Hostage Queen (Marguerite de Valois)

by Freda Lightfoot

  The two friends set about making careful preparations that very afternoon as there was no time to be lost. Margot put on a second gown, Henriette an extra petticoat, before they each wrapped themselves in their cloaks, Margot wearing two. She pulled the hood up to hide her face.

  ‘I swear I must look as fat as a pig, and I’m sweating like one too. Does it look obvious that I am overdressed?’ she asked, anxious suddenly.

  ‘No, no, my lady. You are as slender as a willow wand.’

  ‘Don’t forget to tuck a spare mask into your pocket, Henriette. No lady is ever seen out and about without her mask, save for myself on occasions, and whichever one of them is chosen, he must needs hide his face.’

  ‘And his beard,’ her friend agreed, hiccupping on a hysterical giggle.

  All went perfectly smoothly. The ladies settled themselves comfortably against the cushions of the Queen of Navarre’s coach, which was waved through the gates into the prison yard by the guards without being apprehended.

  Margot climbed out of it on legs that felt decidedly shaky. She could hear Henriette at her side almost whimpering with fear. ‘Hold your head high and look confident. Let us mingle with that group of wives over there. Quickly, while no one is watching.’

  The Queen, the Duchess, and a maid, each carrying a basket of food, hurried across to join the line of women already queuing at a small side door. As always, the stench of the prison almost overwhelmed them as they entered, and the ladies quickly held their pomanders to their noses.

  ‘I swear I shall faint clean away from the stink of it one of these days,’ moaned the Duchess.

  ‘There are no days left,’ Margot grimly reminded her. ‘This is the last. We must put the plan into action at once. Delay could be fatal for us all.’

  With fast-beating heart, Margot led the way down a stairway slippy with moss and fungi, and something far less pleasant. The sound of feet scampering away into the darkness made her shudder with revulsion. They reached the prison cell in what felt like the bowels of the earth, and the turning of the huge rusty key in the lock by the gaoler grated loudly in her ear, causing her to tremble with a new fear. If the plan failed, she may well be hearing that sound locking her into such a cell.

  Margot held up her lamp, struggling to adjust her vision in the gloom. La Molle lay curled in a corner, his eyes fixed and glazed. Coconnas was huddled beside him, the cell barely big enough to accommodate the two prisoners, let alone their visitors. There was no other light but the lamps they carried with them and, as always, Margot was shocked by the sight of her lover. He looked like a bundle of filthy rags, half dead already. She fleetingly recalled his crimson-lined, cream satin cloak, the glorious elegance of the man as he danced, and the way his enigmatic smile would melt her heart. Tears ran down her cheeks at the thought of this lost beauty.

  For the first time she began to question the wisdom of her scheme. Could he even get up, let alone walk out of this place disguised as a lady-in-waiting?

  She kissed him on the mouth, trying not to mind the foul stink that emanated from it, or the lice that moved in his hair. Nor did she allow herself to recall how scented and smooth this skin, now so grey and rough, had been when last they’d made love beneath her satin sheets.

  She wasted no time in asking after his health, an irrelevant question in the circumstances. Margot let him sip from the flask of wine she had brought, gave him a hunk of cheese to eat, but he turned his head away.

  ‘Where is the point in eating? I shall need no more food from tomorrow.’

  ‘It is vital that you keep up your strength.’

  She rapidly outlined her plan, and as she saw hope dawn in his loving gaze, hastened to explain how they could only risk taking one of them out. ‘You must decide quickly. Which of you is it to be?’

  But they could not decide. The two men fell to quarrelling, knowing that whoever was left would undoubtedly suffer further torture before the blessed relief of death finally overtook them. How could one friend leave the other to such a torment? They clasped each other in terror and regret.

  ‘We will die together, as we lived together,’ La Molle finally announced. ‘There is no other way.’

  Margot was forced to accept the futility of her plan. But she was shocked and devastated by their decision, tried desperately to make them change their mind while the Duchess wept, adding her own pathetic pleadings. But no amount of tears or persuasion would alter their decision.

  Then came the rattle of a key. The gaoler was at the cell door. It was time to go, and reluctantly the two ladies kissed their lovers goodbye and departed.

  The following morning, 30 April, Margot and the Duchess watched in horrified disbelief as their lovers were executed on the Place de Grève. From the safety of the Queen of Navarre’s coach, they saw how La Molle showed remarkable strength and courage, walking unaided to the scaffold. His last words were, ‘God have mercy on my soul, and the Blessed Virgin. Commend me well to the good graces of the Queen of Navarre and the ladies.’

  And how the ladies wept, all of them, for the tragic loss of such beauty.

  The head of Coconnas was the next to roll, and was equally mourned.

  Following an execution, according to custom, the heads were placed on public exhibition in the square, as a warning to the populace. Later that night, Margot sent her chamberlain to collect the heads of both their lovers, giving instructions for them to be embalmed and buried in the Chapel of St Martin at Montmartre.

  She could not bear to go herself. For days Margot couldn’t even bring herself to leave her room. The two friends were distraught, inconsolable in their loss, weeping and sobbing together, offering each other what comfort they could in their grief. The Duchess of Nevers ventured out only to call for a maid to bring them some sustenance, although persuading Margot to eat was difficult.

  Margot felt responsible for La Molle’s death. If she had not encouraged Alençon in his ambitions, and her husband in his bid to escape, none of this would have happened, and these two innocent men might have been alive to this day. It was a bitter lesson.

  One morning, Henriette came running into the privy chamber in a highly nervous state. ‘You won’t believe what I have heard. It has been noticed that the heads are gone, and it is being whispered that we have them here, that you keep La Molle’s head in a silver casket under your bed, so that you can kiss his lips whenever you wish.’

  Margot looked at her friend in horror. ‘Dear God, can I not even mourn my lover in peace? When will the rumour-mongers let me be?’

  The King was dying. As the scents of spring and May blossom drifted over the Palace gardens where the courtiers strolled, the windows of the royal bedchamber remained fast shut against any inclement chill. The threatened plot, the rush to Vincennes, had all been too much for Charles’s weakened state. He lay swamped in apathy and despair, unable to summon the strength to rise, uncaring of day or hour, or of what was going on around him.

  Relieved as Catherine was that she’d successfully quelled this latest plot, yet she still saw dangerous waters ahead. Her beloved Anjou was many miles distant in Poland, far from the throne he was about to inherit. Alençon, on the other hand, was dangerously close, as was Navarre. She didn’t trust either, and, secretly calling her most trusted messenger, urged him to ride with all speed to Poland to warn her son that the King’s death was imminent.

  Charles looked so frail and thin. He was but a month from his twenty-fourth birthday yet he looked like a wizened old man with scarcely any hair left on his head, his cheeks hollowed, the skin grey and pallid. It was as if the death mask were already upon him.

  Elisabeth of Austria, Charles’s Queen, sat opposite her husband, weeping and never taking her eyes from his face. She had always loved him, and he returned her adoring gaze with gratitude, but also sent for his beloved Marie Touchet. His mistress came at once to make her farewells and sit by his side, holding his hand.

  Nearby hovered his loyal old nurse, constantly wiping h
is brow or changing the bed sheets as he continued to cough up blood. He gazed up into her face, looking with love upon this woman who had brought him up, been as a mother to him, and, since she was Huguenot, whose life he had saved.

  He cried out in his despair. ‘What blood and what murders! What an evil counsel was given me. Oh, my God, forgive me all that, and have mercy upon me. What will become of this country, and what will become of me, into whose hands God commended it? I am lost! Full well I know it.’

  His nurse leaned close to whisper to Charles under her breath, loyal to her beloved charge to the last. ‘May the murders and the bloodshed be upon the head of those who compelled you to them, and upon your evil counsellors.’

  The King’s confession was heard and the last rites given. Charles asked for the prayer of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, to be said to him, as if by this means he could gain absolution for the atrocities he’d sanctioned against the capital.

  The next day he slept fitfully and, when he woke, cried out, ‘Call my brother.’

  But when Alençon was summoned and came to stand by the bed, Charles shook his head, and said again, ‘No, no, let my brother be fetched.’

  ‘It is Navarre he wants,’ Catherine murmured with dismay. ‘Well, let him be brought. He and my younger son can act as witnesses for this document.’

  Navarre came in fear and trembling. Under strict orders from the Queen Mother he was taken to the King’s bedchamber not through the open passages or via the other Palace apartments, but up a secret staircase lined with arquebusiers. He trod with extreme caution, keeping a wary eye on the guards who accompanied him, half expecting at any moment that one might turn and stab him through the heart, or finish him off with a bullet in the head.

  By the time he reached the King he could hardly believe he’d been spared, and almost fell to his knees at the foot of the bed in gratitude, so great had been the strain.

  Catherine presented the dying King with a document to sign, one which placed the regency in her safe hands until Anjou arrived from Poland to take his rightful place on the throne. She insisted that Navarre and Alençon act as witnesses, and that they agree it had been drawn up at their request, and not hers.

  Charles then called for Navarre to come close, whereupon he embraced him.

  ‘Brother, you are losing a good friend.’ Charles’s voice was so feeble it was barely above a whisper, and he was obliged to pause frequently in order to catch his breath. ‘Had I believed all that I was told, you would not be alive. But I always loved you. Do not trust—’

  Catherine stepped hastily forward to interrupt. ‘Do not say that!’

  ‘Madame, I do say it, for it is the truth.’ A fit of coughing took him and his nurse hurried forward to soothe him and wipe the blood and spittle from his mouth. But even in the hour of his death, Charles found the strength to rail against his mother, still determined to hold on to some small degree of independence.

  He gathered his failing strength and again addressed Navarre. ‘Believe me, brother, and love me. I trust in you alone to look after my wife and daughter. Pray God for me. Farewell. I rejoice that I leave no male child to wear the crown after me.’

  And on these last words, poor mad Charles IX finally escaped his mother and found peace with his maker.

  Before the end of the day Catherine dispatched a second messenger in the wake of the first, calling for her favourite son to come and claim his crown.

  ***

  Part Five

  ESCAPE

  1574–1578

  August 1574

  MARGOT WAITED with something like dread for the arrival home of her brother, the King of Poland. Where once she had been flattered by his attention, now she felt only loathing and fear. Knowing the sorry state of their relationship, of his petty jealousies and the way he had always tried to control her, she could not imagine his becoming King of France would improve relations between them. On the contrary, she rather thought all the worst excesses of his nature would come to the fore once he held the reins of power in his hands.

  Having learned of the death of his brother, Charles IX, from the Emperor Maximilian, whose messenger reached him before those of Catherine, he’d been so anxious to escape Poland that he’d apparently galloped off in the dead of night.

  ‘Not only that, but he took with him the Polish crown jewels: pearls, rubies and diamonds,’ Henriette said, savouring the telling of this convoluted tale to Margot.

  ‘He’s like a greedy jackdaw,’ Margot scathingly remarked.

  ‘Lost in the forests and pursued by the ambassadors of his court, Henri’s men forced a poor woodcutter at sword point to lead them safely to the frontier.’

  ‘He must have thought he was the hero in some romantic ballad.’ The scorn she felt for her elder brother was all too evident in her tone.

  Madame de Curton pursed her mouth in that disapproving way she had when one of her charges had displeased her. ‘Why must Henri forever over-dramatise?’

  They were once more travelling in Margot’s coach, a capacious, handsome vehicle lined with beautiful yellow velvet trimmed with silver brocade; large enough to accommodate not only Madame, who was always with her, but her friend the Duchess of Nevers, the Duchess of Retz and Madame de Thorigny. The journey was again taking place in the heat of August, but this time she was not heading for Bayonne and a possible betrothal to a madman, but to Lyon to herald the arrival of a new King.

  ‘And did the courtiers catch up with him?’

  ‘Apparently so. They begged him to return to Krakow but Henri swore that he must first save France from the Huguenots, promising to return at the very first opportunity. All lies! Once back home, we all know that he will never set so much as a toe out of France ever again.’

  ‘Am I the only one who mourns my brother’s death?’ Margot asked on a sigh.

  Madame de Curton put an arm about her young mistress to hold her close, as she always did when this rebellious, over-affectionate girl was suffering. ‘His little Queen still weeps for him.’

  ‘Oh, Elisabeth is my dearest friend. I love her dearly and hope it will ever be so between us.’

  ‘Charles is in a better place now, my lady. Do not weep for him. The burden of his distress and pain has been lifted.’

  ‘And he is safe from my mother at last,’ Margot agreed, drying her eyes with a silk kerchief, a useful fashion accessory imported from Italy by Catherine when she first came to France as a young girl. ‘I cannot see Henri bowing to our mother’s whims, as did poor Charles. The battle of wills between those two might prove to be most entertaining,’ she said, smiling suddenly with mischievous delight.

  ‘The Queen Mother will ever indulge his fantasies.’

  ‘My mother has been making herself quite ill, continually celebrating this momentous event by gorging herself on all sorts of delicacies, like cockscombs and artichokes, which do her no good at all.’

  ‘It is the rheumatism which plagues Her Majesty that drives her to such folly, my lady. Have some sympathy for her aging years.’

  ‘Why do you always see the best in everyone, Lottie?’

  ‘Only where appropriate, my lady. I see no malice in overeating. The Queen Mother harms only herself with such indulgence.’

  ‘Well, that makes a change. Her malice has done enough harm already.’

  ‘The weakness of over-indulgence is in us all,’ scolded Madame, ever the stern governess.

  ‘It is certainly a fault in Henri, together with indolence and pure selfishness,’ Margot sharply responded. She had no intention of defending her own weakness, although she was only too aware of the silent accusation that she had indulged in an inappropriate love affair, one which had resulted in dreadful consequences.

  She met the Duchess of Nevers’ troubled gaze with a poignant smile, both ladies still haunted by the tragic loss of their lovers. Anxious to protect her friend from further scolding, Henriette leaned forward to continue her story in hushed tones.

&nb
sp; ‘But having left Poland, the King did not rush straight home to France. Tales have reached us of His Majesty being feted in Vienna, and while in Venice, when he should have been attending a state banquet held at great expense for his benefit, he was lounging in a gondola decked out in gold. The rumour-mongers have it that he roamed abroad at night visiting certain ladies of disrepute, and that he spent his time buying perfume and jewels, which he showered upon everyone he met, along with cash and other gifts. He is said to have spent thousands of écus and is already in debt.’

  Margot rolled her eyes heavenwards in despair. ‘Can France afford such munificence? It is long past time he came home and took up his responsibilities, before he bankrupts us all. Why has he delayed so long? It is months since Charles died.’

  ‘Because he likes the idea of the glory of a crown, but not the work or the responsibility that goes with it,’ Madame dryly remarked. ‘Yet he is here now, and you will see him soon enough, my lady. The Queen Mother is eager to welcome home her . . .’

  ‘. . . favourite son and see him fulfil her long-held ambition for him,’ Margot finished for her, a bitterness creeping into her voice. ‘I know that full well. Would I not make a better king than all of my brothers?’

  ‘Indeed you would, my lady, were it not for salic law.’

  ‘And a better queen than the King of Poland,’ giggled Henriette.

  The tension in the carriage eased as all the ladies indulged in merry laughter at the joke.

  Margot said, ‘Come, we must not be too gloomy. There will be balls for us to enjoy in Lyon, Henriette; parties and entertainments. Perhaps the bitterness and the rivalry will end, and we can be free again, free to enjoy a new reign, a new beginning. Life may take a turn for the better, do you not think?’

  Her friend looked doubtful. ‘We can but hope so.’

  Madame de Curton said,’ Do not forget, my lady, that the King’s favourites – his mignons, including Louis du Guast – will also be present, and if he can find some way to make trouble for you, he will.’