The Rival Queens (37 page)

And this time, Marguerite, too, joined the fray.

A
FTER THE FRACAS OVER
the duke of Épernon’s visit, Margot’s relationship with her husband and his mistress had continued to deteriorate. Three in a marriage is never a particularly genial situation, but by the winter of 1584 the queen of Navarre had begun to suspect Diane of more than the usual petty jealousy and vindictiveness.
François’s death and Henry’s subsequent rise to next in line for the French throne, however contested, had significantly increased her husband’s value in the world. The Protestants were rallying around him. In December, Elizabeth I and a number of Swiss and German lords had signed a pact pledging to uphold Henry’s rights to the throne. And although he did not make an official announcement, Henri III, who hated the duke of Guise, had indicated that he was strongly considering naming the king of Navarre as his legitimate heir. If Henry did succeed in overcoming the odds and ascending to the throne, his wife would ascend along with him. To become queen of France was no small incentive, and there is evidence that Diane did indeed harbor ambitions to secure this title for herself.

The problem was that the options for disposing of the existing queen of Navarre were limited. The customary route of acquiring an annulment, for example, was out, as the pope, also concerned that a Huguenot might ascend to the throne of France, had already condemned Henry as a heretic. Petitioners who had been excommunicated were unlikely to be granted the favor of an annulment. There was always the possibility that natural causes might carry Marguerite away, but she was only thirty-one and, in Diane’s opinion, depressingly healthy and strong. That left murder. It is clear that Margot understood this and that an attempt was made on her life. She reported in a letter that one of her ladies had “
fallen very ill
”—by which she meant she had been poisoned—after partaking of a broth intended for herself. There were also rumors at court that she was to be abducted, and then simply disappear, and “
many other designs
of a like nature,” she noted grimly.

If Henry did not actually condone his wife’s assassination, he was certainly doing all he could to harass her. In February he infuriated her by intercepting letters she had written to her mother, arresting her messenger, and claiming that she had betrayed confidential information to the royal court (which would have been a neat trick, as she had seen her husband only once since the duke of Épernon’s visit the previous August). In March, believing himself to have been
the target of a potential poisoning, he openly debated bringing Margot to trial and, if she were found guilty, condemning her to execution, a course of action so patently ridiculous that he was eventually talked out of it by his own counselors. “
A villain has endeavored
to poison the King of Navarre; but either because the poison was not sufficiently virulent, or because the prince’s constitution was too strong, the venom did not take effect,” observed a Huguenot envoy from Austria on March 6, 1585. “The wretch [poisoner] attempted to kill himself with a pistol,” he added.

It did not take long for Marguerite to come to the conclusion that her chances of surviving her husband’s and his mistress’s animosity diminished the longer she remained within their power. But where to go and whom to trust? François was dead, and Henri III was her sworn enemy. She knew her mother, fearful of further scandal, would never tolerate her leaving her husband, even if remaining in Nérac meant putting her life in jeopardy. Catherine made no secret of her dislike for her daughter or the fact that she believed Margot had brought on her own marital problems. “
I beg you, before you leave
, to lay before her all the things which… ought to be considered and done by persons of her rank,” the queen mother had instructed Bellièvre while he was still on assignment in Nérac. “For not only our life but also the company which we have around us has a great deal to do with our honor or dishonor and especially for princesses who are young and who think they are beautiful,” she continued scornfully. “Perhaps she’ll say to you as she’s always said, that I have all sorts of people around me and that I kept company with all sorts of people when I was young… I beg you to say to her that she mustn’t do any more as she had done and make much of those to whom he [Henry] makes love, because he will think that she is very glad that he loves somebody else in order that she may be able to do the same. Don’t let her cite me as having done the same thing, because, if I made good cheer to Madame de Valentinois [Diane de Poitiers], that was the King and besides I always made it quite plain to him that it was to my very great regret.” No, Marguerite could not look to her mother for help.

But she was still a queen and a princess of France, possessed of rank, courage, and influence, and these qualities were not to be underestimated. Having been pushed to the limit and believing with complete justification that her life was in danger, she resolved upon a desperate plan. Toward the middle of March she petitioned her husband to allow her to spend Easter in the Catholic town of Agen, a municipality she knew well, as it formed part of her dowry. Henry, only too happy to be rid of her for a few weeks, agreed. The queen of Navarre left the court and arrived at her destination on March 19, 1585. To avert suspicion, she traveled very quietly, with only a few of her ladies and gentlemen for company, although by evening the rest of her household had followed her and was installed behind the city’s strong walls. The townspeople welcomed her warmly. Marguerite had visited many times before and was known for her piety and generosity. They were happy to have her there.

It was only later, as more and more courtiers and servants arrived, followed by an influx of knights and soldiers, that the outline of the queen’s design became clear. Unbeknownst to Henry, Marguerite had reached out through her network of spies and begun a secret correspondence with the duke of Guise. The queen of Navarre had joined the Catholic League.

T
HE DUKE OF
G
UISE
was Marguerite’s obvious choice of ally. Not because he and she had once been romantically involved but because they shared a common enemy in the duke of Épernon. If anything, the duke of Guise loathed the king’s favorite even more than Margot did, and not just because he had kept attendance down at his tennis parties. For years the duke of Guise had watched with growing frustration as Henri III dispensed honor after honor, title after title, property after property on the upstart Épernon—all the wealth and privileges that the duke of Guise was convinced were due him by right of rank, service, and ability. The duke had started his rebellion to rid the kingdom as much of Épernon as of the Huguenots.

Soon after her arrival in Agen, Marguerite sent a secret messenger
volunteering her active support for the Catholic League in the critical region of Gascony, and the alliance was struck. In return, the duke of Guise promised to advance the queen of Navarre fifty thousand crowns and sent a letter to Philip II asking him to forward the money “
in order that she whom we have
established as an obstacle to her husband, may not be abandoned by her people.”

On the strength of this commitment Margot launched into action. She used the month of April to discreetly gather her forces. In a gesture of defiance to both her husband and Henri III, she reinstated Madame de Duras and Mademoiselle de Béthune as her ladies-in-waiting. Madame de Duras’s husband was appointed commander of the queen of Navarre’s troops. As word of her alliance with the league leaked out, Catholic noblemen, some sent by the duke of Guise but the majority from the surrounding area, poured into Agen. She told the magistrates at a formal meeting of the local council that she required the soldiers as bodyguards, “
having reason to mistrust the King
of Navarre and several of his religion.” No one doubted this explanation. Agen was a Catholic town; the citizenry feared and hated Henry and his Huguenots as much as his wife did. That Henry and Diane were complicit in plots against Margot was confirmed at this time by Bellièvre, who wrote to Catherine on April 18 that “
I have not failed to speak
… of the wrong that the King of Navarre is committing in preferring the friendship of the countess [Diane] to that of his wife, who has been constrained to return to Agen, to protect herself from the countess, who is plotting against her life.”

But by May it was clear that Marguerite intended to use the regiment she was assembling at Agen not simply for defensive purposes but to take control of the area and expand league operations in Gascony. To this end, the duke of Guise sent her François de Lignerac, seigneur de Pleaux, an experienced governor and high-ranking member of the Catholic faction in central France. With Lignerac came a suite of cavalry, including a red-haired young captain named Jean d’Aubiac, who was reported to have exclaimed
upon meeting the queen of Navarre, “
What a woman!
If I could go to bed with her they could hang me an hour afterward.” Aubiac was exactly the sort of daring, cocksure swain to whom Marguerite had been attracted in the past, and his undisguised admiration must have made a welcome change from her husband’s callous rejection.

Marguerite’s rebellion had been aimed at her husband, but by allying with the duke of Guise she was also defying the authority of her brother the king, who had condemned the actions of the Catholic League as treason against the Crown. An incensed Henri III dispatched a commander of the royal army, the Maréchal de Matignon, to Gascony to wrest Agen away from his sister. When Catherine, who had been sent to negotiate a truce with the duke of Guise (whose territorial conquests by then included large segments of Normandy and Poitou in addition to Champagne, Burgundy, and Picardy), discovered that her daughter had left her husband and was at the center of league activities in Gascony, she burst out bitterly in a letter to Bellièvre that “
she had been so troubled
that she had really thought she was about to die, for she had never been so overwhelmed by any affliction that had come to her… I see that God has left me this creature [Marguerite] for punishment of my sins through the affliction which she gives me every day. She is my curse in this world.” Never mind that it was Catherine and Henri III, as much as the king of Navarre and his mistress, who had left Margot with little choice but to rebel or face assassination.

An even greater transgression on Marguerite’s part, in the opinion of her husband, mother, and brother, however, was that her side in the war was winning. By summer, sixty-six-year-old Catherine, faced with the league’s overwhelming military success and fearing that her son would lose his throne completely if the conflict were not brought to an immediate halt, abruptly conceded to the duke of Guise’s demands. The peace treaty, signed at Nemours on July 7, represented a complete repudiation of previous royal policy. It revoked the Edict of Toleration and made Protestantism illegal in France. By this agreement, Henry’s claim to the French crown was
denied and Henri III was forced to declare war on the king of Navarre and all his Huguenot supporters. The Catholic League and its adherents were allowed to keep all the territory they had conquered. The terms were so favorable that even the duke of Guise (who had many years of experience negotiating with Catherine and was under no illusion as to the value of her word) understood that the king and queen mother were simply buying time. “
We are well advertised
from all sides that their intention is to deceive us and we well believe it,” he noted. Nonetheless, the treaty represented a significant political victory for the league, as evidenced by Henry’s outraged reaction. “
I hear now that our Majesties
have arranged a peace with the authors of the League on the condition that… a good part of your subjects should be banished… and the conspirators armed with the force and authority of the King against them and against me, who hold such rank in this realm,” he shot back indignantly.

Marguerite was not a signatory to this agreement, and as a sovereign in her own right she evidently did not feel herself bound by its terms, particularly as she was well aware that her husband would never countenance a pact so prejudicial to his interests. She had lived with Henry long enough to have become familiar with his military strategy, and in July she paid him the very great compliment of emulating his methods. Specifically, she launched a series of lightning raids on the neighboring towns, all of them Huguenot and recognizing Henry as their liege lord, and by these means succeeded in surprising and capturing the nearby stronghold of Tonneins.

Alas, she could imitate Henry’s battle plans but not his experience or ferocity.
^*
The king of Navarre was a
much
better commander than Madame de Duras’s husband, and after a dozen years of waging guerrilla war against the Catholics in Gascony, seizing small towns
and fortresses like Tonneins was as easy for Henry as spearing a rabbit on a hunt. He struck back instantly, slaughtering the small battalion of troops his wife had left behind to hold the city and laying siege to Agen itself.

Marguerite, pressed, appealed once again to the duke of Guise. The promised financing from Spain had yet to arrive, and she was in urgent need of it. The duke reiterated to Philip II the need to support the queen of Navarre’s campaign against her husband, but the king of Spain failed to deliver, evidently believing that he had already contributed sufficiently to the Catholic cause in France. Margot, daily expecting to receive funds that never materialized, was left to deal with an increasingly threatening situation on her own.

As her younger brother François had discovered before her, it is very difficult to wage war without an adequate supply of money. The queen of Navarre’s unpaid soldiers, penned up in Agen, became unruly and began to frighten the citizenry. It was August, and the weather was stifling hot and humid; worse, plague, the inevitable companion of war, had descended on the city, further demoralizing the inhabitants. To meet expenses, Margot was forced to levy additional taxes on the local population, never a popular move. But the denouement came when, acting on the advice of Madame de Duras’s husband and the other cavalry officers, Marguerite mandated that fifty of the town’s finest homes, set on coveted high ground, be demolished in order to erect a new, more secure royal fortress on the spot.