The Rival Queens (32 page)

The fury of her Huguenot hosts at the handful of Catholic inhabitants
who had dared to defy the town’s religious strictures was profound, and they hurried to Henry’s secretary, Jacques du Pin, whom Marguerite referred to scornfully as Le Pin, to inform on their neighbors. Pin, who was every bit as fanatical a Protestant as the rest of Pau, and who strongly disapproved of his overlord’s wife being allowed to remain Catholic instead of being forced to convert to the reformed religion, “
ordered the guard to arrest
these poor people, who were severely beaten in my presence, and afterwards locked up in prison, whence they were not released without paying a considerable fine. This indignity gave me great offence, as I never expected anything of the kind,” Marguerite recalled, still anguished by the memory decades later.

Inflamed with grief and anger—these were
her
subjects, and despite her emphatic, increasingly authoritative commands to desist she had been unable to save them from violence at the hands of her husband’s guard—she flew to Henry, whom she found in conference with Pin. “
I complained of it
to the King my husband, begging him to give orders for the release of these poor Catholics, who did not deserve to be punished for coming to my chapel to hear mass, a celebration of which they had been so long deprived,” Marguerite continued, still impassioned. She had not hesitated to do what she could for him at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, even going down on her knees to save the lives of two of his Huguenot noblemen. Surely her husband could return the favor. However, before Henry could answer, “
Le Pin, with the greatest disrespect
to his master, took upon him to reply, without waiting to hear what the King had to say. He told me that I ought not to trouble the King my husband about such matters; that what had been done was very right and proper; that those people had justly merited the treatment they met with, and all I could say would go for nothing, for it must be so; and that I ought to rest satisfied with being permitted to have mass said to me and my servants.” Never in her life had an official dared to address Margot, a member of the royal family, with anything other than the deepest deference. “
This insolent speech
from
a person of his inferior condition incensed me greatly, and I entreated the King my husband, if I had the least share in his good graces, to do me justice, and avenge the insult offered me by this low man.”

Henry was in a bind. There was no question that Pin had overstepped the boundaries of his position by addressing his sovereign’s royal consort as though she were the local fishmonger’s wife. On the other hand, Pin was a loyal servant who in general handled his duties well, if a little overenthusiastically, and the Catholic interlopers had clearly broken the laws of Pau. Uncertain of what to do, Henry wavered, first telling his wife that he would fire his secretary, then allowing his secretary to talk him out of it. Marguerite had to threaten to leave him before he sulkily agreed to dismiss Pin. “
The King, however, continued
to behave to me with great coolness,” she acknowledged. To punish her, Henry began a highly public affair with another woman (Dayelle having departed earlier with Catherine), who flaunted her position and influence over the king of Navarre and did her best to humiliate Margot.

It wasn’t until they left Pau—that “
little Geneva
,” as Marguerite bitterly referred to the town—some two months later that they managed to patch up their marriage. As had happened once before, illness played a critical role in reconciling the king of Navarre to his wife. On the way back to Nérac, Henry came down with a nasty fever, and Marguerite again put aside her wounded feelings to assiduously restore her husband to health. “
He took notice of my
extraordinary tenderness, and spoke of it to several persons, and particularly to my cousin… who, acting the part of an affectionate relation, restored me to his favor, insomuch that I never stood so highly in it before,” Margot related. “This happiness I had the good fortune to enjoy during the four or five years that I remained with him in Gascony.”

Marital harmony being so unexpectedly and fortuitously restored, the royal couple returned to Nérac in August of 1579 to set up housekeeping and establish their court. These would be among the happiest years of Marguerite’s life. Although Henry was not
faithful—he had replaced his Pau amour with a member of his wife’s entourage, a girl named Fosseuse, barely fifteen years old—the pair exercised discretion, which allowed Marguerite to maintain her dignity.
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“
The King was very assiduous with Fosseuse
, who, being dependent on me, kept herself within the strict bounds of honor and virtue,” Margot explained.

Possessed of her husband’s good opinion, removed from the threats and demands of her family, Marguerite was at last free to express herself by organizing her surroundings in a manner compatible with her upbringing and aesthetic. The citizens of Nérac, used to the dreary Calvinism practiced by Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, were delighted to find themselves suddenly treated to a cornucopia of new sights and sounds. The queen of Navarre adored music and dancing, and the sweet songs of lutes and violins could be heard emanating from the grand balls and concerts she arranged in the evenings. Her thirty-three ladies-in-waiting might not have been quite as heavenly as those comprising her mother’s Flying Squadron, but in their trendsetting Parisian silks and brilliant jewels, they more than satisfied the local appetite for glamour. Nor was the theater neglected; roving players found a home in Nérac, some from as far away as Italy.

As she had in Paris, Marguerite befriended poets and sought to replicate the diverse cultural milieu of the Green Salon. Her official court poet, the seigneur du Bartas, expressed his appreciation for her patronage with these lines: “
Great Henry’s daughter
, another Henry’s queen / Whose beauty’s equal never has been seen / Judith thy poet calls thee,—harken, though he raise / Naught worth men’s hearing save thy wondrous praise.” She invited scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, to Nérac to promote the city as a center of learning; a Huguenot courtier who attended one of these lectures reported that an eminent doctor of science “
showed how the wind blew
.” Marguerite was able to observe with justifiable pride, “
Our Court was so brilliant
that we had no cause to regret our absence from the Court of France.”

Her cultural stewardship was undoubtedly admirable, but it was for the king and queen of Navarre’s tolerance of religious differences that their court at Nérac was most to be commended. Almost alone in France—in western Europe—a Protestant king and a Catholic queen lived without violence. “
This difference of religion
, however, caused no dispute among us; the King my husband and the Princess his sister heard a sermon, whilst I and my servants heard mass,” explained Marguerite. “I had a chapel in the park for the purpose, and, as soon as the service of both religions was over, we joined company in a beautiful garden, ornamented with long walks shaded with laurel and cypress trees. Sometimes we took a walk in the park on the banks of the river, bordered by an avenue of trees three thousand yards in length. The rest of the day was passed in innocent amusements; and in the afternoon, or at night, we commonly had a ball.”

Ironically, the promise of Marguerite’s marriage before the blood and horror of the massacre—the wedding of Catholic and Huguenot—was fulfilled in this brief moment in Nérac. True, the religious tolerance did not extend beyond the court into the general populace, but by their example she and Henry proved that it
could
be done and therefore
might
be done on a larger scale, given time. But time was exactly what they did not have. Marguerite’s lyric description of dappled green paths and lush gardens inevitably evokes images of her court at Nérac as a sort of Eden. And the story of Eden always ends in exile.

W
HILE
M
ARGUERITE WAS BUSY RESUSCITATING
her relationship with her husband and assembling her court in Nérac, her brother François, as per the siblings’ original plan, was laboring to deliver Flanders from the tyranny of Spain as a prelude to establishing his own rule. This enterprise, unfortunately, was not destined to yield the brilliant success for which its architects had hoped. On the contrary, in a century famous for bungled opportunities and mismanaged engagements, the duke of Anjou had the distinction of running one of the briefest and most inept military campaigns of the day. His funds ran out almost before he got there; his unpaid soldiers, angry and hungry, ransacked the towns they had been hired to protect, raping and murdering the inhabitants; filth and disease, the inevitable by-products of war, spread dangerously in their wake, killing thousands. When Don John himself fell victim to the typhoid epidemic plaguing the army camps and died in the fall of 1578 at the age of thirty-one, François prudently decided that it might be best to suspend his
activities in the north until such time as hygienic conditions improved. By January 1579, he was back in France.

Attributing this slight setback to a deplorable lack of funds and international support, the duke of Anjou turned once again to his mother and older brother. Anxious to keep him away from his old allies, the Huguenots and the Politiques, Henri III sent François the money necessary to appear at court. The impoverished duke of Anjou arrived in Paris on March 16, 1579, and found himself once again in the enviable position of being bribed to maintain cordial relations with the Crown. He received one hundred thousand
livres
outright, and the tempting title of lieutenant-general was once again hinted at as a potential reward for services rendered in the not-too-distant future. The marriage negotiations with Elizabeth I were also revived at this time, as a cover for securing English funds and soldiers for a second attempt at Flanders. “The king,” reported a Venetian official who was in Paris and observed the warm reconciliation between Henri III and François firsthand, “
has such a strong desire
to satisfy his brother and completely win him over, with the tranquility of the kingdom depending on it, that he will soon concede this and everything else besides.”

Having patched up his relationship with the king, François promptly fell out with Bussy. The abysmal showing in the Netherlands had put everyone in the duke of Anjou’s suite a little on edge, and to relieve his feelings, the veteran swashbuckler had argued with another gentleman in service to François. Much to his lord’s displeasure, the squabble had escalated to a duel in which Bussy had killed his opponent, running him through with his sword. As it was obviously going to make it more difficult to recruit men for another crack at Flanders if Bussy insisted on using them first as fencing partners, François had rebuked his former favorite. The jocose Bussy, in turn, was reported to have insulted his master by jesting about his unattractive demeanor, always a particular sore spot with
François.
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In retaliation, the duke of Anjou betrayed his longtime friend to Henri III by sharing a letter in which Bussy had bragged of a recent conquest with the wife of an official in charge of the hunt, quipping that “
he had at length
completely lured the grand-huntsman’s hind into his net.” The king had helpfully passed along this information to the injured husband, who had stood over his wife with his dagger and threatened to cut her throat if she did not cooperate in helping to trap her lover by penning a note to him arranging a romantic interview.

Bussy received the lady’s enticing missive on August 19, 1579, and set off to avail himself of the favors it promised that very evening. Alas for the gallant chevalier, when he arrived at the tête-à-tête he found not the comely doe he had so carelessly joked about but her buck of an irate husband accompanied by a band of gentlemen, all with their rapiers drawn for blood. Never one to run from a fight, Bussy leaped instantly into combat and slew many of his attackers. From here, as befit so celebrated a warrior, the chroniclers offer differing versions of the contest. In one, Bussy’s ferocity caused his remaining opponents to draw back and, taking advantage of the pause in the action, he attempted to escape by leaping out of a nearby window to the safety of the street below. He would have made it, too, if his jacket had not gotten caught on a particularly inconvenient latch jutting out from the wall. In another, the beleaguered nobleman’s blade fractured, but heedless of the danger, Bussy simply tossed it away and swung furniture at his assailants. But no matter the number and disparity of the stories, the outcome was always the same: Louis de Clermont d’Amboise, seigneur de Bussy, the most daring and controversial knight of his age, died that night of multiple stab wounds.

The news of the great swordsman’s assassination reached Marguerite just as she was settling into her new life with Henry in Nérac. Although she never referred to the event, she must have grieved deeply at the loss. This was the second of Margot’s lovers to have died a violent, premature death. It was rumored that to compensate she took Henry’s first lieutenant, the vicomte de Turenne, into her bed. It is impossible to confirm this gossip with any degree of assurance; certainly both she and Turenne, when accused of intimacy, vehemently denied the charge. But Margot’s own romantic temperament and the conspicuously amorous nature of her court lent so much credibility to the story that it didn’t matter whether it was true or not; it was believed. “
She told her husband
that a knight without a love affair was one without a soul. He caressed her servants and she caressed his,” asserted a Huguenot member of Henry’s court.

This bit of malicious innuendo linking the queen of Navarre with one of her husband’s senior officials passed irresistibly from Nérac to Paris, where it was destined to have far more serious consequences for Marguerite than the usual unpleasant hearsay. For no sooner had Catherine returned from her highly touted extended diplomatic excursion than the trumped-up peace she had brokered in the south of France fell apart completely, a situation that Margot, to Henri III’s intense annoyance, had predicted in a series of increasingly urgent letters to the royal court. “
The King my husband
and Maréchal de Biron, who was the King’s [Henri III’s] lieutenant in Guienne, had a difference, which was aggravated by the Huguenots,” Marguerite recalled. “This breach became in a short time so wide that all my efforts to close it were useless… I saw, with great concern, that affairs were likely soon to come to an open rupture; and I had no power to prevent it,” she concluded in frustration. Margot’s letters advising her older brother to replace Biron with a less belligerent official and the rumor of her scandalous behavior with the vicomte de Turenne arrived in Paris at about the same time. Henri III, believing his sister to be deliberately working against his interests with her husband, saw an opportunity to separate the king of
Navarre from his wife. He sent a letter by special messenger informing Henry of Marguerite’s infidelity, just as he had previously passed along the news of Bussy’s affair to the deceived husband, hoping for similar results.

But Henry, who was far more concerned about the Maréchal de Biron’s behavior than his wife’s, failed to take the bait. Instead of turning on Marguerite, he showed both her and Turenne the letter, and accepted their protestations of innocence, good-naturedly remarking that he was used to this sort of stunt from the king of France. Since along with this unkind note, Henri III had also sent word that he refused to replace Biron, it is not surprising that open war broke out soon afterward. Hoping to take their opponents by surprise, the vicomte de Turenne, as Henry’s first lieutenant and best warrior, immediately left Nérac and took to the field, besieging a Catholic city. This intelligence making its way north, one of Henri III’s
mignons
spitefully interpreted it as Margot’s revenge for the king’s having revealed her illicit affair to her husband. The courtier drolly dubbed this renewal of hostilities between Huguenots and Catholics “The Lovers’ War,” a play on the reputation of the court of Nérac. As it was far pleasanter to blame his sister for the failure of his policies than to take responsibility for the conflict himself, Henri III was easily persuaded of the truth of this explanation and seethed against Marguerite.

But nothing could have been further from the reality of the situation. As Margot herself emphatically observed, no one had more to lose by a renewal of hostilities between Catholic and Huguenot than she. “
This was what I feared
; I was become a sharer in the King my husband’s fortune, and was now to be in opposition to the King my brother and the religion I had been bred up in,” she despaired. “I gave my opinion upon this war to the King my husband and his Council, and strove to dissuade them from engaging in it. I represented to them the hazards of carrying on a war when they were to be opposed against so able a general as the Maréchal de Biron, who would not spare them, as other generals had done, he being their
private enemy. I begged them to consider that, if the King brought his whole force against them, with intention to exterminate their religion, it would not be in their power to oppose or prevent it… this war was of such a nature that I could not, in conscience, wish success to either side; for if the Huguenots got the upper hand, the religion which I cherished as much as my life was lost, and if the Catholics prevailed, the King my husband was undone.”

Beyond all this, a return of civil war greatly jeopardized François’s ambitions in Flanders, as the duke of Anjou could not rationally expect to recruit a new army to invade the Netherlands if all the soldiers in France were already busy fighting each other. Marguerite’s hopes were still tied desperately to those of her younger brother; she needed the idea of the northern realm as a possible refuge even more than he did. For this reason there was no voice in the south of France more consistently, more forcefully committed to peace than the queen of Navarre’s.

And unfortunately for her husband and the Huguenots he led, her assessment of the Maréchal de Biron’s military abilities was only too accurate. Although Henry managed to take a Catholic stronghold early in May 1580, this would represent his sole conquest. By contrast, over the course of the summer and early fall, his opponent succeeded in capturing nearly thirty fortresses or towns claimed by the Protestants. In September, Biron even fired on Nérac. Only a heavy rainstorm and Marguerite’s presence (the marshal had agreed, because she was a Catholic and a member of the royal family, not to attack a city in which she was staying) averted a complete disaster for Henry.

In the end it was the prince of Condé who saved the Huguenots from outright defeat. Frustrated by the direction the war was taking, he challenged the king of Navarre for leadership of the party and succeeded in convincing Elizabeth I to provide funds to help raise an army of German soldiers with which to invade France. The possibility of foreign intervention alarmed Henri III and Catherine, and they decided to try to isolate the prince of Condé and split the Huguenot faction by executing a peace treaty with Henry. Since he
was at that point on good terms with his younger brother, the king asked François, who had already offered his services in the matter, if he would handle the negotiations. The duke of Anjou arrived in Cognac in October to meet with Henry and Marguerite.

That her younger brother had been chosen for this assignment could not have been more gratifying to Margot. There they were—she, Henry, and François, the three of them working together just as she had hoped and planned. And between them they settled in seven months what Catherine had been unable to accomplish in the more than a year and a half she had spent alternately bribing, scolding, and threatening the numerous local officials she had interviewed on her recent grand tour. “
The peace my brother made
… was so judiciously framed that it gave equal satisfaction to the King and the Catholics, and to the King my husband and the Huguenots, and obtained him the affections of both parties,” Margot observed. Although she gave all the credit to François, Marguerite was clearly instrumental in these negotiations, as by her advice Biron, the source of much of the trouble, was redeployed to her brother’s service. “
He [François]… acquired from it
the assistance of that able general, Maréchal de Biron, who undertook the command of the army destined to raise the siege of Cambrai,” the queen of Navarre continued. “
The King my husband was equally
gratified in the Marshal’s removal from Gascony and having Maréchal de Matignon in his place.” If Henri III and Catherine had listened to Marguerite and removed the too-aggressive Biron in the first place, hostilities might have been avoided altogether.
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