Game of Queens (52 page)

While I write, they are casting them out naked and dragging them through the streets, pillaging their houses and sparing not a babe. Blessed be to God, who has converted the Princes of France to His purpose. May He inspire their hearts to go on as they have begun!

Priests encouraged the bloodshed but of the three or four thousand people killed in the capital not all were necessarily Huguenots. Some were killed in personal vendettas rather than for their religious faith, as the orgy of bloodletting took on a dreadful momentum.

Those on the list of high-profile victims, compiled by Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, were largely killed within the first two hours. But once kindled, the flame could not be put out. This was something the royal group had not foreseen. That afternoon Charles sent orders for the killing to cease but he was ignored.

It was another three days before Paris was quiet; by then, despite fresh orders from the king, the violence had spread to the provinces. It would be October before the storm cleared southern France, and across the country (although estimates vary wildly) some suggest as many as thirty thousand died. The royal family sheltered inside the Louvre while the slaughter was going on. Later (according to two sources) Catherine had recovered enough that on being presented with the head taken from Admiral de Coligny's disfigured and emasculated body, she had it embalmed and sent as a gift to the pope.

 

There could be, from this, no going back. ‘You must clearly see that you cannot govern too wisely with kindness and diffidence', Anne de Beaujeu said three-quarters of a century earlier. This explosion of violence had ripped Europe apart, and left its divisions exposed all too clearly.

The French ambassador to Spain reported that Philip literally danced for joy when he heard the news. He certainly wrote to congratulate Catherine de Medici on ‘this glorious event', admitting to the French ambassador that ‘he owed his Low Countries of Flanders' to the French action. In the Netherlands, the Spanish general Alba's actions were becoming ever more brutal. That October, he allowed his men to sack and massacre the town of Mechelen, where Margaret of Austria had once lived in luxury. The pope ordered
Te Deums
sung, until he was informed that the massacre had never been intended and that the original assassination attempt had been a political rather than primarily religious story.

By contrast, the Queen of England was appalled. As Elizabeth wrote to Walsingham, the murder of the supposed Huguenot conspirators, without ‘answer by law', was bad enough:

We do hear it marvellously evil taken and as a thing of a terrible and dangerous example . . . But when more added unto it – that women, children, maids, young infants and sucking babes were at the same time murdered and cast into the river . . . this increased our grief and sorrow.

When Elizabeth at last consented to receive the French ambassador Fénelon, not a courtier would speak to or look at him as he approached the presence chamber. There, so the story goes, he found the queen, her ladies, and her privy councillors all dressed in mourning black. What the queen said to Fénelon was mild compared to the reproaches of the councillors. Cecil told him it was the greatest crime since the crucifixion. No one on the English side could now think of a marriage with the French royal family. If the French king had been ‘Author and doer of this Act, shame and confusion light upon him', Leicester wrote to Walsingham. And the same would naturally be true of his mother.

The other marriage that had sparked the dreadful affair was completed. Henri of Navarre (and his cousin Condé) had been taken from the apartment where Margot was so rudely surprised and brought to the king, who assured them of their safety. Margot claimed she was asked by her mother whether the marriage had been consummated, since if not it could be dissolved. Margot, fearing Henri's life would be in danger, refused to comply with the clear suggestion, and said it had. The two Huguenot princes had, however, formally to be received back into the Catholic church. Catherine, perhaps overstrained, burst into rude laughter as they made the sign of the cross before the altar. Henri had, moreover, to return Béarn to Catholicism. Jeanne d'Albret was truly dead.

But Catherine de Medici too had lost; lost in reputation. She soon realised how much blame she would have to shoulder for the affair. Pamphlets against Catherine attacked the rule of women along with her other supposed iniquities; others harked back to her Florentine roots and recalled that Machiavelli's
The Prince
had been dedicated to her father.
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Her ambassador to Venice wrote that the massacre not only of the Huguenot leaders ‘but against so many poor and innocent people' meant that the Venetians (though themselves Catholic) nevertheless ‘cannot be satisfied with any excuse, attributing everything that has been done to you alone and Monsieur d'Anjou'.

She had moreover lost the chance of peace in France. Huguenots, believing the whole marriage had been a trap, now faced stark choices; driven now, as Elizabeth of England said ‘to fly or die'. Those standing out in La Rochelle called on the protection of Elizabeth, now their ‘natural sovereign princess for all eternity'. As royalist forces embarked on a long and bitter siege, the women of La Rochelle mustered on the walls to throw rocks at them.

Elizabeth's support of the continental Protestants remained partial and hesitant for some time to come. Not until 1585 was she finally persuaded to send an army to the support of the Dutch Protestants. Elizabeth even, although not without lengthy comment about the strangeness of the request, agreed to stand godmother to the daughter Charles IX's wife bore him that autumn. She found it politic now to seem to believe French assurances that the king had merely acted against a Huguenot plot and that what followed had been a tragic accident. But talk of her possible marriage to Catherine's youngest son d'Alençon was off the table, for the moment, anyway.

Like her enemy and ally Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth Tudor (and Mary Tudor before her), was forged by fear. It was one reason they and Mary Stuart, the child who grew up the darling of the French court, would never be sisters in any real way.

For another queen had lost, here. Amid the fallout from the massacre, one thing that could be seen was a new consensus among Elizabeth's ministers as to the danger represented by the Scottish queen, Mary. In March 1571, Mary's agent the Bishop of Ross had written that the Queen of Scots's life was in great danger, with Cecil and others urging she should be put to death.

Elizabeth's councillors were almost united in believing that Mary (so recently the Catholic focus of internal rebellion) should be excluded from the succession, if not actually killed. It would be another fifteen years before the tussle between Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart reached its climax, but the end was plain to see.

PART VII

1572 onwards

And nothing is firm or lasting in the gifts of Fortune; today you see those raised high by Fortune who, two days later, are brought down hard.

Lessons for my Daughter,
Anne de France (Anne de Beaujeu) published 1517–1521

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Turning points

England, France, 1572–1587

The early to mid-1570s represented a turning point in the history of women’s rule in Europe. The question of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage had retreated somewhat, only to have one final resurgence before finally it went away. The ‘princely pleasures’ of Elizabeth’s 1575 visit to Leicester’s house of Kenilworth signalled the last gasp of his long courtship, as well as promoting his bid to be allowed to help the beleaguered Netherlands Protestants. Elizabeth Tudor had turned forty; old for childbearing by the standards of the day. Her councillors must have been resigned to her determined virginity.

But an heir, however important, was not the only point of a royal marriage. The increase in Catholic activity on the Continent could only leave England more anxious for allies. The mid-1570s saw the start of the great Catholic infiltration of England itself, and of Philip of Spain eyeing opportunities in Ireland. And there had long been the idea of an alliance with a son of Catherine de Medici.

For a time after the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, and amid the massacre of her reputation, Catherine was preoccupied with the election of her favourite son Henri, Duc d’Anjou, to the vacant throne of Poland (shades of Louise of Savoy and the election to the Holy Roman Empire), a throne he would in due course abandon when that of France fell vacant. Her dying son, Charles IX, as he became ever more feeble, accused her: ‘Madame, you are the cause of everything! Everything!’ But nevertheless, on his deathbed, he ordered a new document to be drawn up, securing the regency to his mother until Henri could return from Poland. Charles died on 30 May 1574, holding her hand. As Catherine later said, ‘After God, he recognised no one but me.’

The accession of her best-beloved Henri to the throne of France was at once a triumph and a problem for Catherine. She wrote that if she lost him, too, ‘I would have myself buried alive’, and that his return ‘will bring me joy and contentment on contentment’, while he wrote that he was her ‘devoted servant’. The secretary of the English ambassador, in the first days of the new king’s reign, wrote that Catherine’s authority ‘was as ample as ever’. But not everyone agreed. When Henri’s dawdling journey home finally brought him back to France, Catherine found a young man whose ideas did not always match her own. She advised that in his new role as Henri III he should show who had the upper hand: he promptly put an end to the practice by which state papers might be shown first to her, although mother and son still held joint audiences and observers could still report that the queen mother ‘commandeth very much’.

The religious divisions showed no sign of abating. As Henri III’s younger brother François, the Duc d’Alençon, toyed with joining the Huguenots, Henri of Navarre escaped from the French court and back to his own lands in the southwest, where he abjured the Catholic religion to which he had been forced to convert after St Bartholomew’s Day. The Huguenots were acting with virtual autonomy in several of the southern provinces of France. It was Catherine de Medici who, after a fragile peace was signed, had to carry the king’s message into what was effectively enemy territory. She was still needed but also marginalised by the dissent within her family.
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Henri’s accession left his brother François, long at odds with his family and long debating the idea of marriage as a way to bolster his position, more disaffected than ever.
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In 1578 he allied with rebels in the Netherlands, accepting from the Protestants the title of ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’.

Elizabeth of England had spent much energy patching up relations between the Dutch Protestants and the said Spanish tyrant, and her first reaction was to send a message of solidarity to King Philip. The right of monarchy always weighed with her more strongly than bonds of faith. But in the long term, for the English, the important thing was to be on good terms with anyone who held the harbours just across the sea. For Alençon, the important thing was to get English men and money. And in any game of alliances, marriage was still the best piece anyone could play.

But this last move in her long mating game was not wholly political, at least on Elizabeth Tudor’s side. In 1579, first Alençon’s personal envoy Jean de Simier, and then Alençon himself, arrived to conduct an overheated courtship, acted out on all sides with a kind of delighted fantasy. Catherine de Medici talked of visiting England, to sort this thing out; another of the meetings doomed never to occur. An on/off game for several years, it culminated in Elizabeth’s publicly telling Alençon she would marry him, only to change her mind the next day.

In the spring of 1582 Alençon finally set out again for the Netherlands, with a hefty subsidy of English money. When he died in 1584 Elizabeth wrote to Catherine de Medici that even her grief as a mother could not be greater: ‘Madame, if you were able to see the image of my heart, you would see the portrait of a body without a soul.’ Nonetheless, the start of the 1580s effectively marked Queen Elizabeth’s recasting of herself as the perpetual virgin. She would increasingly be figured as Diana, the ferociously chaste huntress.

The remaining female rulers continued to be, to some degree, aware of their sex as a potential bond. In 1578 Catherine de Medici was reported as praising Elizabeth Tudor’s Christian love of peace: ‘For her part, she also was a woman, and as became her sex, desired nothing more than a general quietness’. In her communication with Elizabeth Tudor she had often figured herself as a parent writing to a child, just as Elizabeth had in her letters to Mary Stuart. In June 1572 Catherine had told Elizabeth that ‘I love you as a mother loves her daughter’, and the maternal rhetoric resumed, in the light of the possible Alençon marriage, quite soon after the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day.

Catherine also sponsored the 1570s
Discourse on the legitimate succession of women
, a defence of female sovereignty published in France by the Scot David Chambers. Brantôme would write of a private conversation in which she deplored the Salic Law and wished that her daughter Margot might inherit the kingdom ‘by her just rights, as other kingdoms also fall to the distaff’, since she ‘is just as capable of governing, or more so, than many men and kings whom I know’. Sisterhood was also an ideal to which Mary, Queen of Scots never ceased appealing. But it had long ceased to have any reality in the relationship of Elizabeth and Mary.
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