Free Heretic Queen by Susan Ronald Page A

Navarre’s viewpoint was obvious. The more the ailing Jeanne thought about it, the more appealing it seemed. So Jeanne traveled to meet privately with Catherine de’ Medici under a safe conduct signed by Catherine, Charles, and the Duke of Anjou to lay down her terms. Jeanne, who had been in long and amicable correspondence with Elizabeth, was taking no chances. While Walsingham and Smith were negotiating on behalf of Elizabeth, Jeanne was in talks with Catherine.
    In mid-March, Jeanne invited Walsingham and Smith to a private dinner, where she discussed her concerns quite openly with the two English commissioners. After dinner, they adjourned to another room where twelve men “of religion” greeted them—men who were Jeanne’s closest advisers. Many were Calvinist ministers whose hearts palpitated at the thought of a frocked priest performing the wedding ceremony, as it could “not but breed general offense to the Godly.” Jeanne agreed. She feared she would “incur God’s high displeasure” if the ceremony was a Catholic one. Walsingham calmly gave advice on how matters could be resolved for the good of all by use of a proxy bridegroom within the cathedral precinct of Notre Dame. When the proposed marriage seemed lost to all others, Walsingham wrote to Burghley “that hardly any cause will make them break; so many necessary causes there are why the same should proceed.” 3 Once again, Walsingham was right. The marriage treaty was signed on April 11, 1572, only eight days before the Treaty of Blois united England and France.
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    That April proved momentous in other ways, too. Pius V became grievously ill. The pope, who had begun life as a shepherd before becoming a Dominican priest, then promoted through the ranks to cardinal, was not expected to survive. His pontificate had revised the catechism, breviary, and missal; reinstituted the Inquisition against “northern heretics”; set up a permanent Congregation of the Index, which would oversee and update the list of banned books; and issued numerous decrees against blasphemy, sodomy, adultery, and clerical marriage. 4
    April 1572 was also the month when the Dutch Sea Beggars who had been expelled from England’s shores in February retook Brielle, one of two deepwater ports in the Netherlands, from the Spanish. Two months earlier Elizabeth and Alba had begun to discuss a resumption of trade between the Low Countries and England, interrupted since Elizabeth had sequestered Alba’s pay ships in November 1568. The precondition to any agreement was for the queen to exile the Sea Beggars from her shores. 5 She readily complied, knowing it was a cunning deceit that would cost Spain dearly. It was also the “green light” for Louis of Nassau to press home his desire with Charles IX to invade the Netherlands.
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    Still, Elizabeth was not the only queen capable of cunning deceits that spring and summer. Catherine de’ Medici, having secured the marriages of two of her children, proceeded to insinuate her younger and ambitious son Henry, Duke of Anjou, into a crown of his own. Anjou and his elder brother Charles loathed one another, with Anjou constantly taunting the king. Alençon and Marguerite also detested Anjou for his malicious nature (he was a remorseless teaser), but both were powerless to rebel against him, as he was Catherine’s favorite child. On hearing from one of her favorite dwarves that Sigismund-Augustus II, king of Poland and Lithuania, lay dying, and without issue, Catherine sprang into action, bribing, cajoling, and bullying everyone who would make the decision on the king’s elected successor. For her, only Anjou was fit to wear Poland’s crown. 6
    By mid-May, Rome had elected Cardinal Ugo Boncompagni as Pope Gregory XIII. Where previously the pope was believed to be infallible and worshipped as the “sundial of the