Prologue
In 1276 Robert, Count of Clermont, married Béatrix of Burgundy. Béatrix was a very great heiress indeed, her mother being the daughter of Archembault VIII, Lord of Bourbon and last of his line, who had died on Crusade in 1249. Although her mother was still alive and had married again, King Philippe III ordained that the lordship must pass to Béatrix. Bourbon I’Archembault (near Moulins in the modern département of Allier) took its name from some hot springs which the ancient Gauls had dedicated to the god Borvo. Since the ninth century its château had been the centre of a great seigneurie holding sway over a vast area of central France—the Bourbonnais. The descendants of Robert and Béatrix were to become the royal house of Bourbon.
Count Robert came of an even greater line than his wife. He was a Capetian, being the sixth son of King Louis IX, whose ancestor, Hugues Capet, Count of Paris, had seized the crown in 987 from the last Carolingians. Hugues took his name of Capet through being lay Abbot of Saint-Martin at Tours, where the cloak of the patron saint of France was venerated. As King, he was little more than feudal lord of about sixty dukes and counts, his effective realm reaching from just north of Paris to just south of Orleans. But with Philippe Auguste, who ascended the throne in 1180, the Capetian kings began to make real their authority. Louis IX (1226–70), who was Count Robert’s father, inherited a realm which stretched from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. This crowned monk, who washed the feet of the poor and kissed lepers, was a strong, practical ruler. Unfortunately he was so much a product of his age as to lead two disastrous Crusades, to Syria and to North Africa, dying on the second; he was canonized in 1297. St Louis, who made the monarchy almost sacred, was always present for his successors in the Sainte-Chapelle—which he built to house the Crown of Thorns—and in a charming life written by his friend, the Sieur of Joinville. (Of his reign, Joinville wrote, ‘The throne shone like the sun which sheds its rays far and wide’.) Until the end, Fils de Saint Louis remained one of the proudest titles of a king of France.
Louis arranged rich marriages for all his sons. However when Robert of Clermont entered into the Bourbon inheritance in 1283, he was unable to take much pleasure in it. Five years before, during a tournament, Robert had received a blow on the head which rendered him permanently insane. He lived in quiet retirement until his death in 1318 at the age of sixty-two. He was succeeded by his son, and in 1327 King Charles IV made the Seigneurie of Bourbon into a Duchy.
When Charles died in 1328 the main line of the Capetians came to an end. However, it was (and is) almost impossible for the Capetian dynasty to fail, because of a provision in the Salic Law of the ancient Franks which forbids inheritance in the female line. Philippe of Valois, Charles IV’s cousin, ascended the throne as Philippe VI. In 1346 he led his chivalry to disaster at Crécy, His one achievement was to purchase Vienne: the Counts of Vienne had styled themselves Dauphin (from the dolphin in their coat of arms), and from 1349 until 1830 the eldest son of the King of France was known as the Dauphin. Splendid and unlucky, Philippe personified the house which was to rule France for the next two centuries.
The Counts of Vendôme, who descended from a younger grandson of Robert de Clermont, were only distant cousins of the Valois, yet they were destined to inherit the throne as well as the Duchy of Bourbon. Charles, Comte de Vendôme, born in 1489, became one of the greatest lords in the kingdom, being made a Duke and Peer in his own right and Grand Huntsman of France. He played an important part in public life throughout the reign of François (1515–47): he performed the duties of the Count of Flanders at the King’s Coronation, and in 1517 was one of three Princes who held the crown over the Queen’s head at her coronation. The chroniclers give glimpses of the new Duke, gorgeously appareled, jousting at the Field of Cloth of Gold. In 1521 he commanded the rearguard of the royal army during the King’s campaign in Flanders; the year after, as the King’s Lieutenant in Picardy, he conducted his own energetic campaign against the Imperial troops. However, in 1523 after the conspiracy of his cousin, the Constable de Bourbon, he was relieved of his command. Vendôme vindicated himself when King François was a prisoner in Spain, serving faithfully as President of the Council; he dismissed some Councillors of the Paris Parlement who had urged him to seize power, with the words ‘Obey the King!’ After the Constable’s death, François rewarded Vendôme by recognizing him as first Prince of the Blood and head of the House of Bourbon. In his latter years the Duke seems to have spent most of his time away from court, devoting himself to his thirteen children. He had married Françoise d’Alençon, sister of the King’s brother-in-law.
Vendôme died in 1547, aged forty-seven, and was succeeded by his son, Antoine de Bourbon. The Abbé de Brantôme remembered him: ‘He was high-born, brave and valiant—men of the Bourbon race are never otherwise—and of a most handsome appearance (well-built, and much taller than my lords his brothers) and altogether regal in manner, very fine and eloquent in his speech’. But for all his courage and charm, Antoine was wildly unstable, to the point of insanity.
In 1548, when he was thirty, Antoine married Jeanne d’Albret, daughter of King Henri d’Albret of Navarre and Marguerite d’Angoulême, sister of François I. Her father died in 1555 and, as Jeanne III, she inherited Navarre. This ancient Kingdom had been reduced to a little strip of territory north of the Pyrenees—since 1512 most of the realm, on the far side of the mountains, had been occupied by the Spaniards. King Consort of this minute state, Antoine ranked as a European sovereign; the title, King of Navarre, was to be born by the Bourbons until 1830. As Jeanne’s husband, Antoine was also lord of the d’Albret lands, a vast area of south-western France which included Béarn, Foix and Armagnac. He was the greatest magnate in France. But he was not satisfied, and dreamt feverishly of recovering his wife’s lost domains.
After Henri II’s death in a tournament in 1559, the French magnates saw the regency of his widow, Catherine de Medici, as an opportunity for a feudal revival. In his capacity of Governor of Guyenne, Antoine at once tried to recover southern Navarre, in a notably foolhardy and unsuccessful expedition. But there were prizes to be won at home. Calvinism, with its aggressive ideology and para-military organization—each church had a captain as well as a minister—was sweeping France. Great nobles exploited the Reformation in the way they had the Hundred Years War. At the end of 1559 King Antoine adopted the Calvinist faith, Queen Jeanne already being an enthusiastic convert who corresponded with Calvin himself. However, Antoine’s notorious fondness for loose women soon earned him a rebuke from the great Reformer. His marriage had begun as a love match; later Jeanne referred sadly to his many infidelities as ‘a sharp thorn, not in my foot but in my heart’. In 1561 Antoine returned to the Roman Church: as Lieutenant-General he held the greatest office in the realm and was subordinate only to the Regent, Catherine de Medici.
The first War of Religion had now broken out. In October 1562, Antoine directed the siege of Rouen which was held by the Huguenots. He behaved with crazy bravado, dining in the trenches. Eventually he was shot while relieving himself in full view of the enemy. Mortally wounded, King Antoine expired a month later, in the arms of his latest mistress, having become a convert to Lutheranism on his deathbed. This futile weathercock can never have suspected that his only son was to become King of France and found a new dynasty.