TEN

CONCILIATOR NO LONGER

The greatest wickedness in the world

1566–70

In the summer of 1566 a dramatic outbreak of violence in the Spanish Netherlands – later called ‘the iconoclastic fury’ – caused a huge rise in tension and mistrust between the Huguenots and Catholics in France. The uprising in the Low Countries had started as a protest by the nobility against harsh new laws and restrictions imposed on them by the regent, Margaret of Parma, Philip II’s half-sister. The struggle soon encompassed the Flemish Calvinists against whom Philip now decided to take extreme measures. Religious and civil unrest so close to the French border presented a sore Catherine could not afford to disregard. The Spanish were deeply unpopular in France at the time due to the massacre of the settlers in Florida and the Queen Mother arranged a mournful procession of the victims’ widows throughout the streets of Paris in the early summer of 1566, feeling this would serve as an aide-mémoire to keep alive the national sense of outrage.

Catherine could not resist a dig at the failure of Philip’s rigorous and uncompromising policies in the Low Countries, writing smugly to him, ‘Take us as an example, for we have sufficiently shown, at our own cost, how others should govern themselves.’¹ Then, mistakenly believing that the Spanish were about to employ a more conciliatory approach, perhaps one similar to her own, she wrote to her ambassador in Spain, ‘I am marvellously pleased that they now applaud and approve in their own case what they were formerly so ready to blame in ours.’ This blithe self-congratulation proved premature; she did not know it at the time but Philip shortly planned to lead an army to the Netherlands specifically to increase the repression and exact a terrible retribution on Flemish Protestants.

French Calvinists were enjoying a brief spell of favour from Catherine and Charles at Court. The King had grown particularly fond of Gaspard de Coligny who was gradually becoming Charles’s mentor and friend, just as Coligny’s uncle Montmorency had once been to Henry II, and Condé also made a brief appearance. The Guises once again withdrew, unable to tolerate the ascendancy of their mortal enemies. They were particularly angry that Coligny’s brother, the Cardinal de Châtillon, now a Protestant and a recently married man, continued to enjoy the enormous revenues from his many rich Church benefices. Only the King could annul this, but Catherine restrained him from taking any action against Châtillon or the many other converted prelates who still drew huge sums from the Church. She did not wish to provoke the Huguenots while there was peace in France, however ragged; instead, she seemed unconcerned about enraging even the moderate Catholics.

The Huguenots naturally took full advantage of their moment of seeming royal favour and began to press the cause of their coreligionists in the Netherlands, whose clamour for help grew ever more urgent. Coligny, offering Huguenot military assistance, argued forcefully that French interests would be served if they helped eject Spain from the neighbouring Low Countries, even suggesting that Charles might like to add these territories to France. Catherine promptly put a stop to this discussion. The very last thing she wanted was to inflame Philip; besides, she needed help from him with yet another matrimonial project: she wished to marry the King to one of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian’s daughters. She mistakenly imagined that Philip might feel grateful for her stand against Coligny’s plans and, in return, underwrite her marital project. A further bond between the two dynasties formed when word arrived that Elisabeth, after suffering several miscarriages, had on 12 August 1567 successfully given birth to a daughter, an Infanta of Spain.

Emboldened by his sound relationship with the King, Coligny and his entourage continued, meanwhile, to agitate and petition him for action in the Netherlands. Charles – urged by his mother – closed the matter with a sharp rebuke to the Admiral by finally announcing that he wished to maintain good relations with his brother-in-law King Philip. He did not know it yet, but these were now to be severely tested. Assured of this French intention not to aid the Flemish rebels, Philip then declared that he would shortly be leaving Spain at the head of a large army bound for the Netherlands. A few weeks later his ambassador, the Duke of Alava, sought an audience with the King and Queen Mother. He delivered his master’s request to disembark with his forces at Fréjus in southern France. From there Philip proposed a route northwards through eastern France to Flanders. Catherine, thunderstruck at the idea of permitting approximately 20,000 Spanish troops to travel through the length of France, unequivocally refused. The relative religious calm in the country was precarious at best; the presence of such a vast number of Spanish troops on French soil ‘would set fire to the kingdom’. The Spaniards’ subsequent invitation that the French might like to join their campaign against Protestantism also met with a blunt refusal. Thus denied, Philip found a different though less convenient route to his northern territories via Savoy, Milan and Lorraine.

The Spanish army marched inexorably towards Flanders, though Philip had decided not to lead his troops himself but put the Duke of Alba at their head, simultaneously replacing Margaret as regent of the Netherlands. The duke had orders to repress and if need be exterminate the rebels without mercy. Such a large Spanish force on her northern borders posed a critical danger to France, so amid great anxiety on the council, Catherine and Charles set out immediately to inspect their defences in the north. As an additional precaution Charles hired 6000 Swiss mercenaries, as well as reinforcing garrisons in Piedmont, Champagne and the Three Bishoprics.^fn1 Philip found these security measures outrageously insulting. Alava protested to the Queen Mother, ‘The king has no need of such an army.’² Catherine, knowing well the reputation for ferocity of the Spanish soldiers, felt equally incensed that she had not been kept fully informed about her son-in-law’s own plans. She commanded the French ambassador in Madrid to explain her situation, rhetorically asking, ‘Is it reasonable that among all the violent turbulence, which is everywhere, we should be at the mercy of anyone who wishes to do us harm?’³ Typically, at the same time, to keep Philip assured of her overall goodwill, she sent his army supplies of grain. Catherine had reason to fear potential foreign predators. Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, enjoying a short respite in his war against the Turks, might also find this a propitious moment to attack an enfeebled France and Queen Elizabeth I had just sent Thomas Norris as special envoy to the French Court to demand the return of Calais. Catherine formulated Charles’s uncompromising reply: ‘Since the Queen has broken the peace herself by taking Le Havre she should renounce Calais and be content to keep to the natural boundaries of her kingdom.’

By the summer of 1567, meanwhile, the Huguenots became increasingly convinced that a secret plan existed between the Spanish and Catherine to use the hired troops against them. This was exacerbated when Charles did not release the 6000 soldiers despite the fact that the danger of invasion had passed once Alba and his army arrived in the Netherlands. Violent attacks by Protestants against Catholics were reported in the provinces. The leading Huguenots at Court felt the chill wind of Catherine’s withdrawal of favour as she went out of her way to show that she was quite ready to put down the savage behaviour of the reformers who attacked Catholics. In Pamiers, near Toulouse, there had been a particularly vicious assault by the Protestants who killed monks and ejected Catholic citizens. The Queen Mother described their conduct as no better than that of the Turks. The Protestants were equally horrified at reports of Alba’s atrocities that came filtering through from the Netherlands. He had set up what is today known as the Tribunal of Blood, which oversaw the killings of hundreds of rebels and Calvinists. Engravings at Hatfield House, where Elizabeth I had heard the news of her accession to the English throne in 1558, show these grisly mass executions.⁴

The arrest of two leading rebel nobles, Counts Egmont and Horne, who were executed in June 1568, proved Alba and his regime of terror planned to make no exceptions for the high nobility. Indeed, the arrests of Egmont and Horne made the senior Huguenots south of the border even more apprehensive. Was the same fate intended for them? They protested again about the presence of the Swiss soldiers, arguing that they could not guarantee peace from their own side should the mercenaries remain in France. Catherine promised Condé that she would personally see to the strict adherence to the Edict of Amboise and punish anyone who put him- or herself above the law, yet crucially she said nothing about the troops.

Dissatisfied, Coligny demanded an explanation from his uncle about the mercenaries. The Constable replied, ‘The King has paid for them; he wishes to see how his money has been used.’ This simple answer was the literal truth, if no more than that, and borne out when Catherine arranged a military review for her son’s amusement. The court was staying at Montceaux, just to the south-east of Paris, and the Swiss entertained them there with a parade. The Protestants set little store by this, thinking it merely a show to lull them into complacency. In the growing panic a false rumour reached them that Catherine had held a secret meeting at Montceaux giving the order to arrest the Huguenot leaders whose lives were thus in imminent danger. In that nervous period of rumour and counter-rumour they began to arm and prepare for conflict. Their plan was simple: they must first capture Catherine, Charles, Anjou and the leader of the Guise faction since his brother’s death, the Cardinal of Lorraine. Several large towns were to be taken as Huguenot strongholds and troops raised that could then cut the Swiss mercenaries ‘to pieces’.

Nearby at Condé’s Château de Vallery the Huguenot leaders carefully composed their scheme. As they did so Catherine, who had ordered no attack of any sort upon them, was instead taking pleasure in her stay at Montceaux in the beautiful early autumn weather, cheerfully imagining that all was well. Yet on 18 September she received word of the Huguenot war preparations; there had also been sightings of approximately 1500 soldiers near Châtillon. She sent Artus de Cossé, one of her military commanders, to look into the reports and wrote to Forqueveaux, the French envoy in Madrid, to say, ‘It was just a small scare which has now blown over.’ Determined to enjoy her stay hunting and resting at ‘sa belle maison de Montceaux’, an unprotected château vulnerable to attack, she assured the King’s lieutenant in the Dauphiné that ‘everything is as peaceful now, thank God, as we could hope’.⁵ While Catherine’s wishful thinking got the better of her instincts, the Protestants finalised their plans. Further warnings arrived from the Spanish in Brussels about the impending attack, although she brushed these aside too, dismissing them as attempts to frighten her. The Constable, who still believed his intelligence network to be as good as it had been in his prime, bolstered her confidence by declaring that not even a hundred horsemen could gather ‘without my knowing of it instantly’. Unfortunately, the days when Montmorency’s boast would have been true had long since passed. There was even smug talk of making it ‘a capital offence to spread false alarms’.⁶

As rumour piled upon rumour, confirmed sightings of soldiers and warning messages continued to arrive that troops were massed close by at Rozay-en-Brie. Catherine could no longer ignore the awful truth; her dream had evaporated. On 26 September 1567 the Court moved to the relative safety of the fortified town at nearby Meaux. She sent out an immediate summons for the Swiss soldiers quartered at Château-Thierry. News arrived that Péronne, Melun and other towns had been attacked by the Huguenots. Worse was to come when enemy troops had been spotted on most of the roads approaching Meaux. Unable to comprehend what had prompted the Huguenot uprising, Catherine declared herself ‘amazed’ and ‘could see no reason’ for what she called ‘the infamous enterprise’ which became known as the ‘Surprise de Meaux’.

At three o’clock in the morning of 27 September the Swiss troops arrived and, taking the advice of the Guises against that of the Constable and de L’Hôpital, Catherine decided to make a dash for Paris, preferring to risk flight to being besieged at Meaux. At the centre of a square troop formation, surrounded by ‘a forest of Swiss pikes’, the Queen Mother and the King, their family and the most senior nobles set out for the capital. Terrified, the rest of the Court joined the exodus as best they could. The rebel cavalrymen harried and attacked the party several times at the start of the hazardous journey but the Swiss successfully repulsed each assault. Finally it was decided that Catherine, the King and her children should dash ahead in light carriages with a small guard to Paris where they arrived at four o’clock in the morning, eventually followed by the rest of the party. The courtiers’ appearance made an unedifying spectacle as they entered the city, dishevelled, terrified and exhausted, many of them having made the journey on foot. Throughout the sprint to Paris, Catherine had watched Charles weep with rage and promise that from that day onward ‘he would never allow anyone to frighten him again and swore to pursue the culprits into their houses and beds. He intended henceforth to lay down the law to everyone great and small.’⁷

Frustrated by the successful flight of their royal quarry, the Huguenot rebels stopped outside Paris at Saint-Denis and prepared to besiege the city. They also blocked supplies going down the Seine. Anxious to gain time and decide upon her next move, Catherine sent de L’Hôpital to Condé. She needed to discover the rebels’ aims. The prince, offered a full amnesty in exchange for disbanding and disarming his men, disdainfully responded that this was not enough and, presenting himself as a hero of the downtrodden people, demanded that the King disband his armies and disarm entirely. He insisted upon the full reinstatement of the Edict of Amboise, an immediate recalling of the Estates-General and an overall lowering of taxes. French men and women, he declared, were suffering and paying for the greed of foreigners and ‘Italians’ at a time when the kingdom was not even at war. This last point could only be understood as a personal and direct attack upon Catherine, the expensive splendour of her Court and the loans from the Italian bankers who propped up her empty exchequer.

At a meeting of the King’s Council Catherine is reported to have turned upon her former mentor, Michel de L’Hôpital, who offered suggestions about reconciling the two sides, angrily saying, ‘It is you and your advice that have brought us to this pass!’ As the Parisians began to feel the effects of the blockade, there was no solution but to fight the rebels’ infamous and unprovoked treason, which she called ‘the greatest wickedness in the world’. The King amassed an army while his mother sent out appeals for help to her ‘cousin’ Cosimo, Duke of Florence. Philip of Spain and Pope Pius V also received her applications for help. With her stubborn belief in a peace that had never really existed now shattered for good, the days of Catherine the enlightened and passionate conciliator were finally over.

In a letter to Spain she lamented, ‘You may imagine with what distress I see the kingdom returning to the troubles and afflictions from which I laboured to deliver it.’ Talks between the two sides foundered as the Parisians endured their hunger. On 7 October 1567 the King’s herald was, according to ancient tradition, sent to Saint-Denis to demand that Coligny, d’Andelot and Condé disarm and give themselves up. The three Huguenot leaders replied that they were still loyal to their King and wanted only to deliver the country from its present troubles. Time for talk had passed; on 10 November the seventy-four-year-old Constable rode out of Paris at the head of the King’s 16,000-strong army. Charles had made an impetuous attempt to lead a body of troops himself but had beenrestrained by Montmorency. Holding the bridle of the King’s horse, he said, ‘Sire, this is not how Your Majesty should risk his person; it is too dear to us and we would require at least ten thousand cavalrymen to accompany you.’⁸ Frustrated, Charles turned back and at three o’clock in the afternoon battle was joined outside the Porte Saint-Denis.

A sweeping and courageous cavalry charge by Condé nearly won the day, but was repulsed by the royal troops and by nightfall the Huguenot army had quitted the field. During the battle the Constable received a mortal wound: having endured several blows to the face and head, an arquebus shot in the back left him dying in agony. Carried back into the city and after much suffering, the doughty old man died on 12 November. Catherine and the King ordered a funeral with such honours that it could almost have been mistaken for a royal interment. Montmorency was finally laid to rest at Saint-Denis near the tomb of Henry II, the king he had loved and served so faithfully.

Having lost the Constable, Catherine, blind to public reaction and to common sense, announced that her adored son Henri of Anjou had been made Lieutenant-General and now commanded the army. Only sixteen years old, hitherto petted and surrounded by the Queen Mother and her women, living a cosseted life to protect his health, given specially warmed rooms, kept out of drafts and generally pandered to, he hardly presented a confidence-inspiring military leader, nor were the men she picked as his military advisers. These were the Duke of Nemours (recently married to the widowed Duchess of Guise), the Duke de Montpensier, whose Catholic zealotry was directly proportionate to his lack of military experience, and Artus de Cossé, the Royal Secretary of Finance. The parlous state of the treasury provided no source of comfort if it reflected his strategic and military abilities, though by creating him a Marshal of France it was perhaps hoped that he would find the inspiration that had hitherto evaded him. To complicate matters further, the relationship between Cossé and Montpensier could, at best, be described as one of intense mutual dislike. Catherine’s appointments reflected political rather than primarily military considerations. Conducting warfare by committee is always a risky undertaking, but when the committee was composed of feuding inadequates led by an effete teenager the risk seemed near-suicidal.

Condé had withdrawn towards the east and eventually joined his forces with those of a large contingent of German Reiters (hired troops from Protestant princes) who had come to his aid. Just before Christmas 1567 Catherine summoned Alava and asked him to join her for a walk in the gardens of the Tuileries where building had started on a new palace. Catherine excused her son’s military incompetence by blaming his youth, but Alava replied uncompromisingly. Why blame her son’s youth, he asked, when she had chosen idiots as his chief commanders? Cossé was a nobody, Nemours was too love-struck to think of war and Montpensier was a fool. Alava strongly advocated that the Queen Mother appoint Tavannes, a great and loyal soldier who would not flinch from doing his duty. In January 1568 Catherine set out for Anjou’s headquarters at Châlons-sur-Marne. The disarray at the camp was palpable; had it not been for the arguments between two senior officers, who preferred to arrange a private quarrel between themselves before taking up arms, the German Reiters might have been prevented from uniting with the enemy. Furthermore, with the army chiefs unable to agree on a course of action, the Queen found her son and his commanders in hopeless chaos. She therefore placed Tavannes at the head of the vanguard of the army and it was decided they should proceed to Troyes to try to stop the Huguenots from capturing the heartlands of France.

Catherine’s visit hid a secret mission, for she also planned to meet Châtillon, who represented the rebels, to attempt to seek a formula that would end the war. She returned to Paris on 15 January 1568 and Châtillon followed two days later under a secret royal safe conduct, staying at the Château of Vincennes just outside the city. Yet word had somehow leaked out that Catherine was in talks with the Huguenot rebels. The Parisians, who had been squeezed for money to help levy troops and keenly felt the effects of the rebels’ blockade, were astounded that Catherine would consider anything less than the total obliteration of the enemy. Charles received offers of money by the citizens and by Philip II to continue the war. Walking with Charles one evening in the rue Saint-Denis, the Queen Mother lifted her touret de nez to say something to her son when an angry voice from the menacing crowd shouted, ‘Sire! Do not believe her, for she never tells you the truth!’ A scuffle followed, resulting in the royal guards beating the protesters. Catherine nevertheless continued her discussions with Châtillon and his advisers, under cover of night. Her efforts proved fruitless and the talks broke up without any agreement being reached.

Despite the bitterly cold winter of 1567–68 the Huguenots and the German Reiters made substantial advances, reaching Auxerre, and then marching onwards to take Beauce. In the face of the Protestants’ spectacular progress, Anjou was forced to pull back his forces to Nogent-sur-Seine, and Paris once again lay open to the enemy. Charles, already angry at his brother’s military command and his incompetence, declared that he himself would lead the royal army to victory, but Catherine refused to allow the King to expose himself to any such danger. Condé managed to reach Chartres in late February and laid siege to the city, but his campaign stopped there due to lack of money and supplies. During the war both sides had been pillaging the countryside, leaving the land ravaged and the peasants in a precarious state; now there remained nothing to live off. Condé sent out an urgent appeal to the King for talks, which he answered and which resulted in the Peace of Longjumeau, signed on 22–23 March 1568.

As usual, the peace treaty was unpopular with both sides. The King agreed to pay the German Reiters to get them off French soil, the Edict of Amboise was reinstated without restrictions, and in exchange the Huguenots were ordered to hand back towns they had taken during the short and chaotic Second War of Religion. The danger Condé ignored, but which alarmed Coligny, was that Charles would keep his army intact, leaving the Protestants vulnerable to a fresh attack. In the months that followed the so-called peace, the fighting and troubles continued and were considered by some to be much worse than the short war itself. Protestants refused to quit the towns they had taken; they killed priests, burned churches, destroyed religious statues and desecrated relics. Catholics immediately responded by murdering Protestants. The barbarity on both sides continued to grow; in just one of many horrific incidents a priest captured by angry Protestants was slashed, laid out and had his wounds repeatedly covered with vinegar and salt. He took eight days to die.

As the violence escalated it became clear that the Peace of Longjumeau could barely even be called a truce. One Protestant historian claimed that more Huguenots died during the period after the second civil war than during both the first two wars together.⁹ By late April 1568, when Catherine called the King’s Council, she no longer knew what to do. On 28 April she fell desperately ill with a high fever, suffering from agonising headaches, vomiting and pains to her right side. By 10 May, as Catherine started to bleed from her nose and mouth, the council began discussions about what to do in the event of her death. During these urgent council meetings Charles had been lost without his mother to guide him. True to form, Lorraine pressed for the most stringent measures of repression and punishment against the Huguenots. De L’Hôpital, equally true to form, advised further conciliation. Just as all hope seemed lost, Catherine’s fever abated. Though the illness and sweating returned in the evening – her bedclothes had to be changed four or five times each night – she managed to do a little work during the day. By 24 May she sat propped up in bed dictating letters and sent one to Coligny about the theft of money intended to pay for the Reiters’ departure. Charles’s almost total paralysis without his mother beside him had been an alarming taste of what to expect if Catherine died.

Of the rash of political assassinations that followed the Treaty of Longjumeau, one commentator remarked,

Since France has learned Italian fashion in murder, and the custom has grown of hiring assassins to cut throats as one might make a deal with a mason or a carpenter, it would be almost a novelty if several days were to pass without some crime of this sort, whereas formerly a man might not hear of a murder more than ten times in his lifetime. We know that it was the ancient custom of France, and more religiously observed than anywhere else, to attack an enemy openly, never taking him unarmed or otherwise at a disadvantage, but always warning him giving him time to draw and considering it unfair to attack him two to one. Of all this I have heard the Italians make great sport.¹⁰

The blame for this was often laid, however unfairly, at the door of the Medici Queen and the Italian habits she had imported with her. There was a general sense that social order was disintegrating; what had begun as a religious struggle was turning into an anarchic, depraved free-for-all.

Catherine received a sombre letter from Coligny: ‘I shall remind Your Majesty of what I have sometimes said before, that religious convictions cannot be removed by fire, nor by sword, and they consider themselves highly favoured who can employ their lives in the service of God.’¹¹Catherine, unimpressed, replied, ‘The King wishes justice to be done to all his subjects without discrimination … I believe that his will would produce more effect if arms were not in the hands of those who should not have them rather than in his, which is why everyone resists and prevents him from being obeyed.’¹² At the same time as this exchange of letters, Condé withdrew with a large force to Picardy, allegedly swearing, ‘As long as the Cardinal of Lorraine remains at Court the peace will not hold. I will fetch him and stain his gown red with his own blood.’ The sullen and uneasy atmosphere meant that neither Catherine nor Charles went anywhere without a strong escort. Speaking during an audience with the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Correro, she whispered, ‘Who knows … even in this room there may be people who would like to see deaths, and would kill us with their own hands. But God will not allow it for our cause is His and that of all Christianity.’¹³ She also told him that according to astrological predictions, fortunes changed every seven years and that since her miseries had started seven years earlier she believed that her destiny might now improve with the stars.

A few weeks after this conversation French Protestant troops, led by the Sieur de Cocqueville, crossed Picardy heading for Flanders to join a force of their Dutch co-religionists. Catherine despatched Marshal de Cossé to intercept the rebels who were caught in time. Cocqueville was summarily executed and his head sent back to Paris, where it was stuck on a pike. The Dutch members of the rebel army fared little better, delivered by the French to Alba as prisoners, from whom they could expect only torture and death. Catherine was unusually sanguine – in both senses – about the fate of the rest of the captured French rebels: ‘I think some of them should be punished by execution and the rest sent to the galleys.’¹⁴ On hearing the news of the public beheading of Counts Egmont and Horne in June (the latter a cousin of Coligny’s), Catherine remarked to the Spanish ambassador that she considered it a ‘holy decision’ and hoped to be able to follow the same example in France with a leader of the Huguenots.¹⁵ Accordingly, on 29 July 1568 Catherine ordered Tavannes and his men to capture Condé. She wanted ‘cette tête si chère’ (this valuable head).

A warning of the Queen Mother’s intentions reached Condé and Coligny by an intercepted message which read ‘The quarry is in the trap, she wishes the hunt to begin.’ The pair set out at the end of August from Noyers with their families and followers for the stronghold of La Rochelle on the south-western coast of France. As they made their way across country towards their haven, the numbers of the Huguenot party of men, women and children grew until it was hailed as a modern ‘Flight from Egypt of God’s chosen people’. The Admiral wrote lyrically to the Queen Mother and the King on the subject, though he stressed that unarmed people fleeing to a safe haven could hardly be considered a rebellion. In early 1567 Jeanne d’Albret had fled France for her own Principality of Béarn with her son Henri of Navarre without Catherine’s permission, who as a result called her ‘the most shameless woman in the world’. She had thus placed herself beyond the pale. On 24 September Jeanne and the fifteen-year-old Henri met the party and four days later the leaders of the Huguenot movement rode into La Rochelle at the head of their followers. Jeanne had brought with her substantial reinforcements and immediately set them to work strengthening the town against the expected royalist onslaught. She sent word to Catherine that this was a fight for ‘the service of my God and of the true faith’, ‘the service of my King and the observance of the Edict of Pacification’, and also nothing less than ‘the right of blood’.¹⁶

As the economic situation in France deteriorated and the hatred born of the two civil wars of religion festered, the number of Huguenots grew. Calvin’s efficient organisation of proselytising agents infiltrating France, combined with the Protestant printing presses, had spread the reformers’ message throughout the country to increasingly receptive people of all classes. Calvin’s doctrinal tenets had by now become enmeshed with the complex conflicting political agendas that sprang not only from the different powerful factions within the kingdom itself, but also from the fear that Spain might join with the French ultra-Catholics and attempt to annihilate the Protestants altogether. The Netherlands provided a salutary example as to how the Spanish suppressed religious dissidents.

Hearing the news of the escape of the Huguenot leaders and their likening themselves to Moses’ followers’ flight from Pharaonic tyranny, Catherine (particularly maddened by the biblical parallel) wrote that now her sole aim was to ‘run them to earth, defeat them and destroy them before they can … do something worse’.¹⁷ Since early August she had been suffering not just the horrific spectacle of the kingdom sliding back into anarchy, but also of the King’s failing health. Retiring with over 10,000 men for protection to the Château of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, Catherine had watched over her fever-racked son as he grew progressively weaker. Though she did not know it, he was reaching the later stages of tuberculosis and his bouts of illness would grow more frequent and more desperate. While caring for him she received word that Pius V had authorised a special levy from the French clergy to subsidise the coming war. This provoked the final schism between her and her moderate Chancellor Michel de L’Hôpital. He argued that by allowing the order to go forth Catherine could only expect to provoke the Protestants further. She was enraged by his continued policy of appeasement and the Chancellor – once Catherine’s guide and even mentor – found himself isolated in the council and finally discredited. On 19 September 1568 he refused to seal the orders arising from the papal bull which allowed the alienation of Church property to prepare for the war, at which the Cardinal of Lorraine entirely lost his usual composure and had to be physically prevented from assaulting de L’Hôpital. A few days later the Chancellor retired from the council, pleading old age, and withdrew to his estates, surrendering his seals of office before his departure.

By mid-August 1568 the King had made a slow recovery, returning to the council looking frail and thin. Catherine herself then fell ill with stomach problems. Throughout her life she was prey to such gastric attacks, though it is probable that these were largely self-inflicted due to simple greed. On one occasion she nearly died from eating too much cibreo, one of her favourite Florentine dishes, an irresistible concoction made from gizzards, testicles, offal and cockerels’ coxcombs.¹⁸ Once she and her son had recovered, the royal family left the Château of Madrid for Catherine’s much-loved castle at Saint-Maur a short distance outside Paris. The atmosphere there was grim as the council prepared for war. Anjou was kicking his heels as he waited to lead the army to victory. Charles, who jealously longed to lead his armies himself, played mournful tunes on his horn, stopping only to spit the tubercular blood-flecked sputum from his mouth. Catherine, meanwhile, worked on her own opening salvo against the Huguenots in what was to be called the Declaration of Saint-Maur. This edict effectively revoked the concessions contained in the Treaty of Amboise and banned the practice of any religion in France save Catholicism.

Catherine became distracted with worry when the King fell ill again. An infection in his arm had taken hold after he had been inefficiently but routinely bled, whereupon a huge abscess developed and once again he suffered from high fevers. The physicians feared that he might not survive. Terrified that his arm would be crippled, the young King called his mother and brothers to his side at Saint-Maur. Prayers and Masses were said for his recuperation and salvation throughout Paris. Defying medical opinion – such as it was – Charles recovered sufficiently to lead the procession through the capital that traditionally preceded military expeditions. This culminated at Saint-Denis where the King symbolically placed his crown and sceptre under Divine protection until the war was won.

The Duke of Anjou, once again named Lieutenant-General, departed for Étampes where Catherine soon joined him. After soothing the usual heated discussions among the commanders, she returned to Paris where she supervised matters regarding supplies for the army. This work, once familiar to her as a kind of quartermaster-general for her husband’s forces, provided a piquant reminder of a bygone era. Back then the French were fighting a foreign enemy; now they were fighting each other. No detail proved too small for the Queen Mother’s attention, though she had much to distract her personally. Her daughter Elisabeth was expecting a child again and although only four and a half months pregnant she had gained an enormous amount of weight. On 18 October 1568 Catherine wrote to Philip begging him to ensure that Elisabeth ‘eats but two meals each day and only bread in between meals’. She did not know it, but as she wrote that letter her daughter had already been dead for two weeks.¹⁹

The day after the courier left Paris for Spain with Catherine’s dietary instructions there arrived another messenger bringing the grim tidings of Elisabeth’s passing. She had died at midday on 3 October giving birth prematurely; the barely-formed infant girl died immediately and Elisabeth had expired a few hours later. A typically high-flown official bulletin of the news stated that the Queen had died ‘in a most Christian manner … dressed in the habit of Saint-François, preceded to heaven by the child she carried who had received the holy water of the sacred baptism’.²⁰ The news came first to the Cardinals of Lorraine and Bourbon who decided they would wait until the morning – the courier having arrived in the late afternoon – before telling the King and his mother. When they gave the sad communication to Charles he went immediately to Catherine to break the news to her before she heard it accidentally from a courtier, since word spread fast at Court. Those who saw the Queen Mother’s shock found it agonising to witness. She withdrew from her councillors and attendants without a word, her face an impassive mask as she went alone to her private chapel.

Paradoxically, she and Elisabeth had only become intimate after her daughter had gone to Spain. Once there, Catherine had written frequently to the young Queen pouring out her joys and troubles by letter. In general Catherine had no gift for intimacy with her children unless they were far away; only then did she feel able to unfetter her emotions and express her love. To everyone’s astonishment, a few hours after she had received the dreadful news, the Queen reappeared before the council, quite composed, to swear that she would, despite her tragic loss, dedicate herself to the holy task of prosecuting the war against the Huguenots. She went on to amaze the council further by declaring that if the enemy believed that the death of Elisabeth would loosen French ties with Spain they would be sadly disappointed. ‘King Philip will certainly remarry. I have but one wish and that is for my daughter Marguerite [Margot] to take the place of her sister.’²¹ Catherine suppressed her genuine desolation at Elisabeth’s death, for her duty to her late husband, his children and France always came before her own feelings. There is no doubt that she felt devastated at losing her beloved daughter with whom she enjoyed a close relationship, albeit by letter, yet this moment of self-control – denying herself the right to collapse – was to safeguard a higher cause: the future of the Valois dynasty. Catherine had almost always been mistress of her feelings.

Now liberated from the family connection with Catherine, Philip, who had loved Elisabeth and felt distraught at losing her, nonetheless made it clear that a marriage with Margot was out of the question. He held Catherine in contempt for her handling of the heretics; and he despised the French government’s woolly compromises, for which he held the Queen Mother entirely responsible. He wanted to be left to grieve in peace and have nothing more said about a union with his sister-in-law. Shortly afterwards talk arose of Philip marrying the Holy Roman Emperor’s eldest daughter, Anne. At the same time the Spanish suggested that Charles take the younger daughter Elisabeth as a bride, while Margot, instead, marry the King of Portugal. Appalled, Catherine wrote to her ambassador in Madrid, Fourquevaux, that only a marriage between Margot and Philip could keep the intimate union between France and Spain. All this occurred just as the Cardinal of Guise was in Madrid presenting his condolences to the grief-stricken Philip. Fortunately Catherine managed to overcome her obsession with matchmaking for her children and thought better of fighting that particular matrimonial battle now, realising how grotesquely tactless it was. At the end of her letter to Fourquevaux she enjoined him to burn it as soon as he had read it, an invocation that usually ensures the safe and careful filing of correspondence.

On 24 October a service of remembrance was held for the Spanish Queen. Charles broke with the tradition that the monarch should not attend any such ceremony and stood, dressed in violet, beside his mother in her usual black veils. The pain of the Queen Mother and the grief of the King were so evident that all those who saw them were moved. Yet time for mourning might prove an expensive luxury as the future of Catholicism in France and possibly the House of Valois itself were at stake. Catherine raised money from all possible sources; nor did she spare herself and, as so often before, she used her own personal assets for the welfare of her cause. She even pawned jewellery left to her by her illegitimate ‘brother’, the murdered and now long-dead Alessandro. Cosimo de Medici, Duke of Florence, eager to repatriate the gems, haggled over their value. Surrounded by feudal lords who thought only of themselves and their own interests, an army led by her inexperienced son of seventeen and a king too frail to leave for long, Catherine, unsurprisingly, felt exhausted.

A harsh winter prevented any decisive military engagements. One battle had had to be abandoned before it began because icy conditions prevented the cavalry from moving to new positions. The waiting brought talk of peace and compromise on the council, but Catherine reacted violently against any such suggestion. This time victory must be decisive. Alava found her tearful and tired when he came to Saint-Maur for an audience. She had just returned from a meeting of the council, which had gone on for far longer than was usual and had forced her to miss Mass, something she rarely did. ‘I may well seem tired, as I have to carry the whole burden of government alone.’ She told him, ‘You would be very surprised if you knew what has just happened. I no longer know whom to trust. Those whom I believed to be wholly devoted to the service of the King, my son, have turned around and are opposing his wishes … I am scandalised by the conduct of members of the council; they all want me to make peace.’²² In another moment of self-pity, she later commented upon Elizabeth of England’s good fortune that ‘all the subjects share the Queen’s religion; in France it’s quite another matter’.²³ Elizabeth would have been delighted had Catherine’s remark been true, but she too faced mounting problems in England where the old religion was still adhered to in large parts of the country, but it is nonetheless instructive about the Queen Mother’s state of mind at the time.

Catherine continued her work, even paying off the Protestant Prince of Orange, who had brought a large force to aid the Huguenots, to leave France. This aroused furious protest from the Spanish ambassador, though for the government it had the desired effect since a substantial number of enemy troops quitted the kingdom. At Joinville, the Guise family seat, she found time to deal with family matters and asked the Dowager Duchess of Lorraine to enter into talks with the Emperor and to help obtain his consent to a marriage between Charles and his daughter Anne. She hoped for a reply from the Emperor Maximilian while at Metz on 22 February 1569, where she inspected work on the fortifications, visited the citadel and walked the ramparts. As part of her general review she paid a call to a hospital – always a perilous business – and shortly afterwards fell ill with a high fever and pains down her right side.

Just as Catherine lay incapacitated and feverish, Anjou was about to engage in his first important battle. The night before it, Catherine lay half sleeping, half delirious. Believing their mother to be dying, Margot, Charles, François and the Duke and Duchess of Lorraine had gathered round her bed. Margot wrote in her memoirs, ‘She cried out, still asleep, as though she could see the battle of Jarnac, “See how they run! My son is victorious. Ah! My God! Pick up my son he is on the ground! Look, look among the troops, the Prince de Condé is dead!”’²⁴ The following night the King, already asleep, awakened to receive the news of the victory at Jarnac. He went to his mother still wearing his nightgown with a robe covering his shoulders and roused Catherine to tell her of the battle. It was just as she had dreamt it. Catherine could not contain her joy; Anjou, her favourite son, was victorious and vindicated. Te Deums were sung and church bells rung throughout Metz, and the Queen Mother made a good, if slow, recovery.

The battle of Jarnac, situated near Cognac, was notable, apart from being a royalist victory against the Huguenots, for the death of their leader Louis de Condé. The royal army, though nominally led by the Duke of Anjou, was de facto commanded by Catherine’s trusty Marshal de Tavannes. On 13 March 1569, after the royalists had finally succeeded in engaging Coligny and his men in battle, Condé – who had injured his leg the night before – received an urgent summons to bring help to Coligny. According to the account of his death by the Huguenot soldier and scholar Agrippa d’Aubigné, Condé mounted his horse awkwardly and broke his injured leg so badly that the bone pierced the side of his boot. Despite this he cried out, ‘To face danger for Christ is a blessing,’ adding, ‘Brave and noble Frenchmen, this is the moment we have waited for!’²⁵ He then galloped off at the head of a splendid though hopeless cavalry charge.

Coligny had already countermanded his request for help but the news did not reach Condé in time. When his horse was killed from under him, the prince could not get to his feet properly, weighed down by his armour and the pain of his broken limb. As he surrendered and lifted his visor, the two soldiers to whom he gave himself up, named d’Argens and M. de Saint-Jean, recognised him. D’Argens had fought at Angoulême with Condé where the prince had saved his life. Saint-Jean also knew him by sight. They advised him to keep his visor down if he valued his safety. The approaching guard of the Duke of Anjou, led by a Captain Montesquiou, spotted the prince and shouted, ‘Kill! Kill!’ At this Condé turned, saying, ‘You cannot save me, d’Argens.’ At that instant Montesquiou shot Condé in the back of the neck, the bullet exiting from his right eye.

Anjou savoured the death of his princely relative. His men tied Condé’s body to a mule and paraded it around to shouts and jeers of the engaging ditty: ‘He who avoids the Mass, now is tied to an ass’. Such behaviour was worlds away from the chivalric traditions that had been so highly valued by Anjou’s father. In stark contrast, when François, Duke of Guise had taken Condé prisoner after the battle of Dreux, he had invited him to stay with him and the pair dined together. Now, asked what to do with a crowd of other captives nearby, Anjou is alleged to have ordered, ‘Slay them!’ He left this task to the Swiss mercenaries. Such conduct on the field of battle demonstrates clearly how the usual courtesies and traditions of knightly conduct had been entirely replaced by the passion for vengeance, as a result of the appalling acts each side had committed against the other since the first religious civil war. It is a truism that civil wars and wars of religion tend to produce the worst atrocities; how much the more ghastly, therefore, were France’s civil wars of religion.

Anjou paid a brief visit to his family and proudly announced his victory to Charles, who looked hot with jealousy at his brother’s ‘glory’ in the field. Henri, using a pun on the town of Meaux where Condé had tried to kidnap the royal family, announced to his brother, ‘Monseigneur, you have won the battle. The Prince de Condé is dead. I have seen his body. Alas the poor man had caused us tant de maux [so much trouble].’

Admiral de Coligny – who had hitherto been the true strategic and military commander of the Huguenots behind Condé, the active figurehead with the lustre of royal legitimacy – now stood alone as the head of the party in matters of policy, inspiration and military strategy. He became the protector of the two fatherless Huguenot princes, Henri of Navarre, the sixteen-year-old First Prince of the Blood, and Condé’s fifteen-year-old son, also named Henri. Jeanne d’Albret led the boys out before the Huguenot troops who hailed the princes as their nominal leaders, backed by their military hero, the wise, courageous and morally gleaming Gaspard de Coligny. The Catholics knew he presented a formidable enemy. Untainted by scandal, greed or any of the usual vices, he was a leader who inspired near-veneration among his Huguenot followers.

While Anjou paid his short visit to Court he took particular care to flatter Margot, Catherine’s youngest daughter, who had only come to live there with her brother François the previous year. Since leaving the royal nursery at Amboise she had grown close to Charles and he worshipped her. She knew how to calm his temper tantrums and soon became his companion and friend. The lonely King had found someone with whom he could share his secrets. By contrast Catherine barely addressed a word to Margot; she still seemed to resent her evident health, lovely face and high spirits, only speaking to her daughter when issuing an order or a reprimand. In her memoirs the princess remembered trembling when summoned by her mother. Anjou decided that he must make good use of Margot – still innocent and trusting – to help him keep command of the army, as the King openly talked of leading the troops himself. He wanted her to keep him abreast of any important developments while he was away campaigning.

Margot was in raptures to have the confidence of her glamorous brother, who told her that she had always been his favourite sibling. This closeness must now be turned to their advantage: ‘It was good for our childhood,’ he told her, ‘but we are no longer children.’²⁶ He added, ‘I know no one as fit as you, whom I consider my second self. You have all the requisite qualities: judgement, and intelligence and fidelity.’²⁷ He insisted that she attend the lever and coucher of their mother whenever possible and accompany her wherever she went, knowing well that all the ultimate political decisions were made there. Anjou confided that ‘he would elect a cruel death’ rather than lose command of the army and he promised that she would win their mother’s approval if she aided him in this way. He encouraged his sister to ‘Forget your timidity and speak to her confidentially. … It will be a great joy and honour for you to be loved by her. You will do much for yourself and for me; and I shall owe you, after God, the preservation of my good fortune.’²⁸ He also fostered the hope in Margot that Catherine would come to treat her daughter quite differently if she followed Anjou’s instructions.

Shortly afterwards Catherine spoke to Margot about all that Anjou had said and told her, ‘Your brother has told me of your conversation, he no longer considers you a child. It will be a great pleasure for me to talk to you as I would to your brother. Wait upon me, do not fear to speak to me freely, I wish it.’²⁹ Margot later recalled, ‘Such language was new to me, for until then I had lived aimlessly, with no thought of anything but dancing or hunting … for I was not yet old enough for such ambition and I had been brought up in such dread of my mother that not only did I not venture to speak to her, but I died when she looked at me, for fear I had done something to displease her.’ Now she felt ‘a happiness so unbounded that it seemed to me as if all the pleasure I had known until then had been merely the shadow of this, and I looked upon the past disdainfully’. It was the unlucky princess’s initiation into political and Court intrigues, a bent for which she soon developed about as much talent as her former sister-in-law, Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 7 April 1569 the Spanish ambassador received an audience with the still bedridden Queen Mother. The conversation that took place that day provided the basis for Catherine’s later reputation as ‘The Black Queen’, a scheming poisoner and a murderer. The ambassador reported his suggestion to the Queen Mother that the time had come for la sonoria. This expression means the ‘death knell’, although in this context he would probably have meant the assassination of the chief rebels, Coligny, his brother d’Andelot and the leading Protestant nobleman François III de La Rochefoucauld. Allegedly Catherine replied that she had thought of the very same solution seven years earlier at the start of the troubles. She added that not a day had passed without the regret that she had not taken these extreme measures at the time. She had, however, put a considerable price on the heads – dead or alive – of Coligny, d’Andelot and La Rochefoucauld only three days earlier. The offers of 50,000 écus for Coligny, 20,000 for d’Andelot and 30,000 for La Rochefoucauld were large enough to tempt would-be assassins.

On 7 May 1569 d’Andelot died at Saintes, probably of poison since Coligny and La Rochefoucauld fell seriously ill at the same time. Coligny was so sick that word of his death abounded; too weak to walk he had himself carried about in a litter, mingling with the public to quash the rumours. When Catherine heard the news she wrote to Fourquevaux, ‘We greatly rejoiced over the news of d’Andelot’s death … I hope that God will mete out to the others the treatment they deserve.’³⁰ Cardinal de Châtillon, Coligny’s surviving brother, escaped to England where he wrote to Frederick III, the Elector-Palatine, denouncing the Queen Mother as responsible for exacting vengeance, the traditional preserve of the Almighty. He accused Catherine of poisoning his brother, d’Andelot, and explained that not only had the post-mortem borne this out but a young Florentine who claimed responsibility for these crimes had also bragged at making the Admiral and his brother drink from the same cup. Châtillon claimed that the Italian was even then petitioning the King for his reward.

A rumour now circulated about a scented apple that the Queen Mother had supposedly ordered as a gift for Condé at the start of the religious troubles. When the apple arrived from her infamous parfumier Maître René, the prince’s surgeon, Le Cros, happened to be present. His suspicions aroused, he took the apple and held it to his nose to smell it. Immediately his nostrils became red and inflamed. Shaving a small piece of the fruit into his dog’s food, he mixed it up and as soon as the dog ate a mouthful it dropped dead. Whether this particular story is true or not, we can be certain that by now Catherine had resorted to some sinister and highly unusual practices to dispatch her enemies.

Alava reported to Spain that in January Catherine had been approached by an Italian sorcerer who worked in a squalid place known as the ‘Vallée de Misère’ on the Quai de Mégisserie in Paris. He promised to rid the Queen Mother of her chief enemies and she decided to hire him. His instructions were to cast lethal spells on Condé, Coligny and d’Andelot that would kill them. A metal worker arrived from Strasbourg to cast three bronze effigies of the intended victims. These were the same height and size as the three men and were cast standing up, with their faces looking upwards. Each one had very long hair dressed to stand up on end. A complex set of screws implanted into the effigies allowed their limbs to move and their chests and heads to be opened up. Each day, locked away in his frightful workshop, the Italian cast horoscopes for his three victims and adjusted the screws accordingly. Sure enough, when they died both Condé’s and d’Andelot’s bodies reportedly had strange marks upon them that did not seem to relate to their overt causes of death. At the time it was thought that the poison had caused old wounds of d’Andelot’s to flare up; Condé’s marks apparently left those who saw them baffled. Yet whatever supernatural powers Catherine’s sorcerer might have conjured up, Coligny seemed protected and continued to trouble the kingdom. By July, after complaints from the Queen Mother, the Italian blamed his failure to kill the Admiral on his star that was now too high and powerful, adding that he would need no fewer than seventeen such effigies of Coligny to have the desired effect.

In August a report reached Philip from Alava which told of another attempt on Coligny’s life. He had met a German who had recently come from Coligny’s camp and after bragging about how much he knew of the Admiral’s daily routine he talked of a plot to kill Coligny. When Alava spoke to the King and his mother they asked him to beg the German to keep silent and merely told the ambassador to await good news. Sir Henry Norris, the English ambassador, also wrote of a German named Hajiz who had been paid to poison the Admiral. A few weeks later French Protestants arrested a man named Dominique d’Albe. Travelling with a laissez-passer from Anjou, he nevertheless claimed to be a servant of Coligny’s and a search of his belongings revealed a sachet of powder hidden in his clothes that turned out to be poison. D’Albe was tried and hanged on 20 September 1569.³¹ There can be little doubt that Catherine was taking great pains to rid herself of Coligny by any means possible, though without success.

Anjou and the War Council now desperately needed Catherine’s presence. The Huguenots had the support of various German Protestant princes and their armies. The Duke of Bavaria, the Duke of Zweibrücken and the Flemish prince Louis of Nassau were facing a royalist army of French Catholics, Swiss mercenaries, Walloons financed by Spain, Italians from Rome and Tuscany, and soldiers led by the Margrave of Baden and Count Ernst de Mansfelt. The sides were numerically fairly evenly matched by the summer of 1569, with the royalists holding a slight advantage. Despite this the royalist troops felt that their victory at Jarnac had been wasted and were angry that the armies of the foreign Protestant princes had successfully joined forces due to blunders by Charles’s commanders. Unfortunately the Duke of Zweibrücken, a corpulent bon viveur, died before he had the pleasure of seeing his troops link up with their Protestant allies. The Marshal de Tavannes said his death was due to drinking ‘the wine of Avalon’, wine apparently poisoned by a village doctor and captured by the duke’s men. More likely, however, he died simply from drink. Catherine, always ready to see the hand of God in everything, rejoiced at her enemy’s death and wrote to the King, ‘You see, my son, how God helps you more than any man, and kills your enemy without even striking a blow.’³² During the summer of 1569 Catherine travelled to the front, watched minor engagements, reviewed the troops, helped raise further men and generally stiffened the resolve and morale of the royalists’ often lacklustre leadership.

In July 1569 the King passed an edict confiscating all Huguenot property and assets, and on 13 September Coligny was condemned to death in absentia for the crime of lèse-majesté. The execution would take place at the Place de Grève when finally they captured him. Stripped of his honours, titles and estates, the Admiral suffered the immediate seizure and sale of his goods and properties. For the time being, however, the crowd had to make do with an effigy that hung in the Place de Grève. The man himself was proving highly resilient and difficult to capture or kill. The Huguenots, having generally enjoyed the advantage throughout the summer, decided despite Coligny’s original reservations to lay siege to Poitiers on 14 July. By clever diversionary tactics, on 5 September Anjou managed to lift the siege. Despite his age he was quickly learning the art of warfare.

On 3 October 1569, on the advice of Tavannes, Anjou engaged the enemy in battle near Moncontour, north-west of Poitiers. The Huguenots wore white surcoats – with yellow and black armbands in memory of the late Duke of Zweibrücken. The King’s men fought in the traditional surcoats emblazoned with the white cross of the Crusaders and royal shoulder sashes of red. Before the action Tavannes climbed to a spot from which he could see the disposition of the enemy army. Such was his confidence that upon his return he declared to Anjou, ‘Monseigneur, with the help of God, we shall have them. I will never more take up arms again if we do not fight and vanquish today. Let us march! In the name of God!’³³

At about three o’clock in the afternoon Montpensier received the order to attack. The Swiss soldiers, by custom, kissed the ground and a blast of trumpets gave the usual signal to prepare. Alerted, the Huguenot army responded by singing psalms as they too readied themselves. During the action Tavannes skilfully outflanked Coligny and forced him to change the disposition of his troops. Despite a brave cavalry charge the Huguenot forces could not break the royalist line and the Admiral, badly wounded by a shot in the face, passed the command to Louis of Nassau. The prince rallied the Huguenot cavalry once more and made a last desperate attack on the royal troops. In the midst of the action, Anjou was knocked off his horse; his bodyguard, led by François de Carnavalet, surrounded him as he remounted and eventually the enemy horsemen were forced off the field. At dusk in the mist the screams of the many Huguenot soldiers left behind could be heard begging and protesting for their lives, shouting that they were ‘bons papistes’ before they had their throats slit. It is thought that as many as 15,000 French Protestant soldiers were put to death that night. Many old scores were settled.

Coligny and the still substantial Huguenot army – his cavalry had remained virtually intact though he had lost most of his infantry – withdrew, leaving a series of strongholds that would block the approaches to La Rochelle. The first was Saint-Jean-d’Angély, south-east of the Huguenots’ citadel. Coligny continued further south to recover and recruit reinforcements with which he hoped he would soon return. Tavannes had sensibly urged immediate pursuit and destruction of the Huguenots, but the arrival of the King, anxious to share and participate in Anjou’s military glory, meant a change of tactics. Charles insisted that the strongholds be taken instead of being bypassed. Thus, as the second winter of the war set in, there was no prospect of an early end to the fighting.

On 9 October, shortly after the battle of Moncontour, a close friend and senior captain of Coligny’s named the Seigneur de Mouy was shot in the back and killed by Charles de Louviers, Seigneur de Maurevert. This young nobleman, originally a client of the Guise family, had gained access to the Huguenot leadership by presenting himself as a victim of his former patrons and had been greatly helped by the warm welcome extended to him by de Mouy who had once been his tutor. Maurevert’s goal had been to assassinate the Admiral but lacking an opportunity he had killed de Mouy instead. Maurevert presented himself proudly at the royalist camp where most regarded him with great disgust for shooting his trusting former tutor in the back, though Anjou received him with pleasure. The King ordered that the killer receive an ‘honourable gift’ and awarded him with nothing less than the collier of the Order of Saint-Michel. Maurevert would later be known to history as ‘le tueur du roi’ (the King’s killer).

The siege of Saint-Jean-d’Angély proved long and arduous. The royal finances were in a parlous state and morale among the men was low. By contrast the Huguenots appeared defiantly buoyant despite the defeat at Moncontour. As was her wont, Catherine opened peace talks during the siege. The discord in the royalist camp grew as the latent rivalry between the King and Anjou simmered barely under control, and Catherine had further to contend with jealousy between Monluc and Montmorency-Damville, her two southern commanders.³⁴ Exhausted, she wrote to her ambassador in Madrid, ‘Please make the Catholic King, my good son, believe that extreme necessity has obliged us to take the path of pacification rather than that of force.’³⁵ Of course the news appalled Philip who threw every obstacle he could into Catherine’s path.

Jeanne d’Albret featured prominently in the peace talks but she considered the royalists’ approaches with caution and mistrust, writing, ‘A peace made of snow this winter that would melt in next summer’s heat’ was not worth the bother. She rejected Catherine’s offer of peace with freedom of conscience, insisting that absolute freedom of worship must form part of any lasting agreement. She appealed to the Queen Mother: ‘I can scarcely persuade myself having once had the honour of knowing Your Majesty’s sentiments intimately that you could wish to see us reduced to such an extremity or to profess ourselves of no religion whatever … We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than abandon our God, the which we cannot maintain unless permitted to worship publicly, any more than a human body can live without meat or drink.’³⁶

During talks in April 1570 between Coligny’s brother-in-law, Charles de Téligny, and the council, the King became so enraged by fresh Protestant demands that with one hand on his dagger and the other clenched into a fist he lunged at the astonished emissary, who was only saved from being stabbed by the quick reaction of those around Charles IX forcibly holding him back. Coligny meanwhile continued to enjoy a military progress towards Paris. Catherine felt embattled as Jeanne d’Albret accused the ‘black-hearted’ Cardinal of Lorraine of sabotaging peace prospects and claimed that his spies had been caught carrying evidence that he had hired three assassins to kill her son Henri of Navarre, her nephew Henri de Condé, and Coligny. It seems highly unlikely that the cardinal would have acted without Catherine’s agreement. Jeanne stopped short, however, of actually accusing the Queen Mother of complicity in the supposed plot. Philip of Spain pushed Catherine a step further towards peace and away from Spanish influence by marrying the Emperor’s eldest daughter, Anne, who the Queen Mother had hoped would make a fine bride for Charles. Not content with this, Philip also brought strong pressure to bear upon the Portuguese to prevent the young King Don Sebastian from marrying Margot.

Margot’s marriage featured prominently in the peace talks, but not a union with Don Sebastian. The groom now proposed for her was Henri of Navarre, the Bourbon prince. This would unite the senior and junior branches of the royal family and also act as a beacon of hope for future peace in the kingdom. After all, the marriage of Elizabeth of York to Henry Tudor had finally brought an end to the English Wars of the Roses and perhaps the same remedy would work in France. The match held the added and intriguing possibility that should Henri de Bourbon inherit the throne of France, the blood of the Valois and Medici dynasties would continue to live and rule through his offspring with Margot. The Cardinal of Lorraine had other plans, however. He had been somewhat unrealistically promoting a marriage between Margot and his young nephew, Henri, Duke of Guise; he also nursed now increasingly remote hopes of a marriage between his niece Mary, Queen of Scots and Charles or his brother Anjou. Since Mary’s flight to England and effective imprisonment in 1568 this plan had suffered a considerable setback; in consequence he looked upon the young duke and Margot as his most promising matrimonial venture.

The cardinal’s plans flourished thanks to the seventeen-year-old Margot’s genuine attraction to Henri of Guise. The couple flirted and corresponded, but unfortunately for them their letters fell into the wrong hands. Anjou, whose almost feline sensitivity had aroused his suspicions of a growing closeness between the couple, was told of the correspondence. He felt personally betrayed, his close relationship with Margot being compromised by his friend and rival Guise. Having only recently made her his confidante at Court, his sense of affront was immense. He quickly and spitefully passed the news – probably with some elegantly embroidered additions – on to his brother who he knew felt an unusual attachment to Margot. According to Alava’s cheerful report to Philip in Madrid, on 25 June 1570 at five o’clock in the morning Charles appeared in his mother’s room wearing only a nightshirt and raged about his sister’s clandestine romance. Some sources claim that Henri of Guise barely escaped being caught in the princess’s bed, only saving himself from discovery by climbing from a window, but this is improbable as the despoliation of the King’s virgin sister would have constituted high treason and Guise is unlikely to have risked a death sentence despite his enormous ambitions.

Catherine’s fury was prodigious and she summoned Margot instantly to her room with her governess. When the terrified girl came into the presence of her mother and the King, the pair fell upon her, beating and punching her, and pulling out handfuls of hair. Trying desperately to defend herself, Margot’s nightdress was torn to shreds. Eventually, their fury abated, Charles and Catherine left the wretched girl alone, battered and contused. Charles sent out an order for his bastard brother Angoulême to seize Guise and have him killed. Catherine, realising that Margot must not be seen in such a shocking state, gave her daughter a fresh nightgown, spending over an hour trying to comb her hair and disguise the marks of their blows. Guise received warning of what had happened and managed to save himself by making an immediate announcement of his engagement to Catherine of Clèves, the recently widowed Princesse de Porcien.

There were deep political repercussions from these family dramas. Catherine’s dreams for Margot and her sons to make matches worthy of their dynasty and position were a driving element in her desire for peace. The Guise family, disgraced for having so nearly undone her daughter’s reputation, wisely left Court for their estates. The chance absence of the hawkish Cardinal of Lorraine thus facilitated a conclusion to the peace talks. On 29 July Coligny brought the prospect of agreement closer by writing to Catherine, ‘When Your Majesty will study all my actions since first she knew me until now, she will admit that I am quite different from the portrait that has been painted of me. I beg you, Madam, to believe that you have no more devoted servant than I have been and have wanted to be.’³⁷ Catherine sent out an invitation for Coligny to come to Court, which he declined. A few days later, on 5 August, the King’s Council met three times, the third meeting not ending before eleven o’clock at night.

Catherine worked tirelessly to find a solution acceptable to all. The result was the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 8 August 1570. Its main terms largely mirrored the Peace of Amboise of 1563: it allowed freedom of conscience and freedom of worship with restrictions as to location. La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban and La Charité were granted as places de sûreté; in addition goods and properties seized during the civil war were to be restored. There was to be no discrimination against Huguenots regarding universities, schools or hospitals to which they were to enjoy the same access as other citizens. Once again both sides greeted this enlightened treaty with little enthusiasm. The Catholics grumbled that they were giving away more than was needed, while the Protestants thought that they were not being given enough.

Charles solemnly commanded his councillors to swear adherence to the treaty’s terms and Catherine wrote, ‘I am glad that my son is now old enough to see that he is better obeyed than in the past,’ although she was careful to add, ‘I will help him with my counsels and with all my power; I will assist him in enforcing the terms which he has conceded, as I have always wanted to see the kingdom restored to the state it was in under his royal predecessors.’³⁸ The Queen Mother was underscoring her determination to continue holding on to the reins of power, notwithstanding Charles’s increasing maturity and desire to form his opinions independently. Though physically feeble and prey to attacks of ill health, he had begun to grow in confidence as a man and a king.

The Treaty of Saint-Germain has long been the subject of controversy. It is hard to say how much faith Catherine truly placed in the peace and its concessions. It is clear from her behaviour since the ‘Surprise de Meaux’ that she was ready to take whatever steps she considered necessary to rid herself of her enemies including her ‘regalian right of summary execution’ and going to the other extreme of resorting to the alleged powers of the black arts. After three increasingly bitter civil wars she had learned through experience that the two religions could not coexist peacefully in France. She had also learned that her truest efforts at conciliation aroused nothing but mistrust from both Catholics and Protestants.

War brought only ruin to France and peace had thus far only come as a result of exhaustion on both sides, not outright victory. It is probable that Catherine – Florentine to her core – understood that peace, however temporary, would give her time to form a policy for the future. With that in mind she would present her habitual conciliatory face as she watched carefully for future opportunities to heal the wounded kingdom and bring it back under full control of the House of Valois. Catherine had always regarded time as her ally. The Treaty of Saint-Germain proved her right.

^fn1 Toul, Metz and Verdun.