This had the desired effect: Margot, terrified of her family, agreed to stay away from de Guise. Feeling that she would not be safe from rumours of their involvement until he was married, she went to her sister Claude, hoping that she could compel him to marry someone else. And Claude pulled through: de Guise was married in short order to another woman; Margot and her family were present at the ceremony, because this is all like a very murder-y high school where no one can ever avoid seeing each other at all the big parties.
But the lessons she learned through this cruel sequence of events was one that would come to serve her in the near future; in order to survive within this court and her family, she would need to remain vigilant and careful, and suspicious of the motives of everyone around her.
So it was that, despite her best attempts, Catherine was not able to find anyone better to marry Margot off to than Henry of Navarre. Margot, a devout Catholic, saw this marriage as literally being condemned to Hell. She may have been brought up in basically Game of Thrones, but her religious devotion was absolutely genuine. Physicians at the time claimed she died of natural causes, but rumours persisted that Catherine had killed her with a set of poisoned gloves.
The preparations and wedding itself occurred during a heatwave, which just sort of sets the scene for the way it was all about to explode. Everyone was sweaty and tired and wearing all of the layers of clothing one had to in the 16th century.
As was the custom for a royal marriage, the ceremony itself was followed by four days of celebration. As was not the custom, at the end of the days of festivity, Catherine and arranged for many of the visiting Protestants to be assassinated.
Due to his high profile, most of the most prominent French Protestants came to Paris to celebrate his marriage — especially as they, too, assumed Margot was going to convert. There was a lot of backroom deals going on, everybody was backstabbing everybody but blaming others for it, and it wound up with Catherine arranging an assassination attempt on a leading Protestant general, framing the Huguenots for the crime. The night this happened, Margot was sitting with Huguenots, all of whom were surprised and confused by this turn of events; clearly, Margot saw, none of them had been involved.
And yet the next day, word began to spread that the Huguenots had been behind the attempt themselves, in their attempt to make it look like the Catholics had done it… it was a mess, and Catholics started killing Protestants and it became known as the St. Happy wedding, Margot and Navarre!! He was pursued by armed guards, including four archers!!! Margot, acting entirely on instinct and in the first major moment that truly defined her true character, threw herself between this stranger and the palace guards determined to kill him.
The guards were ordered away, and Margot was permitted to tend to the wounded man, saving his life. She then set out to see what she could do, as the Queen of Navarre, to help protect other Huguenots who were under threat, including her new husband.
Navarre, the person, had been forced to convert to Catholicism, saving his life for the time being. Having humiliated him through this conversion and parading him into Catholic mass, Catherine next set out to have their marriage annulled.
Given that they had only just been wed, and that they almost definitely had not consummated their union, this could have likely been done quite quickly. And once Margot was freed of her husband, Catherine could more easily have Navarre killed. But the thing is: Margot knew that was the plan.
And so, in a decision that would cement the nobility first hinted at when she saved the stranger, she refused the annulment. In so doing, she put her husband under her protection, ensuring her family could never kill him. In a brutal twist, Navarre never learned that she had done this for him. Her true motivations were never revealed until her memoirs were published, long after both of them had died. The way that life always does, even after a life-altering, horrifying thing happens, life returned pretty much to normal.
She joined up with the most fabulous squad at court, led by Henriette de Cleves and Catherine de Clermont-Dampierre, attending all of their soirees and parties, socializing with artists and writers and great thinkers of the age.
Since he valued her skill in projecting the image of royal dignity and wished to show her the greatest marks of respect, he also entrusted her with responsibility for receiving ambassadors: in short, she once again had an important position at court and, even more surprising, she became an intimate of the royal family. Upon her death in , she was sincerely mourned.
Mourned and not forgotten. The publication of her memoirs in brought a surge in interest. No prince or princess of the royal family had ever before written anything so personal, described family quarrels so openly, or provided so much information about the rulers of the time.
Moreover, Marguerite wrote in a vivid, often startling language that pointed forward to Saint-Simon, the great diarist of the court of Louis XIV and the Regency that followed. Her memoirs were so popular that they were reprinted several times through the course of the century.
Then the curtain fell. As an authentic historical figure and as a memoirist, Marguerite vanished during the eighteenth century. If anyone still spoke of her at all, it was only to keep alive a scandalous and meretricious legend that focused on her lust, disorderly life, lavish spending, and immorality. As the French Revolution loomed, her memory suffered in particular from a groundswell of hostility toward queens, flamboyant princesses, and courtesans that culminated in the explosion of hatred for Marie Antoinette.
The First French Empire was to prove no kinder to exceptional women, for Napoleon ratified the revolutionary principle of the juridical inferiority of women. And yet, thirty years after the fall of the Empire, Marguerite made her comeback. The most plausible explanation for that unexpected revival is a novel by Alexandre Dumas published in , in which, dexterously blending fact and fiction, he transformed a frozen image into an impetuous, unforgettable, popular character. Out of Queen Marguerite, he created Queen Margot.
Four new editions of her memoirs appeared between and , as well as a substantial selection of her letters. The Valois princesses seemed to inspire composers. How could anyone suffocating under the rule of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, help dreaming of a century marked by a taste for pomp and festivities, set against a backdrop of warfare, duels, intrigues, and treason?
Dumas had better luck, choosing Marguerite of Valois for the first in his series of historical novels. As befitted a skilled feuilleton writer who never mistook himself for a historian, Dumas tried above all to create characters who draw the reader in, frequently at the expense of subtlety and accuracy.
Dumas makes a shining hero of Henry of Navarre. His depiction of Margot is more nuanced. He portrays her as sensual, adventurous, and yet practical. He also endows her with qualities of mind and presents her as better educated than her husband and brothers.
Dumas doubtless took inspiration from an anecdote related by a number of contemporary observers: the young princess was said to have been the only member of her family capable of answering the Polish ambassadors in Latin upon their arrival at court. Merry, mischievous, quick-witted, she has a common touch that appeals to ordinary people.
The novel ends when Margot is only twenty-one, with a long and agitated life still before her. The popularity of the novelized history of Marguerite of Valois has never waned since it first appeared. In France, there has been an unbroken chain of editions up to the present day, three of them in the past ten years.
Over the years, the queen has continued to tempt filmmakers, biographers, and journalists, but they have interpreted her story in an increasingly dubious fashion. Margot became a nymphomaniac in the s, in particular in a very widely read book by Guy Breton. It would be difficult to make anything more insidious, anything less historically accurate. Whereas Catherine, in her role as regent first and later through sheer force of character and the extraordinary authority that she exercised over all her children, had always terrorized her daughter.
One of the challenges facing any historian of this period is the sheer profusion of themes that need to be handled. Goldstone displayed the same qualities in her previous books. She lands upon the handsome, grizzled La Mole Vincent Perez , and then there she is up against the wall with a man she never knew, a man who should have been her enemy, in the city that belongs to her new husband. It is a shockingly beautiful scene, yet also perverse and raunchy. She hikes up her embroidered skirt, made of the finest material, and has a Protestant soldier penetrate her on the very streets where the massacre of his people takes place.
Ruined me. She is not a frail queen, a Disney princess with an evil, plotting mother, or a ready victim. It is not religion could Medici represent not just bad faith, but the worst faith? She is both a paperback heroine and her antithesis. She will merely attain a survival attenuated by disgrace. Her mother—ugly, unloved by her husband, and finding refuge in cunning—plotted to use her as bait for the brutal massacre.
The daughter—beautiful, not perhaps so cunning—resisted the plot, and tried to annul her dangerous sexuality by reconstituting it as love of the first man, La Mole, who really tempted her. See also, among others: Princess Di. The role of queen is that of the greatest visibility and least actual power in the land.
She is protected not as a wife but as a mother to an heir, so it is no wonder that tales of queens becoming adulteresses are common throughout historical adaptations, if not history itself.
Skip to content.