The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  If their positions had been reversed—if Catherine had wanted her to go and Marguerite had wept and begged that she would be ruined if she went—there is no question that Catherine would have sent her anyway. But Margot was not her mother. She returned reluctantly to Paris.

  THE TERMS OF THE Peace of Monsieur, when they became known, stunned the Catholic majority. The Parisian populace in particular, who not without reason had been under the impression that the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had more or less permanently settled the religious question in their favor, openly revolted against the treaty. The Parlement of Paris declined to register the edict granting the Huguenots freedom of worship throughout the realm; the priests of Notre-Dame retaliated against the Crown by refusing to allow Henri III to enter the cathedral; and there were placards in the streets railing against the royal family’s capitulation to the heretical Protestants. The Guises were, as always, at the vanguard of the protest. “There is much heartburning touching the execution of this peace,” worried an English diplomat. “The churchmen and the Guises show themselves open enemies to it, and solicit the towns to make resistance, namely, touching the exercise of religion.”

  The Catholic faction did more than just protest against its defeat; it adapted. Their leaders could not help but notice how well organized the Huguenots were—how much better organized, in fact, than the Catholics themselves. It was the Protestants’ ability to call up men and resources quickly that made them so dangerous. To neutralize this advantage, the Catholics, under Guise management, decided to put into place a similarly structured political organization that would link their coreligionists town by town and so present a united front against the enemy. “A league was formed in the provinces and great cities, which was joined by numbers of Catholics,” Marguerite explained. “M. de Guise was named as the head of all.” This was the beginning of what would evolve into the Catholic League, a confederation of orthodox believers operating within France as a quasi-independent regime outside the law, not unlike a shadow government.

  As it turned out, the Guises and their allies needn’t have bothered to get so upset about the Crown’s concessions to the Huguenots. Once the threat was over and the German horsemen paid off by the royal treasury, with funds accumulated through yet another highly unpopular tax on the royal subjects, it rapidly became apparent that neither the king nor his mother had any intention of keeping their side of the bargain and enforcing the edict. Catherine went out of her way to point this out to the majority of the Catholic aristocracy (who had remained out of the Politique movement). The duke of Nevers recorded in his diary that the queen mother had informed him to his face that she “had made the peace in order to get back Monsieur, and not to reestablish the Huguenots, as everybody now realizes.”

  Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude toward official commitments extended to promises made to Marguerite as well. Her dowry went unpaid, and even after François returned to the court in November the king did not allow his sister to join her husband in Navarre, although Henry asked repeatedly for his wife and even sent an ambassador, Monsieur de Duras, to fetch her. “After some time, M. de Duras arrived at Court, sent by the King my husband to hasten my departure,” Marguerite recalled. “Hereupon, I pressed the King greatly to think well of it, and give me his leave. He, to color his refusal, told me he could not part with me at present, as I was the chief ornament of his Court; that he must keep me a little longer, after which he would accompany me himself on my way as far as Poitiers… These excuses were purposely framed in order to gain time until everything was prepared for declaring war against the Huguenots, and, in consequence, against the King my husband, as he fully designed to do,” she concluded.

  As difficult as it is to believe from his treatment of her when they were together, the king of Navarre was sincere in his desire to have his wife returned to him. Allied with François, she had proved herself a significant political asset. Marguerite may not have had her dowry, but she brought legitimacy and powerful allies to the marriage. If she turned against him, or encouraged the new duke of Anjou to support Catholic policies over those of the Huguenots, Henry’s position in the kingdom could be severely weakened. He was stronger with his wife, the king of Navarre realized belatedly, than without her.

  The problem for Henry was that his brother-in-law the king realized this as well and was intent upon breaking the three-way alliance between his younger siblings and the king of Navarre. When the duke of Anjou returned to court, Margot remembered, “The King received him very graciously, and showed, by his reception of him, how much he was pleased with his return. Bussy, who returned with my brother, met likewise with a gracious reception.” (Henri III must indeed have felt the need to placate his younger brother and sister to have swallowed his anger at the redoubtable Bussy.) “The King,” Marguerite continued, “turned his thoughts entirely upon the destruction of the Huguenots. To effect this, he strove to engage my brother against them, and thereby make them his enemies; and that I might be considered as another enemy, he used every means to prevent me from going to the King my husband. Accordingly, he showed every mark of attention to both of us, and manifested an inclination to gratify all of our wishes.”

  One of these wishes had to do with the revival of the old plan for a military campaign in the Netherlands, originally sponsored by Coligny. The Dutch Protestants, brutally repressed by their Spanish overlord, Philip II, were extremely impressed by François’s successful rebellion and the religious freedom promised by the Peace of Monsieur. It was decided that the French king’s younger brother was just the sort of man they needed to help them throw off the yoke of oppression imposed by tyrannical Spain. Accordingly, one of their leading barons, William of Nassau, prince of Orange, made overtures to François, promising him a million florins and the rule of Holland if he would lead an army into the Netherlands to fight against Philip II.

  To conciliate his brother, Henri III pretended to consider this offer but in reality he had other plans for François. Marguerite was correct: the king was plotting to renew hostilities against the Protestants. Henri used the occasion of the meeting of the main representative body, the Estates-General, in November 1576 to formally rescind the edict to which he had so recently agreed and declare war on the Huguenots. To induce the duke of Anjou to join in repudiating the treaty that he himself had negotiated, François was finally appointed as commander of an army—but only if he agreed to lead it against his former allies, the Huguenots. “The King called my brother to his closet, where were present the Queen my mother and some of the King’s counselors,” Marguerite reported. “He represented the great consequence [threat] the Catholic league was to his State and authority… that the Catholics had very just reason to be dissatisfied with the peace, and that it behooved him [François], rather to join the Catholics than the Huguenots, and this from conscience as well as interest.”

  Henri III’s bribe proved efficacious. Six months after leading an insurgency against the king in the name of the Huguenots, François, perhaps not the brightest of Catherine’s children, committed himself to leading another army, this time against the Huguenots in the name of the king.

  François’s defection put Marguerite in the extremely awkward position of having her favorite brother, to whom she was still intensely loyal, commanding a military operation whose aim was to annihilate her husband and his subjects, whom, as queen of Navarre, she was honor-bound to protect. No matter which side won in this conflict, she would lose, which was just what Henri III had intended. She wasted no time confronting him. “I went directly to the closet of the Queen my mother, where I found the King. I expressed my resentment at being deceived by him, and at being cajoled by his promise to accompany me from Paris to Poitiers, which, as it now appeared, was mere pretence,” she fumed. “I represented that I did not marry by my own choice, but entirely agreeable to the advice of King Charles, the Queen my mother, and himself; that, since they had given him to me for a husband, they ought not to hinder
me from partaking of his fortunes; that I was resolved to go to him, and that if I had not their leave, I would get away how I could, even at the hazard of my life.” (This after having been so recently confined under house arrest. Marguerite was nothing if not brave.)

  “Sister… what the Queen my mother and I are doing is for your own good,” Henri lectured her fatuously in reply. “I am determined to carry on a war of extermination until this wretched religion of the Huguenots, which is of so mischievous a nature, is no more. Consider, my sister, if you, who are a Catholic, were once in their hands, you would become a hostage for me, and prevent my design! And who knows but they might seek their revenge upon me by taking away your life? No, you shall not go amongst them; and if you leave us in the manner you have now mentioned,” he concluded ominously, “rely upon it that you will make the Queen your mother and me your bitterest enemies, and that we shall use every means to make you feel the effects of our resentment; and moreover, you will make your husband’s situation worse instead of better.”

  Infuriated by Henri’s feigned solicitude for her welfare and undaunted by his threats, Marguerite retired from this interview and sought the counsel of her friends and especially her brother François. Fleeing the court for Navarre against the king’s express command was considered too risky to undertake, but Margot refused to stay and play the role of helpless pawn in which she had been cast by her mother and older brother. Her friends agreed. “I found them all of the opinion that it would be exceedingly improper for me to remain in a Court now at open variance with the King my husband,” the queen of Navarre affirmed. But if she could not escape to Henry, then where to go?

  Various options were floated for a neutral locality. It was suggested, for example, that Marguerite might go on a pilgrimage somewhere. Or perhaps visit friends or family who lived outside of France—there were her cousins in Savoy. While she was weighing these alternatives, the princess of Roche-sur-Yon, who had been ailing, piped up that she was intending to journey to a town in Belgium known for its healing waters and would be only too thrilled to have Margot come along.* At the mention of this locale, a new member of François’s household, a gentleman by the name of Mondoucet, who was also among those present, was gripped by sudden inspiration. Mondoucet had very recently returned from a posting in Flanders, where he had had an opportunity to acquaint himself with the political situation in the Netherlands. He had seen firsthand the discontent with Spanish rule and had made a number of important contacts. “He stated that he was commissioned by several nobles, and the municipalities of several towns, to declare how much they were inclined in their hearts towards France, and how ready they were to come under a French government,” recalled Marguerite. “My brother readily lent an ear to Mondoucet’s proposition, and promised to engage in it… Mondoucet was to return to Flanders under a pretence of accompanying the Princesse de Roche-sur-Yon in her journey to Spa… and he suggested to my brother that I might be of great use to him in Flanders, if, under the color of any complaint, I should be recommended to drink the Spa waters and go with the Princesse.”

  Here at last was a proposal that appealed to Marguerite—appealed greatly. To be François’s covert agent in the Netherlands, to be useful, to win him allies and pave the way for French sovereignty—that was an endeavor worthy of a queen. François also leaped at the opportunity. “My brother acquiesced in this opinion, and came up to me, saying: ‘Oh, Queen! You need be no longer at a loss for a place to go to. I have observed that you have frequently an erysipelas [a skin infection, also known as cellulitis] on your arm, and you must accompany the Princess to Spa. You must say your physicians had ordered those waters for the complaint; but when they did so, it was not the season to take them. That season is now approaching, and you hope to have the King’s leave to go there.’ My brother did not deliver all he wished to say at that time,” Margot confided, “because the Cardinal de Bourbon was present, whom he knew to be a friend to the Guises and to Spain. However, I saw through his real design, and that he wished me to promote his views in Flanders.”

  The very next day Marguerite went to Catherine and, holding out her arm, showed her mother her rash and informed her that her doctors had recommended that she take the cure at Spa as the best means of healing the inflammation. As it happened, the princess of Roche-sur-Yon was also intending to go—might Margot be allowed to accompany her? Strangely, Catherine agreed instantly to this plan and without further inquiry promised to use her influence with Henri to obtain the necessary permission. “She was as good as her word,” reported Marguerite, “and the King discoursed with me on the subject without exhibiting the smallest resentment,” an accommodation that Margot put down to Henri’s exultancy at having bested his sister by keeping her away from Navarre. “Indeed, he was well pleased by now that he had prevented me from going to the King my husband, for whom he had conceived the greatest animosity,” she commented.

  The speed with which her request was granted in fact hinted at other, less altruistic motives than concern for her skin, but in the excitement of packing—this would be the queen of Navarre’s first trip outside France—and her triumph at what she believed to be the successful dissembling of her true objectives, Margot failed to notice. She saw only that Henri went out of his way to be helpful, ensuring that the proper authorities were informed of her impending visit. He even “ordered a courier to be immediately dispatched to Don John of Austria—who commanded for the King of Spain in Flanders—to obtain from him the necessary passports for a free passage in the countries under his command, as I should be obliged to cross a part of Flanders to reach Spa, which is in the bishopric of Liège,” relayed Marguerite happily, not perhaps fully appreciating the dubious worth to an aspiring French agent provocateur of having Don John, the brutal governor of the Spanish forces in the Netherlands and one of the most feared men in Europe, forewarned of her impending arrival.

  14

  Queen of Spies

  A prince need trouble little about conspiracies when the people are well disposed, but when they are hostile and hold him in hatred, then he must fear everything and everybody.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  THE COURT SPLIT UP AT the end of May 1577. François went off with the royal army to besiege the Huguenot town of Issoire, in southern France; Catherine and the king traveled to Poitiers in preparation for a future attack on Henry of Navarre in Gascony; and Marguerite embarked for Flanders, in the company of the princess of Roche-sur-Yon and a large party of some twenty-five or thirty companions, including a dozen or so ladies-in-waiting, one cardinal, a bishop, a count, her chief steward, and other members of her household deemed necessary to the queen of Navarre’s comfort and well-being, to take up her new role as secret agent.

  In keeping with her cover story of elegant female sovereign en route to a fashionable watering hole, she journeyed in high style. “I travelled in a litter raised with pillars,” Marguerite remembered fondly. “The lining of it was Spanish velvet, of a crimson color, embroidered in various devices with gold and different colored silk thread. The windows were of glass, painted in devices. The lining and windows had, in the whole, forty devices, all different and alluding to the sun and its effects. Each device had its motto, either in the Spanish or Italian language. My litter was followed by two others; in the one was the Princesse de Roche-sur-Yon, and in the other Madame de Tournon, my lady of the bedchamber. After them followed ten maids of honor, on horseback, with their governess; and last of all, six coaches and chariots, with the rest of the ladies and all our female attendants.” Margot acknowledged that this procession “excited great curiosity as it passed through the several towns in the course of my journey.”

  Her first stop outside France was Cambrai, at that time an ecclesiastical state under Spanish dominion. Cambrai boasted a large fortress, extremely useful for military purposes, commanded by an officer by the name of Monsieur d’Ainsi, “a polite and well-accomplished man, having the carriage and behavior of on
e of our most perfect courtiers, very different from the rude incivility which appears to be the characteristic of a Fleming,” Marguerite observed. (Like many first-time travelers, the queen of Navarre brought her native prejudices with her on this trip.) The spy saw at once that procuring the allegiance of Monsieur d’Ainsi and his stronghold for François would provide her brother with a secure foothold from which to conquer the rest of Flanders. That evening, a grand ball was given in her honor, and it naturally fell to Monsieur d’Ainsi, as the highest authority in the town after the bishop (who, luckily, retired early that evening), to escort the guest of honor to the dance floor. “I employed all the talents God had given me to make M. d’Ainsi a friend to France, and attach him to my brother’s interest,” Marguerite reported. Monsieur d’Ainsi was unused to being the object of the attentions of beautiful highborn women. “Through God’s assistance I succeeded with him,” Margot advised modestly.*

  Next stop on the goodwill ambassador’s tour was Valenciennes, about twenty-five miles to the northeast. By the time she left Cambrai, Monsieur d’Ainsi was so smitten that he obtained leave to accompany Marguerite all the way to Namur, deep in Spanish-held Belgium, where Don John had arranged to meet the visiting French dignitaries. This afforded plenty of time for plotting. Monsieur d’Ainsi “took every opportunity of discoursing with me… and declaring that he heartily despised being under the command of his Bishop, who, though his sovereign, was not his superior by birth, being born a private gentleman like himself, and, in every other respect, greatly his inferior,” the queen of Navarre confided. The Flemings, it seemed, were not without their own native prejudices.