The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

Author:Eleanor Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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GABRIELLE d’ESTRÉES, MISTRESS of KING HENRI IV of FRANCE, 1573–1599

On Thursday, April 8, 1599, twenty-six-year-old Gabrielle d’Estrées, duchesse of Beaufort, entered Paris for a festive weekend that would culminate in her wedding to King Henri IV and her coronation as queen of France on Easter Sunday, three days later. The people of Paris rejoiced. The match was a true love story, and their beloved Gabrielle’s diplomatic skill and insightful advice had played a major role in ending the religious civil wars that had devastated France for more than thirty years. Parisians have always been captivated by beauty, and their new queen would be the most ravishing in the world—tall and voluptuous, with pale blond hair and wide blue eyes.

But many in the higher echelons of society opposed the wedding. Gabrielle wasn’t exactly a virgin princess. In fact, she had been the king’s mistress for eight years—while he was still married to Marguerite de Valois, whom he had locked up in a castle—had given him three children, and was six months pregnant with the fourth. Her enemies—and there were many—felt the king’s marriage to a harlot shamed all of France, confused the royal succession (which son would inherit the throne: the eldest who was technically a bastard, or the one born after the wedding?), and squandered a valuable opportunity for a political alliance with a foreign country.

Within hours, Gabrielle would become not a queen but a corpse, and given the timing, everyone assumed she had been poisoned.

The daughter of Antoine d’Estrées, marquis de Coevres, Gabrielle grew up in turbulent times. The Catholic French king Henri III battled the Catholic League—a union of Spain, the pope, and the Jesuits angered by his leniency with heretics. The league was especially dismayed that the king’s heir was none other than the wisecracking heretic-in-chief, King Henri of Navarre, who had converted to Catholicism after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 and then abjured it as soon as he escaped. The league grew more insistent on regime change in 1589, when Henri III was stabbed to death by a fanatical monk, making the heretic-in-chief now king of France.

When Henri IV visited Coevres Castle in 1590, he fell in love at first sight with the gorgeous seventeen-year-old daughter of the house. The feeling was not mutual. Gabrielle was already having an affair with Henri’s friend, the dashing duc de Bellegarde. And Henri, twenty years her senior, was no Adonis with his big nose, bowlegs, and ragged clothing. Although he was the king of France, his prospects of clinging to the throne and uniting the country were quite slim, considering the superpowers lined up against him.

The king told the duc de Bellegarde to find another mistress and continued to pursue Gabrielle, showing up periodically at her father’s castle. The marquis was outraged at the scandal; not only would his daughter be known across France as a fallen woman, she would also be an adulteress: the king was a married man. In 1592, he forced his daughter to

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