of Bearn, afterwards Henry the Fourth of France. Nothing could equal the magnificence of this marriage; which was succeeded by the horrors of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Though Margaret was a strict Roman Catholic, she was not entrusted with the secrets of that horrible day. She was alarmed with suspicions, which her mother would not explain to her, and terrified by a gentleman, who, covered with wounds, and pursued by four archers, burst into her chamber before she had risen in the morning. She saved his life, and by her prayers and tears, obtained from her mother grace for two of her husband's suite. Henry himself escaped the fate prepared for him, and Margaret refused to suffer her marriage to be cancelled.
In 1573, when the Polish Ambassadors came to create her brother, the Duke of Anjou, king of that country, Margaret, as a daughter of France, received them. The Bishop of Cracow made his harangue in Latin, which she answered so eloquently, that they heard her with astonishment. She accompanied the Duke d'Anjou as far as Blamont, and during this journey she discovered a plot of her husband and her next brother, who was become Duke d'Anjou, to revenge the massacre, which she revealed to her mother, on condition that no one should be executed. The princes were imprisoned; but the death of Charles the Ninth, in 1577, set them at liberty. The King of Navarre, continually occupied by new beauties, cared little for the reputation of his wife; yet, when he stole from the court, he commended his interests to her, in a letter he left for her. But Margaret was then confined to her apartments, and her confidants were treated with the greatest severity. Catharine, however, prevented her brother from pushing matters to extremity with her, and by her assistance she obtained a short peace. Margaret then demanded permission to retire to her husband in Guienne; but Henry the Third refused to allow his sister to live with a heretic.
At length open war was commenced against the Protestants, and Margaret withdrew into the Low Countries, to prepare the people in favour of her brother, the Duke d'Alen on, who meditated the conquest of them by the Spaniards. There are curious details of this journey in her memoirs. On her return, she stopped at La Fere, in Picardy, which belonged to her, where she learned that, for the sixth time, peace was made in 1577. The Duke d'Alençon came to Picardy, and was delighted with the pleasures that reigned in the little court of Margaret. She soon returned to France, and lived with her husband at Pan, in Beam, where religious toleration was almost denied her by the Protestants; and Henry showed her little kindness; yet the tenderness with which she nursed him during an illness, re-established friendship between them, from 1577 to 1580, when the war again broke out. She wished to effect another reconciliation, but could only obtain the neutrality of Nerac, where she resided.
After the war, Henry the Third, wishing to draw the King of Navarre, and Margaret's favourite brother, the Duke d'Anjou, to court, wrote to Margaret to come to him. Discontented with the conduct of her husband, she gladly complied, and went in 1582; yet so much was her brother irritated by her affection for the Duke d'Anjou, that he treated her very unkindly. Some time after, a courier, whom he had sent to Rome with important dispatches,
