The Rival Queens (43 page)

Marguerite was no less extravagant in her donations to charity than she was in her secular life. She dispensed hundreds of thousands of
livres
annually to the holy orders, to hospitals, and to the indigent. She heard Mass three times a day, and the poor knew to gather on her doorstep, as she always distributed alms on her return from church. Similarly, she took the occasion of handing out a hundred gold coins and an equal number of loaves of bread on every holiday, including her birthday. In 1608 she built a chapel and two years later began work on a church. For these acts of kindness she was beloved in Paris.

But it was her political altruism that represented her true contribution to the kingdom. By her background and family allegiance she could easily have sowed dissent and made it far more difficult for Henry to rule. Instead she became his helpmeet. Her support, as the last surviving member of the Valois dynasty, was of inestimable advantage to the king in healing the realm of the wounds of the religious wars, and Henry recognized this. He who had shunned her advice while they were married now frequently ambled over to her court to consult her on matters of state. There was no greater evidence of Marguerite’s graciousness than her participation at the coronation of Marie de’ Medici, held at Saint-Denis on May 13, 1610. Informed that Henry’s seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, would take precedence over her in the procession and that she could not wear a fleur-de-lis mantle similar to Marie’s, she nonetheless attended the enthronement of her replacement with good grace (although she did insist on wearing a crown and an immense cloak of purple velvet, symbol of royalty).

The value of this symbolic gesture of goodwill was immediately apparent when, the next day, May 14, a Catholic fanatic leaped out of the crowd and accosted Henry’s carriage as it attempted to negotiate
a busy city street. Clinging to the coach door, dagger in hand, the zealot stabbed the king three times in the neck and chest through the open window. “
It’s nothing
,” said Henry, veteran of countless battles, just before he lost consciousness, the blood pouring from his severed aorta. Minutes later, he was dead.

M
ARGOT WAS AT A
party celebrating her fifty-seventh birthday when she received the news of the king’s assassination. She left immediately and went straight to the Louvre to be with Marie and the children. She made an effort in the days following the tragedy to be of assistance to the widowed queen of France. Marguerite’s was one of the few dinner invitations Marie accepted on her rare sojourns out of the Louvre. Margot also made a point of publicly honoring her ex-husband and seemed genuinely grieved at his loss, not just for the kingdom but privately as well. “
Queen Marguerite caused a beautiful
service to be sung at the Augustines, for the repose of the soul of the deceased King, whose affectionate wife she had been for twenty-two years, and who voluntarily agreed, with the dispensation of the Pope, to the dissolution of the marriage, chiefly because the Lord had not blessed her with happy offspring, which was greatly desired by good Frenchmen,” admitted a Huguenot chronicler who had not always been so charitable in his descriptions of the former queen of Navarre.
^*

The Parlement of Paris acted swiftly in the wake of the stabbing, confirming the dauphin as the rightful heir to the throne and according Marie de’ Medici the regency of France until her son came of age. At the coronation ceremony, held at Rheims that October, Marguerite stood sponsor, along with the prince of Condé, at the confirmation of the nine-year-old king, Louis XIII. Marie
also appointed Margot as godmother to her second son, Gaston, born in 1608.

As regent, Marie de’ Medici actively pursued an alliance with Spain. She arranged to wed Louis XIII to Philip III’s daughter Anne of Austria and to marry her daughter Elizabeth to Philip’s eldest son. When, two years into her regency, a group of noblemen used these nuptial alliances as a pretext to revolt, Marguerite, who knew all the parties well, attempted to mediate, urging the leaders of the group to abandon the rebellion and return to obedience. She further allied herself publicly with the regency by hosting a lavish engagement party for Elizabeth on August 26, 1612.

It was again in the Crown’s interests that she attended the opening of the Estates-General in December 1614. A dispute had arisen over the levying of a new tax, and Marguerite helped to work out a compromise solution. But it was a very cold winter, and she caught a chill. Over the next three months, the chill gave way to fever, and she became seriously ill. On March 26, 1615, she was told the end was near and heard last rites. Louis XIII sent his own physician to attend the queen, but the surgeon was unable to help her. Sometime between eleven and midnight the following evening, Marguerite de Valois, once queen of Navarre and princess of France, succumbed to infection at the age of sixty-one.

“
On March 27
, there died in Paris Queen Marguerite, the sole survivor of the race of Valois; a princess full of kindness and good intentions for the welfare and repose of the State, and who was her only enemy,” the count of Pontchartrain, minister of state under Marie de’ Medici, reported. “She was deeply regretted,” he added sadly.

I
N CONTRAST TO THEIR HOSTILITY
toward her mother, the citizens of Paris grieved openly over Marguerite’s passing. The queen’s body was placed on public display, and throngs of visitors came to view her remains and pay their respects. “
There is a crowd as great
as at any ballet,” observed an eyewitness. The entire royal family went into mourning, and when, as had happened with Catherine, Margot’s creditors descended upon her château demanding payment, Marie de’ Medici undertook to settle the deceased queen’s debts. This was only fitting, as in a last act of generosity Marguerite had left her entire estate, with the exception of a few small bequests, to Henry and Marie’s son, the thirteen-year-old king of France, Louis XIII. Margot was buried at Saint-Denis, in the abbey where her father, Henri II, and her four brothers were interred. Catherine’s remains had also been quietly moved from Blois to the same sanctuary in 1610 after Henry’s assassination, so the family that had been so bitterly divided in life was finally reunited in death.

Over the centuries, Catherine de’ Medici’s reputation has slowly recovered from the disapprobation with which she was generally regarded in Europe at the time of her demise. There is even a movement afoot to rehabilitate the queen mother as a skilled chief executive who negotiated the turbulent era in which she lived as well as could possibly be expected. At the very least, Catherine is today universally considered to have been an able disciple of Machiavelli, expertly playing off various factions to her own and her
family’s advantage. The evidence for this is usually based on Machiavelli’s well-known assertion that “
a prudent ruler ought not
to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist,” and that to be successful a prince must be able “
to be a great feigner and dissembler
.”

Certainly Catherine de’ Medici was a noted feigner and enthusiastic dissembler, but unfortunately these traits alone do not satisfy Machiavelli’s criteria for leadership. A careful reading of
The Prince
reveals that honor and what Machiavelli called virtù—ability, strength of character, and vision—were as necessary to the state as the pragmatic deceit he recommended; also, he stressed many times how vital it was that a ruler take great pains to avoid being despised. Catherine prevaricated so consistently and artlessly that she soon lost all credibility, a situation that only created more problems for the kingdom. She almost never planned ahead but reacted moment by moment to varying stimuli. This meant that the Crown rarely anticipated events and so was frequently caught by surprise. In addition, Catherine’s fear of losing her position forced her to make increasingly unsustainable compromises. Finally, her authorship of the atrocities committed at the time of her daughter’s wedding absolutely excludes her from being elevated to the rank of elite, or indeed tolerable, leadership. Even today, after more than four centuries and a revolution, the wound from the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre lingers in France—run a finger down that scar and the country still shivers.

The standing of Marguerite de Valois, on the other hand, has suffered from the reverse treatment. Respected and admired at the time of her death, over the centuries Catherine’s youngest daughter has come to be regarded as a sensual dilettante who put her own romantic inclinations ahead of her duty to the kingdom. Today she is remembered—if she is known at all—as the sympathetic but ultimately tragic heroine of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel
La Reine Margot.

But even Dumas’s portrayal, favorable though it may be, fails to give Marguerite’s intelligence and courage their due. It has become commonplace to suggest that a historical figure anticipated modern attitudes, but in Margot’s case this happens to be true. Here, hundreds of years before the advent of the feminist movement, was a strong, spirited, resolute individual unafraid to confront sexual mores. It is for this reason more than any other that her reputation has been systemically denigrated. Her desire to love and be loved—her willingness to engage in a series of passionate affairs—has overshadowed every other aspect of her life. This is especially ironic considering the licentious nature of her surroundings. By any measure the carnality attributed to her brothers and her husband dwarfs the queen of Navarre’s sensual experiences. And although Catherine de’ Medici cannot be accused personally of wanton behavior, she clearly encouraged it in others in order to gain political advantage. Alone among her family, Margot refused to use sex as a weapon and searched only for love.

But the queen of Navarre was so much more than the sum of her affairs. Acutely aware of the vulnerability of the position forced upon her by her marriage, Marguerite nonetheless steadfastly refused to accept victimhood and instead strove throughout her life to carve out a measure of independence and influence for herself. To an astounding degree, considering the variety and potency of the forces ranged against her, she succeeded. The political ascension of her brother François may be traced directly to his sister’s participation in and sponsorship of his interests. Although painted as a scapegoat for the kingdom’s woes by her family, Marguerite in fact consistently counseled peace between Catholics and Huguenots and presided over one of the very few courts in Europe where, at least briefly, religious tolerance was officially sanctioned. She only took up arms as a last resort when compelled to do so in her own self-defense. And she was invaluable to Henry IV, both as a political symbol and an advocate, in helping to secure his rule and that of his successors after the death of her brother Henri III.

But for her inability to conceive a child, Marguerite might well have gone down in history, as Henry IV did, as one of the great French rulers. Instead she is simply Queen Margot, who saved her husband—and, by extension, the kingdom. “
I have no ambition
and I have no need of it,” she once wrote, “being who and what I am.”

Three in a Marriage

Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici as a young wedded couple…

… the bewitching Diane de Poitiers at her toilette.

Catherine de’ Medici’s outsized father-in-law, François I, king of France.