NINE
How Spanish you have become, my daughter
1564–66
Catherine placed the Constable in overall charge of the royal progress, which left Paris for Fontainebleau on 24 January 1564. They were not to return until May 1566, nearly two and a half years later. Several thousand members of the Court and their servants made up this great royal caravanserai. Among the essential members of the party were the King’s Council, in order that government business could be conducted en route, and the foreign ambassadors. Catherine hoped that the latter would report back to their various masters describing the splendour of her train, thereby refuting the widely held view that France teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. The royal household travelled with their usual attendants, ladies and gentlemen – including the flying squadron – tutors, priests, five doctors, five kitchen officers, five sommeliers, cooks, musicians, porters, grooms, beaters for the hunt and nine essential dwarves, who of course had their own miniature coaches.
The number of horses and mules required to transport both people and luggage – particularly the gold-studded trunks of the royal family – was phenomenal. With them the party carried everything from furniture and cooking utensils to clothes and costumes for all the festivals, feasts, joyeuses entrées and masques that had been planned. Portable triumphal arches, which could be easily erected when needed, were also stowed and elaborate royal barges for when the royal pageant took to the water. It was a city on the move. Catherine brought with her such diverse items as silk sheets, silver washbasins, gold plate for banquets, her writing table, registers, papers, money, hats and her lute and lyre players. In bad weather or when the need arose, she chose to travel either in a horse-drawn litter or in a large cumbersome coach drawn by six horses so that she could conduct state business in transit. The seats were lined with green velvet and cushions, and the children would often sit with her in this coach so spacious that it resembled a small room. Unfortunately these vast vehicles induced attacks of travel sickness that were anything but majestic, so when weather and work permitted the Queen Mother, who had six of her finest horses with her, would ride along with the rest of the nobles. Whenever possible the royal family would travel by barge. For protection there were four companies of gens d’armes, a company of light horse and a unit of the French guard whose commander was Filippo Strozzi, a second cousin to the Queen Mother.
The Court made a short stop at Saint-Maur near Vincennes – a small château that Catherine planned to rebuild upon her return – before moving on to Fontainebleau where they were to spend Lent. While at Saint-Maur, the Cardinal of Lorraine returned from the Council of Trent that had finally closed. After eighteen years of spasmodic deliberations on reforming the Catholic Church, the council gave its belated response to the reform movement in a series of fundamental changes now known as the Counter-Reformation. The Cardinal brought with him the Tridentine Decrees – the rulings of the Council of Trent – ordered by the papacy. The council clarified once and for all the impossibility of reconciling Catholicism with Protestantism and made the schism of the Christian faith complete. Since Lorraine’s return, Catherine knew pressure from the more extreme Catholics would mount and she accordingly gave him a cool reception.
On 31 January the party set out for Fontainebleau where Catherine had ordered that each of the most important nobles give a reception or ball. Both the Constable and the Cardinal de Bourbon gave suppers at their lodgings, and on Dimanche Gras, Catherine threw a banquet at the dairy of Fontainebleau which lay a little way out from the palace, near a meadow. The courtiers dressed as shepherds or shepherdesses for this fête champêtre, a precursor of the Petit Trianon parties thrown by Marie Antoinette nearly two centuries later. Everyone judged the day a huge success, the nobles having enjoyed their little afternoon of pastoral simplicity, albeit in February. Later in the early evening the guests attended a comedy in the great ballroom, followed by a ball at which 300 ‘beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth’ performed a specially choreographed dance. Henri of Anjou gave his banquet the next day, after which a mock battle was held between twelve young knights. On Mardi Gras an enchanted castle had been built in which six maidens were held captive by devils and guarded by a giant and a dwarf. Their liberators appeared, led by the four Marshals of France. Six groups of men came to claim the captive damsels. At the sound of a bell, Condé led the defenders out of the castle to fight a superb mock battle and the scantily-clad nymphs were rescued by their gallants. The royal children also played a role in the festivities giving a performance of a pastorale written by Ronsard.
Once the feast days had finished, the Cardinal of Lorraine, determined to grasp control of the King’s Council, tried to have the rulings of the Council of Trent endorsed. Essentially the Tridentine Decrees threatened the royal rights of the French Crown over the Church. With Catherine’s backing, de L’Hôpital strenuously opposed the decrees, enraging the cardinal, who accused him of being a crypto-Huguenot. It is clear from surviving documents that the strenuous efforts to enforce the Edict of Amboise were initiated by the Queen Mother, who meticulously followed the various cases where the edict was being ignored. Without her support de L’Hôpital would not have been able to operate since he was otherwise mistrusted by both parties.
Catherine deeply resented the papacy’s attempts to enforce their rule over matters that were, in her opinion, strictly reserved to the Crown. Her attitude hardened further when Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, received a summons from Rome on a charge of heresy. Infuriated that Pius IV dared to threaten a sovereign, and moreover one with much land and property in France, Catherine replied that he had no licence to rule over foreign princes nor to dispose of their properties. The entire concept was anathema to the Queen Mother for whom the rights of the Crown were almost a religion in itself. She protected the Queen of Navarre and Pius deemed it wise to leave the matter alone. ‘I put myself wholly under the wing of your powerful protection,’ Jeanne wrote gratefully; ‘I will go to find you wherever you may be and shall kiss your feet more willingly than the Pope’s.’1
On 13 March 1564 the royal progress set off in earnest. Arriving on the evening of 14 March at Sens, the scene of an appalling massacre of Protestants two years earlier, the Court made its first stop. Two days after his arrival Charles came across a sow with alitter of newborn piglets. He picked one up to caress it at which the sow attacked him. Furious, Charles brutally killed the sow. This violent and unfortunate episode was witnessed by Claude Haton, an ecclesiastic diarist at the French Court, who noted it as an example of the King’s tendency to manic rages.
The Court arrived at Troyes on 23 March to an exotic greeting by people dressed as savages and satyrs riding goats, donkeys and ‘unicorns’. The welcome was an allusion to the French exploration of the Americas where they had founded colonies in Florida and Brazil; indeed, Admiral de Coligny had sent three expeditions there recently. During their stay at Troyes Charles touched the feet of the scrofulous and washed those of thirteen child paupers. He then served them at dinner, which as a young boy he had seen his father do at Fontainebleau. Catherine meanwhile did the same for thirteen mendicant women.
Easter was spent with the usual displays of piety and devotion, while Protestant members of the Court celebrated Easter four leagues outside the town. A few peaceful demonstrations took place by the Huguenots, yet no real trouble arose and most of the twenty days that the Court lodged at Troyes were spent enjoyably with banquets, parades and other pleasures. It was also here that the peace with Elizabeth of England was finally signed over Calais and Le Havre. As a subtle touch, the Queen Mother had particularly chosen this town for the signature, for it was here that 140 years earlier France had capitulated to England in the ignominious Treaty of Troyes of the Hundred Years War. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was specially released to sign the treaty for Elizabeth, and Catherine seemed particularly gracious and cheerful that day. From Troyes the Queen Mother wrote to Coligny to reassure him about the enforcement of the Peace Edict of Amboise. She claimed, ‘One of the main reasons for which the King, my lord and son, has undertaken his travels is to show his intention regarding that matter so clearly wherever he passes that no one will have any pretext or occasion to contravene it.’2
At Bar-le-Duc in early May there was a family celebration to which Catherine had been eagerly looking forward. Her first grandson, Henri, the offspring of her daughter Claude and son-in-law Charles, Duke and Duchess of Lorraine, had been born and was to be baptised. The Queen Mother, Charles and Philip II stood godparents to the baby. Catherine was overjoyed to see her daughter Claude again and pleased at the name her grandson had been given. In each town or city where the royal caravan stopped the King and his mother examined local grievances, attempting to ensure the observations of the edict. The King spoke forcefully to those he found flouting his decree and threatened harsh measures for anyone who disobeyed him. The party then moved south to Dijon, where Catherine’s trusty but refined soldier, Gaspard de Saulx, Seigneur de Tavannes, was governor. The spectacle he laid on for the Court’s amusement lacked the usual poetic delicacy, with nymphs and fauns versifying and extolling the virtues of their King, of most cities they visited. Instead, Tavannes had arranged for a ‘mock’ attack upon a fortress to entertain the royal party. An expectant hush fell upon the observers awaiting the start of the celebration when deafening live fire from four huge cannon suddenly blew the fortress to atoms, shaking the ground around them. Catherine, who had been untroubled by the bombardment at Rouen, was left trembling by the Marshal’s overenthusiastic military tribute. She had time to recover on the next stage of the voyage, which included a soothing trip by barge to Mâcon.
Before the King’s entrée joyeuse on 3 June some of Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre’s, Huguenot followers abused and heckled the Corpus Christi procession taking place in the town. Catherine, incensed, ordered that the procession take place again on 8 June. This time the Huguenots removed their hats and stood respectfully watching the proceedings; the Spanish ambassador observed their restrained behaviour with much satisfaction. In Lyons on 24 June, in order to avoid further troubles of this sort, the King decreed that during his progress throughout the kingdom Protestant worship must be suspended, save for baptisms and marriages.
Lyons was a particularly important cosmopolitan city, rich in commerce and with a significant foreign population. Large numbers of Germans and Italians lived there. Lying close to Geneva, it had fallen under Protestant domination during the First War of Religion, though the expelled Catholics had now returned. As the city boasted excellent fortifications, Montmorency took the precaution of installing his soldiers at key points taking over the artillery and forts before the royal family arrived. Ignoring rumours that the Protestants planned to rise up and kill the King, Charles made his entry into the city on 13 June. Catherine cried unrestrained tears when she saw her beloved sister-in-law, Marguerite of Savoy, and her husband Emmanuel-Philibert who now joined the Court. The duke lived up to his nickname of ironhead with his tiresome and immediate importuning of the Queen Mother over the return of two strongholds, Pinerolo and Savigliano, that had been lost to France by the duchy many years before. Catherine responded by awarding him an honorary captaincy of a French company, not quite what he had hoped to cajole from her. Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, also arrived to pay his respects to the young King and to see what he could gain for himself; indeed, throughout the tour petitioners from all ranks of society presented themselves to the King and Queen Mother.
To demonstrate the new-found religious harmony the children made a symbolic procession through the city. They walked in pairs, Protestant and Catholic side by side. Then the foreign contingents took their turn to celebrate Charles’s arrival. Each wore their local costume and traditional colour. The Florentines wore purple, the Genevoise black velvet and the Germans black silk. As they processed many noted that the King looked a sad and serious child for his age, dressed in green with a white plumed hat. Next to him sat his brother Henri of Anjou looking dashing in a crimson doublet embroidered with silver, immaculately dressed as usual. Lyons had been transformed with triumphal arches and columns imitating those of antiquity, upon which adulatory verses to the King were inscribed. Catherine noted with satisfaction that the humiliating interlaced Hs and Ds, of Henri and Diane, were no longer in evidence in the city, but instead the Medici arms were conjoined with those of France. During the Court’s stay, the Queen Mother visited shops filled with exotic merchandise, silks and other delights but her spending spree had to be cut short due to a sudden outbreak of plague. Fear of contagion sent the whole Court and its followers on their way; though normally slow in packing for departure, on this occasion the exit was notable for its singular despatch. The plague went on to kill over 20,000 Lyonnaise in only a few days.
During a short stop at Crémieu – east of Lyons – en route for Roussillon, where they were to stay with the Cardinal de Tournon, Catherine mischievously sent a message to Montmorency to say that there had been a massive change in the tour schedule and that she had left for Barcelona. This sent the old man into a blind panic, until he found out that it was a practical joke. Catherine wrote to her ambassador in Spain telling him she must report the story to her daughter the Queen, ‘so that she may laugh over it’.3 It was here that de L’Hôpital issued an edict to curb the growing independence of the royal towns. In future two lists of candidates for municipal posts must be presented to the King who would choose between them. This provided an important step in regaining authority over provincial towns where royal control had almost been lost, allowing leagues and parties to form.
Also at Crémieu Jeanne d’Albret begged to be allowed to retire to her own territories in Béarn on the Spanish border and to take her son with her. Catherine refused the Queen of Navarre’s request outright. Instead she gave her 150,000 livres and sent her to Vendôme. As for Jeanne’s adored son Henri, Catherine declared she would keep him with her. She wanted the boy by her side as a hostage against the fanatical Huguenot Queen’s future plans. Jeanne had become such a strict adherent to the new faith that her son, though devoted to his mother, was relieved to remain with the royal circus and his young playmates, away from the sermonising. Through the late summer months the caravan passed through Roman, Valence, Montelimar, Orange and Avignon. The train was so long and so large that often the vanguard arrived at the party’s next destination before the rearguard had left the last one. To Catherine’s alarm the King caught a cold, which developed into bronchitis; his sickly lungs were a constant worry but the warm southern winds and dry climate sped his recovery.
The Queen Mother then made a visit to Nostradamus at Salon in Provence. It was an interview she had probably looked forward to and dreaded at the same time. She had infinite respect for the predictions of this great soothsayer and mystic. Unfortunately, just before the royal party arrived at Salon-de-Crau there had been an outbreak of plague and most of the townspeople had fled. For Catherine there was no question of avoiding the town or cancelling the interview. Accordingly, Charles ordered that the people return to give their King a proper welcome or face punishment. The local population evidently feared royal ire more than the plague because they turned out to watch Their Majesties’ entry into the town. The royal family arrived in the mid-afternoon of 17 October. Charles was ‘seated on an African horse, with a harness of black velvet with large trimmings and fringes of gold. His person was robed in a cloak of Tyrian purple, adorned with silver ribbons. He wore an amethyst in one ear and a sapphire in the other.’4
It was arranged that the Queen Mother would meet Nostradamus with no fuss or fanfare, and he suggested he ‘move about and meet Her Majesty away from the vulgar people’. Suffering from gout, the old man walked up to the château to meet the King and Queen Mother. Moving slowly with a malacca cane in one hand and his velvet cap in the other, he was eventually presented to the royal party. After greeting the King properly in Latin, a long conversation ensued during which the prophet pronounced that Charles would not predecease the Constable; this hardly gave cause for celebration since Montmorency was already in his seventies. Catherine gave Nostradamus 200 écus and made him a royal councillor and king’s physician.
This was not their first meeting; that had taken place at Blois in 1560, where at Catherine’s request she had asked Nostradamus to draw up Henri of Anjou’s horoscope that predicted he would one day be King of France. This prophecy seemed to please the Queen Mother very much indeed. Less satisfactory was the interest Nostradamus had shown during his visit in a young page-boy of the French King’s suite. He insisted upon seeing the boy who, when called for, bolted in terror. The page was Henri of Navarre. The following morning at Navarre’s lever he noticed that his servants were slow in giving him his chemise. Navarre shivered, as he recalled when he repeated the story, not from cold but from fear that he was to be whipped for some misdemeanour. In fact, the servants had withheld his shirt so that Nostradamus, who had arrived in the chamber, could inspect the boy’s body, particularly his moles. This was common practice, similar to palm-reading. The old man, certain that Henri (who at the time was only sixth in line to the throne) would one day be King, pronounced forcefully to the servants around Navarre, ‘You will have as a master the King of France and Navarre.’5
At Aix-en-Provence the King reprimanded the Parlement for refusing to register the Edict of Amboise. He also put a commission of Parisian parlementaires in their place and suspended the local magistrates. Now came the discovery of a part of Charles’s realm which seemed like paradise to Catherine’s brood. For the first time in their lives the royal children experienced the sunshine and beauty of the Mediterranean. The strange fruits and smells, lavender, thyme and the sea enchanted them. They saw orange trees – imported from China via Portugal as recently as 1548 – and palm trees, another new import, growing in this strange and bewitching place. For Catherine it was a return to a landscape and climate similar to the one in which she had grown up, and she happily watched her children enjoy the countryside and all its novelties. At Brignoles local girls greeted the King wearing the traditional Provençal dress; they danced the Volta and Martingale. Their simple enthusiastic greeting cheered the Queen Mother and her children more than any of the triumphal arches and Latin declamations they had heard so many times before on the journey. Catherine judged the whole visit such a success that she decided to buy a large property near Hyères and fill the park with orange trees. For the feast of Toussaint the royal party camped by the sea. What memories did this bring back to the Queen Mother, seeing for the first time in over thirty years the stretch of coast she had passed along all those years ago, as a fourteen-year-old bride-to-be? At Toulon Charles and his brother set out to sea in galleys provided by René of Lorraine, Marquis d’Elbeuf.
On 6 November the people of Marseilles gave the royal party the warmest greeting they had yet received. Staunchly royalist and Catholic, even the Spanish ambassador found himself grudgingly impressed by the fealty of the city. Charles and his family attended a great service of thanksgiving, which his young companion Henri of Navarre could not join because of his religion. Obliged to stand at the door of the church, he patiently waited for the service to end. Charles teased Henri about not entering and, unable to provoke his friend to put his foot over the threshold, seized his cap and threw it inside. His trick had the desired effect and Navarre leapt inside chasing after his velvet hat. Expeditions by sea were arranged and a picnic organised to the Château d’If. Taking one look at the threatening swell, Catherine decided against the plan and the party took place in a sheltered cove instead. Here Charles decided that an improvised naval battle should take place. A number of courtiers, including himself, represented the Turks, and the others Christians. This drew a withering report from the Spanish ambassador. How could the King of France play the infidel? All this was duly recorded and sent off to Philip in Madrid.
After further peregrinations, there followed a stay of nearly a month in Arles due to the flooding of the river Rhône. Finally on 7 December the party set out for Montpellier where they were to spend Christmas. This was the heart of Montmorency country and the governor was the Constable’s second (and by far the most able) son, Montmorency-Damville, who had ruthlessly retaken the churches seized by Protestants and re-established the Catholics in the area after the war. If Provence had been warm and welcoming, the Languedoc, with its substantial and committed contingents of Protestants, gave a far cooler and sometimes even abusive reception. During this part of the progress Catherine discovered that here certain Catholic leagues had sprung up during the troubles and were now becoming a deep-rooted and serious problem. The leagues were against the law, but under the guise of mercantile trades unions and other such ‘fronts’ a variety of people, including nobles, joined up and the local authorities feared they might provoke a violent reaction by suppressing them. The Queen Mother knew that these societies represented precisely the lawless fraternities that protested allegiance to the Crown while zealously preparing to serve their own intolerant ends.
To add to her troubles, soon after Christmas Catherine received news that serious problems had arisen back in Paris. Marshal de Montmorency, the Constable’s eldest son, had quarrelled with the Cardinal of Lorraine for bringing a troop escort with him into the city. As armed escorts were banned, François, Marshal de Montmorency – the governor of Paris – had been forced to use his own men to split up the cardinal’s troop. Hearing this, the Guise family had sent reinforcements to their brother and Coligny ordered 500 soldiers to the capital to counter the Guises’ move. Finally, Coligny’s men left Paris peacefully, but a renewed outbreak of the civil war was only narrowly averted. Marshal de Montmorency’s swaggering and overbearing behaviour had generally irritated almost everyone who mattered, and his bravado and abuse of power in the King’s absence had been bound to cause trouble. Worrying news that Condé was fortifying garrisons in Picardy also arrived to cause the Queen Mother much disquiet, but to the astonishment of the Spanish ambassador she refused to do more than send written reprimands and keep herself informed of any further developments.
As the party changed composition all the time, some of its most powerful nobles travelled to their estates to attend to business, rejoining the royal caravan when they could. This made it harder to keep an eye on the troublemakers among them. In contrast to the darker political moments, there were many touching displays of love for the King. One day shortly after Christmas, when the party passed through a small village called Leucate, an old crone ‘of eighty years or more’ learned, to her complete disbelief, that the splendid train passing through was that of the King. She asked to be allowed to approach, Charles bade her to come forward, then ‘falling to her knees and throwing her hands up in the air, she said in her local dialect these words which were translated into French: “He that I am happy to see today that which I never hoped to see, you are most welcome my King, my son; I beg of you kiss me, for it is impossible that I shall ever see you again.”’6 Kissed by the King, the by now tearful old peasant woman watched the party’s departure with her simple devotion and unshakeable love for the monarch redoubled. This was precisely the type of encounter that Catherine set much store by, not just impressing nobles and townspeople but also those toiling in the fields for whom the Second Coming of Christ would have been almost as much of a surprise as the arrival of their own sovereign.
At Carcassonne, scene of some of the most terrible violence during the religious troubles, heavy snowfalls delayed the party. As the children held snowball fights the Queen learned of a local executioner whose cruelty was unsurpassed even in those grisly times. While burning five people alive, he had cut the liver out of one and eaten it before the eyes of the dying victim and then had sawn the limb off another poor soul who was not-yet-dead.
During the Court’s seven-week stay at Toulouse from 1 February to 18 March, the two princes, Henri of Anjou and his younger brother Alençon, were confirmed. As their education continued during the long tour across France and their stay in Toulouse was a long one, Anjou and his friend Henri de Clermont had been given a room in the same building as they lodged in which to do their lessons. Large chambers had been sectioned off to make smaller temporary ones in order to provide private space for the family members. One day they enjoyed a lesson that was certainly not on Catherine’s curriculum. Hearing a noise in the neighbouring room, the two students got up and peeped through a hole in the wall. Clermont reported about what they saw to Brantôme.
[There were] two extremely large women, with their skirts rolled up and their undergarments [callessons] down and one was lying on top of the other … they rubbed against each other, pressing hard, in short their movements were very strong, their lewdness resembled a man’s. After an hour or so of this activity, having become so hot and tired, they lay red-faced and quite covered in sweat, although it was extremely cold, that they could not longer continue and had to rest.7
Clermont went on to add that this grotesquely sensual spectacle took place regularly for the rest of the time the Court was in residence, and that both he and Anjou enjoyed watching whenever they could.
While this rather primitive initiation took place, Catherine embarked on a remarkable spending extravaganza (even by her standards) to prepare for the most exciting part of the royal progress, the meeting with her daughter Elisabeth of Spain scheduled to take place in June 1565. Catherine had borrowed over 700,000 écus, mainly from the Gondi bank, for the lavish impression with which she intended to dazzle the Spaniards. Her correspondent economies were to cut back the pensions of the unfortunate Duke of Ferrara and the Count Palatine of the Rhine. Buying jewellery, silks and other presents for her daughter and the Spanish suite, Catherine even adopted Spanish dress herself in her excitement. For six years the Queen Mother had been asking for a meeting with Philip and for six years he had been avoiding her. He believed that Catherine, whom he apparently nicknamed ‘Madame La Serpente’, was a woman whose words were born only from expedience; her half-measures and inability to live according to firm and unbending principles were complete anathema to him. His defence was to remain hidden. Catherine had a well-earned reputation for her elusiveness and opaque pronouncements, particularly when he wanted her to be substantial on matters of religion. Philip decided, therefore, that if he remained invisible he could not be tricked by her manipulative charms and evaporating promises. He would have agreed with the Englishman who observed of Catherine, ‘She hath too much wit for a woman, and too little honesty for a queen.’ Another contemporary said of her, ‘She lies even when she is telling the truth.’
Catherine’s Edict of Amboise disgusted Philip and some time after the grand tour had started he informed her that since it was not customary for a sovereign to leave his own borders to meet other monarchs, there could be no encounter between them. He would, however, allow his wife to make the journey to Bayonne, where a convenient place to rendezvous lay on the frontier. It was to be considered a purely family meeting. Upon hearing that Philip refused to see her, Catherine had been utterly downcast, but when the reunion with her daughter was confirmed she had burst out into peals of laughter and lost her composure to such an extent that she had ended up sobbing.
By 1 April the tour had arrived at Bordeaux, the capital of Guyenne. On 12 April Charles held a ‘lit de justice’ during which Chancellor de L’Hôpital spoke sternly to the local magistrates about the King’s unswerving intention to enforce the Edict of Amboise. ‘All this disorder stems from the contempt in which you hold the King and his ordinances,’ he told them, ‘which you neither fear nor obey except at your own pleasure.’ Wherever there had been poor observation or non-enforcement of the edict Charles commanded that it be put into effect.
On 3 May the party left Bordeaux. The caravan headed for Catherine’s personal climax of the progress, to meet her daughter at Bayonne. She had much to prepare for the elaborate reception of the Spanish party. On 8 May at Mont Marsan Catherine heard, to her dismay, rumours that Philip had decided not to send Elisabeth after all. He was particularly displeased having heard that Catherine had received an emissary from the Sultan of Turkey and he had also learned from his spies that a French expedition to Florida was being organised by Catherine to sail from Dieppe. The Spanish felt fiercely protective of their New World discoveries and disliked the threat of any other nation interfering in the lands that they were plundering so thoroughly. Any last hopes that Catherine might have fostered of Philip attending the meeting had now died, though her daughter finally received permission to meet her mother after all. Unfortunately Philip had also decided to send the severe and ferocious Duke of Alba as his personal representative, who he hoped would talk sense into the Queen Mother about her discussions with the infidel, concessions to French Protestants and land claims in Florida. Three weeks later, on 30 May, while the Court remained at Dax, Catherine set off for Bayonne incognito. She needed time to prepare for her daughter’s arrival, which had been arranged for 14 June. Meanwhile Henri of Anjou left for Vitoria in Spain from where he was to fetch his sister.
In the burning summer heat on a floating pontoon in the middle of the Bidassoa river, the twenty-year-old Elisabeth of Spain affectionately embraced her brother Charles, still only a boy of fifteen. The heat was so great that six soldiers dropped dead from standing in the sun in their armour. Arriving on the French side of the river, the scene of so many emotional moments during the last fifty years, Elisabeth rode escorted by a huge contingent of the highest nobles of France, except for those known to be Huguenots. Philip had made it a precondition that his wife should not be infected by coming into contact with heretics, and Catherine’s argument that this would alienate Condé and his followers and arouse unnecessary suspicions had left the Spanish King quite unmoved. Thus, without Condé, or any other supposedly contaminating influences to greet her, the French Queen of Spain rode into Saint-Jean de Luz. Catherine had been waiting there for over two hours with ill-concealed impatience. Mother and daughter kissed and cried when they first met, then Elisabeth turned quickly to Margot and François (aged twelve and ten respectively), her two youngest siblings. They had not seen each other for six years. During the family supper that night, after a fuss between the two Queens about who should sit in the place of honour which Catherine won – insisting that a blushing Elisabeth must not forget her superior station as Queen of Spain – the Queen Mother appeared extremely moved that she had her daughter close to her again. On 15 June Elisabeth made a glittering official entry into Bayonne. The city was illuminated by flaming torches and she was mounted on an exquisite grey palfrey presented to her by Charles; its gem-studded harness worth 400,000 ducats had been a gift from Philip.
Catherine found Elisabeth much changed since leaving her mother country in 1559. Her daughter had become more Spanish than French and had acquired many of the elaborate formalities of her adopted land. When she spoke it was with the words of her husband whom she loved, and years of indoctrination by the older man – who had at last found true happiness with Elisabeth, his third wife – had brought her unformed mind to think as he did. Thus after the first impulsive embraces and displays of tenderness Elisabeth became more formal and restrained. Though they tried to recapture them, the easiness of former days was gone. Elisabeth had become Philip’s mouthpiece and after a long and futile effort begging her mother to see reason, she received a quick response from Catherine: ‘So your husband suspects me? Do you know that his suspicions will lead us straight to war?’8 Elisabeth replied, ‘What makes you suppose, Madame, that the King suspects Your Majesty?’9 The Queen Mother remarked coolly, ‘How Spanish you have become, my daughter.’ In addition to Elisabeth and Alba, Philip had taken the trouble to replace his ambassador to France, Chantonnay, for Francès, Duke of Alava. He hoped that by removing Chantonnay, whose relationship with the Queen Mother had often been less than cordial and marked by his frequent reproaches, veiled threats and support for the Triumvirs, the new man might help bring Catherine firmly into the Catholic camp.
One of the Queen Mother’s principal reasons for wanting a meeting with her daughter and son-in-law was to promote further marriages between the Valois and the Habsburgs. Alba, unaccustomed to dealing with a woman, especially one who employed every device and artifice to flatter and cajole her interlocutor, found himself greatly discomfited by Catherine’s complicated artfulness. Her naive belief in the power of dynastic unions, and some say a fundamentally bourgeois desire to see her younger children well married, were not what the Duke of Alba expected. The old idea of a union between Margot and Don Carlos was resurrected, then Catherine enthusiastically suggested a fresh proposal, that Henri of Anjou be married to Juana, Dowager Queen of Portugal and Philip’s sister. The fact that Juana was twice Henri’s age and Don Carlos was a homicidal maniac and shortly to be locked into a cell – his father stoically hammering the bolts on to the door himself – did not worry Catherine in the slightest. Off his guard and unfamiliar with matrimonial politics, Alba grew gruff and soldierly.
In the talks that ensued, the duke kept trying to steer the discussion back to the affairs that so preoccupied his master in Madrid. He denounced the Queen Mother’s policy of toleration, suggesting extreme and violent measures that certainly lacked subtlety but which would, he promised, remove the knotty religious problem from her realm for ever. Executions, expulsions, torture, a reversal of the Edict of Amboise; his message was of persecution not pacification. He would soon try these solutions himself as Philip’s regent in the Netherlands, but for all his brutal thoroughness his methods succeeded no better than Catherine’s. Alba also made the veiled threat that if the Queen Mother could not contain the growth of Protestantism within her son’s kingdom, Philip would have to deal with the menacing heretics so close to his own frontiers himself. Catherine, detesting ultimata and threats, remained regally unmoved. As Queen of France she gave him explanations and justifications for her policy of pacification, but they all fell on stone-deaf ears. Exasperated by Catherine’s darting mind and flow of impassioned talk, the duke gave up, exhausted. The Queen Mother hoped with unfounded optimism that the fabulous entertainments she had organised to enchant the visitors would give new life to the talks.
Among the exchange of gifts, decorations, ballets, jousts and mock battles, the spectacle on the Bidassoa river is considered one of the most famous of Catherine’s ephemeral works of art. After a waterside picnic, with all the participants dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, Charles appeared on the river in a barge that had been disguised as a floating fortress. As the other participants took to their own sumptuously decorated barges, a gigantic artificial whale appeared that was then attacked by ‘fishermen’. Suddenly a gargantuan man-made tortoise was seen swimming towards them; on it stood six tritons blowing cornets. The two marine gods, Neptune and Arion, surfaced; the former in his chariot was pulled by three sea horses and the latter carried by dolphins. The extravaganza ended as three mermaids glorified France and Spain with their siren songs. Catherine, more than anyone, inaugurated the fantastic entertainments for which later French monarchs also became renowned. One spectator wrote, ‘Strangers of all nations were now forced to recognise that in these things France had surpassed, with these parades, bravado, glories and magnificences, all other nations and even herself.’ Catherine believed that by such fabulous displays of wealth, power and unity among her Court she had finally shown the Spanish that, far from ruined, France remained a glorious power. Better still, she believed that the result of the progress would now ensure internal peace and stability, allowing her adopted country to grow strong again.
The true outcome proved rather different; the Spanish were not impressed with the sumptuous displays by the French, which left them more distrustful of Madame La Serpente than they had been when they had arrived. Their own shabby appearance had beenjudged offensive by Catherine’s courtiers, though this was more the fault of the sad state of Spanish finances. Philip had already been bankrupt once and his treasury was perilously bare. Despite the constant talks, nothing had been promised by the Queen Mother regarding her treatment of heretics, nor would she endorse the Tridentine Decrees. She also intended to stand by the Peace Edict of Amboise (also known as the Edict of Pacification). For the Spanish the whole excursion had been largely pointless. On 2 July 1565 Catherine and the children bade a tearful farewell to Elisabeth. They were never to meet again.
For the Queen Mother and her family there had at least been the joy of seeing Elisabeth and, while no agreement was reached between the two sovereigns, since neither side could afford further war, a cordial display had been maintained and conflict thus averted. One crucial point that the Queen Mother had signally failed to realise, however, was that having banished the Huguenots from the Spanish visit, and fraternised enthusiastically with Alba, the man most feared and hated by the Protestants in Europe, they came to believe that a pact had been concluded between the pair to exterminate them. For many years this calumny was circulated and held against the Queen Mother, particularly after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, when the Huguenots pointed to the meeting at Bayonne as the time and place where their near-extinction had been cold-bloodedly arranged. Catherine’s policy of toleration and pacification was thus coming undone, since neither Catholic nor Protestant trusted her any longer.
As for the proposed marriages between the Habsburgs and the Valois, Catherine received not one scintilla of encouragement from the Spaniards. Margot would in any event have been quickly widowed had she married the crazed Don Carlos, for he died three years later, by then completely insane. After developing an obsessive love for his gentle step-mother, Margot’s sister Elisabeth, and giving away state secrets to anyone who would listen, he had tried to flee to Germany. At this Philip had had him incarcerated again and he died six months later in July 1568. Rumours that he was murdered by Philip are no more than romantic fiction; a more plausible explanation is that the Infante died of pneumonia as a result of his bizarre habit of sleeping totally naked on a huge block of ice in order to keep cool during the summer months.
With the climax of the royal progress over, the journey, though still a long one, was homeward bound from now on. Catherine met Jeanne d’Albret, who had been allowed to return there from Vendôme to greet the party at Nérac (capital of the Duchy of Albret). Here Catherine showed she still lacked the capacity to comprehend how deeply people held their religious beliefs when she urged Jeanne to renounce Protestantism and return to the Catholic faith. Jeanne used this opportunity to introduce Henri to the leading Huguenots and he spent time with his uncle Condé. Leaving the Queen of Navarre’s son with his mother until they were both commanded to rejoin the court at Blois, the progress continued. Journeying up through western France, the party encountered some difficulties as the King and his family were often heckled and harassed by angry reformers. Blaise de Monluc ordered a larger contingent of soldiers to accompany the royal family through this hostile country.
At Jarnac, near Cognac, on 21 August Catherine had the great pleasure of meeting Guy Chabot de Jarnac, the man who had won the duel against La Châtaigneraie, Diane de Poitiers’ and Henry’s champion, at the beginning of Henry’s reign. By November the Court were at Angers, from where the royal family sailed up the Loire, stopping at Tours, Chenonceau and Blois. On 21 December 1565 they reached Moulins, the heart of Bourbon country, and moved into the château there, the former seat of the treacherous Constable de Bourbon. An Assembly of Notables had been convoked for the purpose of completing an enormous programme of reforms to the judiciary and administration. Among the leading men now gathered together were Montmorency’s nephews and most of the Guise family. The two clans had not met for over a year. After Charles officially acquitted Coligny of any part in the duke’s murder, Catherine applied her usual prescription for reconciliation: she required the two principal parties, the Cardinal of Lorraine and Admiral de Coligny, to kiss each other. This they did, although with how much sincerity is highly debatable.
On 6 January 1566, before the assembly had officially opened, news of terrible atrocities arrived from Florida, where Spanish troops had massacred the mainly Protestant French colonists. The French had reached the virgin territory first and claimed it in the name of their King, but they had reckoned without Philip’s fury that there should be a colony of French heretics anywhere near Spanish territory. He had sent out a force of 26,000 men who attacked the 600 settlers and four companies of French soldiers in a fury of bloodletting. Most of the settlers, men, women and children, had had their throats cut. Only a handful managed to escape. Outrage erupted at Moulins, where, according to the Spanish ambassador Alava, ‘Her Majesty was growling like a lioness’ over the grim despatches. She condemned the Spaniards as being more savage than the Turkish infidel. Yet there was little that the Queen Mother could do. Too weak to demand reparations from Philip successfully, she had to content herself with marble columns inscribed with the victims’ names being placed in Fort Coligny, the sole surviving French camp in Florida.
Michel de L’Hôpital opened the Assembly of Notables and, in a brilliant speech, outlined the purpose of the meeting. The French judiciary required both regularisation and to be brought under the more effective control of the Crown. The present confusion over jurisdictions, contradictory laws, abuses of power and corruption due to many factors – not least the religious conflicts – must be tackled thoroughly, he said. The eighty-six clauses of what became the Ordinance of Moulins of February 1566 was de L’Hôpital’s masterpiece; the reforms to government and the judiciary that it demanded returned authority to the Crown. Unfortunately the coming civil wars prevented the proper implementation of the ordinance, but historians agree that it served ‘as a launching pad for future attempts to reform the government of France’.10
At last, on 1 May 1566 the royal tour arrived back in Paris after 829 days, of which a quarter had been spent travelling and three-quarters staying at châteaux, camps by the sea, palaces, abbeys, towns, cities and villages. The fabulous voyage dreamt up by Catherine in a magnificent attempt to bring concord and harmony to her son’s war-riven kingdom had covered nearly 3000 miles, crossing mountains, rivers and parched southern plains. They had encountered snowfall, floods, plagues and scorching heat. This indomitable and imaginative woman had shown her son to the people and the people to their King. She had every reason to feel a sense of personal triumph on her return to the capital, believing, as she did, that there was now a real prospect of lasting peace. Yet she reckoned without the passion that the cause of religion could stir in men’s souls.