Henry II of France

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry II of France died from a splinter of wood. On the 30th of June 1559, a jousting tournament was held near the Place des Vosges to celebrate a hard-won peace with the Habsburgs and the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth to King Philip II of Spain. Henry rode out wearing the colors of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. His opponent was Gabriel de Montgomery, captain of the King's Scottish Guard. Montgomery's lance shattered, and a fragment drove into the king's eye. The royal surgeons Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius attended him, but the court doctors ultimately chose a wait-and-see approach. Ten days later, on the 10th of July 1559, Henry was dead from sepsis, a cerebral abscess eating away his brain.

  He was forty years old. He had been king for twelve years. He left behind four young sons, a widow named Catherine de' Medici, and a kingdom on the edge of a religious war that would consume France for decades. The questions that matter about Henry are not just how he died, but how he lived: as a child hostage in a foreign country, as a king who burned Protestants while allying with Protestant princes, as a husband who slept beside one woman while his heart belonged entirely to another.

• 2. The Boy Held in Spain

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  Henry was born on the 31st of March 1519 at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, the second son of Francis I and Claude, Duchess of Brittany. His childhood took a brutal turn at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, when his father was captured by the forces of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and held prisoner in Spain. The ransom was not money. It was children.

  Henry and his elder brother Francis were sent to Spain as hostages in exchange for their father's freedom. They spent over four years in captivity. Henry was not yet seven years old when he left France. The day he departed, a woman named Diane de Poitiers embraced him warmly. She was thirty-five years old and a widow. He was a small child heading into exile. The bond formed that day would define the rest of his life.

  When Henry finally returned to France, he was no longer the carefree second son. The years in Spain had shaped him in ways that would color his reign, his loyalties, and his choices. At a tournament held in 1531 to honor his father's new bride Eleanor, Henry and his brother Francis dressed as chevaliers. Henry rode out wearing Diane's colors.

• 3. Catherine, Diane, and the Court

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  On the 28th of October 1533, fourteen-year-old Henry married fourteen-year-old Catherine de' Medici, a member of the ruling family of Florence. The wedding was officiated by Pope Clement VII, himself a Medici. At the time, Henry's older brother Francis was still alive and Henry had little reason to expect the throne. The marriage was a diplomatic arrangement; what followed was something far more complicated.

  The following year, Henry became romantically involved with Diane de Poitiers, the same woman who had embraced him as a child departing for Spain. She was now thirty-five years old. He was fifteen. The relationship deepened over the years into something that left Catherine, his queen, almost entirely sidelined. Diane was described as extremely confident, mature and intelligent, and she left Catherine powerless to intervene.

  Yet Diane made one pragmatic concession. She insisted that Henry sleep with Catherine in order to produce heirs. The couple struggled through the first decade of their marriage without success. The physician Jean Fernel eventually advised them on how to address what he observed as slight abnormalities in both partners. He later denied ever having provided such advice. Whatever the truth, Catherine eventually bore Henry ten children.

  When Henry lay dying in July 1559, Catherine exacted her revenge. She controlled access to his bedside and refused Diane permission to see him, even as Henry repeatedly asked for her. After his death, Catherine sent Diane into exile. Diane lived out her remaining years in comfort on her own properties.

• 4. War and Diplomacy

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  Henry launched the Italian War of 1551-1559 by declaring war on Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, aiming to recapture Italy and establish French dominance over European affairs. The war did not prevent him from forming alliances of convenience with Protestant princes inside the Holy Roman Empire. At the Treaty of Chambord in 1552, while persecuting Protestants at home, he allied with German Protestant princes against the Habsburgs.

  His father Francis I had maintained a Franco-Ottoman alliance, and Henry continued it. This allowed him to invade the Rhineland while a Franco-Ottoman fleet defended southern France's coastline simultaneously. In the Three Bishoprics of Toul, Verdun, and Metz, he secured occupations that proved lasting. A victory at Renty in 1554 helped consolidate those gains.

  After Charles V abdicated in January 1556, the Habsburg empire split between his son Philip II of Spain and his brother Emperor Ferdinand I. The war's center of gravity shifted to Flanders. Philip, together with Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, defeated the French at St Quentin. England's entry into the conflict led to the French capture of Calais, a significant prize.

  By April 1559, drained of money and facing mounting religious tensions at home, Henry agreed to the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. He signed one peace with Elizabeth I on the 2nd of April and another with Philip of Spain on the 3rd of April, both at Le Cateau-Cambrésis. France surrendered its claims in Italy and restored Piedmont and Savoy to Emmanuel Philibert, but kept Calais and the Three Bishoprics. Henry's sister Margaret married Emmanuel Philibert to seal the arrangement; his daughter Elisabeth of Valois became Philip's third wife.

• 5. Protestants and Power

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  Henry's reign brought systematic persecution of France's Protestant minority, particularly the Calvinists known as Huguenots. Punishments included burning at the stake and cutting out the tongues of those found guilty of uttering heresies. Ministers faced especially severe treatment.

  The Edict of Châteaubriant, issued on the 27th of June 1551, organized this persecution into law. It called upon both civil and ecclesiastical courts to detect and punish heretics. Informers received one-third of a convicted Huguenot's property as a reward. The edict also strictly regulated publications, prohibiting the sale, import, or printing of any book that lacked official approval. The scale of attempted suppression was extraordinary, yet Huguenot numbers continued rising dramatically throughout Henry's reign.

  The contradiction at the heart of Henry's religious policy was impossible to ignore. He burned Huguenots in France while simultaneously courting Protestant princes in Germany as military allies. In June 1559, with the Habsburg war finally concluded, Henry issued letters patent calling for the Gendarmerie, fresh from foreign campaigns, to redirect its energies toward eliminating domestic heresy. He never lived to see the result. The unfinished campaign, combined with the weakness of his young successors, helped ignite the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants.

• 6. Mary, Scotland, and Dynastic Ambition

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  Henry raised the young Mary, Queen of Scots, at his court with a specific dynastic purpose. On the 24th of April 1558, Mary married the Dauphin Francis, Henry's eldest son. Had their union produced a child, that child would have been King of France, King of Scotland, and a claimant to the throne of England. Henry had Mary sign secret documents, illegal under Scottish law, that would guarantee Valois rule in Scotland even if she died without a child by Francis.

  The scheme collapsed not through Scottish resistance but through death. Henry died in July 1559. Francis inherited the throne but died without issue a year and a half later, in December 1560. Mary returned to Scotland in August 1561. The French claim to Scotland ended with Francis's death, and the secret documents Henry had extracted from Mary became moot.

• 7. The Patent and the Monument

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  Henry II introduced an idea that outlasted every treaty and every battle: the requirement that an inventor publicly describe an invention in exchange for monopoly rights. The description of an invention in a patent became known as a patent specification. The first such specification was submitted by an inventor named Abel Foullon for a rangefinder device called the Usaige & Description de l'holmetre. Publication of the specification was delayed until after the patent expired in 1561, two years after Henry's death.

  His death left another kind of monument. By tradition, a French king's heart was enclosed in an urn and kept separately from the body. The Monument to the Heart of Henry II now resides in the collection of the Louvre. It was originally housed in the Chapel of Orleans beneath a pyramid. The original bronze urn was destroyed during the French Revolution, and a replica was made in the 19th century. The marble sculpture of the Three Graces that holds the urn was carved from a single piece of marble by Germain Pilon, the sculptor to Catherine de' Medici. Henry's body was interred in a cadaver tomb at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. His death at a tournament is credited with accelerating the decline of jousting as a sport, particularly in France, where the spectacle had just killed its king.