The negotiations, as one knows, came to nothing. Charles was resolute not to abate one demand for the woman who had all the facile sweetnesses of her brother, all the glib and cunning adroitnesses he knew so well in his intercourse with the other. The family resemblance between them was over-strong; Charles could not avoid suspecting the sister of the same deep, inherent duplicity as the brother.
Margaret had failed, and all her life this sharp and public failure must have remained a hidden sore in memory. She had also, after her defeat, ungracefully to rush back into safety. The period of her safe conduct had almost expired, and information had been received that Charles intended to detain her as prisoner if she exceeded it.
The consequent release of Francis and the terms of the agreement are matters of history. Margaret had no hand in them, and the next momentous incident in which she figured was her own re-marriage with the King of Navarre.
This marriage is among Margaret’s foolishnesses. Henri D’Albret, who had been another of the prisoners taken at Pavia, was eleven years her junior and exceptionally good-looking. Charles V. remarked of him later that, save for Francis, he was the one man he had seen in France. Margaret should have known that to keep the affections of a handsome husband, over whom she possessed the disadvantage of eleven years’ seniority, was anticipating the impossible. But at the time of their first meeting they had intellectually many interests in common, and Margaret, it seems, fell in love with his fascinations. The marriage was not to prove happier than the previous one; but in the beginning everything promised the creature of joyeuse vie a more congenial existence than she had known for many years. Henri de Navarre was an able and conscientious administrator; Bordeaux says of him, “Had he not been so given to women as he was, he would have been irreproachable. He loved his people like his children.”
At Navarre, Margaret made her court the home of three kinds of people—the intellectual, the gay, and the persecuted; for while Francis had been a prisoner in Spain, Louise had established the Inquisition in France. The scholar Berguin was the first notable personality to be martyred by it; but the precedent once established, there followed a never-ending list, drawn from every class of society. Margaret had tried to save Berguin, and, indeed, was all her life, from that date onwards, trying to save some one from the furnaces of the Inquisition. Florimond de Rémond, in his “Historie du Progres de l’heresie,” says—and he was not upon her side, and refers to her elsewhere as a good but too easy-going princess—“She had a marvellous dexterity in saving and sheltering those in peril for religion’s sake.” As a further corroboration, there is Sainte Marthe’s pretty reference, “She made herself a harbour and refuge for the despairing.... Seeing them surrounding this good lady, you would have said it was a hen who carefully calls and assembles its little chickens to cover them with her wings.”
Etienne Dolet, another remarkable scholar, who was at one time the friend of Rabelais, she strove to the last to rescue. She was twice successful, but Dolet was more difficult to save than most people, being by nature inherently quarrelsome. Among the charges made by the Sorbonne against him was the remark he had made, that he preferred the sermon to the mass, while in his writings he had seemed to doubt the immortality of the soul. The first charge alone was considered sufficient reason for burning him. Orriz, the Inquisitor, whom later Renée was to have bitter dealings with in Ferrara, headed the Paris Inquisition; and Orriz, of the feline persuasive manners, is said to have found no occupation so congenial as that of hunting, trying, and making ashes of heretical people. Dolet himself had already said of him, “I never knew any one more ignorant, more cunning, or more lustful after the death of a Christian.” Lanothe Laizon adds an interesting touch to this impression. He writes: “Orriz was grim only to those who did not finance his purse. He became soft and lenient to those who paid him, ... and for a round sum one could get from him excellent certificates of Catholicity.” This leniency, however, could not be relied upon; Orriz had a trick of letting prisoners go and then rearresting them upon another accusation.
Dolet was very brilliant and very eloquent. His epigrams were held to be so good that one of his friends begged him to make one on him, so that his name might go down to posterity. Margaret had invited Dolet to shelter in the safety of Bourges, but he was too reckless to be permanently rescued. He escaped once from prison, and was re-caught, it is said, because he could not keep himself from coming back to see his little son. He had written in his Commentaries, “I now come to the subject of Death, the extreme boundary of life, terrible to those about to die.” It is a wonderful phrase, solemn with a simply worded, haunting veracity.
Margaret herself had, it is said, become touched with more than pure compassion for the new doctrines. And martyrs were being made not only for Lutheranism; a rival reformer—no less abusive—had arisen in Calvin, whom Margaret was supposed among others to have sheltered at Navarre. She certainly corresponded with him, and Calvin upon one occasion censured her for harbouring godless people among her flock. It is, however, wonderful and disturbing to realize how these Protestants, through a sustaining passion for right conduct, bore the unbearable. There are stories of death after death which cannot be read without anguish. These martyrs of the Sorbonne rendered even hideous facts heartbreaking and sweet. In 1557, for instance, Calvin wrote to comfort some doomed disciples in the Inquisition prisons at Paris. Among them was a certain Lady Phillipine de Luny. When the day for her burning came, “the executioners beheld her approach with a smile of happiness on her face, and dressed in white as for a festival.” How did they do it? Phillipine de Luny was not yet twenty-four years of age.
At another bonfire Louis de Marsac was offended because they did not, in leading him to the stake, put a halter round his neck as they had done to the rest of the party; the indignity had been spared him on account of his noble birth. He asked why he was refused the collar of that “excellent order” of martyrs. Another victim, Peter Berger, shortly before, had exclaimed, like Stephen when the flames reached him, “I see the heavens opened.”
These burnings destroyed a good deal of Margaret’s original joyousness of temperament. But nothing lasts; an event that whitens a person’s very lips with horror is over by the morrow; the week after, thousands of trivial incidents have swept between. Domestic existence is full of sanity and healing. Margaret had an engrossing daily life apart from her pitiful struggle to save people who exulted in new conceptions of the soul and immortality. She was often at Paris, and she was also busy at this time with her babies.