The Rival Queens (4 page)

And just in time, too, for on March 31, 1547, she lost her mainstay when that virile lover, fine art connoisseur, and redoubtable Renaissance gladiator François I finally succumbed to what was long thought to be a well-earned case of syphilis. (Medical science has since determined that this diagnosis was merely a vicious rumor; the king actually died of gonorrhea.) But either way, Henri inherited the throne in his father’s place, and his wife ascended with him. And that was how Catherine de’ Medici became queen of France.

I
F SHE BELIEVED THAT
motherhood and a crown would end her husband’s infatuation with Diane and restore her dignity and rightful place at court, Catherine was quickly disabused of the notion. Henri made it abundantly clear both at home and abroad that his mistress took precedence over his wife in every aspect of his reign. Diane was raised to the position of duchesse de Valentinois, a tribute that fixed her rank just below that of the royal family. Both courtiers and commoners knew to
address her as Madame
, an honorific commonly used to designate a royal princess.
Even the pope
was aware of the love affair. To honor Henri’s succession (and to try to coax him to follow in his father’s footsteps and support papal policy in Italy), the pontiff sent Catherine the prestigious Golden Rose—but made sure to include a magnificent pearl necklace for Diane as well.

This was not the only instance in which Diane reaped the rewards of Henri’s favoritism. The king showered her with gifts, while Catherine got the leftovers. The pick of the royal jewels went to Diane, as did the exquisite castle of Chenonceaux, one of the most desirable properties in France. Catherine hotly disputed this bequest,
claiming that François I had told her that upon his death she was to have it. Her husband overruled her, and she had to be content with the more humble château at Chaumont. Henri’s generosity to his beloved consort extended far beyond gifts of homes and expensive trinkets and into the realm of government patronage. Diane had “
the right of control
over all the offices of the kingdom which are obtained from the new king on payment of a certain sum, and from this she has made 100,000 écus and more,” an ambassador observed in an official report. She was given the wherewithal to reward family and friends with titles and high administrative posts. By contrast, Catherine was allowed only to keep the income associated with her much-reduced dowry in addition to the occasional bequest to a cousin.

The peculiar dynamic of Henri II’s sex life did not escape the notice of the many foreign dignitaries who visited the royal court. “
His Majesty
… spends at least eight hours with her [Diane], and if she happens to be in the apartments of the Queen, he sends for her,” one diplomat complained. “
When the King has told her
[Diane] all the business he has transacted in the morning, whether with ambassadors or other people of consequence, he seats himself in her lap, strumming his cither, and often asks the Constable or Aumale [two of the principal noblemen of the kingdom] if she is not beautiful, touching her breasts from time to time and gazing at her raptly like a man in the toils of love,” reported another in distaste.

It was not only in her capacity as queen and wife that Catherine was denied her rightful prerogative; even when it came to the children whom she had worked so hard to conceive, Diane completely usurped her role as parent. From the very beginning, with the birth of their first child, Henri put Diane, who had had daughters by her deceased husband and was experienced in child rearing, in charge of the royal nursery. Catherine had no say in her children’s upbringing. It was Diane who chose the wet nurses, Diane who managed the household staff and expenses, Diane who monitored and cared for the children when they were ill. This state of affairs persisted as
they grew older and approached young adulthood. Diane chose their tutors and governesses, the material and tailors for their clothing, and organized their schedules. The children’s doctor, Jean Fernel, commented admiringly on her judgment, acknowledging that Diane appointed “
wise and prudent governesses
; while she caused [the children] to be instructed by good and learned preceptors, as much in virtue and wise precepts, as in love and fear of God.” On the subject of Catherine’s maternal guidance, however, the doctor was silent.

The queen of France’s undeniable absence from her children’s lives when they were young has often been interpreted as a sign of her neglect or indifference, particularly as the majority of the letters she wrote during these years were political rather than maternal in nature. But this does Catherine a disservice. It is true that, after 1552, her correspondence concerning her children dwindles almost to nothing. But before that she regularly inquired anxiously as to their welfare. A letter she wrote on December 21, 1546, soon after the birth of her second child, Elizabeth, to the governor of the royal nursery, Jean II d’Humières (who, with his wife, were openly identified by Diane as “
my allies
”), reveals the emotions of a mother who was anything but removed—was in fact almost pathetically grateful for any report on her babies’ progress: “
Monsieur de Humyères
,” Catherine wrote, “I have received the letter that you wrote me and it has given me very great pleasure to have news of my children. I am pleased that Madame de Humyères has arrived, for the help she will provide you with the care of said children… Monsieur de Humyères, pray continue to keep me apprized of their news often because you could not give Monsieur [Henri] and me any greater pleasure, and for this I will pray to God, Monsieur de Humyères, and recommend you to him.”

Far from being voluntarily estranged from her brood, it was probable that the queen of France was simply worn down over time by her husband and his mistress and overwhelmed by her many pregnancies. By the time her seventh child, Marguerite, was delivered
in 1553 Catherine seems to have resigned herself to accepting a certain degree of isolation from her children. This accounts for the paucity of her youngest daughter’s early memories of her. When her father, the king, played with Margot or teased her affectionately, it was likely Diane and not Catherine who represented the maternal presence in the room.

This perverse and corrupt accommodation, which demanded that Catherine bury her hurt and resentment deep beneath a facade of cheerful approbation so that her husband and his lover would continue to accept her presence at court, ground along year after interminable year. She was not completely snubbed; there were those among her French acquaintance who evidenced sympathy for the new queen’s position. Chief among these was François I’s sister, Marguerite, one of the most accomplished women of her time.
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“
God will give a royal line
to Madame la Dauphine when she has reached the age at which women of the House of Medici are wont to have children,” she had written soothingly to Catherine during those dreadful years of barrenness. “The King and I will rejoice with you then, in spite of these wretched backbiters.”

Catherine remembered and reciprocated this support. When François died, Marguerite, an advocate for reform of the Catholic Church, whose court in Navarre formed a haven for persecuted members of the burgeoning Huguenot movement, fell out of favor with the new regime. Despite her age and renown, she was treated disparagingly by Henri and Diane. Catherine stood by her. “
I feel for you in your trouble
,” she wrote, “as I always knew you [felt] for me in mine.” Later, after Marguerite’s death in 1549, Catherine transferred her affections to Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre. Jeanne was even more radical in her religious beliefs and committed to the Huguenot cause than her mother had been and was consequently also at odds with the ultra-Catholic
Henri and Diane. Any enemy of Diane’s was a friend of Catherine’s, although in this case the two shared more than outsider status. Jeanne, married to the feckless Antoine de Bourbon, a dedicated womanizer and the highest-ranking nobleman in the kingdom after the royal family, had problems with her husband, too.
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Catherine and Jeanne commiserated with each other and on at least one occasion left behind their respective cares to enjoy a bit of fun together. According to the Spanish ambassador, they once went shopping in Paris “
disguised as bourgeois ladies
in simple headdress. They visited the boutiques around the Palais de Justice and on the Pont St. Michel.”

But Catherine’s meager circle of supporters was no match for Diane’s formidable political machine. Chief among her abettors were the powerful Guise brothers. The eldest, François, duke of Guise, was the kingdom’s most successful warrior. The second, Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, highly intelligent, urbane, and ruthless, owed his incumbency to Diane’s influence. “
I cannot refrain from thanking you
again for the special favor you have shown me, and for the great happiness it has given me,” he wrote to her on receiving his cardinalship. “I will use every effort to serve you more and more, and I hope from these efforts to reap good fruits for you as well as for myself, since my interests henceforth cannot be separated from yours.” A third brother, Claude, married Diane’s daughter by her legitimate husband. So entrenched was the Guise family at court that their sons were brought up with the royal princes. And, of course, little Mary Stuart from Scotland, engaged to Catherine’s eldest son, the dauphin Francis, was the duke of Guise’s niece. Mary and Francis were married in April of 1558, when Mary was just sixteen. The groom was fourteen.

Catherine loathed the Guises. They had been among those of François I’s advisers who had pressed most strongly to have her
repudiated when she failed to conceive quickly, arguing that Henri deserved a new, more acceptable wife—the duke of Guise’s daughter. Their intimacy with Diane and unquestioned authority only served to heighten her animosity. In their supremacy, the Guises were arrogant and made no secret of their condescension. In a letter of April 21, 1558, the wife of the duke of Guise made plain the family’s attitude toward the queen of France. The Medici family (and by extension Catherine herself), she wrote, was “
not fit to call themselves our servants
.” Taking her cue from her powerful relatives, the young bride Mary Stuart also felt comfortable insulting the queen, referring to her as “
the daughter of merchant
s” and making fun of her accent.

There was nothing Catherine could do but endure the endless humiliations, both profound and petty, and pretend to smile. A decade passed, then two, with seemingly no end in sight. Until one summer’s day at the end of June 1559, when forty-year-old Henri, approaching middle age, decided to prove his manhood at a tournament by competing three times in a single afternoon. He took a lance in the eye on the third joust, contracted an infection, and died ten days later—and everything changed.

M
ARGOT WAS ONLY SIX YEARS
old when her father died, too young to remember her mother’s shocked, almost paralyzing grief or the grim procession that formed within hours of the king’s death, signaling the change in succession. Led by her eldest brother, Francis, and his wife, Mary Stuart, Margot and her youngest brother, four-year-old François, were carried out of the castle that held their father’s corpse by Mary’s uncles the duke of Guise and the cardinal of Lorraine, thereby enhancing the Guises’ image as solicitous protectors of the bereaved royal family. Nor did she recall later in her memoirs the long days of official mourning that followed immediately after—fourteen in all—that she spent sitting quietly in a bedroom shrouded in almost complete darkness beside her mother, who from that day forth wore only black.
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So tangible was Catherine’s prostration that even the new queen of France was touched.
“
She is still so troubled
,” Mary Stuart observed of her mother-in-law in a letter to Scotland, “and has suffered so much during the illness of the late King that, with all the worry it has caused her, I fear a grave illness.”

Catherine was indeed pitiable in her grief. She cried endlessly. Her voice shrank to a whisper. She who rejoiced in ostentation wore no finery save for a band of ermine, symbol of royalty, around her neck. She was obviously devastated by her loss.

But not so devastated that she did not find the energy to utterly vanquish Diane. Even before her husband succumbed to his infection, Catherine made it clear that his mistress was forbidden access to the sickroom. “
Up to this hour
,” wrote one of the Italian ambassadors two days after Henri’s injury, “Madame de Valentinois [Diane] has not yet appeared in the chamber of the King lest the Queen put her out.” Within twenty-four hours of Henri’s passing, Diane was instructed to return the royal jewels and informed that Catherine, who had spent a portion of almost every day of her married life in the courtesan’s presence, no longer wished to meet her—effectively banishing her from court. Within a year, Catherine had legally appropriated the beautiful palace of Chenonceaux, forcing Diane to accept the inferior chateau at Chaumont in its place, just as Catherine had once been required to do by Henri.

Nor did the former favorite find comfort or support from her previous allies. The Guises decided to back the docile grieving widow over the grasping, imperious mistress. The duke of Guise took the opportunity of her disgrace to move his belongings at the earliest possible moment into Diane’s grand apartments in the Louvre; his brother the cardinal of Lorraine made a point of informing the woman who had secured his papal conferment for him that his family had demeaned itself by a marriage arrangement with her daughter.

Although the new king, Catherine’s eldest son, Francis, had been declared legally of age to rule even before his father’s death, in reality he was ill equipped to take Henri’s place. He was only fifteen,
and not a particularly mature fifteen. He had fainted—twice—at his father’s bedside and had a fit of hysterics when it was made clear to him that the king was dying. Francis’s incapacity was not really his fault. He was seriously ill with an undiagnosed ailment, probably tuberculosis, and had been for most of his life. Although wedded to Mary Stuart the year before, poor Francis was so physically undeveloped that his testicles had not yet descended (his father was apparently not the only one to have trouble in this all-important region), and so could not consummate his marriage. The majority of the court had long since concluded that Catherine’s eldest son would not live to see his twenty-first birthday, and certainly they had not expected him to outlive his strong, healthy father. For this reason, Francis was not well-trained in statecraft and knew very little of politics or government.

The obvious solution was to appoint a regent to govern the kingdom until Francis became proficient enough to rule in his own right. But this could not be done—well, not legally—because Francis had already been declared of age. The weakness of the heir to the throne and the absence of a distinct line of command were apparent even before Henri’s death. The uncertainty over who would actually rule the kingdom when Francis was declared sovereign created a vacuum of power at the very top of government. That vacuum in turn created an opportunity. And into that opportunity marched the Guises.

They maneuvered so quickly that no one else had a chance to react. Catherine, ever concerned for her own security, seems to have anticipated some move, because Francis’s very first proclamation, made on the evening of his father’s death, referred the government of the realm to her, “
this being the good pleasure
of my Lady-Mother and I also approving of every opinion that she holdeth.” But this was meant as a defensive measure only. No one expected the grieving widow, who could barely speak, so burdened with sorrow was she, to take on the day-to-day administration of the kingdom. No, this statement was intended merely to prevent whoever did
finally assume power—and at this early stage in the proceedings Catherine could not know whether Diane would yet prevail after all—from persecuting her or perhaps even exiling her from court. It was a clever move, and judging by the speed with which the Guises, who needed to cultivate Francis’s trust, dropped Diane in favor of Catherine, it worked.

The Guise brothers acted swiftly because they had to. Although they justified their claim to power by emphasizing their family’s relationship to the new queen, Mary Stuart, they were in fact usurpers, and they knew it. By right of lineage, Antoine de Bourbon, philandering husband of Catherine’s friend Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, and the person next in line for the throne after Catherine’s sons, should have taken command as unofficial regent. But Antoine was more than three hundred miles away in southwest France on the day Henri died. Even after he was informed of the change in succession, and despite the urgent entreaties of his more alert and ambitious younger brother, the prince of Condé, to hurry up and get himself to Paris, the bungling Antoine meandered his way north to the capital city, arriving on August 18, more than a month after Henri’s death. By that time the Guises had long consolidated their hold on the government. The English ambassador observed in a letter written less than a week after Francis’s ascension that “
the house of Guise ruleth
and doth all about the French king.” Nobody even bothered to meet Antoine the day he arrived at court, and he was eventually ignominiously sent away on the pretext that, as the royal family’s nearest relation, it was his job to deliver Catherine’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who before her father’s death had been contracted to marry Philip II, king of Spain, to her impatient fiancé.

The field having been so helpfully cleared of rivals, the two eldest Guise brothers proceeded to split the government of France between them. The duke of Guise, in his capacity as the soldier of the family, took over the management of the kingdom’s military affairs, while his brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, who was very good with
money and property, having applied himself assiduously throughout his career to the collection of bribes and preferments, shouldered the responsibility for fiscal policy. The late king’s ruinous wars against the empire had left the treasury heavily burdened with debt, so the cardinal prudently instituted a strict austerity program, cutting back on military wages and back pay, calling in long-term debts, foreclosing on properties, and eliminating royal subsidies and grants to various recipients. He also significantly stepped up the campaign against heresy, which in this case meant rooting out and exterminating the Protestant Huguenots, building on an ideology initiated by Henri and Diane.

It is a sad political truth that reducing wages and incomes during a period of challenging economic conditions attributable to the lingering effects of a previous war tends to make people grumpy, and grumpy people are more likely to find fault. The cardinal very quickly found himself the most detested man in the kingdom. Most of those affected by the cuts assumed that the monies due them had been diverted not to the accounts of the royal treasury but to the pockets of the avaricious cardinal. They called him
Tiger of France
and rearranged the letters of his name in clever anagrams such as “
Raked up from the gold
of Henri” and “
A bold thief hides himself
.” Angry retainers converged on the capital seeking redress. “
The court
,” the Spanish ambassador observed, “will go ten miles from here to Amboise, the King meanwhile hunting for twelve or fifteen days to escape the importunities of captains and others, to whom one owes much and does not pay.” Adding to the general dissatisfaction with the cardinal’s policies was the unfortunate tendency of the new regime to publicly execute people on a monthly basis. “
One is continually burning
someone of the lower class,” the Florentine envoy complained glumly.

At this stage
, by best estimates, only a very small segment—less than 3 percent—of the population of France had been persuaded to accept Protestantism, but that 3 percent included some very high-ranking members of the nobility. In particular, Antoine de Bourbon’s
wife, Jeanne d’Albret, and his younger brother, the prince of Condé, were known to favor the Huguenot cause. Unlike the Protestants of Germany, who were inspired by the life and work of Martin Luther, Jeanne, the prince, and the other Huguenots were guided by the significantly more severe Church reforms advocated by John Calvin, a Frenchman then living in exile in Geneva, who in addition to rejecting the sacrament of Mass and insisting that the service be conducted in the vernacular preached the doctrine of predestination. Even Antoine seems to have toyed with the idea of converting to Protestantism (although at the first sign of disapproval by the court he hurriedly changed his mind).

Another important recruit to the Calvinist movement was Gaspard de Coligny, who held the title of Admiral of France, which gave him control over the northern coastline and the administration of the French navy. Like the duke of Guise, Coligny was one of the kingdom’s most experienced and successful warriors. He embodied the spirit of the professional soldier. During a campaign, Coligny was involved in every aspect of command. He fought harder, and slept less, than any man under his authority. It was Coligny who penned the ordinances governing military behavior, who set the punishment for every infraction from brawling to desertion, and who insisted that the civilian population be protected against the time-honored practice of plunder and violence commonly and enthusiastically perpetrated by the national armed forces. He was related to Antoine de Bourbon’s family through marriage; his niece was wedded to the prince of Condé. The admiral had grown up with the duke of Guise and had formerly been one of his closest friends, but the pair had subsequently fallen out over ambition and religion, these two concepts being pretty much indistinguishable at the royal court during this period.

The furor over the government austerity program gave the Huguenot faction the opening they needed to contest the Guises’ leadership. With financial help from Elizabeth I—“
Now is the time to spend money
and it will never have been better spent,” declared the
English ambassador, Throckmorton, in a letter to his sovereign—a daring plan to murder the Guises and take over the court was conceived. Bands of armed Huguenots, supported in many cases by formerly loyal French soldiers who had been deprived of wages and back pay by the cardinal of Lorraine, were set to converge on the royal hunting lodge at Amboise, where the king and his court had taken refuge.

Unfortunately for the conspirators, their plan was betrayed almost from the beginning. Espionage was so prevalent in France that it might well have been considered the national pastime. One of the duke of Guise’s servants bribed an informant who in turn alerted the family to the plot. The brothers took appropriate precautions, which naturally caught the attention of the spies for the opposing party. The Guises “
are in such feare
… [that they] are in night garded with pistoleers and men in arms,” fretted Throckmorton on March 7, 1560, some two weeks before the main attack was launched. Adding to the eventual disaster was the total lack of skill and organization displayed by the Huguenot forces. There appears to have been no active chain of command or communication between regiments. They simply straggled along in groups, some as small as two dozen or so, others numbering in the hundreds, making no effort whatever to disguise their movements.

The first set wandered into Amboise on March 13, were quickly rounded up, and a few of its members selected for interrogation. Francis himself questioned them, offering them coins in exchange for information. Under this happy stimulus, the former malcontents volunteered all sorts of useful intelligence, including how many Huguenot troops were estimated overall and when they might be expected to arrive. As a consequence, most of the rebels were picked off in the forests surrounding the palace before they even had a chance to prepare for action, and the one battle that did take place, on March 20, was a complete rout, owing to the superiority of the royal army. “
The Duke [of Guise] himself set out
with a Train of Noblemen and other Servants of the Household to reconnoiter the
Enemy, whom he found without a Head, and in such a Consternation, that most of the poor Country Fellows, not knowing what to do, threw away some old rusty Arms which they had, and begg’d for Mercy,” observed a member of the French court.
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