The Rival Queens (16 page)

It took some time, however, for Catherine, who was intent on persuading a reluctant Jeanne d’Albret to approve the engagement
of her son to Marguerite (and so prevent him from pursuing Elizabeth I), to understand this. At first Catherine considered Coligny an ally. She believed that she had bought his support for her plan by bribing him, especially as he had not come cheaply. The admiral walked away from his visit to court with an outright cash bequest of one hundred thousand
livres
in his pocket. His forfeited estates were returned to him, and he also resumed his old place on the royal council. Under the circumstances, Catherine felt she could ask him to use his friendship with Henry’s mother to reassure her of the Crown’s good intentions. “
We are too old
, you and I, to deceive each other,” the queen mother told the admiral. “Can she [Jeanne d’Albret] believe that the King would seek an alliance with her son in order to do away with her?”

To keep the pressure on Jeanne, Catherine wrote repeatedly requesting the queen of Navarre’s presence, and that of her son, at court, making sure to stress that her motives were benign. Jeanne raised an eyebrow at this approach. “
I cannot imagine why
you should find it necessary to say that you want to see me and my children, but not in order to do us harm,” the queen of Navarre shot back with withering sarcasm. “Forgive me if I laugh when I read these letters, for you are allaying a fear I have never had. I have never thought that you fed on little children, as they say.”

Eighteen-year-old Marguerite, the prospective bride, followed the course of these negotiations with a sinking heart. To the outside world, the union with her cousin was portrayed as a healing event, a way to bring the two religions together amicably after the horrors inflicted by the prolonged civil war. The alliance “
is a resolution I have taken
with such careful consideration that I expect from it not only the peace and welfare of my kingdom… but also of Christendom in general,” Charles boasted to the papacy. “The Prince [Henry] is so young and so favored by inheritance that it should not be too hard to lead him in the path His Holiness desires, as was the case with his late father [the ever-wavering Antoine].” Through Coligny, the Huguenots were made to understand that the marriage of
Henry of Navarre and the king’s sister was a symbol of Charles’s military commitment to the Protestants of the Netherlands. “
Upon the success of the Navarre marriage
depends the enterprise of Flanders,” the English ambassador Walsingham reported flatly to his government.

But Marguerite, once again the pawn of her family’s schemes, knew better. The marriage would not bring happiness and prosperity to the kingdom; it would only bring misery to her. Henry would never convert to Catholicism; it was she who would be expected to practice her beliefs in secret or, worse, give way altogether and become a Huguenot. This she refused to do. Her religion was very important to her. “
A marriage was projected
betwixt the Prince of Navarre… and me,” Marguerite remembered. “The Queen sent for me to attend her… she was desirous to learn my sentiments upon it.” For a faithful daughter of the Church such as Marguerite this was the equivalent of being asked how she felt about being consigned for eternity to the fires of hell. But having so recently endured the consequences of her mother’s displeasure, Margot had no wish to repeat the experience. The princess knew better than to express a preference. “I answered that my choice was governed by her pleasure,” she replied, tight-lipped, “and that I only begged her not to forget that I was a good Catholic.”

This was precisely the excuse that her brother Henri had used to shun a union with Elizabeth I, a rejection that had caused Catherine no little embarrassment in addition to potentially costing the royal family of France the kingship of England. The lieutenant-general had informed his mother loftily that “
he would be damned unless
he could have his mass, and that he would not be content with the permission to have it privately in a chapel, for he was very devout and fasted… much in Lent.” Catherine had relented and let him have his way, but in Marguerite’s case the queen mother paid no attention. Margot was not Henri.

Catherine was of course aware that Coligny wished Charles to intervene in the Netherlands against Spain. By late fall everyone at
court knew it. Even the Spanish ambassador was in on the secret. “
It is perfectly well understood
that the Admiral sleeps not, and that in the end every design will be turned against the states of the Catholic King [Philip II],” he warned in a letter of November 16, 1571, to his sovereign. But the queen mother underestimated Coligny’s influence over the king; she thought she could control Charles as she always had. She had no idea how far the plan had progressed until the Spanish envoy pointed out to her that her son was withholding information from her about the Netherlands expedition because “
the Admiral told him very politely
that they were not questions to be discussed with women and clerks. When the Queen Mother heard of this, she was on very bad terms with the said Admiral, as was also Anjou [Henri].” The ambassador from Venice agreed with this assessment. “
The war would maintain his [Coligny’s] authority
, power, and supremacy, because none could lead it better than he and the war would let him assure the fortune of all of his party,” he reported shrewdly. “On the other hand, if the war were not waged, he must leave the court considering that he would not be able to hold his head up against his enemies and above all against the Queen and Monseigneur [Henri] who hated him to the death.”

Catherine opposed Coligny’s Netherlands offensive on two counts: she feared Spanish retaliation and she dreaded losing power, and these were the two most likely outcomes of the admiral’s initiative. For if the French won, Charles would become even closer to his Huguenot mentor, and his mother’s role in government would be severely curtailed, if not extinguished altogether. And if Charles and Coligny lost, the Catholics would blame her as well as her son and band together with Philip II to seek her removal. Already the duke of Guise, who nurtured a profound grudge against the admiral (who, he was convinced, had murdered his father and gotten away with it) and was consequently appalled at his renewed influence at court, was stirring up trouble. “
In Paris there are a growing number
of gentlemen friends of the lords of Guise, and they have rented rooms in various quarters, plotting nightly something between
them… and that among the plans they have one will go and kill the admiral in his house,” reported the governor of the city toward the end of December.

A few weeks later, in January of 1572, the duke of Guise, intent on seeking justice either in the form of a private duel with Coligny or, failing that satisfaction, a court of law, entered the capital accompanied by an entourage of five hundred soldiers. Although he eventually backed down, this show of force delighted the city’s Catholic majority, with whom the handsome duke (in contrast to Charles and Catherine) was immensely popular. Emboldened, a celebrated priest gave a rousing sermon at Notre-Dame that Easter, during which he proclaimed that “
if the king ordered
the Admiral killed, it would be wicked not to kill him.”

But Catherine could not afford to have the admiral killed—at least not yet—because if she did so she knew she would forfeit her much-desired goal of wedding Henry of Navarre to Marguerite. Jeanne d’Albret would never agree to the alliance if Coligny was assassinated or even removed from power. The Huguenots would have gone right back to Elizabeth I, and that would have been the end of poor little François’s chances. As it was, it had taken the queen mother nearly a year to coax Jeanne to court to discuss the matter. The queen of Navarre finally gave in and came to Blois in February 1572. She brought her thirteen-year-old daughter with her, but, significantly, left her son behind; she was still highly suspicious of Catherine’s motives and wished to interview her prospective daughter-in-law before approving the final terms of the marriage.

If Jeanne was hoping to convince Marguerite to convert, or even have a genuine conversation with her, she was destined to be disappointed. Margot was rigidly correct throughout the course of her visit, having no doubt been threatened if her behavior or attitude was found to be lacking. The queen of Navarre wrote a series of letters home to her son chronicling the negotiations for the marriage that evidence her ever-increasing frustration with the royal family’s obvious dissembling. “
Madame [Marguerite] has paid me great honor…
assuring me that she favors your suit,” Jeanne wrote at first. “Given her influence with the King and her mother… if she embraces the Religion, we can count ourselves the luckiest [persons] in the world, and not only our family but the whole kingdom of France. But if, with her caution and judgment, she is determined to stick stubbornly to her religion—as I am told—I fear this marriage will be the ruin… of our friends and domains, and such an aid to the Papists… that we and all the churches of France will be destroyed.”

Within a few short weeks this less-than-optimistic attitude had descended into outright gloom: “
I am being obliged to negotiate
quite contrary to my hopes—and to their promises,” Jeanne wrote grimly. “I am not free to talk with either the King or Madame, only with the Queen Mother, who goads me… Monsieur [Henri] tries to get around me in private with a mixture of mockery and deceit; you know how he is. As for Madame [Marguerite], I only see her in the Queen’s quarters, whence she never stirs except at hours impossible for me to visit her.”

Then a little later: “
My son, since writing this letter
, I have told Madame the contents of yours to her… she replied that when these negotiations began we well knew that she was devout in her religion. I told her that those who made the first overtures to us represented the matter very differently, giving the impression that religion would be no problem as she had already shown some inclination toward ours, and that, had this not been so, I would not have proceeded thus far… I think she says what she is told to say. I also believe that what we were told—about her alleged inclination to our religion—was a trap for us… Last evening I asked whether she had a message for you. At first she said nothing, then, when I pressed her, admitted, ‘I can send nothing without permission.’ ” Her prospective mother-in-law was correct in assuming that Marguerite had been rigorously coached; months before Jeanne’s visit, a Florentine envoy reported that “
the Queen of Navarre wishes
to examine and tempt Madame… but Her Highness [Margot], already warned of the very words that will be used, will answer in a certain way.”

But Catherine would brook no dissent; she steamrolled over every difficulty and objection and was perfectly willing to use threats to get her way. The queen of Navarre was made to understand that if she did not approve the marriage of her son, Catherine would have Henry declared illegitimate by the pope and written out of the French succession. At the end of March 1572, Jeanne finally bowed to pressure and agreed to the alliance.

The Florentine ambassador recounted the final encounter between Jeanne and Marguerite. The strain on the princess was obvious. There was no going back. Catherine and Jeanne had come to terms. The marriage would take place. Margot knew she had to yield to her family’s will, but she also refused to dissemble. She had to find an honorable way to serve as queen to a Huguenot husband and kingdom and yet save her soul. Her future mother-in-law continued to thrust the knife in deeper by her unrelenting insistence that her son’s fiancée convert.
“Two days ago,” the Italian envoy reported, “
Navarra
[Jeanne] said to [Marguerite] that, since the marriage could from now on be considered a
fait accompli,
she wished to know whether she would be content to follow the religion of the Prince.”

This was the question Margot most dreaded.
^*
She was conscious that she risked the wrath of both sides by remaining true to herself and that the punishment for failing to give satisfaction to either party would be great. And yet this was a point on which she could not compromise. She had evidently turned the matter over in her mind and come up with, if not a solution to her problem, at least a moral imperative by which to navigate the treacherous road that lay ahead. “Madame replied with great wisdom that if it pleased God she would not fail in obedience to her and the Prince in all reasonable
ways, but that even if he were King of the whole world she would never change her religion.”

If Jeanne had been able to see into the future she might perhaps have been grateful for the younger woman’s resolute commitment, despite her deep religious misgivings, to her sovereign duty. But the queen of Navarre was not a fortune-teller. She found Margot’s response unbearable and, according to the diplomat, flew into a passion. “Thereupon [Jeanne] said, ‘The marriage shall not take place.’ Then Madame said she would do as the King wished… So they parted with little satisfaction on either side.” Marguerite clearly loathed her prospective mother-in-law. “Since then, Madame has pretended to be indisposed,” the Italian observed pointedly.

But Jeanne knew when she was beaten and wrote soon after this to both her son and Elizabeth I, announcing that she had resolved to go through with the alliance. Her final words of advice to Henry reflected her understanding of the values of the court to which she was consigning him: “
Every enticement will be offered
to debauch you, in everything from your appearance to your religion… I know it is their object because they do not conceal it,” she wrote. “This is all I have to say… except this: try to train your hair to stand up and be sure there are no lice in it.”

P
LANS FOR THE WEDDING
then proceeded in earnest. But for the fact that the groom fell severely ill in April and was unable to travel for two months Marguerite would have been a bride before her nineteenth birthday. Although unintended, the delay worked significantly to the Catholic advantage, for on June 4, while shopping in the unseasonably oppressive heat of an early summer’s day in Paris for her son’s ceremonial apparel and other gifts appropriate for the bridal party, Jeanne d’Albret suddenly collapsed, complaining of an intense pain under her right shoulder. Less than a week later, the queen of Navarre was dead.