Princess, Scholar, Poet, and ‘Heretic’

With a millennium of Roman Catholicism under its crown, early sixteenth-century France was hardly a friend to new Protestants. Question the Latin translation, meet interrogation. Endorse Luther’s or Calvin’s teachings, prepare to learn a lesson in heresy. Deny papal authority, deny yourself sight of the sun, or even a chance at life itself. The French king would have his Roman Catholic way — that is, unless his Reformed sister stepped in.

Education Fit for a Christian

The only sibling of Francis I (r. 1515–1547), Marguerite de Navarre received an education fit for an heir presumptive, not just a princess-sister. Their mother, Louise de Savoy, a learned woman herself, seemed to spare no text or philosophy when it came to both her children’s instruction. Perhaps Louise was the first to expose Marguerite to the controversial figure Erasmus and, through Erasmus’s Christian humanism, the original Greek New Testament.

Forced to marry in 1509, she found herself with not only a husband but a surprising amount of time alone, with open access to her new spouse’s resources. (Charles, Duke of Alençon, preferred to be away hunting.) Though her name had changed, her interests had not. She would spend most of her time in Alençon building a diverse library, dining with Renaissance poets, conversing with evangelical preachers — and serving the poor.

Charles may have controlled the people, but Marguerite cared for them. She funded hospices for the elderly and almshouses for the orphaned, improved hygiene measures in convents and safety codes in hospitals. She even took up the cause of the unborn, requiring that expectant mothers under Alençon’s jurisdiction receive adequate food and shelter before, during, and after birth. By all appearances, Marguerite’s faith seemed like no dead faith.

And soon her faith would become a Reformed faith. When her brother donned the French crown in 1515, Marguerite’s newfound Catholic limelight did not stop her from reading “dangerous” Protestant works, most notably those of Martin Luther.

The same year his Ninety-Five Theses shook Germany, she requested a French translation. His writings confirmed what Marguerite’s own reading had begun to uncover: God’s word and Christ’s work, the nature of forgiveness and saving faith were not as the Catholic Church and its Latin translation made them seem.

Sensitive in Spirit

When Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther in 1521, Marguerite was distraught. She loved the Church and its officials, but why did they hate the priest and professor she so admired — better yet, the one she thought so scriptural?

The conflicted Marguerite sought counsel from members of the Circle of Meaux, a group of French evangelicals who embraced many Reformation teachings, like justification by faith alone and sola Scriptura. So committed to the latter was one Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1450–1536), a humanist scholar and priest with whom Marguerite became a close friend, that he traveled the French countryside, distributing French copies of the Gospels — Gospels that he had translated himself.

“Marguerite de Navarre desired to see God’s word accessible, his Son exalted, his body united.”

By confiding in people like Lefèvre, Marguerite proved herself more sensitive to Scripture’s truths and the Spirit’s leading than those who upheld France’s religious and social standards — no matter how powerful, even threatening, those standards may have been.

After all, Marguerite possessed her own degree of power. She began to wield it not merely to pursue her convictions from within the Catholic Church but to shield French Protestants who stood, upright yet unprotected, outside of it.

Power of Power

Marguerite was more than a sister to the French king — she was a beloved and esteemed sister. Francis’s wife, Claude, was often ill, and Marguerite never hesitated to fulfill the frail queen’s duties at court. Nor did she falter in tenser times: She once helped to negotiate the king’s release after he became a prisoner of war, and when Queen Claude died, she raised Francis’s two motherless children as her own. No wonder he dismissed complaints of Marguerite’s Protestant bent, saying, “If what you say is true, I love her too well to allow her to be troubled on that account” (Reformation Women, 30).

Francis would do far more than let Marguerite alone. She could speak openly in the Catholic court, winning other nobles to her Reformed convictions. And were those same nobles to then find themselves imprisoned for their newfound faith, they could expect Marguerite to plead freedom on their behalf.

Her brother often granted the request, along with many others. Through Marguerite’s influence, prominent Protestant exiles returned home (if not always for good, at least for a time), many “heretics” sentenced to death saw pardon, and the Circle of Meaux, conspicuous as it was, continued to preach sola fide in relative safety.

In 1527, she added “queen” to her long list of high stations. When her first husband was killed in battle, she married Henry d’Albret, King of Navarre, a mountainous region situated between Spain and France. When Marguerite traded Paris for Nérac, Navarre’s capital, she lost sway over her brother’s rulings. But as Queen of Navarre, she gained another kind of protective power: the power of asylum.

Though her new husband was Catholic, sometimes aggressively so, her new kingdom was historically tolerant of other faiths. Marguerite extended Nérac as a city of refuge for those fleeing persecution. None other than John Calvin himself once enjoyed safety in Marguerite’s land.

‘Heresy’ in Verse

But Marguerite was more than a queen; she was a poet. As early as 1522, she penned Reformed poetry, the first female Protestant verse to make it into print. Beautiful and Bible-saturated, Marguerite’s works circulated privately in evangelical circles during the 1520s, an intentional choice on the poet’s part. Careful not to tilt her brother’s crown and desiring reform from within the Church, Marguerite often avoided sowing public seeds of disagreement.

But upon her Catholic mother’s death in 1531, Marguerite went public with her Protestant pen. She published “The Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” a 1,434-line poem whose couplets condemn men as dead in their sins and name Christ as humanity’s only hope before a holy God:

I see that none other than
Jesus Christ is my plaintiff. . . .
He has made himself
Our advocate before God, offering up virtues of such worth
That my debt is more than paid. (qtd. in Reformation Women, 35)

Such markedly Reformed lines earned Marguerite a title she had hitherto avoided: heretic. Outraged over many parts of the poem (Dare she cite Scripture in French, not Latin?), the faculty of theology at the University of Paris condemned the work soon after its first publication. King Francis, however, moved quickly and twice forced them to remove Marguerite’s poem from their blacklist.

While the king could keep Marguerite’s poetry from being banned, he could not keep Marguerite from falling out of favor with members of the Catholic Church. On one occasion, a monk desired that Marguerite be woven into a sack and vaulted into the Seine — a threat Marguerite appeared to ignore. She seemed too awed by her holy and gracious God to fear man, at least in her youth. She would go on to publish volumes of Christian poetry, along with many prayers, meditations, and songs, throughout her life.

Reformed Legacy

Though Marguerite never ceased to enjoy personal safety and freedom of speech, her footing with others slipped over time, especially following the autumn of 1534. In what is known as the Affair of the Placards, posters disparaging the Mass were secretly hung across France, most infamously on Francis’s bedchamber. One part fooled and three parts fuming, the king allowed far greater violence to be taken against Protestants. Spite triumphed over love for a sister, and people like her printer, Antoine Augereau, were hanged for their faith.

Perhaps Marguerite’s Reformed convictions also waned as she aged. She cut ties with Calvin after he publicly criticized men she trusted. The Reformer went so far as to privately say, gently yet boldly, that he feared for her spiritual health. And though Marguerite’s writings had long rejected unbiblical Catholic rituals, later in life she feasted in honor of St. Martin. Was she endorsing the cult of the saints or appeasing a brother and king? Her motivation remains a mystery.

What we do know is that Marguerite de Navarre desired to see God’s word accessible, his Son exalted, his body united. And surely, the princess-queen did not reduce her life to the likes of silks and banquets but used her education, her stations, her freedoms, her pen for far richer ends: soli Deo gloria.

And before she died, Marguerite would hope that more — much, much more — might be said of her only surviving child one day.

God, I am assured, will carry forward the work He has permitted me to commence, and my place will be more than filled by my daughter, who has the energy and the moral courage, in which, I fear, I have been deficient. (Reformation Women, 39)

In Jeanne d’Albret (1528–1572), future Queen of Navarre and lionhearted defender of the French Reformation, God indeed carried forward the work of royal “heretics.”