fn1 Margot’s palace has since been destroyed. The present Académie Française stands just behind the site.
fn2 A chicken in his pot.
Catherine’s death left people shocked and in a state of disbelief; she had been an ever-present feature in their lives since her arrival in France in 1533. Few Frenchmen could remember a time without her. The post-mortem might have shown that she died from pleurisy, but in fact her entire body had worn out. After her son’s murderous attack on the Guises she was sapped of her will to continue. She had long known that only a miracle could now preserve the Valois dynasty, but she laboured on, ignoring the peril that her son seemed so wantonly to invite with each new folly, extravagantly casting away the fruits of her work both as Queen and Queen Mother.
Unbroken by the sensationally shocking death of her husband, Catherine bore her widowhood as her defining emblem; it signified that she had been wife and consort to Henry II, despite his often callous disregard for her. Their children, the Valois–Medici, were his dreadful legacy to her and to France. The thirty-year struggle since his death to preserve the kingdom for them became both her religion and her ideology. Her blinkered devotion to her sons, particularly Henri III, proved her greatest fault, but it also endowed her with her most important faculty, the fanatical determination that they must not lose their birthright. This, combined with her inability fully to appreciate their failings until it was too late, made her incapable of seeing how the odds were heaped against her. There is also a genuine sense by which Catherine wished to repay the honour that Francis I and Henry II had done her in making her – a Medici commoner – Queen of France, and she worked until her last breath to that end.
Short lives, of which the sixteenth century saw many, have intimations of tragedy, but long lives also have their own disappointments and tristesses. Of her ten children – her offerings to France – Catherine lived to see all but one of her sons die, and her sole surviving daughter utterly disgraced. Her courage was extraordinary, her wiliness and cunning legendary. Her optimism and energy defied the dark realities that surrounded her. Unlike her contemporary Elizabeth I, Catherine was not a sovereign in her own right and, more important, though blessed with great political talents, she lacked the gifted and great vision that the English Queen, a born stateswoman, possessed. Elizabeth’s femininity was a formidable weapon, she could be cunning, but these were only part of her arsenal; she was academically Catherine’s superior, and had no children to blur and blunt her judgement. As Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth had only one child – England.
Catherine was hampered by exceptional difficulties that the Tudor Queen did not have to face. Eight successive wars of religion that tore France apart, the last still unresolved as she died, nonetheless brought out the best in the Queen Mother. By necessity this almost constant state of stasis did not allow her the luxury of any long-term planning and her most significant attempt to do so had resulted in the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. The best that she could do was to try to contain each conflagration as it arose; often this meant applying temporary measures to buy herself time because time, as she so often said, was her greatest ally.
Yet by 24 August 1572 time had almost run out for Catherine and the Valois. The massacre that took place that terrible night has, more than any other single action of her life, served to blacken her reputation before the bar of history. What had been intended as a relatively small-scale surgical operation designed to excise the canker in the heart of French politics, instead became a major crime against a significant number of French men, women and children, most of them innocent. Yet Catherine should be indicted primarily for a botched job, rather than judged according to twenty-first-century liberal principles of human rights and religious toleration, neither of which existed in sixteenth-century Paris. To make matters worse, Catherine’s total inability to provide a convincing explanation for the Massacre, or to attempt to justify it even on Realpolitik grounds in a manner European opinion could understand, handed the political momentum to her enemies in the aftermath. Blunder compounded the crime. This was an unusual lacuna in Catherine, otherwise a skilled propagandist.
Elizabeth of England is believed to have once remarked: ‘I would not open windows into men’s souls.’ Catherine behaved as though she would find no passionate beliefs there if she had tried. Her struggles to reconcile Protestants and Catholics were hampered by this want of imagination. The concept that deeply-held spiritual beliefs could be something men would die for was alien to her. Her overwhelming pragmatism and scepticism led her to attempt a practical solution for matters of faith; her efforts at the Colloquy of Poissy should be lauded as they spoke of an enlightened approach compared to burning people at the stake, although ultimately they proved futile. She knew also that the religious struggles served as a useful front for the political ambitions of the great houses of France, and for the over-mighty subjects who Henry II had raised so high that they threatened his own dynasty after his death.
If she did not recognize herself as a child of the Reformation, Catherine certainly thought of herself as a daughter of the Renaissance. Her love of building, probably inspired by the breathtaking châteaux built by Francis I, was often frustrated by lack of money, as a result of the endemic civil wars. La Colonne de l’Horoscope, formerly at the centre of the Hôtel de la Reine, is almost all that remains of her once ambitious and original projects, and is a poignant reminder of the fleeting nature of power. The Medici Queen’s greatest Renaissance talent was, by its very nature, ephemeral. Her fabulous and unsurpassed ‘magnificences’ can be considered true works of art. The great painters, sculptors, poets and writers of the day played the central roles in creating these extraordinary spectacles. In them she brought together dance, song, acting and astonishingly complicated and beautiful settings. These performances were ingenious and no cost was spared in their production. They came to life for one brilliant occasion and then were dismantled forever. She carried her impresario’s gift for these spectacles when making the official entries with her family into important towns around France. Their purpose was amply fulfilled; Catherine projected the glory of the monarchy both to her own people and to impress foreign visitors. The Renaissance ethos – that no matter how bad things really were, an awe-inspiring show must be put on – was one that the Queen Mother pursued, personified and perfected.
Catherine presented a powerful mixture of bold contradictions: she fought for her children yet could not be intimate with them; she did not comprehend religious passions though she held rigidly to the forms of the Roman Church and seemed baffled that anyone should feel the need to question them; she was a pragmatist racked by superstitious fears; she was majestic yet approachable, without once stepping off the high pedestal that her crown afforded her.
Catherine attracted brilliant and brave men to work for her, and inspired their loyalty. A staggering spendthrift, she found herself constantly beset by worries about the Treasury since her generosity was legendary. She could be feminine and strangely attractive though she worked, rode, hunted and faced mortal danger with the courage of a man. In an age dominated by men, she asked that no quarter be given on account of her sex. To paraphrase her Tudor contemporary, she had the heart and stomach of a king. She did not flinch from making difficult decisions, nor from executing them.
In the words of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Catherine’s epitaph should be, ‘To be a great Prince one must sometimes violate the laws of humanity.’ As wife, mother, grandmother, regent and Queen of France she was a woman of action, appetites and excitement, both a great prince and a great woman.