Some have stated that the Queen bribed them; this was wrong, for in each province there were authorities who would not have yielded to her wishes. I do not say that she did not win them over later; that was a fine stroke of policy, showing her resourcefulness. But it was not she who summoned the Assembly. On the contrary, she laid all the blame on it, because it lessened both the King's authority and her own. It was the Church party which had long demanded the Assembly, and voluntarily called it together, and required by the articles of the last peace that it should be convened and held; to which the Queen strongly objected, foreseeing this abuse of power. Nevertheless, to quiet their incessant clamour, they were allowed to convoke it, to their own confusion and injury, not to their profit and contentment as they had thought; and for this reason they resorted to arms. Again it was not the Queen who did so.
Neither was it she who caused certain of them to be seized when they captured Mont-de-Marsan, La Fere in Picardy, and Cahors. I recall what the King said to M. de Moissans, who came to him on behalf of the King of Navarre. He repulsed him roughly, telling him that while these men were cajoling him with fine speeches, they were taking up arms and seizing cities.
This, then, is the way in which the Queen was the fomenter of all our wars and civil fires, the which she not only did not light but employed all her energies and efforts to extinguish, abhorring to see the death of so many nobles and landed gentlemen. And without that and her commiseration, those who bore against her a mortal enmity would have found themselves in dire straits, themselves laid beneath the sod, and their party not flourishing as it now is. All this must be imputed to her goodness of heart, of which we now stand in sore need--so everybody agrees and the poor people cry: "We no longer have the Queen Mother to make peace for us!" It was not through lack of her efforts that she did not succeed when she went to Guienne recently to treat for peace, at Coignac and Jarnac, with the King of Navarre and the Prince de Condé. I know that which I have witnessed--the tears in her eyes and the regret in her heart to which these princes would not yield; and the result we possibly see in the evils which afflict us to-day.
They have wished to accuse her of having been implicated in the War of the League. Why, then, should she have undertaken to conclude the peace I have just mentioned, if she had been? Why should she have appeased the riots of the barricades of Paris; and why reconciled the King with the Duc de Guise, as we have seen, if it were only to destroy the latter?
In short, no matter how much they slander her, never shall we have in France another so active in peace.
But the chief accusation against her is the massacre of Paris [of Saint Bartholomew]. All that is a sealed book to me, for I was just then setting out by boat from Brouage; but I have heard it said on good authority that she was not the prime mover in it. Three or four others, whom I might name, were much more active in it than she, pushing her forward and making her believe, from threats made upon the wounding of Admiral Coligny, that the King was to be killed, with herself and all her children, or else that the country was to be still worse involved in arms. Certainly the Church party were very wrong to utter such threats as they are said to have made, for they hastened the downward steps of the poor Admiral and procured his death. If they had kept their own counsel and uttered no word, and allowed the Admiral's wounds to heal, he could have left Paris in safety and quiet, and nothing else would have happened. M. de La Noue has been strongly of this opinion. Indeed, he and M. de Strozze and I have talked it over more than once, and he has never approved the bravados, the bold threats and the like which were openly made in the King's Court and his city of Paris. And he blamed no less strongly his brother-in-law, M. de Theligny, who was one of the hottest heads of them all, calling him a downright fool and blockhead. The Admiral never was guilty of this loud talk, at least not in public. I do not say that in secret or with his closest friends he did not say things. And this was the true cause of his death and of the massacre of his friends, and not the Queen, as was charged, although there are many who never have been able to get the idea out of their heads that this was a train long laid and a fuse well concealed. It is false. The least passionate agree with me, and the more violent and obstinate think otherwise; and thus very often we credit to kings and great princes the ordering of the natural course of events, and say afterwards how prudent and provident they were and how well they could dissimulate; when all the while they knew nothing more about it than a plum.
To return again to the Queen, her enemies have given it out that she was not a good Frenchwoman. God knows with what zeal she urged that the English be driven from Havre de Grâce, and what she said about it to M. le Prince, and how she made him go, with many cavaliers of his party, with the crown-companies of M. Andelot, and other Huguenots, and how she herself led this army, usually on horseback, like a second beautiful Queen Marfisa, exposing herself to the arquebusades and the cannonades like one of her captains, always watching the batteries, and saying that she would never be at ease until she had taken this city, and driven the English out of France, and hating worse than poison those who had sold it to them. And she accomplished so much that finally she restored it to France.
When Rouen was besieged I saw her in the greatest of fury, when she saw enter English reinforcements, by means of a French galley captured the year before, fearing that this place, failing to be captured by us, might fall into the control of the English. For this reason she "pushed hard at the wheel," as the saying is, to capture it, and never failed to come each day to the fort Sainte-Catherine to hold council and to watch the bombardment.
I have often seen her passing along the covered way to Sainte-Catherine, while the arquebusades and cannonades rained shot around her, and her paying no attention to them. Those who were there saw it as well as I. There are living to-day ladies who accompanied her, to whom the firing was not pleasant (I know this for I saw them there), and when M. le Connétable and M. le Guise remonstrated with her, telling her some accident might happen to her, she merely laughed and said that she saw no reason why she should spare herself more than they, since her courage was as good as theirs, although her sex had denied her the same strength. As for hardship, she endured that very well, either on foot or horseback. I think that for a long time there never was a better queen or princess on horseback, nor one who sat her mount with better grace; not seeming for all that like a masculine woman, formed like some fantastic Amazon, but a noble princess, beautiful, gracious and sweet.
It was said of her that she was strongly Spanish. Certainly while her good daughter was alive [Elizabeth, wife of Philip II of Spain] she loved the Spanish. But after her daughter died we knew--at least some of us--whether she had cause to love either the land or the people. It is true that she was always so prudent that she desired to receive the Spanish King always as a good son-in-law, to the end that he should treat her daughter the better, as is the way with good mothers; and also that he might never come to trouble us in France, nor make war here according to his warlike tastes and natural ambition.