The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  It was Catherine who confirmed the king’s suspicions. The queen mother had gone north to meet her youngest son to try to convince him to surrender his ambitions in the Netherlands. They met in Chaulnes, near Amiens, on July 11. François was ill with a troubling cough, and after a few days with his mother she broke him down and he agreed to follow her advice. But she no sooner left than he changed his mind, a reversal attributed by Catherine to the queen of Navarre’s influence. Marguerite, her mother reported to Henri III, had sent a messenger to François “to turn him away from his promises and make him take up some new evil intent,” by which she meant that Margot had persuaded him not to give up after all but to recruit a new army and try again in Flanders.

  That was all the king needed to hear. Taking advantage of Catherine’s absence (for although the queen mother had supplied her son with proof of his sister’s sedition, it is unlikely she would have agreed with his manner of dealing with the problem), he attacked.

  On the evening of August 8, 1583, the king threw another of his grand fetes. The queen of France being out of town visiting relatives, Henri III asked Marguerite to stand as hostess in her place. Margot never referred to this episode, but it seems likely from her subsequent actions that she had no inkling of her brother’s true intentions. She may even have taken the request as a sign that the king’s attitude toward her was thawing. In any event, she accepted his invitation and at the appointed time appeared at the Louvre magnificently gowned, as befit her status as a queen and member of the royal family. After the customary banquet, she assumed her seat on the raised throne at the head of the company. The musicians raised their instruments; the dancers took their places; the ball commenced.

  Soon afterward, Henri III, accompanied by a number of his mignons, including Margot’s particular nemesis, the duke of Épernon, made his way to her side. Addressing his sister in a voice loud enough to be heard above the strains of the music, without the least note of warning, he launched into a tirade, accusing Marguerite of wanton promiscuity and of descending to the worst forms of lewdness. He listed her lovers one by one, beginning with Champvallon, with whom he accused her of having a child. He then went on to Bussy, La Môle, and numerous others, “naming so precisely dates and places that he seemed to have been a witness of the incidents of which he spoke,” reported a shocked diplomat from Austria who happened to be present at the dance. Marguerite, stunned by the ambush, sat helpless with mortification as her brother continued his pitiless tongue-lashing to the general entertainment of her enemies before finally pronouncing a sentence of immediate banishment so as to “deliver the Court from her contagious presence.”

  She fled the room, and the next morning, masked and accompanied by a few members of her household, including Madame de Duras and Mademoiselle de Béthune, she left Paris by closed coach. But her trials were only beginning. No sooner had she departed the city, a chronicler reported, than her party was intercepted by some sixty members of the king’s guard charged with detaining her maids of honor for questioning. The soldiers treated the occupants of the carriage with stinging contempt, roughly pulling off the ladies’ masks in an effort to identify the women. “Miserable wretch, do you dare to lift your hand against the sister of your king?” Marguerite demanded, outraged. “I am acting on his orders,” the captain returned coolly. Both Madame de Duras and Mademoiselle de Béthune were arrested over their mistress’s protests; only after their removal from the coach was she allowed to continue her journey. The queen of Navarre had made it no more than a mile down the road when she spotted Henri III’s distinctive coach coming toward her. Seeking the king’s clemency, Margot leaned out her window in an attempt to hail her brother, but Henri refused to acknowledge her presence, staring past her with brutal indifference.

  If she had not known it before, she knew then that Paris was lost to her and that her only hope of recovering her reputation was to return to Gascony to try to patch up her marriage. But she dreaded approaching her husband. By the rules of sixteenth-century France, she was now officially labeled a fallen woman. The news of her disgrace and banishment was no doubt already speeding gleefully ahead of her. Henry would be within his rights to repudiate her. She could not bear to arrive in Nérac only to be cruelly dressed down and summarily banished, as she had been from the royal court. The humiliation would be too great.

  She could not go back, and she feared to go forward. There was nothing to do but wait to see how Henry would react.

  19

  The Queen’s Revolt

  It is necessary for a prince to possess the friendship of the people; otherwise he has no resource in times of adversity.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  MARGUERITE WAS CORRECT: WORD OF her abasement reached Nérac in a matter of days, and, just as she had feared, Henry instantly recognized that she had given him the means to renounce her. The temptation to do so must have been very strong. He hadn’t wanted her back even before the scandal.

  But the king of Navarre also knew an advantageous bargaining position when he saw it. The king of France had been so unwise as to insult Henry’s wife and throw her out of Paris? Henry could use this incident to wrest concessions from the Crown. Accordingly, he sternly forbade Marguerite to return to Nérac and instead sent a Huguenot emissary to the royal court to express his outrage over his wife’s treatment (and so begin negotiations). “It is an affront which no princess of her rank has ever before received,” observed the envoy, who later recorded this discussion in his memoirs. “It is impossible to conceal it… all Europe is discussing it. The King of Navarre has reason to fear that the Queen his wife has committed some very criminal act, since you yourself, Sire, whose kindness is so well known, have been able to treat thus your own sister. Of what then is she guilty to be so cruelly humiliated?… If she has deserved the affront, he [Henry] demands justice from you against her, as the master of the house, the father of the family. But,” said the ambassador (cleverly leaving the door open for a counteroffer), “if she is the victim of false reports, he begs you to punish openly those who have calumniated her.” In a further demonstration of just how upset he was over this infamous insult to his wife’s reputation, Henry rode out and captured the valuable Catholic stronghold of Mont-de-Marsan, just north of Pau, as a means of soothing his injured feelings.

  The king of Navarre’s immediate warlike response to his wife’s humiliation revealed to Henri III the considerable political drawbacks associated with his outburst. The king could not afford to marshal an army in order to quell a new round of hostilities in the south. Recognizing the need to placate his brother-in-law, he temporized. The haggling went on for months, during which time Marguerite, ostracized and demeaned, was powerless to influence her fate. Lacking money or support, she was forced to appeal to her husband for shelter. Henry, who was clearly enjoying having the moral upper hand for a change, ordered her from one temporary residence to another. He kept her in a state of suspense, deliberately blowing hot and cold, sometimes treating her with sneering contempt and on other occasions writing to assure her that “were it not for the meddlers who have troubled our affairs, we should have the pleasure of being together at this hour.”

  Utterly wretched and fearing that the scandal would be used as an excuse for either her husband or her brother to rid themselves of her entirely, Marguerite appealed to her mother to send a trusted servant to at least confirm that the rumors that she was with child, or had ever delivered a child, were entirely erroneous. “Madame, [I] implore you very humbly to be unwilling to permit that the pretext of my death be used at the expense of my reputation… that it may please you that I have some lady of quality and worthy of trust, who may be able, while I am alive, to bear witness to the condition in which I am [i.e., not pregnant], and who, after my death, may be present, when my body is opened, in order that she may be able, through the knowledge of this last injustice, to make every one aware of the wrong which has been done,” she concluded bitterly in a letter to Cath
erine.

  When confronted later, Henri III claimed that in banishing his sister he had acted upon the queen mother’s counsel, and Catherine did not contradict him. But clearly the manner in which he had accomplished the punishment had left the Crown open to censure, not to mention the possibility of renewed hostilities with the king of Navarre. Catherine now moved swiftly to limit the damages to the royal family. She began by convincing Henri III to set free Marguerite’s two ladies-in-waiting, Madame de Duras and Mademoiselle de Béthune. She sent one of her most accomplished officials, Pomponne de Bellièvre, formerly president of the Parlement of Paris, to Henry to negotiate for Marguerite’s return to Nérac. “I beg you do not abandon the matter of my daughter, nor return before you have, if possible, put her once more on good terms with her husband; because, if you return before this is done, I am very much afraid that we shall fall again into our earlier history, to the ruin of this poor kingdom and the too great infamy of all our family,” she instructed her emissary. At his mother’s prodding, Henri III backed away from his original position. “Kings are often liable to be deceived by false reports,” he wrote loftily in a letter delivered by Bellièvre to his brother-in-law. “Calumny has not always respected the conduct and morals of even the most virtuous princesses—as, for example, the Queen your mother. You cannot be ignorant of all the evil that was said of her.” Henry was reported to have laughed outright at this helpful parallel. “His Majesty does me too much honor,” he told the queen mother’s envoy. “First he calls my wife a whore then he tells me that I’m the son of one!”

  It took a full eight months, but Bellièvre eventually hammered out a deal that allowed both men (if not Marguerite) to save face. This was accomplished by laying the full blame for the incident on the entirely expendable Madame de Duras and Mademoiselle de Béthune, for whose deplorable behavior and deceptions Margot was forced to apologize abjectly to her brother the king. For his part, Henry got to keep Mont-de-Marsan and several other important towns in Gascony as recompense for the injury done to his reputation through the contemptible actions of his wife’s servants. Even then, however, the king of Navarre, who already had another girlfriend and had no desire to be burdened again with his queen, had to be more or less forced to take Margot back by his advisers, one of whom wrote to him that his “love-affairs, which are carried on so openly, and to which you devote so much time, are no longer seasonable. It is time, Sire, for you to make love to all of Christendom, and especially to France.”

  And so, on April 13, 1584, a month before her thirty-first birthday, Marguerite and the exceedingly reluctant Henry were finally reunited in Gascony. It was immediately clear to even the most casual observer that their reconciliation was in name only. The couple spent several hours pacing back and forth in sharp conversation; Henry was evidently laying down the law. “The King and Queen arrived about four o’clock, and were alone together, walking in the gallery of the Castle of Nérac until evening,” reported a Huguenot diplomat attached to the prince of Condé, who was present at the king of Navarre’s court that day. “When they were at table (it was very late, and the candles were lighted), I saw this Princess weeping incessantly, and never did I see a countenance more washed with tears nor redder from weeping. And much did I pity her, seeing her there seated by the King her husband, who was carrying on I know not what vain talk with his gentlemen, without speaking a word to this Princess, neither he nor any other.”

  Over the course of the ensuing weeks, her husband’s plan for their marriage was made plain to Marguerite. As had been the case with her mother before her, she was to hold the title of queen but not to inhabit the office. That position was reserved for Henry’s new mistress, Diane d’Andoins, countess of Guiche.* It was Diane who held sway over Henry, who counseled him and influenced his policy; she who held first place in his kingdom; she who was allowed to move freely through Gascony with him. The king and queen of Navarre, Marguerite was informed by her husband, were from this point on to live separate lives: he with Diane, whom he had installed in Pau; Margot in Nérac—or wherever Henry and Diane were not.

  There were many levels of irony to this situation, but the principal incongruity was how unlike Diane was to any of Henry’s previous infatuations and how similar in fact she was in breeding, culture, and temperament to his own wife. Diane was no seasoned coquette like Madame de Sauve or impressionable young girl like Fosseuse. She was only five years younger than Marguerite and came from an extremely honorable aristocratic family—not as prestigious as Margot’s, of course, but still very old and respected. She, too, was a mature woman interested in politics who advised Henry on strategy. Diane even had classical literary pretensions, answering to the name of Corisande, a character in a popular chivalric tale. And she, too, wished to be queen of Navarre.

  Marguerite, with no place else to go, had little choice but to accept her situation. And then a mere two months after she arrived, just when she thought she could not be more tormented, came word that the duke of Anjou and Brabant, heir to the throne of France, had died.

  FRANÇOIS WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD of tuberculosis on June 10, 1584, at the age of twenty-nine. He was the second of Catherine’s children to succumb to the disease. Latent since childhood, his symptoms had become acute over the previous six months. Margot had known he was ill, but it was possible that she was not warned of the seriousness of his condition; as late as May, Catherine, relying on the opinion of her doctors, believed he would recover.

  The queen of Navarre’s grief was intense. With the death of her younger brother she had lost her one ally and protector, her only hope of recovering some semblance of her former stature and dignity. While he was still alive she could yet exhort herself to exercise patience, believing that everything would change once he inherited the throne. Now even this slender possibility had vanished. She could not attend the funeral, held in Paris, but shrouded her rooms in Nérac in black silk and retreated into mourning.

  The confusion and sorrow Marguerite experienced at the loss of her younger brother was echoed by the rest of the kingdom. For with François’s demise came the shocked recognition that, both legally and by tradition, the new heir to the throne was none other than the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, first prince of the blood.

  To have a Protestant as the next in line to inherit the crown of France (for it was clear by this time that Henri III would have no children) was unthinkable to the Catholic faction, which still represented an overwhelming majority of the population. Anticipating this, Henri III dispatched his closest adviser, the duke of Épernon, to Nérac to try to persuade the king of Navarre to reject the reformed religion and return to orthodoxy. Margot, who held Épernon responsible for her humiliation at court, was livid at her older brother’s choice of messenger. The queen of Navarre at first refused to receive the ambassador, but Henry, who desired above all to be publicly named as heir to the throne and could not afford to have his wife insult the king’s envoy, intervened with quiet but ominous authority.

  “I see very clearly that I can neither flee from nor avoid the misfortune of this visit,” she wrote despondently to Bellièvre, who still served as intermediary between Nérac and the royal court. “It is not the first mortification nor will it be the last that will come to me from that quarter, but since my life has been reduced to the condition of slavery, I will yield to a force and power I cannot resist.” Still, even in her unhappiness and resignation, there were glimmers of her old spirit, an indication that she was not yet entirely beaten down. “The day on which he [Épernon] arrives, and so long as he remains, I shall dress myself in garments which I shall never wear again: those of dissimulation and hypocrisy,” she concluded crisply. Henry might have spared her this latest indignity, since he had no intention of converting. “A man’s religion could not be put on and off like his shirt,” he informed Épernon.

  Even if Henry had agreed to return to Catholicism it is not certain that the majority of the kingdom would have accepted the sincerity of the gesture.
But the king of Navarre’s refusal to recant made it easy for his enemies and touched off a succession crisis. The duke of Guise, representing the Catholic League, was pushed into open rebellion. On December 31, 1584, in the company of his family and a large number of supporters, he signed the Treaty of Joinville, an alliance with Spain whereby Philip II agreed to provide him with a whopping six hundred thousand crowns annually to fight the Huguenots and keep Henry off the throne. With the money, the duke raised an army and began to seize towns and cities. By February he controlled almost all of northeast France. On March 31, 1585, he went even further and published the Declaration of Péronne, a stinging indictment of Henri III’s government, with particular emphasis on the king’s wasteful extravagance, his unreasonable promotion of his favorites, and his leniency toward the Huguenots. The duke of Guise used this proclamation to urge his fellow Catholics to rise up against the scourge of Protestantism. By March, the kingdom was once again consumed in a civil war.

  And this time, Marguerite, too, joined the fray.

  AFTER THE FRACAS OVER the duke of Épernon’s visit, Margot’s relationship with her husband and his mistress had continued to deteriorate. Three in a marriage is never a particularly genial situation, but by the winter of 1584 the queen of Navarre had begun to suspect Diane of more than the usual petty jealousy and vindictiveness. François’s death and Henry’s subsequent rise to next in line for the French throne, however contested, had significantly increased her husband’s value in the world. The Protestants were rallying around him. In December, Elizabeth I and a number of Swiss and German lords had signed a pact pledging to uphold Henry’s rights to the throne. And although he did not make an official announcement, Henri III, who hated the duke of Guise, had indicated that he was strongly considering naming the king of Navarre as his legitimate heir. If Henry did succeed in overcoming the odds and ascending to the throne, his wife would ascend along with him. To become queen of France was no small incentive, and there is evidence that Diane did indeed harbor ambitions to secure this title for herself.