Episode 55: Ménage à trois

Now queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici is forced to form a somewhat unorthodox household with her husband Henri and Diane de Poitiers. Meanwhile religious persecution and violence have been growing, and Henri prepares to once again face his and his father’s nemesis, Emperor Charles V. 

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Transcript

Catherine finally gave birth to a new heir to the French throne, named Francois after her father-in-law, she kept having children. This ensured Catherine’s political survival. However, I think that even outside the need to preserve her future at the French court, Catherine wanted to be a mother. In her memoirs, her daughter Marguerite described Catherine as “ a mother who doted on all her children, and was always ready to sacrifice her own repose, nay, even her life, for their happiness.” Indeed, Catherine went above and beyond most royal mothers, making sure they were well tended to and that they ate a diet she herself prescribed even when she was away. She was, apparently, also personally strict, at least to Marguerite, who also wrote, “It is not only that I dare not open a conversation with her, but when she looks at me I almost die of fright in case I have done something to displease her.”  But perhaps that was only Marguerite’s experience, since she was apparently the problem child out of Catherine’s brood, who frankly wrote in one letter, “I see that God has left me this creature for the punishment of my sins through the afflictions she gives me. She is my curse in this world.” But regardless of such sour feelings toward this one child, Catherine was clearly a loving mother, probably by any standards and not just those of sixteenth century royalty. One of the artifacts she left posterity is a prayer book, which carries a painting of Louis, Victoire, and Jeanne, the three children of hers who died in infancy.

Luckily the children secured her position just in time, because her number one benefactor King Francos was entering his final days. Toward the end of January 1548, King Henry VIII of England died and was succeeded by the son he desperately wanted, who became King Edward VI. The court celebrated, since they long though of Henry VIII as France’s enemy, especially after he managed to capture the city of Bolougne on the English Channel during an invasion. However, Francois was unnerved. He long thought of Henry VIII as a kindred spirit. So the fear they would also die in the same year gripped him. Francois was already ill, only able to go on hunting trips while carried in a litter. It was on the way back to Paris to attend a memorial service for Henry VIII that Francois was suddenly struck by a severe fever, stopping at the royal chateau in the town of Rambouillex. There, he gradually lost the ability to get up from his bed and speak until, on March 31, he followed Henry VIII to the grave. Historians suspect, given Francois’ rather risqué lifestyle, that he died from either gonhorhea or syphilis. Henri II and Catherine were now king and queen of France. At Francois’ funeral, Catherine genuinely wept, having lost a man that she may very well have come to see not just as her benefactor, but as the sort of father figure she never had.

While Francois was content playing a balancing act between the various factions and dynasties at the royal court, Henri immediately cleaned house. Henri particularly had a grudge against his father’s mistress, Anne d’Etampes. She was barred from returning to court and even briefly imprisoned. Without royal protection, her husband – who had married her at the king’s behest to provide a layer of respectability to their affair – sued her, claiming she had embezzled some of his land revenues. In the end, Anne d’Etampes retired from public life, dedicating herself to charitable works. If Diane de Poitiers took this as a warning about how fragile a mistress’ position was no matter how high she rose, there is no sign. Henri would also give the cold shoulder to anyone suspected of reformist or Protestant sympathies. Francois’ beloved sister Marguerite de Navarre appeared less in court. So did the king’s cousins, the Bourbons, whom we’ll hear more about soon. Instead, the king invited back Anne de Montmorency, who had retired from court after losing King Francois’ favor. Also Henri favored a new family, the Guises. The Guises were a branch of the ruling family of the duchy of Lorraine on France’s eastern border. At the start of the sixteenth century, the family migrated to some lands in northern France. The family patriarch, Claude, was commended for his fighting during the Italian Wars and granted the title of duke of Guise. Within just a generation, the family had become part of France’s aristocratic and clerical elite, with one of Claude’s daughter Marie even marrying King James V of Scotland. Of course, in the world of the French aristocracy where pedigree was almost everything, it helped that the Guises were, as part of a family ruling an independent duchy, almost as good as royalty. But the dukes of Lorraine, and the Guises themselves, had a claim to be directly descended from none other than Charlemagne. It’s a dubious claim neither proven or disproven by modern genealogists and historians, but it was a claim that was widely believed at the time nonetheless and that would in time help make the Guises seem to be a threat to the throne itself.

That was in the future, though. For now, though, the Guises formed a new power block on which Henri rested his reign, one that was both anti-imperial and also rigidly anti-Protestant. When it came to his oppression of the Huguenots, Henri wasn’t entirely charting a new course. Persecutions had been growing since the Night of the Placards, but in the final years of Francois’ reign, the anti-Protestant campaign had been escalated. With the support of the king, the regional parliaments of France put Huguenots on trial, imprisoning them or even burning them. As might be expected, the campaign was especially hard in the south. At the major port city of La Rochelle in the south, 118 people were arrested, 25 of whom were burned alive. Likewise the Parliament of Provence had over 60 people killed and executed in one session of persecution. The worst persecution to take place under King Francois also happened in Provence, on April of 1525. Members of the Waldesian movement, a religious sect that had existed since the twelfth century deemed heretical by the Catholic Church, were massacred at the behest of local officials and with King Francois’ approval. Perhaps up to 2,700 people were killed and 600 more were made into galley slaves. The baron of Oppéde, the chief architect of the massacre, was congratulated by King Francois and granted a noble title in the Papal States by the pope. After Henri II came to the throne, Oppéde was actually brought to trail, mainly on allegations that he exploited the massacre in order to confiscate land from a local noblewoman. Although he was imprisoned for two years, he was eventually exonerated and allowed to assume his old office as First President of the Parliament of Providence. At the very least, Henri in his own reign did make the machinery of persecution more formal. Henri established a special judicial office to try cases of heresy, given the ominous name “the Burning Chamber” by Protestants, and he asked the papacy to establish the French Inquisition. How Catherine felt about all this we don’t really know, although there is evidence that she did not share her husband’s animosity toward the Huguenots. Indeed, there is one instance during Henri’s reign where she intervened personally to get a Huguenot woman released from prison.

Overall, Catherine wasn’t completely left out in the cold, despite her husband’s relationship with Diane de Poitiers. Once her husband became king, she was granted estates and revenues as was suitable for a new queen, and was allowed to fully claim some property and wealth from the estates of her mother, who was a French noblewoman. However, Diane de Poitiers was also elevated. She was given the title of Duchess of Valentinois, the highest title in the French aristocratic hierarchy that Henri could give her. The new title gave her the right to walk alongside princesses of royal rank during Catherine’s own coronation as queen. Diane also tended to Catherine personally whenever she fell ill or when she was in labor. Indeed, the three formed an odd three-way household. We know Catherine’s real feelings about the woman she called her “husband’s whore.” In another letter to her daughter Elizabeth later in life, Catherine admitted, “ “I loved him so much, I was always afraid.” I interpret this to mean that Catherine put up with Diane because she was afraid she could lose what esteem her husband had for her. While we don’t know how much political influence Diane had over Henri II, and she probably didn’t have much even though ambassadors loved to suggest otherwise since Montmorency was happy to fill the role of unofficial prime minister, he certainly did spend a great deal of time in her presence. According to an ambassador from Ferrara, Henri spent about one third of each day in Diane’s company and would share with her all the important business of state. No wonder Catherine must have resented Diane. Even so, when Henri struck up an affair with the Scottish woman Janet Stewart, the governess who accompanied Mary Queen of Scots to France. Catherine and Diane closed ranks and managed to get Janet sent back to Scotland. Neither wanted a new competitor to disrupt the equilibrium they had in Henri’s life.

Luckily for them, Henri was not as much of a Lathario as his father. Nor was he as smart or culturally curious. Henri never shared his father’s appreciation for art and literature, although he did have a taste for music and architecture. Still, under Henri the expenditures spent on patronage and court entertainments were cut. Since she was merely the queen consort, there was only so much money Catherine could spend, although she did apparently help keep some artists from Francois’ court employed in France, like the painter and sculptor Francesco Primaticcio. During these years, Catherine’s fascination with astrology and the occult also grew, which would depending on your point of view either taint or delightfully embellish her historical reputation. While Catherine patroned several astrologers, she learned enough mathematics and astronomy that she could make her own star charts. In her employ she also had two notorious magicians from Florence, Tommosso and Cosimo Ruggieri. Cosimo had a particularly morbid reputation. It was whispered that he kept the decapitated head of a Jewish baby that would tell him secrets when he performed the right rituals. Catherine herself believed that she had a second sight. In her memoirs, Margot claimed that she herself witnessed her mother predicting Henri’s death and how he would die in a dream.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s meet another surrogate member of Catherine’s growing family, Mary Stewart, the oft-romanticized Queen of Scots. Her father King James V died young in 1542, possibly from cholera, although some have speculated he was pushed over the brink by news of a disastrous battle against the English. Henry VIII, who was still alive at the time, planned to conquer Scotland and abduct the infant Mary. Since she was James’ only child and heir, the infant was the rightful queen of Scotland. By forcing the child to wed his own son Edward, the kingdoms of Scotland and England would be united. This was darkly called England’s “Rough Wooing.” However, Mary’s mother, the queen regent of Scotland, Marie de Guise, managed to smuggle Mary off on a ship to France. Once the Scottish queen was safe at the French royal court, in 1549 Henri II declared war on England, retaking Boulougne. While Mary was a useful political pawn, Henri did dote on her as if she were her his own daughter. She became an unusually tall and attractive teenager who took to her education easily, although her tutors were tasked to wean Mary off her Scottish heritage which seemed quasi-barbaric to the elites of France. Her first language throughout most of her life would not be her native Scots which she spoke when she first arrived in France as a small child, but French.

By 1553, when Mary was just ten years old, her power on the English diplomatic chessboard soared. Despite an ill-fated coup by militant Protestants to put Edward’s cousin Jane Grey on the throne, instead England came to be ruled by Edward’s staunchly Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor. She had no children and was unlikely to have any because she was still in her late 30s. She did have a sister, Elizabeth, but because of Henry VIII’s complicated marital history in the eyes of the Catholic Church Elizabeth was illegitimate. In this view, this made Mary Stuart, who was Henry VIII’s great-niece, Mary Tudor’s rightful heir. That’s a lot of Marys, I know. This made Mary Stuart too valuable a resource for the French monarchy to leave in the hands of the Scottish. So the French entered negotiations that Mary Stuart would not just be the head of an ally seeking refuge in their nation, but to have her marry the Dauphin Francois. In the official treaty, Henri II and the Scottish ambassadors agreed that the crown of Scotland would be unified with that of France in the event that Francois and Mary had a male heir. If Mary died without a child, however, then the crown of Scotland would go to Mary’s nearest blood relation. But behind the scenes, Henri had Mary sign another treaty unknown to any of the Scottish diplomats. In this one, if Mary died even without children, then the Scottish crown would actually go to Francois and his descendants. It’s hard to fault Mary for signing off on such a betrayal of Scottish independence. After all, why would the man she saw as her father, whose son would be her husband, ever not have her best interests at heart?

English affairs taken care of at least for a little while, Henri reignited the Italian Wars in 1552. Apparently this wasn’t just about French pride or even Milan, but Henri burned for personal revenge against Charles V for holding himself and his brother hostages all those years ago. On the pretext that he was helping defend the liberty of several German Protestant princes against the Holy Roman Empire (never mind that Henri was having Protestants burned to death in his own domains), Henri declared war on the Holy Roman Empire. This would be Catherine’s first time in the spotlight. While she had assumed political responsibilities while her husband was off on campaign before, now she was allowed to serve as a regent – but only a regent who presided over a council of five along with Montmorency. It was apparently during their heated debates over policy that Catherine forged her dislike of Montmorency, if she didn’t come to dislike the man before.

But it was Catherine, not Montmorency or Diane for that matter, who personally appeared before the Parliament of Paris, requesting that they vote to grant their king more funds for his war.  She said, “My dear lords, I am come to you because the blood of France is also my blood. We know that during times of war many sacrifices have to be made and that for some cities the cost of war is so great that it is almost unbearable. However, I would not be presenting myself to you if I, and your lord, my king, did not need you in this difficult time. I do not doubt the confidence, trust, and affection you have for your king, my lord and husband.” She apparently wept at one point, and she received the full 300,000 crowns she asked for. It was a proud political debut, and she must have known. She even boasted to her cousin Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, that her husband had trusted her with such a crucial task. 

Unfortunately, the investment did not pay off. By 1559, Henri was no longer even fighting Charles V. Perhaps dogged by the depression that seemed to plague his Spanish ancestors, in 1555 Charles V had abdicated and retired to an isolated monastery in Spain, leaving Austria to his brother Ferdinand and Spain and his territories in Italy and the Netherlands to his son Philip. Philip eventually kept on with the Italian Wars along with his wife, who happened to be Mary Tudor and who dragged England back into war with France despite the opposition of England’s Parliament. By 1559, Henri was forced to the negotiating table. The resulting treaty of Cateau-Cambresis saw Henri give up all claims to Milan and Naples in exchange for some territory in what is now northeastern France. To seal the deal, the recently widowed King Philip was to marry Henri’s daughter Elizabeth. The treaty also saw France receive Calais, England’s last crumb of territory in France. This was supposed to be only a temporary transfer of the territory, but I suspect both the French and the English envoys realized that it would prove to be a permanent land grab.  It was a historic victory for France, seeing France finally wipe away the last remnant of what was once England’s stranglehold on the country. But the mood at the French court about the treaty was dour. France had fought this series of wars for generations, and all they had to show for it was the old status quo except for a slight expansion of their northeastern border, while the Hapsburgs of Spain and Austria remained as much of a threat as ever.

Still, after the bitterness over defeat had passed, I suspect for Henri things were looking up. Queen Mary of England had died in despair over losing Calais and her disastrous marriage to Philip, which was not unlike Catherine’s own fate in marrying a man she loved who did not love her in return. The bastard heretic Elizabeth was now queen, and Henri had the rightful monarch of England and Scotland right in his own court. Actually, she was even married to his own son and heir! It was about time the game of dynastic marriage and royal succession worked out in favor of someone who wasn’t the Hapsburgs. So perhaps this bit of hope in the horizon was on Henri’s mind as he fought in a joust on June 30, to celebrate the peace treaty and the betrothal between Elizabeth and Philip. His wife had a dream he would be badly injured at the joust, but Henri laughed off such concerns. Catherine had clearly been spending too much time in the company of sorcerers and astrologers. After all, Henri had beaten the duke of Guise and the duke of Nemours at the joust. He had been riding a horse named Malheureux (Unfortunate), but this was a joke or perhaps a blessing of sorts, like wishing an actor to break a leg during a performance. Trusting his luck despite such omens and despite his growing exhaustion, Henri decided on one more joust, against a Scottish nobleman, the Count of Montgomery, the captain of the king’s Scottish bodyguard. Montgomery nearly knocked Henri off his horse. Catherine got up again and asked Henri to retire from the competition. Even Montgomery asked the king to let him step away. Henri got annoyed, however, and commanded Montgomery to come at him again.

This time, the king did fall. And when they found him, he had a long piece of wood broken off from Montgomery’s spear sticking out of the visor of his helmet.

Thank you for listening, and buona notte.