If only Marguerite de Valois had been born in England.
That is what I found myself thinking as I researched and wrote about this much-maligned princess. Setting aside the myths about her (and I will get to those in a minute), and looking at the historical record, it is clear that Marguerite was highly intelligent, politically astute, and, in her later years, a serious force in the literary life of France. Arguably her political acumen exceeded that of her brothers, making her more similar to her strong-willed, politically expert mother, Catherine de Médicis. Yet, as the Valois princes died one by one and left Marguerite the last legitimate royal of her line, Salic Law kept her from ruling in France as her contemporary, Elizabeth I, was doing so ably in England. She might have made another great sovereign queen, but fate was not kind to Marguerite de Valois.
Nor was history.
As long as a royal line endures, those who go before will be memorialized by people with a vested interest in maintaining their reputations. When a dynasty expires, its last years are recounted by people who often have agendas that make it tempting to denigrate their predecessors. Such was the fate of Valois in the late sixteenth century. No member of the royal family was exempt from the attacks of anonymous political pamphlets during their lifetimes or after. Anti-Valois propagandists seeking to degrade Marguerite—like the pamphleteers who, in a later era, skewered Marie Antoinette—chose that easiest and most ancient path for destroying a woman: allegations of rabid sexual desire and wanton conduct. Marguerite owes most of the defamation of her character to a single such work, Le divorce Satyrique. This pernicious tract mocked and insulted her as it stated, purportedly in the first-person voice of her husband, grounds for the annulment of her marriage—an annulment essential to the production of a Bourbon heir for the man who was no longer merely King of the Navarre but King of France. That such propaganda should have been taken for fact seems astounding today. But early chroniclers of history were often not particularly concerned with objectivity. As Robert J. Sealy argues in The Myth of the Reine Margot: Toward the Elimination of a Legend, “The documentary sources for our knowledge … were written during the wars of religion and, all too frequently, are colored by political expediency…” Even some later histories written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make no pretense at objectivity. The authors unabashedly announce in their prefaces which side they are on. I hope in Médicis Daughter that I have done Marguerite justice. Better justice than she received from Valois disparagers, and from those later historians who saw no reason to look more closely at a figure considered insignificant.
What about Catherine de Médicis, then? If I am discarding what can be clearly identified as propaganda and rehabilitating Marguerite, can’t Catherine be more the sainted “mother of a nation” and less La Serpente? Catherine is a trickier figure. While the Queen Mother was by no means the cartoon villainess or “black queen” as she was dubbed by her most ardent contemporary detractors, historians disagree strongly on both the content and efficacy of her policies with respect to the Wars of Religion—and just about everything else. Unquestionably, Catherine was a woman of influence who preserved her sons and wielded power for and through them. As such, she can be given credit for that which went well in the post–Henri II Valois era. But she must also take her share of the blame for what went disastrously. To insist that she was effective as a political operative when the resulting events are viewed as laudable, yet argue she was utterly unable to influence events that turned out to be less than savory (and the most blatant Catherine apologists do this), is too logically inconsistent for my taste. Also, such assertions strip Catherine of her agency, doing her no justice as one of the sixteenth century’s impressively powerful women. As historian R. J. Knecht asserted, “Whitewashing Catherine can be taken too far. She may have been given more than her fair share of blame, but she was no saint and had dabbled in assassination…”