Dark Eminence Catherine De Medici And Her Children by Marguerite Vance (good e books to read .TXT) 📗

found wariness and uncertainty. Paris seemed to have lost its heart (and its head) to the handsome young Duke of Guise who apparently had inherited his late father's knack for making himself popular; Marguerite, her husband, Henry of Navarre, and her brother, Alengon, were obviously leagued in a triumvirate of plotting; and Alengon, always a devout Catholic, was making

strangely congenial observations about his recent archenemies, the Huguenots. Marguerite remained irritatingly withdrawn and noncommittal

Then on the 30th of May, 1547, just a month before his twenty-fourth birthday, Charles IX, King of France, died. His young wife, looking at their baby daughter, said quietly, "I thank God our little one is a girl. So is she spared the agony of wearing the crown." How little this young mother realized that had her child been a son, means would have been found by his grandmother for preventing him from wearing the crown which she would reserve for her beloved Henry at all costs.

There was something unspeakably sad about the last years and death of Charles of Valois. He wanted so very much to be a kingly king. He was shy and sensitive, violent, and often unmanageable in his rages. But he did love beauty as expressed in music and poetry; he did love manly sports; and if his mother's preference for Henry had not been a corroding acid on his boyish spirit, Charles might have been all and more than Catherine's soaring ambition could have asked of a son.

Of all her children Charles alone had inherited his grandfather Francis Fs resoluteness. Francis II had not wanted the crown and had wept in dismay when he found he actually was King. Henry of Anjou certainly was not interested in kingship beyond its dramatic aspects—a jeweled cloak to wear picturesquely in procession. Alengon, the little egomaniac who saw himself the successful suitor for the hand of Queen Elizabeth of England, twenty-one years his senior,

Alengon believed himself not only a king but the great king of all time, the conqueror, the new Charlemagne.

Now Charles, his young tody destroyed by tuberculosis, his mind shattered by frustration and bitterness, was at peace. Word of his death had been sent to Henry in Poland and meanwhile a strange custom must be followed. For forty days the King s effigy in wax, fully clothed in ceremonial robes, lay upon his bed while his embalmed body rested in the adjoining chapel Twice daily an elaborate meal, such as would have been served him in life, was set out before the effigy and

later was distributed among the poor. But all the pomp, all the wildly extravagant mummery was finished long before the King of Poland arrived.

Envy and ambition form a dangerous combination. Al-engon, a victim of both, hating his brother, Henry, and now in the good graces of his sister, Marguerite, and her husband, Henry of Navarre, plotted to put himself at the head of the combined Huguenot armies. Marguerite s main objective was to manage by any means possible to replace Henry with Alengon on the throne of France. That she planned to have Henry assassinated seems likely since she and Alengon constantly at this time referred to Navarre as his, Alen^on's, next of blood and so his heir to the throne. It was a wretched plot, clumsily conceived, and in the end it failed.

The news of Charles's death reached Henry at a time when he was sunk in the deepest depths of homesickness and despair. He hated Poland and its barbaric glitter, its language which, try as he would, he could not master, its lack of finesse. France, his homeland, he knew had paid heavily for his unwelcome Polish crown, and now all he wanted was to be rid of it, to be back home in surroundings he loved.

Henry may have suspected how unsuited was his head to wear a crown. Given an army to command he had acquitted himself magnificently, but to assume the responsibility of ruling a nation, this was almost more than he could face. In Poland, among strangers who understood him no better than he did them, he was at a complete loss. After ten months in Cracow he felt he knew less about the Polish people than he had before he arrived. Henry was thoroughly bewildered,

out in turbulent waters far, far beyond his depth and longing for his mother's advice.

Then had come the dispatch from France with its sad news. For moments Henry could not seem to grasp the fact that Charles was dead. His mother had warned him when he left Paris that his brother was failing fast; but, as with most warnings, he had paid little heed to it. Now Charles was gone, and with all the irrational agony of mind which a fundamentally shallow character can attain, Henry gave himself up to haunting, soul-searching grief. Charles had been such an amusing little warrior when they were children, playing in the shady garden court at the old palace of Vincennes east of Paris. He was remembering how Charles in their games of war always had insisted, "I am older so I am wiser. Follow me!" So long ago that seemed now, with so much bitterness in the years between. Why had he taken such delight in irritating Charles? And his mother's letter had said—he opened it again, smoothing the pages on the table before him:

"Never did man die in better possession of his understanding . . . commanding his brothers and all those who served him to obey me as yourself till you came, confident that you would wish it so, speaking constantly of your goodness and that you have always loved and obey him so well and never given him a moment's pain, only great services/'

Henry crushed the paper in his fist, staring before him. "Always loved and obeyed . . /* Charles had said. Dear God, what a cad he, Henry,