Game of Queens (50 page)

So Queen Elizabeth was amenable to Catherine's suggestion, in December 1571, that she might marry François, the Duc d'Alençon, instead of his elder brother, the reluctant Anjou. François, his mother Catherine coolly observed, was ‘much less scrupulous' than his brother in matters of religion; sympathetic, even, to the Huguenots. Altogether less ‘like a mule' as Elizabeth's envoy chimed in enthusiastically, and ‘more apt than th'other' when it came to getting children.

England and France concluded the Treaty of Blois, whereby they agreed to support each other against the Spanish enemy. It now seemed more desirable than ever that this alliance should be cemented dynastically. In June came the formal offer of Alençon's hand. Elizabeth's ambassador (and later spymaster) Francis Walsingham feared that the small and pockmarked seventeen-year-old Alençon would never pass the crucial test, given ‘the delicacy of Her Majesty's eye'. Nevertheless, as the court set off on its annual summer progress, the marriage seemed still a real possibility.

England and France had both seen trouble, but both might now hope the trouble had been successfully resolved. That hope would prove deceptive.

42

The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Day

France, 1572–1574

Queen Elizabeth was at Robert Dudley's great castle of Kenilworth when she had news of an event that shook her world, one of those events which really do change history: the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Day. The story had seemed at first to lie between Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d'Albret but in the end, the repercussions would reach out to touch everybody.

In the early months of 1571 William of Orange, the exiled leader of the Netherlands Protestants, was trying to orchestrate an armed invasion of the Netherlands from Germany. Although his brother was with the Huguenot rebels in La Rochelle, Orange needed to draw the French crown also to his side, invoking an old anti-Spanish hostility still arguably more potent than religious division. The idea had immense appeal for a young king anxious to prove his mettle in battle and soon Charles IX was to be heard complaining that Catherine was ‘too timid'. Newly married to Elizabeth of Austria, devout young daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles was beginning to resent his mother's dominance.
¹
A few days after the formal entry into Paris that celebrated his marriage in March 1571, Charles made a speech to his
parlement
commending Catherine's ‘tireless work, energy and wisdom' in taking care of affairs of state for all the time he had been too young to do so himself; the implication being that such days were coming to an end.

Catherine de Medici was temperamentally opposed to expensive warfare (yet another thing on which she agreed with Elizabeth of England) but she was prepared to use the possibility of French support for the Dutch Protestants as a lever to induce Jeanne d'Albret to agree to the marriage of her son Henri to Catherine's daughter Margot. (No one cared about Margot's reluctance to marry a heretic. Catherine threatened to make her daughter ‘the most wretched lady in the kingdom' if she refused, but Jeanne's reluctance was another story.)

There was still, in theory, a personal bond between Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d'Albret. At the start of 1571 Jeanne wrote to Catherine of her reluctance to bring her son to the French court:

. . . I have a suspicious nature, Madame, as you well know, which makes me fear that, although your intentions are good – which I do not doubt – those who have been able to alter them in the past in regard to us . . . continue to have credit with you . . . I would fear to anger you by these words, Madame, if your kindness to me in my youth had not accustomed me to the privilege of speaking frankly and privately to you . . .

Touchingly, she wrote ‘
je suis ung petit glorieuse
' (‘I am a proud little thing' or ‘a bit of a proud one'). She was indeed so; Biron, one of the envoys sent to negotiate with her, described to a colleague ‘the scowling face in front of me'. An Italian wrote that ‘the temper of this Queen is
molto fantastico
[very fantastical] . . . She changes often and eludes you every minute. In the end she hopes to manage everything her own way.'

Jeanne d'Albret was under considerable pressure, not least from some of her own side. Admiral de Coligny's prime goal was to get French help for the Dutch Protestants; Jeanne's to preserve her inherited territories and her son's place in the French succession. On 31 August the papal nuncio reported that ‘there is great discord between them because the Queen [Jeanne] wishes to conduct her own affairs by herself, without interference from the Admiral, while he seeks to make her obey the King'. While she was dubious about marrying her son to the Catholic Margot, she must have been alarmed, too, by Coligny's attempts to marry him elsewhere; even, for a few weeks in 1571, to Elizabeth of England.

That autumn Coligny arrived at court to negotiate, his safe conduct signed by Charles IX, by Catherine de Medici and by her next son, Anjou. His friends had warned Coligny not to go. His reception, however, went almost too smoothly. Coligny even accompanied Catherine to Mass, though he made a point of neither removing his hat nor of bowing to the Host. The young king Charles was soon back under Coligny's sway. The Spanish envoy described how Coligny told the king not to discuss his Netherlands plans with his mother, because these were ‘not questions to be discussed with women and clerks. When the Queen Mother heard of this, she was on very bad terms with the said Admiral . . .'

Ever more pressure was being placed on Jeanne that she too should come to the French court. One indirect form of blackmail was the fear that her youthful marriage to Cleves could be recalled to discredit her marriage to Antoine de Bourbon and thus cast doubts on her son Henri's legitimacy. During the summer of 1571 Jeanne's health had given her a pretext to stall: ‘I can never thank you enough for the honour you do me in wishing to see me', she wrote to Charles, ‘but, to my great regret, Monseigneur, I have been obliged to yield to the exigencies of my health.' If she could no longer reasonably remain in La Rochelle, she could and did go to take the water cure at Eaux-Chaudes.

To Catherine de Medici's endless assurances of her safety if she entrusted herself to the French court, Jeanne d'Albret wrote testily from La Rochelle:

I cannot imagine why you should find it necessary to say that you want to see me and my children, but not in order to do us harm. Forgive me if I laugh when I read these letters, for you are allaying a fear I never had. I have never thought that you fed on little children, as they say.

Eventually, her historian Bordenave related, Jeanne could no longer hold out. ‘The leaders of her own religion were those who most urged her to do it.' She ‘bowed to their will in order that they might not blame her stubbornness for keeping so many good things . . . from coming to pass'.

Jeanne said she would come to court, on certain conditions. One was that she wanted to negotiate directly with Catherine. Was it to be another kind of ladies' peace?

 

There were conditions on the other side, of course. The pope vowed he would lose his last drop of blood rather than grant the necessary dispensation for the marriage before the groom had returned to the Catholic church. But his envoy told him that most French, even Catholics, desired the marriage, ‘comparing it to that of Clovis and Clothilde' – the Frankish king and the wife who persuaded him to convert to Christianity – while Catherine de Medici warningly invoked the example of Henry VIII.

In January 1572, in a carriage the size of a house, with a stove burning inside, and in no particular hurry, Jeanne d'Albret reluctantly set out to join the French court at Blois. The Florentine ambassador Petrucci wrote on 14 February that:

today the Queen Mother [Catherine] went to Chenonceau to meet the Queen of Navarre. Embraces and salutations were exchanged . . . and the Queen of Navarre asked at once for something to eat. Immediately afterward the two queens retired into a room alone.

Jeanne's letters to the son she had left behind are revealing and sometimes appealing. She took to her prospective daughter-in-law: ‘If she embraces our religion I may say that we are the happiest persons in the world.' Jeanne's thirteen-year-old daughter Catherine de Bourbon added her mite: ‘I have seen Madame [Margot] and found her very beautiful . . . She was kind to me and gave me a little dog I like very much.'

Jeanne's initial attempts at optimism did not last. She suspected that Catherine and her son the king were trying to play her for a fool and she was probably right. A Huguenot contemporary describes Charles IX lavishing attention on Jeanne in public but then asking his mother in private if he was not playing his part well: ‘Leave it to me and I will deliver them into your net.'

An ardent Catholic advised Catherine on how to handle Jeanne: ‘as one woman to another, make her mad while staying calm yourself'. Petrucci described one long and fraught bout of negotiations, in which Catherine had suggested they allow their differences to be settled by deputies, to which Jeanne retorted that she trusted nobody but herself. ‘This is no small break in the negotiations because
Navarra
is so obstinate . . . and no real results can be obtained without her agreement.'

On 8 March Jeanne sent a long and agitated letter to her son:

I am in agony, in such extreme suffering that if I had not been prepared, it would overcome me . . . I am not free to talk with either the King or Madame [Margot], only with the Queen Mother, who goads me [
me traite a la fourche
] . . . She treats me so shamefully that you might say that the patience I manage to maintain surpasses that of Griselda herself . . . I have come this far on the sole understanding that the Queen and I would negotiate and be able to agree. But all she does is mock me.

Even Margot was not as she had been represented: ‘she replied that when these negotiations begun we well knew she was devout in her religion. I told her that those who made the first overtures to us represented the matter very differently . . .'

Another letter to one of Jeanne's advisors three days later was even more agitated. ‘I assure you I often remember your warning not to get angry.' She was fighting to keep her son away from the court while matters were still unsettled, fighting to convince the sceptical French courtiers that he was as committed as she to the reformed religion.

‘As for the beauty of Madame Marguerite [Margot], I admit she has a good figure, but it is too tightly corseted. Her face is spoiled by too much makeup, which displeases me . . .' The corruption of the French court was a recurrent theme. Everyone was aware of the possibility of espionage and deceit. Jeanne swore holes were drilled in the walls of her apartment for the use of spies.

Jeanne d'Albret put her faith in the support of the English, claiming Queen Elizabeth would only make a treaty with France if the crown behaved properly over the Navarre marriage. But if it was important for Jeanne to feel the weight of international Protestant opinion behind her, international Protestantism also needed this alliance.

Acting as England's ambassador in France, Francis Walsingham found himself in a very special relationship with Jeanne. On 29 March he was writing to Cecil of how ‘with the consent of the Queen-Mother, she had sent for us as the ministers and ambassadors of a Christian princess, whom she had sundry causes to honour, to confer with us . . . touching certain difficulties'.

Jeanne wished to confer with her co-religionists on some knotty points of doctrine concerning the marriage of a Catholic and a Protestant and also on the central issues of the two continuing in their separate religions. Her advisors urged her to stand firm on some points, but it remained vital that the marriage went ahead: ‘upon the success of the Navarre marriage depends the enterprise of Flanders', wrote Walsingham.

Towards the end of March King Charles gave ground. As long as Henri of Navarre would come to Paris for the wedding, he would yield on all other points. Even the ministers to whom Jeanne appealed, asking if the marriage could be legal if it were not performed before a Calvinist congregation, declared that ‘considering the urgent necessity of the case' it was.

Jeanne wrote encouragingly to Henri of how he should behave at the French court:

be gracious, but speak boldly even when you are taken aside by the King, for note that the impression you make on arrival will remain . . . try to train your hair to stand up and be sure there are no lice in it.

‘Your sister has a very annoying cough, which keeps her in bed. She drinks donkey's milk and calls the little ass her brother', Jeanne added, charmingly.

On 4 April the official decision was made to proceed. The next day Jeanne d'Albret wrote to Queen Elizabeth:

I would not, therefore, Madame, lose time in informing you of the event, so that I may rejoice with you . . . I entreat you, Madame, to pardon the boldness which your goodness inspires, if I venture very earnestly to desire that I may soon have occasion to congratulate you on a similar event personal to yourself.

The marriage contract signed on 11 April made no mention of religious issues but only of the inheritance of various lands. This was based on a French conviction that Henri, if not Jeanne herself, would soon return to the Roman church. The Bishop of Maçon saw it as Catherine's victory: