The Rival Queens (39 page)

Finally, in the predawn hours of October 17, she and her weary party located the haven they sought. But no sooner had the queen of Navarre achieved the presumed safety of Ibois than an intimidating regiment of royal cavalry galloped up to the walls of the château and loudly commanded that the doors to the villa be opened so they
could search the premises. Châteauneuf, it seemed, was an informer. Acting on his intelligence, Joyeuse had sent a large company under the direction of the marquis de Canillac to apprehend the king’s sister.

Resistance was futile—Ibois had neither the armaments nor the fortifications of Carlat—but Marguerite nonetheless did her best to forestall, or at least delay, their entry. She knew Canillac; he was the son of her childhood governess, Madame de Curton, who had taught Margot to love Catholicism and had replaced her book of hours those many years ago when her brother Henri had teased her by throwing it into the fire. While the queen negotiated, she searched desperately for a way to conceal Aubiac. Familiarity with Henri III’s methods indicated that her lover was in as much trouble as she was. She could bear the pain of her own punishment but not his. Margot must have done a good job of keeping the king’s soldiers at bay, because she had time to have Aubiac’s telltale red hair shaved off and to find a secret compartment in the chimney for him to hide in. But all her precautions turned out to be useless. Châteauneuf’s information had obviously been very precise. Canillac knew all about Marguerite’s lover and found him easily as soon as he and his men entered the castle, which they did later that day.

Having identified Aubiac, Canillac had him dragged from his hiding place and sent to a nearby prison. Then he turned to Marguerite, who was tearfully pleading for her chevalier’s life, and pronounced her under arrest in the name of the king.

T
HE RIGHTEOUS SATISFACTION BOTH
Henri III and Catherine experienced upon being informed by urgent messenger that the marquis de Canillac had succeeded in apprehending the queen of Navarre is evident from the tone of the instructions that the king dashed off in response. “
Tell Canillac not to budge
until we have made the necessary arrangements,” Henri wrote in his own hand to one of his ministers. “Let him convey her to the Château of Usson. Let, from this hour, her estates and pensions be sequestrated, in order to
reimburse the marquis for his charge of her. As for her women and male attendants, let the marquis dismiss them instantly, and let him give her some honest demoiselle and waiting-woman, until the Queen my good mother orders him to procure such women as she shall think suitable. But, above all, let him take good care of her. It is my intention to refer to her in the letters patent, only as ‘my sister’ and not as ‘dear and well-beloved.’ The Queen my mother enjoins upon me to cause d’Aubiac to be hanged, and that the execution takes place in the presence of this wretched woman, in the court of the Château of Usson. Arrange for this to be properly carried out. Give orders that all her rings be sent to me, and with a full inventory, and that they be brought to me as soon as possible,” he added.

Canillac received these instructions on November 8, but before he had a chance to act on them, a second royal missive arrived. Henri III had evidently had time to reflect and decided he had been too lenient. “
The more I examine the matter
, the more I feel and recognize the ignominy that this wretched woman brings upon us,” proclaimed the king. “The best that God can do for her and for us, is to take her away… As for this Aubiac, although he merits death, both in the eyes of God and men, it would be well for some judges to conduct his trial, in order that we may have always before us what will serve to repress her [Marguerite’s] audacity, for she will always be too proud and malignant. Decide what ought to be done, for death, we are all resolved, must follow. Tell the marquis not to budge until I have furnished him with Swiss and other troops.”

The king’s orders were carried out with dispatch. Marguerite was conveyed under heavy guard to the massive fortress of Usson, outside Issoire, on November 13. Several days later a hasty tribunal was organized, and Aubiac was declared guilty of an unspecified crime (no record of the trial has survived) and sentenced to death. Although he was of sufficient rank to merit beheading, he was instead hanged as a common criminal. Margot, who was en route to her new prison, was at least spared the sight of his execution. This was an act of kindness on Canillac’s part, especially as Aubiac’s punishment was
reported to be exceptionally gruesome. Apparently it took the vital young man so long to die that his hangman got bored and flung him still breathing into his grave.

The forbidding château of Usson, where Marguerite, surrounded by her Swiss Guard, was held prisoner, had been employed for centuries by a series of French monarchs as the equivalent of a state penal institution. It was considered to be absolutely secure, a vast emptiness into which criminals and traitors were deposited and never heard from again. The queen of Navarre was utterly desolate, “
treated like the poorest
and most abandoned of creatures,” lamented the envoy from Tuscany with rare compassion. In a surviving letter to her mother and brother, Margot “
threw herself at their feet
and begged them to have pity on a long misery.” To Catherine, “
who had brought her into
this world and wished to take her out of it,” Margot wrote in anguish that she hoped to find the courage “to kill herself before she would fall into the hands of her enemies and face degrading ruin.”

Prolonging her agony was her brother’s decision not to render a final verdict on her transgressions until Twelfth Night—January 7, 1587. Marguerite well understood that, precedent having been so recently set by Elizabeth I’s condemnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, Henri III would find it far easier to hand down a sentence of death in her own case.

The two-month delay in Marguerite’s judgment—from early November of 1586, when Henri III had first been informed of his sister’s capture, to January 7, 1587—was not arbitrary. Catherine was scheduled to meet with the king of Navarre on December 13, 1586, at a villa outside Cognac. With her came her granddaughter Christine of Lorraine, daughter of Margot’s gentle sister Claude.
^*
Christine was intended as an inducement to Henry to agree to disband his Huguenot army and return to Catholicism. If he did so,
Catherine and Henri III would see to it that Marguerite was disposed of so he could marry the young, unsullied Christine in her place. It was a typical Catherine solution: in Christine she had found a marital candidate who would link Henry to both the royal family and the Guises, and this, in her mind, would be sufficient to end the succession conflict.

Although Henry had at one point also considered murdering his wife, to his very great credit he rejected the queen mother’s proposals definitively. This may have been because he had absolutely no intention of abandoning the Huguenot cause and returning to Catholicism and so wasn’t the least bit tempted by Catherine’s rather heavy-handed attempts to persuade him. Or it could have been that hearing the queen mother blithely discuss peace terms that involved executing her daughter led him to reflect that if she could behave this way toward Marguerite, her own flesh and blood, she would certainly have no qualms about doing the same to him one day. Whatever Henry’s reasoning, the duke of Retz, who was present at these negotiations, testified that the king of Navarre made a point of declaring that he “
would never consent to such
an execrable misdeed.”

And so, in a bit of fascinatingly improbable historical symmetry, Henry unknowingly repaid the debt he had owed his wife since the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when she had saved his life by refusing the divorce dangled so temptingly by Catherine. For by rejecting the queen mother’s overtures he delivered Marguerite from what would almost certainly have been a death sentence. Instead, on January 7, 1587, Henri III issued a decree condemning his sister to life imprisonment.

He was almost immediately sorry. A mere six weeks later came the news that the queen of Navarre had turned the tables on her brother completely and taken the formidable château of Usson in the name of the Catholic League.

B
RANTÔME ALWAYS MAINTAINED THAT
Marguerite’s comeliness was the determining factor in
the marquis de Canillac
’s decision to
transfer his allegiance from the king to the duke of Guise, and indeed this was the prevailing opinion at the time of her coup. “The Marquis de Canillac carried her off, and brought her to Usson,” her old friend enthused. “But, soon afterwards, this lord of a very illustrious house saw himself the captive of his prisoner. He thought to triumph over her, and the mere sight of her ivory arms triumphed over him, and henceforth he lived only by the favor of the victorious eyes of his beautiful captive.” Certainly her breeding and good looks worked in her favor, but Canillac had other sentiments to consider as well. There was, for example, the general contempt the inhabitants of France, and particularly the citizens of Paris, had for their king. Henri III’s popularity was so low that during the Christmas season the queen mother’s spies had uncovered a plot by a local chapter of the Catholic League to occupy the Louvre and murder the king and all his council. A frightened Catherine had warned her son “
not to go about any more
alone and to have good care taken about what he ate.” The duke of Guise’s prospects, on the other hand, had never looked more hopeful. It was clear that, if he so chose, the duke could take over the government at any time.

As Madame de Curton’s son, Canillac was a devout Catholic, Marguerite knew. It was only a matter of convincing him where his true interests and advantage lay. It helped that Henri III had not had the foresight to forward some immediate monetary reward to the marquis. Margot, on the other hand, made sure to sign a document that read, “
in consideration of the very signal
and very acceptable services which she has received and hopes to receive from Jean de Beaufort, Marquis de Canillac, [Marguerite] gives, cedes, and transfer[s] to him and his all the rights that she may possess over the county of Auvergne and other estates and lordships in the said county of Auvergne… also the sum of 40,000 écus, payable as soon as it will be possible to discharge it… and the first vacant benefices in our estates up to the annual value of 30,000 livres.”

Whatever Canillac’s deciding motivation, this was a clear triumph for the queen of Navarre. Overnight, her jailer became her
protector. The formidable Swiss Guard was summarily expelled and a line of communication opened to the Catholic League’s headquarters. By February 14 the duke of Guise was able to send a letter announcing the triumph to his contact in Spain. “
I do not intend to fail
to advise you that the negotiations begun by me with the Marquis de Canillac have happily succeeded, and I have persuaded him to cast in his lot with our party, and, by this means, assure the person of the Queen of Navarre, who is now in full security,” he wrote. “And I rejoice at this, as much on her account as for the acquisition that it has brought us, of a very great number of places and châteaux, which renders the Auvergne country perfectly assured to us… You can understand how this matter has affected the King of France, seeing that the Marquis has dismissed the garrison which his Majesty had placed there, which is the first proof of his good faith that I demanded of him.” To further ensure the surrounding area and his ally’s security, Guise sent a company of soldiers to Canillac to help guard the queen.

Mary Stuart was put to death on February 8. Her gruesome beheading—it took three strokes to decapitate her, and the executioner missed her neck entirely on the first blow, hitting the back of her head instead, so that she was conscious and in obvious fear and pain before he could raise the ax a second time—sparked outrage in France and Spain and precipitated a crisis.

But Marguerite, who had come within a scratch of the king’s pen of replicating this terrible fate, had instead managed to manipulate her circumstances and find a way out of her dilemma. By the spring of 1587, the queen of Navarre was no longer a helpless prisoner in a cell, vulnerable to the perpetual intrigues of brother, mother, or husband, but mistress of perhaps the mightiest fortress in France. So invulnerable was her new abode that “
the sun alone could enter
by force,” admitted a chronicler of the period.

C
ATHERINE AND
H
ENRI
III
COULD
hardly credit the news of Canillac’s defection. “
The marquis swore
and promised to set the queen of Navarre at liberty!” an astonished queen mother informed her son by letter. But there was nothing either of them could do to enforce the king’s will. Marguerite’s deliverance was simply another reflection of the growing impotence of the Crown.

Moved to action, Henri III decided to try to take momentum away from the duke of Guise and win over some of his adherents by promoting himself rather than the duke as the ultimate defender of Catholicism. That summer the king announced that he would personally oversee the war against the Huguenots. He divided up the royal army and sent Joyeuse with one division into Poitou to confront Henry, then cleverly assigned the duke of Guise to lead another regiment east to intercept the German and Swiss troops who had been recruited to come to the Huguenots’ aid. In this way the
king sought to forestall the invasion, which he and Catherine greatly feared, while putting the man he most hated in danger.

Henri III made a great show of his desire to rid the kingdom of Huguenots, but after the queen mother’s repeated negotiations with the king of Navarre his motives were considered suspect. A nuncio sent by the pope to the court of France summed up the general mood of the citizenry in a report back to Rome. “
The hate of the people
for the government is great and the King, in spite of his power, is poor and his prodigality makes him poorer. He shows remarkable piety and at the same time detests the Holy League. He is about to make war on the heretics and is jealous of the success of the Catholics. He wants the defeat of the heretics and is also afraid to have them defeated. He fears the defeat of the Catholics and desires it… He does not believe in himself but all his trust is in d’Epernon… Guise is adored by the people but hated by the King, while the King loves d’Epernon, whom the people hate,” the nuncio concluded.

The results of the Crown’s renewed campaign against heresy were not promising. Henry’s army trounced Joyeuse’s at a battle on October 20, giving the Huguenots a much-needed boost in morale. The duke of Guise had more success against the Germans and Swiss, but Henri III, fearful that an all-out victory would only add to his nemesis’s prestige, sent Épernon to bribe the mercenaries to leave the kingdom before the duke had an opportunity to strike the decisive blow. Deprived of his quarry, an outraged duke of Guise wrote to his Spanish contact “
of the strange favors
and overt connivance that Epernon shows to the enemy.” Insult was added to injury when the king, touting his favorite’s achievement as a triumph for peace, rewarded Épernon by making him governor of Normandy and Admiral of France (a position formerly held by Joyeuse, who had, unfortunately, died in combat), two immensely prestigious and lucrative titles, both of which the duke of Guise believed should have gone to him.

It was an inopportune moment to vex the head of the Catholic
League. For some time Philip II had been building a fleet of warships, known as the Spanish Armada, for the purpose of invading England and overthrowing Elizabeth I. Work on the last of the galleons was completed in the spring of 1588, and the ships were set to sail from Spain in early May. While Philip II was confident that he would prevail, he did, however, prefer that Henri III, whom he considered less than vigilant when it came to opposing Protestantism, not be tempted to intervene on Elizabeth’s behalf. Accordingly he asked his ally the duke of Guise if he couldn’t arrange a small diversion to keep the king of France occupied while the Spanish Armada exterminated the English navy.

The duke of Guise was only too happy to comply. Under his direction the Catholic League made plans to assassinate the duke of Épernon, occupy the Louvre, and take the king captive. Henri III was alerted to the plan and to forestall the coup sent Épernon to Normandy and sternly forbade the duke of Guise to enter Paris. The duke saw fit to disobey the royal command and rode into the capital on May 9, 1588. Thousands of Parisians once again lined the streets to catch a glimpse of their hero. “
Long live Guise!
Liberator of France, pillar of the Church, exterminator of heretics!” they cried. To prevent her son’s violent overthrow, a panicked Catherine pretended that she had invited the duke. Having no choice, Henri III accepted her deception and met with his adversary. The king used this interview to try to persuade Guise to forswear his animosity toward Épernon out of loyalty to the Crown. “
He who loves the master
should love the dog,” the king noted reprovingly. “Provided that he does not bite,” returned the duke.

Unsatisfied with this response, Henri III decided to reassert his authority a few days later by bringing four thousand soldiers of the royal guard into the capital on May 12 to intimidate the league. This turned out to be a big mistake. Instead of backing down, the citizenry leaped into action. They erected blockades in the streets to trap the members of the guard and then shot at them with harquebusiers from the windows and balconies above. By noon there were
dead soldiers everywhere. The next day Henri III was forced to flee the city, leaving the duke of Guise in control of Paris. The uprising, immediately dubbed the Day of the Barricades, made it “
certain that the King of France
will have his hands so tied before the Armada sails that it will be impossible for him even in words, still less by deeds, to help the Queen of England,” rejoiced the Spanish ambassador in a letter to Philip II.

The king having cravenly escaped without his aged mother, it fell, as always, to Catherine to try to salvage the situation by negotiating with the Catholic League. Fearful that the armada, which by summer was poised for battle, would be turned against the French Crown after the defeat of the English, she strongly advised her son to accede to the duke of Guise’s demands. Accordingly, on July 15, Henri III signed a new edict demoting Épernon and instead showering new honors upon the duke, including the coveted title of lieutenant-general. The Guise family was also granted a number of major cities in France, including Orléans, Boulogne, and Angers. This capitulation by the Crown “
put almost absolute authority
in the hands of the Duke of Guise,” observed the ambassador from Venice.

Two weeks later, on July 28, 1588, to Philip II’s great chagrin, the nimble English navy obliterated the bulky Spanish Armada, a twist of fate that saved the Crown of France as much as it did that of Elizabeth I.

S
OON AFTER THE DEFEAT
of the armada, Henri III had a falling-out with his mother. The Catholics having suffered a setback and consequently weakened, he blamed her for his submission to the league’s demands. He accused Catherine of favoring the duke of Guise and plotting his advancement at court. Her descent from power was swift. In September Henri III abruptly replaced his most senior counselors, all of them Catherine’s close confidantes, with new officers who were instructed to ignore the queen mother. Catherine was no longer to be involved in the day-to-day operations of his government. Worse, he stopped confiding in her or asking her
advice. The envoy from Venice, who was at court during the shake-up, noted the queen mother’s misery. “
Seeing a thing of such importance
done without her knowing anything about it, she is entirely beside herself,” he reported.

The court was at Blois, where the king intended to remain until after Christmas. At the beginning of December, sixty-nine-year-old Catherine, already plagued by obesity and gout, came down with a bad cold and fever and was confined to her bed. Being ill and removed from the circles of power for some months, she was consequently unaware of the fact that her son and three of his innermost circle had secretly decided on December 20 to emulate her strategy at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and deliver the kingdom from its enemies by assassinating the duke of Guise.

Clandestine plots being what they were at Henri’s court, the duke of Guise was warned the very next day by no less than three reputable sources—the papal nuncio, his mother, and his mistress (the ever-communal Madame de Sauve, still in the game)—that the king intended to have him killed. But the duke refused to take the threat seriously. “
He would not dare
,” Guise snorted. On the morning of December 23, 1588, as he made his way to the royal chambers, having been summoned to an urgent meeting with the king, all sorts of people stopped him in the hallway to caution him to turn back, that he was about to meet his death, but he belittled them. “
Fool,” he s
aid under his breath of one of these retainers.

So he walked into the royal anteroom, ordered his breakfast—prunes—and then, as the door to the inner sanctum swung open, took his leave of those of Henri’s counselors assembled near the fire and entered the king’s bedchamber. Once inside, he found himself confronted not by his sovereign, who was nowhere in sight, but by members of the king’s guard. As this was somewhat strange, he turned back toward the door that had been shut behind him, at which point he was pinioned by three of the officers. With cries of “
Traitor! You will die for it!
” they repeatedly thrust their daggers into his chest and throat despite his desperate pleas for mercy.
Bleeding copiously, the thirty-nine-year-old duke of Guise, savior of Paris and the Catholic League, managed momentarily to push himself away from his assailants and stagger across the room before collapsing onto the floor. He expired a few minutes later at the foot of the king’s great bed.

Catherine, whose sickroom was located directly beneath her son’s bedchamber, heard the scuffle overhead and inquired anxiously as to the cause of the commotion. Eventually her son came down into his mother’s bedroom to enlighten her. According to her doctor, who was present at this edifying interview, Henri III addressed his mother as follows: “
Good day, Madame, I beg
you to forgive me. Mr. de Guise is dead. I have had him killed, having got ahead of him in what he planned to do to me. I could not bear his insolence any longer… knowing and proving every hour that he was sapping and mining… my rule, my life, and my realm, I made up my mind to do this deed… God has inspired and aided me to do it, whom I am now going solemnly to thank in church at the sacrifice of the mass,” the king added piously. “I wish to be the King and no longer prisoner and a slave as I have been from the 13th of May until this hour in which I begin again to be the King and the Master,” he concluded with grim resolve. Then he left.

If the doctor feared that this disturbing news would deal a deathblow to his patient, he did not know the queen mother. Catherine fretted, but she also rallied. Her son needed her. By New Year’s Day her fever had broken. “
In spite of the great trouble
of her mind and her inability to see any way of meeting the dangers of the hour, the Queen Mother is convalescent and in eight days we hope she can return to her ordinary way of living,” the royal physician was able to record in his medical journal.

No, it was not the fact of the murder itself but her commitment to her adored Henri III and her belief in her own abilities to smooth over even the most difficult situations that condemned her. Hearing that his mother had improved, the king asked if she wouldn’t mind visiting her old friend the aged cardinal of Bourbon, whom Henri
III had, unfortunately, been forced to place under house arrest for collaborating with the Guises, to see if she couldn’t reason with him. Anxious to begin the inevitable process of conciliation that she understood would be necessary if the Crown were to withstand the violent repercussions of the king’s action, she immediately dragged herself out of bed and, over her doctor’s strenuous objections, had herself dressed and carried in a chair over to the cardinal’s drafty apartments.

Having been removed from events and therefore not in possession of all the details of her son’s behavior in the wake of the assassination, the queen mother did not perhaps fully appreciate the magnitude of the job she had ahead of her. The cardinal of Bourbon, who was old and weak, had been treated very badly by Henri III. As a cousin of the king of Navarre, the cardinal had stood to inherit the realm if Henry remained a Huguenot and his claim to the throne were negated. After the murder of the duke of Guise, the king had had the cardinal arrested and dragged into the royal bedchamber to view the corpse of his former ally. “
Fool! Knave! Puppet!
Do you recognize that?” Henri III had growled at the quaking prelate. “But for your age, old imbecile, I would treat you the same… What! You aspired to become the second person in my kingdom!… I will make you so little, that the least in my realm shall be greater than you!”