Catherine de' Medici

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine de' Medici was born on the 13th of April 1519 in Florence, and within a month both her parents were dead. Her mother Madeleine died of puerperal fever on the 28th of April. Her father Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, died on the 4th of May. The infant girl who had no parents, no throne, and no certain future would go on to outlive three kings of France. All three were her own sons. She has been called the most important woman in Europe in the 16th century.

  How does a girl orphaned before she is thirty days old become the figure who holds an entire kingdom together through decades of civil war? What does it mean to wield power from the margins, denied a formal role by the men around her, yet steering the fate of France for a generation? And what are we to make of a woman who issued edicts of religious tolerance, then was present when thousands were slaughtered on a single night in Paris? This is the story of Catherine de' Medici, and the questions her life raises have no easy answers.

• 2. The Orphan Duchess

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  A contemporary chronicler noted that when Catherine was born, her parents were as pleased as if it had been a boy. That small grace was quickly overtaken by catastrophe. After both parents died, Catherine came under the care of her paternal grandmother Alfonsina Orsini, and after Alfonsina's death in 1520, she was raised by her aunt Clarice de' Medici. The Florentine people called her duchessina, meaning the little duchess, in deference to her unrecognised claim to the Duchy of Urbino.

  In 1527, the Medici were overthrown in Florence and Catherine, then eight years old, was taken hostage and placed in a series of convents. Voices called for the ten-year-old to be killed, stripped naked, and chained to the city walls. Some suggested she be handed over to the troops to be raped. Mark Strage described the years she spent in the final convent, the Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, as the happiest of her entire life. The city surrendered on the 12th of August 1530. Pope Clement VII summoned Catherine from her beloved convent to Rome, greeted her with open arms and tears, and immediately set about finding her a husband.

• 3. A Grand Match

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  The Venetian envoy who saw Catherine on her visit to Rome described her as small of stature, thin, and without delicate features, but having the protruding eyes peculiar to the Medici family. Suitors lined up nonetheless. James V of Scotland sent the Duke of Albany to pursue a match. When Francis I of France proposed his second son Henry, Duke of Orleans, in early 1533, Clement VII accepted at once.

  The wedding took place on the 28th of October 1533 in the Eglise Saint-Ferreol les Augustins in Marseille. Prince Henry danced and jousted for Catherine. The fourteen-year-old couple left their wedding ball at midnight. Henry arrived in the bedroom with King Francis, who reportedly stayed until the marriage was consummated, noting that each had shown valour in the joust. Clement visited the newlyweds in bed the next morning and added his blessings.

  The papal blessing proved more durable than the papal money. When Clement died on the 25th of September 1534, the new pope Alessandro Farnese felt no obligation to continue paying Catherine's dowry. King Francis lamented: the girl has come to me stark naked. Henry showed no interest in Catherine as a wife and openly took mistresses. For the first ten years of the marriage, the couple produced no children, and divorce was discussed at court. In desperation, Catherine tried every known remedy for pregnancy, including placing cow dung and ground stags' antlers on her body and drinking mule's urine. She finally gave birth to a son on the 19th of January 1544. After that, she bore Henry nine more children in rapid succession.

• 4. Sidelined by a Rival

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  Henry II allowed Catherine almost no political influence as queen. Around 1538, when he was nineteen, Henry had taken as his mistress the thirty-eight-year-old Diane de Poitiers, a woman nearly twice his age, whom he adored for the rest of his life. The imperial ambassador reported that in the presence of guests, Henry would sit on Diane's lap and play the guitar, chat about politics, or fondle her breasts. Henry even gave the Chateau de Chenonceau, which Catherine had wanted for herself, to Diane rather than his wife.

  Diane never regarded Catherine as a threat. She even encouraged the king to spend more time with Catherine in order to produce more heirs. Catherine complied, bearing ten children in total. When Henry signed the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis on the 3rd-the 4th of April 1559, ending a long period of Italian Wars, the treaty was sealed by the betrothal of Catherine's daughter Elisabeth, aged thirteen, to Philip II of Spain.

  A jousting tournament was held on the 30th of June 1559 as part of the celebrations. Henry rode wearing Diane's black-and-white colours. He defeated the dukes of Guise and Nemours, but the young Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, knocked him half from the saddle. Henry insisted on riding again. This time Montgomery's lance shattered in the king's face. Henry reeled from the clash with splinters of a good bigness sticking from his eye and head. Five splinters were extracted from his head, one of which had pierced his eye and brain. Catherine stayed by his bedside. Diane kept away, for fear, in the words of a chronicler, of being expelled by the Queen. On the 10th of July 1559, Henry died at the age of forty. From that day, Catherine took a broken lance as her emblem, inscribed with the Latin words meaning from this come my tears and my pain, and wore black mourning for the rest of her life.

• 5. Regent in the Chaos

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  Francis II became king at fifteen, and the Cardinal of Lorraine together with the Duke of Guise seized power the day after Henry's death. The English ambassador reported that the house of Guise ruled and did all about the French king. Francis died of an infection or abscess in his ear on the 5th of December 1560. When Catherine realised he was going to die, she made a pact with Antoine de Bourbon by which he would renounce his right to the regency in exchange for the release of his brother Conde, who had been sentenced to death. As a result, the Privy Council appointed Catherine as governor of France with sweeping powers.

  Catherine presided over the council of her next son, ten-year-old Charles IX, deciding policy, controlling state business and patronage. She even slept in his chamber. Her first acts included forcing Diane de Poitiers to hand back the crown jewels and return Chenonceau to the crown.

  She attempted to broker peace between Catholic and Protestant factions, summoning church leaders from both sides for the Colloquy of Poissy, which ended in failure on the 13th of October 1561 without her permission. Historian R. J. Knecht observed that she underestimated the strength of religious conviction, imagining that all would be well if only she could get the party leaders to agree. In January 1562 she issued the tolerant Edict of Saint-Germain. On the 1st of March 1562, the Duke of Guise and his men attacked worshipping Huguenots in a barn at Vassy, killing seventy-four and wounding one hundred and four. Guise called the massacre a regrettable accident. He was cheered as a hero in the streets of Paris. The massacre lit the fuse for the French Wars of Religion. For the next thirty years, France found itself in a state of either civil war or armed truce.

• 6. The Night of Saint Bartholomew

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  Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was walking back from the Louvre when a shot from a window wounded him in the hand and arm. A smoking arquebus was found in a window, but the culprit had fled on a waiting horse. The surgeon Ambroise Pare removed a bullet from Coligny's elbow and amputated a damaged finger with a pair of scissors. Catherine, who was said to have received the news without emotion, made a tearful visit and promised to punish his attacker.

  Two days later, on the 23rd of August 1572, Charles IX is said to have ordered the killing of the Huguenot leaders who were still in Paris after the recent wedding of Margaret and Henry of Navarre. Historians have suggested that Catherine and her advisers feared a Huguenot uprising to avenge the attack on Coligny and chose to strike first. The slaughter in Paris lasted for almost a week and spread to many parts of France, where it persisted into the autumn. Historian Jules Michelet wrote that St Bartholomew was not a day, but a season. Thousands of Huguenots were killed across France.

  On the 29th of September, when Henry of Navarre knelt before the altar as a Roman Catholic, having converted to avoid being killed, Catherine turned to the ambassadors and laughed. From this moment dates the legend of the wicked Italian queen. Huguenot writers branded Catherine a scheming Italian who had acted on Machiavellian principles. Some historians have excused her from blame for the worst decisions of the crown, but evidence for her ruthlessness can be found in her own letters.

• 7. Art and Architecture

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  Catherine believed in the humanist ideal of the learned Renaissance prince whose authority depended on letters as well as arms. Once in control of the royal purse, she launched a programme of artistic patronage that lasted three decades. An inventory drawn up at the Hotel de la Reine after her death revealed tapestries, hand-drawn maps, sculptures, rich fabrics, ebony furniture inlaid with ivory, sets of china, Limoges pottery, and hundreds of portraits.

  Many portraits in her collection were by Jean Clouet (1480-1541) and his son Francois Clouet (c. 1510-1572). Francois Clouet drew and painted portraits of all Catherine's family and many members of the court. After Catherine's death, a decline in the quality of French portraiture set in, and by 1610 the school she had patronised had all but died out.

  Antoine Caron (c. 1521-1599) became Catherine's official painter after working at Fontainebleau under Primaticcio. His Mannerist style, with its love of the ceremonial and its preoccupation with massacres, reflects the neurotic atmosphere of the French court during the Wars of Religion. His designs for the Valois Tapestries depict events held at Fontainebleau in 1564, at Bayonne in 1565, and at the Tuileries in 1573 for the visit of the Polish ambassadors who presented the Polish crown to Catherine's son Henry of Anjou.

  Catherine gradually expanded the role of dance in court entertainments. A distinctive new art form, the ballet de cour, emerged from these advances. The Ballet Comique de la Reine, produced in 1581, is regarded by scholars as the first authentic ballet. In architecture, Catherine commissioned work on the Chateau de Montceaux, Chateau de Saint-Maur, and Chenonceau, and built two new palaces in Paris: the Tuileries and the Hotel de la Reine. For Henry's tomb at the basilica of Saint Denis, she commissioned Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570) as designer and Germain Pilon (1528-1590) as sculptor. Art historian Henri Zerner has called this monument the last and most brilliant of the royal tombs of the Renaissance.

• 8. A Life's End

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  On the 23rd of December 1588, Henry III asked the Duke of Guise to call on him at the Chateau de Blois. As Guise entered the king's chamber, the bodyguard known as the Forty-five plunged their blades into his body. He died at the foot of the king's bed. That same night, Henry entered Catherine's bedroom on the floor below and said: please forgive me. Monsieur de Guise is dead. He will not be spoken of again. I have had him killed. I have done to him what he was going to do to me. On Christmas Day, Catherine told a friar: oh, wretched man. What has he done? Pray for him. I see him rushing towards his ruin.

  Catherine died on the 5th of January 1589 at the age of sixty-nine, probably from pleurisy. L'Estoile wrote that those close to her believed her life had been shortened by displeasure over her son's deed. He added that no sooner was she dead than she was treated with as much consideration as a dead goat. Because Paris was held by enemies of the crown, she was buried provisionally at Blois.

  Eight months later, Jacques Clement stabbed Henry III to death as he was besieging Paris with the King of Navarre. That assassination ended nearly three centuries of Valois rule. Henry IV, who had once knelt at the altar as a Catholic to save his own life on the night of St Bartholomew, now became king. He later said of Catherine: I ask you, what could a woman do, left by the death of her husband with five little children on her arms, and two families of France who were thinking of grasping the crown? Was she not compelled to play strange parts to deceive first one and then the other, in order to guard her sons? I am surprised that she never did worse. Years later, Catherine's remains were reinterred in the Saint-Denis basilica by Diane, the daughter Henry II had fathered outside his marriage. In 1793, a revolutionary mob tossed her bones into a mass grave with those of the other kings and queens.