Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  After this incident, she quit the court, withdrawing to the Château de Loches in Touraine. However, she would occasionally journey to her other primary residence, the Manoir de Beauté on the Marne River. There the king would secretly visit her, not just for lovers’ trysts, but to discuss matters of state as well.

  They were wise to meet in secret, because it was not merely Louis’ outburst that had led to Agnès’s self-imposed exile. Public sentiment was now very much against her because of the extent of her substantial influence with the monarch. Her biggest detractors were those who wished to control Charles instead: the dauphin Louis, the Scottish mercenary nobles, and the captains of his former bands, who had been his allies before Agnès had ever met the king.

  Agnès may have left the court, but she did not abandon her lover. In the early days of 1449 she was pregnant with their fourth child when she set out from Chinon in the bleak winter cold to meet him at the front in Jumièges. The forty-year-old royal mistress became ill during the journey and died at six p.m. on February 9, 1449, at the farm of Mesnil, a dependency of the abbey at Jumièges. The abbey records state that “Charles VII had been at Jumièges for six weeks when Agnès Sorel was prostrated by an acute attack of dysentery.”

  But soon after her death, the belief that she had expired from natural causes was dismissed, replaced by the theory that she had been killed by mercury poisoning, perhaps the victim of a murder. Her friend the jeweler-financier Jean Coeur was at first suspected, although he was never charged, and he does not seem to have had any motive to be rid of her. Agnès had languished for forty days; if she had deliberately been given a fatal dose of poison, wouldn’t she have expired a lot sooner?

  Agnès Sorel’s remains were examined in 2005 by a French forensic scientist, Philippe Charlier, whose tests concluded that mercury poisoning was indeed responsible for her demise. But as mercury was a popular ingredient in cosmetics and it was also used to treat worms, he could not state with any certainty whether she had been murdered.

  Although it would have been nice if Charles had elevated his beloved Agnès to the nobility when she was alive to enjoy the perquisites of rank, the king made her a posthumous duchess so that she could receive an appropriately opulent ducal burial. Her body was interred in Loches in the Church of St. Ours.

  Charles survived Agnès by a dozen years, dying in 1461. Incapable of fidelity to his poor dishrag of a queen (who would outlive him by more than two years), he took a new paramour—Agnès’s cousin, Antoinette de Maignelais.

  HENRI II

  1519–1559

  RULED FRANCE: 1547–1559

  Henri needed love from the beginning. He was only six years old when he and his older brother François were sent to the Spanish court as hostages, imprisoned in their father King François I’s stead after he was vanquished at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Upon their departure on March 17, 1526, one of the noblewomen in the French entourage was particularly touched by the sight of brave little Henri. She broke out of the crowd of spectators and took him in her arms, kissing the tearful boy au revoir on the forehead and wishing him Godspeed. For the rest of his life, the child would remember the maternal solicitousness of Diane de Poitiers.

  The princes were held in captivity in increasingly squalid conditions for nearly five years while their dad blithely reneged on the terms of the treaty he had forged with Charles of Spain. When the boys were finally sent home to France and had difficulty reacclimating themselves to anything approaching normalcy, François scolded his sons, declaring he had no time for “dreamy, sullen, sleepy children.”

  On October 28, 1533, just fourteen years old, as part of another deal his father cut with the king of Spain, as well as Henry VIII, and Pope Clement, Henri wed His Holiness’s niece, the homely, dumpy, and dusky Catherine de Medici—wealthy, but sullied by the fact that she was not of royal blood. Her family had made its fortune first in trade and then in banking. The couple had a miserable sex life; Catherine did not bear Henri their first child until they had been married for a decade. They eventually had ten children between 1543 and 1555, seven of whom survived to adulthood.

  The August 2, 1536, death of the dauphin François made Henri the heir to the throne of France. Upon the death of his father he assumed the crown on his twenty-eighth birthday, March 31, 1547.

  Much of Henri’s reign was spent in conflict. He fought foreign wars with Austria, in Flanders, and challenged Charles of Spain’s sovereignty over Italy. At home he persecuted the French Protestants, the Huguenots, confiscating their property and burning them as heretics.

  Although Henri eventually came to respect his wife, the great love of his life was Diane de Poitiers, nearly twenty years his senior. Her elevation to the rank of duchess, let alone maîtresse en titre, was wound enough. But Henri’s passion for Diane humiliated Catherine de Medici on a deeper level, because the queen was unfortunately very much in love with her husband.

  Henri’s death was foretold by the prognosticator Nostradamus as well as three other forecasters, who predicted he would meet his end during his forty-first year. Four years before the king’s demise Nostradamus had published the prophecy:

  The young lion will overcome the old, in

  A field of combat in a single fight. He will

  Pierce his eyes in a golden cage, two

  Wounds in one, he then dies a cruel death.

  Like Julius Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, who warned the emperor to stay away from the forum that mid-March morning, Catherine urged Henri not to enter the jousting tournament on June 30, 1559.

  But he laid no store by the predictions of astrologers. The contest was just one of many brilliant festivities organized around a double wedding: the marriage of Henri and Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth to King Philip II of Spain on June 22 and that of Henri’s sister Marguerite to the duc de Savoie, which would take place on July 2.

  Henri handily triumphed over his first two opponents. But when he took the field against the third combatant—the captain of his Scots Guard, Gabriel de Montgomery—the king’s Master of the Horse warned him that his helmet was not properly fastened. And his opponent had not realized that the metal tip of his lance was missing.

  After his second pass, Henri had lifted his visor to mop his brow, but had failed to close the door to his “golden cage” before commencing the third pass. The riders faced off, spurred their mounts, and charged toward each other. De Montgomery’s lance struck Henri’s gorget, the armorial element that protects the throat, splintering the lance. Because the king’s visor had not been secured, a shard of wood pierced him above the right eye, penetrating his skull and exiting through his temple. Another splinter struck him through the throat. The king reeled in pain and shock; swaying from the force of the blow, he dropped his steed’s bridle.

  Henri was taken from his horse and, according to the bishop of Troyes, “a splinter of a good bigness was removed” from his eye and temple. The renowned doctor from Brussels, Andreas Vesalius, was immediately sent for and was able to remove several splinters of wood and shattered bits of bone from the king’s skull. But part of the lance remained embedded in the wound, and the physicians dared not touch it. Henri took ten days to die, finally expiring on July 10, 1559, at the age of forty. He had reigned for twelve years, three months, and eleven days. He was buried in the Valois crypt at Saint-Denis and was succeeded by his frail fifteen-year-old son, François, who was married to the teenage Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Henri’s queen, Catherine de Medici, became a regent to be reckoned with after Henri’s death. She succumbed to pleurisy on January 5, 1589.

  HENRI II AND

  DIANE DE POITIERS (1499–1566)

  Henri became a bridegroom at the age of fourteen, which was not considered particularly young for the era. He was tall for his age, with a muscular, athletic physique, almond-shaped brown eyes, brown hair, a straight nose, and a somewhat olive but clear complexion, perhaps the greatest asset of all for an adolescent boy. Small wonder that his
little Medici dumpling of a spouse was immediately smitten. However, the physical attraction was not at all mutual. Catherine had not been warmly welcomed into the French court; her marriage to Henri was purely a matter of political back-scratching. She was short, dark, stout, plain, and a commoner, in a world where willowy, fair-skinned, blue-blooded blondes were the fashion. And Henri had eyes only for the lady who had been assigned to ease Catherine’s assimilation into the world of the Valois court. That woman was Catherine’s second cousin, who perfectly embodied the era’s belle idéale—the serenely beautiful Diane de Poitiers.

  Educated according to the principles of humanism, Diane was a true Renaissance woman, cultured and literate, well versed in music, Greek, and Latin; her dancing was graceful and her conversation was elegant and witty. An avid huntress, like the Roman goddess who was her namesake, Diane also kept fit and glowing by swimming in cold water every day. To avoid wrinkles, she slept upright against a bolster and concocted her own facial masks from melon juice, young barley, and an egg yolk mixed with ambergris.

  Diane’s connections to the court reached back to her childhood. In 1524, when she was barely five years old, her father’s life was spared at the last possible moment by Henri’s father, François I, after Jean de Poitiers had been accused of treason. Diane was born in the south of France in a region known as the Dauphiné, which borders Provence. At the age of fifteen, she was married to a man some forty years her senior, Louis de Brézé, seigneur d’Anet, who happened, appropriately enough, to be the royal Master of the Hunt. Louis was the grandson of King Charles VII—his mother, Charlotte, was the king’s oldest daughter by his maîtresse en titre Agnès Sorel. However, Charlotte’s disastrous marriage to Jacques de Brézé ended in a double murder when he came home one day to discover his wife (who, according to trial witnesses, was “moved by an inordinate lechery”) in bed with his Master of Hounds. Jacques immediately drew his sword and ran the pair of them through—one hundred times.

  By the time Henri was old enough to know Diane, she was a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had also given Louis de Brézé, now governor and Sénéchal of Normandy, two daughters: Françoise (who was only a year older than Henri), and Louise, who was two years younger.

  The first scandal to enmesh Henri and Diane ensued when he was just a boy, during the March 1531 joust to honor the marriage of Henri’s father to his second wife, Eléanore, a princess of Portugal. The theme was a Spanish chivalric legend, the story of twelve-year-old Amadis, which hit bone-close to the prince, who was a few weeks shy of his own twelfth birthday. The plot revolves around the two young sons of the King of Wales exiled to a strange land and enslaved by a magician. The princeling falls in love with a lady fair and a fairy grants them eternal youth.

  At a tournament, the knights traditionally lower their lances in front of the object of their admiration so that she can tie her favor—her silken scarf—to the tip, and her knight then sallies forth into the combat wearing her colors. It was naturally expected in the grand tradition of courtly love that the new queen would be judged “la belle parmi les belles”—the beauty among the beauties. It was Henri’s first tournament and he was cast in the role of the hero, Amadis. But instead of lowering his lance before the auburn-haired Eléanore of Portugal, or even his father’s buxom and vivacious blond mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly (who believed she deserved the honor, and privately expected it), Henri, perhaps wishing to publicly acknowledge the woman who had shown him kindness on the saddest day of his life, halted before the thirty-year-old Diane de Poitiers, Grande Sénéchale of Normandy. He dipped his lance and, in a reedy voice not yet matured by adolescence, boldly offered his protection as her gallant knight if she would favor him with her green and white colors that day.

  The crowd didn’t know whether to be shocked or charmed. Anne d’Heilly was steamed and made a dramatic exit from the wooden stands, drawing even more attention to her rejection. From then on she regarded Diane de Poitiers as her enemy and spared no opportunity to attack her beautiful rival. A couple of years later, long before their romance began, the fourteen-year-old Henri energetically defended Diane from Anne d’Heilly’s slanderous allegations that “the Wrinkled One,” as the royal mistress called Diane (who was only nine years her senior), maintained her youthful looks by practicing witchcraft—a serious charge in the sixteenth century.

  By the time Henri became a bridegroom in 1533, the tall and slender comtesse de Brézé had already been widowed for two years. Diane had added the widow’s symbol, an upended torch, to her coat of arms, with the motto Qui me alit me extingit—“He who inflames me has the power to extinguish me.” It was a family symbol, but the semierotic phrase would prove prophetic.

  Black and white were the official colors of mourning in France, and the Sénéchale, as Diane was also known, decided that they flattered her pale complexion and strawberry blond hair so well that she retained them. Black and white became her signature, and from then on she wore nothing else and decorated her rooms at court as well as her great gift from Henri (upon his accession to the throne), the Château d’Anet, exclusively in those two hues. Diana was not only the Roman goddess of the hunt; she was the goddess of the moon, and black and white also represented the dark and light sides of the celestial sphere.

  From the outset, Henri made no secret of his attraction and devotion to Diane de Poitiers, and Catherine de Medici endeavored to compete with her kinswoman for his affection. But the new bride was soon compelled to acknowledge that this elegant older woman in the prime of her beauty had utterly bewitched her husband.

  In 1537, while Henri was on a military campaign in Piedmont, he impregnated a commoner named Filippa Duci, which was all it took to convince him that the fertility issues he and Catherine had been suffering in the four years since their wedding were his wife’s fault. Filippa bore a daughter, and Henri named her Diane, after the Sénéchale, to whom he gave the child to be raised alongside her own two girls. Because of the infant’s name, and the fact that the comtesse de Brézé was parenting her, rumors abounded that little Diane de France was really the bastard daughter of Diane de Poitiers and Henri. By now he had moved up a notch in the line of succession and was the dauphin, owing to the death in August 1536 of his older brother.

  Although it is possible that Diane and Henri consummated their romance as early as the end of 1536 or the start of 1537, it’s more likely that the liaison didn’t blossom into a full-blown sexual relationship until 1538, after Henri returned from the front. The eighteen-year-old had come back more confident and mature of mind and body (not to mention a dad). An erotic poem that Diane, then thirty-seven, wrote soon after Henri’s return to France refers to her having submitted, “quivering and trembling…[to] a boy, fresh, ready, young,” so she may indeed have kept him waiting and wanting until then.

  Henri and Diane’s is one of the greatest romances in royal history. Until she slept with Henri, the Sénéchale’s sexual experience had been limited to a successful seventeen-year marriage with a man forty years her senior, a man she’d wed at fifteen, when he was old enough to have been her grandfather. With Henri she was experiencing passion for the first time in her life, but enjoying relations with a man young enough to be her son.

  One clue that their affair became carnal in 1538 is that Henri began to dress only in Diane’s colors—black and white. He also adopted the crescent moon as his emblem, and created a monogrammed device with their initials as entwined as their limbs must have been every night. Emblazoned beneath the moon, Henri’s motto became an erotic double entendre: Cum plena est, emula solis—“When full, she equals the sun.” Portraits of Diane, including nudes depicting her as Diana, goddess of the hunt, were hung everywhere. Desperately in unrequited love with her husband, the unhappy Catherine de Medici had no choice but to accept the ubiquitous HD insignias and the new decor with dignified silence, tamping down her bitterness and humiliation. There was nothing she could say, because until she gave Henri a child, she could be
sent home to Florence at any time, repudiated for barrenness.

  A plot to put aside Catherine had already been set in motion by François I’s scheming blond mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly. Anne wished to topple her rival courtesan, Diane de Poitiers, by finding Henri a new bride—one he would actually desire. But Catherine had an unlikely ally: her second cousin Diane. It was in Diane’s interest as well that her lover retain his homely little wife; otherwise she, too, ran the risk of being cast aside. So she became the couple’s sex therapist.

  Meanwhile, Catherine availed herself of every known remedy in an effort to become fertile: wearing a girdle under her gowns that was made by a witch (soaked in she-donkey’s milk and bearing charms such as the middle finger of a fetus); sporting an amulet about her neck containing the ashes of a giant frog; ingesting myrrh pills and mare’s urine; and slathering herself with poultices of cow’s dung and ground stag antlers. But as things transpired, part of their conception problem may have been Henri’s. Referred to in several diplomatic dispatches, he suffered from a mild deformity of the penis, a downward curvature known as chordee or hypospadias. Evidently, Catherine’s real medical issue was an inverted uterus, and some scholars have hypothesized that had Henri’s penis been straight, she would have had far less trouble conceiving.

  Henri was an adventurous lover with Diane but never attempted anything too exotic with his wife. Diane advised Catherine to jettison all the quack remedies, and instead (in concordance with the royal physicians), she suggested a number of sexual positions to the royal couple that would facilitate successful intercourse, including making love à levrette—which we might call doggie style, a levrette being a greyhound.

  Not only did the gossip regarding Henri and Catherine’s embarrassing sex life spread through the French court, but foreign ambassadors provided the intelligence to their employers. It humiliated Catherine all the more that the whole world seemed to know that Henri’s mistress “at night urges [him] to that couch to which no desire draws him.”