The Rival Queens (26 page)

Under the circumstances, even Henri, who did not have the funds to raise a competing force of anywhere near that size, understood that he was going to have to make some concessions to his despised brother or risk losing the throne altogether. Despite her age and corpulence—she was by this time fifty-six and so obese that the Huguenots christened their largest cannon the
Queen Mother
after her—Catherine volunteered to act as mediator, traveling back and forth repeatedly between the duke of Alençon’s headquarters and the court. To protect Henri, the queen mother conceded almost everything François wanted. Mindful of the bond that existed between her youngest children, Catherine planned to bring Marguerite along with her to these negotiations in order to ensure a successful result. This, however, was not to be. Fate (or, more accurately, vengeance) intervened when, on the evening of November 1, 1575, All Saints’ Day,
Guast was discovered murdered
in his town house in Paris.

By daylight, the details of the crime were well known. According to the Parisian chronicler Pierre de L’Estoile, who recorded the event in his diary, Guast had been lying in bed reading when a small band of intruders led by a masked man burst into his rooms. Taken by surprise, the victim reached for the weapon he routinely kept hidden by the side of the bed but in his haste mistakenly came up with only a pillow. This instrument, alas, proved of limited worth against the swords and daggers of his assailants. Demonstrating that presence of mind that had made him so successful in life, with his last breath, just before he expired, Guast identified his murderer as the baron of Vitteaux, who had borne the king’s favorite a long-standing mortal grudge.
^*

The problem was, however, there were so many people who had
also borne Guast a mortal grudge that it was difficult to believe that Vitteaux had acted alone. The Parisian chronicler maintained that the assassin had performed the execution on behalf of François as retribution for the open scorn Guast had displayed for the duke of Alençon while he was still at court. Similarly, Marguerite’s hatred of the king’s favorite was well known, and it was rumored that she and her usual accomplice, the duchess of Nevers, had arranged for Vitteaux to dispose of the odious Guast. Still others whispered that the assassination had been a crime of passion, not politics—that Vitteaux had been hired by the jealous husband of Guast’s most recent mistress, who did not believe that his patriotic duty extended to sharing his wife with one of Henri III’s
mignons
.

Of all these tantalizing conspiracy theories, the one involving Marguerite is the least likely. The queen of Navarre was seriously ill in September and was still weak and confined to her room at the time of Guast’s murder in November. Moreover, she knew she was unprotected and under constant surveillance; this would not have been the time to risk so bold a strike against her brother Henri, who had already threatened her life. Nor did she dissemble at the news of the crime. Brantôme reported that “
when he was killed
, and they came to announce it to her, she… said, ‘I am very vexed that I am not quite cured, in order to have the joy of celebrating his death.’ ”
^*

Whatever pleasure she took from the slaying of Guast was short lived. For early the next year again came the threat of serious punishment from the king when Marguerite’s husband, following her younger brother’s example, slipped away from the court and escaped to his home territory of Navarre, far to the southwest. During the months since François’s flight, Henry had managed to prove his loyalty to the Crown by shunning his wife and leaving her to take all the blame for her brother’s defection. The king of Navarre had continued to profess great friendship for the duke of Guise and had even sent his own men to fight alongside the Catholic duke in a
skirmish against the Huguenots. He cultivated a carefree, comic demeanor that amused the king, and Henri III had evidently been lulled into believing that his brother-in-law was firmly on his side—so much so that he allowed Henry the freedom to hunt. This proved to be a mistake when, on February 3, 1576, Henry took off on one of these sporting expeditions and never came back. As soon as he returned to Navarre, he converted back to Protestantism. One of his traveling companions noted that, when he knew he was safely away, Henry quipped “that
he regretted only two things
he had to leave behind in Paris—the Mass and his wife.”

In accordance with this cavalier attitude toward Marguerite, to whom he owed his life several times over, Henry did not bother to forewarn her of his plans, although he must have known that she would be blamed for his escape and possibly severely punished as a result. “
He quite forgot his promise
to my brother of speaking to me, and when he went away, it was without taking leave of me,” Margot reported sadly.

And now there was no escaping Henri III’s wrath, the full force of which was directed at his sister. “
The King, supposing that I
was a principal instrument in aiding the Princes in their desertion, was greatly incensed against me, and his rage became at length so violent that, had not the Queen my Mother moderated it, I am inclined to think my life had been in danger,” said Marguerite. “Giving way to her counsel, he became more calm, but insisted upon a guard being placed over me, that I might not follow the King my husband, neither have communication with anyone, so as to give the Princes intelligence of what was going on at Court. The Queen my mother gave her consent to this measure,” she added.

In fact Catherine broke the news to the queen of Navarre herself. She came to Margot’s room while her daughter, still weak from her long illness, was struggling to change into an appropriately magnificent costume so as to be presentable at court. “
My child [said the queen mother], you are giving yourself
unnecessary trouble in dressing. Do not be alarmed at what I am going to tell you. Your own
good sense will dictate to you that you ought not to be surprised if the King resents the conduct of your brother and husband, and as he knows the love and friendship that exist between you three, should suppose that you were privy to their design of leaving the Court. He has, for this reason, resolved to detain you in it, as a hostage for them… On this account it is that the King has ordered his guards to be placed, with directions not to suffer you to leave your apartments… I beg you will not be offended with these measures, which, if it so please God, may not be of long continuance. I beg, moreover, you will not be displeased with me if I do not pay you frequent visits, as I should be unwilling to create any suspicions in the King’s mind,” Catherine concluded.

So saying, she left her beautiful, vivacious daughter, who had just been humiliatingly discarded by her husband, to her punishment. In an unusual and particularly vindictive feature of her sentence, twenty-two-year-old Marguerite was not only imprisoned in her room under house arrest, she was denied all intercourse with the court. She was forbidden news of the outside world and was given no indication of the expected duration of her captivity or whether it would end with her freedom or her trial and eventual death. She knew only that she faced the long bleak days and nights entirely alone but for the menials who tended to her physical requirements. Deprived of all visitors, friends, and social companionship, the young queen who loved balls and dancing, whose undeniable charm and grace had won the court of France international renown, who had never spent a solitary moment in her life, sat alone day after day in the silence of her cushioned prison with no hope of deliverance.

T
HE FIRST WEEKS WERE THE
most difficult, as Margot soon realized that Henri and Catherine had succeeded in turning the entire palace against her. “
I remained a close prisoner
, without a visit from a single person, none of my most intimate friends daring to come near me, through the apprehension that such a step might prove injurious to their interests. Thus it is ever in Courts,” she observed bitterly. “Adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd.” Only one of her former familiars, a lord named Grillon, defied the king’s order and, at risk to his own safety, insisted on attempting to comfort her in her solitude. “Brave Grillon… came five or six times to see me, and my guards were so much astonished at his resolution, and awed by his presence, that not a single Cerberus of them all would venture to refuse him entrance to my apartments,” Marguerite recounted fiercely in gratitude.

However, like her former sister-in-law Mary Stuart, who was similarly constrained under house arrest by Elizabeth I, the queen of Navarre seems to have managed to circumvent at least some of the restrictions of her captivity. She contrived, for example, to smuggle letters in and out of court by bribing the servants, a stratagem that brought her news of the outside world. In this way she
learned that she was not quite so bereft of allies as Henri would have her believe: her brother François had learned of her imprisonment and was threatening retaliatory measures if his sister were not released. “
Some few days after
I had been put under arrest, my brother had intelligence of it, which chagrined him so much that… [he wrote] to the Queen my mother, informing her that, if I was thus treated, he should be driven upon some desperate measure,” Marguerite reported triumphantly.

But certainly the most unexpected—and encouraging—message she received while a prisoner came from her husband. Henry might have sneered at her while in Paris, but he was induced to change his mind upon his return to Navarre. “
Meanwhile, the King my husband
reached the States under his government. Being joined there by his friends and dependents, they all represented to him the indignity offered to me by his quitting the Court without taking leave of me,” Margot wrote. “They observed to him… that it would be for his interest to regain my esteem; that… he might derive to himself great advantage from my presence at Court. Now that he was at a distance from his Circe, Madame de Sauves, he could listen to good advice… Accordingly, he wrote me a very affectionate letter, wherein he entreated me to forget all that had passed betwixt us, assuring me that from thenceforth he would ever love me, and would give me every demonstration that he did so, desiring me to inform him of what was going on at Court, and how it fared with me and my brother.”

What Henry’s love was worth at this point is questionable—and certainly this communication, for all its professed sentiment, was a far cry from François’s threats and indignant demand for her release—but it did represent an olive branch and an apology of sorts, and Margot accepted it. “
I received this letter during
my imprisonment, and it gave me great comfort under that situation,” she admitted. “Although my guards had strict orders not to permit me to set pen to paper… I found means to write many letters to him.” Margot understood that when he requested information about the court,
Henry was actually asking for her analysis of the political climate and, if possible, intelligence relating to Henri III’s plans against the Huguenots, and this, in her outrage at being kept a prisoner, she was happy to provide to the best of her ability, given her constrained circumstances. Thus the king and queen of Navarre, separated by hundreds of miles, began cautiously to repair their relationship.

In addition to her smuggled letters, Marguerite had another important solace in her captivity: books. Her quarantine apparently did not extend to the royal library. She had always loved poetry and literature, but for the first time in her life she had leisure to devote herself to more serious scholarship. “
I had found a secret pleasure
, during my confinement, from the perusal of good books, to which I had given myself up with a delight I never before experienced,” she explained. “I consider this as an obligation I owe to fortune… to prepare me, by such efficacious means, to bear up against the misfortunes and calamities that awaited me… My captivity and its consequent solitude afforded me the double advantage of exciting a passion for study, and an inclination for devotion, advantages I had never experienced during the vanities and splendor of my prosperity.”

She put on a brave face, but underneath the queen of Navarre must have entertained many doubts and suffered sleepless nights while locked away in her room. She could not help but apprehend that there was a strong possibility this situation might not end well. Arrest and imprisonment had in the past presaged execution for many political prisoners, even those of the highest rank. Certainly this would prove to be the case for Mary Stuart, whose royal status did nothing to save her from Elizabeth I’s enmity—or the ax.

But Marguerite’s luck held where Mary’s did not. For during her months of captivity, while she lost herself in a world of books, Henri III, faced with the escalating threat of an invasion led by his brother François, lost the confidence of the majority of the aristocracy and had to beg his mother to arrange a peace. Catherine, armed with a new array of bribes and concessions with which to coax her youngest
son to call off his military campaign, trundled off again in her jolting, cumbersome carriage to meet François but was forced to turn around empty-handed almost as soon as she arrived, having been made aware, “
of his [François’s] firm resolution
not to listen to any terms of peace until I was restored to my liberty, and reparation made me for the indignity I had sustained,” Margot rejoiced.

In consequence there occurred a scene that must have been highly satisfying for the formerly helpless prisoner. Hard upon Catherine’s return from this aborted negotiation, Marguerite suddenly found herself released from her cell and ushered solicitously into her mother’s chamber. Catherine, having already “
acquainted the King with my brother’s
determination,” and “
the King… on a sudden
, as eager to reconcile matters betwixt us as she was herself,” explained that she needed her daughter’s aid to mediate a peace and “
expressed her hopes
that I would forget the injuries I had received.” The queen mother further “assured me that the King was sorry for what had happened; that he had even expressed his regret to her with tears in his eyes, and had declared that he was ready to give me every satisfaction,” Marguerite noted wryly.

Restored to freedom, Margot graciously agreed to accompany Catherine to a rendezvous outside Sens with the leaders of the opposing party for the purpose of negotiating a treaty. In a show of strength, François greeted his mother and sister in the company of his numerous aristocratic allies, including the prince of Condé. Henry wasn’t in attendance, but his presence was effectively represented by a contingent of some six thousand German cavalry “
raised by the Huguenots
, they having joined my brother, as the King my husband and he [again] acted in conjunction,” the queen of Navarre explained.

To ensure her youngest son’s cooperation, Catherine brought François the happy news that Henri III had had a sudden change of heart and was anxious to name his younger brother duke of Anjou. He was throwing in the duchies of Berry and Touraine for good measure, an investiture that increased François’s annual income
from rents and property by approximately three hundred thousand
livres
a year. To sweeten the pot still further, the queen mother also announced that the king had ordered that his younger brother be awarded an outright annual pension of three hundred thousand
livres,
to be scraped together somehow by the already impoverished royal treasury. Nor were the Huguenots forgotten: their demand for a new, more comprehensive Edict of Toleration was accepted. French Protestants were for the first time to be guaranteed “
a free, public, and general
exercise of religion” throughout the kingdom with the exception of Paris and its immediate environs. “
With respect to these
[the articles of the Edict of Toleration], when at length agreed upon, they were too much to the advantage of the Huguenots, as it appeared afterwards, to be kept,” Margot noted, “but the Queen my mother gave in to them, in order to have a peace, and that the German cavalry before mentioned might be disbanded. She was, moreover, desirous to get my brother out of the hands of the Huguenots; and he was himself as willing to leave them, being always a very good Catholic, and joining the Huguenots only through necessity.”
^*

With the queen mother conceding almost every point, negotiations were concluded quickly, and on May 6, 1576, what became known as
the Peace of Monsieur
—“Monsieur” being a reference to François’s elevated status as the new duke of Anjou—was signed. It represented an unqualified victory for François and also for Marguerite, whose influence, advice, and intermediary services had been critical to the success of the strategy. It was the queen of Navarre’s first exposure to a winning political coalition, and she loved it. To have succeeded was exhilarating, but even more gratifying was the feeling of being useful and valued. And in François she believed she had found a brother to replace Charles. She never forgot that he had stood up for her and gotten her out of captivity. He had even tried,
during the negotiations, to ensure that she receive the dowry monies and property due her that had never been paid by making this a condition of the treaty. “
My mother, however, opposed it
, and persuaded me to join her in it, assuring me that I should obtain from the King all I could require,” she observed. Her gratitude toward her younger brother for his support and protection during her time of need was profound. She would remain intensely loyal to him for the rest of her life.

At this moment of triumph, to add to her felicity, came a message from Henry. “
The peace being thus concluded
and ratified on both sides, the Queen my mother prepared to return. At this instant I received letters from the King my husband, in which he expressed a great desire to see me, begging me, as soon as peace was agreed on to ask leave to go to him,” recounted Marguerite. “I communicated my husband’s wishes to the Queen my mother, and added my own entreaties.”

Margot was sincere in wishing to go to Navarre. Despite Henry’s ignominious treatment of her while at court, she was still his wife and a queen in her own right. She wanted to establish her own court, where she could express her aesthetic and rule beside her husband. She and Henry might never love each other, but they could learn to respect each other. More important, it was time to start a family—not simply to establish a line of succession in tiny Navarre but also because Marguerite’s sons would be in line for the throne of France.

It was with dismay, then, that she once again encountered her mother’s opposition. “
The Queen my mother expressed herself
greatly averse to such a measure and used every argument to set me against it,” Margot reported. “She observed that, when I refused her proposal of a divorce after St. Bartholomew’s Day, she gave way to my refusal, and commended me for it, because my husband was then converted to the Catholic religion; but now that he had abjured Catholicism, and was turned Huguenot again, she could not give her consent that I should go to him.” (This argument is particularly
amusing, as Catherine was the one who had insisted that Marguerite marry the Huguenot Henry in the first place.)

The truth was that a united king and queen of Navarre represented a strong political alternative to Henri III and to Catherine herself, particularly given Marguerite’s close relationship with François. The queen mother feared her daughter’s influence would eclipse her own and, when reasoning failed, was forced to resort to her usual negotiating tactic in order to get her way. “
When I still insisted upon going
, she burst into a flood of tears, and said, if I did not return with her, it would prove her ruin; that the King would believe it was her doing; that she had promised to bring me back with her; and that, when my brother returned to Court, which would be soon, she would give her consent,” said Marguerite.

If their positions had been reversed—if Catherine had wanted her to go and Marguerite had wept and begged that she would be ruined if she went—there is no question that Catherine would have sent her anyway. But Margot was not her mother. She returned reluctantly to Paris.

T
HE TERMS OF THE
Peace of Monsieur, when they became known, stunned the Catholic majority. The Parisian populace in particular, who not without reason had been under the impression that the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had more or less permanently settled the religious question in their favor, openly revolted against the treaty. The Parlement of Paris declined to register the edict granting the Huguenots freedom of worship throughout the realm; the priests of Notre-Dame retaliated against the Crown by refusing to allow Henri III to enter the cathedral; and there were placards in the streets railing against the royal family’s capitulation to the heretical Protestants. The Guises were, as always, at the vanguard of the protest. “
There is much heartburning
touching the execution of this peace,” worried an English diplomat. “The churchmen and the Guises show themselves open enemies to it, and solicit the towns to make resistance, namely, touching the exercise of religion.”