Many years later, Catherine wrote to an envoy who was trying to help her daughter Margot out of a bad marriage to Henri of Navarre. Referring to her own difficult ménage, Catherine confided, “If I made good cheer for Madame de Valentinois, it was the king that I was really entertaining, and besides, I always let him know that I was acting sorely against the grain; for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore. For one cannot call her otherwise, although the word is a horrid one to us.”
In August 1548, the five-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots arrived in France at Henri’s invitation. That year he had sent forces to Scotland to aid in their ongoing skirmishes with the English. In return, he had asked for the child’s hand in marriage for François, the dauphin, who was a few months younger than Mary. Mary would be raised at the French court and the children would wed when they came of age. Accompanying Mary to France was her governess, the gorgeous, redheaded Janet Fleming, a bastard daughter of James IV of Scotland. When Diane de Poitiers broke her leg in 1550 and left court to recuperate, Henri indulged in a highland fling with Lady Fleming, resulting in a bastard son. Little Henri, duc d’Angoulême, was raised in the royal nursery alongside his legitimate children and Mary, Queen of Scots. That year Henri fathered another royal bastard by a married woman named Nicole de Savigny. Although the child was named Henri, the king did not legitimize him and he was given the surname of Nicole’s cuckolded spouse, Saint-Rémy.
Catherine played the role of the outraged wife to the hilt, even as she enjoyed her longtime rival’s public humiliation.
Henri may have felt guilty about his flurry of infidelities, because by 1551 he was evidently paying marked attention to his wife. A court insider observed, “The King visits the Queen and serves her with so much affection and attention that it is astounding.” Their relationship must have turned a corner because Henri finally began to rely on Catherine’s political counsel, particularly as he embarked for Germany in 1552 to defend its Lutheran princes against Charles V’s religious and political aggression. However, he didn’t trust his wife to run things entirely on her own in his absence, appointing one of Diane’s cronies to share the duties of regent.
When it came to politics and power, Catherine was a quick study. Eager to please her husband, she would do whatever it took. In August of 1557, Henri’s army suffered its worst defeat ever at Saint-Quentin in Picardy, trounced by the allies of King Philip of Spain, who had succeeded his father, Charles V.
Back in Paris, Catherine helped calm the populace, who feared that the enemy no longer had any barrier to marching on the capital. Alone, but for two remaining advisers—and Diane—Henri sent word to Catherine to raise money from the Parisians with which to fund more troops. Finally, after twenty-four years of marriage, the thirty-eight-year-old queen got the call she had been waiting for: her husband needed her and had given her a task that no one else could accomplish. For nearly a quarter century their subjects had regarded her as little more than a broodmare and a merchant’s daughter unworthy of the French throne. Catherine was keenly aware of their unfavorable opinion; at this juncture it was crucial that she not only change their minds and demonstrate her ability to lead and inspire, but also to raise the desperately needed revenue.
Accompanied by her sister-in-law and wearing black mourning, Catherine stood on the steps of Paris’s town hall and gave her first major public address. She appealed to the hostile citizenry with grace and humility, seasoned with more than a soupçon of flattery. Speaking of the peril facing all of them, she humbly asked for their aid, and after only a few moments of deliberation, she received a unanimous vote of confidence—and the impressive sum of 300,000 livres.
Catherine’s success with the people of Paris marked a turning point on two levels. First, she’d won the respect and admiration of her subjects. Moreover, she had tasted power and authority—and found them to her liking.
According to the Venetian ambassador Michele Sorzano, in a dispatch written in 1558, Catherine “is loved by all and more than anyone else she loves the king, for whom she overcomes all fatigue to follow. The king honors her and confides in her . . . the fact that she has borne him ten children counts very much for this attachment to her.”
But even the fruits of Catherine’s womb could never be entirely hers without some intrusion from her husband’s mistress, who insisted on employing the queen’s private pet names for the royal offspring.
By the middle of 1559, Catherine had grown anxious about Henri’s health. Ever since the military debacle at Saint-Quentin he had been exhausted, overstressed, and had begun to suffer from episodes of vertigo.
On June 29, the night before Henri was scheduled to participate in the joust to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Princess Elisabeth to Philip of Spain, Catherine had a prophetic dream in which she saw her husband lying wounded on the field, his face covered in blood. Over the years, four different forecasters, including Nostradamus, had predicted the identical outcome: Henri’s death in his forty-first year during a duel in an enclosed arena. Echoing Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, Catherine urged Henri not to enter the tournament. But Henri pooh-poohed the prognostications.
The following day, June 30, 1559, Henri took the field. After triumphing over his first two opponents, he faced the comte de Lorge, Gabriel de Montgomery. But just before their third pass the king’s Master of the Horse warned Henri that his helmet was not properly fastened. And de Montgomery had not realized that the metal tip of his lance was missing.
The combatants spurred their horses and charged at each other. One eyewitness, the Bishop of Troyes, Antoine de Caraccioli, wrote to Corneille Musse, the Bishop of Bonito, “The king was struck on the gorget [the armorial element that protects the wearer’s throat], the lance broke, but the visor was not strapped down and several splinters wounded the king above the right eye. He swayed from the force of the blow and the pain, dropping his horse’s bridle, and the horse galloped off to be caught and held by the grooms. Helped from his horse, his armor [was] taken off, and a splinter of a good bigness was removed.”
For the next ten days Catherine maintained a vigil by Henri’s bedside while the physicians did everything they could to save him. Throughout their twenty-six years of marriage, Catherine had been robbed of her husband “by Diane de Poitiers in the sight and knowledge of everyone.” Now, in the king’s final hours, his wife would claim her due, preventing Diane from coming anywhere near her dying lover. She even demanded the jewels Henri had given to Diane, but while there was breath and life in him, his maîtresse en titre refused to relinquish them. And as soon as Henri expired, Catherine also exercised her authority as the widowed queen and stripped Diane of all but one of the properties Henri had bestowed upon her, including the breathtakingly glorious Château de Chenonceau, which Catherine had long coveted and Henri had always denied her.
The king’s funeral was held between August 11 and 13, 1559, and he was buried in the Valois crypt at Saint-Denis. The fifteen-year-old dauphin became King François II and Mary, Queen of Scots, only sixteen, was now the Queen of France. Henri’s death left Catherine distracted with grief, but their children were his legacy and she vowed to do everything in her power to fiercely protect them. As two of their sons, François and Charles, inherited the crown when they were minors, Catherine, styled as the Queen Mother, played an enormous and powerful role in their respective regencies.
Over the next thirty years Catherine became a consummate intriguer and a canny politician. One Englishman observed that “she hath too much wit for a woman and too much honesty for a queen.” Everything she did as a regent and later as an adviser—no matter whether it was popular—was intended to preserve the throne of France for her sons.
History has painted her as an evil schemer who dabbled in the occult, earning her various unpleasant nicknames, including “Madame la Serpente,” “the Black Queen,” and the lurid “Maggot from Italy’s tomb.” Part of that portrait is accurate. It is true that Catherine maintaine
d a chamber in the Château de Chaumont that contained alchemical paraphernalia, including the “philosopher’s egg,” an incense burner, a death’s-head, a purification fountain “with its pentacles and avocatory spells,” an astrolabe, and a divining rod. On one wall hung the infamous “magic mirror” in which her astrologer Cosimo Ruggieri foretold the number of years that each of her sons would rule France. The shocking surprise at the end of his mystical prophecy was that Henri of Navarre would succeed her own blood on the French throne, signifying the end of the Valois dynasty and the birth of the Bourbons. It’s been said that Catherine insisted on marrying her daughter Margot to the King of Navarre in a last-ditch hope of continuing her bloodline.
During the reign of François II, the kingdom was plagued by violent uprisings from French Protestants, known as the Huguenots—the name derived from a meeting of rebel dissenters held near the port city of Hugues on February 1, 1560. That March, some fifty-two rebels—members of the nobility—were publicly beheaded. But the antagonism between the Catholics and Protestants was just heating up. Over the next several years there would be three civil wars between Catholic and Huguenot factions, as the Huguenots would see their religious freedom alternately tolerated and restricted numerous times.
Shortly after sixteen-year-old François’s death from an ear infection in December 1560, Catherine wrote a letter to her eldest daughter, Queen Elisabeth of Spain, confiding, “. . . I was not loved as much as I wished to be by the King your father, who honored me more than I deserved, but I loved him so much that I was always in fear, as you know; and God has taken him from me and, not content with that, has deprived me of your brother whom you know how I loved, and has left me with three little children and a divided kingdom, where there is not one man whom I can trust. . . .” At the end of 1560, Catherine’s surviving boys were ages five, nine, and ten; but in her letter to Elisabeth she must have conveniently forgotten to count seven-year-old Marguerite (Margot), whom she never had much use for anyway.
Her grief remained palpable, but at the age of forty-one, Catherine was at the pinnacle of her power, the de jure as well as the de facto ruler of France, as the new king, Charles IX, was all of ten years old. Faced with massive debt, she drastically cut expenditures while enacting reforms to protect the peasants from abuses by the nobility. A system of unified weights and measures was adopted. In a pragmatic step to preserve her young son’s reign, she concluded that violence was an ineffective tool for bringing the Huguenots into the Catholic fold. Not above using sex as a weapon—or at least as an effective form of espionage—the woman who as queen had expelled her ladies from court if they became pregnant now employed between eighty and three hundred of the most beautiful and alluring females in France as a “flying squadron.” Dressed according to Catherine’s dictate “like goddesses in silk and gold cloth,” their brief was to behave most decorously in public, but in private were encouraged to act as they liked, using sex and seduction as a method of obtaining information, “provided they had the wisdom, ability, and knowledge to prevent a swelling stomach.” Catherine always wore black mourning, a raven presiding over a bevy of swans.
On August 18, 1572, Catherine and Henri’s youngest child, Margot, was wed to Henri of Navarre, an on-again, off-again Protestant. While we can’t be certain she was influenced by the prophecy of Cosimo Ruggieri in arranging this marriage, we do know that Catherine had hoped that the union would ease religious tensions by bringing a Catholic and a Huguenot together. Unfortunately, the royal wedding had the opposite effect. When Catherine discovered that prominent Protestants at court had formed armed factions that endangered the life of the royal family and the stability of the crown, she retaliated quickly. The result was an unmitigated slaughter and an even deeper rift between the Protestants and Catholics that no mixed marriage could repair. On August 24, the eve of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, a hit list of Huguenot leaders compiled by Catherine were assassinated, but the violence escalated when the Parisian mob turned butchers, viciously murdering every black-clad Huguenot they could find.
On May 30, 1574, the twenty-three-year-old Charles IX died of tuberculosis and his younger brother, the twenty-two-year-old duc d’Anjou, who had recently been elected King of Poland, returned to France to claim the throne as Henri III. As it would be weeks before he arrived in Paris, Catherine’s regency was officially published on June 3. Henri would remain on the throne until his death in 1589.
Toward the end of 1588, the sixty-nine-year-old Catherine took to her bed with a lung infection. On January 5, 1589, she dictated her will to King Henri III. At one thirty that afternoon, the eve of Epiphany, or as the French call it, le Jour des Rois—the Day of the Kings—Catherine de Medici, the mother of three kings and the widow of a fourth, succumbed to pleurisy and breathed her last.
Her body was dressed in garments belonging to Henri II’s maternal grandmother, Anne of Brittany. Political unrest in Paris made it too dangerous to transport her lead-lined coffin to Saint-Denis, so her ineptly embalmed and steadily reeking body remained at Blois, where the funeral was conducted on February 4. Henri III ordered her corpse to be temporarily dumped into an unmarked grave in the churchyard of Saint-Sauveur, but it remained there for twenty-one years, until Henri II’s illegitimate daughter Diane de France had Catherine’s coffin moved to Saint-Denis to repose in the Valois rotunda beside that of the husband she had adored nearly to distraction.
Born a commoner of mercantile stock, Catherine had been determined to prove herself worthy of her royal title as Queen of France. But not until she was a widow did she come into her own as a woman, as a ruler, and as a force of nature. She adored her husband, but their relationship was an entirely lopsided one; compared to his lover Diane de Poitiers, she always came up short. Much has been written about the power, sway, and allure of Henri’s far more attractive paramour. The royal mistress, the star-crossed desired one who could never fully possess him—the sexually confident and magnetic personality—is far more intriguing to the pages of posterity than a drab, dumpy, and desperate wife. And so the enduring love story of Henri II and Diane de Poitiers is the stuff of high romance, with Catherine de Medici invariably cast as the jealous villainess. Yet the circumstances of Catherine and Henri’s royal marriage were not of their making. The homely but highly intelligent heiress was lucky enough to have wed a man she loved on sight, but fate played a cruel joke on both of them. Catherine’s handsome spouse was hers for life, yet never entirely hers, unable to reciprocate her passion because Diane de Poitiers was the guardian of his heart. Henri, too, had been tripped up by duty, destiny, and dynasty; yoked to a woman he hadn’t chosen, he was never able to fully possess the one he so feverishly desired.
HENRY VIII
and
JANE SEYMOUR
(“BOUND TO OBEY AND SERVE”)
1509-1537
married 1536-1537
“[She will] not in any wise to give in to the king’s fancy unless he makes her his queen.”
—excerpt from April 1, 1536, report of imperial ambassador Eustache Chapuys to Charles V of Spain regarding the courtship of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour
So, AFTER MARRYING AND RIDDING HIMSELF OF TWO fiery and temperamental auburn-haired forces of nature—Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn—what did Henry want with Jane Seymour, a whey-faced woman with washed-out blond locks and a pointy little chin? The answer is obvious, actually. Peace and tranquility. He craved harmony, not just in his marriage, but throughout his realm. Following his failed union with a dragon, Henry wanted a doormat, and the modest and docile twenty-five-year-old Jane was the perfect antidote to Anne Boleyn. So, okay, Jane was a drip and a pill, but that was the medicine the self-diagnosing Henry required. She was also likely as anyone else to produce sons. Her mother had given birth to ten children, so her fecundity pedigree was high.
Although Henry was taunted about his new in-laws’ comparatively low connections, the Seymours were a respected family within the Tudor court, even if their
associations were nowhere near as powerful, nor their lineage as illustrious, as the Boleyns or the Howards. Sir John Seymour, Jane’s father, had served with Henry in France in 1513. Her mother, Margery Wentworth, was descended from Edward III. Jane’s brother had recently been in service to the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. And Jane herself had been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, so it stands to reason that Eustache Chapuys, the imperial ambassador to Henry’s court, would have something nice to say about her. However, the diplomat described Jane as being “of middling height and nobody thinks she has much beauty. Her complexion is so whitish that she may be called rather pale.”
Yet this young woman whom the ambassador also characterized as “not very intelligent, and . . . said to be rather haughty,” knew how to play the hand that was dealt her. Until the autumn of 1535, when Anne Boleyn was enduring a difficult pregnancy (that would result in yet another miscarriage the following winter), Jane was just a speck on the walnut-paneled walls; yet she had spent a lifetime at court, observing and absorbing what to do and, more to the point, how not to behave around the king. Most important, she’d proven clever enough to remain chaste in a court renowned for its flirtatious, if not outright licentious, behavior.
Enough people knew Jane well and could confirm her pretensions to purity, although a doubting Chapuys tartly remarked that “You may imagine whether being an Englishwoman and having been long at court, she would not hold it a sin to be a maid.” However, the ambassador’s view of Henry was equally jaded, suggesting that the king “may marry her on condition she is a maid, and when he wants a divorce there will be plenty of witnesses to testify that she was not.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 16