The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  But Henry, who was far more concerned about the Maréchal de Biron’s behavior than his wife’s, failed to take the bait. Instead of turning on Marguerite, he showed both her and Turenne the letter, and accepted their protestations of innocence, good-naturedly remarking that he was used to this sort of stunt from the king of France. Since along with this unkind note, Henri III had also sent word that he refused to replace Biron, it is not surprising that open war broke out soon afterward. Hoping to take their opponents by surprise, the vicomte de Turenne, as Henry’s first lieutenant and best warrior, immediately left Nérac and took to the field, besieging a Catholic city. This intelligence making its way north, one of Henri III’s mignons spitefully interpreted it as Margot’s revenge for the king’s having revealed her illicit affair to her husband. The courtier drolly dubbed this renewal of hostilities between Huguenots and Catholics “The Lovers’ War,” a play on the reputation of the court of Nérac. As it was far pleasanter to blame his sister for the failure of his policies than to take responsibility for the conflict himself, Henri III was easily persuaded of the truth of this explanation and seethed against Marguerite.

  But nothing could have been further from the reality of the situation. As Margot herself emphatically observed, no one had more to lose by a renewal of hostilities between Catholic and Huguenot than she. “This was what I feared; I was become a sharer in the King my husband’s fortune, and was now to be in opposition to the King my brother and the religion I had been bred up in,” she despaired. “I gave my opinion upon this war to the King my husband and his Council, and strove to dissuade them from engaging in it. I represented to them the hazards of carrying on a war when they were to be opposed against so able a general as the Maréchal de Biron, who would not spare them, as other generals had done, he being their private enemy. I begged them to consider that, if the King brought his whole force against them, with intention to exterminate their religion, it would not be in their power to oppose or prevent it… this war was of such a nature that I could not, in conscience, wish success to either side; for if the Huguenots got the upper hand, the religion which I cherished as much as my life was lost, and if the Catholics prevailed, the King my husband was undone.”

  Beyond all this, a return of civil war greatly jeopardized François’s ambitions in Flanders, as the duke of Anjou could not rationally expect to recruit a new army to invade the Netherlands if all the soldiers in France were already busy fighting each other. Marguerite’s hopes were still tied desperately to those of her younger brother; she needed the idea of the northern realm as a possible refuge even more than he did. For this reason there was no voice in the south of France more consistently, more forcefully committed to peace than the queen of Navarre’s.

  And unfortunately for her husband and the Huguenots he led, her assessment of the Maréchal de Biron’s military abilities was only too accurate. Although Henry managed to take a Catholic stronghold early in May 1580, this would represent his sole conquest. By contrast, over the course of the summer and early fall, his opponent succeeded in capturing nearly thirty fortresses or towns claimed by the Protestants. In September, Biron even fired on Nérac. Only a heavy rainstorm and Marguerite’s presence (the marshal had agreed, because she was a Catholic and a member of the royal family, not to attack a city in which she was staying) averted a complete disaster for Henry.

  In the end it was the prince of Condé who saved the Huguenots from outright defeat. Frustrated by the direction the war was taking, he challenged the king of Navarre for leadership of the party and succeeded in convincing Elizabeth I to provide funds to help raise an army of German soldiers with which to invade France. The possibility of foreign intervention alarmed Henri III and Catherine, and they decided to try to isolate the prince of Condé and split the Huguenot faction by executing a peace treaty with Henry. Since he was at that point on good terms with his younger brother, the king asked François, who had already offered his services in the matter, if he would handle the negotiations. The duke of Anjou arrived in Cognac in October to meet with Henry and Marguerite.

  That her younger brother had been chosen for this assignment could not have been more gratifying to Margot. There they were—she, Henry, and François, the three of them working together just as she had hoped and planned. And between them they settled in seven months what Catherine had been unable to accomplish in the more than a year and a half she had spent alternately bribing, scolding, and threatening the numerous local officials she had interviewed on her recent grand tour. “The peace my brother made… was so judiciously framed that it gave equal satisfaction to the King and the Catholics, and to the King my husband and the Huguenots, and obtained him the affections of both parties,” Margot observed. Although she gave all the credit to François, Marguerite was clearly instrumental in these negotiations, as by her advice Biron, the source of much of the trouble, was redeployed to her brother’s service. “He [François]… acquired from it the assistance of that able general, Maréchal de Biron, who undertook the command of the army destined to raise the siege of Cambrai,” the queen of Navarre continued. “The King my husband was equally gratified in the Marshal’s removal from Gascony and having Maréchal de Matignon in his place.” If Henri III and Catherine had listened to Marguerite and removed the too-aggressive Biron in the first place, hostilities might have been avoided altogether.*

  It might be expected that Henri III was pleased with so fortunate and speedy a result, but this was not the case. “My brother returned to France accompanied by the Maréchal de Biron. By his negotiation of a peace he had acquired to himself great credit with both parties, and secured a powerful force for the purpose of raising the siege of Cambrai. But honors and success are followed by envy,” Marguerite warned. “The King beheld this accession of glory to his brother with great dissatisfaction. He had been for seven months, while my brother and I were together in Gascony, brooding over his malice, and produced the strangest invention that can be imagined. He pretended to believe (what the King my husband can easily prove to be false) that I instigated him to go to war that I might procure for my brother credit of making peace!”

  This is hindsight, of course. She could not have known the depth of the king’s animosity from so great a distance. Unfortunately for the queen of Navarre, events would unfold in so inopportune a fashion that all too soon she would acquire firsthand experience of it.

  MARGUERITE DID NOT HAVE long to bask in the successful conclusion of the Lovers’ War. The blessings of peace were superseded almost immediately by a new and potentially even more dangerous development. For soon after the negotiations terminated, pretty little Fosseuse, Margot’s young lady-in-waiting, discovered herself to be pregnant with Henry’s child.

  In the nearly three years since she had joined her husband in his southern kingdom, Margot had done her best to produce an heir to the throne of Navarre. At first, knowing her mother’s history—an initial barrenness followed by sustained fecundity—Marguerite probably did not worry too much about her own inability to become pregnant. But as the months and then years crept by and she still failed to conceive, it is obvious from her behavior that she became increasingly anxious. She even condescended to make a pilgrimage deep in Huguenot territory to sample the waters of a particular spring known for fertility. One of Catherine’s servants, sent to observe the peace negotiations and spy on the participants, reported in a letter of June 1, 1581, that “the Queen your daughter went to the baths close to Pau, which she indicated she did because of her great desire to satisfy the King her husband and bring him the happiness of children.”

  Fosseuse’s pregnancy not only emphasized the hollowness of Marguerite’s efforts in the most humiliating manner possible, it also represented a distinct threat to her position. Henry had conceived a child with another woman; therefore the problem lay with his wife’s reproductive ability rather than his. Margot understood very well that her husband would have no use for her if he believed her to be barren. Worse, he was besot
ted with Fosseuse, and his adoration encouraged the young lady’s hopes of becoming Henry’s lawful wife. “She altered her conduct towards me entirely from what it was before,” Marguerite observed. “She now shunned my presence as much as she had been accustomed to seek it, and whereas before she strove to do me every good office with the King my husband, she now endeavored to make all the mischief she was able betwixt us.” This included keeping Henry away from his wife’s bed, a contrivance that effectively destroyed the queen of Navarre’s chances of redeeming her situation by becoming pregnant herself. “For his part, he avoided me; he grew cold and indifferent, and since Fosseuse ceased to conduct herself with discretion, the happy moments that we experienced during the four or five years we were together in Gascony were no more,” Margot concluded bitterly.

  Nine months is a long time. The pleasantly diverting milieu formerly established at Nérac deteriorated sharply. Fosseuse, seeking to get away from the prying eyes of the court, “persuaded the King my husband to make a journey to the waters… in Béarn,” Marguerite reported. The queen of Navarre declined to attend her husband and his sweetheart on this happy excursion, but she could not ignore the problem. “I had every day news… informing me how matters went,” Margot remembered. “Fosseuse… expressed her expectations of marrying the King herself, in case she should be delivered of a son, when I was to be divorced.”

  An impossible situation, especially for a proud princess of France, and Marguerite strove to contain the damage. Upon Henry and Fosseuse’s return from Béarn, she took her rival aside and offered a compromise notable for its reasonableness. “The pregnancy of Fosseuse was now no longer a secret. The whole Court talked of it and not only the Court but all the country. I was willing to prevent the scandal from spreading, and accordingly resolved to talk to her on the subject… ‘Though you have for some time estranged yourself from me,’ ” said the queen of Navarre, “ ‘yet the regard I once had for you, and the esteem which I still entertain for those honorable persons to whose family you belong, do not admit of my neglecting to afford you all the assistance in my power in your present unhappy situation… Tell me the truth, and I will act towards you as a mother. You know that a contagious disorder has broken out in the place, and, under pretence of avoiding it, I will go to Mas-d’Agenois, which is a house belonging to the King my husband, in a very retired situation. I will take you with me, and such other persons as you shall name. Whilst we are there, the King will take the diversion of hunting in some other part of the country, and I shall not stir thence before your delivery. By this means we shall put a stop to the scandalous reports which are now current, and which concern you more than myself.’ ”

  But Fosseuse did not wish to be separated from Henry or removed from court. She was still quite young—only seventeen—and did not perhaps fully appreciate the precariousness of her position. Although she was by this time six months pregnant, she must have felt that she was successfully hiding her condition under her court dress, and, like many teenagers before her, she tried to bluff her way out of her predicament. “Far from showing any contrition, or returning thanks for my kindness, she replied, with the utmost arrogance, that she would prove all those to be liars who had reported such things of her; that, for my part, I had ceased for a long time to show her any marks of regard, and she saw that I was determined upon her ruin,” Marguerite remembered. “These words she delivered in as loud a tone as mine had been mildly expressed; and, leaving me abruptly, she flew in a rage to the King my husband, to relate to him what I had said to her. He was very angry upon the occasion, and declared he would make them all liars who had laid such things to her charge. From that moment until the hour of her delivery, which was a few months after, he never spoke to me.”

  Henry’s experience of childbirth being as limited as Fosseuse’s, it’s possible that he actually believed that the whole affair would be over quickly and quietly with no great inconvenience to either himself or his loved one. If so, he was soon to be educated. Fosseuse slept in a large room with Marguerite’s other maids of honor. Her contractions started at dawn, while she and the other women were still in bed. Sharp, searing, sustained pain that builds to a crescendo then slowly recedes only to repeat itself every five minutes or so turned out to be much more frightening and difficult to hide in close quarters than Fosseuse had anticipated. In her wretchedness, she called for the court physician and implored him to rouse the king of Navarre and notify him of her pitiful condition. Although Henry and Marguerite were no longer sharing the same bed, they were sleeping in the same room, so when the doctor entered, he woke up the queen of Navarre as well as the king.

  “The physician delivered the message as he was directed, which greatly embarrassed my husband,” Marguerite observed drolly. “What to do he did not know. On the one hand, he was fearful of a discovery; on the other, he foresaw that, without proper assistance, there was danger of losing one he so much loved. In this dilemma, he resolved to apply to me, confess all, and implore my aid and advice… Having come to this resolution, he withdrew my curtains, and spoke to me thus: ‘My dear, I have concealed a matter from you which I now confess. I beg you to forgive me, and to think no more about what I have said to you on the subject. Will you oblige me so far as to rise and go to Fosseuse, who is taken very ill? I am well assured that, in her present situation, you will forget everything and resent nothing. You know how dearly I love her, and I hope you will comply with my request.’ ”

  Henry was indeed fortunate in his wife. She didn’t have to do it. But Marguerite had probably already suspected that it would come to this, and she saw a chance to remind her husband of her worth and perhaps save the marriage. “I answered that I had too great a respect for him to be offended at anything he should do, and that I would go to her immediately, and do as much for her as if she were a child of my own,” she replied with a generosity that few women would have been able to summon under similar circumstances. Still struggling to contain the scandal as effectively as possible, the queen of Navarre at once took command of the situation by dismissing her husband. “I advised him, in the meantime, to go out and hunt, by which means he would draw away all his people, and prevent tattling,” she instructed briskly. Henry, only too glad to have an excuse to absent himself from what he was just beginning to recognize might devolve into a taxing enterprise, agreed with alacrity.

  And so Margot hauled herself out of bed in the frigid darkness of the very early hours of a winter morning, dressed quickly, and went to her husband’s mistress. The first order of business was obviously to get the girl away from the other maids of honor. The queen of Navarre pretended to her women that Fosseuse was ill with a contagious disease and needed to be quarantined so she could have her moved to a remote part of the castle where her cries would not be heard. Fosseuse was in labor the whole day, and Margot and her doctor, along with some domestics, remained by her side hour after hour, soothing her. At last the baby came. “It pleased God that she should bring forth a daughter, since dead,” Marguerite observed.

  As soon as she could after delivery, having satisfied herself that Fosseuse was out of danger, Marguerite had the teenager returned to her quarters on the pretext that her illness had passed. “Notwithstanding these precautions, it was not possible to prevent the story from circulating through the palace,” Margot admitted. Still, the queen of Navarre felt that she had done the best she could to protect both the mother and her reputation. It had been a difficult delivery, but Fosseuse was at least alive, so Henry should be pleased. Exhausted from the demands of so trying a day, Marguerite retired early, shrugged out of her heavy court dress, and collapsed into bed.

  But her ordeal was not yet over. Fosseuse, who had expected to end the day triumphantly, universally admired as the proud mother of a healthy young prince, found herself instead the object of scurrilous gossip and scandal. Feeling her disgrace for the first time, she urgently sought protection. “When the King my husband returned from hunting he paid her [Fosseuse] a vi
sit, according to custom,” Marguerite continued. “She begged that I might come and see her, as was usual with me when any one of my maids of honor was taken ill. By this means she expected to put a stop to stories to her prejudice. The King my husband came from her into my bedchamber, and found me in bed, as I was fatigued and required rest, after having been called up so early. He begged me to get up and pay her a visit.”

  This was too much. Marguerite, who desperately wanted to be a mother but could not have children of her own, had just spent the whole day bringing her husband’s illegitimate daughter into the world. She was tired and already in bed; she did not want to get up and struggle into her many layers of finery in order to pay a meaningless courtesy call to inquire into the health of a young woman whose physical condition, as both of them knew only too well, had been her sole preoccupation for the previous twelve hours or so. Marguerite had put aside her own humiliation, her own overwhelming desire for love and affection, in order to aid a young woman in need, but the crisis had passed and she was not going to participate in Henry’s demeaning charade one moment longer. “I told him I went according to his desire before, when she stood in need of assistance, but now she wanted no help; that to visit her at this time would be only exposing her more, and cause myself to be pointed at by all the world,” Marguerite lashed out. The wound was clearly as fresh when she wrote these words decades later in her memoirs as it had been on the evening it occurred. For his part, Henry reacted churlishly. He’d had a perfectly good day’s hunting ruined by his girlfriend’s complaints and the news that he did not have a son after all. Margot should have had him hang around all day as a witness; he might have behaved a little more charitably. “He seemed to be greatly displeased at which I said, which vexed me the more as I thought I did not deserve such treatment after what I had done at his request in the morning; she likewise contributed all in her power to aggravate matters betwixt him and me,” Marguerite contended.