The Rival Queens (41 page)

With his acceptance by the Catholic inhabitants of Paris, for whom he had wisely issued a general amnesty forgiving their participation in the wars opposing his right to the throne, Henry knew he had gotten what he wanted at last. He was indisputably king of France.

Now all he had to do was deal with his queen.

T
HROUGH ALL THE YEARS OF
assassination and civil war preceding Henry’s conversion, Marguerite had by choice remained resolutely sequestered in the secure stronghold of Usson. Despite her isolation, she was not completely untouched. The succession conflict raged in the south of France as it did in the north, and in March 1590, Henry’s forces routed those of the Catholic League in a battle at Cros-Rolland, a small town just north of Issoire, so close to her château that she could probably smell the smoke from the artillery. Most of the region of Auvergne subsequently fell to her husband’s partisans as well, the exception being her fortress, which was too arduous to assail. Unable to take the castle in a frontal offensive, her enemies instead conspired to strike from within. In January 1591, an attempt was made on her life. An official account of the event by local authorities reported that the captain of her own guard tried “
to kill the Queen of Navarre
by pistol-shot in her very chamber.” The gun did go off, but luckily the assassin narrowly—very narrowly—missed
the mark. Margot survived unharmed, protected by the underframing of her voluminous hoop skirts, where the iron ball had lodged, the sixteenth-century version of a bulletproof vest.

Even without the attempted murder, these were extremely difficult years for Marguerite. She was rendered so impoverished by her mother’s disinheritance and her husband’s antipathy that she was forced to beg Elizabeth of Austria, Charles IX’s widow, for money with which to purchase food and other basic necessities. But her kindhearted former sister-in-law died in 1592, leaving Margot deprived of her benefactor and so insolvent that she had to divest herself of nearly every portable asset, right down to the silverware, in order to maintain her skeletal household.

And then Henry decided to convert.

Among the myriad issues raised by this unexpected resolution came the question of what to do about Marguerite. If by his action Henry became king, as was expected, he was going to need a queen who could give him a son and heir. This ruled out his current wife (even if he had wanted her, which he most definitely did not). Margot had recently turned forty. If she hadn’t successfully conceived already, it was unlikely that she would do so in the future.

And anyway Henry already had a candidate for future queen of France—his latest mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées. Nearly twenty years younger than the king of Navarre, Gabrielle had summarily replaced Diane, with whom Henry (no doubt to Marguerite’s great satisfaction) was no longer even on speaking terms. But in order to wed Gabrielle, Henry was going to have to rid himself of Margot, and the easiest way to do this was to have the marriage annulled. Accordingly, in April of 1593, he put one of his closest counselors, Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay, in charge of this delicate negotiation. Philippe dispatched a trusted envoy to the château of Usson bearing the king of Navarre’s “
good favor and protection
” and the outline of a lucrative deal: if the queen would give her consent to and active participation in her husband’s quest for an annulment, Henry was prepared to offer her an outright cash settlement of 250,000
écus,
a yearly
income of twelve thousand
écus,
and a house of her choice anywhere but Paris.

Marguerite knew an opportunity when she saw it. Although she would no doubt have liked to be queen of France, she recognized that the chances of this happening were very slim and that if she held out for that honor Henry might turn on her. She had had enough experience with death threats to be grateful that his first approach had been friendly. Accordingly she responded enthusiastically to the emissary’s overture. She wrote immediately to Du Plessis-Mornay, praising “
the kindly disposition of the King
my husband [and] the honor which it has pleased him to do me in assuring me of his favor, the possession in the world which I hold most dear.” She even went to the lengths of cultivating Philippe himself in the hopes of encouraging the dialogue. “If you will oblige me by assisting in the carrying through of what has thus begun so well, on which depends all the repose and security of my life, you will place me under an immortal obligation, and I shall be very desirous of showing myself, by every means, your most affectionate and faithful friend,” she cajoled. She was rewarded immediately with a note from Henry himself, expressing “
my extreme contentment at the resolution which you have taken to bring our affairs to a satisfactory conclusion” and not neglecting to assure her of his intention to send a first installment “for the payment of your debts and pension as quickly as can be desired
.”

But divorce proceedings—or, rather, petitions for an annulment, for the king of France was seeking separation on the grounds that he and his wife had married within the prohibited bounds of consanguinity without first obtaining the necessary papal dispensation and that additionally Margot had been forced into the union against her will by her family—were notoriously long, drawn-out affairs, and Henry and Marguerite’s proved no exception. It took the pope until September of 1595 just to lift the ban of excommunication against the king and readmit him as a member of the Catholic Church in good standing. By that time Henry’s mistress Gabrielle,
although married to another man for appearance’s sake, had already given Henry an illegitimate son. This led to further complications, as it was unclear what the status of the boy would be if the king later married Gabrielle and had other, legitimate children by her. The proceedings dragged on.

But by her swift concurrence with his request, Marguerite had bought herself her husband’s goodwill, and this produced immediate monetary relief and an improvement in her living conditions. She began once again in a small way to indulge her taste for culture, although she replaced the gaiety and grand balls of her youth with a far more tranquil atmosphere devoted to piety and introspection. She still heard music daily, but her vocalists came from the choir of the local cathedral. “
Now that the world has abandoned
her she has found help in God alone, whom she serves every day most devoutly,” observed her old friend Brantôme, who came to visit her at Usson in 1593. “
Never does she miss
a celebration of the Mass,” he added. Again in a small, regional way, she undertook the patronage of poets and writers. Many of these came from nearby Lyon, where much of the literary community was consumed with a new aesthetic that attempted to synthesize religion and passion—the doctrine of ideal love, possibly inspired by proximity to the queen. That several books on the subject of ideal love were dedicated to “
Madame Marguerite of France
, Queen of Navarre,” attests at the very least to Margot’s sympathetic interest and support for the authors.

Marguerite had not given herself over entirely to religious devotion. While at Usson she reputedly began a relationship with her choirmaster, with whom she was close for many years; in 1595, she raised him to the nobility and later made him a high official in her household. One of her other visitors, the Huguenot scholar Joseph Juste Scaliger, sniffed that while in retirement Margot “
has as many men as she wishes
, and she selects them herself”—this was probably an allusion to the choirmaster, as no other name is coupled with hers during this period.

But it was to her love of reading that Marguerite gave herself
mostly during the long years of solitude at the château of Usson. Her library consisted of some three hundred volumes, including works by poets, scholars, and novelists such as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, and du Bellay as well as many demanding works of history and science. “
She is very anxious
to obtain all the fine new books that are being composed, those of holy subjects as well as those of the humanities,” reported Brantôme, “and when she begins to read a book, long though it may be, she will not stop until she comes to the end, and often she forgets food and sleep thereby.” It was during this period, too, that she found her own literary voice and began work on her memoirs. She structured the story of her life in a number of letters to Brantôme, who was then similarly engaged in writing a series of biographies of celebrated women, including one of Marguerite herself. “
I have been induced to undertake
writing my Memoirs the more from five or six observations which I have had occasion to make in your work, as you appear to have been misinformed respecting certain particulars,” Margot explained in her correspondence. “These Memoirs might merit the honorable name of history from the truths contained in them, as I shall prefer truth to embellishment… They are the labors of my evenings, and will come to you an unformed mass, to receive its shape from your hands… Mine is a history most assuredly worthy to come from a man of honor, one who is a true Frenchman, born of illustrious parents, brought up in the Court of the Kings my father and brothers, allied in blood and friendship to the most virtuous and accomplished women of our times, of which society I have had the good fortune to be the bond of union,” she wrote.

It was well that she had this project to occupy her, for by the beginning of 1599 she and Henry still had not obtained the desired annulment. This had far more to do with the question of who Henry’s future wife would be than the behavior of his present one. Gabrielle, the king’s mistress, while not a Huguenot herself, was very close friends with Henry’s sister, Catherine, one of the staunchest Protestants in France, and the pope worried that if the king
married his lover she might encourage him to relapse into heresy. Consequently he refused to authorize the necessary inquiry into the matter that was a prerequisite to annulment.

In April of 1599, however, Gabrielle herself settled the question to Rome’s satisfaction by unexpectedly dying in childbirth, thus paving the way for papal approval. Accordingly, on September 24, the pontiff ordered the various parties involved in the petition to be examined by representatives of the Church as a final step before annulment. Although the inquiry was to be held at the Louvre in Paris, Marguerite received permission to give her testimony privately at Usson, fearing that she might break down in front of an audience. “
Never did I consent willingly
to this marriage,” her signed statement read. “I was forced into it by King Charles IX and the Queen my mother. I besought them with copious tears but the King threatened me that, if I did not consent, I should be the most unhappy woman in the realm. Although I had never been able to entertain any affection for the King of Navarre, and said and repeated that it was my desire to wed another prince, I was compelled to obey. To my profound regret, conjugal affection did not exist between us during the seven months which preceded my husband’s flight in 1575. Although we occupied the same couch, we never spoke to one another.”
^*
Additionally, two members of Catherine de’ Medici’s household, including her chambermaid, testified on Marguerite’s behalf, reporting her many tears of refusal prior to the wedding and her mother’s subsequent threats “
to make her the most wretched
lady in the kingdom” if she did not go through with the marriage.

Margot’s affidavit was convincing. On November 10, 1599, the pope declared the union of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite de
Valois to be null and void. On December 17, this decision was publicly confirmed by the Parlement of Paris, which authorized “
both His Most Christian Majesty
and Her Serene Highness the Queen to contract other alliances.” The very next day, a grateful Henry wrote to his former wife: “
My Sister—The persons
delegated by our very holy father to decide upon the nullity of our marriage, having at length pronounced their decision to our common desire and satisfaction, I did not wish to defer longer… to inform you of it on my part, and to renew the assurances of my affection for you… I desire you also to believe that I do not intend to cherish and love you the less, on account of what has taken place, than I did heretofore,” Henry continued, apparently without irony. “But, on the contrary, that I intend to exercise more solicitude than ever in regard to everything which concerns you, and to make you recognize, on all occasions, that I do not intend to be henceforth your brother merely in name, but also in deed… Further, I am very satisfied with the frankness and candor of your prudence, and I trust that God will bless the rest of our days, by a fraternal friendship accompanied by a public felicity, which will render them very happy.”

And this time he meant what he said, for less than two weeks later, on December 29, 1599, by letters patent, Marguerite was granted the honorary title of queen as well as duchess of Valois, and her entire dowry returned to her along with the rest of Henry’s settlement. She was forty-six years old and wealthy in her own right. And with wealth came independence.