A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Margaret of France, Queen of Navarre
Brantome says, if ever there was a perfect beauty born, it was the queen of Navarre, who eclipsed the women who were counted most charming in her absence. Others say, that she had more grace and youthfulness about her than beauty; that she walked well, and was the best dancer in Europe. She gave early proofs of genius, and was a brilliant assemblage of talents and faults, of virtues and vices. This maybe naturally attributed to her education in the most polished and at the same time the most corrupt court in Europe. Margaret was demanded in marriage both by the emperor and the king of Portugal; but, in 1572, was married to Henry, prince of Beam, afterwards Henry IV, of France. Nothing could equal the magnificence of this marriage, which was succeeded by the horrors of St. Bartholemew. Margaret, though far from strict in her way of life, was strongly attached to the Catholic religion; but she was not intrusted with the secrets of that horrible day. She was alarmed with suspicions, which her mother would not suffer to be explained to her, and terrified by a gentleman, covered with wounds and followed by four archers, bursting into her room, and clinging round her. Scarce could her prayers obtain his life; and, after fainting with terror by the way, at the feet of her mother, her tears obtained grace for two of her husband's suite. Henry escaped the fate prepared for him, and Margaret refused to suffer the marriage to be cancelled.
In 1573, when the Polish ambassadors came to elect her brother, the duke of Anjou, king of their country, Margaret, as a daughter of France, received them. The Bishop of Cracow made his harangue in Latin, which she understood, and answered with so much eloquence, that they heard her with astonishment and delight. She accompanied the duke on his way to Poland, as far as Blamont, and during this journey heard of a plot of her husband and Henry her next brother, who was become duke of Anjou, to avenge the massacre, which she revealed to her mother, on condition that no executions should follow the prevention of the plot. The princes finding their designs discovered, put off the execution to another time; but they were seized, and imprisoned. The death of Charles IX. set them at liberty; but the hopes Margaret entertained of being of more consideration on the accession of Henry III. were disappointed, by means of the queen mother, and Dugast his favourite, who abused her to him as the tie of friendship between the king of Navarre and the duke of Anjou, as also of intrigues with one name Bidé; and the brave Bussi d'Amboise, who was, at least, passionately in love with her, and whom she evidently had great esteem for, from the high terms in which she mentions him; with respect to the first, she appears wholly justified.
The king of Navarre, whose heart was continually occupied by new beauties, cared little for the reputation of his wife; yet, when he stole from the court, recommended his interest to her care in a polite letter. She was, however, confined a prisoner in her apartment, her confidents were treated with the greatest severity; but the politic Catherine prevented the king from pushing matters to extremity with her, by whose means she brought about a short peace. Margaret demanded permission to retire to her husband in Guyenne; but Henry III. answered, that he would not permit his sister to live with a heretic. The Catholic league was soon concluded, of which he was declared chief, and an open war commenced against the protestants. Margaret withdrew into the Low Countries, to prepare the people in favour of the duke of Alençon, who meditated the conquest of them from the Spaniards. There are curious details of this journey in her memoirs. On her return, she stopped at Fere, in Picardy, which belonged to her, where she learnt that, for the sixth time, peace was made in 1577. The duke of Alençon came to Picardy, and was delighted with the pleasures that reigned in the little court of Margaret, compared with the cabal and unpleasantness of that of France. She soon returned to France, where love, religion, and treachery reigned in every political movement, and there lived with Henry at Pau, in Beam, where religious toleration was, on the part of the Protestants, almost denied her; and Henry shewed her little kindness; yet the care and tenderness with which she nursed him, during his illness, reestablished friendship between them from 1577 to 1580, when the war again broke out. She wished to effect another reconciliation; but was not listened to, and all she could obtain was the neutrality of the town of Nerac, where she resided.
After the war, Henry III. was determined to draw the king of Navarre, and Margaret's favourite brother the duke of Anjou, again to his court, and for this purpose wrote to his sister to come to him. Discontented with the conduct of her husband towards her, she gladly obeyed in 1582; yet so much was her brother irritated at her affection for the duke of Anjou, that he treated her very unkindly. Some time after a courier, whom he had sent to Rome with an important letter, being poignarded by four cavaliers, who took his dispatches from him, he suspected his sister of being concerned in the plot. And publickly reproached her with the irregularity of her conduct; saying everything that was bitter and taunting. Margaret all the while kept a profound silence; but left Paris the next morning, frequently repeating as she went, that there had never been two princesses so unfortunate as herself and the queen of Scots. On the journey she was stopped by an insolent captain of the guards, who obliged her to unmask; it was then the custom for ladies to travel in masks, which were tied to a ribbon round their waist, and hung down when they entered a town. He also interrogated the ladies with her, and look down their answers in writing. Henry IV. when he knew the truth, resented the unworthy treatment she experienced from her brother. He received her at Nerac; but could not dissimulate the disgust her conduct occasioned. She was engaged in new intrigues there, and the breach grew daily wider between them; when, on his being excommunicated, she left him, and went to Agen, then from place to place, and experienced many dangers, difficulties, and much inquietude. Her charms made a conquest of the marquis de Carnillac, who had taken her prisoner; but though he insured her a place of refuge in the castle of Usson, she had daily the misery of seeing her friends cut to pieces in the plains below; and, though the fortress was impregnable, was assailed by famine, forced to sell her jewels, and even then, had it not been for the aid of her sister-in-law, Eleanor of Austria, she must have perished. The duke of Anjou was dead, who would have protected her; and though she might have returned, after the accession of her husband to the throne of France, on condition of consenting to a divorce, she would never do so during the life of Gabrielle d'Estrees. After her death, tired of the retreat she lived in, she herself solicited Clement VIII. to forward it, which he did, and Henry was married to Mary de Medicis in 1600. Margaret, in the mean time, made herself serviceable to the king, and in recompence was permitted to return to court in 1005, after an absence of 22 years. She even assisted at the coronation of Mary de Medicis, where etiquette obliged her to walk after Henry's sister. She consoled herself by pleasure, for the loss of honours; and though Henry IV. begged her to be more prudent, and not to turn night into day and day into night, she paid little attention to his advice. She passed her last years in devotion, study, and pleasure. She gave the tenth of her revenues to the poor; but did not pay her debts. The memoirs which she has left, which finish at the time when she reappeared at court, prove the elegant facility of her pen, and the curious preserve pieces of her poetry, which equal those of the best poets of her time. She was particularly fond of the company of learned men, especially of the famous Brantome, who has numbered her amongst his Illustrious Women. "Margaret," said Catherine de Medicis, "is a living proof of the injustice of the Salic law; with her talents she might have equalled the greatest kings."
"The last of the house of Valois, she," says Mezeray, "inherited their spirit; she never gave to any one, without apologizing for the smallness of the gift. She was the refuge of men of letters, had always some of them at her table, and improved so much by their conversation, that she spoke and wrote better than any woman of her time."
She appears to have been good-natured and benevolent; and wanting in fidelity, not in complaisance, to her husband, as, at his request, she got up one morning to attend one of his mistresses who was ill.