prince, but despite his best efforts the line gave way. The admiral, understanding that defeat was imminent and hoping to fight another day, broke off and escaped with his men, but Condé was not so lucky. Finding himself surrounded, he dismounted and surrendered but, in a treacherous act highly reminiscent of the murder of the duke of Guise, was instead shot in the back by an unknown assailant, rumored to be either an Italian operating under Catherine’s instructions or the duke of Anjou’s personal captain of the guards. What is not in dispute is Henri’s cool response to the assassination of his cousin, whose rank as the first prince of the blood was inferior only to his own: he had Condé’s corpse slung over the back of a donkey like the meanest peasant and paraded through the streets of Jarnac, much to the delight of the conquering royalist troops.

  The court was overjoyed at the news of the duke of Anjou’s triumph. Finally, an outright military victory! The acknowledged head of the Huguenot faction slain, the insurgents in full retreat, and the opposition leadership in chaos and scrambling for mere survival. Understanding that he would never occupy a more estimable position relative to his brother the king, and wishing to milk the moment for all it was worth, Henri sent an envoy back to Paris from his base camp at Tours to summon his mother and the rest of the family to judge the results of his handiwork for themselves. “I leave to your own imagination to suggest to you the impression which such a message from a dearly beloved son made on the mind of a mother who doted on all her children, and was always ready to sacrifice her own repose, nay, even her life, for their happiness,” Margot, who was included in this invitation, observed drolly. “She flew on the wings of maternal affection, and reached Tours in three days and a half.”*

  It was during this visit that Marguerite was introduced to her family’s delightful, all-consuming pastime of informing on one another. After a ceremonial presentation by the duke of Anjou at which he eloquently outlined the military victories already achieved under his leadership (“It is… impossible for me to describe in words the feelings of my mother on this occasion, who loved him above all her children,” his sister noted of this address), Henri unexpectedly invited Margot for a private chat in the garden.

  He began with flattery. “Dear sister, the nearness of blood, as well as our having been brought up together, naturally, as they ought, attach us to each other. You must already have discovered the partiality I have had for you above my brothers.” This wasn’t saying much, but it sounded good.

  Having ingratiated himself, Henri then went on to elucidate the incomparable advantages his friendship could confer. “You know the high situation in which, by the favor of God and our good mother the Queen, I am here placed,” he reminded his younger sibling. “You may be assured that, as you are the person in the world whom I love and esteem the most, you will always be a partaker of my advancement.” Then he went in for the kill. “I know you are not wanting in wit and discretion,” Henri continued agreeably, “and I am sensible you have it in your power to do me service with the Queen our mother, and preserve me in my present employments… Whilst I am away, the King my brother is with her, and has it in his power to insinuate himself into her good graces… The King my brother does not want for courage, and, though he now diverts himself with hunting, he may grow ambitious, and choose rather to chase men than beasts; in such a case I must resign to him my commission as his lieutenant. This would prove the greatest mortification that could happen to me.” To prevent this calamity from occurring, Henri had determined to place “a confidential person about the Queen my mother, who shall always be ready to espouse and support my cause.” There could be no one better suited to this happy employment, he went on, than his beloved sister Marguerite.

  Margot was far too green to penetrate the underlying implications of this magnanimous offer. Dazzled by Henri’s sudden attention, she saw not intrigue but entrance into the adult world of responsibility and trust. Her brother’s rhetoric “was entirely a new kind of language to me,” she remembered. “I had hitherto thought of nothing but amusements, of dancing, hunting, and the like diversions; nay, I had never yet discovered any inclination of setting myself off to advantage by dress, and exciting an admiration of my person and figure. I had no ambition of any kind.” This is what came of having been shunted off to the nursery for all those years. But the prospect of being useful, of having something of actual importance to do, was irresistible. Her older brother Henri, the lieutenant-general of the realm, wanted her, Marguerite. He needed her! There could be no higher compliment. As he had intended, she rose instantly to the challenge. “I shall sacrifice all the pleasures in this world to my watchfulness for your service,” she pledged in her enthusiasm. “You may perfectly rely on me, as there is no one that honors or regards you more than I do. Be well assured that I shall act for you with the Queen my mother as zealously as you would for yourself.”

  And so it was agreed between them that, for the first time in her life, Marguerite would wait upon her mother in her private chambers. “Be the first with her and the last to leave her,” Henri, who knew his mother well, instructed his sister. “This will induce her to repose a confidence and open her mind to you.” For his part, Henri promised to put in a good word for her to help ensure the success of their little enterprise. This he clearly did quickly, as no sooner had they returned from their tête-à-tête in the garden than Catherine pulled her daughter aside and, in another first in their relationship, offered Marguerite, who had been denied affection since her father’s death and who consequently craved it above all else, the prospect of maternal love and intimacy. “Your brother has been relating the conversation you have had together; he considers you no longer as a child, neither shall I,” the queen mother observed. “It will be a great comfort to me to converse with you as I would with your brother. For the future you will freely speak your mind, and have no apprehensions of taking too great a liberty, for it is what I wish.”

  The elation Margot felt at her mother’s words was intense; it must have been like being wrapped in the luxurious warmth of a fur blanket after spending years shivering in the cold. “I felt a satisfaction and a joy which nothing before had ever caused me to feel,” she related. “I now considered the pastimes of my childhood as vain amusements. I shunned the society of my former companions of the same age. I disliked dancing and hunting, which I thought beneath my attention.”

  But unbeknownst to the novice informant, she had been seduced into playing a game in which she held no cards. It has been insinuated by novelists and even some historians over the centuries that one or both of Marguerite’s older brothers abused her sexually while she was still in her teens. Of this there is absolutely no evidence, and certainly the duke of Anjou’s later obvious preference for men would seem to rule out an unconquerable passion for his sister. But from a psychological and—far darker and more damaging—an emotional point of view, the analogy holds. For with this corrosive offer and Margot’s guileless concurrence Henri initiated his
sister into the corrupt world of the Valois court and arranged, at least figuratively, for her to lose her innocence.

  7

  Fall from Grace

  A prince is… esteemed when he is a true friend or a true enemy; when, that is, he declares himself without reserve in favor of someone against another. This policy is always more useful than remaining neutral.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS, from June to October of 1569, Marguerite scrupulously upheld her end of the bargain she had entered into with her brother. As per his instructions, she was present at Catherine’s rising and again at her retiring. She never missed a morning or evening. Why should she? It was the great pleasure of her life to win the approbation of her mother. “She did me the honor, sometimes, to hold me in conversation for two and three hours at a time,” Margot remembered proudly. “God was so gracious with me that I gave her satisfaction; and she thought she could not sufficiently praise me to those ladies who were about her.” Nor did Marguerite neglect to report the content of these discussions in detail to the absent lieutenant-general and to pursue his advancement at court as though it were her own. “I spoke of my brother’s affairs to her, and he was constantly apprised by me of her sentiments and opinion; so that he had every reason to suppose I was firmly attached to his interest.” Henri had chosen well: Margot made an admirable intelligence operative.

  So when the royal army achieved yet another outstanding victory against the Huguenots on October 3, this time at Moncontour, in southwest France, about halfway between Angers and Poitiers, and the exultant lieutenant-general again summoned his family for a visit to applaud his prowess and bask in the glory of his triumph, Marguerite was only too thrilled to accompany her mother and the rest of the court to Henri’s base camp, near Saint Jean d’Angély. She had every reason to believe that she would be greeted warmly by her brother and showered with words of praise and affection. She knew she had done well at the task he had set her, and she was genuinely delighted by his success and excited to share in the joy of it. She was therefore completely unprepared for the reception that awaited her.

  She knew something was wrong the instant she saw him. “Upon our arrival… my mother began to open in my praise and express the attachment I had discovered for him,” Margot recalled. “This was his reply, which he delivered with the utmost coldness: ‘He was well pleased,’ he said, ‘to have succeeded in the request he had made to me; but that prudence directed us not to continue to make use of the same expedients, for what was profitable at one time might not be so another.’ ” Catherine was as confused by this statement as her daughter was. “She asked him why he made that observation,” Marguerite continued. “This question afforded the opportunity he wished for, of relating a story he had fabricated, purposely to ruin me with her.”

  And then he hit her with it. “He began by observing… that I was grown very handsome and that M. de Guise wished to marry me; that his uncles, too, were very desirous of such a match; and, if I should entertain a like passion for him, there would be danger of my discovering to him all she [Catherine] said to me; that she well knew the ambition of that house, and how ready they were, on all occasions, to circumvent ours. It would, therefore, be proper that she should not, for the future, communicate any matter of State to me, but, by degrees, withdraw her confidence,” Margot reported.

  This was a serious accusation. Royal princesses were not supposed to go behind their mothers’ backs and arrange marriages for themselves. Moreover, simply by giving voice to this allegation and speculating on the strength of Marguerite’s supposed attachment to her suitor, Henri implied that some form of sexual impropriety had already been committed. This, of course, violated Catherine’s strict moral code, which expressly forbade physical intimacy outside the bounds of wedlock unless it was done specifically in the queen mother’s interests.

  In vain did Marguerite protest—indeed insist upon—her innocence. “I did not omit to say everything to convince her [Catherine] of my entire ignorance of what my brother had told her,” she remembered passionately. “I said it was a matter I had never heard mentioned before; and that, had I known it, I should certainly have made her immediately acquainted with it.” Her words had no effect. Catherine turned on her instantly and “ordered me never to speak to her in my brother’s presence. These words were like so many daggers plunged into my breast. In my disgrace, I experienced as much grief as I had before joy on being received into her favor and confidence.”

  Although for the rest of her life Margot would take Henri’s accusations as a personal affront and her reputation would be smeared for centuries by the resulting scandal, in reality her brother’s words had very little to do with her and everything to do with the duke of Guise. Because it seems overwhelmingly likely that at the time of this meeting, Marguerite was innocent of having conducted a clandestine love affair with the duke of Guise, or of having promised to marry him, for the simple reason that she hadn’t seen him in more than a year—and certainly not since the previous interview with her brother, when Henri had placed so much trust in her. The duke of Guise’s movements during the war are well documented: he’d been off fighting, first on the eastern front, then later with the royal army, since September of 1568. Even in the bawdy sixteenth century it was very difficult to conduct intimate relations if the two parties involved were separated by hundreds of miles.

  The person who had seen quite a bit of the duke of Guise, especially over the previous few months, was Henri. Increased proximity had not endeared the lieutenant-general to his former schoolmate. The duke of Guise had not changed much in the decade following the colloquy of Poissy, when he’d tried to bully Henri into being tossed out the window to a waiting carriage and abducted. He was still the better athlete and swordsman, and his prerogative settled on his broad aristocratic shoulders like an exceptionally well-tempered suit of armor. Moreover, Guise’s contempt for army discipline had led him to commit an unconscionable blunder that had severely weakened the royal forces: in June, operating independently and without bothering to check with his superiors, the headstrong duke had led a small division of cavalry and infantry across the river at La Roche-l’Abeille, in southern France, only to come face-to-face with four thousand Huguenot horsemen. The Catholics were thoroughly trounced, many of his men were lost, and the duke of Guise himself only just made it back to headquarters without being captured or killed. Henri was livid at his insolence, and even the chief royal military adviser, Gaspard de Tavannes, regarded the insubordinate commander with disgust. “Sir,” said Tavannes icily to the shamefaced duke of Guise, “after doing what you have done, you ought never to have come back.”

  Ironically, if his military career had ended there, Marguerite would likely have been spared the humiliation that awaited her in October, but from July to September the duke of Guise redeemed himself utterly by almost single-handedly holding off Coligny and a much larger force of Huguenots at the siege of Poitiers. It was this action that set up the royalist victory at Moncontour, another battle at which Guise fought with conspicuous bravery and covered himself with glory despite being seriously wounded in the foot.

  The only thing worse than an arrogant, insubordinate duke of Guise was an arrogant, victorious duke of Guise whose amazing exploits threatened to dwarf those of the lieutenant-general. Already competitive with his brother the king, Henri did not appreciate having to deal with the superior attitude and growing popularity of somebody who was supposed to be a humble vassal. He was therefore susceptible to giving a robust hearing to any allegation of malfeasance on the part of his rival, and in the wake of the duke of Guise’s rise these were not slow in coming.

  In her memoirs, Margot identifies the source of the rumor against her as Louis Béranger, seigneur du Guast, whom she contemptuously refers to simply as “Le Guast.” Guast would evolve into a particular enemy of Marguerite’s; she harbored a bitter (and highly deserved) resentment against him, so anything she writes a
bout him has to be weighed carefully against this bias. But in this instance her instincts were probably correct, as circumstances clearly favor her conclusion.*

  Guast was the first in a series of attractive, ambitious young noblemen surrounding the lieutenant-general whom the French court euphemistically referred to as “favorites.” Unlike many of Henri’s future minions, Guast came from an old and venerable family; his bloodline was unimpeachable, and he, too, knew how to foster an aura of hauteur. He was a captain in the royal guard and just old and sophisticated enough—twenty-five to Henri’s nineteen—for his commander-in-chief to look up to him. Guast was eager to make his fortune and advance at court, and one way to do this was to make himself invaluable to the lieutenant-general. This was accomplished through flattery and the regular contribution of choice bits of information obtained through surreptitious channels.

  The duke of Guise, who had no reason to dissemble, no doubt made Guast’s job easy for him. The prospective suitor believed that he boasted a suitably impressive list of nuptial credentials. He came from a historically illustrious family, and his uncle the cardinal of Lorraine was a member of the royal council and the most important churchman in France. The cardinal was intimately involved in the affairs of his nieces and nephews and was in the process of arranging a highly advantageous marriage between the duke of Guise’s sister and a member of the extended Bourbon family. If his sister could marry so high, why could his uncle not then arrange for him to wed a member of the royal family?

  If this thought had occurred to the duke of Guise it most certainly had already occurred to the politically adept and experienced cardinal as well. After the long dry period following his brother’s assassination, the fortunes of the family were finally on their way up again. The cardinal of Lorraine remembered the heady days when his niece Mary Stuart had ascended, however briefly, to the throne of France. This flirtation between his nephew and the royal princess was to be encouraged. Adding to the logic of the alliance was the fortunate coincidence that the duke of Guise seemed genuinely to be in love with Margot, and she appeared not to be indifferent to him. Knowing the royal family to be strapped for cash, he was even willing to contribute two hundred thousand livres out of his own pocket as an extra incentive so that the young couple would have something to live on.