A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Margaret of France
MARGARET OF FRANCE,
Queen of Navarre, daughter of Henry the Second of France and Catharine de Medicis, was born in 1552. Brantôme says, "If ever there was a perfect beauty born, it was the Queen of Navarre, who eclipsed the women who were thought charming in her absence." She walked extremely well, and was considered the most graceful dancer in Europe. She gave early proofs of genius, and was a brilliant assemblage of talents and faults, of virtues and vices. This may, in a great measure, be attributed to her education in the most polished, yet most corrupt court in Europe. Margaret was demanded in marriage, both by the Emperor of Germany and the King of Portugal; but, in 1572, she was married to Henry, Prince of Bearn, afterwards Henry the Fourth of France. Nothing could equal the magnificence of this marriage; which was succeeded by the horrors of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Though Margaret was a strict Roman Catholic, she was not entrusted with the secrets of that horrible day. She was alarmed with suspicions, which her mother would not explain to her, and terrified by a gentleman, who, covered with wounds, and pursued by four archers, burst into her chamber before she had risen in the morning. She saved his life, and by her prayers and tears, obtained from her mother grace for two of her husband's suite. Henry himself escaped the fate prepared for him, and Margaret refused to suffer her marriage to be cancelled.
In 1573, when the Polish Ambassadors came to create her brother, the Duke of Anjou, king of that country, Margaret, as a daughter of France, received them. The Bishop of Cracow made his harangue in Latin, which she answered so eloquently, that they heard her with astonishment. She accompanied the Duke d'Anjou as far as Blamont, and during this journey she discovered a plot of her husband and her next brother, who was become Duke d'Anjou, to revenge the massacre, which she revealed to her mother, on condition that no one should be executed. The princes were imprisoned; but the death of Charles the Ninth, in 1577, set them at liberty. The King of Navarre, continually occupied by new beauties, cared little for the reputation of his wife; yet, when he stole from the court, he commended his interests to her, in a letter he left for her. But Margaret was then confined to her apartments, and her confidants were treated with the greatest severity. Catharine, however, prevented her brother from pushing matters to extremity with her, and by her assistance she obtained a short peace. Margaret then demanded permission to retire to her husband in Guienne; but Henry the Third refused to allow his sister to live with a heretic.
At length open war was commenced against the Protestants, and Margaret withdrew into the Low Countries, to prepare the people in favour of her brother, the Duke d'Alen on, who meditated the conquest of them by the Spaniards. There are curious details of this journey in her memoirs. On her return, she stopped at La Fere, in Picardy, which belonged to her, where she learned that, for the sixth time, peace was made in 1577. The Duke d'Alençon came to Picardy, and was delighted with the pleasures that reigned in the little court of Margaret. She soon returned to France, and lived with her husband at Pan, in Beam, where religious toleration was almost denied her by the Protestants; and Henry showed her little kindness; yet the tenderness with which she nursed him during an illness, re-established friendship between them, from 1577 to 1580, when the war again broke out. She wished to effect another reconciliation, but could only obtain the neutrality of Nerac, where she resided.
After the war, Henry the Third, wishing to draw the King of Navarre, and Margaret's favourite brother, the Duke d'Anjou, to court, wrote to Margaret to come to him. Discontented with the conduct of her husband, she gladly complied, and went in 1582; yet so much was her brother irritated by her affection for the Duke d'Anjou, that he treated her very unkindly. Some time after, a courier, whom he had sent to Rome with important dispatches, being murdered and robbed by four cavaliers, he suspected his sister of being concerned in the plot, and publicly reproached her for her irregularities, saying everything that was bitter and taunting. Margaret kept a profound silence, but left Paris the next morning, saying, that there never had been two princesses as unfortunate as herself and Mary of Scotland. On the journey she was stopped by an insolent captain of the guards, who obliged her to unmask, and interrogated the ladies who were with her. Her husband received her at Nerac, and resented the cruel treatment she had experienced from her brother; but her conduct, and the new intrigues in which she was constantly engaged, widened the breach between them. When her husband was excommunicated, she left him, and went to Agen, and thence from place to place, experiencing many dangers and difficulties.
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 the misery of seeing her friends cut to pieces in the plains below; and though the fortress was impregnable, it was assailed by famine, and she was forced to sell her jewels, and but for her sister-in-law, Eleanor of Austria, she must have perished. The Duke d'Anjou, who would have protected her, was dead; and though, on the accession of her husband to the throne of France, in 1589, she might have returned to court, on condition of consenting to a divorce, she never would do so during the life of Gabrielle d'Estrées.
After the death of the mistress, Margaret herself solicited Clement the Eighth to forward the divorce, and, in 1600, Henry was married to Marie de Medicis. Margaret, in the mean time, did some acts of kindness for the king, and was permitted to return to court, after an absence of twenty-two years. She even assisted at the coronation of Marie de Medicis, where etiquette obliged her to walk after Henry's sister. She consoled herself by pleasures for the loss of honours; and though Henry the Fourth begged her to be more prudent, and not to turn night into day and day into night, she paid but little attention to his advice.
Margaret passed her last years in devotion, study, and pleasure. She gave the tenth of her revenues to the poor, but she did not pay her debts. The memoirs she has left, which finish at the time of her re-appearance at court, prove the elegant facility of her pen; and her poetry, some of which has been preserved, equals that of the best poets of her time. She was very fond of the society of learned men.
"Margaret," said Catharine 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," says Mezeray, "she 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; wanting in fidelity, not in complaisance to her husband; as, at his request, she rose early one morning, to attend to one of his mistresses who was ill. How could Henry reproach her for infidelities, while living himself a life of the most scandalous licentiousness! If Margaret had had a more affectionate and faithful husband, she would doubtless have been a true and affectionate wife. This does not justify her errors, but it accounts for them. She died in 1615, aged sixty-three.