SEVENTEEN

SO PERISH THE RACE OF THE VALOIS

What could the poor woman do …?

1588–1615

On New Year’s Eve Catherine made a supreme effort to dress, go to Mass in the chapel and then visit her old friend the Cardinal de Bourbon who was imprisoned in his apartments. She gave him her assurance that the King meant him no harm and that he would be safe. Bourbon replied ferociously to the frail old woman standing before him, shouting, ‘It is on your word that we came here and you led us to this butchery!’ Catherine sobbed at his angry reproach, turned and left without another word. She then stubbornly decided, against Cavriani’s advice, to take a short walk although the day was extremely cold. Her fever returned.

By the morning of 5 January 1589 the Queen Mother could hardly breathe. On so many earlier occasions Catherine had, by sheer force of her personality, overcome bodily weaknesses, but not this time. Her demise was clearly imminent, ‘to the great astonishment of us all,’ wrote one observer. She asked to make her last testament. By now her voice had become so feeble that Henri had to dictate his mother’s whispered wishes. No mention was made of Margot, the only other surviving child of the ten she had borne for her beloved husband Henry and for France. After receiving the Sacrament, Catherine de Medici, wife of one King of France and mother of three others, died at half past one in the afternoon, on the eve of the Epiphany, or what the French call ‘Le Jour des Rois’ (the day of the kings). She was sixty-nine.

Catherine’s superstitions are not all to be scoffed at; many years earlier she had received a warning from one of her seers – to beware of ‘Saint-Germain’ which presaged a mortal threat. Though she had built her Hôtel de la Reine outside the parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and she did not often frequent the château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, she received the last rites from her son’s confessor and not her usual priest. His name was Julien de Saint-Germain.

By royal custom, Henri ordered a post-mortem that revealed pleurisy (as it is now called) as the immediate cause of death. The corpse was duly embalmed, though not all the necessary herbs and spices were available for the job to be done properly. Catherine’s body was then placed in a wooden lead-lined coffin surmounted by the traditional effigy of the deceased Queen, and dressed in the robes of Anne of Brittany. Because of the desperate state of unrest that followed the murder of the Guises, and the widespread belief that the Queen Mother had had a hand in it, Parisian Leaguers threatened that her corpse would be dragged through the streets and dumped in the Seine if brought to the capital. For the time being at least, therefore, she could not be buried at Saint-Denis alongside her husband and sons in the superb Valois chapel she had especially added to inter her family. Instead, the body would have to remain at Blois until the political situation calmed down.

At the funeral, held on 4 February at the Church of Saint-Sauveur at Blois, the Archbishop of Bourges paid fine tribute to the late Queen. He spoke of her arrival in France as a splendid bride with a great dowry, the ten children she had borne Henry II, and lauded her personal courage during the many wars that had taken place during her widowhood. Whether at Rouen or Le Havre, she had been present with her armies and walked between the warring troops without fear.¹ In his peroration he asked the congregation to ‘acknowledge that you have lost the most virtuous Queen, the noblest of race and generation, the most prudent in government, the sweetest in conversation, the most affable and kindly to all who wished to see her, the most humble and charitable to her children, the most obedient to her husband, but above all the most devout before God, and the most affectionate to the poor of any queen who ever reigned in France!’²

The chronicler Pierre l’Estoile summed up Catherine a little less reverently.

She was seventy-one years old [in fact she was two years younger] and well preserved for such a fat woman. She ate heartily, feeding herself well and was not afraid of work although she had to face as much as any queen in the world since the death of her husband thirty years before. … She was mourned by some of her servants and intimates and a little by her son the King. … Those closest to her believed that the assassination of the Guises hastened her end. This was not so much due to the friendship for the victims (whom she liked in the Florentine way - that is to say in order to make use of them), but because she could see that it would benefit the King of Navarre. … His succession was what she feared most in the world.³

Estoile added that in view of the Parisians’ belief in her complicity in the Guises’ murder her body was not welcome in the capital but ‘so much for the Parisian view. In Blois where she had been adored and revered as the court’s Juno, she had no sooner passed away than she was treated with as much consideration as a dead goat.’⁴

This last remark perhaps reflected the fact that the Queen Mother’s ineptly embalmed corpse had begun to smell horribly and the King therefore considered it best that it be deposited at the Saint-Saveur churchyard under the cover of night in an unmarked grave. In fact, Catherine’s remains were to stay in this humble plot for a further twenty-one years until Henry II’s illegitimate daughter, the gentle Anne de France, had the body moved to the Valois rotunda at Saint-Denis.

The ultra-Catholics, though stricken by the loss of their leader Guise and his brother the cardinal, continued their increasingly fevered campaign against the King who had, by the summer of 1589, allied himself with Henri of Navarre. The widowed Duchess of Guise and her baby son were idolised by the Parisian crowds, who called her their ‘Sainte Veuve’. But with the death of the duke the extreme Catholic movement now splintered and became chaotic. Guise’s brother, the Duke of Mayenne, who did not have any of his brother’s charisma, intellect or military flair, nonetheless fancied himself for the throne. He and his sister the Duchess de Montpensier even seized Catherine’s Hôtel de la Reine where they lived in majestic style. Vulnerable and in a state of collapse, France once again attracted unwelcome attention from Philip II and other neighbours.

By the summer of 1589 the King and Henri of Navarre were stationed at Saint-Cloud just south-west of Paris, from where they hoped to recapture the capital. On 31 July a Dominican friar was spotted walking on the road to Saint-Cloud and was stopped by the King’s Attorney-General, Jacques De La Guesle, who happened to be passing. When asked what business he had at the King’s headquarters, the monk introduced himself as Jacques Clément and said that he had come from Paris with information ‘of great moment’ for His Majesty. He then produced a letter of introduction that appeared genuine, so De La Guesle conducted him to Saint-Cloud where he was told to wait for a possible audience. In fact, the Dominican friar was a delusional loner who believed he could hear God’s voice in his head and that he had received instructions from the Almighty to kill the King.

Henri, always pleased to welcome a man of God and especially one carrying news from loyalists in Paris, agreed to see him at eight o’clock the following morning. That evening Clément dined with De La Guesle and his companions; he proved to be a jovial guest who, those present later recalled, cut his meat with his own sharp knife as he chatted about the latest news from the rebel capital.

The next morning De La Guesle fetched Clément for his audience with Henri. The guards inexplicably failed to search the assassin before he was ushered into the royal presence and after a few further questions, which seemed to satisfy everyone that he was indeed bringing vital news to the King, Clément found himself being conducted into Henri’s cabinet. The King was only half dressed and sitting on his commode when the monk entered. He greeted him with the words, ‘Mon frère, you are welcome! What news of Paris?’ Ignoring protests from those present, Henri insisted that the monk draw near to impart his information. Clément kissed the King’s hand and gave him his letter of introduction. Henri, asking for further news and letters, motioned the monk closer to whisper in his ear. Clément bent low as though to produce the correspondence, but instead his hand emerged from his sleeve with a knife that he plunged up to the hilt into the King’s lower abdomen. Henri stood up crying, ‘Ah! My God, the wretch has wounded me!’ He pulled the knife out of his stomach and punched Clément twice in the face as his bodyguards fell upon the assassin, stabbing him. The guards then threw the regicide’s body out of the window. Henri, bleeding profusely, was left standing with the killer’s knife in one hand and his own intestines in the other.

At first the King felt little discomfort and spoke in a strong voice. The surgeons attending him seemed optimistic as they replaced the intestines protruding from the wound, though their royal patient fainted from the pain. Once they had finished they bandaged him up. Charles IX’s illegitimate son, Charles of Angoulême, a young man much loved by the King, had arrived in the chamber as this gruesome operation was taking place and wept when he saw what had happened to his uncle. Regaining consciousness, Henri stroked the boy’s head and comforted him, saying, ‘My son, my son! Do not grieve! They have tried to kill me but, by God’s mercy, they have not succeeded. This will be nothing; I shall soon be better!’ With this he slipped his fingers under the bandage and prodded his wound to ensure that his intestines were indeed intact. One of the King’s surgeons, unable to share his colleagues’ positive prognosis, took the sixteen-year-old boy aside and whispered that he feared the injury would in fact prove fatal.

By ten o’clock the King, lying on his bed, issued orders for the news of his wounding and his hopes for recovery to be sent to the provincial governors. He also complained of cold and numbness in his feet, so ‘petit Charles’ tended to him by rubbing them. Mass was held by the King’s bed and afterwards he dictated a letter to Queen Louise telling her about the attempt on his life. The King also issued an order to summon Navarre who, by the time he arrived at the King’s bedside, could have been under no illusions as to the eventual outcome. Having slept on and off during the early afternoon, the King had become feverish and vomited a large quantity of blood. With the fever came excruciating pain.

Understanding all too well that he had not many hours left to live, the King became anxious to take the Sacrament, though he first addressed the assembled nobles. Holding out his hand to Navarre, he said, ‘You see, my brother, how my subjects have treated me! … Take good heed for your own safety.’ He continued, ‘It is now for you, my brother, to wear that crown which I have striven to preserve for you; justice and the principle of legitimacy demand that you should succeed me in the realm. You will experience many calamities, unless you resolve to change your religion.’ Navarre, greatly moved, said nothing. The King then demanded that his officers and nobles pledge their oath of allegiance to the man who would shortly be their sovereign, stating that this sight would comfort him greatly. Kneeling at the King’s bed, they duly gave their promise of loyalty to Navarre. Once this was done, Navarre, who was weeping, received the King’s benediction and withdrew with the others. The King, exhausted, slept for a few hours. When he awoke he cried, ‘My time has come!’ After making his confession he received the last rites and died two hours later, at four o’clock on the morning of 2 August, from perforated intestines and severe internal bleeding. As Catherine’s favourite son expired, so did the Valois dynasty.

The new King, Henri de Bourbon, now styled Henri IV, faced the monumental task of making himself king not only in name but also in fact. Hearing the news of the murder of Henri III, the ultra-Catholics declared the aged Cardinal Charles de Bourbon to be King Charles X, though he was shortly afterwards captured by his nephew Henri. For over four and a half years Henri fought vigorously against the powers ranged against him, including forces and aid from the Duke of Savoy, Philip II and the Pope. ‘I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist,’ he declared, urging his soldiers to ‘rally to my white plume’.⁵

After years of arduous campaigning during which Paris stubbornly held out, Henri finally decided that the time had come to re-convert to Catholicism. The solemn ceremony took place at Saint-Denis on 23 July 1593, witnessed by hundreds of Parisians who had slipped out of the city to watch him abjure the Protestant faith. Henri dressed simply and unadorned in the black and white of a penitent. As he walked to the church, crowds numbering between 10,000 and 30,000 people cried, ‘Vive le roi!’ That summer evening after the ceremony he stood surveying the city from Montmartre, where he is said to have uttered the famous remark, ‘Paris is well worth a Mass.’⁶

After long and secret negotiations, and the promise of a general amnesty, the forty-year-old king finally entered Paris just before dawn on the morning of 22 March 1594. He came into the capital by the Porte Neuve, the very gate through which Henri III had escaped after the Day of the Barricades almost six years earlier. He met no resistance. After a service of thanksgiving at Notre-Dame, he showed immense personal courage, walking unprotected through the streets, and was greeted by crowds of curious citizens who were pleasantly surprised to see that the supposed ‘ogre’ appeared to be a normal man. To signify their loyalty to Henri, the people tied white scarves round their arms.

The Spanish troops stationed in the capital marched out of Paris. As they saluted the King he is said to have shouted, ‘Recommend me to your master, but never come back!’⁷ The clemency he had promised won the respect and eventually the love of the Parisians, though the gallows he had placed near the Porte Saint-Antoine warned of his firm commitment to law and order, as he began the rebuilding of the city.

Margot had long been estranged from her husband when he became King. As early as 1592 Henri had broached the subject of having their marriage annulled; he desperately needed a legitimate heir and to free himself to marry again. Margot, still in the Auvergne, drove a fine financial bargain for herself. In addition to an excellent income and the repayment of all her outstanding debts, she would continue to be addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ and known as ‘Queen Margot’. The couple’s annulment (eventually granted in 1599) was argued on the three grounds that Margot had not consented to her marriage freely, the couple’s consanguinity (as Henry II was godfather to the groom, Margot and Henri were also considered spiritual brother and sister), and that neither before nor after the wedding of August 1572 did Catherine ever receive the papal dispensation she needed to overcome these obstacles. Though canonically doubtful, Margot’s supposed infertility may also have assisted the process.

After twenty-two years’ absence, Margot returned to Paris in 1605 at the age of fifty-one. Daughter of a king, sister to three more and, nominally at least, Queen of France herself for a time, she came back to the scene of her youthful triumphs to find a new political order in place. Conscious of being the last of the Valois, she ensured that proper respect was accorded to her. But the Valois were a spent dynasty; the founder of the Bourbons, her former husband, now ruled and in 1600 he married, though with little enthusiasm, Maria de Medici, daughter of the late Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany and thus a distant relative of Margot’s.

Henri insisted on having sex with his twenty-eight-year-old bride almost immediately upon greeting her at Lyons. It is unlikely that he did this because he found her irresistibly beautiful – she was, in fact, fat and plain – but he probably wanted to ensure that there were no physical abnormalities that might prevent her from bearing an heir. The couple had already been married by proxy, but Maria tried – unsuccessfully – to insist upon waiting for the ceremony of blessing by the papal nuncio. The Medici were Henri IV’smain creditors and Maria’s dowry provided the principal reason for choosing her as his bride; he called her ‘the fat banker’ behind her back.⁸ The new Queen of France promptly and obligingly ensured the continuation of the Bourbon dynasty by producing an heir, who was named Louis, the year after her marriage (he eventually became Louis XIII). Among the three further children she bore her husband was Henrietta Maria, the future wife of King Charles I of England.

Margot maintained an amicable relationship with Henri, whom she called ‘my brother, my friend and my King’. She also understood that the new dynasty would benefit much from validation by the last surviving member of the Valois line and this she accorded in whatever way she could. Margot established a close bond with Queen Maria and, childless herself, doted on the royal children and in particular the Dauphin Louis who, after much debate on how to address her, called her ‘Maman, ma fille’. Many of the goods and properties that should rightfully have been her inheritance were restored to her and in return she made the Dauphin her heir, once more demonstrating the joining of the two royal lines. At last living in Paris again, Margot decided she needed a residence that properly reflected her rank. Henri generously granted her a large tract of land immediately opposite her mother’s palace of the Tuileries and, in what might be construed as a desire to copy Catherine but perhaps also to defy her, she built the lovely Palais des Augustins with an extensive park and gardens on the left bank of the Seine.^fn1 As well as making the left bank fashionable, she filled her palace with a bohemian mixture of musicians, writers and philosophers attracting cultured people to her salons.

Catherine’s own palace, the Hôtel de la Reine, suffered an ignominious fate. One of the consequences of her last son dying seven months after her was that her debts could not now be paid off to her creditors. Though her estate was bankrupt, the vast properties she had received from her mother were legally unassailable. The Queen Mother’s personal residence in Paris had no such protection, nor did Chenonceau, Montceaux or Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. Her effects were thus eventually sold off, which for all the posthumoushumiliation involved, at least provides historians with plenty of information since the contents of her various homes, once the property of the woman who had for so long ‘incarnated the grandeur of the French Crown’, were carefully catalogued for sale and dispersal.⁹

Margot often wrote to Henri, giving her opinion of courtiers or councillors, and on several occasions alerted her former husband to plots against him. Queen of nowhere and wife to no one, the last of the Valois lived the rest of her life to suit herself. She continued to take lovers, now much younger than she, and kept irregular hours; if a book pleased she would read it from cover to cover and not sleep until she had finished it. She would eat when hungry and not necessarily at appointed mealtimes. As the tool of her mother’s and brothers’ politics, she had finally earned the right to live according to her own timetable. Her health had been undermined by her adventures and exile; she suffered from appalling toothache and could only eat her food puréed. She had grown fat and jowly, physically resembling her mother more and more as she grew older. Gradually abandoning her glorious gowns, jewels and make-up, she adopted simpler clothes. Increasingly drawn to a more spiritual existence, Margot gave large sums of money to charity and religious orders and, much loved by the people, lived out the rest of her once-stormy life in relative contentment, dying in 1615.

Henri IV, the warm-hearted king famous for his love affairs and martial valour, whose natural sense of majesty did not obscure his personable traits, became one of the most popular monarchs in the whole of French history. He restored the country’s economy with the aid of his trusted adviser the Duke de Sully, centralised French government and re-established a vigorous monarchy. The religious problems that had torn the country apart for forty years were settled by his Edict of Nantes of 1598, which allowed for the peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants, and broadly mirrored the agreement of La Paix du Roi of 1577. Henri, with his mixture of warmth, simplicity and majesty, had the common touch necessary to make himself accessible to his people. He understood the basic requirements for their comfort, once famously remarking that a Frenchman should have a ‘poule au pot’^fn2 at least once a week. While centralising French government and administration, and re-establishing order, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty oversaw the birth of what is known by the French as the ‘grande siècle’. Tragically, Henri was assassinated in May 1610 by a Catholic zealot, François Ravaillac. By fighting to preserve the throne (albeit for her own sons) and the principle of legitimacy, Catherine de Medici – foreigner, consort and then beleaguered regent – had ensured the future of the French monarchy, at least until the revolution of 1789.

Time softened Henri’s views on his long-dead former mother-in-law. Overhearing a group of courtiers blaming all the misfortunes of France upon the late Queen Mother, he is reported to have said, ‘What could the poor woman do, with five children in her arms, after the death of her husband, and with two families in France – ours and the Guise – attempting to encroach on the Crown? Was she not forced to play strange parts to deceive the one and other and yet, as she did, to protect her children, who reigned in succession by the wisdom of a woman so able? I wonder that she did not do worse!’¹⁰

It was a valediction as wise as it was gracious.