Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

Ned thought of Margery’s arranged marriage. ‘I sympathize with Margot,’ he said.

‘If the rumours about her are true, she won’t let her marriage vows constrain her behaviour.’

Behind the king came his brothers, all wearing the same yellow satin. They were making sure the crowd got the point: from today on the Valois men and the Bourbons were going to be brothers. The bride was followed by at least a hundred noblewomen. Ned had never seen so many diamonds and rubies in one place. Every woman was wearing more jewels than Queen Elizabeth owned.

Still no one cheered.

The procession moved slowly along the raised walkway to the amphitheatre, and there the bride took her place beside the groom. This was the first time a Catholic had married a Protestant in a royal wedding, and a complex ceremony had been devised to avoid offending either side.

In accordance with custom, the wedding was performed outside the church. The cardinal of Bourbon administered the vows. As the seconds ticked by and the words were spoken, Ned felt the solemnity of the moment: a great country was moving, inch by painful inch, towards the ideal of religious freedom. Ned longed for that. It was what Queen Elizabeth wanted, and it was what Sylvie Palot needed.

At last the cardinal asked Margot if she would accept the king of Navarre as her husband.

She stared back at him, expressionless and tight-lipped.

Surely, Ned thought, she would not sabotage the whole wedding at this point? But people said she was wilful.

The groom shifted from one foot to the other impatiently.

The princess and the cardinal stared at one another for a long moment.

Then King Charles, standing behind his sister, reached forward, put his hand on the back of her head, and pushed.

Princess Margot appeared to nod.

This clearly was not consent, Ned thought. God knew that, and so did the watching crowd. But it was good enough for the cardinal, who hastily pronounced them man and wife.

They were married — but if something went wrong now, before the marriage was consummated, it could yet be annulled.

The bridal party went into the cathedral for the wedding Mass. The groom did not stay for the Catholic service, but emerged again almost immediately.

Outside the church he spoke to Gaspard de Coligny, the Huguenot general. They may have intended no offence, but their casual manner gave the impression that they were disdaining the service going on inside. That was certainly what the crowd felt, and they began to shout protests. Then they started their victory chant:

This was infuriating to the Huguenots whose leaders were being tortured in the dungeons of the duke of Alba.

The notables in the stand were milling around, chatting, but as the chanting grew, their conversations tailed off and they looked around anxiously.

A group of Huguenots on the roof of a nearby house retaliated by singing a psalm, and other voices joined in. In the crowd on the ground, a few young toughs began to move towards the house.

The scene had all the makings of a riot. If that happened, the pacific effect of the marriage could be reversed.

Ned spotted Walsingham’s friend the marquess of Lagny, in his jewelled cap, and spoke to him urgently. ‘Can’t you stop those Huguenots singing?’ he said. ‘It enrages the crowd. We’ll lose all we’ve gained if there’s a riot.’

Lagny said: ‘I could stop the singing, if the Catholics would stop chanting.’

Ned looked around for a friendly Catholic and saw Aphrodite Beaulieu. He buttonholed her and said: ‘Can you get a priest or someone to stop the crowd doing the Hangest chant? We’re heading for a nasty disturbance.’

She was a sensible girl and saw the danger. ‘I’ll go into the church and speak to my father,’ she said.

Ned’s eye lit on Henri of Bourbon and Gaspard de Coligny and he realized they were the root of the problem. He went back to Lagny. ‘Could you tell those two to make themselves scarce?’ he said. ‘I’m sure they don’t mean it, but they’re provoking the crowd.’

Lagny nodded. ‘I’ll speak to them. Neither of them wants trouble.’

A couple of minutes later, Henri and Gaspard disappeared into the archbishop’s palace. A priest came out of the cathedral and told the crowd that they were disturbing the Mass, and the chanting subsided. The Huguenots on the rooftops ceased their singing. The square became quiet.

The crisis was over, Ned thought — for now.

The wedding was followed by three days of lavish celebrations, but no riots. Pierre was bitterly disappointed.

There were street fights and tavern brawls, as exultant Protestants clashed with furious Catholics, but none of the affrays turned into the city-wide battle he was hoping for.

Queen Caterina did not have the stomach for a violent confrontation. Coligny, like all the more cunning Huguenots, believed his best strategy was to avoid bloodshed. Together, milk-and-water moderates on both sides kept the peace.

The Guise family were desperate. They saw power and prestige slipping away from them permanently. Then Pierre came up with a plan.

They were going to assassinate Gaspard de Coligny.

On Thursday, as the nobility attended the tournament that was the climax of the festivities, Pierre stood with Georges Biron in one of the medieval rooms in the old part of the Louvre palace. The floors were dirt and the walls were rough stone.

Biron moved a table to a window for better light. He was carrying a canvas bag, and now he took from it a long-barrelled firearm.

‘It’s an arquebus,’ said Pierre. ‘But with two barrels, one below the other.’

‘So if he misses Coligny with the first ball, he has a second chance.’

‘Very good.’

Biron pointed to the trigger mechanism. ‘It has a wheel-lock firing action.’

‘Self-igniting, then. But will it kill him?’

‘At anything up to a hundred yards, yes.’

‘A Spanish musket would be better.’ Muskets were bigger and heavier, and a shot from one of them was more likely to be fatal.

Biron shook his head. ‘Too difficult to conceal. Everyone would know what the man was up to. And Louviers is not young. I’m not sure he can handle a musket.’ It took strength to lift one: that was why musketeers were famously big.

Pierre had brought Charles Louviers to Paris. Louviers had kept a cool head in Orléans: the assassination of Antoine de Bourbon had failed through the dithering of King Francis II, not by any fault of Louviers’s. Some years later, Louviers had assassinated a Huguenot leader called Captain Luzé and won a reward of two thousand écus. And Louviers was a nobleman, which — Pierre thought — meant that he would keep his word, whereas a common street thug would change sides for the price of a bottle of wine. Pierre hoped he had made the right decisions.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look at the route.’

Biron put the gun back in the bag and they stepped out into the courtyard. Two sides of the square were medieval castle walls, the other two modern Italian-style palaces. Biron said: ‘When Gaspard de Coligny walks from his lodging to here, and from here back to his lodging, he is accompanied by a bodyguard of about twenty armed men.’

‘That’s going to be a problem.’

Pierre walked the way Coligny would have to go, out through the medieval gateway to the rue des Poulies. The Bourbon family had a palace immediately opposite the Louvre. Next to it was the mansion of the king’s brother Hercule-Francis. Pierre looked along the street. ‘Where does Coligny lodge?’

‘Around the corner, in the rue de Béthisy. It’s just a few steps.’