Game of Queens (51 page)

The Queen Mother has chosen the best possible way . . . she has abased the haughtiness of the Queen of Navarre, overcome her instability, and made her accept conditions . . . we will soon see the Prince [Henri] returning to the bosom of Holy Church.

 

Jeanne, exhausted, set out for Vendôme to rest but soon the need to prepare for the forthcoming marriage sent her back to Paris. As Anne d'Este wrote to her mother Renée of Ferrara : ‘The Queen of Navarre is here, not in good health but very courageous. She is wearing more pearls than ever.' Jeanne herself wrote to an absent Catherine late in May that, ‘I have seen your Tuileries fountains, when M. de Retz invited me to a private supper. I have found many things for our wedding in this city during my excursions with him. I am in good form awaiting your arrival.' This last was not true.

Jeanne d'Albret's health had been poor since childhood and was growing worse; the chest problems from which she suffered were almost certainly a sign of tuberculosis. On 4 June, returning from a shopping trip, she felt tired and feverish. She took to her bed and two days later rewrote her will. Catherine de Medici, Margot and even Anjou came to visit her but she seemed resigned to her fate; she had, after all, found this life very trying: ‘
fort ennuyeuse
'.

Protestant chroniclers provide long hagiographic descriptions of her heroic last days: ‘as soon as the pain increased she did not lose courage, showing an admirable confidence in the last fight and preparing herself gladly for death'. Like Katherine of Aragon, albeit from the other side of the religious divide, she urged that her daughter should ‘stand firm and constant in God's service despite her extreme youth' and this instruction Catherine de Bourbon (like Mary Tudor before her) most faithfully obeyed.

Jeanne's last days were spent listening to expositions of Scripture and reading Psalm 31 and the Gospel of St John. The Calvinist ministers around her recorded with admiration and relief that she showed no concern for the worldly wedding arrangements that had been occupying her so completely. ‘O my saviour, hasten to deliver my spirit from the miseries of this life', she prayed:

. . . and from the prison of this suffering body, that I may offend thee no more, and enter joyfully into that rest which thou hast promised and that my soul so longs for.

Tell my son that I desire him, as the last expression of my heart, to persevere in the faith in which he has been brought up.

On 9 June 1572 she died. A suggestion that Catherine de Medici had poisoned her with a pair of perfumed gloves first appeared in 1574, in a vicious published attack on Catherine, but that was with the hindsight of what came next. The suggestion was not, even had Jeanne's state of health not made a natural death likely, mentioned by any strict contemporaries. But it was true that Jeanne's death, wrote the Venetian ambassador Cavalli, ‘is causing the greatest possible setback to Huguenot affairs'.

The papal envoy praised God for the death of ‘such an important enemy of His Holy Church', while the Spanish ambassador heard from home that ‘all Madrid rejoices that the Devil has got her, at last!' But perhaps Jeanne d'Albret would prove lucky to have escaped the events of the next three months.

 

Catherine de Medici's energies were devoted to weaning her son Charles IX from his dependence on Admiral de Coligny, who she feared would lead the country into a war with Spain. She declared that she, with Anjou, would retire to her estates in the country, or even back to Florence, some said. Charles backed down (more frightened, recalled one observer, of his mother and brother than of the Huguenots). Amid scenes of ‘mingled violence and tender reproach' he begged his mother not to retire from public life. An emergency council meeting on 10th August voted overwhelmingly for peace. But when the admiral warned that Catherine might regret what she had done, it must have sounded like a threat.

Catherine and Anjou decided that Coligny was too inimical an influence and had to be got out of the way, or so the
Mémoires
(produced by his son twenty years later) of the fanatically Catholic Maréchal de Tavannes, one of Catherine's advisors, declared, adding however that, ‘this design was not imparted to the King'. But, typically practical, Catherine had first to finish with the wedding and its festivities.

After attending his mother's funeral at Vendôme, Henri of Navarre came on to Paris. Perhaps recalling his youth at the French court, he seemed to be getting on well with Charles as they waited through the summer's heat in a city increasingly filling up with wedding guests, with peasants from the surrounding countryside driven out of their homes by drought and famine, and with Huguenots.

Catherine de Medici (who had been visiting her daughter Claude) returned to find Catholic preachers fulminating from the pulpits and stirring up hatred of the Protestant visitors. She also found a Spanish ambassador demanding furiously why three thousand Huguenot troops had taken up station near the Netherlands border. It was clearer than ever to Catherine that Coligny had to be neutralised.

 

First, however, there was the wedding. On 16 August there was a betrothal ceremony at the Louvre and two days later, the actual marriage. As had been agreed by Jeanne d'Albret, Henri of Navarre did not attend the nuptial Mass; he was represented by the bride's brother, Anjou. One other hurdle had to be overcome: the assent of the bride.

When, in April, Catherine de Medici had asked her daughter for her formal consent, Margot recalled later in her memoirs, ‘I had no will, no choice but her own.' She begged Catherine, however, to keep in mind the strong Catholic faith that made her reluctant to marry a heretic. She was moreover, as many a royal bride – a Margaret Tudor or a Katherine of Aragon – must have been, justifiably and prophetically anxious about an alliance which would, if things went wrong, place her on the opposite side to her family in a conflict.

Dressed in blue with ‘all the jewels of the Crown', Margot took refuge in a passive resistance; going through the motions as she knelt beside Henri but making no answer when the cardinal asked if she took Henri as her husband. Finally, Charles IX stepped forward and pushed her head down, as though she were nodding agreement. (Later, she would use this lack of consent as grounds for an annulment; shades of Jeanne d'Albret and the Cleves match, some thirty years before.) There were to be four days of parties, with the king's masked ball boasting, as its centrepiece, a
pantomime tournoi
which saw Charles and his brothers first dispatching Navarre and his companions to hell, then rescuing them again.

By 22 August, the festivities were at an end. As Admiral Coligny walked back to his lodging from a council meeting at the Louvre, business having resumed that morning, he found a binding on his shoe was loose, and bent over to adjust it. Just as he did so came the sound of a shot. The bullet meant to kill him instead broke his arm and almost tore off a finger.

Catherine de Medici had just sat down to dinner with Anjou when the news was brought to her. Not even the watching Spanish ambassador could tell from her impassive face that it was not the assassination attempt but its failure that spelled disaster for her. Charles IX was on the tennis court when word came; finding himself confronted by his new brother-in-law Henri of Navarre and other senior Huguenots, he promised a full investigation and ordered that the citizens should not take up arms.

When Charles went to visit Coligny that afternoon, Catherine and Anjou went with him but Coligny indicated that he had words for the king's ears alone. As Anjou put it later: ‘The Queen my mother has since acknowledged that never had she found herself in a more critical position.' They could not discover what Coligny had said but on the journey back to the Louvre it was clear that Charles was furiously angry with them.

No wonder Anjou, visiting his mother early the next morning, found she had not slept. They were desperate, he himself said later, to ‘finish the Admiral by whatever means we could find. And since we could no longer use stratagem, it had to be done openly, but for this purpose it was necessary to bring the King around to our resolution.'

In the streets, people cried out against the king and Catherine de Medici; not on suspicion of murder but for allowing themselves to be surrounded by Huguenots. The Huguenots were already armed, having intended to go straight from the wedding to the fight in the Low Countries. Many Catholics now decided that they too needed to be prepared.

Opinions, contemporary and modern, vary wildly about who was to blame for the attempted assassination of Coligny. The Venetian ambassador wrote that, ‘Everyone supposed it had been done by order of the Duc de Guise to avenge his family, because the window from which the shot was fired belonged to his mother's house'. But later he changed his mind, having learnt from various conversations ‘that from start to finish the whole thing was the work of the queen. She conceived it, plotted it, and put it into execution, with no help from anyone but her son the duke of Anjou.'

Catherine's daughter Margot seemed to agree: at first the Guises were blamed but then it was revealed to Charles that his brother and mother ‘had their shares in it'. At the lowest, Catherine de Medici and her sons (and the royal council with them) came to support the idea of Coligny's assassination once it had been introduced but it is unclear whether the Guise family were their evil geniuses or their scapegoats. Was Catherine Machiavellian enough to reflect that if the Guises suffered all the blame of these events then she would be rid not only of the Huguenot/Bourbon threat but also of the other great noble house that challenged her position as the power behind the throne?

On the evening of 23 August, Catherine sent one of her supporters to the king to tell him not only that his mother and brother had been aware of the attempt on Coligny's life, but that the entire royal family was now in danger. Charles was told also that the Huguenots were planning an attack that very night.

Catherine entered the fray, urging again and again that the Huguenots had brought nothing but trouble. Though he at first refused to believe them, finally the feeble young king was won over. ‘Then kill them all', he is said to have cried. ‘All', that is, of the senior Huguenots on a list Catherine had drawn up and which he now ratified, not all the Huguenots in Paris, or indeed in France.

At 3 am, the bell of the Palais de Justice was to toll to signal the start of the attack. By that time the militiamen had been alerted, all exits from the city closed, and chained barges linked cross the Seine. The Duc de Guise himself led the party which went to Coligny's house, stabbed the admiral to death and threw his body out of the window.

It was obvious from the first that no one was grand enough to be immune from this violence. The new bride Margot had been in her mother's apartments, together with her sister Claude, just arrived in Paris for the wedding, when it became obvious some sort of preparations were being made. But ‘as for me no one told me anything about this', she wrote in her
Mémoires
. ‘The Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I had married the King of Navarre':

I was at the
coucher
of the Queen my mother, sitting on a chest with my sister of Lorraine [Claude], who was very depressed, when my mother noticed me and sent me to bed . . . My sister said that it was not right to send me away like that to be sacrificed and that, if they [the Huguenots] discovered anything, no doubt they would avenge themselves on me. My mother replied that, God willing, I would come to no harm, but in any case I must go, for fear of awakening their suspicions . . . I left the room bewildered and dazed without knowing what it was that I feared.

In the quarters where the Protestant royal party lodged, her new husband Henri of Navarre sent Margot to bed. Woken by someone banging at the door and crying out for her husband, she found it was a stranger, one of Henri's gentlemen, wounded, pursued by four archers:

To save himself, he flung himself on my bed, and I, with that man holding me, rolled into the passage and he after me, still hugging my body. I did not know who he was nor whether he meant to outrage me nor whether it was him or myself whom the archers were pursuing. We both screamed and were equally terrified.

The captain of the guards arrived just in time to grant Margot's request to spare the man's life before escorting her to Claude's apartment, where she ‘arrived more dead than alive', ordered the man's wounds tended and changed her bloodied shift.

If none were too high to be troubled, none were too low as to be spared. The Huguenots, all too easily recognisable by their black and white clothes, were slaughtered. Violence against women featured heavily in the dreadful tales: of pregnant women with their wombs ripped out, of baskets of small children flung into the Seine.
²
Protestant, and admittedly partisan, sources told of a woman leaping out of a window to avoid capture, breaking both her legs in the fall, being dragged through the streets by her hair and having her hands slashed off at the wrists for the sake of her gold bracelets. Another woman, about to go into labour, was stabbed in the abdomen and hurled into the street below, where she died along with the child, its head protruding from her body. The killers then looted the house.

Even the Duc de Guise was so appalled by the scale of the killing (and by the fact that Catherine was according him the blame) that he could be seen defending Huguenots in the streets, and opening his house to give them sanctuary. The Spanish ambassador saw the mounting pile of bodies: