Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

The royal wedding was the result of a round-robin of international negotiations. Henry VIII of England needed a favor from Pope Clement: the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so that he could replace her with Anne Boleyn. François agreed to intercede with the pontiff as long as Henry didn’t object to France’s regaining Milan. And since the marriage would create a Franco-Italian alliance that might displease Spain, His Holiness decided to bring the Spanish king into the loop, asking Charles V (who was also the Holy Roman Emperor) if he had any objections to a match between his niece and François’s second son. Charles’s army had sacked Rome just a few years earlier and temporarily taken Clement hostage, so the Pope had every reason to tread carefully with him.

  Because Pope Clement’s family, the powerful Medicis, had been in the textile and spice trade before they became bankers, Charles readily assented, never for a moment believing that the fastidious French ruler would allow his boy to espouse a “grocer’s daughter.” But he guessed wrong: François chose to accept Clement’s offer, and Catherine de Medici began her journey from merchant princess to real one.

  It cost Clement a fortune to fund the colorful pageant that marked Catherine’s entry into the city of Marseille, where the wedding was to take place, but it was important for him to make an excellent impression on the French. His Holiness had to take out a loan to afford Catherine’s trousseau. Three pounds of gold, two pounds of silver, and two pounds of silk were purchased just for the embroidery on her garments. Her gold brocade wedding gown was trimmed in ermine; the purple velvet bodice was richly embroidered with pure gold thread, edged in ermine, and studded with glittering precious gems.

  François greeted his future daughter-in-law with grace and dignity, but she only had eyes for Henri—who looked as though he’d rather be anywhere else. Fair-skinned and clear-complected, the prince was tall with an athletic physique, brown hair, dark, almond-shaped eyes, and a straight nose. Most likely, Catherine couldn’t believe her good luck. Henri, however, saw a short, stumpy girl with long dark hair and thick eyebrows, a protruding lower lip, and a receding chin.

  The marriage contract was signed on October 27, 1533, and the following day the two fourteen-year-olds were wed in a religious ceremony.

  The masked ball held after the wedding banquet on October 28 quickly assumed orgiastic proportions when a Marseille courtesan disrobed and dipped her breasts into wine goblets and invited the male guests to lick them off. She also lay utterly nude on a table with her naughty bits strategically covered with nibblies and urged people to partake of the evening’s bounty. Not to be outdone, some of the female guests undid their bodices and vied for attention with the professional.

  Catherine herself missed all the fun, having been decorously led to the bridal chamber. But she, too, was expected to put on a show. According to the custom of the day, the couple’s embarrassing consummation was witnessed by several spectators.

  It could have been the beginning of a beautiful marriage, as the hapless bride and groom had more in common than one might think. Both Henri and Catherine had spent a significant amount of their childhoods in captivity and deprivation, pawns in their respective families’ political squabbles. King François had been taken prisoner by Charles of Spain after the Battle of Pavia in 1525, but had managed to secure his release upon the agreement to a treaty that was highly unfavorable to France. However, as a surety that he would uphold his end of the bargain after gaining his freedom, François’s two oldest sons were sent to Spain to be imprisoned in his stead. Henri had been six years old at the time; he and the dauphin, his older brother, François, were incarcerated in increasingly sordid conditions for nearly five years while their father blithely reneged on the terms of the treaty. The poor boys were not even welcomed home with open arms. From our perspective, it’s clear they had been psychologically damaged during their captivity and had difficulty readjusting, but the king declared he had no time for “dreamy, sullen, sleepy children.”

  Orphaned within a month after she was born, Catherine’s childhood had been no picnic, either. Her mother, Madeline de la Tour d’Auvergne, a French countess, died on April 28, 1519, of puerperal fever when Catherine was just fifteen days old. On May 4, Catherine’s father, Lorenzo II de Medici, Duke of Urbino, succumbed to syphilis, hastened to his grave by consumption. Catherine was raised by relatives and given a humanist education in Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics—a subject in which she excelled. But in 1527, Florence suffered a series of uprisings and was subsequently placed under siege, resulting in severe famine. The ruling Medici family was blamed for all the strife. During that time Catherine was shuttled from one convent to another, always in fear for her young life. After the siege was lifted in August 1530, the Medici heiress became a political pawn, the primary bargaining chip of her uncle, the Pope.

  In order to bring the royal marriage to fruition, Clement had promised a great deal to François. Not only would the French king achieve considerable material and financial gain from the match, but the pontiff had secretly agreed to join forces eighteen months from the wedding date to help François reclaim the two Italian duchies of Milan and Urbino. However, within a year of the “I dos,” Clement was dead and his guarantees died with him. The new Pope, who was not a Medici, had neither motive nor inclination to make good on his predecessor’s agreements, and the French were stuck with their lopsided royal mésalliance. Catherine was neither pretty nor pregnant, nor prosperous, nor politically useful. “J’ai eu la fille toute nue,” François griped, as her dowry remained largely unpaid. “She came to me utterly naked.”

  Speaking of utterly naked bodies, young Henri did his duty on their wedding night, but thereafter did everything in his power to ignore Catherine. Henri didn’t find her sexually alluring, nor was he even interested in talking to her. She had not been warmly welcomed at court, nor was the atmosphere conducive to conception. Because Henri’s older brother was still unwed, protocol dictated that the newlyweds had to share the boys’ “bachelor” apartments, affording precious little privacy, a perfect excuse for Henri not to sleep with his wife.

  In order to ease Catherine’s assimilation, King François had assigned one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting to be her guide, schooling her in the manners and protocol of the French court. This woman was Catherine’s second cousin, Diane de Poitiers, the thirty-three-year-old widow of the Sénéchal of Normandie, Louis de Brézé. Although she was nineteen years Henri’s senior, Diane was also his secret crush, and held him completely in her thrall. Within a few years, she would be his lover in every way, destroying Catherine’s pathetic hopes that her handsome husband would ever reciprocate the love she bore him.

  On August 2, 1536, the eighteen-year-old dauphin felt ill during a game of tennis and grew sicker after drinking a glass of cool water. Eight days later, he was dead.

  Henri was now the dauphin and Catherine the dauphine—the first lady in France after the queen—but after three years of marriage, she and her husband remained childless. Catherine’s apparent barrenness was a continual source of anxiety to everyone, but no one felt the stigma more than she did and she greatly feared repudiation. Consequently, she resolved to cultivate the goodwill of everyone at court.

  Catherine easily earned the sympathy of the Venetian ambassador Matteo Dandolo, who reported that “The most serene dauphine is of a fine disposition, except for her inability to become a mother. Not only has she not yet had any children, but I doubt that she will ever have them, although she swallows all possible medicines that might aid conception. . . . She is, as far as we can see, loved and cherished by the dauphin her husband. His Majesty is also fond of her, as are the court and the people, and I don’t think there is anyone who would not give their blood for her to have a son.”

  As Dandolo suggested, Catherine had tried every quack remedy available in an effort to become fertile. She cheerfully gulped down Dr. Fernel’s myrrh pills, which were probably among the more benign cures. And after she gamely drank great quantiti
es of mule’s urine, and applied foul-smelling poultices made from ground stag antlers and cow dung, it’s no wonder the ambassador diplomatically asserted that “From this I would deduce she is more at risk of increasing her difficulty than finding the solution.” Henri might not have been able to get anywhere near her, let alone become aroused in her presence.

  And Catherine certainly wasn’t going to conceive if her husband was elsewhere. In 1537 the eighteen-year-old Henri urged his father to allow him to fight on his behalf against Charles V of Spain. François reluctantly agreed, and Henri distinguished himself on the field in Provence.

  He also cheated on his wife.

  Depending on the source, Filippa Duci was either a Piedmontese courtesan, the sister of a local squire Henri met during the military campaign in the Piedmont and Savoy, or the sister of one of Henri’s Piedmontese grooms. Whatever her origin, Filippa became the mother of Henri’s first child. He named the baby Diane de France, after the goddess of his heart, Diane de Poitiers, who raised his illegitimate daughter alongside her own two girls, while Signorina Duci more than likely got to spend the rest of her days in a convent.

  Having developed a taste for adultery, or at least good sex, soon after he returned from northern Italy, Henri consummated his passion for Diane de Poitiers. To Catherine’s humiliation, her husband copied Diane’s habit of dressing and accoutering herself only in black and white. He adopted Diane’s symbol, the crescent moon, as his own, and designed a device formed from their interlocking initials, which was embroidered or embossed on his clothing, his servants’ livery, his horses’ caparisons, and was eventually carved, sculpted, and otherwise emblazoned all over his residences. Everywhere his poor wife looked, there were Hs and Ds, as entwined as the illicit lovers’ limbs were in bed.

  Little Diane de France was all the proof the French required to claim that the fault lay entirely with Catherine for her failure to conceive. A secret campaign to repudiate her was being orchestrated by François’s paramour, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, whose real target was the rival mistress at court, Diane de Poitiers. If Henri were to get a new wife who was both alluring and fecund, Diane’s star would plummet.

  One day, Catherine took a huge risk, throwing herself at the king’s feet like a penitent and submissively offering to step aside to make way for a fertile bride, as long as she could remain in France as her replacement’s humble servant. Touched to the core, François assured her, “My child, it is God’s will that you should be my daughter and the wife of the dauphin.” With those words all plans to repudiate Catherine were jettisoned. Once the king had spoken, the sycophants, regardless of their opinions, had no choice but to follow suit.

  Diane de Poitiers also proved a most unexpected ally to Catherine. After all, it inured to Diane’s benefit that her lover’s wife was homely. But both women acknowledged that Catherine’s fate in France could only be secured if she gave birth. So Diane became the royal couple’s sex therapist. After she made love with Henri, she would send him directly upstairs to do the same thing with his wife, urging him “to that couch which no desire draws him.” If it cost her emotionally, she kept it to herself. Instead, Diane counseled Catherine as to which sexual positions would be the most beneficial in facilitating conception.

  According to the court physicians, Henri and Catherine each suffered from problems with their reproductive organs. Catherine had an inverted uterus. Henri had been diagnosed with a mild deformity of the positioning of the urethra called hypospadias. According to a number of diplomatic dispatches he also suffered from a common side effect of this condition known as “chordee,” the downward curve of the penis. This trajectory did not preclude the ability to father children, but in order to do so he had to learn the most effective techniques. Two renowned medical experts of the day recommended acrobatic sexual positions, but it seems that for the longest time Henri had no interest in practicing them with his wife.

  He was far more athletic and inventive with his mistress, as Catherine found out. All this time she’d considered herself inept in bed and thought that perhaps she hadn’t been doing things right. Horribly jealous of her husband’s passion for Diane and curious to know what it was he saw in her and what they did together, she hired an Italian carpenter to drill two small spy holes in her floor, through which she watched Henri and his mistress making love all over Diane’s room, including her velvet rug, until it was time for her to send him upstairs to do his conjugal duty. According to the court chronicler Pierre de Brantôme, after witnessing the lovers in action, Catherine, who was tragically in love with her husband, tearfully told her friend the duchesse de Montpensier that Henri had “never used her so well.”

  Both Diane and the court physician Jean Fernel separately advised Catherine that the royal couple’s peculiar anatomies would be best served if they enjoyed sex à levrette, a levrette being a grey-hound bitch. Essentially, he was recommending that they practice what we call the doggie style. One historian has acerbically hypothesized that Henri could only do what was required of him with such frequency if he did not have to look at his wife’s face. And when he was finished, Henri would rejoin Diane downstairs and spend the rest of the night in her arms.

  Finally—in the spring of 1543, after a decade of marriage—Catherine became pregnant. On January 19, 1544, she went into labor, and late that afternoon she gave birth to a son, whom the royal couple named François, in honor of the king. After ten agonizing years, Catherine had finally achieved her goal and secured her place at court.

  But the dauphine’s postpartum relief was short-lived. During the next dozen years Henri visited her bed regularly enough to keep her almost perpetually pregnant, for which she was no doubt grateful, but his passion for Diane remained as strong as ever.

  Realizing that her husband shunned their bed entirely after she announced a new pregnancy, Catherine began to delay the news for as long as possible so that she could continue to enjoy her husband’s body, even if the feeling was not mutual. She bore ten children between 1543 and 1555. Seven of them survived to adulthood, although all but their youngest child, Margot, were sickly runts with weak lungs, perpetually runny noses, and delicate constitutions. Three of the four boys would end up suffering dementia as young adults; two of those crackpots became King of France. Catherine’s final pregnancy ended on June 26, 1556, with the birth of twin girls. It nearly killed her. One of the twins, Jeanne, died during the birthing process and her leg had to be broken in order to remove her from the womb. The other twin, Victoire, only survived a few weeks.

  With three people in their marriage, Catherine was certainly the odd one out. So one might think that after her children were born she would refocus her energy and devote herself to them. But even in this realm, Diane de Poitiers seemed to reign. Her cousin Jean d’Humières was awarded the governorship of the royal nursery and, at her lover’s insistence, Diane was a de facto third parent, as involved in decision making as Henri and Catherine when it came to the raising and education of their children. To retain her husband’s affection and respect, Catherine had no choice but to suffer it all with the utmost dignity. It was her modus operandi when it came to everything at court, and had allowed her to remain on good terms with everyone.

  François I became ill in March 1547, and it was clear that the fifty-two-year-old king would never recover. On the thirtieth of the month a tearful Henri asked for his father’s blessing and the two men held each other tightly until the dauphin “fell into a swoon.” The following day, Henri received the twenty-eighth birthday present of a lifetime: the crown of France. François died that afternoon—his myriad illnesses (including cancer) possibly exacerbated by his advanced gonorrhea.

  After thirteen years in France Catherine still spoke the language with a heavy Italian accent, but now, at the age of twenty-eight, this daughter of Florentine “merchants” was their queen. Sadly, her marital situation didn’t magically change when she acquired her crown. Henri created his mistress duchesse de Valentinois and
treated Diane as his queen, while Catherine was more or less a “legal concubine,” in the words of the Venetian envoy Lorenzo Contarini.

  As the years progressed Henri came to appreciate and ultimately rely on his wife’s judgment and loyalty. But at the outset of his reign, he created an intimate circle comprised of fiercely loyal nobles—and Diane—excluding Catherine from his confidences. Contarini confirmed as much. Catherine was “not beautiful but possesses extraordinary wisdom and prudence—there is no doubt that she would be capable of governing. However, she is not consulted or considered as she merits, for she is not of royal blood, but she is liked by everyone including the king for her character and her kindliness.”

  In the grand scheme of things, apart from the number of Protestant heretics he consigned to the flames, Henri was a relatively progressive ruler. He instituted a sort of Renaissance socialism, where each district in Paris was required to pool its wealth for the needs of the poorer citizens of the quarter. On certain days convents dispensed money and free food. A “workfare” program employed able-bodied mendicants to repair the city’s infrastructure, while the crippled or otherwise disabled beggars were placed in hospitals.

  After observing the traditional ninety days of mourning for his father, Henri was crowned at the Cathedral of Rheims on July 26, 1547. The very pregnant Catherine was just an honored spectator, resplendently attired in white satin and crimson velvet, her garments edged in gold and dripping with gems. But Diane was dressed just as ornately and, as an added insult, atop her flaxen hair was a diamond crescent, resembling a crown. Catherine did not even get to enjoy her husband’s coronation night with him. According to the Italian ambassador, after the banquet Henri “went to find the Sénéchale.”

  The Venetian ambassador summed up Catherine’s reaction to her husband’s grand dalliance: “Since the beginning of the new reign, the Queen could no longer bear to see such love and favor being bestowed by the duchess, but upon the King’s urgent entreaties she resigned herself to endure the situation with patience. The Queen even frequents the duchess, who, for her part, serves the Queen well, and often it is she who exhorts him to sleep with his wife.”