The Rival Queens (38 page)

The townspeople, particularly the fifty formerly affluent families evicted from their residences, who then had to stand by and watch while their possessions were tossed into the street and their houses destroyed, could hardly believe that this was the same queen of Navarre whom they had welcomed into the city less than six months before. That queen of Navarre had been generous and obliging; this one was grasping and imperious. Marguerite had probably not meant to be callous; the action was portrayed to her as a wartime measure
necessary for her protection. It simply didn’t occur to her that she was ruining other people’s lives, particularly as she had offered to pay for the appropriated property once the expected funds from Spain arrived. But by that time no one believed her, and anyway no sum could compensate for the loss of the venerable ancestral dwellings.

If the Huguenot king of Navarre had been their only alternative, it is likely that the inhabitants of Agen, overwhelmingly Catholic, would never have betrayed their queen. But it was well known that Henri III had sent the Maréchal de Matignon to retake the city from his sister in the name of the Crown. An appeal to this commander meant that orthodoxy would be preserved in Agen. Accordingly, a deputation from the town escaped Marguerite’s guard under cover of darkness. They found Matignon and the royal army, explained the problem, and offered to revolt if he would help them. Matignon, who had been hesitant to openly attack the city—despite Henri III’s commands, Marguerite was still the king’s sister, and it was never an intelligent career move to launch an assault on a member of the royal family—was only too happy to have a surrogate force take the blame. A satisfactory strategy was immediately devised. The town deputies, still operating undercover, slipped surreptitiously back into Agen bearing a declaration from Matignon officially sanctioning the revolt and promising to support the effort with one of his own regiments provided that the townspeople “
treat the Queen of Navarre
, her ladies, and maids-of-honor with the honor, respect and very humble service which was their due.” This was Matignon’s insurance policy against any future recriminations by Marguerite herself or any other member of the royal family. Alliances changed so precipitously in the Valois family, one could never have too much protection, the general reasoned.

The sad truth was that the citizen militia hurriedly conscripted by the town magistrates was much better organized and more disciplined than Marguerite’s professional recruits. Taking advantage of the soldiers’ late nights and even later mornings, the rebellion
began at daybreak, when most of the guard was still in bed. The townspeople, well armed, overcame the troops stationed at one of the gates to the city and unlocked the doors. This was the signal for Matignon and his regiment, who had been lurking just outside the town, to burst through and begin the fight. Taken by surprise, the queen of Navarre’s small force was overcome before noon.

It was the morning of September 25, 1585. Marguerite heard the fighting but probably did not know the degree of danger until François de Lignerac, the intermediary sent by the duke of Guise, appeared outside her quarters accompanied by the red-haired cavalry officer Jean d’Aubiac and an additional forty or fifty mounted guards.
According to both Brantôme and Aubiac’s brother
, who afterward wrote a letter describing these events, Lignerac brusquely informed the queen of the town’s revolt and advised her to flee with him immediately or face capture by the French king’s forces. Not wishing to put herself once again at her brother’s mercy, and with no time even to call for her own horse, Marguerite immediately swung herself into the saddle behind Lignerac. Madame de Duras, who probably feared Henri III even more than Margot did, performed the same maneuver behind another gentleman, and the party galloped off.

They had just enough of a head start to get safely out of Agen. Once in the open, they turned north, toward Lignerac’s territory in central France, with Matignon and his men in full pursuit.

F
OR FIVE DAYS
M
ARGUERITE AND
her escort raced on, seeking the safety of the fortress of Carlat, where Lignerac’s brother, le seigneur de Marcé, commander of a small regiment of soldiers, was stationed, charged with holding the citadel for the Catholic League. Carlat was in the mountainous region of Auvergne, where it was difficult to ride but easy to hide. Somewhere along the way, Matignon, who feared leaving the region around Agen unprotected against Henry’s forces, gave up the chase. But the queen of Navarre and her companions, unaware of their pursuer’s withdrawal, did not slacken their pace and successfully achieved their destination on September 30. Margot must have been exhausted; she had traveled more than a hundred miles through rough terrain since her precipitate flight from Agen.

As the most secure compound in the area, Carlat represented her obvious choice of refuge. Even better, Marguerite owned the castle outright. It was one of the properties Henri III, faced with the problem of providing for his sister’s dowry, had bestowed upon her some years earlier in lieu of cash. Centuries old, situated at the crest of a steep cliff, ringed by a massive wall, and guarded by high stone
towers, the enclosure formed part of a great estate, boasting its own small church in addition to an immense formal château and other equally impressive outlying buildings. Accessible only by a single rocky pathway, Carlat was as close to unassailable as it was possible to get.

Unfortunately it was also unlivable, as its owner soon discovered. Grand residences required large sums and regular upkeep, not to mention protection from looters, and no one had actually resided in Carlat for many years. The once opulent palace had fallen into considerable disrepair. Margot arrived to find her new quarters picked clean of all their former luxury, right down to the holes in the windows where the panes of glass had been removed.

Again her royal status saved her, or at least mitigated her suffering. The citizens of Agen, anxious to honor their commitment to Matignon, treated her ladies-in-waiting and the rest of her household staff with considerable solicitude. Those who served the queen of Navarre but had been left behind in her escape were allowed to pack up and follow their mistress, but in a much more decorous and comfortable fashion. In addition, all her belongings, including her couch, bedding, and gowns—even her carriages and jewelry—were carefully wrapped and transported to Carlat. It took more than two months, until the beginning of December 1585, but eventually Marguerite was reunited with her retainers and was even able to sleep once again in her own bed.

But her situation remained extremely precarious. She had spent all her money in anticipation of the promised fifty thousand crowns from Spain and so lacked the financial resources necessary even to support her household. Her secretary, who apparently did not enjoy living in a ruined castle in a remote mountainous region in the middle of winter, attempted to improve his circumstances by trying to extort money from her. When she refused to pay, he lashed out at her in a very rude fashion and was consequently discharged from her service. In retaliation, he went straight to Paris with some of the confidential letters he had been entrusted with prior to his dismissal.
These were missives from Marguerite to the duke of Guise confirming her participation in the Catholic League. The secretary put them directly into the hands of the king.

Both Catherine and Henri III had already known that Margot had joined the Catholic League—she had made no secret of it—but now they had irrefutable proof. Not that this was any longer a crime. By conceding to the terms of the peace treaty signed at Nemours the previous summer, the king was now technically on exactly the same side of the succession conflict as his sister and the duke of Guise. Of course, in reality, Henri III despised and feared the popular duke and was only waiting for a chance to avenge himself on his supposed ally. But so far the duke, an exceptional general, had proved far too formidable for Henri III to confront directly. When on February 15, 1586, soon after Marguerite’s secretary had betrayed her, the duke of Guise entered Paris at the head of a large procession, the citizenry thronged the pavement to catch a glimpse of the celebrated warrior. “
Very few or no courtiers
rode in front of us, but a great host of the nobility that I guess there to have been five or six hundred,” recounted the cardinal of Guise, who accompanied his brother on this excursion. “We did not see the king that day, and on our way to the Hôtel de Guise along the few streets one has to travel I have never seen such acclamation by the people, for all the houses and streets were crammed with men.”

The duke of Guise might have been too intimidating to oppose publicly, but Margot was a different story. When the queen of Navarre fell seriously ill in her drafty, ramshackle castle that February and March, both Henri III and Catherine openly hoped for her death and were disappointed to hear of her recovery in May. Catherine in particular had a reason for wishing her daughter harm. The king of Navarre had put together a substantial army and was threatening to employ an additional twenty thousand German and Swiss mercenaries, financed by Elizabeth I. The queen mother, desperate to stop this invasion, had determined to solve the succession problem and so end the conflict by coaxing her son-in-law back to
orthodoxy. Catherine planned to pull this off by bribing Henry with a brand-new, very attractive bride on the condition that he break his ties with the Huguenots and formally renounce the reformed religion. Obviously this happy marital project could not be consummated while Marguerite still lived. If the queen of Navarre didn’t see fit to die of her own accord from illness, both Catherine and Henri III believed that she should be hurried along to the grave. “
If I were to repeat
all that is being said, Sire,” hinted the Tuscan ambassador ominously in an official report home, “it would indeed be
materia tragica.
” The Crown’s attitude toward Margot and the plots against her life were so public that even the duke of Guise was aware of them. Catherine and Henri III had “
tragic designs
[for Marguerite],” he informed an envoy from Spain with whom he was in regular contact, “the details of which would make the hair of your head stand up.”

The queen of Navarre was aware of her family’s animosity and consequently feared capture by the king’s forces above all else. True, the stronghold of Carlat could withstand a frontal assault, but her experience at Agen had taught her to fear betrayal from within. And, as had recently been made manifest by her secretary, she had no money with which to purchase the loyalty of her servants, while it was clear that Henri III would reward handsomely those who undertook to deliver his sister into his hands. This made her even more vulnerable to treachery. Soon after receiving her letters to the duke of Guise, the king had sent his sister a sinister message commanding her to leave Carlat or face “
the most rigorous punishment
.”

The strain imposed by external forces was exacerbated by the solitary nature of her confinement. Marooned under desolate conditions, frightened at the prospect of eventual retribution by the king, the inhabitants of the fortress of Carlat, in their collective search for a way out of a rapidly deteriorating situation, appear to have turned on one another. Although no detailed account of the turmoil has survived, subsequent events would indicate that a power struggle
took place among the various military officers for control of the castle—and, by extension, the queen. The first cracks appeared that summer, culminating in a murder that took place in Marguerite’s presence. “
I hear it said
that the Queen Mother has lately been lamenting with Silvio that Monsieur de Lignerac had stabbed to death the son of an apothecary in the bedchamber of the Princess of Béarn [Marguerite],” the Spanish ambassador observed in a letter to Philip II on July 19, 1586. “So close to her bed was it that she was all stained with blood, and they say that this was done through jealousy, which makes the matter worse,” he recounted with obvious relish, the implication being that Margot was sleeping with one or perhaps both the participants.

This slur on her daughter’s reputation was Catherine’s work. Anyone with any knowledge of the queen of Navarre’s somewhat exalted views of love, and of her own rank, would view with great suspicion the notion that she had suddenly decided to become intimate with the boy who delivered her potions.
^*
Nor, it would soon be made clear, was she at all enamored of Lignerac. But the episode occurred at exactly the time that the queen mother was promoting her scheme to convert Henry by tempting him with a new wife. To broadcast that Marguerite had brazenly descended into utter depravity lowered her value to both her husband and the Catholic League and so served Catherine’s purposes very well.

By fall the gloom at Carlat had deepened to despair. In September, Lignerac’s brother, who had been the senior authority representing the Catholic League, died suddenly from undisclosed causes. His death created an opening at the top level of command for which both Lignerac and the young red-haired cavalry officer Jean d’Aubiac
competed. At almost the same time, Mary Stuart was condemned for treason and sentenced to be executed by Elizabeth I. This blow sent ripples of outrage throughout the league in France, which had been a strong supporter of the Scottish queen’s right to the English throne. If Marguerite had believed that her rank protected her from a similar fate, Elizabeth’s action quickly disabused her of the notion. And the English queen was a model of tolerance next to Henri III.

Then came the news that the royal army, led by the king’s second-favorite
mignon,
the duke of Joyeuse, another of Marguerite’s particular enemies, had descended upon the region around Auvergne, where Carlat was situated. The implication was clear. Henri III intended to use crushing force to capture—or kill—his sister.

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
J
OYEUSE
and his soldiers precipitated a crisis among the queen of Navarre’s company. Unhappy with Lignerac’s leadership and questioning the older man’s loyalty to his mistress, Jean d’Aubiac, who had apparently succeeded in his quest to win Marguerite’s affections, challenged his superior for command of the fortress—and lost. According to a Huguenot commander serving the king of Navarre who later recounted these events, after his victory over his rival Lignerac brusquely informed Marguerite that “
d’Aubiac must leap the rock
[die].” To save her lover, Margot was forced to hand over all her remaining jewelry to the commander. But even so, she only succeeded in having the prisoner’s sentence commuted from execution to banishment. Weighing her situation carefully, the queen of Navarre then took a calculated risk and, despite the alarming proximity of the royal troops, joined Aubiac in fleeing the fortress. “
She would rather go away
and change her abode than abide here without him,” the Huguenot commander sneered, intimating that infatuation had overwhelmed her judgment. It may have been simple passion that prompted Margot—she did throw herself body and soul into her love affairs—but in this instance, self-preservation might also have played a crucial role in her decision to leave. After all that had happened, to remain alone
and unprotected with the greedy Lignerac, who had already demonstrated a certain degree of murderous vindictiveness in the incident with the apothecary’s son, could easily have appeared the more perilous alternative. Additionally, Margot seems to have feared (with good reason, as it later turned out) that Lignerac intended to betray her by opening the castle to Henri III’s forces. The Tuscan ambassador reported in a letter home that it was “
certain that the King was the cause
of the flight of the Queen of Navarre.”

Accordingly, Marguerite and Aubiac, along with a small number of trusted retainers, decamped by horseback on October 14, 1586. Their object was to reach the castle of Ibois, which lay north of Issoire, where Joyeuse’s army was quartered. As Ibois belonged to Catherine, Marguerite may have had the idea of throwing herself on the queen mother’s mercy, hoping to persuade her to use her influence to blunt the king’s wrath. Inexplicably, the hostile Lignerac, far from trying to stop the queen of Navarre from leaving Carlat, instead helpfully arranged to have a nobleman of his acquaintance, the seigneur de Châteauneuf, meet her party halfway to guide her safely to her destination.

For three days Marguerite rode through the countryside, trying to reach Ibois. When Châteauneuf failed to rendezvous with the queen’s party as planned, she and Aubiac were forced to find their own way to the castle. It was a rough passage. With Henri III’s knights and foot soldiers stationed at all the main municipalities and thoroughfares, Margot could not take the risk of revealing her whereabouts by taking shelter in a town. She and her retainers traveled mostly under cover of darkness, an imperative that made the journey even more treacherous. Compelled to cross the Allier River in the dead of night, she nearly drowned.