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In August 1572, broiling and tense, Paris filled with sumptuously dressed guests. The Protestant bridegroom, Henri of Navarre, dark, aquiline, muscular, had arrived with 800 black-clad, heavily armed horsemen. Margot dazzled the courtiers: ‘Besides the beauty of her face and her well-turned body, she was superbly dressed … her hair was dressed with big white pearls and rare diamonds – [like] a brilliant night sky full of stars.’

On 18 August, in Notre-Dame, Margot, wearing an ermine-rimmed crown, a jewel-spangled dress, stood beside Henri, who was accompanied by Admiral Coligny, to take her vows. It was claimed that when twice asked by the cardinal for her assent Margot said nothing, so Charles reached out and pushed her head down in a nod. This might be later Bourbon propaganda, but the ceremony was laden with menace. During the next four days Catherine prepared her strike. Not for nothing did she collect embalmed crocodiles: seven hung from the ceiling of her study.

On the 22nd Catherine and Anjou ordered a hitman to shoot Coligny, but he only wounded the admiral’s hand. The king was furious when Coligny whispered that his power had been usurped by his mother and brother. Catherine and Anjou were made to pay their respects to the bedridden Coligny, surrounded by Huguenots eager for revenge. Within the Louvre, Catherine and Anjou agreed ‘to finish the admiral by whatever means. It was necessary to bring the king round. We decided to go to him in his study after dinner …’

The crocodile queen decided to massacre not just Coligny but the Huguenot nobility. When he was told of Coligny’s plan to attack him and his mother, Charles shouted, ‘Lies! The admiral loves me as though I were his own son.’ Catherine argued that Coligny was tricking him. Suddenly the unbalanced king was convinced. ‘Then kill them all!’ Brat shrieked. ‘Kill them all!’

In the early hours of St Bartholomew’s Day, the hit squad of Anjou’s Swiss Guards stormed Coligny’s house and erupted into the bedchamber. ‘Are you the Admiral?’ they asked.

‘I am. I should at least be killed by a gentleman and not this boor,’ but the boor drove his sword through Coligny’s chest, then threw him out of the window, the signal for the hecatomb to begin. At the Louvre, where her new husband Henri and his retainers were lodging, Margot was suspected by both sides, ‘so that no one told me anything, until that evening’. She finally confronted her mother. ‘God willing, my mother replied, I’d come to no harm but in any case I must go, for fear of awakening their suspicions.’ After praying for her life, Margot joined Henri in his bed, surrounded by forty Huguenot guards. Margot fell asleep. Henri later wandered out of his room, but he was detained and safely locked up as the royal guardsmen went from room to room, killing the guests. When Huguenots escaped into the courtyard, archers shot them.

‘Navarre!’ Margot was awoken by banging on the door. When a servant opened the door, a Huguenot covered in blood staggered in, pursued by five royal hitmen, and clung on to Margot, covering her in blood. Laughing, the captain of guards ‘gave me the life of that man clinging to me’.

‘They’re killing them all,’ the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip, ‘stripping them naked, dragging them through the streets, sparing not even children. Blessed be God!’ Philip ‘experienced one of the greatest pleasures I’ve had in all my life’.

King Charles panicked, crying, ‘What bloodshed! God, forgive me … I’m lost,’ then blamed it all on his mother: ‘God’s blood, you’re the cause of it all!’ Henri of Navarre converted to Catholicism. Bodies were heaped around the Louvre. Coligny was castrated and gibbeted, his head delivered to Catherine, who forwarded it to the pope. Three thousand were killed in Paris, 20,000 nationally.

The French, said a foreign monarch, were barbarians. That monarch, Ivan the Terrible, was himself no humanitarian^* and now his capital was lost thanks to his own atrocities. In May 1571, the Crimean khan Devlet Giray galloped north and stormed Moscow, enslaving tens of thousands and leaving the city a smoking ruin. ‘They burned Moscow, and didn’t dare tell me for ten days,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s treason’ – and traitors had to be killed, some poisoned by Dr Bomelius.