The Rival Queens (21 page)

Henry’s sole aim, on the other hand, was to escape to the safety of his own lands and subjects in Navarre and put as much distance as possible between himself and the hell of the royal court, his Catholic wife, and her murderous family. About the only thing these two young men did agree upon was that the lieutenant-general was overbearing and obnoxious, they didn’t like taking orders from him, and they wanted to be rid of him. On this somewhat tenuous basis was their relationship—and, later, the Politique movement—founded.

As it turned out there was no need to revolt against the lieutenant-general, at least in the short term: fate—or, rather, the queen mother—intervened. For in the late spring of 1573 came word that Henri had received the rather dubious honor of being elected king of Poland.

T
O FULFILL
N
OSTRADAMUS’S PROPHECY
and see all her sons crowned kings was Catherine’s most cherished objective. Over the years she had devoted countless hours and much deliberation to its accomplishment. It was this goal (along with her survival as head of state), not the welfare of France, that lay at the root of all her foreign policy and fueled her diplomatic efforts. She cared not which realm she secured for her progeny—Catholic or Protestant, wealthy or impoverished, ally or enemy—so long as the land in question boasted a throne. She had sacrificed her daughter to Henry of Navarre in order to keep the crown of England safe for François, but this still left her favorite son, Henri, without a monarchy to call his own. When the last of a long line of hereditary rulers in Poland died without a male heir, Catherine saw her chance. She immediately dispatched Jean de Monluc, the bishop of Valence, the only court official of her acquaintance who had ever visited that faraway Slavic
kingdom, along with one of her favorite dwarves who happened to be Polish, and instructed the pair to do whatever it took to procure the crown for Henri. What it took was a bribe of four hundred thousand
livres
outright, along with the promise of hundreds of thousands more in the future, in order to underwrite an army, wipe out the Slavic national debt, and provide scholarships to Paris to educate a hundred sons of the Polish aristocracy, all to be paid out of the already bankrupt French royal treasury. But in the end Henri got his title. The first time one of the members of the Flying Squadron curtsied low before her and murmured with cunning flattery, “
I salute you as the mother
of the King of Poland,” Catherine was so overcome with emotion that she sobbed in ecstasy.

The election of the lieutenant-general of France to the throne of Poland was a source of unmitigated joy to many besides his mother. In an instant François, Henry of Navarre, and the prince of Condé were relieved of their most reviled tormentor. Margot, too, had the satisfaction of knowing that the older brother who had persecuted her before her marriage and then taken a leading hand in ensuring that her wedding would go down in history as one of the most despicable betrayals of hospitality of all time would be leaving the kingdom to take up a post in a land so remote that it was unlikely she would ever be called upon to visit it. Even Charles, who had finally been diagnosed with consumption (tuberculosis) and was visibly failing, was comforted by the fact that his mother’s favorite, the detested Henri, who had conspired treasonably against him and gotten off scot-free, would not be around to gloat at his death. As for the Huguenots, they could hardly believe their luck: Henri’s ascension to the Polish crown was so expensive that the siege of La Rochelle had to be immediately abandoned and peace terms drawn up in their favor so that funds could be diverted to purchase the lieutenant-general’s kingdom for him. So, again to the Catholics’ incredulity, less than a year after the catastrophe on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the Protestants had gained back almost all the political ground they had lost in the immediate aftermath of the massacre.

About the only person in France who was not completely thrilled by this unlooked-for honor was the prospective king himself. Being monarch of Poland might not have been too bad if it meant only an appreciation in rank, but it seemed that everyone expected him to actually take up residence in his newly acquired realm. Poland! What did Catherine’s son know of Poland? He’d never been out of France. He didn’t speak the language. He didn’t know the customs. He could barely find it on a map. It is entirely likely that at this point Henri deeply regretted his decision to reject Elizabeth I. If he’d played along with his mother from the beginning, marriage negotiations with England would probably still be dragging on and that little toad François would have been the one exiled to the Slavs instead of the other way around.

But there was nothing he could do about it. Step by step the formalities associated with his coronation, set in motion by Catherine, moved relentlessly forward, propelling him toward his fate, just as the preparations for the Navarre wedding, also instigated by the queen mother, had previously overtaken and conquered Marguerite. On August 19, 1573, an embassy from Poland consisting of a dozen or so of the most important noblemen in the kingdom, accompanied by their servants and retainers, trundled into Paris in a line of fifty coaches. They were welcomed officially into the city by the royal family and treated to a magnificent dinner and entertainment at the Tuileries Palace in celebration of the exalted occasion. Brantôme was a guest at this affair and described it in detail. Marguerite dazzled the Polish delegation at the reception and ball; she must have taken distinct pleasure in doing all she could to recommend her brother to his new subjects and in so doing hurry his departure.
“For my part,” Brantôme recalled, “the most becoming
array in which I ever saw her was, as I think, and so did others, on the day when the queen-mother made a fête at the Tuileries for the Poles. She [Marguerite] was robed in a velvet gown of Spanish rose, covered with spangles, with a cap of the same velvet, adorned with plumes and jewels of such splendor as never was. She looked so beautiful in
this attire, as many told her, that she wore it often and was painted in it.”

The Polish envoys, out of their element in the ornate surroundings, were apparently struck dumb by the sight of their new king’s sister: “
She seemed to them so beautiful
and so superbly and richly accoutred and adorned, and with such great majesty and grace that they were speechless at such beauty,” Brantôme reported. “Among others, there was Lasqui, the chief of the embassy, whom I heard say, as he retired, overcome by the sight: ‘No, never do I wish to see such beauty again. Willingly would I do as do the pilgrims to Mecca… where they stand speechless, ravished, and so transfixed at the sight of that superb mosque that they… burn their eyes out with hot irons till they lose their sight… saying that nothing more could be seen as fine, and therefore would they see nothing.’ ”
^*
So taken with Marguerite were the Polish envoys that they turned up at the Louvre the next day to pay their respects to the king and queen of Navarre. As befit a formal audience, the bishop of Kraków, another of the Polish ambassadors, made a pretty speech to Henry in Latin. To the bishop’s open-mouthed astonishment, it was Margot who stepped forward afterward and, having obviously understood what was said, graciously answered for her husband in kind with a degree of fluency no other member of her family had managed to acquire. When she finished, the members of the Polish embassy unanimously applauded Marguerite as “
a second Minerva, goddess of eloquence
,” and later referred to her simply as “
that divine woman
.”

Margot’s unqualified diplomatic triumph and easy mastery of the Polish delegation underscored her rapidly growing influence at court. As a queen and member of the royal family, she embodied authority—people looked to her for leadership. Nothing bespoke the strength of her political position more than Henri’s desperate attempts to regain her friendship before his banishment to Poland.
“
For some months before he quitted
France, he had used every endeavor to efface from my mind the ill offices he had so ungratefully done me,” Marguerite reported later in her memoirs. “He solicited to obtain the same place in my esteem which he held during our infancy; and, on taking leave of me, made me confirm it by oaths and promises.” But Margot was no longer the naive girl of sixteen who had fallen so readily under the charm of her older, more calculating brother. She was a married woman of twenty with a wealth of firsthand experience of court intrigue. She swore the oaths Henri demanded, but she knew better than to trust him.

The pressure Henri felt to secure allies who would remain loyal to him in his absence was rooted in a glaring political reality: his older brother, the king, was visibly dying. Too weak to hunt, Charles was frequently incapacitated with high fevers and had even begun vomiting blood. By right of succession, since the king had failed to produce a legitimate male heir, when he died the crown would fall to Henri. But if Charles expired while Henri was away in Poland, the resulting confusion and uncertainty that inevitably accompanied a change in rule would encourage plots against him. His brother François might challenge his right to the throne and take over France before Henri had a chance to return. Henri knew that Catherine would do her best to save the kingdom for him, but even she might not be able to withstand a concerted effort to unseat him. Henri tarried in France as long as he could, hoping the king would die quickly so that he would not have to leave at all, but Charles saw through this stratagem. Too ill to stand, the king called his mother into his sickroom and from his bed issued an executive order that Henri be forced to depart for Poland immediately. Catherine bowed to his authority and accompanied her favorite son as far as the duchy of Lorraine before seeing him off on his journey.
“Go! Go!” she whispered to the unwilling Henri at their parting. “You will not stay long.”
And so the new king of Poland took final leave of his family and rode despondently out of Lorraine in quest of his distant, alien domain during the last week of November 1573.

Henri had been correct to worry. He wasn’t gone five days before the first of what would prove to be a series of attempted coups designed to take advantage of his absence broke out at court. And Marguerite was right in the middle of them.

I
T ALL BEGAN OVER
the coveted title of lieutenant-general. Obviously Henri could not simultaneously serve as a foreign potentate
and
head of the French armed forces, so just prior to his departure for Poland he had reluctantly resigned his commission. François, as next in line, naturally assumed that he would be named his brother’s successor. After all, Catherine had elevated Henri to the title when he was only sixteen and had no practical experience of battle, and François was eighteen and had already participated in the siege of La Rochelle.

It had therefore come as a highly unpleasant shock to discover that the king had no intention of naming him to this prestigious post. Neither Catherine nor Charles trusted François. They knew he was ambitious and that both the Politiques (the moderate Catholics who resented both Henri and the Guises) and the Huguenots (empowered once again by having withstood the siege of La Rochelle and forcing the queen mother to come to terms) saw him as a counterpoint to the Crown. Under the circumstances, it did not seem like a good idea to either Catherine or Charles to give François, whom the opposition parties were obviously cultivating for leadership, command of the royal army. He might just turn around one day and use it against
them
.

Piqued by this slight to his honor, François had surreptitiously complained to his supporters through trusted members of his household, and they had come up with an impulsive plan. Both the duke of Alençon and Henry of Navarre had accompanied Catherine to Lorraine to bid adieu to Henri. On the return journey the two teenagers plotted to escape from the court (where they were both under close surveillance) and rendezvous with a band of opposition cavalry and soldiers. “
The Huguenots, on the death of the Admiral
, had obtained from the King my Husband, and my brother Alençon,
a written obligation to avenge it,” Marguerite explained. “Before St. Bartholomew’s Day, they had gained my brother over to their party, by the hope of securing Flanders for him [i.e., they bribed him]. They now persuaded my husband and him to leave the King and Queen on their return, and pass into Champagne, there to join some troops which were in waiting to receive them.”

Unfortunately, the conspirators were not terribly discreet, with the result that the king of Navarre’s chancellor, Monsieur de Miossans,
^*
soon got wind of the intrigue. Appalled, he tried to put a stop to it.

This was not a case of a fanatical Catholic, a Guise disciple, or one of Catherine’s own spies working against the Huguenots. Miossans was one of the two men in Henry’s household whom Marguerite had personally saved from death after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre by going down on her knees in front of her mother and the king. He had been a Huguenot before being obliged, like his master, to convert to Catholicism in order to save his life. He was one of the men who had stayed up the night before the massacre with the king of Navarre in his bedroom discussing what to do about the assassination attempt on Coligny. There is no reason whatever to doubt his loyalty to Henry. If Miossans was against Henry and François’s rushing off half-cocked to start what amounted to a rebellion, then most likely the two teenagers were out of their depth and there was something seriously amiss with the plan.
^*

As further proof that Miossans was trying to protect his lord and was not motivated by ideology or personal gain, he did
not
take his information directly to either Catherine or the king, both of whom would have rewarded him handsomely for his service but most likely
would have dealt harshly with Henry. Instead he turned to the woman to whom he owed fealty, who had previously shown him such mercy: Marguerite. “
M. de Miossans, a Catholic gentleman
, having received an intimation of this design, considered it so prejudicial to the interests of the King his master, that he communicated it to me with the intention of frustrating a plot of so much danger to themselves and to the State,” Margot reported. The queen of Navarre immediately saw his point. The last thing she needed was for Henry to be caught and tried for treason. She couldn’t approach her husband directly; he already didn’t trust her. He’d never believe that she was acting as much in his interest as in her own. So she handled it as deftly as she could. “
I went immediately to the King
and the Queen my mother, and informed them that I had a matter of the utmost importance to lay before them; but that I could not declare it unless they would be pleased to promise me that no harm should ensue from it,” she declared. Catherine and Charles agreed, and she told them of her brother and husband’s plans to escape the court and join forces with the Huguenots. “
I begged they might be excused
, and that they might be prevented from going away without any discovery being made that their designs had been found out. All this was granted me, and measures were so prudently taken to stay them, that they had not the least suspicion that their intended evasion was known,” Margot concluded.