Henry IV of France's Wives and Mistresses - Marguerite of Valois

Marguerite of Valois

By 1570, Catherine de' Medici, the powerful mother of King Charles IX, was seeking a marriage between her youngest daughter Marguerite, also known as Margot, and Henry. Catherine, who believed in dynastic marriage as a potent political tool, aimed to unite the interests of the Valois and the Bourbons. Given the ill health of her sons, she also wished to join the two bloodlines, since Henry of Navarre stood to inherit the French throne should her sons fail to produce male heirs. The seventeen-year-old Marguerite, however, was secretly involved with Henry of Guise, the son of the late Duke of Guise. When Catherine found this out, she had Marguerite brought from her bed. Catherine and the king then beat her, ripping her nightclothes and pulling out handfuls of her hair. Henry of Guise fled the court and, threatened with death by King Charles IX, hurriedly announced his engagement to Catherine of Cleves. Some sources claim that he narrowly escaped being caught in Marguerite's bed, but biographer Leonie Frieda regards this as unlikely, given the risks.

By all accounts, however, Marguerite was deemed highly attractive, even sexually magnetic. In 1572, the court chronicler Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, after watching her in a festival procession, described her as follows:

One had never seen anything lovelier in the world. Beside the beauty of her face and her well-turned body, she was superbly dressed and fantastically valuable jewellery adorned her attire. Her lovely face shone with faultless white skin and her hair was dressed with big white pearls, precious stones and extremely rare diamonds shaped like stars—one could say that her natural beauty and the shimmering of her jewels competed with a brilliant night sky full of stars, so to speak.

The staunchly Protestant Queen Jeanne was at first strongly opposed to the marriage on religious grounds. Catherine, however, was persistent in her calls for Jeanne to attend the French court. Writing that she wanted to see Jeanne's children, she promised not to harm them. Jeanne replied: "Pardon me if, reading that, I want to laugh, because you want to relieve me of a fear that I've never had. I've never thought that, as they say, you eat little children". When Jeanne did attend court, Catherine piled mental pressure on her. Jeanne wrote to Henry: "I am not free to talk with either the King or Madame, only the Queen Mother, who goads me … You have doubtless realized that their main object, my son, is to separate you from God, and from me". Catherine played manipulatively on Jeanne's hopes for her son and finally won her agreement to the marriage by promising that Henry could remain a Huguenot. When Jeanne arrived in Paris to buy clothes for the wedding, she was taken ill and died, aged forty-four; and Henry succeeded her as the King of Navarre. Huguenot writers later accused Catherine of murdering Jeanne with poisoned gloves. The wedding took place on 18 August 1572 at Notre-Dame, Paris.

A royal match between a Roman Catholic and a Huguenot was controversial and irregular. The pope refused to grant a dispensation for the marriage, and the different faiths of the bridal couple made for an unusual wedding service. For example, Henry did not attend the mass, where his place was taken by Marguerite's brother Henry, Duke of Anjou. After a nuptial lunch, four days of balls, masques and banquets ensued, only to be interrupted by the outbreak of violence in Paris. After the attempted assassination of the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny on 22 August 1572, Catherine de' Medici and King Charles, to forestall the expected Huguenot backlash, ordered the murder of the Huguenot leaders gathered in Paris for the wedding. The result was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, beginning before dawn on 24 August, in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris and throughout France. Marguerite of Valois later described in her Memoirs the chaos and bloodshed in the Tuileries Palace, where she and her new husband were lodged. Henry found himself escorted to a room with his cousin Henry, prince of Condé, and told to choose between death and conversion to Roman Catholicism. He chose the latter. For a while, Catherine de' Medici considered having him killed, but when she proposed to her daughter that the marriage be annulled, Marguerite replied that this was impossible because she had already had sexual relations with Henry and was "in every sense" his wife.

Until 1576, Henry remained at court, siding with Marguerite and her brother François of Alençon against Henry III, who became king in 1574. During this time, Henry of Navarre often ignored Marguerite and instead slept with his mistress, Charlotte de Sauve. It appeared, in the words of Henry's biographer David Buisseret, as if "the pleasure-loving and libidinous elements of his ancestry had finally gained the upper hand". A rivalry developed between him and Alençon over the beautiful de Sauve, who was one of Catherine de' Medici's so-called "flying squadron", a group of "court lovelies" whom Catherine used to lure noblemen to court and, it was rumoured, as informants. According to Marguerite's Memoirs, de Sauve "treated both of them in such a way that they became extremely jealous of each other… to such a point that they forgot their ambitions, their duties and their plans and thought of nothing but chasing after this woman". De Sauve may have been acting as a tool of Henry III and Catherine in their attempts to split the two men. Henry of Navarre's good judgement was already known to desert him when it came to women. He wrote to a friend:

This Court is the strangest place on earth. We are nearly always ready to cut each other's throats… All the band you know wants my death on account of my love for Monsieur and they have forbidden my mistress to speak to me. They have such a hold on her that she does not dare look at me… they say they will kill me, and I want to be one jump ahead of them.

Marguerite's behaviour was also the subject of scandal. On one occasion in 1575, Catherine de' Medici was heard yelling at her, accusing her of taking a lover. In a separate incident, the king sent a band of assassins to murder Marguerite's lover Bussy d'Amboise, a friend of Alençon's, who managed to escape. As Catherine's biographer Leonie Frieda puts it: "he then decided to leave the Court immediately citing health reasons, which happened to be nothing less than the truth". In 1576, Henry III accused Marguerite of improper relations with a lady-in-waiting. Marguerite claimed in her memoirs that he would have killed her if Catherine had not stopped him. Despite their sexual infidelities, Marguerite remained politically loyal to her husband during the early period of their marriage and helped him negotiate the complexities of the court. By 1575, however, their relations were no longer physical: "I could not endure the pain that I felt", she recalled in her Memoirs, "and I stopped sleeping with the King my husband".

In 1576, Henry managed to slip away while hunting and made for his kingdom, where he abjured the Catholic religion on 13 June. For a time, the abandoned Marguerite found herself imprisoned, suspected of complicity, and was afterwards distrusted by her own family. Henry eventually demanded that she be brought to him. In 1578, therefore, Catherine de' Medici travelled south to Nérac and duly delivered Marguerite to her husband. At first, in this new phase in their marriage, the couple managed a show of harmony, but strains were apparent. In 1580 a religious war, later called the "Lovers' War", broke out between the Huguenots and King Henry III. Although inaccurate, this name for the war relates to a series of scandals at the Navarre court and to the notion that Henry of Navarre took up arms in response to jibes about his love life from the French court. At this point, he was conducting a passionate affair with a mistress known as "La Belle Fosseuse", while Marguerite was involved with one of his own commanders, the Vicomte de Turenne. Henry wrote to Marguerite apologising for the state of affairs between them. He expressed "extreme regret that instead of bringing you contentment… I have brought the opposite".

In 1582, Marguerite returned to the French court without her husband, who was still openly besotted with La Fosseuse. Before long, she began taking lovers again, such as Harlay de Champvallon, one of her brother François's retinue, and acting more scandalously than ever. After a rumour that she had borne Champvallon a child, Henry III ordered her back to Navarre and then had her carriage searched and detained her in an abbey for questioning. According to her Memoirs, when Marguerite was interrogated, she screamed, "He complains of how I spend my time? Does he not remember that it was he who first put my foot in the stirrup!"

Henry of Navarre at first refused to take Marguerite back unless Henry III made a public statement asserting her innocence of all the charges against her. Catherine de' Medici sent Pomponne de Bellièvre south to smooth things over and arrange Marguerite's return. In a letter, she spelled out to Marguerite that a royal wife must bear her husband's affairs without complaint, recalling proudly that her own conduct as a wife had been impeccable, despite all provocation. Marguerite was reunited with Henry on 13 April 1584, but she failed to heed her mother's words, even though the death of her brother François in June 1584 made her husband heir presumptive to the French throne. Henry himself was under increased pressure to produce an heir. He was advised by his closest friend Philippe Duplessis-Mornay that it was now "time to make love to France".

In 1585, Henry embarked on a passionate love affair with a widow called Diane d'Andouins, nicknamed La Belle Corisande. Marguerite found it impossible to ignore this particular lover of Henry's, since d'Andouins was pressing Henry to repudiate Marguerite so that she could become queen of Navarre herself. Marguerite responded by attempting to poison Henry, and then she shot at him with a pistol but missed. To escape his revenge, she fled the Kingdom of Navarre again, this time to her property at Agen. From there she wrote to her mother begging for money. Catherine sent her enough "to put food on her table" but was contemptuous.

Marguerite attempted to strengthen the fortifications at Agen, raise troops, and ally with the Catholic League against her husband. Before long, however, the officials and people of Agen drove her out of the town. Retreating to her lofty and impregnable fortress of Carlat, and refusing her mother's pleas that she move to a royal manor, she there took a lover called d'Aubiac. Catherine's patience ran out, and she insisted that Henry III arrest "this insufferable torment" and act "before she brings shame on us again". On 13 October 1586, therefore, the king had Marguerite forcibly removed from Carlat and locked up in the Château d'Usson. D'Aubiac was executed, though not, as Catherine demanded, in front of Marguerite. Catherine cut Marguerite out of her will. Marguerite never saw her mother or brother again. Marguerite assumed she was going to die and even employed a food taster at the château. In a "farewell" letter to her mother, she asked that after her execution a post-mortem be held to prove that she was not, despite gossip, pregnant with d'Aubiac's child. At this point, her luck took a turn for the better. Her gaoler, the Marquis de Canillac, whom she was rumoured to have seduced, suddenly switched from the royal side in the civil war to that of the Catholic League and released her in early 1587. Her freedom suited the League perfectly: her continued existence guaranteed that Henry of Navarre would remain without an heir. This problem became acute for Henry after he succeeded to the throne of France in 1589.