The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  Her fears for her safety and position at court would prove only too true. Henri was not in Lyon three days before he went right for her.

  ALTHOUGH HENRI HAD NOT bothered to communicate with his mother while he was on holiday in Italy, this had not prevented her from writing to him, and so the new king of France was aware that Catherine was keeping both his younger brother and the king of Navarre under such close surveillance that they were virtual prisoners. “I have forbidden any subject of my lord and son the king to quit the realm without my permission,” the queen mother had informed him coolly. Henri was further cognizant that Marguerite had stepped in and saved her husband from execution by coordinating the defense at his trial and that since this time a tenuous trust had developed between the king and queen of Navarre. The establishment of amicable relations between these two, in combination with Margot’s friendship and protection of François, made the possibility of a revolt against him that much more likely. Encouraged by his principal adviser, Guast, he rode into Lyon determined to do what he could to dissolve this alliance by setting husband against wife and cousin against cousin. This being the court of France, he naturally chose sex as his weapon of choice.

  It was the queen of Navarre’s first visit to Lyon, so soon after she arrived she and some of the members of the Flying Squadron decided to do a little sightseeing. “Mademoiselle de Montigny… observing to us that the Abbey of St. Pierre was a beautiful convent, we all resolved to visit it,” Marguerite reported. The entire party piled into Margot’s coach and drove to the church, which was located in a part of town where many courtiers had rented rooms. “My carriage was easily to be distinguished, as it was gilt and lined with yellow velvet trimmed in silver,” Margot observed. The coachman was commanded to wait in the square while Marguerite and her friends visited the convent. While they were inside, “the King passed through the square on his way to see Quélus, who was then sick,” said Margot. “He had with him the King my husband, D’O [another courtier, unnamed]—and the fat fellow Ruffé.

  “The King, observing no one in my carriage, turned to my husband and said: ‘There is your wife’s coach, and that is the house where Bidé lodges. Bidé is sick, and I will engage my word she is gone upon a visit to him. Go,’ said he to Ruffé, ‘and see whether she is not there.’ ” Ruffé, understanding the implication—that Margot was not tending to a sick man but meeting a lover—did all he could to ingratiate himself with the king. “I need not tell you he did not find me there; however, knowing the King’s intention, he, to favor it, said loud enough for the King my husband to hear: ‘The birds have been there, but they are now flown.’ This,” Margot concluded grimly, “furnished sufficient matter for conversation until they reached home.”

  To be caught in open daylight in a compromising situation violated Catherine’s unspoken rules of decorum, so Henri made haste, as soon as he had returned to court, to inform her of her daughter’s supposed indiscretion. Marguerite finished her tour of the abbey and came back to discover herself the centerpiece of a laughably contrived but nonetheless odious scandal. Luckily Henry, who had evidently warmed to his wife after she had saved his life a second time, warned her of the plot: “Upon this occasion, the King my husband displayed all the good sense and generosity of temper for which he is remarkable,” Margot recalled gratefully. “He saw through the design, and he despised the maliciousness of it.” Her husband laughed and sent her to her mother to find out the details of her sin but made it a point to reassure her. “I do not give the least credit to the story,” said Henry, “which I plainly perceive to be fabricated in order to stir up a difference betwixt us two, and break off the friendly intercourse between your brother [François] and me.”

  Bewildered, Margot sought out her mother, who received her in high dudgeon. “She would not hear a word I had to offer, but continued to rate me in a furious manner; whether it was through fear, or affection for her son, or whether she believed the story in earnest, I know not. When I observed to her that I understood the King had done me this ill office in her opinion, her anger was redoubled, and she endeavored to make me believe that she had been informed of the circumstance by one of her own valets de chambre, who had himself seen me at the place.”

  But of course the presence of so many witnesses who could vouch for Marguerite’s innocent visit to the chapel made it very difficult for Catherine to persist in believing Henri’s story, and within a day or two both were obliged to retract their accusations. The queen mother took the usual way out—she punished an underling. “She had discovered, she said, that there was not the least foundation for the report her valet de chambre had made, and should dismiss him from her service as a bad man,” Margot related wryly. But this was not enough for her daughter. “As she perceived by my looks that I saw through this disguise, she said everything she could think of to persuade me to a belief that the King had not mentioned it to her. She continued her arguments, and I still appeared incredulous. At length the King entered the closet, and made many apologies, declaring he had been imposed on, and assuring me of his most cordial friendship and esteem; and thus matters were set to rights again.” Score: Margot, Henry, and François 1; Henri and Catherine 0.

  Sadly, this episode, seemingly so trivial, represented the high point of cooperation between Marguerite and her husband. Henri had assumed that Margot was the weak link in the alliance, but he had underestimated her. The next time he struck, which was very soon, he would not take his sister on directly but take aim at her through Henry and François. And this time, his blade would thrust home.

  AFTER LYON, THE COURT set off on an extended journey through Provence before eventually turning north in preparation for an elaborate coronation ceremony in Reims. Along the way, Henri’s subjects began to get glimmers of their new king’s character and notions of government.

  Henri faced a number of serious, but not insurmountable, problems upon his ascension. The most pressing concern was the bleak condition of the royal treasury. Put simply, the kingdom was bankrupt. In addition to the money Henri had squandered on his way home from Poland, Catherine had spent a truly staggering sum—estimated at 150,000 crowns—on Charles’s funeral. The debts incurred during the siege of La Rochelle were still unpaid, the royal army was owed back wages, and even Catherine’s ever-present Italian bankers refused to lend to her. They had good reason: every year, the French royal government incurred expenses of approximately twenty million livres, to which had to be added current and past-due debt of some additional twelve million livres. But as a result of the damage to the agricultural economy from the continuing civil wars, the treasury was only taking in about 4.5 million livres a year in revenues, leaving a deficit of some 27.5 million livres. “The bad administration of money, and the bad policing of the country which has prevailed with the civil wars, have brought the kingdom of France… to such a pass that at present it is deformed in practically every part,” reported the Venetian ambassador. “Everywhere one sees ruin: the livestock for the most part destroyed, and great stretches of good land uncultivated, and many peasants forced to leave their homes to become vagabonds. Everything has risen to exorbitant prices, principally victuals, [for] which I have paid six times their former value,” he complained. There is no question that Henri was aware of the problem, as one of his most senior military advisers sent him a letter immediately upon his return from Poland urging him to address this woeful state of affairs. “The most important and chief point is finances, because without these, everything is stayed and nothing can be executed,” the counselor wrote forcefully.

  A dire lack of funds was not the only obstacle plaguing the kingdom upon Henri’s return in the fall of 1574. The Huguenots were threatening to renew open hostilities. The prince of Condé, who had managed to escape the court, was in Germany negotiating for troops. Elizabeth I was covertly supplying the French Protestants with money. And the Politiques had even come to an arrangement in Languedoc whereby Catholics and Huguenots had put aside their differences
to work together for freedom of religion and to expel Catherine’s Italian advisers, who were perceived as being particularly greedy and influential, from France.

  And yet despite these admittedly adverse economic and political realities, Henri’s position was not nearly as precarious as it seemed. The king had a number of advantages working in his favor. The Catholic majority, for example, was firmly behind him and against the Huguenots. To them he was the lieutenant-general, a seasoned, victorious commander and keeper of the faith who had distinguished himself on Saint Bartholomew’s Day. The Guises and all their vassals and supporters were with him. If he had behaved with energy and decisiveness; if he had lived up to his reputation as a warrior or, better yet, co-opted the Politiques by naming François lieutenant-general, as was his due as next in line to the throne; if he had made even the faintest show of reining in spending, the likelihood is that the opposition movement would have collapsed and the kingdom would have been brought back to stability.

  But Henri did none of this. He had come back from Poland a changed man. Far from demonstrating the drive and ambition of his teenage years as lieutenant-general, Henri indulged in an extravagant, almost epic laziness. He spent most of his time in his room under his silken covers, comfortably propped up by the royal pillows. Occasionally he roused himself enough to lie around on a golden barge floating on the Rhône, as he had in Venice. Guast, Villequier, and Quélus were always with him. A papal envoy attending the court in Lyon was taken aback by Henri’s behavior. “The king is a young man as juvenile in mind as can well be imagined,” he chided in a report to Rome. “He is a poor creature, most indolent and voluptuous, passing half his life groveling in bed.”

  Henri’s chief concern, the issue that clearly kept him up at night, revolved around etiquette. He spent hours debating fashion, interior design, and the rules by which he as king might be properly approached by those of his subjects whom he deemed worthy of the honor. After extended consultations it was decided that no one could come near the king unless he or she followed a rigorous dress code, which eventually evolved into a list of some twenty or thirty separate outfits—including specifications for the number of ruffles on each shirt—deemed necessary for admission to court. According to one eyewitness, for example, Henri allowed no male visitor into his rooms unless he had on “white pumps, high slippers of black velvet, with stockings with garters and other garments, which had to be worn with the utmost care.” The king was also never to be approached while eating; a boundary was erected around his dining table and guards strategically placed to ensure his privacy. This represented a significant change from the past, when the monarch had made himself accessible to society by taking his meals in the presence of a large company. Similarly, as soon as he became king, the former lieutenant-general suddenly broke with established custom by refusing to go about on horseback, as every other French sovereign before him had done for centuries. Instead he chose to travel in a shuttered coach so no member of the hoi polloi could peek in at him. Finally, tradition dictated that any citizen of France could petition the sovereign at any time, but because Henri disliked being accosted by crowds he instituted a new, highly unpopular procedure whereby he would hear such appeals only at certain hours. In fact, every revision Henri made was designed to isolate him from his subjects and keep him from public view.

  Which was odd because no one loved spectacle more than Henri. His taste in clothing was so flamboyant that it bordered on the fantastic. A Spanish diplomat who was in Lyon when Henri arrived described one of his costumes. “For four whole days he was dressed in mulberry satin with stockings, doublet and cloak of the same color. The cloak was very much slashed in the body and had all its folds set with buttons and adorned with ribbons, white and scarlet and mulberry, and he wore bracelets of coral on his arm,” he observed. In addition to bracelets, Henri favored diamond earrings and makeup. Prematurely bald, he often wore tall turbans that, with the jewelry, gave him an especially exotic look. His favorite ensemble for costume balls was to dress up as a woman. “The king made jousts, tournaments, ballets, and a great many masquerades, where he was found ordinarily dressed as a woman, working his doublet and exposing his throat, there wearing a collar of pearls and three collars of linen, two ruffled and one turned upside down, in the same way as was then worn by the ladies of the court,” a Parisian lawyer confirmed.

  But without question the most controversial aspect of Henri’s court was the introduction of a new class of favorites. In yet another and perhaps the most bizarre incarnation of la petite bande, Henri surrounded himself not with beautiful young women, as had his mother and François I, but with beautiful young men. They were known familiarly in France as Henri’s mignons. The mignons caused sufficient stir among the populace that there is no shortage of eyewitness accounts describing them. They “wear their hair long, curled and recurled by artifice, with little bonnets of velvet on top of it like whores in the brothels, and the ruffles on their linen shirts are of starched finery and one half foot long so that their heads look like St. John’s on a platter,” observed a Protestant nobleman caustically. “The King arrived… with his troop of young mignons, frilled and curled with their crests lifted, the crinkles in their hair, a disguised carriage, with the same ostentation, measured, diapered and covered with violet powders and odiferous scents, which smell up the streets, squares and houses they frequent,” seconded the ambassador from Venice. Henri lavished money and titles on his mignons, especially the core group of those who had accompanied him to Poland and who remained his closest companions after his return to France.

  Even Catherine disliked the mignons, mostly because their influence over her son limited her own ability to control the government. When Henri first arrived in Lyon, his mother tried to get him to take the duke of Retz, who had served his brother Charles before him, into his household as a senior official. The same canny Venetian envoy reported that “this strong desire of the Queen Mother was not so much on de Retz’s account, as to assure herself more firmly in government; because it is the duty of the first gentleman of the chamber to stay always in the room of the King and to be always near him and so she was sure to know not only what her son did, but, as it were, what her son thought. It was her custom, as I am informed, during the life of the last King, to have reported to her every morning everything the King had said and all that had been said to him, in order to take measures against anything that was being arranged against her power in the government.” (Poor Charles.) But Henri was not his brother, and he had his own ideas about what to do with his evenings in the privacy of his own rooms. It was Villequier, Henri’s particular intimate from Poland, not the duke of Retz, who attended the king at night.

  Unfortunately, Henri’s sexual preferences were at odds with acknowledged Catholic dogma, which regarded sodomy and other homosexual acts as mortal sins. The dichotomy between his erotic conduct and his strong Christian beliefs created a fierce moral struggle within the king that triggered extreme swings in behavior. Periods of licentious activity were followed first by long, listless days in bed and then by public penance. He must have been particularly conflicted when he got to Avignon, because he joined an especially masochistic order of penitents known as the Flagellant monks, who walked the streets of the city barefoot and in sackcloth, moaning and chanting while continually scourging themselves. The entire court was obliged to participate one evening in December 1574, when Henri, decked out in a coarse shift attractively embellished with little black death’s head ornaments, led a wailing procession through a cold rain, flagellating himself as he went.* This night in the frigid air suffering alongside his howling sovereign was too much for the forty-nine-year-old cardinal of Lorraine, once the greatest power in France. The cardinal, in his open-toed sandals, caught a bad cold and fever and died three weeks later, on the day after Christmas.

  The gulf between what his subjects expected of him and what Henri turned out to be was so vast, the comparisons between his gratuitously frivolous lif
estyle and their cruel poverty and suffering so stark, that it created its own momentum. The opposition saw its opportunity and pounced, fanning the flames of public disapproval to their advantage. Again, none of his eccentric behavior would have mattered—or mattered as much—if Henri had made even a vague attempt to project the image of an engaged sovereign, a vigorous leader who intended to address the kingdom’s many woes. But the only battlefield in which Henri applied himself with any energy at all was in the arena of court intrigue, where he strove to destroy his siblings. And there, it must be admitted, he showed himself indefatigable.

  THE KING’S NEXT PLOT, like his previous attempt, again revolved around sex. (Henri and his mignons were consistent, if not particularly imaginative.) “After staying some time at Lyons, we went to Avignon,” Margot related. “Le Guast, not daring to hazard any fresh imposture, and finding that my conduct afforded no ground for jealousy on the part of my husband, plainly perceived that he could not, by that means, bring about a misunderstanding betwixt my brother and the King my husband. He therefore resolved to try what he could effect through Madame de Sauves.”

  Charlotte de Sauve was in her early twenties, very pretty, and a valued member of Catherine’s Flying Squadron.* Married to a nondescript midlevel functionary, Charlotte sought advancement by securing the intimate friendship of gentlemen of high rank and then reporting on them to the king and queen mother. Her great value was that she seemed to require no physical attraction at all in order to have sex, which meant that she was willing to sleep with both Marguerite’s brother François and her husband, Henry. “This occasioned such jealousy between them,” Marguerite observed drolly, “that though her favors were divided with M. de Guise, Le Guast, De Souvray, and others, any one of whom she preferred to the brothers-in-law [François and Henry], such was the infatuation of these last, that each considered the other as his only rival.”