448 pages, Back Bay Books, ISBN-13:
978-0316409667
Nancy
Goldstone’s The Rival Queens: Catherine
de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a
Kingdom takes the form of a dual biography of Catherine de’ Medici – Queen
of France, an Italian noblewoman of the Florentine Medici family who married
King Henri II of France and served as regent for her son Charles IX – and her
daughter Marguerite de Valois – Queen Margot who was compelled to marry the Protestant
King Henry of Navarre. In tracing the lives of these two 16th Century
monarchs, Goldstone vividly and painstakingly recreates the immensely
complicated twists and turns of the French Wars of Religion, which occurred
while Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne but have received much less attention
in popular histories and culture in the English-speaking world. Over the course
of 400+ pages, we are taken from Catherine’s inauspicious birth in 1519, to her
daughter Marguerite’s much-grieved death in 1615 and, with it, the fall of the
House of Valois. Goldstone has two aims: to soften images of Catherine de’
Medici, famed for her Machiavellian statesmanship and her murderous
machinations, and, at the same time, to harden image of Marguerite, who is
chiefly remembered for her silly romantic intrigues and rumors of her
incestuous relationships with her brothers. In the second of these two aims
Goldstone is particularly successful as, through careful analysis of a wide
range of contemporary sources, she places Marguerite back at the heart of 16th
Century French politics with a crucial role to play in the crossings and
double-crossings that defined these intensely violent decades.
The Rival Queens begins powerfully with the St. Bartholomew’s
Day massacre of 1572, the event that defined the lives and reputations of both
Catherine and Marguerite. In the days
following Marguerite’s wedding, thousands of Protestants were murdered by
Catholics. Catherine de’ Medici appeared to be the instigator of the violence
with Marguerite caught between the two factions. In popular culture, such as
Alexander Dumas’ novel La Reine Margot
(and the film of the same name) Marguerite’s romances are the focus, but
Goldstone reveals her sincere Roman Catholic religious faith, intellectual
interests and political acumen. Her life was filled with narrow escapes, quick
thinking and daring rescues and The Rival
Queens is most engaging when it is describing her adventures in France and
Navarre during the Wars of Religion. All well and good, but while Marguerite
emerges as a fully realized figure in The Rival Queens, Catherine de Medici
does not receive the same nuanced treatment: her childhood and decades of
marriage to Henri II are summarized in a single chapter. This approach not only
results in a hurried description of a fascinating period of Catherine’s life –
the young Mary, Queen of Scots was raised alongside her children – but her
complex motivations are simplified to resentment alone. While Goldstone is
critical of how historians have reduced Marguerite to her personal life, she
accepts much of the traditional depiction of Catherine de Medici as an
unambiguous villain. For example, she describes Catherine’s “Flying Squadron”
of beautiful ladies-in-waiting as her spies, encouraged to seduce unsuspecting
male courtiers even though there is recent scholarship arguing that this
interpretation is a legend that reflected male discomfort at the prominence of
women at Catherine’s court.
But this
book is much more than a dual biography of these two women; The Rival Queens is, in fact, a
masterful biography of the House of Valois in its entirety and of the
complicated relationships that existed between Catherine’s seven surviving children,
all but two of whom would become European sovereigns( indeed, at several points
in the book both Catherine and Marguerite disappear from the proceedings
entirely to make way for the dramatic and scandalous intrigues that existed
between brothers Charles, Henri and François as they vied for positions of
power within the kingdom, appropriating the religious divides between Catholic
and Huguenot factions at court and across the country into their various plots
and alliances). The title is misleading in another way in that that mother and
daughter were rarely rivals, for their tempestuous and fraught relationship was
merely one small facet of a family defined by dysfunction. In the same way,
although the “betrayal that ignited a kingdom” of the title refers to the St
Bartholomew’s Massacre, it could in fact refer to any of the decades-long
betrayals that the Valois siblings perpetrated against one another. But Goldstone’s
greatest achievement is in her recreation of one of the most complex periods in
French history in a way that it at once easy to follow and also entertaining. Her
jovial, light-hearted style gets the reader on-side early on and makes the
intricate allegiances and betrayals of a group of French aristocrats – almost
all of whom are called Henri – appear compelling and even entertaining.
Alongside all the tragedy and violence there is more than a faint air of the
ridiculous about the Wars of Religion, and Goldstone captures this well. There
are moments when Goldstone does get a little bogged down in the detail, and
there are a few sections that could perhaps have done with a bit of cutting
(I’m not sure, for example, that we really needed a four page tangential
biography on Nostradamus), but given the complexity of the subject matter, it
is impressive that this doesn’t happen more often.
The Rival Queens is an engaging introduction to the two most
influential women of the French Wars of Religion. Marguerite de Valois emerges
as a survivor and an unlikely heroine, saving her husband’s life multiple times
then accepting an amicable annulment and settling down as an elder stateswoman
in Henry IV’s Paris. In contrast, Catherine de’ Medici reached the zenith of
her power as Charles IX’s regent then found herself unable to control her his
successor, Henri III. Mother and daughter struggled for power in one the most
tumultuous periods in France’s history and emerged as Rival Queens.
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