Volume II Part 38 (1/2)

Besides the Flemish project, an important domestic affair engaged the attention of the king and his counsellors at the time of Coligny's visit.

This was the proposed marriage of young Henry, the Prince of Bearn, and after his mother's death heir of the crown of Navarre, to Margaret of Valois, the youngest sister of Charles the Ninth. Margaret, who had lately entered upon her twentieth year, was a year and a half older than the prince.[854] In a court and a state of society where the birth of a daughter was the signal for the initiation of an unlimited number of matrimonial projects, it is not surprising that this match, among many others, was talked of in the very infancy of the parties, perhaps with little expectation that anything would ever come of it. The prince was a sprightly boy, and, it is said, so delighted his namesake, Henry the Second, that the monarch playfully asked him whether he would like to be his son-in-law--a question which the boy found no difficulty in answering in the affirmative. In fact, the matter went so far that, when the young Bearnese was little over three years of age, Antoine of Bourbon wrote to his sister, the d.u.c.h.ess of Nevers, with undisguised delight, of ”the favor the king has been pleased to show me by the agreement between us for the marriage of Madam Margaret, his daughter, with my eldest son--a thing which I accept as so particular a token of his good grace, that I am now at rest and satisfied with what I could most ardently desire in this world.”[855] But the boy's mother had not been inclined to accept the king's offer to take and educate him with his own children.[856] She was not very familiar with the disorders of the royal court; but she had seen enough to convince her that the quiet plains at the foot of the Pyrenees could furnish a safer school of manners and morals. More than once the idea of the connection between the crowns of France and Navarre was revived, and in 1562 Catharine bethought herself of it as a means of detaching the unfortunate Antoine from the triumvirs, whose cause he had espoused with such strange infatuation.[857] But other plans soon diverted the ambitious mind of the Italian queen. Moreover, the civil wars between Protestants and Roman Catholics made the marriage of the daughter of the ”Very Christian King” to the son of the most obstinate Huguenot in France appear to be out of the range of propriety or likelihood. Meantime, Margaret's union with Sebastian of Portugal was seriously discussed.[858]

The tiresome negotiations ended in January, 1571, with a haughty refusal of her hand, dictated, as we have seen, by Philip himself. A few weeks later, as Margaret informs us in her Memoires--which may generally be credited, except where the fair author's love affairs are concerned--the Prince of Navarre began again to be mentioned as an available candidate for her hand. She expressly states that it was from the Montmorencies that the first suggestion came[859]--that is, from Francois de Montmorency, the constable's oldest son. This n.o.bleman, while he had inherited a great part of his father's influence, as the head of one of the most honorable feudal families in France, having its seat in the very neighborhood of the capital, had ranged himself with the party opposed to that with which Anne had been identified, and, although in outward profession a Roman Catholic, was in full sympathy with the liberal political views of his cousin, Admiral Coligny. This fact effectually disposes of the story that the marriage was proposed, however much it may subsequently have been entertained, as a trap to ensnare the Huguenots, thus thrown off their guard.

Marshal Biron, another statesman of the same type, was the messenger to carry the royal proposals to La Roch.e.l.le. He pictured to the Queen of Navarre in glowing colors the advantages that would flow from this alliance, the strength it would impart to the friends of mutual toleration, the consternation and dismay it would carry into the camp of the enemy. At the same time he declared that Charles the Ninth felt confident that, although he had not as yet obtained from the Pope the dispensation which the relations.h.i.+p subsisting between the parties, as well as their religious differences, rendered necessary, Pius the Fifth would ultimately place no obstacle in the way. Jeanne d'Albret gratefully acknowledged the honor offered by the king to her son, but, before accepting it, professed herself compelled to consult her spiritual advisers respecting the question whether such a marriage might in good conscience be entered into by a member of the reformed church.[860] As for Margaret herself, she gives us in her Memoires little light as to the state of her own feelings at this time. If we may imagine her so indifferent, she demurely expressed her acquiescence in whatever her mother might decide, but begged her to remember that ”she was very Catholic,” and that ”she would be very sorry to marry any one who was not of her religion.”[861] A few months later, however, when the prospects of the marriage became less bright, because of the difficulties arising from religion, it would seem that, with a perversity not altogether unexampled, Margaret became more anxious to have it consummated. At least, Francis Walsingham writes to Lord Burleigh: ”The gentlewoman, being most desirous thereof, falleth to reading of the Bible, and to the use of the prayers used by them of the religion.”[862]

[Sidenote: The Anjou match abandoned.]

Meanwhile, the project of a marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou had, as we have seen, been virtually abandoned. The matter of religion was the ostensible stumbling-block; it can scarcely have been the real difficulty on either side. As to Anjou, the sincerity of his religious convictions is certainly not above suspicion. But he was the head of a party in his brother's kingdom, a party that professed unalterable devotion to the ”Holy See” and the old faith. If the eternal rewards of his fidelity to the papacy were at all problematical, there was no doubt whatever in his mind of the advantage of so powerful support as that which the ecclesiastics of France could give him. He was resolved not to throw away this advantage by openly agreeing to renounce all exercise of his own religion in England, and this, too, without the certainty that the concession would secure to him the hand of the queen. And, unfortunately, it was impossible for him to gain this certainty. Elizabeth was already pretty well understood. Her fancies and freaks it was beyond the power of the most astute of her ministers to predict or to comprehend. If the barrier of religion were demolished, there was no possibility of telling what more formidable works might be unmasked. And so Henry, rather more sensible upon this point than even Catharine and Charles, who would have had him shrink from no concessions, made a virtue of necessity, definitely withdrew from compet.i.tion for the hand of a woman for whose personal appearance it was impossible for him to entertain any admiration; whose moral character, he had often been told and he more than half suspected, was bad;[863] and told his friends, and probably believed, that he had had a narrow escape. The queen, on the other hand, was perhaps not conscious of insincerity of purpose. She must marry, if not from inclination, for protection's sake--the protection of her subjects and herself--so all the world told her; and a marriage that would secure to England the support of France against Spain was the best. But that she sought excuses for not taking the Duke of Anjou is evident, even though she strove to make it appear to others, as well as to herself, that the refusal came at last from him.[864] And she had her advisers--subjects who in secret aspired to her hand, or others--who, in an underhand way, stimulated her aversion to Henry. It is not unlikely that the Earl of Leicester, despite his ardent protestations of zealous support of the match, was the most insidious of its opponents. ”While 'the poor Huguenots' were telling Walsingham in tears that an affront from England would bring back the Guises, and end in a ma.s.sacre of themselves, Leicester was working privately upon the queen, who was but too willing to listen to him, feeding her through the ladies of the bedchamber with stories that Anjou was infected with a loathsome disease, and a.s.sisting his Penelope to unravel at night the web which she had woven under Cecil's direction in the day.”[865]

[Sidenote: The praise of Alencon.]

So the negotiation of a marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, after being virtually dead for about a half-year, breathed its last in January, 1572. But the full accord between the two kingdoms was too important to the interests of both, and the opportunity of obtaining a crown for one of her sons too precious in the eye of Catharine.

Accordingly the discussion of the terms of the treaty of amity was pressed with still greater zeal, while the French envoy to England was instructed to offer Alencon to Elizabeth in place of his brother. And now were the wits of the statesmen on both sides of the channel exercised to find good reasons why the match would be no incongruous one. Unfortunately, Alencon, as already stated, was short even for his age; but this was no insuperable obstacle. ”Nay,” said Catharine de' Medici to Sir Thomas Smith, when she was sounding him respecting his mistress's disposition, ”he is not so little; he is so high as you, or very near.” ”For that matter, madam,”

replied Smith, ”I for my part make small account, if the queen's majestie can fancie him. For _Pipinus Brevis_, who married _Bertha_, the King of Almain's daughter, was so little to her, that he is standing in Aquisgrave, or Moguerre, a church in Almain, she taking him by the hand, and his head not reaching to her girdle; and yet he had by her Charlemain, the great Emperor and King of France, which is reported to be almost a giant's stature.”[866] It was not so easy to dispose of the disparity in years,[867] and perhaps still less of Alencon's disfigurement by small-pox; for that unlucky prince added this to the long catalogue of his misfortunes. The course of the treaty for mutual defence was, happily, somewhat smoother than that of the matchmaking. On the eighteenth of April the treaty was formally concluded,[868] and shortly after, Marshal Montmorency and M. de Foix were despatched to administer the oath to Queen Elizabeth. This solemn ceremony was performed on Sunday, the fifteenth of June. The deputies were received with every mark of distinction, and the marshal was publicly presented by the queen with the insignia of the Order of the Garter.[869] The commission of the French envoys instructed them to press upon Elizabeth the Alencon marriage as a powerful means of cementing the alliance; and it empowered them to expend money to the extent of ten or twelve thousand crowns in buying the consent of those lords who had hitherto opposed the union. The Earl of Leicester, whose straightforwardness may have been suspected, was to be tempted by the special offer of some French heiress in marriage, the name of Mademoiselle de Bourbon being suggested.[870] But the marriage was not destined to be accomplished, although the negotiations were kept up until the very time of the ma.s.sacre, and Elizabeth sent to Catharine de' Medici her hearty acknowledgment of the honor she had done her _in offering her all her sons successively_.[871] At the very moment when the fearful blow fell which was to render any such marriage impossible, Catharine was planning and proposing an interview between Elizabeth on the one side, and herself and Alencon on the other. That the dignity of neither party might be compromised, it was suggested that the meeting might take place some calm day on the water between Dover and Boulogne.[872] Elizabeth had reconsidered her partial refusal, and encouraged the project; the n.o.bles, the ladies of the court, the council, all favored it; and in a letter written four days after the streets of Paris flowed with blood, but before the appalling intelligence had reached him, the French amba.s.sador wrote to Catharine: ”All who are well affected cry to us, 'Let my Lord the Duke come!'”[873]

[Sidenote: Pope Pius the Fifth alarmed.]

[Sidenote: The Cardinal of Alessandria sent to Paris.]

[Sidenote: The king's a.s.surances.]

It cannot be supposed that such a leaning could be manifested toward the Huguenot party, and such amity concluded with the Protestant kingdom of England, without arousing grave solicitude on the part of the Pope and other Roman Catholic sovereigns of Europe. Pius the Fifth determined, if possible, to deter Charles from permitting the hateful marriage between his sister and the heretical Prince of Navarre. He therefore promptly despatched his nephew, the Cardinal of Alessandria,[874] first to Sebastian of Portugal, whom he found no great difficulty in persuading again to entertain the project of a marriage with Margaret of Valois, and thence, with the utmost haste, to the court of Charles the Ninth.[875] The legate, when admitted to an audience, unfolded at great length the grievances of the pontiff--the mission of a heretic, formerly a bishop, as envoy to Constantinople, the rumored opposition of the king to the Holy League against the Turk, but especially the contemplated nuptials of a daughter of France with the son of Jeanne d'Albret. Charles replied to these charges in the most politic manner. He prayed that the earth might open and swallow him up, rather than that he should stand in the way of so ill.u.s.trious and holy league as that against the infidel. As to his zeal for the Christian faith, he demonstrated it--albeit some might object that the fraternal affection which was reported to subsist between the parties hardly rendered this argument convincing--by the fact of his having exposed, in its defence, his dearest brother, the Duke of Anjou, to all the perils of war. By civil war the resources of his kingdom had been so weakened that they barely sufficed for its protection. He justified the Navarrese marriage by alleging the remarkable traits which made Henry superior to any other prince of the Bourbon family, and by the great benefit which religion would gain from his conversion. In short, Charles was profuse in protestations of his sincere determination to maintain the Catholic faith; and, drawing a valuable diamond ring from his finger, he presented it to the legate as a pledge, he said, of his unalterable fidelity to the Holy See, and a token that he would more than redeem his promises. The cardinal legate, however, declined to receive the gift, saying that he was amply satisfied with the plighted word of so great a king, a security more firm than any other pledge that could be given to him.[876] Such seem to have been the a.s.surances given by Charles on this celebrated occasion, vague and indefinite, but calculated to allay to a certain extent the anxiety of the head of the papal church.[877] There is good reason to believe that the king's intention of fulfilling them, not to say his plan for doing so, was equally undefined; although, so far as his own faith was concerned, he had no thought of abandoning the church of his fathers. The expressions by means of which Charles is made to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated ma.s.sacre,[878] of which, however the case may stand with respect to his mother, it is all but certain that he had at this time no idea, can only be regarded as fabulous additions of which the earliest disseminators of the story were altogether ignorant. The fact that the cardinal legate's rejection of the ring was publicly known[879] seems to be a sufficient proof that it was offered simply as a pledge of the king's general fidelity to the Holy See, not of his intention to violate his edict and murder his Protestant subjects. The government made the attempt in like manner to quiet the people, whom even the smallest amount of concession and favor to the Huguenots rendered suspicious; and the words uttered for this purpose were often so flattering to the Roman Catholics, that, in the light of subsequent events, they seem to have a reference to acts of treachery to which they were not intended to apply.

[Sidenote: Jeanne d'Albret becomes more favorable to her son's marriage.]

The doubt propounded by Jeanne d'Albret to the reformed ministers, respecting the lawfulness of a mixed marriage, having been satisfactorily answered, and the devout queen being convinced that the union of Henry and Margaret would rather tend to advance the cause to which she subordinated all her personal interests, than r.e.t.a.r.d it by casting reproach upon it, the project was more warmly entertained on both sides. Yet the subject was not without serious difficulty. Of this the religious question was the great cause. To the English amba.s.sadors, Walsingham and Smith, Jeanne declared (on the fourth of March, 1572) in her own forcible language, ”that now she had the wolf by the ears, for that, in concluding or not concluding the marriage, she saw danger every way; and that no matter (though she had dealt in matters of consequence) did so much trouble her as this, for that she could not tell how to resolve.” She could neither bring herself to consent that her son with his bride should reside at the royal court without any exercise of his own religion--a course which would not only tend to make him an atheist, but cut off all hope of the conversion of his wife--nor that Margaret of Valois should be guaranteed the permission to have ma.s.s celebrated whenever she came into Jeanne's own domains in Bearn, a district which the queen ”had cleansed of all idolatry.” For Margaret would by her example undo much of that which had been so a.s.siduously labored for, and the Roman Catholics who had remained would become ”more unwilling to hear the Gospel, they having a staff to lean to.”[880]

[Sidenote: Her solicitude.]

It was this uncertainty about Margaret's course, and the consequent gain or loss to the Protestant faith, that rendered it almost impossible for Jeanne d'Albret to master her anxiety. ”In view,” she wrote to her son, ”of Margaret's judgment and the credit she enjoys with the queen her mother and the king and her brothers, if she embrace 'the religion,' I can say that we are the most happy people in the world, and not only our house but all the kingdom of France will share in this happiness.... If she remain obstinate in her religion, being devoted to it, as she is said to be, it cannot be but that this marriage will prove the ruin, first, of our friends and our lands, and such a support to the papists that, with the good-will the queen mother bears us, we shall be ruined with the churches of France.” It would almost seem that a prophetic glimpse of the future had been accorded to the Queen of Navarre. ”My son, if ever you prayed G.o.d, do so now, I beg you, as I pray without ceasing, that He may a.s.sist me in this negotiation, and that this marriage may not be made in His anger for our punishment, but in His mercy for His own glory and our quiet.”[881]

But there were other grounds for solicitude. Catharine de' Medici was the same deceitful woman she had always been. She would not allow Jeanne d'Albret to see either Charles or Margaret, save in her presence. She misrepresented the queen's words, and, when called to an account, denied the report with the greatest effrontery. She destroyed all the hopes Jeanne had entertained of frank discussion.

[Sidenote: The Queen of Navarre is treated with tantalizing insincerity.]

”You have great reason to pity me,” the Queen of Navarre wrote to her faithful subject in Bearn, ”for never was I so disdainfully treated at court as I now am.... Everything that had been announced to me is changed.

They wish to destroy all the hopes with which they brought me.”[882]

Catharine showed no shame when detected in open falsehood. She told Jeanne d'Albret that her son's governor had given her reason to expect that Henry would consent to be married by proxy according to the Romish ceremonial.

But when she was hard pressed and saw that Jeanne did not believe her, she coolly rejoined: ”Well, at any rate, he told me something.” ”I am quite sure of it, madam, but it was something that did not approach that!”

”Thereupon,” writes Jeanne in despair, ”she burst out laughing; for, observe, she never speaks to me without trifling.”[883]

[Sidenote: She is shocked at the morals of the court.]

But it was particularly the abominable immorality of the royal court that alarmed the Queen of Navarre for the safety of her only son, should he be called to sojourn there. The lady Margaret, she wrote--and her words deserve the more notice on account of the infamy into which the life as yet apparently so guileless was to lead--”is handsome, modest, and graceful; but nurtured in the most wicked and corrupt society that ever was. I have not seen a person who does not show the effects of it. Your cousin, the marquise, is so changed in consequence of it, that there is no appearance of religion, save that she does not go to ma.s.s; for, as for her mode of life, excepting idolatry, she acts like the papists, and my sister the princess still worse.... I would not for the world that you were here to live. It is on this account that I want you to marry, and your wife and you to come out of this corruption; for although I believed it to be very great, I find it still greater. Here it is not the men that solicit the women, but the women the men. Were you here, you would never escape but by a remarkable exercise of G.o.d's mercy.... I abide by my first opinion, that you must return to Bearn. My son, you can but have judged from my former letters, that they only try to separate you from G.o.d and from me; you will come to the same conclusion from this last, as well as form some idea respecting the anxiety I am in on your account. I beg you to pray earnestly to G.o.d; for you have great need of His help at all times, and above all at this time. I pray to Him that you may obtain it, that He may give you, my son, all your desires.”[884]

[Sidenote: Death of Jeanne d'Albret, June 9, 1572.]

Such were the anxieties of the Queen of Navarre in behalf of a son whom she had carefully reared, hoping to see in him a pillar of the Protestant faith. She was to be spared the sight both of those scenes in his life which might have flushed her cheek with pride, and of other scenes which would have caused her to blush with shame. At length the last difficulties in the way of Henry of Navarre's marriage, so far as the court and the queen were concerned, were removed.[885] Charles and Catharine no longer insisted that Margaret should be allowed the ma.s.s when in Bearn; while Jeanne reluctantly abandoned her objections to the celebration of the marriage ceremony in the city of Paris. Accordingly, about the middle of May the Queen of Navarre left Blois and came to the capital for the purpose of devoting her attention to the final arrangements for the wedding. She had not, however, been long in Paris before she fell sick of a violent fever, to which it became evident that she must succ.u.mb. We are told by a writer who regards this as a manifest provocation of Heaven, that one of her last acts before her sudden illness had been a visit to the Louvre to pet.i.tion the king that, on the approaching festival of Corpus Christi (Fete-Dieu), the ”idol,” as she styled the wafer, might not be borne in solemn procession past the house in which she lodged; and that the king had granted her request.[886] During the short interval before her death she exhibited the same devotion as previously to the purer Christianity she had embraced, mingled with affectionate solicitude for her son and daughter, so soon to be left orphans. Her constancy and fort.i.tude proved her worthy of all the eulogies that were lavished upon her.[887] On Monday, the ninth of June, she died, sincerely mourned by the Huguenots, who felt that in her they had lost one of their most able and efficient supports, the weakness of whose s.e.x had not made her inferior to the most active and resolute man of the party. Even Catharine de' Medici, who had hated her with all her cowardly heart, made some show of admiring her virtues, now that she was no longer formidable and her straightforward policy had ceased to thwart the underhanded and s.h.i.+fting diplomacy in which the queen mother delighted. Yet the report gained currency that Jeanne had been poisoned at Catharine's instigation. She had, it was said, bought gloves of Monsieur Rene, the queen mother's perfumer[888]--a man who boasted of his acquaintance with the Italian art of poisoning--and had almost instantly felt the effects of some subtle powder with which they were impregnated. To contradict this and other sinister stories, the king ordered an examination of her remains to be made; but no corroborative evidence was discovered. It is true that the physicians are said to have avoided, ostensibly through motives of humanity, any dissection of the brain, where alone the evidence could have been found.[889] Be this as it may, the charge of poisoning is met so uniformly in the literature of the sixteenth century, on occasion of every sudden death, that the most credulous reader becomes sceptical as to its truth, and prefers to indulge the hope that perhaps the age may not have been quite so bad as it was represented by contemporaries.

The Prince of Bearn now became King of Navarre; and, as the court went into mourning for the deceased queen, his nuptials with Margaret of Valois were deferred until the month of August.