The Rival Queens (23 page)

A dire lack of funds was not the only obstacle plaguing the kingdom upon Henri’s return in the fall of 1574. The Huguenots were threatening to renew open hostilities. The prince of Condé, who
had
managed to escape the court, was in Germany negotiating for troops. Elizabeth I was covertly supplying the French Protestants with money. And the Politiques had even come to an arrangement in Languedoc whereby Catholics and Huguenots had put aside their differences to work together for freedom of religion and to expel Catherine’s Italian advisers, who were perceived as being particularly greedy and influential, from France.

And yet despite these admittedly adverse economic and political realities, Henri’s position was not nearly as precarious as it seemed. The king had a number of advantages working in his favor. The Catholic majority, for example, was firmly behind him and against the Huguenots. To them he was the lieutenant-general, a seasoned, victorious commander and keeper of the faith who had distinguished himself on Saint Bartholomew’s Day. The Guises and all their vassals and supporters were with him. If he had behaved with energy and decisiveness; if he had lived up to his reputation as a warrior or, better yet, co-opted the Politiques by naming François lieutenant-general, as was his due as next in line to the throne; if he had made even the faintest show of reining in spending, the likelihood is that the opposition movement would have collapsed and the kingdom would have been brought back to stability.

But Henri did none of this. He had come back from Poland a changed man. Far from demonstrating the drive and ambition of his teenage years as lieutenant-general, Henri indulged in an extravagant, almost epic laziness. He spent most of his time in his room under his silken covers, comfortably propped up by the royal pillows. Occasionally he roused himself enough to lie around on a golden barge floating on the Rhône, as he had in Venice. Guast, Villequier,
and Quélus were always with him. A papal envoy attending the court in Lyon was taken aback by Henri’s behavior. “
The king is a young man
as juvenile in mind as can well be imagined,” he chided in a report to Rome. “He is a poor creature, most indolent and voluptuous, passing half his life groveling in bed.”

Henri’s chief concern, the issue that clearly kept him up at night, revolved around etiquette. He spent hours debating fashion, interior design, and the rules by which he as king might be properly approached by those of his subjects whom he deemed worthy of the honor. After extended consultations it was decided that no one could come near the king unless he or she followed a rigorous dress code, which eventually evolved into a list of some twenty or thirty separate outfits—including specifications for the number of ruffles on each shirt—deemed necessary for admission to court. According to one eyewitness, for example, Henri allowed no male visitor into his rooms unless he had on “
white pumps, high slippers
of black velvet, with stockings with garters and other garments, which had to be worn with the utmost care.” The king was also never to be approached while eating; a boundary was erected around his dining table and guards strategically placed to ensure his privacy. This represented a significant change from the past, when the monarch had made himself accessible to society by taking his meals in the presence of a large company. Similarly, as soon as he became king, the former lieutenant-general suddenly broke with established custom by refusing to go about on horseback, as every other French sovereign before him had done for centuries. Instead he chose to travel in a shuttered coach so no member of the hoi polloi could peek in at him. Finally, tradition dictated that any citizen of France could petition the sovereign at any time, but because Henri disliked being accosted by crowds he instituted a new, highly unpopular procedure whereby he would hear such appeals only at certain hours. In fact, every revision Henri made was designed to isolate him from his subjects and keep him from public view.

Which was odd because no one loved spectacle more than Henri. His taste in clothing was so flamboyant that it bordered on the fantastic.
A Spanish diplomat who was in Lyon when Henri arrived described one of his costumes. “
For four whole days
he was dressed in mulberry satin with stockings, doublet and cloak of the same color. The cloak was very much slashed in the body and had all its folds set with buttons and adorned with ribbons, white and scarlet and mulberry, and he wore bracelets of coral on his arm,” he observed. In addition to bracelets, Henri favored diamond earrings and makeup. Prematurely bald, he often wore tall turbans that, with the jewelry, gave him an especially exotic look. His favorite ensemble for costume balls was to dress up as a woman. “
The king made jousts
, tournaments, ballets, and a great many masquerades, where he was found ordinarily dressed as a woman, working his doublet and exposing his throat, there wearing a collar of pearls and three collars of linen, two ruffled and one turned upside down, in the same way as was then worn by the ladies of the court,” a Parisian lawyer confirmed.

But without question the most controversial aspect of Henri’s court was the introduction of a new class of favorites. In yet another and perhaps the most bizarre incarnation of
la petite bande,
Henri surrounded himself not with beautiful young women, as had his mother and François I, but with beautiful young men. They were known familiarly in France as Henri’s
mignons
. The
mignons
caused sufficient stir among the populace that there is no shortage of eyewitness accounts describing them. They “
wear their hair long
, curled and recurled by artifice, with little bonnets of velvet on top of it like whores in the brothels, and the ruffles on their linen shirts are of starched finery and one half foot long so that their heads look like St. John’s on a platter,” observed a Protestant nobleman caustically. “
The King arrived… with his troop
of young
mignons,
frilled and curled with their crests lifted, the crinkles in their hair, a disguised carriage, with the same ostentation, measured, diapered and covered with violet powders and odiferous scents, which smell up the streets, squares and houses they frequent,” seconded the ambassador from Venice. Henri lavished money and titles on his
mignons,
especially the core group of those who had accompanied
him to Poland and who remained his closest companions after his return to France.

Even Catherine disliked the
mignons,
mostly because their influence over her son limited her own ability to control the government. When Henri first arrived in Lyon, his mother tried to get him to take the duke of Retz, who had served his brother Charles before him, into his household as a senior official. The same canny Venetian envoy reported that “
this strong desire of the Queen Mother
was not so much on de Retz’s account, as to assure herself more firmly in government; because it is the duty of the first gentleman of the chamber to stay always in the room of the King and to be always near him and so she was sure to know not only what her son did, but, as it were, what her son thought. It was her custom, as I am informed, during the life of the last King, to have reported to her every morning everything the King had said and all that had been said to him, in order to take measures against anything that was being arranged against her power in the government.” (Poor Charles.) But Henri was not his brother, and he had his own ideas about what to do with his evenings in the privacy of his own rooms. It was Villequier, Henri’s particular intimate from Poland, not the duke of Retz, who attended the king at night.

Unfortunately, Henri’s sexual preferences were at odds with acknowledged Catholic dogma, which regarded sodomy and other homosexual acts as mortal sins. The dichotomy between his erotic conduct and his strong Christian beliefs created a fierce moral struggle within the king that triggered extreme swings in behavior. Periods of licentious activity were followed first by long, listless days in bed and then by public penance. He must have been particularly conflicted when he got to Avignon, because he joined an especially masochistic order of penitents known as the Flagellant monks, who walked the streets of the city barefoot and in sackcloth, moaning and chanting while continually scourging themselves. The entire court was obliged to participate one evening in December 1574, when Henri, decked out in a coarse shift attractively embellished with little black death’s head ornaments, led a wailing procession through
a cold rain, flagellating himself as he went.
^*
This night in the frigid air suffering alongside his howling sovereign was too much for the forty-nine-year-old cardinal of Lorraine, once the greatest power in France. The cardinal, in his open-toed sandals, caught a bad cold and fever and died three weeks later, on the day after Christmas.

The gulf between what his subjects expected of him and what Henri turned out to be was so vast, the comparisons between his gratuitously frivolous lifestyle and their cruel poverty and suffering so stark, that it created its own momentum. The opposition saw its opportunity and pounced, fanning the flames of public disapproval to their advantage. Again, none of his eccentric behavior would have mattered—or mattered as much—if Henri had made even a vague attempt to project the image of an engaged sovereign, a vigorous leader who intended to address the kingdom’s many woes. But the only battlefield in which Henri applied himself with any energy at all was in the arena of court intrigue, where he strove to destroy his siblings. And there, it must be admitted, he showed himself indefatigable.

T
HE KING’S NEXT PLOT,
like his previous attempt, again revolved around sex. (Henri and his
mignons
were consistent, if not particularly imaginative.) “
After staying some time at Lyons
, we went to Avignon,” Margot related. “Le Guast, not daring to hazard any fresh imposture, and finding that my conduct afforded no ground for jealousy on the part of my husband, plainly perceived that he could not, by that means, bring about a misunderstanding betwixt my brother and the King my husband. He therefore resolved to try what he could effect through Madame de Sauves.”

Charlotte de Sauve was in her early twenties, very pretty, and a valued member of Catherine’s Flying Squadron.
^*
Married to a nondescript
midlevel functionary, Charlotte sought advancement by securing the intimate friendship of gentlemen of high rank and then reporting on them to the king and queen mother. Her great value was that she seemed to require no physical attraction at all in order to have sex, which meant that she was willing to sleep with both Marguerite’s brother François
and
her husband, Henry. “
This occasioned such jealousy
between them,” Marguerite observed drolly, “that though her favors were divided with M. de Guise, Le Guast, De Souvray, and others, any one of whom she preferred to the brothers-in-law [François and Henry], such was the infatuation of these last, that each considered the other as his only rival.”

A practiced coquette, Madame de Sauve was expert at leading one young swain to the brink of rapture, thereby plunging the other into despair, and then with exquisite timing abruptly reversing the process. By this technique did she keep both François and Henry at each other’s throats and in a perpetual state of ecstatic anticipation. So smitten were the rival lovers that they availed themselves of any stratagem that could be used to gain advantage over the other in their mistress’s affections. Since Charlotte made it plain that the confiding of privileged information yielded her sweetest smiles, the two outdid each other at volunteering secrets. There was no surer line of communication in the kingdom than the love whispers that emanated from Charlotte de Sauve’s bedroom directly to Catherine and Henri. Marguerite knew it, but she was helpless. “
I now turned my mind to an endeavor
to wean my brother’s affection from Madame de Sauves,” she recalled. “I used every means with my brother to divert his passion; but the fascination was too strong, and my pains proved ineffectual. In anything else, my brother would have suffered himself to be ruled by me; but the charms of this Circe, aided by that sorcerer, Le Guast, were too powerful to be dissolved by my advice. So far was he from profiting by my counsel that he was weak enough to communicate it to her!” Margot exclaimed.

But the competition over Charlotte de Sauve was not the only cause for division between the duke of Alençon and the king of Navarre.
They were also contending for political supremacy within the Huguenot party. And here François, by virtue of his higher rank as a member of the royal family and as next in line to the throne should Henri die without siring sons (which, in light of his preference for male company, was certainly a possibility), held the distinct advantage.

Henry was very bitter about this. After all, his family had been associated with the leadership of the reformed religion almost since its inception; he was clearly the heir apparent to the cause. Yet even the prince of Condé, negotiating for men and support with the Protestant princes of Germany, recognized François as the head of the opposition party in France, and when Elizabeth I sent funds to shore up the Huguenot defenses, she sent them to the duke of Alençon. A Protestant broadside appeared referring to François as “
that puissant Hercules
commissioned by Heaven to exterminate the monsters who devour and oppress France.”
^*
Henry was unable to contain his resentment. François, he predicted tartly, would “
start by being the master
of the Huguenots and end by being their valet.”

Naturally this information went straight from Charlotte to Catherine and Henri, who leaped on it. The king of France, who seems to have detested François with a passion that exceeded every other emotion, much preferred his brother-in-law to his brother. There were other effective inducements (besides sex) by which the king of Navarre might be coaxed to abandon the Huguenots to his rival and instead join forces with the Crown, and Henri dangled some of these provocatively in front of Margot’s husband. According to a chronicler who knew Henry of Navarre, sometime after leaving Avignon for Reims the king of France called his brother-in-law to him, made him captain of the guard, then held out the prospect not only of the lieutenant-generalship of France but also, eventually, of the throne itself. “
I would rather that you reigned
than that
malotru
[lout] of a traitor, my brother,” Henri snarled. “What! Shall I leave my crown to this vile profligate?
Mon frère,
take my advice; [after
my death] find means to rid yourself of him and gather your friends, so as to be ready at the first moment to seize my crown!”