Charlotte de Sauve
A French noblewoman and a mistress of King Henry of Navarre, who later ruled as King Henry IV of France. She was a member of Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici’s notorious Flying Squadron(Escadron Volant in French), a group of beautiful female spies and informants recruited to seduce important men at Court, and thereby extract information to pass on to the Queen Mother. Charlotte de Sauve has been credited as a source of the information that led to the execution of Marguerite de Valois’s lover Joseph Boniface de La Môle and Annibal de Coconnas for conspiracy in 1574. In 1575, Catherine de’ Medici, abetted by her son Henry III, instructed Charlotte to seduce the king’s brother, her youngest son, François, Duke of Alençon, with the aim of provoking hostility between the two young men, so that they would not conspire together in the future.Charlotte subsequently became the duke’s mistress, creating a rift between the former close friends, as Navarre and Alençon became rivals over Charlotte. According to Marguerite’s memoirs: “Charlotte de Sauve treated both of them [Navarre and Alençon] in such a way that they became extremely jealous of each other, to such a point that they forgot their ambitions, their duties and their plans and thought of nothing but chasing after this woman”.
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