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 illustrious 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 assurances 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 massacre,[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.
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 retard 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 ambassadors, 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 mass celebrated whenever she came into Jeanne's own domains in Béarn, a district which the queen "had cleansed of all idolatry." For Margaret would by her example undo much of that which had been so assiduously 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]
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 God, do so now, I beg you, as I pray without ceasing, that He may assist 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.
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 Béarn, "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]
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 mass; 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 God's mercy.... I abide by my first opinion, that you must return to Béarn. My son, you can but have judged from my former letters, that they only try to separate you from God 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 God; 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]