The Rival Queens (14 page)

And this is when Marguerite’s troubles began in earnest, because now she
was
in the duke of Guise’s presence nearly every day—Henri made sure of it. After his initial efforts at reconciliation with his sister went unappreciated, the lieutenant-general shrugged his shoulders and reverted to his old plan of trying to discredit Guise. Margot’s bedridden presence made a highly convenient lure; it was only a matter of setting the trap. Henri “
came daily to see me
, and as constantly brought M. de Guise into my chamber with him,” Marguerite reported. “He pretended the sincerest regard for De Guise, and, to make him believe it, would take frequent opportunities of embracing him, crying out at the same time, ‘Would to God you were my brother!’ This he often put in practice before me, which M. de Guise seemed not to comprehend.”

Not only the duke of Guise but also the entire court took the bait. By the spring of 1570, the Spanish envoy reported to Philip II that “
There is nothing talked of publicly
in France but the marriage of Madame Marguerite with the Duke of Guise.” The members of the Flying Squadron, always ready to egg on a grand passion, particularly one involving two such celebrated participants, did all they could to encourage the lovers. This worried the cardinal of Lorraine, who knew better than to flaunt a dalliance in the absence of an ironclad marriage contract approved by the queen mother. “
The ladies at court are real stirrers
and mixers,” he complained in a letter to the duke of Guise’s mother. “The poor little [Marguerite] and your son are riding luck in such a way that it is very bad.” Only Margot seems to have understood (at least in hindsight) that Henri was playing a game. But she’d learned from her previous experience that her mother was unlikely to take her side against her brother, and so she “
did not dare to reproach him
with his hypocrisy.”

More than this, she knew very well that her mother wished to marry her to Don Sebastian, the sixteen-year-old king of Portugal, with whose diplomatic representative Catherine was in active negotiation. This was not an attractive prospect. Reports from the French ambassador at the Spanish court (Philip II would have to approve the alliance) indicated that Don Sebastian was a physically immature religious ascetic who had been taught to disdain and eschew women by his monastic tutors. The Portuguese king’s sexual orientation was apparently so ambivalent that no one was certain whether he was “
of use to have children
,” as Catherine’s envoy so delicately put it.

That Marguerite was still single at this late date was unusual. Both her sisters had been married as soon as they reached thirteen, the age of consent. The blame for Margot’s uncertain matrimonial future rests entirely with her mother. Catherine was unwavering in her desire that all her children marry royalty. In her mind, either Henri or François would certainly wed Elizabeth I and become king of England, and Margot would marry Don Sebastian (Don Carlos,
Philip II’s son, being out of the running, having unfortunately expired two years previously). Nothing anyone said dissuaded her; the same French diplomat stationed in Madrid who had described Don Sebastian tried as hard as he could to break through the queen mother’s carefully constructed fictions. “
I tell you clearly what I think
,” he wrote to Catherine of Philip II and the Spanish and Portuguese courts. “It is my opinion that there is nothing in these people here except bad will… They reckon that your civil war keeps them at peace and the impoverishment of your kingdom in men and in money is the strengthening of theirs.” Margot seconded this opinion about Philip II’s open hostility to her mother. “
The King of Spain was using
his utmost endeavors to break off the match with Portugal,” she remembered. Still Catherine persevered and made it a point of honor with Charles that his sister should marry the king of Portugal.

This, then, was the bleak future that Marguerite contemplated as she approached her seventeenth birthday. A passionate spirit, yearning for romance, ripe with emotions and hormones, and just coming into her own as a great beauty, destined at best to be the unloved, unwanted wife of an androgynous monk-king in faraway Portugal. Her desperation was palpable. And there beside her at court, hoodwinked into believing that he had her powerful brother’s support and consequently throwing himself at her feet every day, was the tall, strong, definitely heterosexual duke of Guise, the object of her desire, holding out the irresistible prospect of an alternate universe, where she could marry the man she loved and stay in familiar France…
^*

Matters came to a head in June of 1570, when Guast persuaded a sympathetic lady-in-waiting, who had been helping the princess’s romance along by offering her services as a conduit for clandestine
love letters, to relinquish a private note from Marguerite meant for the duke of Guise. Guast lost no time in presenting this incriminating missive to Henri, who bade him pass it along to Catherine, who in turn shared it with her eldest son, Charles, the king.

Charles was not in a cheerful frame of mind, having had a particularly infelicitous past few months. After the royalist triumph at Moncontour the year before, the veteran general Gaspard de Tavannes had counseled that rather than pursue what was left of the enemy army, peace terms highly favorable to the Catholics should instead be imposed on what remained of the Huguenot leadership. “
To engage in battle with these people
and risk all is not to combat your true enemies, who, once defeated, will call on the princes of the German league aroused by their loss to have a new army in France tomorrow, while a great part of your principal captains will have been killed,” he pointed out. “I will never be of a mind to gamble all of the Kingdom on the fortune of a single battle.”

But Charles, who could no longer bear his younger brother’s success, had rejected this sound advice and instead ordered that the nearby town of Saint Jean d’Angély, where some of the retreating Huguenot troops had taken shelter, be besieged. He had even defied his mother and stayed to supervise the offensive himself, relegating Henri to a secondary position. Unfortunately for Charles, the siege was spectacularly unsuccessful. The royal army, unable to breach the walls, was forced to camp outside in the cold mud of November. The fever that had attacked Margot spread rapidly under the wretched conditions and carried off a large percentage of Charles’s soldiers. Many of those not felled by disease chose to desert instead. By December there were not enough men left to fight off a squadron of cavalry, let alone take a town, and the king was compelled to abandon the endeavor.

Adding to Charles’s discomfiture was the fact that his failure at Saint Jean d’Angély had allowed Admiral Coligny, who was not among those who had taken refuge in the town, time to regroup his forces. The admiral then took this small but highly effective squadron
(supplemented by an experienced corps of German cavalry, just as Tavannes had predicted) on a rampage through southern France, attacking all the principal Catholic cities, including Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, and Nîmes. It is astonishing how much damage the admiral achieved with this guerrilla operation; it turned the momentum of the conflict completely back in favor of the Huguenots. Having spent all his money on the fruitless siege, Charles had been unable to mount much of a counterattack, and anyway it was very difficult to catch Coligny, whose horsemen and infantry were so motivated that they could travel “
eight or ten good leagues
through mountains where artillery can scarce go,” as a Catholic commander complained in a letter to Catherine. So in a mere eight months, under his personal supervision, Charles had managed to squander all the political and military advantages of his brother’s great victory to the point where it was now likely that he would have to make peace with the Huguenots
on their terms.
This sort of setback would likely put anyone in a bad mood.

And then he discovered that his golden younger brother had been right all along about Marguerite, whose side he had initially taken, and that he was the one who had been duped. According to the Spanish ambassador, who reported on the incident to Philip II in a letter of June 13, 1570, Charles worked himself up into a rage and, still in his pajamas, burst in on his mother at five o’clock in the morning, bellowing for his sister. Margot was awakened and sent for, and when she arrived at Catherine’s room a courtier was posted outside the door so the family could have some privacy. Then Charles and Catherine together let off steam and corrected Marguerite’s behavior by beating her so severely that it took nearly an hour after they had finished for the queen mother to calm her daughter down and fix her appearance, as Margot’s clothes had been shredded where they pummeled and scratched at her.

Violence against women was, unfortunately, extremely common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A woman was considered the property of her husband, her father, or her brother, and they
could do what they liked with her.
^*
What was unusual was to have one’s mother participate in a free-for-all of this nature. Charles is frequently indicted, both by contemporaries and historians, as being subject to uncontrollable fits of rage, giving rise to speculation that the king was unstable. But Margot’s experience indicates that it is possible that Charles’s tantrums were evidence not of mental illness but rather of accepted behavior, as Catherine conducted herself, at least in this instance, with a similar lack of restraint.

Again, poor Marguerite represented merely an easy stand-in for her mother’s real frustration, which was her inability to control events to her satisfaction. Even if she believed that the duke of Guise had deflowered her daughter, Catherine did not dare openly break with the Guises at this time. The Crown was in the process of putting a new army into the field to combat Coligny, and of course the cardinal of Lorraine’s financial acumen, not to mention his and the duke’s many Catholic supporters, were integral to this effort. Hence the assault on the helpless Marguerite rather than on her presumed seducer.

Accordingly, the Guises remained unmolested, and the royal army duly took the field. The Catholic force, which outnumbered the opposing Huguenot militia by a factor of two to one, met Coligny in the small town of Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy, just southwest of Dijon, on June 26 and was beaten back by the admiral’s superior tactics. Catherine had no choice but to sue for peace. On August 8, 1570, Charles signed the Peace of Saint-Germain, which not only reaffirmed the old Edict of Toleration but also granted the Protestants new rights of worship as well as outright possession of a number of important French cities, one of which was La Rochelle. “
We defeat them again and again
… but the edicts are always to their advantage,” a highly placed Catholic nobleman complained bitterly after the terms were made public. “We win by arms and they by these devilish writings.”

This armistice marked not only the cessation of open hostilities but the fall of the Guises as well. Within a week of the signing of the peace agreement, Catherine accosted the cardinal of Lorraine, whose money and support she no longer needed, in his bedroom in Paris, where he was recovering from a fever, and gave the venerable churchman a lacerating tongue-lashing for promoting a marriage between his nephew and her daughter behind her back. That was the end of the cardinal’s influence at court. And very soon after this, the duke of Guise, who for all his good looks and undeniable courage seems not to have been particularly bright, was discredited and banished from Paris after making the mistake of approaching the king in a friendly way at an evening reception. “
I no longer have need
of your service,” snarled Charles, thereby unwittingly fulfilling his detested younger brother Henri’s original objective.

As for Marguerite, the brutality her mother and older brothers displayed in this affair stripped her of any remaining illusions she might have entertained about her standing within the family. She was sufficiently intimidated that she seemed almost in fear for her life. In the weeks before the duke of Guise’s ultimate banishment, she swore to her mother, “
Not a single person
of the Guises ever mentioned a word to me on the subject [of marriage]” and begged her to “
forward this match
with the King of Portugal, and I would convince her of my obedience to her commands.” But these measures failed to appease Catherine. “
Every day some new matter
was reported to incense her against me,” Margot despaired. “In short, I was constantly receiving some fresh mortification, so that I hardly passed a day in quiet.”

Eventually, pushed to extremity, she understood that she would never be safe as long as the duke of Guise remained unattached and appealed to her sister Claude, who had married into the Guise family, to compel the duke to wed one of his old girlfriends. “
I resolved to write to my sister
, Madame de Lorraine, who had a great influence in the House of Porcian, begging her to use her endeavors to withdraw M. de Guise from Court, and make him conclude his match
with the Princess [of Porcian, a minor independent duchy], laying open to her the plot which had been concerted to ruin the Guises and me,” Margot reported. Appalled by her younger sister’s letter, kindhearted Claude came hurriedly to the rescue. “
She [Claude] readily saw through it
, came immediately to Court, and concluded the match, which delivered me from the aspersions cast on my character, and convinced the Queen my mother that what I had told her was the real truth,” Marguerite pronounced with some relief.

Although the duke of Guise was apparently none too pleased with this outcome—he sneered to his family that they were making him
marry a “negress,”
most likely a reference to his fiancée’s Protestantism—he nonetheless bowed to pressure, and the wedding was hurriedly arranged for the end of September. (Just to make sure the duke didn’t wriggle out of it, Charles provided the bride’s dowry of one hundred thousand
livres
out of the royal treasury.) It is a measure of just how far the Guise family fortunes had fallen that less than six weeks after the August signing of the Peace of Saint-Germain the cardinal of Lorraine, the recognized head of the Catholic party in France, was forced to stand witness at the elaborate Parisian nuptial ceremony that united his nephew to a gentlewoman of the reformed religion.