A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens Read Free

transformed himself into a religious fanatic—publicly flogging himself, walking barefoot in bizarre religious processions, and outfitting himself in monk’s clothes with a rosary of small ivory skulls hanging from his waist. “I am frightened that everything is not golden here,” Ougier de Busbecq wrote after witnessing the demonstration of Henri’s unconventional piety.
    During several of his manic bouts of religion, the king made pilgrimages to Chartres on foot, begging the Virgin Mary to give him a son and heir. Alas, even the Mother of God couldn’t help him there. While he loved dressing up his wife, Queen Louise, doing her makeup and playing with her hair, he was rarely up to the task of sleeping with her.
     
    Occupying almost as much of Henri III’s time as his pretty boys and his alternating episodes of penance was his intense feud with his beautiful sister, Marguerite. Margot, as she was known, had a voracious appetite for men. Dating her, however, was often deadly, thanks to her despised brother. Actually, it was several members of the Valois royal family who arranged to make Margot’s active love life lethal.
    She was the youngest and most magnificent of the three daughters of Henri II and Catherine de Medici. When she was nineteen, her ambitious mother married her off to her Bourbon cousin, King Henry of Navarre. It was a cynical political match intended to shore up relations with the tiny kingdom wedged between France and Spain. Even if the newlyweds had loved one another, which they clearly did not, any happiness they might have shared was shattered only days after the wedding.
    Margot’s mother had been involved in a plot to assassinate a Huguenot leader. The murder was planned for just after the wedding, but the scheme failed. Fearing her role in it would be discovered and lead to a violent Protestant revolt, Catherine and her son (King Charles IX, who ruled just before Henri III) secretly initiated a sweeping slaughter of Huguenots who had gathered in Paris to celebrate the union of the Catholic French princess and the Protestant king of Navarre. The event, which became infamous as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was quite a wedding present. Although Margot, now queen of Navarre, was able to save her new husband from being murdered in the bloody frenzy, he was held prisoner in Paris, a situation that did not enhance the couple’s already tenuous relationship. Both Margot and Henry were extraordinarily passionate people—just not for each other.
    Desperate for satisfaction, Queen Margot took on the first of her many doomed lovers not long after she was married. His name was Joseph de Boniface de la Molle and her family hated him. Accused of conspiracy against King Charles IX, La Molle was hideously tortured. His fingernails were torn off and his bones crushed. He was then beheaded, but not before sending salutations to Margot from the scaffold. It was said that the distraught queen secretly ordered her lover’s head removed from public display and brought to her for burial.
    After La Molle’s execution, Margot acquired several more lovers who were lucky enough to narrowly avoid her family’s wrath. Then, wishing to escape her brother Henri, now king of France, and her estranged husband, the king of Navarre, Margot moved to the French town of Agen. Seeing the glamorous queen for the first time, a young officer by the name of Aubiac was entranced. “Let me be hanged,” he exclaimed, “if I might only once sleep with that woman!” He would soon get both his wishes.
    When the town of Agen was ransacked by the king’s forces, Aubiac helped Margot escape. At some point they became lovers, for which he would pay dearly. After Aubiac was captured, Henri III announced that the Queen Mother had begged him to have Margot’s lover “hung in the presence of this miserable woman, in the courtyard of the Castle of Usson, so that plenty of people may see him.” The unfortunate lover was hung,