The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  But she also feared that he would be targeted again, and to protect him she agreed with Catherine that he should leave Paris. “The Queen my mother, apprehensive of evil consequences from this affair, and fearing a dissension betwixt her two sons, advised my brother to fall upon some pretence for sending Bussy away from Court,” Marguerite observed. “In this advice I joined her, and, through our united counsel and request, my brother was prevailed upon to give his consent… Bussy, who implicitly followed my brother’s directions in everything, departed with a company of the bravest noblemen that were about the latter’s person.” It must have been very difficult for her to see him go, but she consoled herself with the thought that at least he would be out of immediate danger. “Bussy was now removed from the machinations of Le Guast,” Margot proclaimed with relief.

  Bussy may have been safe. But she was not.

  SOON AFTER THESE EVENTS, in the heat of that long, fraught summer, Henry fell ill. He had some sort of seizure, which the court physicians diagnosed as epilepsy. However, this seems unlikely, as he had no history of the condition and his symptoms did not persist. More probably it was stress-related; the presence of so much conflict and so many volatile, armed young men at court might certainly induce the occasional panic attack in even the most seasoned warrior. Marguerite, on the other hand, put it down firmly to an overactive libido. “One night my husband was attacked with a fit, and continued insensible for the space of an hour—occasioned, I supposed, by his excesses with women, for I never knew anything of the kind to happen to him before,” she reported. Despite his ill treatment of her and general indifference, she nursed him back to health so gently and faithfully that he credited her with saving his life. If so, this represented the third time in the space of as many years that Henry of Navarre had been rescued from death by his wife. “From this time he treated me with more kindness, and the cordiality betwixt my brother and him was again revived, as if I had been the point of union at which they were to meet, or the cement that joined them together,” Margot observed.

  Certainly the tenderness his wife displayed when he was laid low helped, but other factors contributed to the couple’s reconciliation as well. The most conspicuous of these was the absence of any tangible profit from Henry’s covert alliance with his brother-in-law the king. Henri III’s lofty promises and flattering blandishments had turned out to be just empty words. Henry had not been named lieutenant-general. He had received no special favors or promotion. Worse, Henri III had recently levied a large and highly controversial tax, none of which had found its way into the purse of the king of Navarre, although a significant portion of it had gone to augmenting the estate of the royal favorite, Guast.

  Henry also could not help but notice how unpopular the new king of France was becoming with his subjects. According to a chronicler, they called him “Henri, by the grace of his mother dubious king of France and imaginary king of Poland, concierge of the Louvre… [and] official hairdresser to his wife.” Public opinion was shifting away from the king and toward François and the opposition. Margot’s generosity during his illness presented the king of Navarre with a path back to his Huguenot supporters, where his natural sympathies lay.

  A renewed coalition between Marguerite, François, and Henry was the last thing the king and his mignons wanted, and they moved quickly to break it up. Again Henri identified his sister as the chief threat and concentrated on separating her from her husband. Knowing Margot’s character and instinctively perceiving that nothing in the world was more likely to induce an outsize, rip-roaring quarrel between Henry and his wife than for Henry to imperiously countermand her orders when it came to the management of her personal household, the king called Henry to his chambers and summarily instructed him to force Marguerite to dismiss Gillonne de Goyan, demoiselle de Thorigny, her intimate friend and most trusted lady-in-waiting, from her service.

  Gillonne, or Torigni, as Marguerite called her, had been brought up with Margot and her sisters as a childhood playmate at the royal nursery. She was the daughter of a high-ranking official, Monsieur de Matignon, governor of Normandy, one of Catherine’s closest advisers. Torigni was the queen of Navarre’s oldest and dearest companion. The ambassador from Florence claimed that it was Torigni whom Marguerite used to communicate confidentially with Bussy, which was probably why she was singled out by the king for banishment. Even Henry understood how incensed his wife would be by this commandment. Besides, Torigni had worked side by side with Marguerite to nurse him through his recent crisis, and he naturally felt gratitude toward her. He tried to talk Henri out of it, but the king, suspicious of Henry’s newly established rapport with Margot, made it a test of his allegiance. “The King… told my husband that he should have no more love for him if he did not remove Torigni from about me the very next morning,” Marguerite testified indignantly. “Accordingly, Torigni left me that very day, and went to the house of a relation, M. Chastelas.”

  As he had correctly predicted, if he had put her on the rack, Henri could not have devised a more effective torment for his sister. Margot was utterly unable to control her fury. “I was so greatly offended with this fresh indignity, after so many of the kind formerly received, that I could not help yielding to resentment; and my grief and concern getting the upper hand of my prudence, I exhibited a great coolness and indifference towards my husband,” she admitted. “Le Guast and Madame de Sauves were successful in creating a like indifference on his part, which, coinciding with mine, separated us altogether, and we neither spoke to each other nor slept in the same bed.”

  But although he had succeeded in dividing his sister from her husband, by this maneuver did Henri, paradoxically, reconcile the duke of Alençon and the king of Navarre. Marguerite might not have been speaking to her husband, but his counselors were, and they were quick to point out that Henry’s being forced to prove his loyalty by stooping to the level of dismissing his wife’s household staff did not bode well for his future prospects at court. “A few days after this, some faithful servants about the person of the King my husband… observed to him that already matters were brought to such a pass that the King showed little regard for him, and even appeared to despise him. They afterwards addressed themselves to my brother… representing to him that the King my husband and he were both circumstanced alike, and equally in disgrace.” In other words, neither prince was getting anywhere by remaining at court; the king clearly had no intention of promoting either of them.

  And so Henry and François once again decided to flee—not together, as their previous plans for joint action had been betrayed and failed so spectacularly in the past—but separately, and soon. “It was concerted betwixt them that my brother should depart first, making off in a carriage in the best manner he could; that… afterwards, the King my husband should follow, under pretense of going on a hunting party. They both expressed their concern that they could not take me with them, assuring me that I had no occasion to have any apprehensions, as it would soon appear that they had no design to disturb the peace of the kingdom, but merely to ensure the safety of their own persons, and to settle their establishments,” Margot noted.

  The matter-of-fact tone of Marguerite’s recollection belies the dismay she must have felt at her prospective abandonment. For she knew as well as Henry and François that, despite their blithe assurances, the king would interpret any unauthorized departure from court as a threat to his rule and would lash out in fury at the betrayal. But by that time they would be gone, out of reach of the king’s vengeance. She alone would be left to bear the punishment.

  In spite of this she said nothing; she let them go. In fact she helped. Late in the afternoon of September 15, 1575, François, disguising himself under a large cloak, slipped quietly out of the Louvre and walked unobserved to the Saint-Honoré Gate. There a lady’s carriage stood waiting, rumored to have been lent to him for his escape by Marguerite’s close friend the duchess of Nevers. François jumped in, and the coach drove quickly out of the city. A
short distance away, the loyal Bussy had gathered a band of fifty armed soldiers to guard the duke of Alençon on his journey. François reached the point of rendezvous without incident, leaped out of the carriage and onto a horse that Bussy had thoughtfully provided, and the group galloped safely away.

  It had begun.

  HE WASN’T MISSED UNTIL nine o’clock at night, when he didn’t show up for dinner. Instantly suspicious, Catherine and Henri confronted Marguerite. “The King and the Queen my mother asked me the reason he did not come to sup with them as usual, and if I knew of his being indisposed. I told them I had not seen him since noon,” Margot returned. An inquiry into the duke’s whereabouts was then conducted. His rooms were searched—no François. They knocked on the doors of his various mistresses—he was similarly absent. “There was now a general alarm,” reported Marguerite. “The King flew into a great passion, and began to threaten me. He then sent for all the Princes and the great officers of the Court; and giving orders for a pursuit to be made, and to bring him back, dead or alive, cried out: ‘He is gone to make war against me; but I will show him what it is to contend with a king of my power.’ ”

  But the great knights of the court dragged their feet. No one, it turned out, wanted to get involved in what was well known to be an ugly family disagreement. “They observed that… as their duty directed, they were willing to venture their lives in the King’s service; but to act against his brother they were certain would not be pleasing to the King himself [here Henri undoubtedly would have disagreed]; that they were well convinced his brother would undertake nothing that should give his Majesty displeasure, or be productive of danger to the realm; that perhaps his leaving the Court was owing to some disgust, which it would be more advisable to send and inquire into,” Marguerite recalled.

  A later report from the Venetian envoy confirmed her account. “The major part of the nobility of the realm cannot decide what course to take,” he wrote home to the doge. “Those who take up arms against Monsieur [François], to be sure, will be worse off than those who support him after a settlement is reached, for His Highness will always hold it against them. By contrast, His Majesty will be forced to pardon all those who have demonstrated against him,” he concluded knowingly. A prolonged discussion about the best course to take ensued, and although eventually an armed party was sent out with instructions to bring the truant back by force (led, hilariously, by the duke of Nevers, whose wife’s coach had been used as the getaway vehicle in the first place), they got such a late start that the trail was cold and the reluctant pursuers were obliged to return to the castle empty-handed.

  But this was no laughing matter for Marguerite, who had witnessed Henri’s rage firsthand and understood that she was likely to be the object upon which he took his revenge. She literally made herself sick with worry. “I was in tears the whole night of my brother’s departure and the next day was seized with a violent cold, which was succeeded by a fever that confined me to my bed,” she confessed. She who had so diligently cared for her husband during his recent illness received no comparable kindness from Henry in her time of need; on the contrary, to keep himself above suspicion he deliberately shunned her. “Meanwhile my husband was preparing for his departure, which took up all the time he could spare from his visits to Madame de Sauves; so that he did not think of me,” she reported hollowly. “He returned as usual at two or three in the morning, and, as we had separate beds, I seldom heard him; and in the morning, before I was awake, he went to my mother’s levée, where he met Madame de Sauves, as usual.”

  It was fortunate that Marguerite was confined to her bedchamber, for the king was incensed at François’s escape, in which he suspected his sister was complicit. Having no real proof, Henri was unable to avenge himself openly on the queen of Navarre, so he sought instead to wound her through a surrogate. Specifically, he decided to assassinate her former lady-in-waiting Torigni, now living quietly outside Paris under the protection of a relative. It is difficult to believe that the sovereign of a kingdom as large and important as France, responsible for the welfare of millions of subjects, in the middle of an economic disaster, faced with mounting problems of poverty and ruin, and facing an opposition movement manifestly growing stronger every day, would devote time and energy to planning the abduction and murder of a defenseless young woman. But this was nonetheless what Henri focused on when he was not lying in bed or driving around the countryside with the queen, all the while wearing a basket containing the small lapdogs he loved around his neck.

  Guast was again at the forefront of the plot. “He prevailed on the King to adopt a design for seizing Torigni, at the house of her cousin Chastelas, and, under pretence of bringing her before the King, to drown her in a river which they were to cross,” Marguerite revealed. “The party sent upon this errand was admitted by Chastelas, not suspecting any evil design, without the least difficulty, into his house. As soon as they had gained admission they proceeded to execute the cruel business they were sent upon, by fastening Torigni with cords and locking her up in a chamber… Meantime, according to the French custom, they crammed themselves, like gluttons, with the best eatables the house afforded.”

  This native fondness for fine dining would be their undoing. For while the brave officers sent to drown the dangerous lady-in-waiting were gorging themselves on Chastelas’s larder, they failed to notice their host’s domestics escaping through the back door. By coincidence, the frightened servants ran into a company of soldiers on their way to join François, who had established a base of operations in the city of Dreux, about fifty miles west of Paris. Leading the group were two members of François’s household who knew and admired the queen of Navarre. Upon hearing the servants’ stories, they instantly decided to rescue the unhappy damsel. “Accordingly, they proceeded to the house with all expedition, and arrived just at the moment these soldiers were setting Torigni on horseback, for the purpose of conveying her to the river wherein they had orders to plunge her,” Margot recounted. “Galloping into the courtyard, sword in hand, they cried out: ‘Assassins, if you dare to offer that lady the least injury you are dead men!’ So saying, they attacked them and drove them to flight, leaving their prisoner behind, nearly as dead with joy as she was before with fear and apprehension.” To prevent a future attempt on her life, Torigni was courteously escorted to Dreux, where she remained “under my brother’s protection and was treated with as much respect as if she had been with me,” the queen of Navarre concluded gratefully.

  Marguerite maintained that her mother had no knowledge of the conspiracy against Torigni, and this seems likely. Henri was far more adept at keeping information away from Catherine than his brother Charles had been. And the queen mother certainly would not have approved of the scheme, since she was doing all she could to broker a peace between the king and his younger brother. Upon reaching Dreux, François had issued a proclamation in which he cloaked his resentment at being passed over for promotion under the general banner of his desire to serve the public good. He pointed particularly to the financial burden placed on the population by the imposition of crippling taxes, much of which went “to enrich only a very few persons, nearly all foreigners, who have monopolized the king and the principal offices and governments of the kingdom… Seeing this wound grow worse day by day and our own person treated more unworthily than ever, and with so many princes, nobles, clergymen, citizens, and bourgeoisie with their eyes fixed upon us, imploring us to join hands and help them… we have resolved, without any concern for our own safety, to try to escape from our captivity and to take the public cause in hand,” he announced virtuously.

  But no one at court had any doubt that what François really wanted were the honors and riches that he felt were due him as the brother of the king and next in line to the throne. If Henri had been named lieutenant-general when he was only sixteen, François reasoned, why should this appointment not now come naturally to him, who was already twenty? Similarly, Henri, as crown prince, had been made duke
of Anjou, the realm’s most significant (and lucrative) appanage while Charles was still alive, so why was François, who now occupied this coveted position, still only the lowly duke of Alençon? François was not a Huguenot himself, but he was willing to espouse the principle of freedom of religion if it meant that he could use Protestant money and forces to compel his older brother into giving him his birthright. And those forces were significant. The prince of Condé had spent more than a year recruiting soldiers in Germany. Rumors were that by spring he would have assembled an army of over thirty thousand men—enormous for its day—with which to invade France.

  Under the circumstances, even Henri, who did not have the funds to raise a competing force of anywhere near that size, understood that he was going to have to make some concessions to his despised brother or risk losing the throne altogether. Despite her age and corpulence—she was by this time fifty-six and so obese that the Huguenots christened their largest cannon the Queen Mother after her—Catherine volunteered to act as mediator, traveling back and forth repeatedly between the duke of Alençon’s headquarters and the court. To protect Henri, the queen mother conceded almost everything François wanted. Mindful of the bond that existed between her youngest children, Catherine planned to bring Marguerite along with her to these negotiations in order to ensure a successful result. This, however, was not to be. Fate (or, more accurately, vengeance) intervened when, on the evening of November 1, 1575, All Saints’ Day, Guast was discovered murdered in his town house in Paris.