The Rival Queens

by Nancy Goldstone

  * Marguerite’s recollections of the timing of this meeting, written decades after the fact, appear to have been faulty. The court was at Metz, more than three hundred miles away, at the time of the battle at Jarnac, and Catherine was bedridden with fever; she remained there for at least a month. So it is likely this rendezvous did not occur until the beginning of June, when Margot had just turned sixteen.

  * Marguerite’s principal French biographer, Eliane Viennot, puts forward the hypothesis that it was not Guast and Henri but Catherine alone, or Catherine in combination with Charles, who first saw what the Guises were up to and simply used Henri to confront Margot. But this gives the queen mother too much credit for subterfuge. Catherine reacted to problems as they appeared, and if she had suspected that her daughter was encouraging the duke of Guise she would have put a stop to it immediately. She certainly would not have spent four months confiding in Margot, as Henri had requested. And the idea that Charles would have noticed something that his mother didn’t pick up on first (unless it involved hunting) is also highly unlikely. In fact, neither Catherine nor Charles had much occasion to think about the duke of Guise during the summer and early fall of 1569, but Henri and Guast did.

  * Not to be confused with Louis de Bourbon, the deceased prince of Condé. This Louis de Bourbon was the duke of Montpensier. Louis was, unfortunately, one of those names (like Henri) much favored by the French aristocracy. The Bourbons were members of a large dynasty with many branches and an extremely complicated political history.

  * There is no way to know for certain just how intimate the relationship between Margot and the duke of Guise became during the late spring and early summer of 1570. It is assumed that they were lovers. But it should also be noted that after the rumor of this affair was reported at the Portuguese court, Don Sebastian sent a spy into France to check on Marguerite’s behavior, and the agent found no evidence at all of indecorous conduct or sexual impropriety.

  * It is part of the secret of Elizabeth I’s astonishingly long and successful reign that she was unburdened by male relatives. Marguerite was not so lucky.

  * It is fascinating to think of how history would have been changed if Elizabeth I had agreed to this marriage.

  * Actually, he was the duke of Retz by his marriage to the duchess of Retz in 1565, but these titles were often used interchangeably.

  * It is a commonplace in history that physical love, or rather the lack thereof, was at the root of Marguerite’s objection to the marriage with her cousin. While it is true that she neither loved nor was attracted to Henry, a close examination of the evidence reveals that the difference in their religions far outweighed any other consideration. Although there were people in the sixteenth century, such as Catherine, who were cynical about Catholicism, Margot was not one of them.

  * Most modern historians still credit Maurevert with having fired the shots. But I lean to the savvy Venetian ambassador’s account. Using an Italian, and particularly a Florentine, would definitely have been Catherine’s first choice.

  * The Venetian ambassador reported, “As for the harquebus shot… the duke of Guise knew nothing about it. He would never have dared to do such a thing against the king’s will, because His Majesty… could later have done Guise and his family harm.”

  * Catherine had read about Saint Louis’s reign and was reported to have justified her actions by comparing herself to Blanche of Castile. Again, the queen mother seems not to have understood the material fully, as it was inconceivable that Blanche would ever have conspired with one of her younger sons to commit treason against her elder son the king, as Catherine did.

  * There are those scholars who claim that Marguerite was never really at risk, that her rank would have precluded her being harmed. Easy to say from a quiet perch in a modern library. No one was safe that day, least of all the Catholic princess who was perceived as having been the bait that lured the Huguenots to their doom in Paris. In fact, many women of high aristocratic birth were deliberately marked for death that terrible morning.

  * Marguerite’s conversation with Catherine remained private until her memoirs were published the following century. Nor could Henry have anticipated that Catherine would keep her own daughter in ignorance of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day plot. As far as he was concerned, Margot had spent the night before the massacre in the bedroom with him and his fellow Huguenots listening to their plans without ever bothering to warn them.

  * Claude-Catherine was married to the duke of Retz, Charles’s detested chief gentleman of the bedroom, the man whom the queen mother used to spy on her son. It was the duchess of Retz’s second marriage. Arranging for favored courtiers to wed titled widowed heiresses was a fairly standard reward for services rendered at Catherine’s court.

  * Although Henri was capable of having sex with women, as he grew older he demonstrated a marked preference for men.

  * There seems to have been so much illicit l’amour in Paris at this time that there was some confusion over exactly who was sleeping with whom. A Parisian chronicler of the period, Pierre de L’Estoile, recounted the story that Charles IX, the duke of Guise, and a number of the duke of Nevers’s friends, suspecting that La Môle was the duchess of Nevers’s lover, once waited at the stairway of the Louvre to ambush him on his way out of her apartments. But he never showed up, because he had actually spent the night with Marguerite.

  * A trifle melodramatic for modern tastes, but he was probably sincere in his admiration. This is just the way they talked in the sixteenth century.

  * Margot spells this man’s name variously as “M. de Miossans” and “M. de Mioflano,” but it is the same counselor.

  * Subsequent events would prove him right. The Politiques and the Huguenots were very adept at devising plots but not nearly so skillful at implementing them. Either Miossans suspected that Henry and François were being set up (since their secret escape plans were obviously not nearly so secret as they assumed) or he doubted that there would be an armed force of any significance awaiting them should they manage to escape after all. In either case, they would have been captured and Henry likely executed for treason.

  * In fact, the image was intended as part of a love spell. The figure was that of a girl. The needle stuck in her heart had been placed there to promote her admirer’s suit.

  * Because the duke of Nevers’s memoirs, like Marguerite’s own, were published in the following century, there is no way to prove or disprove this story. Certainly, though, it was in keeping with Margot’s romantic temperament and at the very least is reflective of how she was viewed at court.

  * A crown was the colloquial name for a gold coin of the period. Exchange rates fluctuated widely, but one gold crown could be worth anywhere from ten to thirty livres. Catherine was only able to send Henri this much money by diverting funds that were supposed to have been used as wages for the royal army.

  * The princess of Condé, to whom Henri had written his blood letters while in Poland, had recently died from complications of childbirth, causing the king great distress. The death’s head motif was in her honor.

  * Although Marguerite refers to her as “de Sauves,” today the generally recognized spelling of Charlotte’s name is “de Sauve.”

  * François had been christened Hercules but had subsequently changed his name.

  * It was necessary for the king to marry in order to attempt to provide France with a male heir, although a papal envoy observed in a letter to the Vatican that “it is only with difficulty that we can imagine that there will be offspring… He is so feeble that if he sleeps en compagnie for two or three nights he is unable to get up from his bed for two or three days.”

  * This number is not an exaggeration. Guast, Marguerite observed, “commanded a regiment of guards [and] furnished the requisite number of men, whom he disposed of in five or six divisions.” The King’s Guard consisted of a total of eleven companies of soldiers with approximately two hundred men serving in each company. Marguerite’s husband was a
lso a captain in the King’s Guard, and some of his men participated as well (although not Henry himself).

  * According to L’Estoile, two of Guast’s servants, including his valet de chambre, were killed with their master; presumably one of the other servants survived to witness the dying man’s last words.

  * Never in her life was Margot involved in an assassination attempt.

  * This observation would prove only too true. Later, François would scoff that “in order to hate the Huguenots he had to get to know them better.”

  * The town in Belgium was called Spa. And you thought history was irrelevant.

  * Some of Marguerite’s biographers have cited this passage as evidence that she slept with Monsieur d’Ainsi. This shows a want of knowledge of the period. Ainsi was not of sufficient rank to approach a queen. Marguerite might have flattered him in conversation and by dancing with him, but she would not have considered Ainsi suitable as a lover.

  * The business to be arranged was for François to be invited to rule what amounted to present-day Belgium and the Netherlands (which in the sixteenth century was ruled by various local lords, such as the count, who owed allegiance to an overlord). As the count already had an overlord—Spain, in the person of Don John, who was acting as governor for Philip II—it was understood that François would need to raise an army in order to wrest these lands and castles from Spanish control. The count was volunteering to send his brother, who was familiar with the terrain, to formalize this arrangement and help plan the invasion at a later meeting at La Fère.

  * Attributed by Marguerite to unrequited love but more likely involving a physiological heart defect.

  * By seizing the fortress of Namur on July 24, 1577, and arresting a number of high-ranking local noblemen (and their wives), Don John had violated the Pacification of Ghent, a 1576 treaty between Spain and the States General of the Netherlands (that region’s representative body), which among other articles of agreement prohibited the Spanish army from launching this sort of military offensive.

  * It is quite possible that the medallions were intended to prepare the way for François’s naming Marguerite as regent should something happen to Henri III and should he, as next in line, ascend to the throne of France. The Netherlands were used to female rule—Charles V, father of Philip II, had appointed his sister Maria, queen of Hungary, to the position in 1531, and she had governed for twenty-four years before resigning in Philip II’s favor and being replaced by first the duke of Alva and then Don John. Maria was another of the great queens of the sixteenth century.

  * It is clear from this incident that Catherine was no longer in control of the court, as she had been during the reign of Charles IX. She still managed the day-to-day administration of the government, but she had to show Henri III all the documentation and obtain his signature. The mignons in particular were entirely outside her authority. Marguerite mentioned that her mother “was greatly uneasy on account of the behavior of these young men,” but she was powerless to do anything about them.

  * Monsieur de Matignon was a strict Catholic and trusted adviser to the queen mother who would be promoted to Marshal of France the following year. He was the father of Marguerite’s childhood companion Torigni, whom Margot had been forced by her husband to dismiss from her household three years earlier. It was Torigni who had to be rescued from Henri III’s soldiers. This disturbing incident and her near escape had affected neither her father’s career path nor his loyalties.

  * It is this procession, and Marguerite’s later court in Navarre, that Shakespeare lampooned in his comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, although she was not the target of the satire. English Protestants were disappointed by Henry’s compromises with French Catholics. Love’s Labour’s Lost skewers the king of Navarre by depicting him as passionately infatuated with his own wife, an inside joke greatly appreciated in England.

  * “No sooner [had] he lost sight of her than he forgot her,” Margot commented drily of her rival from Pau.

  * Reputedly, in response to François’s warning that he would be ostracized for his behavior, Bussy replied: “I might be more shunned—for everybody would totally avoid me, if my personal appearance was as ill-conditioned as your own.”

  * The prince of Condé and his German soldiers were also redirected northward and were a great help to François in his Flanders campaign.

  * Of all her correspondence it would be these letters that survived. They are one of the reasons Margot’s prominent role as a political figure in France has been overlooked or discounted by historians. They are the sort of letters that everyone writes at one time or another, usually late at night after too much wine. They make her look ridiculous, and this has been her enduring image. But the affair with Champvallon represents only one small episode in a long life of wielding considerable influence and should be weighted as historical evidence accordingly.

  * It has never been established what grievance Henri III held against the duchess of Nevers that caused him to engineer her downfall. It is interesting to note, however, that this incident occurred at the time of the Lovers’ War, for which the king blamed his sister. It is just possible that, being unable to punish Margot herself, Henri III avenged himself on her friend instead.

  * Whatever the nature of her illness, it was not a pregnancy. With all her love affairs, Marguerite never bore a child.

  * An astonishing coincidence that both Marguerite’s and her mother’s marital bêtes noires should be named Diane.

  * Catherine once described Henry in this way to a foreign diplomat: “Nobody in the world leads a more strenuous life than he does. He never has a fixed time for sleeping or eating; he lies down to sleep with his clothes on. He sleeps on the ground. He eats at any time. I brought him up with my sons and he gave me more trouble than all the rest of the boys put together.”

  * Impossible to know what happened with any certainty but it seems far more likely that she suspected Lignerac was untrustworthy (as indeed he proved to be) and was using the apothecary’s son, whom she had met when she was ill, as a spy or to smuggle messages out of the castle. Either that or the boy was delivering medicines and simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Margot never had more than one lover at a time throughout her life, and this position, as events later developed, was clearly held by Aubiac.

  * Claude had died more than a decade earlier, in 1575, at the start of Henri III’s reign. By the time of this peace summit with the king of Navarre, Marguerite and Henri III were Catherine’s only surviving children.

  * The Abbey of Saint-Denis, completed in the thirteenth century, was the official burial site for kings of France and their families.

  * Henri III had also arrested and executed a third brother, the cardinal of Guise, soon after the murder of Guise himself.

  * Elizabeth, it will be remembered, was Catherine de’ Medici’s eldest daughter (Marguerite’s sister), who had been married as a teenager to the much older Philip II. Elizabeth died in childbirth twenty-five years earlier, in 1568.

  * A Huguenot chronicler openly antagonistic to Margot reported that upon reading this testimony, Henry teared up and cried, “Ah! The wretched woman! She knows well that I have always loved and honored her, and that she cared nothing for me, and that her bad behavior has for a long time been the cause of our separation.” It is very difficult to picture Henry responding with an emotion (other than sarcasm) to anything Marguerite said or did at this point. All one can say about this recitation is that if this was indeed the way the king of Navarre felt about the queen during their marriage, he certainly hid it well.

  * By contrast, Henry’s latest mistress referred to Marie as “that fat banker’s daughter,” a sneer eerily reflective of the sort of prejudice Catherine de’ Medici had faced seventy years earlier, when she first came to France as a young bride. And Henry, who did not love Marie and had not wanted to marry her, treated his Italian wife exactly as Henri II had treated Catherine—he used Marie for breeding but otherwise
openly humiliated her by flaunting his many mistresses, whom he insisted live in the Louvre with the royal couple. Some things never change.