page_title: Margaret of Valois
section_title: Vermillion wedding
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret of Valois / Life / Vermillion wedding
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Miniatura estratta da un libro di preghiere di Caterina de' Medici, raffigurante Enrico III di Navarra e Margherita di Valois. In realtà, Margherita era meno grassa di come rappresentata in questa miniatura che si differenzia molto dalle raffigurazioni della "Regina Margot" dello stesso periodo.
context_page_description: Margaret of Valois was a French princess of the Valois dynasty who became queen consort of Navarre and later also of France. By her marriage to Henry III of Navarre, she was queen of Navarre and then France at her husband's 1589 accession to the latter throne.
  Margaret was the daughter of King Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici and the sister of kings Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. Her union with the king of Navarre, which had been intended to contribute to the reconciliation of Roman Catholics and Protestant Huguenots in France, was tarnished six days after the marriage ceremony by the St Bartholomew's Day massacre and the resumption of the French Wars of Religion. In the conflict between Henry III and the Malcontents, she took the side of Francis, Duke of Anjou, her younger brother, and this caused the king to have a deep aversion towards her.
  As Queen of Navarre, Margaret also played a pacifying role in the stormy relations between her husband and the French monarchy.
context_section_description: By 1570, Catherine de' Medici was seeking a marriage between Margaret and Henry de Bourbon of Navarre, the leading Huguenot (French Calvinist Protestant). It was hoped this union would strengthen family ties, as the Bourbons were part of the French royal family and the closest relatives to the reigning Valois branch, and end the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots.
  On 11 April 1572, Margaret was betrothed to Henry. Henry was a few months younger than Margaret, and their initial impressions of each other were favorable. In one of her letters to Henry, his mother Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, wrote about Margaret: "She has frankly owned to me the favourable impression which she has formed of you. With her beauty and wit, she exercises a great influence over the Queen-Mother and the King, and Messieurs her younger brothers." Jeanne d'Albret died in June 1572, two months after the engagement, and was succeeded on the throne by Henry, so that Margaret became queen of Navarre upon the day of her wedding.
  Margaret and Henry, both 19 years of age, were married on 18 August 1572 at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The marriage between a Roman Catholic and a Huguenot was controversial. Pope Gregory XIII refused to grant a dispensation for the wedding, and the different faiths of the bridal couple made for an unusual wedding service. The King of Navarre had to remain outside the cathedral during the mass, where his place was taken by Margaret's brother, the Duke of Anjou.
  François Eudes de Mézeray, a 17th century historian, invented the anecdote that Margaret was forced to marry the King of Navarre by her brother Charles IX, who pushed down her head as though she were nodding her assent. This was Bourbon propaganda to justify the subsequent annulment of the marriage, 27 years later;. part of the myth of the "Reine Margot". Margaret did not mention this in her Memoirs, nor did any of her contemporaries.
  I was set out in the most royal manner. I wore a crown on my head with the coët, or regal close dress of ermine, and I blazed in diamonds. My blue-coloured robe had a train to it of four ells in length, which was supported by three princesses. A platform had been raised, some height from the ground, which led from the Bishop's palace to the Church of Notre-Dame. It was huge with cloth of gold; and below it stood the people in throngs to view the procession, stifling with heat. We were received at the church door by the Cardinal de Bourbon, who officiated for that day, and pronounced the nuptial benediction. After this we proceeded on the same platform to the tribune which separates the nave from the choir, where was a double staircase, one leading into the choir, the other through the nave to the church door. The King of Navarre passed by the latter and went out of church. 
  Just six days later, the Catholic faction assassinated many of the Huguenots gathered in Paris for the wedding (the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre).
  In her Memoirs, Margaret remembered that she saved the lives of several prominent Protestants during the massacre by keeping them in her rooms and refusing to admit the assassins. Her eye-witness account of the massacre in Memoirs is the only one from the royal family. These facts inspired Alexandre Dumas for his famous novel La Reine Margot (1845).
  After St. Bartholomew's Day, Catherine de' Medici proposed to Margaret that the marriage be annulled, but she replied that this was impossible because she had already had sexual relations with Henry and was "in every sense" his wife. Later she wrote in her Memoirs: "I suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him."
  In the libelle Le Réveil-matin des Français, written by an anonymous Huguenot author in 1574 against the royal family, Margaret was accused for the first time of incest with her brother Henry. This libel was another part of the myth of the "Reine Margot".
caption: Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois
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