The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  But she was not so lucky the next time. Two hours later, the captain of the guard himself banged on her door, and this time there was no denying him entrance. An informer from Paris had just arrived with intelligence relating to the duke of Anjou’s brazen flight from court. The queen of Navarre was summoned to an immediate predawn audience with a furious Henri III and Catherine, at which it was expected that she would confirm her culpability in this treasonous enterprise and provide the details of her brother’s escape.

  HAVING NO CHOICE, MARGUERITE arose from bed and began hurriedly to dress. Her chambermaids had been awakened as well. There was no disguising the precariousness of her situation, and her servants were unable to control their emotions. “One of them was indiscreet enough to hold me round the waist, and exclaim aloud, shedding a flood of tears, that she should never see me more,” Margot recounted. The captain of the guard was incensed. “Pushing her away, [he] said to me: ‘If I were not a person thoroughly devoted to your service, this woman has said enough to bring you into trouble. But,’ continued he, ‘fear nothing. God be praised, by this time the Prince your brother is out of danger.’ ”

  The captain spoke the truth. After being let down with the rope, François, Simier, and Cangé had all managed to creep outside the Louvre grounds without being noticed and had subsequently made their way to a prearranged meeting with the always resourceful Bussy at the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, very near one of the ramparts of the capital. “By consent of the abbot, a hole had been made in the city wall, through which they passed, and horses being provided and in waiting, they mounted, and reached Angers without the least accident,” Margot, much comforted by this information, reported.

  François’s having gained the impregnability of his home base of Angers, which boasted a massive stronghold, was likely the determining factor in saving Marguerite from Henri III’s revenge. As the queen of Navarre had correctly anticipated, the king could not risk provoking the duke of Anjou, who had already shown himself capable of leading a successful attack on the throne, by maltreating his beloved sister. “I found him [Henri III] sitting at the foot of the Queen my mother’s bed, in such a violent rage that I am inclined to believe I should have felt the effects of it, had he not been restrained by the absence of my brother and my mother’s presence,” she affirmed. Still, her situation was sufficiently dire to convince Margot that it might be a good idea, just this once, to set aside those pesky scruples she had about lying. “They both told me that I had assured them my brother would not leave the Court, and that I pledged myself for his stay. I replied that it was true that he had deceived me, as he had them,” protested the woman who had painstakingly planned the escape, smuggled in the rope, secured the necessary accomplices, and then personally helped to lower François out her window. “However, I was ready still to pledge my life that his departure would not operate to the prejudice of the King’s service, and that it would appear he was only gone to his own principality to give orders and forward his expedition to Flanders,” she recovered smoothly.

  These last words were confirmed the next morning, when Henri III received a long, reassuring letter from his brother, in which François again declared his fidelity to the Crown and explained that he had only left the court for his own safety and to pursue his ambitions in Flanders. “This caused a cessation of complaints, but by no means removed the King’s dissatisfaction,” Margot reported frankly. Henri dispatched his mother to Angers to try to persuade the duke of Anjou to return to court. This she was not able to do; nor was she able, despite repeated attempts and a series of tempting marriage proposals aimed at distracting her youngest son’s attention, to persuade François to abandon his Netherlands campaign. Despite the determined opposition of Catherine and Henri, who feared Spanish reprisals if the French king’s younger brother took up arms in Flanders, the duke of Anjou left France, taking his household with him, and by July 12 was at the city of Mons, deep in Flemish territory, with the promise of an army of some three thousand soldiers to follow.

  His initiative was applauded by his sister, who in addition to having imposed her political will over that of her formidable mother and older brother reaped several ancillary benefits from François’s military campaign. The critical role Marguerite had played in these events was not lost on Henri III, and a crude attempt was made to conciliate her by “complying with my wishes, that by this means he could withdraw me from my attachment to my brother,” she observed. That August, she finally received her dowry—not in cash, as the royal treasury could not afford it, but in land and property, “with the power of nomination to all vacant benefices and offices.” Henri even subsidized this with the gift of an annual payment “over and above the customary pension to the daughters of France, he gave another out of his privy purse,” Marguerite noted with satisfaction.

  But nothing bespoke her triumph more than the king’s at last conceding to her request to be reunited with her husband. In this Henri III was influenced by more than his younger brother’s defiance. After François’s flight from court, the king’s mignons, deprived of their favorite target, had turned their attention to goading a new rival: the duke of Guise. An altercation broke out between Quélus and Balzac d’Entragues, a senior member of the duke of Guise’s household, very similar to what had occurred previously with Bussy, only this time a duel took place. The duke’s men, no strangers to warfare, proved to be exceptionally deadly in hand-to-hand combat. Three of Henri’s mignons were killed outright, and Quélus himself, being apparently far more proficient with insults than with blades, was stabbed nineteen times and died slowly and painfully over the course of the following few months. Henri was inconsolable at the loss of his favorites. The king “covered their dead bodies with kisses, clipped their blond locks and had them taken for safekeeping, and removed Quélus’s earrings, which he himself had given him, putting them on with his own hand,” revealed a Parisian chronicler.

  To assuage his anger and grief, Henri III turned on Quélus’s assailant and demanded that Balzac d’Entragues be arrested and condemned for murder. But the duke of Guise defended his retainer and refused to hand him over to the royal guard. “M. d’Entragues did only what any gentleman ought to have done; if anyone attempts to interfere with him, my sword, which has a sharp edge, shall settle the question,” he responded coolly. With this all Henri’s old enmity toward his childhood schoolmate, which he had suppressed since the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when he had needed the duke of Guise’s help, came rushing back with a vengeance. He would never forget this insult to his beloved Quélus. Afraid to confront his adversary directly—for the valiant duke of Guise was extremely popular in Paris, far more than the king himself—Henri instead attempted to incite him to violence (which could then be used as an excuse for arrest) by spreading rumors about his wife’s infidelity. Disgusted but unbowed, the duke of Guise refused to take the bait and instead, like François, simply removed himself and his family and supporters from court.

  Having succeeded in alienating the leaders of both the Catholic and the Politique factions in France, it occurred to Henri III that it would behoove him to placate the Huguenots. As usual, he assigned the task of reconciliation to his mother. To further demonstrate his goodwill to his brother-in-law, who by default had been elevated to a higher position of favor with the king than either his younger brother or the duke of Guise, Henri III found that he was, after all, able to overcome his reservations about reuniting his sister with her husband.

  And so, after more than six years of marriage, Margot was finally permitted to leave the court to take her place in Navarre. It had taken a little longer and been slightly more complicated than she had expected, but she had accomplished every one of the goals she had set out for herself and her brother at La Fère, no mean achievement. Still, although she had worked hard for this and must have savored her victory, she could not have faced the journey south without some trepidation. It had been nineteen months since she had last seen the husband who had s
o callously abandoned her to imprisonment and the king’s wrath. Much had changed in the interim, it was true. But had he?

  16

  Queen of Navarre

  Well-ordered states and wise princes have studied diligently not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to satisfy the populace and keep it contented, for this is one of the most important matters that a prince has to deal with.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  HENRY OF NAVARRE HAD ONE reason and one reason only for wanting his wife back. His small kingdom needed a line of succession, which meant that he needed to start a family. In the absence of divorce or annulment, which the pragmatic king of Navarre had ruled out as potentially jeopardizing his own standing as next in line to the throne of France after François (not to mention that divorcing a royal princess might easily lead to war), Marguerite was the only woman in Christendom who could provide him with a legitimate son and heir.

  Margot’s motives for reestablishing relations with her recalcitrant husband, however, were far more ambitious. Although she was as anxious as Henry to produce a scion to Navarre—her position would be far more secure if she gave birth to a son who might one day rule France—Marguerite also craved the affection, respect, and responsibility that were the assumed by-products of a nuptial union with a sovereign prince. Not for her, the proud daughter of a king of France, the sort of marriage her lower-born Italian mother had endured, publicly set aside in favor of a beautiful mistress. Marguerite’s rank was superior to Henry’s, and she expected to be esteemed accordingly or, at the very least, treated as an equal.

  Still, she could not have helped but have misgivings. She had been to Gascony only once, as a child on the Grand Tour, and did not remember much about it except that it had been very hot and then the rain had come down in torrents and ruined her mother’s party. As her husband’s birthplace and childhood home as well as a Huguenot stronghold, however, Gascony gave Henry every advantage over her. If he wanted to make her life with him unpleasant, he undoubtedly could. She needed his goodwill, and she set out determined to obtain it.

  Catherine, who accompanied Marguerite on the journey south in order to treat with Henry, sabotaged her daughter’s efforts right from the beginning by bringing along twenty members of the Flying Squadron handpicked for beauty. Madame de Sauve’s time seems to have passed; the reigning sirens were now an exotic temptress of Latin ancestry named Dayelle and an equally glamorous Frenchwoman, La Verne. Although at twenty-five Marguerite was still a highly attractive woman in her own right, she understood that she would have to compete for Henry’s attention. “For my husband had been greatly smitten with Dayelle, and M. de Thurène [one of Henry’s principal officials] was in love with La Vergne,” she noted glumly, which of course was the reason Catherine, angling for every advantage in her negotiations, insisted upon bringing the women along in the first place.

  The two queens, mother and daughter, attended by Catherine’s piquant flock of dazzling ladies-in-waiting, in addition to the usual servants, clergymen, physicians, kitchen staff, ambassadors, and royal counselors, left Paris in August 1578. For Catherine this was a reprise, albeit on a smaller scale, of the Grand Tour, and she sought to replicate the opulence of her former journey. A special tax had to be levied to bear the cost of the expedition, with its carts of gowns and jewels, household supplies, and elaborate props for ceremonial entries into the various towns and cities along the route.*

  Marguerite, with so much at stake and so many fascinating rivals with whom to contend, threw herself into the business of standing out and seems for the most part to have succeeded. “I remember (for I was there) that when the queen mother took this queen, her daughter, to the King of Navarre, her husband, she passed through Cognac and made some stay,” recounted the courtier Brantôme. “While they were there, came various grand and honorable ladies of the region to see them and do them reverence, who were all amazed at the beauty of the princess, and could not surfeit themselves in praising her to her mother… Wherefore she begged her daughter to array herself most gorgeously in the fine and superb apparel that she wore at Court for great and magnificent pomps and festivals, in order to give pleasure to these worthy dames.” Marguerite obligingly put on her court dress, “a gown of silver tissue and dove-color… [with] hanging sleeves, a rich head-dress with a white veil, neither too large nor yet too small.” Her appearance drew approbation, even from her mother—“My daughter, you look well,” Catherine remarked. When Marguerite then worried aloud that she had better wear all her clothes now, as they were sure to be out of fashion the next time she returned to court, her mother stopped her. “ ‘What do you mean by that, my daughter? Is it not you yourself who invent and produce these fashions of dress? Wherever you go the Court will take them from you, not you from the Court.’ Which was true,” Brantôme continued, “for after she returned she was always in advance of the Court, so well did she know how to invent in her dainty mind all sorts of charming things.”

  But despite these triumphs, the closer they came to their appointed rendezvous with Henry in La Réole, near Bordeaux, the more anxiety Marguerite demonstrated about the impression she would make upon her husband. “For three days she has kept herself shut up with three women in attendance; she spends her time in the bath, white as a lily, smelling of sweet lotions. One might say it was a sorceress with all her charms,” laughed one of the ladies-in-waiting in a letter home to Henri III in Paris.

  At least initially, these extensive preparations seemed to have been rewarded. Henry made every effort to gratify his wife and mother-in-law. Knowing the women’s fondness for spectacle, he had arranged for an imposing entourage of some six hundred of his highest-born noblemen, arrayed in their most splendid finery, to accompany him to their first meeting. At the sight of his wife, he heaped compliments on her, and professed himself overcome by joy at their reunion. He even made a point of sleeping with her that night. “I received every mark of honor and attention from the King that I could expect or desire,” Marguerite affirmed. For her part, the queen of Navarre demonstrated her worth to her husband almost immediately by deftly intervening in an argument that broke out between Catherine and Henry over the queen mother’s strident insistence that her son-in-law accept the authority of a Catholic governor appointed by the Crown.

  But this overt display of affection was mere pretense—on both sides. Henry was far more interested in Catherine’s Flying Squadron, particularly the enchanting young Mademoiselle Dayelle, than he was in his wife. And no number of sweet-scented baths could disguise from Marguerite the stink of garlic and sweat that formed her husband’s natural perfume, nor could she fail to register his short stature and less-than-courtly manners.

  Their problems went far beyond mere physical attraction (or lack thereof), however. The part of France to which the queen of Navarre and her mother had traveled was so deeply divided by religious controversy and the suspicion and mistrust engendered by the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre that almost every town had declared itself either wholly Catholic or Protestant, with the result that no member of the opposing sect was allowed entrance without specific permission. So, for example, Henry, being of the reformed religion, could not stay with Marguerite in Agen, a Catholic city that formed part of her dowry, and Catherine could not travel farther into Protestant territory than La Réole, “which was held by the Huguenots as a cautionary town; and the country not being sufficiently quieted, she was permitted to go no further,” Margot explained.

  Even when they found a town willing to accommodate both faiths, the acute political instability of the surrounding countryside frequently disrupted their attempts to promote harmony. In November Catherine hosted a ball at Auch for the king and queen of Navarre and their guests. Henry and a large number of Protestant gentlemen attended, many of them officials in his government. This festive occasion began on a very high note. Marguerite, who loved to dance, welcomed her new subjects with a grace and charm that pleased her husband greatly. The m
embers of Henry’s entourage, used to the austerity of their religion, were dazzled by the parade of beauties—one after another—representing the Parisian court. The allure of sermons and scriptures, previously so potent, eroded precipitously in the presence of so much richly dressed loveliness. “We found the Queen and all her maids of honor,” remembered the vicomte de Turenne, a senior member of Henry’s retinue. “The King of Navarre and the said Queen greeted each other and showed themselves more ready for understanding than on the other occasions when they had met. The violins came up. We all began to dance.”

  But this was southern France in the second half of the sixteenth century, and love was not allowed to conquer politics, even for one night. In the middle of the affair, just when everyone was having such a good time, a messenger came and whispered in Henry’s ear that there had been an uprising at La Réole and that the Protestant governor had changed sides. The king of Navarre, instantly assuming a Catholic plot (in fact it was a party of disgruntled citizens upset with what they considered to be abuses of power), motioned to the vicomte de Turenne, his top lieutenant, and a number of other gentlemen. Moments later they had disappeared from the dance floor and were galloping through the night to a nearby Catholic fortress, which they took by surprise in retaliation. This rather ruined the ball for the queen of Navarre and her remaining guests. Even Henry seems to have felt a bit penitent about spoiling his wife’s attempt at promoting concord through revelry. He made a point of rearranging his schedule so that he could return to Auch a few days later to offer his apologies to Marguerite in person and restore conjugal relations with her.