The Rival Queens (24 page)

Henry of Navarre understood in that moment that the king of France was offering to cut his own brother out of the succession and name Henry as his direct heir if he would break off his friendship with François (and by extension with Marguerite, who supported François’s advancement) and come over to the monarchy’s side. It was a bribe of immense proportion, in recognition of the degree of dishonor that accompanied it, for Henry would have to turn his back on everything he as king of Navarre had stood for: the teachings of his beloved mother, Jeanne d’Albret; the still-searing memory of Coligny and all his friends and vassals who had been betrayed and brutally slaughtered attending his wedding; the profound loyalty of those of his Huguenot subjects who continued to believe in him. Mephistopheles himself could not have fashioned a more corrupt lure. And it cost the king of France nothing to proffer it.

Henry took it. From that time on, the tenuous alliance between the duke of Alençon and the king of Navarre vanished, supplanted by open hostility. To replace his old friends, Henry assiduously courted the Guises, despite the fact that he knew the family had taken the lead in gleefully putting to death all his closest confidants and childhood companions on Saint Bartholomew’s Day. The king of Navarre and his former nemesis, the duke of Guise, who must have been in on the scheme, were suddenly to be found constantly in each other’s company. They “
slept, ate and played
their masquerades, ballets and carousels together,” reported the chronicler. The English ambassador reported that the Guises intended to support Henry’s claim to the throne over François’s should the king die without a male heir.

Marguerite, unaware of the significant incentives tendered to Henry by her brother the king, was grieved by her husband’s sudden reversal of loyalties and attributed the deterioration in their marital relations, which she had made such efforts to cultivate, to Madame de Sauve’s pernicious influence. Charlotte, she said, “
persuaded the King my husband
that I was jealous of her, and on that account it
was that I joined with my brother. As we are ready to give ear and credit to those we love, he believed all she said. From this time he became distant and reserved towards me, shunning my presence as much as possible; whereas, before, he was open and communicative to me as to his sister… What I had dreaded, I now perceived had come to pass. This was the loss of his favor and good opinion; to preserve which I had studied to gain his confidence by a ready compliance with his wishes.”

Although she did not perhaps grasp the depth of Henry’s defection, Margot was correct in her assessment that Charlotte de Sauve’s increasing influence over her husband was somehow connected to his rejection of their marriage. Madame de Sauve’s favors had evidently been thrown in as a reward for Henry’s acceptance of the king’s Faustian bargain, for, to her lover’s acute joy (and François’s abject wretchedness), Charlotte suddenly began to spend much more time with the king of Navarre. The price of her affections was his complete estrangement from his wife, a condition that no doubt originated with Henri—or, as Margot was convinced, with Guast acting for Henri. Madame de Sauve “
now entered more fully
into the designs of Le Guast,” the queen of Navarre despaired. “In consequence, she used all her art to make the King my husband conceive an aversion for me; insomuch that he scarcely ever spoke with me. He left her late at night, and, to prevent our meeting in the morning, she directed him to come to her at the Queen’s levée, which she duly attended; after which he passed the rest of the day with her.” Nor could Margot run to François for companionship, for, unwilling to cede the prize to his rival, “
my brother likewise
followed her with the greatest assiduity, and she had the artifice to make each of them think that he alone had any place in her esteem. Thus was a jealousy kept up betwixt them, and, in consequence, disunion and mutual ruin!” recounted an exasperated Marguerite.

And so the stage was set for a new round of scheming and conspiracy, treason and treachery. And in the middle of it all, for the first time in her life, Margot fell truly in love.

H
IS NAME WAS
L
OUIS DE
Clermont d’Amboise, seigneur de Bussy, better known simply as Bussy. Twenty-five to Marguerite’s twenty-one, the most dangerous swordsman at court, Bussy embodied the reckless audacity and devastatingly good looks of a professional swashbuckler. Brantôme praised him as “
without equal in our time
.” Bussy radiated “
an invincible courage
… as valiant as his sword, and as worthy to command an army as any captain in France,” another contemporary concurred admiringly. Even in her memoirs, written long after the fact, when she was striving for objectivity, Marguerite could not quite disguise the adoration she felt for this particularly bold and talented cavalier. Bussy, she noted, was “
received with all the favor
which his bravery merited.”

Like his predecessor La Môle, Margot’s new passion was a member of her brother François’s entourage and one of his closest friends. But this was a relatively recent development. The fearless Bussy had originally been in service to Henri and had even accompanied his sovereign to exile in Poland. But Bussy had not found the king’s
mode of living in Kraków to be to his taste and had decamped early. Worse, he had switched his allegiance to the duke of Alençon and his beautiful sister upon his return to France, “
an acquisition which
, on account of the celebrity of Bussy’s fame for parts and valor, redounded greatly to my brother’s honor, whilst it increased the malice and envy of his enemies,” Margot reported. Henri hated Bussy for this betrayal almost as much as he abhorred François himself, and Henri’s
mignons
were none too fond of their former compatriot, either.

But he was everything that the queen of Navarre—and many other women at court—dreamed of in a lover. He laughed at danger. He wooed with intensity but also humor. He was an avid reader, accomplished in both Greek and Latin, and manifested a deep appreciation for poetry, even dashing off verses in his spare time. With his gloriously heedless chivalric temperament, Bussy “
had no peer for courage
, fame, grace, or wit,” Marguerite avowed.

She caught up with him in Paris, where the court finally settled in the spring of 1575. It had been an eventful few months. Henri’s coronation had been held in Reims in February. In an eerie reenactment of the previous king’s investiture, when the heavy crown was placed on his head, Henri had cried out that it hurt him, just as his brother Charles had. (Of course Charles had been a child of ten.) The coronation ceremony had been followed almost immediately by the king’s marriage to a younger daughter of a branch of the house of Guise.
^*
She was apparently chosen for her physical resemblance to the deceased princess of Condé. Henri—by then officially Henri III, king of France—had not bothered to consult his mother before making his decision. Catherine’s feelings may well be imagined when she discovered that her future daughter-in-law, a mousy, unremarkable girl, came not from royalty but from the Guises.
“
It is much discoursed
what the Queen Mother may think of it, for although she may like the person well enough because she is not like to take over much upon her, yet she may well doubt what may become of the greatness of the Guises by this affinity,” mused the ambassador from England. Marguerite, too, could not have helped but register the irony of her brother’s choice, after he had worked so assiduously to prevent her from marrying into the same family. But Henri was king, and he insisted on having his way. The royal nuptials were concluded so quickly that there was not even time for the guests to procure appropriately lavish gifts, although the ceremony itself, originally planned for the morning after the coronation, had to be
delayed for hours
while the groom painstakingly styled the bride’s hair.

The estrangement between the king and queen of Navarre (and, more significant, between the king of Navarre and the duke of Alençon) had persisted throughout the journey north. By the time the court reached Paris, any semblance of amity between Margot’s husband and her younger brother had completely disintegrated, threatening Huguenot and Politique prospects for a successful challenge to Catholic dominance. “
The quarrel between the King of Navarre
and the Duke is greater than ever it was, so that one of these days they will cut the throats one of the other,” an English envoy observed glumly. Henry himself seconded the ambassador’s assessment in a memorable letter to one of his cousins. “
The court is the strangest place
you ever saw,” Margot’s husband wrote. “We are nearly always ready to cut each other’s throats. We carry daggers, mail coats and often cuirasses under our clothes… The king is just as much threatened as I am. He loves me more than ever. Monsieur de Guise and Monsieur du Maine never leave me… You never saw how strong I am in friends in this court,” he boasted. “I brave all the world. All the cliques which you know about hate me to the death for the love of Alençon and have the third time forbidden my mistress to speak to me and watch her so closely that she wouldn’t dare to look at me. I am only waiting the hour to give
them battle, because they say they will kill me and I want to get ahead of them.”

Under the circumstances, the introduction of so remarkable a swordsman as the revered Bussy on the side of Marguerite and François represented a coup that instantly boosted the legitimacy of the opposition movement and changed the political equation. “
At Paris my brother was joined by Bussy
,” Marguerite explained. “He was inseparable from my brother, in consequence of which I frequently saw him, for my brother and I were always together, his household being equally at my devotion as if it were my own.” Henri and Guast, sensitive to the damage to the Crown’s image caused by Bussy’s defection, moved quickly to counteract the threat. They began by informing Henry of Marguerite’s indiscretion, hoping that he would intervene against their target. But for all his bravado (“I am only waiting the hour to give them battle”) the king of Navarre, noting the size and martial abilities of his wife’s lover and demonstrating that instinct for self-preservation that would serve him so well in the years ahead, prudently demurred. He would take on the world, yes, but Bussy—no.

Frustrated in his first attempt, Henri tried to slander Margot and Bussy again, this time with Catherine. “
The King… mentioned it to the Queen
my mother, thinking it would have the same effect on her as the tale which was trumped up at Lyons,” Marguerite related. But Catherine, who considered the arrangement of her children’s marriages to be hers by divine right and who was still furious with Henri for failing to consult her and impetuously marrying the Guise girl—rather than, say, the princess of Sweden, who had been his mother’s choice—was having none of it. “But she, seeing through the whole design, showed him the improbability of the story, adding that he must have some wicked people about him, who could put such notions in his head… ‘Bussy is a person of quality, and holds the first place in your brother’s family,’ ” Catherine was reported to have continued. “ ‘What grounds are there for such a calumny? At Lyons you caused me to offer her [Margot] an affront, which I fear
she will never forget.’ The King was astonished to hear his mother talk in this manner,” Marguerite observed.

Having failed to dispose of Bussy by intrigue, Henri and Guast determined to rid themselves of him by force. “They entered into a design of assassinating Bussy as he left my brother to go to his own lodgings, which was generally late at night,” Margot explained. “
They knew that he was always
accompanied home by fifteen or sixteen gentlemen, belonging to my brother, and that, notwithstanding he wore no sword, having been lately wounded in the right arm, his presence was sufficient to inspire the rest with courage. In order, therefore, to make sure of the work, they resolved on attacking him with two or three hundred men,” she added.

To add the element of surprise to the ambush—three hundred to sixteen evidently not being considered enough of an advantage on its own where Bussy was concerned—Guast ordered his men to extinguish their torches, wait until Bussy and his party came into range, and then fire their harquebuses into the group. Any survivors of the first onslaught were to be cut down with swords. Ordinarily it would be difficult to tell who was who in the dead of night, but Bussy was using a scarf as a makeshift sling for his wounded arm. Guast instructed his men to look for the scarf and take particular care to butcher the man wearing it.

The trap was set. Sometime after midnight on a late summer evening, Bussy and his companions, as predicted, left François’s apartments in the Louvre. They were on their way home by the usual route when they turned a dark corner and shots rang out. Instantly on their guard, they drew their swords and, despite the swarm of attackers, confirmed their reputation for ferocity by brawling their way through the onslaught to the safety of Bussy’s nearby rooming house. Only one of their party fell: a gentleman in Bussy’s service who had had the misfortune of also hurting his arm and binding it with a scarf. Because of this, it was reported back to the Louvre that Bussy had been murdered. Marguerite, who had not yet undressed for bed, heard the messenger cry, “
Bussy is assassinated!
”
and ran frantically to her brother’s rooms to discover the truth. François, incensed, demanded to go out and investigate, but Catherine, concerned for his safety, ordered the doors of the Louvre locked.

They needn’t have worried. Three hundred men, it turned out, were not enough to massacre a man like Bussy.
^*
The assassination attempt had not only failed, it backfired completely by adding to the warrior’s renown. “
The next day Bussy showed himself
at the Louvre without the least dread of enemies, as if what had happened had been merely the attack of a tournament,” Marguerite marveled. “My brother exhibited much pleasure at the sight of Bussy, but expressed great resentment at such a daring attempt to deprive him of so brave and valuable a servant, a man whom Le Guast durst not attack in any other way than by a base assassination.” If the queen of Navarre had not already given herself to this man before the attempt on his life, then certainly his debonair response to the threat broke down any of her remaining reserve.

But she also feared that he would be targeted again, and to protect him she agreed with Catherine that he should leave Paris. “The Queen my mother, apprehensive of evil consequences from this affair, and fearing a dissension betwixt her two sons, advised my brother to fall upon some pretence for sending Bussy away from Court,” Marguerite observed. “In this advice I joined her, and, through our united counsel and request, my brother was prevailed upon to give his consent… Bussy, who implicitly followed my brother’s directions in everything, departed with a company of the bravest noblemen that were about the latter’s person.” It must have been very difficult for her to see him go, but she consoled herself with the thought that at least he would be out of immediate
danger. “Bussy was now removed from the machinations of Le Guast,” Margot proclaimed with relief.

Bussy may have been safe. But she was not.

S
OON AFTER THESE EVENTS,
in the heat of that long, fraught summer, Henry fell ill. He had some sort of seizure, which the court physicians diagnosed as epilepsy. However, this seems unlikely, as he had no history of the condition and his symptoms did not persist. More probably it was stress-related; the presence of so much conflict and so many volatile, armed young men at court might certainly induce the occasional panic attack in even the most seasoned warrior. Marguerite, on the other hand, put it down firmly to an overactive libido. “
One night my husband
was attacked with a fit, and continued insensible for the space of an hour—occasioned, I supposed, by his excesses with women, for I never knew anything of the kind to happen to him before,” she reported. Despite his ill treatment of her and general indifference, she nursed him back to health so gently and faithfully that he credited her with saving his life. If so, this represented the third time in the space of as many years that Henry of Navarre had been rescued from death by his wife. “
From this time he treated me
with more kindness, and the cordiality betwixt my brother and him was again revived, as if I had been the point of union at which they were to meet, or the cement that joined them together,” Margot observed.

Certainly the tenderness his wife displayed when he was laid low helped, but other factors contributed to the couple’s reconciliation as well. The most conspicuous of these was the absence of any tangible profit from Henry’s covert alliance with his brother-in-law the king. Henri III’s lofty promises and flattering blandishments had turned out to be just empty words. Henry had not been named lieutenant-general. He had received no special favors or promotion. Worse, Henri III had recently levied a large and highly controversial tax, none of which had found its way into the purse of the king of Navarre, although a significant portion
of it
had
gone to augmenting the estate of the royal favorite, Guast.