Catherine de Medici

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Introduction
at, stink, fight and die. Thats all there was to the life of a 16th century noble, glamorous portraits and heroic poses not withstanding. Suffocating the odor with deodorant and Glade plug-ins, our own lives arent that much different. I write this in December 2000, and that epic struggle for the presidency between two men who promised prescription drugs and 10% discounts on hardware for senior citizens has just reached its whimpering climax. History is like this: eat, stink, fight and die. The excitement we celebrate on sacred holidays is manufactured by publicists. Like good scriptwriters, they excise all their heros belches, farts, and bowel movements, airbrush their dimples, transforming dim-witted temper tantrums into legendary acts of heroism. Two hundred years from now, digging out after the coming holocaust our dirty, mutated descendants will be regaled with stories of Sir Alfred and Dubya IIs epic conflict for the soul of a nation. One man will stand up and say it was not so, and point out these two men were nothing but spoiled brats raised in luxury, who read their brilliant orations from texts prepared by others, mimicking in diluted form the language of a common man so alien to them both. Nobody will listen to him but the incomparable Zira and Cornelius, and hell be exiled to the wastelands with a beautiful, mute (beautifully mute?) fashion model at his side.
s blurry as my memories are, I remember the distinct shock I felt in my first college level history class when I learned all the subtle machinations which influence the writing of history. I believed there was more to the past than dry facts and dirty
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old ruins. There is, but the narration and ordering of those artifacts and dates is subject to whims and theories which everyone, we are told, must believe in. Marxists believed that history is a process of mans evolution from slavery to liberation. Capitalists believed, more often than not, in a history of private enterprise, singular heros and the march of progress, granting a better life for everyone and Coca-Cola for the Chinese. Unless Glade plug-ins are a great apex of civilization, theyre both fucked. The world isnt getting any better or any worse. Faces change, nations disappear, dynasties are torn down about the ears of the last in-bred specimen of the ruling line. In this great advanced age, millions starve, Marxism takes food out of their mouth and Capitalism works them until theyre broken. Two scions of powerful families fight for vulgar ambition and the glory of a middle-class tax cut. Millions couldnt care less and believe in neither of them, though they do believe an advanced race of aliens built the pyramids and a face on Mars. When you deprive the story of man of the hand of God (or Marx) and admit that history is nothing but a rudderless series of accidents, all you have left is the story. We all eat, stink, fight and die, some leave a beautiful corpse behind, others leave a good story. Because there are a million things to eat, so many ways to stink; we can fight like cowards or like homicidal maniacs, die in peace or with the glint of dazzling knives behind our backs.
ecent historiansparticularly those extracting tenure from gullible philanthropists by specializing in feminist history have reclaimed a number of wrecks from the past, ennobling their struggle to eat, stink, fight and die into a breathtaking overture of depth and character. Queen Elizabeth has long been revered for her wisdom, Mary of Scots for the romantic figure she cut of the doomed heroine. But no one to my knowledge has made a valid rehabilitation of their contemporary, the third powerful woman of the 16th centurys Goddess Trinity, Catherine de Medici. At a glance, she led a more exciting life than either, with more variations on eat, stink, fight and die than one would think possible. Three of her sons became kings, two of her uncles were popes, and her reign over France lasted more than 30 years. But her life is impossible to turn into a series of wishful self-portraits for female executives, punctuated as it was by massacres, civil wars, and the slow descent of France into hell. She confounds the Marxists and Capitalists alike as she brought neither progress nor liberation. Most damning of all, though, her sex was almost irrelevant. She was no feminist precursor, no spiritual sister to the suffragists yet to come. She was, in the final analysis, a cold-hearted monster, determined to preserve personal power to the ruin of her sons and her kingdom. But, all the same, she left a beautiful corpse behind. And one hell of a story.
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A Cradle Between the Coffins
t was quite a spectacle, one cold morning in a cathedral in Florence, where a childs cradle gently swayed. It was arranged in a strange formation, as to each side of the infants bed a coffin had been placed. In the coffin to the left was Madeleine, a teen-aged princess of France and the greatest trophy on the mantle of the family she had married. Madeleine had died twelve days after giving birth to the fitful child now rocking at her side. In the casket on the right was her husband, Lorenzo, dressed in the regalia of a petty Italian duke, who survived his wife by just six days. The odor of musty cathedrals and blood-stained rags permeates the life of Catherine de Medici, and there is no better place to start than the very beginning, when the child of fortune, daughter and heir of the illustrious House of Medici, was baptized at her parents funeral, orphaned three weeks after she was born. Though nothing could overcome this tragedy, the Infanta did have the good fortune of a powerful protector. For all his shortcomings, Pope Leo X, Catherines great uncle and mentor to her father, made sure that the business of being Shepherd to the World didnt interfere with family business. He had his work cut out for him. Besides himself and the orphan of Florence, all that stood between the glorious past of the Medici and their extinction was a handful of bastards. In spite of the odds, Leo made the resuscitation of his family his first priority. Leo was the second son of the famous Lorenzo de Medici, the acclaimed il Magnifico, a gallant, gentleman, and through stuffed ballot boxes and the dagger of the assas- Pope Leo X in the barbers chair sin, indirect but undisputed ruler of Florence. Upon Lorenzo il Magnificos death, control of the city fell to his first born son and Leos older brother, Piero. Piero managed to undo all of his fathers goodwill and provoked the people of Florence to rebellion in just six years through his arrogant and haughty demeanor. Piero drowned a bitter exile, leaving Lorenzos second son, the aforementioned Pope Leo Xborn Giovanni de Medicithe job of restoring the city to his familys control. Lorenzos influence had smoothed the way for
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Leo to be made a Cardinal in his youth. A typical cleric of his day, Leo drank, gambled, whored, and amused himself with the worldly passions which made the Renaissance Papacy such a scandalous office. Upon being elected pope, Leo is alleged to have quipped to his illegitimate cousin Giulio (who Lorenzo had also helped to become a Cardinal): God has seen fit to give us the Papacy. Now let us enjoy it. If these were not his words, they perfectly encapsulate his philosophy. The state of his home city, Florence, could give Leo but little pleasure. His family had been exiled, the citys republican liberties restored. Leo hijacked Church funds to outfit an army to drive the republicans from Florence and make the city a Vatican-warming present to his dead brother Pieros only son, Lorenzo. Though he bore the name of his famous grandfather, this Lorenzo de Medici was a small, narrow-minded man, who Though the perception of papal holiness would reach its accomplished little in his life but to have two of nadir under the two Medicis, one could hardly say that Mankinds greatest works of art dedicated to him. their neglect of theological righteousness as Bishops of Michelangelo painted the younger Lorenzo as the Rome was unprecedented. personification of Thought in the Medicean Chapel in Florence, considered to be one of his The forgotten Sixtus IV devoted dauntless energy to furfinest works. Every library in the world these days thering the fortunes of a limitless flock of nephews, and holds Lorenzos second edification, in the dedicaengineered from behind the scenes the attempted assassition of Nicolo Machiavellis The Prince. In the nation of Lorenzo il Magnifico in the Pazzi Conspiracy of closing chapter, the author exhorts Lorenzo to rise April 1478, in which his brother (and Pope Clement VIIs Messiah-like from his doldrums to free the rest of father) Guiliano de Medici was murdered. Sixtus succesItaly from the German, Spanish and French barsor, Innocent VIII, publicly acknowledged his illegitimate barians descending on the peninsula. son, who he married off to Lorenzo il Magnificos daughLorenzo died before he had the chance to fulter Maddalena. Innocent also agreed to the elevation of the fill Machiavellis prophecies (and probably never future Leo X as a cardinal at the age of 16, the latter havwould have had he lived a hundred year more). ing been tonsured as a priest at the wise old age of 8. The fortunes of the House of Medici now rested Innocents successor was the infamous Rodrigo Borgia, on an orphan girl, three bastard children and an who as Pope Alexander VI stood by or even helped as his aging pope whose life was so dissolute that he offspring raped, pillaged and stabbed their way into hiswould later be blamed for causing the Protestant tory. After the 26-day reign of the elderly Pope Pius III, Reformation. Julius II, Leos immediate successor and renowned as the Leo dispatched the first of the Medici so-called Warrior Pope, took the throne and the Holy Bastardshis cousin, Cardinal Giulioto Sword of an Unforgiving God. Do it again and Ill hang Florence to watch over the young heiress and proyou, he told one rebel who begged for mercy. After taking tect her from the still-hostile citizens of the city. the field against the French, he proclaimed Lets see who She was placed in a convent, where she would has the bigger balls: the King of France or I. His death was receive a poor education unworthy of a Medici but genuinely mourned by many Italians, and some 19th censatisfactory for a Medici woman. Back in Rome, tury myth-makers considered Julius II the first founding Leo toyed with the idea of marrying his young father of the modern Italian state, propelled by a singleniece to the second of the Medici Bastards, Leos minded determination to drive the foreign barbarians nephew Ippolito. out of the peninsula. Leo died before any of the plans could be finalized and Catherine was still a child nun. The
Three Degrees of Separation
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sun continued to shine on the Medici family however, and the conclave of the princes of the church ordained Leos bastard cousin, Cardinal Giulio, as Pope Clement VII. With two uncles as popes, one would admire the fortuitous fate of the orphan. But the Pope of the 16th century was often but an overdecorated prince of Italy, subject to the whims and caprices of greater princes and kings of Europe. In one such conflict, Emperor Charles V, ruler of Germany and Spain combined, sent a Spanish army down the boot of Italy to cut the uppity Pope down to size. Normally conflicts between Princes and Popes would result in one excommunicated and the other defiant. This time, it ended with Clement exiled from Rome and the Holy City sacked by the Imperial army. With the Pope unable to send assistance, the Florentines rose in one terrible night of riots in April of 1527, tore down the Medici coat-of-arms and once more declared a republic. From the fortified Castle of Saint Angelo outside of Rome, Clement had little choice but to negotiate with his enemy. They settled their squabbles, with Clement agreeing to pay a huge ransom to the Emperor. This first Medici bastard also named the third bastard, Alessandro, as Duke of Florence, with the promise that he should marry the Emperors own bastard daughter, Margaret, soon thereafter. To complicate politics and understanding together, Alessandro, officially a bastard of Catherines father Lorenzo but never acknowledged by him, was rumoured to be Clements own bastard from his more lurid days as a Cardinal. Now all that remained was the subjugation of Alex and Maggies nuptial gift: the city of Florence. The Florentines understandably werent thrilled to be handed over to a Medici and Hapsburg couple like so many toasters or fine china, and refused to surrender. The same Spanish army which had raped Rome now surrounded Florence and held the city under siege. The privations were horrifying during Pope Clement VII in pasta-sucking Italian pose. the year long siege; rat meat was sold for a fortune in the markets. In this nihilistic atmosphere, the Florentines abandoned their young republic and, in a unanimous motion and in all seriousness, named Jesus Christ their perpetual monarch. Naturally, some citizens didnt wish well upon the Medici brats who were starving the city their ancestors nourished. The object of their resentment and cruel fantasies was not the distant pope but their ten year old divested Duchess, Catherine. The distinguished leaders of the republican party, of course, wouldnt succumb to killing a child who had spent all of her life among nuns, but the mob wanted blood. One member of the city council suggested selling Catherine to the Turkish Sultan for his harem; another less romantic soul thought she should earn her keep in common Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 9
brothel. Still another proposed tying her to the citys walls to wait for the assault of Spanish cannon. Cooler heads prevailed and a deputation of citizens found her in the Convent of the Murate, her hair cropped close and dressed in the habit of a nun. She steadfastly refused to leave her cell, where, she said, she hoped to remain for the rest of her life.
he republicans eventually cajoled and threatened the sisters into handing over the girl, and Catherine spent the rest of the war a virtual hostage in another convent closer to the city center. When the gates were finally opened to the Spanish and Alessandro entered triumphant, Catherine was fetched by Clement and hurried off to Rome. So ends the connection of Catherine de Medici to the city of her ancestors. Despite the publics identification of her with Florence, the city was as alien to her as San Francisco would be to an inmate of Alcatraz. As for the saga of the Three Bastards, Clement would die to the general rejoicing of the Romans and most of Christendom. He wasnt a bad man, but he was an unlucky one. Cardinal Ippolito de Medici, once Catherines prospective husband, died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 24. When deciding the destiny of Duke Alessandro, fate would get a case of the giggles. He left the government of Florence to others and spent most of his time carousing and whoring with a mysterious, distant relation named Lorenzino. They shared a love of alcohol, a taste for transvestitism and, on more than one occasion, the same bed. Lorenzino made a friendly wager with Alessandro over which could be the first to defile a cousin of theirs, a distant relation of the Medici who survived the Spanish siege and the wrath of the republicans because of her unimpeachable virtue and celebrated devotion to her invalid husband. Being a good sport, Lorenzino said he would give Alessandro the first try to pick her cherry, and arranged for their cousin to meet the Duke at his house. While the Duke stripped down and slid between the sheets, Lorenzino and a man reputed to be his lover stole into the bedroom. He hovered over the Duke in his bed and asked, Are you asleep yet, my love? He then stabbed Alessandro in the stomach, his comrade drilling his dagger into the Dukes throat. Such was the fate of the man who replaced Jesus Christ as King of the Florentines.
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Flowers of Evil
hether these prevailing themes of Catherines youth murder, intrigue, suspicion and corruptionwere to provide any kind of instruction to guide the acts which would earn her infamy; whether the immediate loss of her parents and abandonment to the care of nuns were to influence her characteristic indifference to human suffering; whether being used as a tool of politics made her see people, like Machiavellis Prince, as means to an end, we can only speculate. Catherine herself was not prone to introspection, save when playing upon the pity of an audience with her story of woea story which, incidentally, never included any mention of her tragic childhood. Perhaps she felt indifferent to it. Of the many blasphemies attributed to Pope Clement VII, indolence can never be one of them. Under the thumb of the Emperor, he sought to escape by striking an alliance with another prince. The dominant powers in Europe besides the Spanish and Germans (united into a single entity by Emperor Charles V) were the Turks, the English, and the French. Obviously, an alliance with the Muslim Turk was out of the question, even for a decadent Pope of the Renaissance. Clement preferred the English, but the impatience of Henry VIII to dispose of his wife Catherine (a princess of Spain and the Emperors own auntobviously, Clement was powerless to dissolve the marriage with the Emperors army breathing down his neck) led to the founding of the Anglican Church and Henrys excommunication. This left the Emperors nemesis and the chief bulwark against Imperial domination of Europe, France and King Francis I. Francis relished the opportunity to renew his countrys claims on Italy and stick it to the Emperor at the same time. Uniting his house with what appeared to be the heiress of the Medici would be a master stroke. (There was, in fact, one last Medici male, the future Grand Duke Cosimo, related to Catherine six generations back through Lorenzo il Magnificos greatgrandfather. Little Cosimo was ignored by Clement, possibly because he was from the long-ignored cadet branch of the familyor possibly because Cosimo was the only legitimate male and Clement, himself a bastard, didnt want to draw attention to his own sinful origins.) Negotiations moved quickly and a contract was drawn up which provided either Francis or Clement plenty of opportunity to break it. Two years
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passed, and the wedding was still in both mens interests. Several other suitors made a pitch for Catherines hand (or, rather, the hand of the niece of the Pope), including the King of Scotland, the Duke of Milan and the bastard son of Henry VIII, but none of these had the appeal of the French match. Catherine was to marry Henry, Francis second son. Henry brought a good deal of money and the prestige of the most decorated royal house in Europe to the table. Catherines dowry was set at a mere 130,000 ducats, but the real prize was in a set of secret protocols annexed to the marriage contract. The Pope was to hand over to Catherine and thus to France the cities of Pisa, Livorno, Reggio, Modena, and Parma, and agree to provide aid should the French seek to reenter Italian politics to exercise their claims on Milan and Genoa. In the life of Leo X, Catherine she was a tool of European diplomacy without her knowledge; now in the reign of Clement, she was a tool of Papal intrigue without being consulted.
he wedding of Henry de Valois and Catherine de Medici took place at Marseilles on 28 October, 1533. Catherine was 14 years old, the groom 13 days older. The ceremony was presided over by Pope Clement himself, assisted by the largest congregation of Cardinals to meet outside of Rome since the medieval councils organized to arbitrate questions of doctrine. It was as grand as a wedding of the son of the King of France could be, followed by 34 days of parties, balls, and feasts from the Mediterranean port to the banks of the Seine. Catherine settled into her home in the Louvre as winter set in. She traded a train of nuns for a train of ladies-in-waiting. In truth, she was out of her league. Most of her maids were of older and more ancient families, and life was difficult for the daughter of merchants and bankers in a land where the descendants of feudal nobility still reigned. The court of Francis was also the first in France to embrace the superficial spirit of the Renaissance. In order to cozy up to the leading figures of the state, men and women alike learned to converse in Greek and Latin and surrounded themselves with poets like Ronsard and sculptors and painters fresh from an Italian education. The decline of the famous Medici was nowhere more evident than in the total ignorance of the little princess. Her letters are filled with Catherine de Medici depicted someawkward phrases and misspellings. The Medici men rarely thought time after her marriage but before enough of their wives and daughters to give them the same education puberty. as their sons. Catherine showed the stunted growth of a chute buried for ten years beneath the dogmatic manure of a convent. Pious professions of faith were no help in the fashionable world of Paris. Its hard to cry too much for a poor little rich girl, particularly against the background of a world still suffocating in the skin of medieval privation. Still, Catherines isolation in these early years is important to keep in mind, considering the traits she would show when she experienced her first taste of power. The Venetian Ambassador to France (typically an extremely wellinformed source) described her as most unpopular among her peers. Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 12
Theres no better tonic for dislike than a vulgar display of power, and the next of many fortuitous quirks of fate would, within three years of her marriage, make the unhappy bride one of the most powerful women in the world. On 12 August, 1536, Henrys older brother and the heir apparent, known in France the Dauphin, died after a brief illness. The entire kingdom was shocked by the sudden end of the prince, whose healthy constitution made the paranoid think of poison. The Dauphin probably died of pleurisy. But in the 16th century, any person of importance who died far from the field of battle was believed to be the victim of a cowardly assassination. Even when medicine advanced to the point where virii and disease became better understood, popular folklore had it that one could still be infected deliberately by ones enemies. Perhaps it was the romantic spirit of the Renaissance which refused to hang over the coffin of the high-born and glorious tags so banal as syphilis. Though she and her husband were the chief beneficiaries of the death of her brother in-law, Catherine was not a suspect in his poisoning. She would never escape suspicion in assassination again. Just about every prominent person who died in her turbulent life was alleged to be her victim. Some murders she undoubtedly had a hand in, but the fear of poison added dozens of undeserved notches to her belt. Though few of her contemporaries had a more blasphemous reputation, it was chiefly her background and birth that led to the aura of murder that surrounded her. She was reputed to keep a lab of Florentine chemists in the Louvre, secretly cooking up poisons and unique delivery mechanisms (Alexandre Dumas in his novel Queen Margot dreamed up some of Catherines most infamous inventions, including a book whose pages contained a poison released by the moisture of the fingertips.) As a Florentine, and a child of the conniving Medici to boot, assassination was supposed to be as natural to her as stuffing a ballot box or charging usurious rates of interest. And wasnt that Satanic book by Machiavelli dedicated to her father? In the case of the Dauphin, it was not Catherine but the Emperor Charles who was accused. A patsy was found in an Italian noble in Lyons named Count Montecuculli, who confessed under torture that he laced a vase of flowers from which the Dauphin drew an aromatic breath with arsenic powder. The Emperor knew better; the grieving father, Francis, probably did too. But just as all monarchs knew that confessions made under torture were worthless but accepted it anyway, accusations of poisonings were par for the course and the unfortunate count was drawn and quartered by a team of manure horses.
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The Dustbowl
obody celebrates the happy fate of finding a path to power when the sides of the road are littered with corpses. The court of France went through the customary period of mourning. Catherine probably wasnt too emotional over the death of her brother-in-law, who had been among the chief critics of her marriage to Henry. All of that was over now. High-born lords and ladies thought better of sharpening their wit against the merchants daughter. Perceptions toward Catherine didnt immediately change though, as many now took the subject of the poor match of the new Dauphin to private quarters. They had no trouble convincing King Francis of their wisdom. Nine years after the ceremony in Marseilles, he was bitter about the marriage deal with the Pope. None of the secret protocols in the contract had been fulfilled, nor would they ever be. The only part of the contract which had been executed was the transfer of the brides dowrya mere 130,000 ducats. People whispered in his ear that the heiress of the Medici fortune should have brought far more, and Francis agreed. This left him with an unremarkable, rather plain and ignorant daughter. The greatest danger, though, was that she appeared to be barren as well. For nine years, she had given the kingdom no children. Now that she was Dauphiness, progeny for the House of Valois was more important than before. She came from good enough stock that inbreeding wasnt the cause. In vain she consulted the alchemists and sorcerers of the day (for barrenness was seen more as the domain of magicians than doctors); it was around this time that she had her first consultation with Francis I, from an illustration found in a dictionary beside Nostradamus. He made a dire prediction that the entry for pompous Catherine, troubled by the present, could mistake for
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happy news: she would have many children, and three of them would be kings. The pretty quatrains of the bard werent reassuring enough when Catherine learned that her husband and father-in-law had been having discussions about the subject of the doomed marriage. Kings in France had dumped wives before, and few foreign princes would complain if the heir would divorce a Medici. In a remarkably audacious act, Catherine decided to head off the machinations of her in-laws by addressing the issue in the open. First she met in private with Henry, who because he loved her agreed to put off talk of divorce. Then, in a meeting with King Francis, Catherine adopted the pose of the loyal and agreeable supplicant. As the continuity of the monarchy was on the line, she said she would step aside and allow the King to find a new wife for her husband. Catherine herself would not fight annulment and would ask only to be allowed the freedom to retire to a convent of her choosing, and the world would never hear of her again. Francis was deeply moved; probably it was the only time he, or anyone, had seen this side of his daughter-in-law. He too agreed to put aside all talk of a separation, and prayed that God Almighty might give them the gift they both so longed for. This is the first time the real Catherine, the Catherine de Medici known to history, comes alive. Before this incident, she was merely a lost childbride in the French court. Here, for the first time, the victim as well as the benefactor of a turbulent fate stepped forward, grabbed life by the mane andin the context of the time, there is no other way to say itdetermined her path for herself, like a man. Women in the French court werent the simpering, abused creatures some would like us to think; as we shall see, they were often more powerful than the most battle-wizened generals and the highest officers of government. However, this was completely out of the character hitherto shown by the young Dauphiness. Never again would she lie down and let others determine her fate. She would suffer, to be sure, but never in silence; and if her power waned, she would no longer be the victim of destiny but struggle to reclaim what she considered her right. This description perfectly fits that of the man of actionthe highest echelon of creature in the Renaissance mind. Catherine would be the first, but not the last, woman of her times to aspire to the ideal.
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Mother to Half the World
hether it was the work of diviners and herbalists or some incredible feat of determination, Catherines ovaries were transformed after her meeting with the King and Dauphin from a barren desert into some of the most fertile land in France. To the rejoice of the kingdom, she delivered an heir on 19 January, 1543; and to the man who had given her a reprieve from the social death sentence, she gave a tribute by naming him Francis. Soon she was slamming out children faster than Hammerin Hank could slam it in. All told, she gave birth to an astounding 10 children in 13 years. It is always interesting to observe how a creature of bitter circumstance treats his or her own children. Many volumes have been written about Catherines relations with her children, and many more could be compiled of just the adjectives. Needless to say, they were complex relationships, each slightly different than the other. The nuances shall be dealt with each in turn. Above Name all, Catherine was concerned with her own power, and though she wouldnt do harm to her children Francis who robbed her of this, she wouldnt be above proElizabeth voking war or eliminating others who tried to step Claude [female] between mother and son. Keeping me from my Louis children, she could call it, and it sounds quite Charles pious. Keeping her from meddling in affairs of Alexander [later rechristened state, her enemies would say, and its hard to as Henry] argue with them. Margherite [aka Margot] Hercules [later rechristened as Francis] twins, Victoire and Jeanne
The Royal Dead Pool

Born 1543 1545 1547 1548 [died in 1550] 1550 1553 1553 1554 1556 [died a few weeks later]
ing Francis died in March of 1547. A contemporary and intimate in his court wrote that women, rather than years, killed him. Its true: sex was everywhere. In the spirit of the Renaissance, a whole kingdom could be given away for a night
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with a beautiful woman. It often was. In the reign of Francis, gallantry, patronage, and outright pimping usurped what was considered to be a closed-off world of men. If one wanted a to procure an indirect favour from an important man, one went first to the mistress, perhaps last to the wife. Its true that many bright and dashing women found themselves in the role of mistress; there usually wasnt a mark of shame about it. Its also true that very few of these women actually controlled their own destinies. A great many were the Pygmalion-like creations of powerful factions at court who used these women to manipulate the King. The practice of sophisticated pandering reached comical proportions three centuries later, in the era of Madame Pompadour and Madame du Barry, when the factions pimping these royal mistresses were known to everyone, it seems, but the King himself. Henry de Valois, crowned King Henry II, had the reputation of a melancholy, grave, and lonely man. Much of this was imposed from outside, as his father gave him little chance to experience either warfare or governing, the two sacred duties of a king. He shook off his imposed isolation after his fathers death. Along with showing an ambitious thirst to expand the boundaries of his kingdom against the Hapsburg Empire, Henry exhibited a colourful, often lighthearted personality. That Henry had a lighter side is proven by the remarkable United Nations of bastards he left behind. There were no less than four, all by women of different nationalities. When one considers that he sired 14 children in less than 20 years, one wonders when he found time to govern at all. Catherine, now queen, did not have the Kings heart. The love of his life was Diane de Poitiers, more than 20 years his senior. Diane, one of the exceptions to the rule of Pygmalion, was credited with taking the somber child and turning him into a powerful man; no doubt she trained him in the responsibilities that Francis had no time to teach him. It was Diane, not Catherine, who held most of the levers of power during his reign. Despite being of the older generation, Diane de Poitiers, from a painting commissioned she was still one of the most beautiful women in when she was about forty France; a delicate, nymph-like creature whose gentle features were inflected with strength by the reputation of the power she held. The comparison with Catherine could not be more striking. From the time she was a child, Catherine had been heavy-set, which years and an extravagant palate would turn into gross obesity. She was described as looking like her uncle Leo, which was no great compliment. No one had ever called her beautiful, and age would accentuate the strangeness of her face, rather than add dignity. Her forehead seemed to expand (it was said that she lost her hair and took to wearing a wig in her thirties), to the extent that it Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 17
appears another face could fit between the eyebrow and hairline. In any case, Diane and Catherine were contrasts in every sense; one aristocratic and proud, the other relatively low-born and defensive; one charming as a Arthurian legend, the other without that one saving grace which would save her, as it has saved any beautiful woman past or present, from the cruelties of her male critics. Though she often burned with jealousy, Catherine publicly reacted to her husbands often-flagrant infidelity with stoic dignity. This is not to say that she never lashed out. A strange incident involving the temporary exile of the Duke of Nemours speaks volumes about her reaction to anyone who blocked her from exercising the power of a Queen of France. From letters published after the death of all parties involved, it appears that Catherine hatched a plot with the Duke whereby he, in a moment of gaiety, would throw a glass of water in Dianes face. A dupe would be accused of having replaced the contents of the glass with quicklime, which would permanently disfigure the Kings favourite and render her a prisoner to a world of veils and gauzy curtains for the rest of her life. The plot was discovered, at least in part. The Duke was driven from court, though eventually allowed to return; after all, he had merely been a dupe himself for the jealous queen. Catherine threw herself into the intrigues of the court, despite being but a minor player in French politics. The conflicts are too petty and obscure to be recounted in full, and only obliquely affected her life or that of the kingdom. Often she would find herself opposed by Diane; more often she would oppose a policy simply because it was endorsed by Diane. She had little effect on the great issues of the day, most of which involved Henrys continuation of his fathers wars against the Hapsburgs. The Emperor was as worn out by conflict as Francis was by women, and had divided his powerful empire, the traditional Spanish Kingdom plus the Netherlands going to his son Philip, and the less impressive Austrian Empire to his brother Ferdinand. The French took on the Austrian half and won a group of small but strategically important cities on the Rhine. The King himself took the field and shared all the hardships of war with his troops. Catherine was appointed Regent of the Kingdom in his absence. It was her first taste of real power. As Procurer General of the Army, she fed the war machine, learning on the fly that merchants are usually not the most patriotic or generous citizens in times of war. The war was soon over with France generally considered to have a great if temporary advantage on her ancient enemy. Catherines time at the top was mostly concerned with supply convoys and the selling price of cattle, and was, in any case, brief. With the avenues of power obstructed, Catherine indulged her tastes for the game of patronage. Certainly there was something about her mastery of this traffick of influence which hearkens back to a youth spent in the full flower of the worlds original political machines: Florence and the Papacy. That she was schooled by her famously manipulative relations in both places is doubtful; she was but a girl, and a sheltered one at that. Her modus operandi consisted of the bribery, blackmail and the intimidation characteristic of municipal politics both past and present. In Capones days they called it Chicago tactics: money and muscle. Today, when we like to think Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 18
pure democracy is triumphant in the world, we call it patronage. As a patron, Catherine was tireless. Countless letters were written to princes, hoping the lustre of her name and her position as Dauphiness, Queen, Regent or Queen Mother will convince this or that ruler to hire one of her proteges into his service. In times when her power at home was on the wane, she would address her letters chiefly to Italy. At all other times, letter writing was not necessary: she made the decisions on who ruled in France, and promoted her subordinates accordingly. For the six years before she became queen, 57 of her letters survive. Three concern the health of her children. The rest are concerned with dispensing patronage and power. These were her only two passionsindeed, they superseded all other concerns, or rather all other concerns grew out of her obsession with personal power and her use of it to add lustre to her children.
ne of the other intriguing women of the era came into Catherines life at this time. Mary Queen of Scots was the daughter of King James of Scotland (a one-time suitor for Catherines hand) and Mary of Guise, a French princess whose family then ruled the Duchy of Lorraine, a small buffer state dividing France and Germany. The Guise were Germans by blood. Though they had been granted naturalization as French subjects several generations back, they were still popularly considered foreigners. After the death of her husband, the elder Mary ruled Scotland as Regent for her daughter. In these turbulent times, brought about by Henry VIIIs obsession with spawning a male heir, it appeared that Scotland may indeed conquer England rather than the other way around. Henrys sole son was a sickly boy, his first daughter Mary Tudor an unstable neurotic, and his second daughter Elizabeth a Protestant barely able to hold on to her throne. For her own safety, it was agreed that Mary Queen of Scots should be brought up in France. She was raised together with Catherine and Henrys children and always given precedence over them as she was already crowned a queen. Her relatives, the Guise, formed one of the most powerful factions at the French court. They convinced Henry that the infant Dauphin and Mary should be married to join the crowns of France and Scotland together (and incidentally make their niece the most powerful queen in the world). The two six year olds were thus engaged (it is a sign of the openness of the Kings affection that the marriage contract was witnessed by, among others, Diane of Poitiers). Grown men wrote about the childrens touching affection for one another. With the Guise ascendent in the claustrophobic world of French politics, Catherine tried, with the meagre influence she held, to balance them against two other powerful families at the French court, the Montmorencys and the Bourbons. She would use this policy of balance her whole life, delaying fortunes dawn and doing her best to undermine those she yesterday promoted. In an ideal situation, she would rise to the top, and no one would be able to challenge her. It worked for a time, but its definitive proof page 19
that Catherine was not, as has often been alleged, a pupil of Machiavelli. She had a copy of The Prince in her private library, but it was probably a keepsake because of its dedication to her father. Machiavelli explicitly condemns a policy of balancing opposing forces against each other as dangerous, and for Catherine it ultimately was. In later days, cutting a faction down to size meant a renewal of a chronic and destructive civil war. Machiavellis belief was that rivals who are down must be made to never walk again, lest they rise with spite and seek revenge. Catherine never learned this lesson. One other child was raised with Catherines childrenHenry de Navarre, the infant heir of the House of Bourbon. Henrys mother was the steely Queen of Navarre, a small state on the border between France and Spain, even more pitiful than the Duchy of Lorraine. Her husband, the ambitious Antoine of Bourbon, took the crown when he married her. He and his family were an important faction at court as Princes of the Blood (nobles with royal blood, but outside of the official royal family. The Bourbons were descended from the younger son of a previous king.) After Catherines own children, Antoines son was the next in line to the throne. The first of Catherines children to rule was her eldest daughter Elizabeth. On the advice of the Guise and ignoring the warnings of the Montmorencys, Henry II renewed war with the Hapsburgs, this time taking on Austria and Spain together. It ended badly; France survived with the towns on the Rhine won in Henrys first war, but most of her Italian possessions were lost. To seal the peace treaty (the Peace of Westphalia, which would hold internationally for a few years while each state in Europe was dealing with the Great European Convulsion brought about by Protestantism), it was agreed that Elizabeth should marry King Philip II of Spain. Grown tired of waiting on Elizabeth of Englands non-answers to his wedding proposals, Philip agreed to take Catherines Elizabeth instead, despite the fact that she had previously been engaged to his own son. She lived a short and unhappy life, married to a tyrannical windbag. Her nervous disposition was characteristic of most of Catherines children; it was said that her hands would tremble when reading letters written in her mothers hand, even from the safe distance of Madrid.
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The Renaissance Faire

second marriage was planned to seal the peace, between the Duke of Savoy and Henrys sister, Marguerite (not to be confused with the daughter he and Catherine named after her). The ceremony was held in France in 1559. No king of the Renaissance could hold a wedding without making it a grand fete, and Henrys sporting tendency as well as a desire to live up to the reputation of his father prompted him to add to the festivities the games of a medieval tournament. Archery, hand-to-hand combat and jousting were planned with magnificent lists made up of some of the most notable personages of the day. The King himself took part in the jousting, prompting many other prominent lords to join in. Henry had been stabbed in the face in a joust against his father when he was still a teen. A great piece of flesh was torn loose, and Henry was humiliated. That he wished to show himself above like incidents of his youth is undeniable, for he pushed himself further than any other. On his first joust, Henry broke a lance with the groom, the Duke of Savoy. It was a manly scene with plenty of backslapping by the victor and self-deprecating remarks by the loser. On his second joust, Henry rode against the Duke of Guise. By now the hour was getting late, and the groom and his wife begged Henry not to ride again. But he wanted a shot at the man who had defeated many of the famous participants, a Scot in the Kings service, Count Montgomery. On the first pass, Montgomery nearly knocked the King out of his saddle. The King was visibly annoyed, and demanded another pass. This time, he broke the Counts lance. The broken segment pushed aside the visor of Henrys helmet and drove into his right eye. The spectators ran to the scene and lifted the Kings helmet to find an enormous wound pouring blood down his neck. Upon sight of this horror, the Dauphin, Francis, fainted. He had to be carried together with his father up to their rooms. Surgeons took a four inch splinter from the Kings head. Henry regained consciousness and had the strength to forgive the terrified Montgomery. He then tried to comfort his son, who was wandering around the Louvre moaning his terror at following his father. Catherine was at her husbands side when he died.
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Immediately thereafter, special companies of the Kings bodyguard disseminated from the capital on a special mission from the Queen-turnedQueen Mother. Catherine had prevented her old rival Diane from visiting the King on his deathbed, but otherwise left her unmolestedthe loss of her influence was penalty enough. Diane lost none of her dignity and shortly thereafter withdrew from court (an act that none of the many tragedies in Catherines life would prompt her to emulate). The Kings other mistresses were not so lucky. Lady Fleming, one of Mary Queen of Scots ladiesin waiting who bore the King a son, had been sent back to Scotland when she wouldnt shut up about how proud she was to have a royal bastard sucking on her placenta. French troops in Mary of Guises service searched her apartments for incriminating materials and tore her small estate to pieces. A Savoyard lady, also mother of a royal bastard, was driven from the kingdom and had all evidence of their relationship taken from her. Years later she would complain to the pope of continuing persecution from French agents. As Henrys bastards were, for the most part, well known (his daughter by Diane had been married to the eldest of the Montmorencys in a grand ceremony), Catherine could not have hoped to have any impact on contemporary legends of her husbands infidelity. A sympathetic interpretation is that she had taken care not to let the Kings memory among posterity fall into ill-repute; a cynical reading is that she had taken care to hoard all pity shown to his aggrieved loved ones for herself.
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The Crack of the Masses

egardless of how many whores he bagged, Henry left behind a mediocre legacy. First and foremost, France was broke. Rare among absolute monarchs, King Francis I had been aware of at least one of his frailties and tried to keep his inclination for extravagance from putting his people into the poorhouse. He made four keys to the royal treasury, keeping one and giving the rest to men who would render scrupulous accounts. Henry abolished this practice. Moreover, Henry appeared to have contracted what some shrewd philosophers of kingship would call Flatterers Disease. He spent freely enough on himself, but showered his friends in gold. Bodin wrote in his Republic that Francis did not give away as much money in his reign of 32 years as his successor did in two. Taxes had been increased more than 50%, but the national debt was still some forty million francsthree times the annual revenues. Henrys life then mirrored his death: foolish, stupid, stubborn and absurd. He passed most of his days in the dark obscurity beneath the towering shadow of a larger-than-life father, and died in circumstances one would expect to find in News of the Weird. One thing in which he was the equal of his contemporaries, though, was his manner of keeping uniformity in the practice of the Christian faith. Emperor Charles V spent most of his life vainly striking at the spectre of Protestantisma trend bolstered, the reader will remember, by the unholy if not blasphemous lives of the popes, especially Catherines two uncles. The persecution and extermination of heresy was the duty of anyone who aspired to the title Defender of the Faith; French kings pledged to exterminate heresy in the sacre, their coronation oaths. Heresy involves a dispute over doctrine; Protestantism was characterized by an uncompromising zeal to reform the Catholic Church itself. More than any other man, the one who could claim credit for the sudden explosion of reform from so many different quarters was Gutenberg, whose invention of movable type allowed bibles to be translated and printed for the first time in native languages (itself once considered a heretical Henry II: Not Homosexual act). Also, critics of the Church and men who led truly holy lives could publish their thoughts and circulate them widely, at least among that segment of the population which could read. The introduction of rela-
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tively cheap and easy-to produce books made the world a smaller place; ideas could spread by more than voice and quill alone. As this pretty story about mans progress against the forces of ignorance and darkness relates to France: toward the beginning of Francis Is reign, Martin Luther and his lesser-known but no-less-important contemporary, Ulrich Zwingli, began to raise hell in German Country. Their writings, thanks to Gutenberg, spread widely and by 1521 the former was condemned as a heretic by the Sorbonne. Twelve years later, the Rector of the University of Paris bravely delivered an oration defending the new teachings. The paper had actually been written by a student, John Calvin. Both were driven out of the city. Of course, the same invention which allows us to read the magnificent novels of Dostoyevsky also circulates the middle-aged colon-coughs of John Updike. The printing press was a new weapon, for fair fights and foul. Placards were printed in the hundreds and posted throughout the kingdom, defending some, slandering others, confusing those who just wanted to get home and draw their weekly bath. One of the Protestant Calvin, besides being one of the leading theologians of the placards actually found its way to King Francis millennium, was also a master of political organization. bedroom door. Outraged, the king who had Huguenot churches in France followed a model drafted in encouraged the study of Greek and Hebrew and his own hand from Geneva. Missionaries and pastors had his own clashes with the Church lashed out. were trained in Switzerland and sent back to France to disCalvin was driven out of the provinces and into seminate their message and attack Catholicism at its roots. Switzerland, and his followers sought shelter The true stand of Calvin and the Huguenots toward reliunder the scorched earth. gious liberty is shown by an incident in the city of Under Henry II, the persecution of heresy Beaugency during the reign of Francis I. One of the membecame even more zealous. He set up special bers of the local Calvinist church protested in public that courts for punishing heresy, similar to the Spanish the magistrates of the state had no right to punish heresy. Inquisitions but known colloquially as the He was taken aside by Huguenot churchmen and Burning Chambers for their most typical seninformed that this position was contrary to Scripture. tence. He did not act in a void: the common peoShown the error of his ways, he appeared before a ple, in the Kingdom as a whole, were often disBeaugency notary and signed a statement withdrawing gusted by Protestants and rarely passed up the his comment, and confirming that the punishment of opportunity to burn a house down with a whole heresy was the duty of state officials because of strong congregation inside. reasons founded on the word of God. The perjurer, like so The Huguenots, as the French Calvinists many other Huguenots, later perished on the stake. were called, dipped their own hands in blood often enough to be considered the persecuting Catholics equal. In regions they controlled, and throughout the civil wars through which France was to pass, they showed all of the intolerance and bigotry of their orthodox countrymen. Calvin, Luther, and other Protestants, for that matter, were hardly the type to turn the other cheek. They saw evil in a state of permanent co-existence between the two branches of the faith. They did not oppose the suppression of heresy in principle, but disputed that it was they and not the Catholics who were the true heretics.
The Watchers of the Watchdogs
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At first, most of the Protestants were members of the small bourgeoisie class, merchants and traders more educated than the peasants but barred access to the vistas of power by common birth. Records indicate that a great number were also nominally members of the Catholic clergy. But in time Calvins missionaries roused the languorous curiosity of the nobility. Through their protection of individuals and control in regions they governed, some pockets of Protestantism were able to flourish. Younger members of the Houses of Bourbon and Montmorency, in particular, showed a strong preference for the creed. Some even thought Catherine herself was a Huguenot. She knew a few, its true. But this is explained not by any sympathy for the Reformed cause, but because people were, in her base analysis of the world, instruments of the royal prerogative. A man was judged not by his beliefs or even his character, but for how he could serve her, and how he could impair her enemies. Later she would be cursed by the Protestants and Catholics together as the chief bulwark of the Church or the chief ally of reform. (As Balzac put it, she was scalded under the mocking fire of the Calvinist pressbut by the neo-Catholic press, too.) By historians, who rise above the strife of the times, shes cursed for believing in neither. Though she was given all outward signs of respect, or at least those due a widow and Queen Mother of a kingdom, Catherine was almost irrelevant during the first years of her son Francis reign. The Guise took control of the young king and their niece, to the detriment of While researching clerical corrupthe other factions. As the King was so young, a tion in the 16th century, I discovshare of power should have gone to Antoine de ered this illustration of gambling Bourbon, the first Prince of the Blood, as Regent of between nuns and friars (degenerthe Kingdom. Bourbon was, for the most part, placated by his ates one and all), playing a rudiappointment as governor of the provinces of Gascony and mentary game of Rock Paper Guienne, from which he drew a large income sufficient to Scissors. Guess what Brother resuscitate his family from the brink of bankruptcy and rejuHornios punishment is? venate them into their former grandeur (a few Bourbon princes had treacherously sided with the Emperor, and were only now recovering from the subsequent punishment by which they lost five hundred years worth of filthy lucre). Other discontent Bourbons took their case to Catherine. She implored them not to cause trouble. Believing they would have an ally in the dispossessed Queen Mother, the Bourbons and their retainers were so amazed at her nervousness over their agitation for a greater share in government that they abandoned their plan and each in turn found an excuse to leave court. If the grand nobility were willing to bide their time, malcontents among the lesser nobility were not. A scoundrel named La Renaudie, once imprisoned as a forger, was the ringleader of the so-called Conspiracy of Amboise which sought the dislodging of the Guise through force of arms. Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 25
The conspiracy was very real, and attracted some prominent members of the provincial nobility as well as common Huguenots. It was not endorsed by the dissident Bourbons, and Calvin went so far to dissociate himself from the conspiracy that he preached a sermon against it. The Guise got wind of the affair while the conspirators were still massing near Amboise, from whence they would march on Paris. Fearing the extent of the conspiracy, they asked Catherine for her help. She agreed to consult with the disaffected nobles at court. They offered no great assistance in cleaning up the mess but publicly condemned those who would resort to arms to settle a political squabble. The conspirators were surrounded and captured, most of them hanged. The Conspiracy of Amboise was a farce, but it had two effects. For the first time, the enemies of the Guise at court realized they had two possible allies: popular discontent over financial mismanagement and the growing tax burden (which dated back to Henry but could be, and was, blamed on the Guise), and the cautious support of the growing Huguenot party. The second effect, far more important for our purposes, was that it brought Catherine back into the picture as a player in France. Had she not been invoked, it is possible that she may have gone the way of other Queen Mothers: building palaces, endowing hospitals and blessing convents. She too had seen the power of the Huguenots, and made an effort to learn more about their actual strength by enticing some of their most prominent clergymen to meet with her secretly. She found out that, while they were not strong enough to drive Catholicism underground, they did have enough power to seriously disrupt the kingdom. Through cleavage such as this do ambitious men (and women) capitalize. From the time the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, asked her to intervene to diffuse the Conspiracy of Amboise, her power only grew. For twenty seven years she had done little but obtain pensions for broom-pushers and soldiers whose skill was exceeded by their longevity. Now, for the first time, she stepped forward to the cadaver of France. Catherine grasped into the cavity with both hands; never again would she willingly let go.
nder Catherines guidance, new dispatches and edicts began to circulate from the epicenter of the Royal Court, signed by the largely irrelevant King Francis. Most ambassadors were confused, as the Guise were still at court but were seen working with the Queen Mother to effect a reconciliation between the Kings faithful subjects and the heretics. Repression was spoken of as a failed medicine, which had not cured the patient and now threatened his life. With a rare worldliness which eluded most Protestants and Catholics of the time, parallels were drawn to the other kingdoms of Europe, diverse in every way but suffering from the same problems over religion. Catherines advice, and the policy which was carried out so far as the state could interfere in matters of conscience, was that worship in private houses should neither be punished nor sanctioned. This decriminalizaDegenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 26
tion of heresy did not extend to public preaching, which was still outlawed. This was entirely insufficient to the Bourbon faction at court (not in the least because the Guise were still in power), but their protests came to nothing. Popular discontent, by Catholics and Protestants alike, was still widespread. Nor does it appear that Catherine was concerned with true reconciliation. She was settling for the appearance of reconciliation and mediation between the two faiths because this policy guaranteed her a role in government. She played the Bourbons against the Guise, though she had no desire of allowing the Bourbons to claim the role that the ancient customs of the kingdom granted them. Once the heat let up the Guise tried to relegate Catherine back into the figurehead role she had played during the early years of Francis IIs reign. The opportunity came when the party Catherine used as their counterweightthe Bourbonssuffered a tremendous scandal. The Prince of Condkid brother of Antoine, King of Navarrewas implicated in a scheme similar to the Conspiracy of Amboise. Lured to court with his brothers, he was placed under arrest by order of King Francis, under the direction of the Guise. Cond blamed his brothers, who had assured him of a safe conduct. They in turn blamed Catherine. She had little to gain by the Princes arrest, and, if she was incapable of showing love to anyone outside of her family (and this being a perverted love at that), she considered the gallant if somewhat goofy Cond one of her favourites at court. The Princes guilt was in any case undeniable. The royal council pronounced him guilty after a cursory examination of the paper evidence, and pronounced his sentencedeath by beheading.
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Generation Gap
he Prince of Conds death, when it came, was far less distinguished than the noble punishment of losing ones noggin. At any rate it was still far off. He was released from custody with a pardon after one of those strokes of fate which serve as the climax of extremely gullible novels. Let John Calvin describe it: Did you ever read or hear of anything more timely than the death of the little King? There was no remedy for the worst evils when God suddenly revealed himself from Heaven, and He who had pierced the fathers eye, struck off the ear of the son. Francis was a sickly boy, said to be crippled from birth owing to the potions Catherines alchemists prescribed to cause her barren womb to become fertile. He was misshapen, with a frail physique and minuscule stature. Ambassadors struggled to try to explain his Forrest Gump-like intelligence. Compared to his bride, Mary Queen of Scots, he was a pallid little troll. He had a chronic respiration problem which troubled Catherine so much that she repeatedly importuned his governess to have him blow his nose hourly to relieve his congestion. Pushed together since they were children, Mary and Francis appeared to share a genuine love, or at least something like it. After the death of Henry at the Renaissance Fair, Mary and Francis retired to play with their dolls and Easy-Bake Ovens, leaving everything to her uncles, the Guise. They had no children; the doomed prince had not even reached puberty, on account of a medical condition referred to then as undescended testicles. He had come down with what was thought to be a cold. Ten days later he was still in bed and had taken a turn for the worst. Doctors diagnosed the problem as an abscess in his inner ear, but were unable to prescribe a remedy for it. He died on 5 December, 1560.
hough her children were born in the sudden burst described earlier, there is a definite line which separate the oldest from the youngest. Elizabeth, now Queen of Spain; the late Francis, and Claude, now Duchess of Lorraine, together with Mary Queen of Scots, grew up together in a royal nursery, doted on like small
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princes by a household of strangers. Elizabeth remained Catherines confidant until her death, a role which Claude, owing to her Guise in-laws, could naturally not assume. Though Charles, Henry, Marguerite and Hercules were only slightly younger than the first three, they seemed to come from a later generation. Catherine saw to it that the boys, at least, were weaned on an overpowering dose of mothers milk, to the extent that their reliance on Catherine formed a kind of dangerous addiction. They were aware that she was undermining their rule, but were powerless to resist it. To ensure that no faction co-opted Charles as the Guise had taken possession of Francis soul, Catherine moved her bed into his room and didnt move it out until he was well into manhood. After she stopped sleeping with him, her presence was preserved by an intricate network of spies who repeated to her everything the King said and everything said to him. Charles, now King Charles IX, was but a boy of ten when his older brother died. Charles would be unable to shake his mothers influence when he was much older; at this tender age, he was a sock-puppet. He announced that he wanted his beloved mother to head the Regency to rule the country until he reached his majority. In a country still decentralized by strong local sympathies, one has to understand the unifying power of the person of the King to comprehend how important a gesture this was. Even a terrible king, an evil, nasty son-of-a-whore, would rarely be derided; instead, his oppressed subjects would blame those around himmen such as the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. The two had placed entirely too much faith in the constitution of a sickly monarch; Catherine, in brutal, cynical politics, simply outplayed them. Despite the fact that the ancient laws regarding the governing of the kingdom in a Kings minority were still not being obeyed, the Princes of the Blood, the Bourbons, failed to take command of the situation. Catherine outmaneuvered them when she convened an Estates General to raise taxes from the clergy and the Third Estate; the body ratified her illegal appointment as Regent and placed a vote of confidence in the new regime. The nobility intended to back the Bourbons, but thanks to one of her new friends, Admiral Coligny, their dissent was mollified. She thanked him personally and with several letters, swearing to stand by his side for the rest of her life.
he Guise may have been down, but they were not out. Their return to power was funded by the King of Spain but assisted most of all by Catherine herself. Having them driven from court as most wished would leave her dependent entirely upon the Bourbons. She was playing a trick popular among marketers by making Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 29
herself indispensable and creating a need for her services where there was none. The disastrous outcome of Catherines maneuvering proves again the wisdom of Machiavelli, and for the opinion that Catherine could not have read the book dedicated to her father. The Sage of Florence would have advised her, once the Guise were down, to destroy them; to answer their injuries to her person with a final death blow. The Guise, to their credit, had learned their lesson from their mishandling of the situation with Mary and Francis and would not rest on the Queen Mothers favour. Through money, threats and finally an appeal to religious feeling, they succeeded in fragmenting the opposing party. Of the three Bourbon brothers, the eldest (Antoine of Navarre and the Cardinal of Bourbon) joined the Guise in arguing for a more strenuous persecution of heresy. Their younger brother, the Prince of Cond, was a convinced Huguenot. In the Montmorency family, their most distinguished member, the Constable, sided with the Catholics as well, against his nephews, Admiral Coligny and Captain-General dAndelot, commander of the Royal Infantry. Thus, through generational strife the Guise had succeeded in splitting the forces opposing them, and decidedly turned the focus from their own ambitions to a purely religious conflict. Catherine, of course, reacted to this new and powerful alignment by swinging to support the weaker party. As the conflict was no longer between the powerful houses of nobility, this meant directly to the heretics. Catherines view of matters of faith wasnt, in fact, much different than that of Elizabeth of England. Both showed a cool pragmatism in religious affairs, though the militancy of the orthodox parties in both their states made them appear to be lost to the heretic parties at the very start. Elizabeth, however, made a conscious decision early on to throw her lot with the heretics in the interest of order. Catherine attempted to stand between the two powers, appearing as impartial as possible. To Huguenots she railed against the Cardinal of Lorraine and, obliquely, the Church he served in. To the King of Spain and other powerful Catholics she called the Huguenots vermin, comparing them to a disease which has built up a resistance to the cure (meaning, terror). However, while it is clear that Elizabeth made an informed decision, Catherine never thought of the Catholic and Huguenot parties in terms of their beliefs, but in the power of their foreign patrons and the numbers of troops they could put in the field. The Venetian Ambassador wrote, I do not believe that Her Majesty understands what the word dogma means. She once gave a handsome prayerbook to her son Charles, only to be told that it was a collection of Huguenot psalms. Despite the fact that she allowed Huguenots to live in her household, she had no sympathy with their cause, as she never truly understood what it meant. The Huguenots around the King were human beings reduced to numerical integersa banking instinct adapted to humans. Her real opinion on the dispute and the two parties is revealed in one of her letters to her daughter Elizabeth: Everything that is done on one side or the other is nothing but the desire to rule and to take from me under cover and colour of religion the power Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 30
that I possess. Paranoid egotism, a modern Freudian would call it. But confessions of faith and obedience aside, it was also probably true.
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The First Huguenot War

he First Huguenot Warthe first of so many that the French typically group them together under the social-historical term the Wars of Religionwas a long time in coming and merciless when spark hit powder. Catherine, for possibly the only time, had nothing to do with it. The Guise faction, supported by their new allies, now felt themselves powerful enough to force the issue. The Duke and Cardinal together went to Germany to visit Christopher, Duke of Wrtemberg, a Protestant but also a loyal ally of the Kings of France in the wars against the Hapsburgs. The Cardinal told Duke Christopher that he agreed with many of Martin Luthers arguments, though he would only with time be able to express this publicly. Both brothers swore to the Duke that they had nothing to do with the persecution of Protestants (a baldfaced lie) and encouraged him, if trouble should start, to side with themthe true defenders of the thronefrom those who preached chaos and anarchy. Duke Christopher took notes on the meeting, which, based on what would happen next, he gathered together and published under the title Treachery. Returning from Wrtemberg, the Guise passed through the city of Vassy. Quite recently, their mother had sent a bishop to Vassy to preach to the largely Protestant citizens and convince them to return to the fold of the Universal Church. The Huguenots had driven the bishop away. With this on his mind, the Duke of Guise stopped in the city where he was met by a delegation of aggrieved Catholics. They told him that the Huguenots were holding a service at that very moment. The Duke sent agents to the secret church (whose location everyone well knew) and demanded they come to his lodging and explain their shabby treatment of his familys representative. The two sides give a wildly varying account of what happened next. Based upon the results45 dead on the Protestant side, compared to one death among the Dukes partyits fair to say that either the Duke drew his sword first or that a Protestant makes a lousy fighter. This incident, called by the Huguenots the Massacre of Vassy, was not remarkable, save for that the first time one of the great nobles of court had
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personally drawn blood in the religious conflict. Massacres and riots were an almost weekly occurrence, but the Duke of Guises involvement drew the Catholics to call him a savior and the Protestants to take up arms to defend themselves from further provocations. As the Duke continued on to Paris, Catherine was at a royal palace at Fontainebleu with the King and the royal household. She sent several letters to the Prince of Cond, begging him to save the children, the mother, and the realmobjects which, if ranked in that order, perhaps encapsulated her philosophy. To Admiral Coligny (who, though he was commander of the French Navy, made his name commanding men on firm ground), she said that lest all be lost, they must be prepared. He was instructed to seize Orleans, Rouen, and other cities. Needless to say, Paris was lost to Catherine and the Huguenots. Guise was in firm control of the capital, and now raised the second pillar of his plan for a coup detat. A troop of guards came to take the boy-king back to Paris with them for, as they put it, safekeeping. Catherine had plenty of time to withdraw with Coligny, who was marching hard for Orleans. She hesitated, as to retreat to Huguenot territory would declare her too openly for their side. Soon the Guises men were upon the royal palace and dragged the King, in tears, from his mother. As she had long ago decided to never let the King remain for a few days out of her sight, she agreed to return to Paris with them. Thanks to the extraordinarily slow journey of a captain of the artillery who, it was said, was either a Huguenot or an old fool, the Admiral beat the Catholics to Orleans and made it his base of operations. A generation before, savage civil war had turned German against German to the horror of all patriots of that nation; now, it was Frances turn. Soldiers actually fought very little in the First Huguenot War, at least not against other soldiers. Most of the killing was done as it had been done beforemassacres of the defenseless, of the suspected and the innocent, only now it was done by professional soldiers. As time went on, the savagery of the population, seized as if by fever, contaminated the armed forces, who degenerated from fighting for God and the Gospels to sack, rape, pillage and all forms of sacrilege. It was, to be contemporary, a kind of Balkan war, where the opposing armies avoid each other and take advantage instead to loot civilians and kill those of the opposite party; fearing a fair fight (and an even chance of death) in favour of easy blood and lucrative rewards. In terms of the actual combat that took place, the Huguenots suffered early losses. They surrendered Tours after a short siege and the Prince of Conds army was routed on its way to relieve it. Rouen was stormed. On the other hand, the Huguenots convinced Queen Elizabeth of England to get involved; she landed several thousand troops at Havre de Grace and gave money to pay for German mercenaries. The real Huguenot victory in the north, though, came amidst their Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 33
defeat at Rouen. In battle the King of Navarre suffered a freak, mortal wound. For all of his life Antoine had been a pathetic figure. His motives, like those of most everyone around him, were self-aggrandizing, but he hadnt a tenth of Catherines self-determination, much less that of his great enemies-turned-allies, the Guise. Toward the end of his life he vacillated wildly, first supporting the Catholics, then marrying the leading Huguenot in the country, Jeanne de Navarre, so he could massage his ego with the flattery of being addressed as a king. Then he flirted with the Catholics again, believing the King of Spain would give him an appendage to tiny Navarre to make it worth his attention. Theres a ring of truth to the account of his final moments, when two surgeons, one Huguenot and the other a Catholic, having lost the patient, fought with one another for possession of the dying mans soul. Its said that Antoine died neither Catholic nor Protestant, unable to the last to make up his mind. Not long after, the Huguenots and Catholics massed their troops at Dreux for the first (and last) grand confrontation of the war. The sides were more or less equally matched. The Catholics had about six thousand more troops, but the Huguenots had twice as many cavalry as their opponents. The Prince of Cond led the first charge upon the center. The Swiss infantry in the Catholic army fell apart. Admiral Coligny led the next wave, driving on the left flank which was completely shattered. There followed the strange spectacle whereby Coligny took prisoner his own uncle, the Constable de Montmorency. The Huguenot troops were disorganized however, and forces commanded by the Duke of Guise sprang upon them, driving them from the field and capturing his old enemy, the Prince of Cond. Now the Catholics fell disorganized and the Admiral, rallying his cavalry, renewed the struggle. One of the six Marshals of France, de Saint-Andr, was captured. Unfortunately, his captor recognized him as one of the men who had been behind the persecutions. This young mans lands had been confiscated and were now owned by the Marshal himself. Drawing his pistol, he exacted his vengeance on the spot. As night fell, the Huguenots withdrew with the advantage and left the battle. Though the Catholics had held the field, it was, in every sense, a true stalemate. In terms of command, both sides were actually stronger now than they were before. The Constable and Cond were of the highest rank but not the best generals; their capture now left the much abler Coligny and Guise in command. The death of Guise himself, though, was not long in coming. After the battle he joined the Catholic army besieging Orleans. One night at camp, surrounded by neither guards nor adherents, he was shot in the back by a Huguenot nobleman who pretended conversion and joined the army the week before. He died the next day. Admiral Coligny was immediately suspected by the Catholic party and, most of all, by the Dukes family. He resolutely denied it. The assassin himself was caught after getting lost in the woods, apprehended a day and a half later not a hundred meters from the crime scene. He gave a detailed confession, saying that the Admiral paid him a hundred francs to kill the Duke, then retracted it, then retracted his retraction, and so on, until he was Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 34
drawn and quartered, alternately accusing and retracting the entire time. Coligny may have been suspected, but Catherine, more than anyone, benefitted from this delightful neutralization of her greatest enemy who threatened once more to take her power away. Theres no evidence to draw her to the crime, nor does it seem likely that she would have had the means to undertake it. She reacted nimbly to the change in fortunes, though. All of the greatest fighting men of the Catholic cause were out of the waythe Constable captured and Marshal de Saint-Andr and the Duke of Guise dead. Relishing her role as a peacemaker, a treaty was speedily hashed out. The Huguenots enjoyed a return to the policy of toleration; the war officially ended on 19 March, 1563.
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The Queen and the Enchanter

atherine still had to deal with the Prince of Cond, who with the death of Antoine and his older brother a Cardinal, was due to rule as Regent. After being released from a rather luxurious imprisonment, he set out to claim his prize. Catherine preempted his maneuvers by having her son officially come into his majority before the Parlement of Rouen on 17 August, 1563, officially ending the Regency. He was still a boy, emotionally a cripple, and as reliant on Catherine as ever before. Though all documents were now signed with his name, Catherine still called the shots, with more ease than she had before. The civil war could hardly have improved the finances of the kingdom. More loans were taken out at steadily increasing rates of interest. Things had been this way since her husband was crowned; apparently used to dealing with creditors, Catherine at this point gave up all hope of returning France to a stable financial footing. She bought millions in jewels for gifts and for gowns, and began to indulge her taste for building grand palaces which would soon appear as the manifestation of a kind of mania. Perhaps she was trying to live up to the name of Medici; if so, she would have been better off just paying a few painters and poets. Francis I, a great builder in his own right, had left to Henry and his progeny nine enormous, stately palaces throughout the kingdom. Catherine undertook to build nine more, yet not a single one was ever finished in her lifetime. Financial shortfalls halted production, but so did caprice: she would invariably order the foundation stones of another before the first was finished. In all, none were ever completed in her very long lifetime. Balzac, in his polemical work defending Catherine de Medici, said in her favour that she had erected noble buildings in spite of a lack of money. The catastrophic state of the kingdoms finances actually had a good deal to do with her mania for erecting noble buildingsnone of which, it should be noted, were for public or even ecclesiastical use, but solely as residences for herself. Charles IX shows off the Valois Birdlegs shortly One theory to explain Catherines leaving these buildafter coming into his majority ings unfinished has to do with a subject it is hardly possi-
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ble to speak plainly about. It involves augurs, talismans, black magic and legions of men hired to read her destiny in the stars, including Nostradamus. Later historians have been very careful to consider Catherines involvement in witchcraftafter all, the polemical writers of the day wouldnt blush to throw all sorts of allegations against their enemies. Huguenots, for instance, were very often accused of staging orgies in their secret churches, of sharing wives and even children for sexual favours. Yet the evidence for Catherines interest in black magic is indisputable. Many of the charms given to her by astrologers and necromancers survived well past the French Revolution. During the Third Huguenot War, she hired an Italian who claimed that for very little money he could kill the Prince of Cond and other Huguenot leaders by means of sorcery. He constructed three life-size statues resembling Cond, Admiral Coligny and dAndelot and conducted mysterious rites with an astrolabe and slight alterations to the statues movable joints. Nostradamus had recently published his quatrains, which he had earlier shown to the Queen, claiming that the House of Valois would soon be extinct. Surely, it took a mothers blindness to find mystery in this prediction, given the sickly and unstable nature of her three surviving sons. Nostradamus allegedly told her that she would die when she completed her palaces; more than one court gadfly suggests that as the reason she never finished them. We should be less amazed that a figure of the 16th century put such stock in a bad poet with the tendency to couch his quatrains in vagaries than that the people of the 21st century continue to believe his predictions of natural disasters and upheavals that never come. That a superstitious queen believed him shouldnt surprise us; that Charlton Heston can find Saddam Hussein in the blue turbaned anti-Christ should. (Then again, maybe not...) It is probable that his reference to the Three Kings of Catherine didnt refer to Francis, Charles and Henry at all, but to the Magi. That he predicted a fourth Henry is an invention of Dumas in his novel Queen Margot (that Nostradamus found this discovery in four H-like indentations in a lambs brain in Dumas novel should tell us all we need to know). Nostradamus was no Rasputin, and Catherine employed many other seers and hucksters. Many were nothing more than spinners of invisible thread who ran away with their pay. On the eve of the Second Huguenot War, King Charles and his brother Henry signed a contract with an alchemist who promised that within six months he would reveal the secret of the transmutation of base metals into gold. It was a boyishly stupid thing that Henry, at least, seemed to learn from. Years later when he became King, he publicly admonished his mother for her continued patronage of magicians who got a great deal of money out of her and didnt do anything.
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The Price of Love
p until 1564, King Charles IXs fourteenth year, it is entirely possible to see in Catherine the good mother shepherding her son through the shark-infested water of a violent kingdom. After that year, the alibi falls apart, and any attempt to portray Catherine as a selfless servant to her children and the state becomes intrinsically fraudulent. For though she aspired for greatness for her children, she would sooner they be spineless mediocrities than glorious Sun Kings who would have no need of her guidance. And in order to continue guiding the ship of France well into her childrens majority, she would tear down the state itself. This becomes clear after her infamous meeting with emissaries of the King of Spain, held in and near Bayonne, in the south of France in 1564. Philip himself did not attend, but sent his wife, Catherines daughter Elizabeth, and was represented by his able lieutenant, the Duke of Alva. The conference, which was born purely of Catherines initiative, had no stated purpose, and it became a popular myth among both Huguenots and Catholics that all sorts of evil was planned there. The King of Spain, of course, was interested in only one thingthe destruction of the Huguenots (well, actually, he was interested only in the destabilization of France; that he was the secular worlds foremost Catholic gave him a religious pretext toward that end). From beginning to end, Alva repeated his masters wish that France should return to the policy of Henry IIs Burning Chambers, and that there was no other issue to talk about. Catherine, on the other hand, would not stop rhapsodizingpositively rhapsodizingabout how fond she was of Philip, and how she would like their families to be closer than ever before. The whole conference, apparently, had been called so that she might pursue significant matches for her children. Her youngest daughter, Marguerite (affectionately known as Margot), she wished to marry to the Prince of Portugal, whose domain would be protected by Philip. Her middle son, Henry, she wished to marry to the eldest daughter by Philips first marriage. So much the pragmatist in other matters, able to coolly dissect the pyres of religion and see the base motivations which fed the embers, Catherine truly believed that by moves such as this, she might gain for her family the unity of the states of France and Spain.
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Alva would later make a name for himself as the Hangman of the Netherlands for his work there killing heretics. At this point, he was a capable general, but more than anything he was a normal man who thought this behavior by the Queen Motherproposing this extraordinary conference dedicated to nothing but fanciful delusions of making her children rulers of the world by marriagewas positively batty. After days of pointless conversation and evasive answers, he prepared to leave Bayonne. Just then, Catherine took him aside. His letters to Philip, which had previously been pessimistic and full of rancor, suddenly brightened. Everything is settled. We acquired everything we wanted. From later correspondence, apparently Catherine agreed to revoke the Edict of Pacification which had granted Huguenots liberties of worship and conscience. Yet Philip had decidedly less enthusiasm than his subordinate for the promises of the Queen Mother. She would demand from Philip the marriages she claimed Alva had promised at Bayonne before she would return to persecution. The way in which the deal fell apart is not nearly as important as the terms of the deal struck in the first place. Catherine was willing, at a time when peace was rejuvenating the kingdom and a degree of genuine tolerance was taking root, to return to a policy of persecution (which would invariably lead to a resumption of civil war), just to ensure advantageous marriages for her children. With the Guise faction decimated by the loss of their leader, Catherine introduced the most implacable enemy of heretics outside of Rome into her balancing act. Possibly, she only meant to mislead Philip, as she had done before, that she intended to reanimate the Burning Chambers. As we have seen, he didnt believe her. But by her mysterious movements at Bayonne, she did convince the Huguenots.
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The Second Huguenot War
hat the Huguenot plan was essentially a reaction, despite the logical mind of the Admiral working on their behalf, is proved by their inability to achieve a single one of their prewar objectives. They had four goals: to seize the person of the King; to cut the royal infantry to pieces so it might not be used as an instrument of oppression at wars conclusion; to grab important cities and hold them as guarantees after the peace; and to end the financial mismanagement and plundering of the Kingdom. Their rising was set for the eve of St. Michaels Day, 28 September 1567. Surprise would be essential to the whole undertakings success. Unfortunately, Catherine was notified by one of her spies in the Prince of Conds bodyguard. She fled with the King, protected by the Royal infantry, to Paris. Thus the first two Protestant objectives failed before the war began. Alone among the vain military leaders of his day, Admiral Coligny was not a man who gloried in the lopsided victory. The world has probably never known another leader, however, who was better in snatching victory out of defeat. At the head of 5,000 horse, he cut a violent swash across the center of the country. True, the leading cities of the kingdom remained in royal hands, but the crowns inability to come up with money and poor leadership canceled out this advantage. The cumulative conflict of the Second Huguenot War was, like the Battle of Dreux, a virtual stalemate. And again, the only victory was in the quality of the casualties, for in the Battle of St. Denis the Constable de Montmorency was mortally wounded. In truth, he wasnt the best general, but in splitting his house and taking the field for his religion against his own family, no one could question his motives. The same could not be said for those who succeeded him. The royal generals were bitterly opposed to each other, each claiming some degree of precedence to receive general command of the Catholic army. It wasnt helped when Catherine, always looking for dynastic advantage, named her second son Henry, then a boy of sixteen, their head. Squabbles soon broke out over who should advise him, since Henry hadnt the faintest idea how to lace up his boots. Through her son, Catherine tried to micromanage the affairs of the army until the Duke of NemoursCatherines old conspirator
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in the plot to disfigure her husbands mistressthreatened mutiny. All of the dissension gave the Huguenots the opportunity to reinforce their ranks with volunteers from their base in the south of the country. Yet the Admiral was as short of money as the Catholics were of humility. Another peace treaty was signed. It gave Huguenots roughly the same liberties as they had before. The whole war had really been nothing more than a tantrum, a reaction to the Queen Mothers coldbloodedness and her willingness to kill her subjects to obtain a good marriage for her son. She had no role in the peace deal. A new generation of leadersthe children of those slain in the first war and the secondwere coming of age with new ideas on how to govern, threatening to push Catherine aside.
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Politique Incorrect
he Second Huguenot War was a skirmish; the peace treaty that ended it but a cease fire. With bad blood on all sides, the peasants broke what feeble amends they had made with their neighbours and dipped their hands in massacre and misery again. One cant underestimate the factional strife which accompanies new ideas, or the genuine conviction of Protestants and Catholics. Its quite clear, however, that the precarious financial position of France (and most of Europe, for that matter) did nothing to elevate mans mind to matters beside the salvation of his neighbours soul. It is no mistake that of all the quotations we have recorded from the mouth of Henry IV, who would do so much to heal the wounds of the Wars of Religion, the most famous is his promise of a chicken in every pot. The arrears of the kingdom were now so grave that the Swiss infantry who had fought on the Catholic side five years before complained that they had not yet been paid. Lost amidst blueprints and back issues of Ladies Home Journal, Catherine roused herself to the only remedy she would ever find. As the Venetian Senate wanted firm guarantees for another loan to France, she offered them the pick of the crown jewels. As bills came due she would pawn as many emeralds, rubies and diamonds as she could, to the extent that toward the end of her life her son issued orders that she should not be allowed anywhere near the vaults in which they were stored. The party which had pressed for peace was now strong enough to operate in the open. There are some familiar names among themmost of all Montmorency, one of the six Marshals of France and the son of the late Constable, married to Henry II and Diane de Poitiers bastard daughter. As a contemporary of his cousins, Coligny and dAndelot, Montmorency had never favoured war but as the son of the commander of the Catholic army, he made a show of filial loyalty and fought on his side. Now in his majority and at the head of the ancient House of Montmorency, he stood in the lead of a group of moderate Catholics who opposed war and heightened persecution. Called the politiques, they adopted Montmorencys credo that One year of civil war does more harm to the Catholic religion in France than ten years with the heretics. The Politiques were, loosely speaking, nationalists, who saw outside powers on all sides sewing discord for their own gain. The state was rotting, not through religion but through corrup-
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tion, bloodshed and the plots of outsiderschiefly the King of Spain, but also Elizabeth of England and the Italian financiers who traded their bank accounts for positions of rapacious authority with the Queen Mothers blessing. By their frank concern for economic situation, which was obviously bleak to everyone but the elite, and the continuing depletion of the radical Catholic party, the Politiques immediately seized the initiative. Their members had never been among the most ardent supporters of persecution, and were able to present a third alternative by rallying nationalist sentiment. And as Catholics not without sympathy for the Protestants, they threatened to take over Catherines role as the peacemaker between both parties. So it was hardly surprising for veterans of the French court to note that Catherine was once again spending a large amount of time with the Cardinal of Lorraine and his late brothers son Henry, the young Duke of Guise. (Because French nobles tended to name a son after his godfather and the King of France was always godfather to their progenythere is a great proliferation of Francises, Henrys, and the like. This is no less confusing than the fact that three of Catherines four sons were known at different times as the Duke of Anjou, or that in her long life she saw most of her contemporaries die and their children inherit their title.) Henry of Guise blamed the Admiral for the assassination of his father, and burned with a desire for vengeance which at times bordered on frenzy. The Politiques saw little reason why the mother of a seventeen year old king should still be involved in the day-to-day affairs of state, and the Huguenots had made in implacable enemy of Catherine with their plot to seize the King at the start of the Second Huguenot War. Moreover, the Protestants and Politiques agreed in their dislike of Catherines foreign proteges who were increasingly prominent among the ministers of state. A Huguenot manifesto was more explicit in denouncing the enormous influence of Strangersmore particularly, Italians. With the Politiques dominating court, the Cardinal of Lorraine left and Catherine found herself drifting again. Though she had learned that war was dangerous, and the results uncertain, there was no other way to resuscitate the militant Catholic party and recreate her job mediating between parties. When one notes how easily she greased the wheels to return to war, one has to remember that, as mother of the King, she couldnt possibly suffer from it. Would she die? The worse punishment she could expect for throwing another generation of Frances brightest at each other was what was already being taken away from her: Power. This clemency, this immunity from the consequences of their own decisions, is the reason why kings have been beheaded by truly civilized countries.
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Fishing for Corpses
hen the Second Huguenot War had ended, the Admiral told Cond that Catherine would never forgive or forget that they had tried to take the King away from her. Despite having far less experience with women than the Prince, who had once managed to woo a rich widow and satiate his mistress while at the same time tending to his wife on her deathbed, the Admiral was right. Cornered and with few allies, Catherine drew her claws. She conjured up a plan that she knew would gain her allies. No one in the militant Catholic party trusted her anymore. Instead she appealed to the man they did trust, or at least worked for: the King of Spain. She wrote him letters congratulating him on his brutal strategy for the Pacification of the Netherlands, which involved executing all their leaders and mutilating their lifeless, decapitated bodies. Catherine couldnt have the gift of foresight to see that Philips strategy in the Councils of Blood then ruling the Netherlands would cause the most prosperous part of the Hapsburg domains to fight for independence. But that would assume she actually cared about exterminating heresy, and not merely swinging the balance of power back into her favour by discrediting the Politiques. At the King of Spains urging, the Cardinal of Lorraine returned to court and, though he still didnt trust Catherine, he was willing to lend his not insignificant abilities to murder and conspire to the noteworthy goal of killing a third of the Kings subjects. He asked money from the Pope for the extermination of heresy in France. With so many powerful men thinking aloud, theres no way the plot could remain a secret long. The Prince of Cond was the first to get wind of it, and urgently sent messengers to the other Huguenot leaders. He hastily sped to what had become and would remain the most defiant Huguenot stronghold in the countrythe city of La Rochelle on the Atlantic seaboarddenouncing the planned extermination in yet another declaration of war.
ne of the greatest Huguenot captains, de la Noue, wrote in his memoirs, We fought the first war like angels, the second like men and the third like devils. Considering the agnostic horror of that first angelic war, thats really saying something. page 44
Private vengeance, greed, and a desire to get even for past injustices combined to cause a social situation not unlike a bloodfeud in some remote, barbaric corner of the world. The Third Huguenot War truly did go beyond the pale. No quarter was given to prisoners, and no advancing army would leave a civilian of the opposing faith unmolested. The Huguenots took the early advantage this time. Their army ranged far and wide before the Catholic force had a chance to outfit. This was because the Politiques, while fighting on the Catholic side, were in no mood to hurry up the war, and secondly because of the horrid financial situation. Catherine once again opened the vault to Italian bankers. This had an untended side-effect when the treasure chest was opened before the Florentine Ambassador. His master, Cosimo de Medici, was Catherines old cousin, the legitimate male heir that the Medici Popes had forgotten about. He and Catherine had quarreled about the family inheritance. Certain items of the inventory of Clement VII had gone missing; the Florentine Ambassador was now looking at those necklaces and crusted broaches among the crown jewels of France. Cosimo reneged on the assistance he had promised. A militant Catholic, he nevertheless became neutral in the conflict, gradually moving to full financial support of the Huguenots later in his life out of spite for his estranged cousin. By the time the Catholic army was able to take the field, winter had set in and both sides camped for the season about 15 kilometers apart in the province of Orleans. The first notable death of the conflict wasnt in France at all. Elizabeth, Catherines daughter and Queen of Spain, was a frail girl not at all suited for the pressures placed upon her to act as a political intermediary, by her mother to her husband and vice versa. Theres little doubt that Catherine felt this loss and grieved deeply. But the pain of her heart would never dominate the perverse workings of her conniving mind. In this case, hardly had the period of mourning passed before she unabashedly began to make overtures to have the widower of her eldest daughter marry her youngest. Jeanne, the Queen of Navarre and Colignys brother, dAndelot, also died during the winter. The allegation that Catherine poisoned them is probably untrue. Catherines goal had been the liquidation of the Huguenot leadership, and Jeanne and dAndelots deaths by poison would have accomplished that rather easily. But there is simply no evidence of the matter. The one time she definitely dipped her hands into assassination, she decided on rather more brutal means than poison. One has to conclude that the only times Catherine was implicated in the use of poisons was in the fantasies of her enemies. Chivalry, or at least really bad poetry, suffered a great loss when the Prince of Cond, first Prince of the Blood and titular commander of the Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 45
Protestant armies, was killed in a rearguard skirmish near Jarnac in the Spring of 1569. He had been dismounted and was prepared to be taken prisoner for the second time in three wars when a captain in Catherines son Henrys regiment rode over and shot him in the face. Henry, whose black character was even then being noted, draped the dead Princes body over a mule, then dumped it in the streets of a nearby city. It was two days before one of the Bourbon kinsmen was allowed to retrieve it. Cond wasnt the best soldier, nor the best Huguenot, but he had a certain verve to him that many would miss. His place as titular head of the Huguenots was taken jointly by two young princes. The first was his son, Henry, Prince de Cond. The second and more important was the son of Antoine de Bourbon and the Queen of Navarre, also named Henry. Henry de Navarre was then still a debauched, oversexed teenager of little use in the field. But he was the fusion of two crucial elementsson of the Queen of Navarre, and thus the head of Huguenots; and son of the eldest Bourbon, and thus the first Prince of the Blood and, should Catherines three sons not manage to make a son, heir to the throne of France. The real command of the army was where it had always been with Admiral Coligny. The Admiral was forced into battle earlier than it would have liked, and at a decided disadvantage. Earlier he had been able to out-think his opponents on the Catholic side. The only worthwhile adversary he had faced had been the late Duke of Guise; his uncle the Constable de Montmorency, while an able commander in his youth, hadnt won a single battle since the reign of Francis I. Now the Catholic party had finally found the Admirals match in Tavannes, who had been promoted due to the fact that no other commander was having any success. The southern gentry which made up the majority of the Huguenot cavalry was growing bored living off the land and avoiding the enemy. The Admiral had calculated that his position would grow stronger with time, while the Catholics weakened, which is precisely what happened, eventually. Nevertheless with a large part of his army forcing the issue, he pulled up and faced off with Tavannes at the small village of Montcontour. Montcontour was the only decisive battle of the first three wars. The Huguenots were completely routed. True, it wasnt as bad as it seemed at the time, for their prized cavalry escaped largely intact. But the Catholics around the King were able to claim total victory, and they had utterly destroyed the Huguenot infantry. Hundreds of standards were given to the King. The Cardinal of Lorraine was given a more macabre trophy. His nephew, Henry, Duke of Guise, had been injured in the foot and sent his bloody boot as a present. But Admiral Colignys prediction won out. The war aims of the Catholics, originally proposed by Catherine, were so radical that she succeeded where all the Protestant rhetoriticians and diplomats of the world Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 46
had failed. Not even the dreaded Philip of Spain had been able to terrorize the Protestant rulers of Europe into an informal alliance. To be sure, volunteers from one state would invariably fight in anothers struggle, but official support was usually covert and often miserly. Now the Prince of Orange, the ablest of the Dutch rebels to escape Philips persecution, crossed the border to Normandy and fought openly on the Huguenot side. The German Protestants, who had previously supported both sides according to their leaders temporary interests, came out decisively for the Huguenots in huge levies of troops, more than making up for the infantry lost at Montcontour. And Elizabeth, Queen of England, though she still kept her support discreet, subsidized the Huguenots with artillery and money. The volunteers under Sir Henry Champernowne who rode into the Huguenot camp after Montcontour had her tacit sanction. The most important conversion of the Third Huguenot War, which was decisive in pushing for peace, was the loss of Tavannes from the militant Catholic to the Politique cause. Now a Marshal of France and a fixture of court life, Tavannes had the bad habit of talking too loud and his change of heart was soon known to everyone. Before a meeting with the King and in the presence of the Spanish Ambassador he recited the Politique credo chapter and verse: These Spaniards would do better to govern their own house and not mix in the government of other kingdoms. It is perfectly well known that they only want to forment these civil wars so that each party will destroy the other and leave them superior to all. For my part Id rather see a hundred white cloaks [the Huguenot uniform] than a single red cross [the Spanish insignia] in Paris. Because the Huguenots are still are brothers, and these vermin will always be the enemies of France. But if the Huguenots relied upon this defection from the extreme Catholic party, Tavannes would soon show that his adeptness at holding a position on the battlefield surpassed his meagre ability to hold fast to his principles. The Politiques were all but victorious when Coligny, strengthened by reinforcements and foreign assistance, began a campaign which has been compared with Hannibals march. With the army reeling from the devastation of Montcontour, he rallied the cavalry and began a 1,200 mile drive in a circular route throughout the whole of France. Linking up with greater forces as he went, the Huguenots lived off the land and from pillage, evading the Catholic army under Catherines favourite general, the inept Marshal Coss. Finally, after several months Coss drew the Huguenots to battle near Arnay le Duc. Colignys reinforced infantry beat back the charge of the much larger Catholic army, inflicting such enormous loses that Coss had no choice but to withdraw. The treaty that ended the Third Huguenot Warthe first with conclusive battles, though they canceled each other outwas called the Edict of St.-Germain, issued on 8 August, 1570. The Protestants were to retain four strong towns (chief among them La Rochelle, the most important French port for trade with the Americas) as a guarantee against further breaches of peace by the Catholic party. The punitive laws which had been passed during wartimeincluding the deprivation of rights to anyone who rose in arms and the confiscation of their estateswere withdrawn and all Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 47
Huguenots were acknowledged as loyal subjects of the Crown. The rights of worship and conscience spelled out in the Edict of Pacification were restored. While the road to a united kingdom would be rocky, most fair-minded men at the time believed the Edict of St.-Germain ended the period of religious strife, similar to the manner in which the Emperors had finally agreed to disagree with their Lutheran subjects in Germany. Coligny certainly believed so. The Queen Mother was diametrically opposed to the peace, but with her children now growing to maturity, nobody thought she would remain the dominating influence in government, especially not with the Politique party in control. That Coligny had been away from court and had a distorted view of reality from his contacts and relations there was obvious. Catherine was relegated to the background for awhile, but would not forget those who dared to stand between herself and her son.
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The Road to St. Bartholomew

he Virgin Mary and Frau Hitler aside, Catherine de Medici could make a fair claim to being the most famous mother in history. Her fortune and influence were based upon the family she had created to make up for the one taken away from her at such an early age. Her youngest daughter, Margot provides numerous insights into the workings of this dysfunctional family which would otherwise be written off as rumour and gossip. Catherine raised Margot, Charles, Henry and Hercules (because of the inherent silliness of his nameso silly he was renamed Francis after the death of his elder brother of the same namewere going to refer to Herc as the Duke of Alenon, even after he no longer held that title) together with Henry, the orphaned King of Navarre. It was a turbulent house, where the four male puppies sharpened their claws on each others pelts. For Catherine raised all of her sons (but, feminist historians may care to note, not her daughters) to crave ambition like oxygen, and to aspire to positions even greater than those they inherited, which were, of course, not insignificant. All three shared some common traits. There was a dangerous sibling rivalry between them which would later blow up and mix with the Huguenot wars into a dangerous cocktail of politics, religion and sedition. Charles hated Henry for his growing fame as the head of the army, and also because Henry was obviously his mothers favourite. Alenon apparently got along with Charles, but hated Henry with an even greater passion. The two often came to blows, sometimes on the field of battle itself. The King of Navarre, when he was not away with the Huguenot army, appeared to get along with all three to a greater or lesser extent, though his trust in Henry was never great and his affection for Charles and Alenon would wane. Margot and Henry of Navarre were definitely the ugly puppies in the kennel. Neither had the peculiar neurotic temperament that characterized Catherines sons. Catherine once said, I raised the King of Navarre among my own children, and he was always the most stubborn. Margots inde-
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pendent nature clashed with her mother from the start. She appears to have genuinely cared for her brothers (the rumours of incest can be attributed to Protestant slander and the reputation for debauchery she would earn later in life), and often tried to undo the bloody hold her mother had over their minds. For Catherine, having brought up her sons to be utterly dependent upon her, was able to play them like violins. The younger Prince of Cond once said he heard her tell Alenon, Tell your secrets only to me, because everyone else in the world will try to hurt youthis when Alenon was but a six year old boy. Only Francis, brought up under the influence of his father, scraped the surface of a healthy emotional hygiene. Its a damning indictment of Catherines upbringing of her sons when a teenager whose physical defect prevented him from reaching puberty was the most normal character in the family. Of the three surviving brothers, Charles appeared to be the most unstable. He was the most violent of the three, prone to absolutely uncontrollable bouts of rage. Charles had an unnatural fascination with death; mixed his volatile temperament, it could take the form of an insatiable bloodlust. He was an inveterate sportsman like his father, going out every day to hunt in the royal grounds (he had little to do in the Louvre anyway, since his mother was running the government). Once he set his pack of trained dogs on a cow and laughed with a frenzied glee as they tore it to pieces. On another occasion, he drew his sword and hacked a family of deer who had wandered into his nets until all that remained was a mess of bloody fur. It is to Charles credit that he recognized this dark side of his personality and tried to control itafter all, self-discipline isnt usually among the characteristics of a man born an absolute monarch. Though fond of wine, he became a tea-tottler later in his life after realizing that alcohol only exacerbated his mean streak. Margot was one of the few people Charles felt he could trust. All of his advisors had been appointed by his mother and reported his every act and utterance back to her. Charles was aware of his servility to Catherine; possibly it was the impotence she imposed on him that made him such a headcase. As Catherine became more politically irrelevant, she spent more and more time in Charles chamber. He was the one trump card she had left, and the control over her children the only factor keeping her, in her warped view of things, from oblivion. So it was hardly surprising that when Margot came between them, Catherine was prepared to do the worst to get her out of the picture. For a Princess of France, that meant banishment. Catherine renewed her machinations to get her married to the Prince of Portugal, practically begging Philip of Spain to consent to the match. Philip was unmoved. The Spanish ambassador (who had instructions to draw out the negotiations) noted that Margot seemed to have something tying her to court. In private to Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 50
Catherine, he named names. Margot had allegedly been having an affair with the young Duke of Guise. Though she denied in her memoirs feeling anything for him, the modesty of old age may have caused her to rethink how much love was really invested in a private caress. Catherine, eager to use anything to undermine her daughter in the battle for the Kings mind, sat awake for hours working on his nerves. Finally, at five in the morning, Charles and his mother burst into Margots chamber. When she denied the affair, Catherine slapped her. From stories that later made the rounds, Margot slapped her back. Charles, now roused into one of his furies, lay his hands on her, which we can take to mean, in the polite language of court etiquette, that he beat the living fuck out of her. In truth, Catherine probably wouldnt have minded a little competition to force the King of Spains hand, but that there was substance to the affair with the Duke of Guise, and that Margot was once again standing in the way of her plans, was unforgivable. When he later went out hunting with the Duke of Guise, Charles alluded to the fact that they were all alone and that it would be quite easy to shoot him on the spot if he so wished. Guise withdrew from court the next day; within a few weeks, his uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, announced the boys engagement to a rich widow. In the meantime, the Politiques had gotten wind of the marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain, and proposed a match between the old playmates, Marguerite and Henry of Navarre, which would seal the Edict of St.Germain and solidify the peace by uniting the Catholic royal family with the titular head of the Huguenots. The Politique leader, Marshal Montmorency, was then enjoying great popular acclaim. He had taken control of the expenses of the kingdom and, through a war on corruption, actually turned the perpetual budget deficits into surpluses, which he used to get some of the crown jewels out of pawn in Italy and pay down the exorbitant loans run up by the Queen Mother. In the Spring of 1572, the engagement between Marguerite and Henry was announced. Catherine couldnt do anything to thwart it, despite her obsession with obtaining grand matches for her children. (It is interesting to note that none of her elaborate marriage plans worked out. Charles married a younger daughter of the Emperor, and Henry married a local girl without consulting his mother. The marriages of her older children had been arranged by her husband.) The marriage plans were well underway when Charles actually began to show some initiative in declaring independence from his domineering mother. He had earlier tried to emancipate himself by getting involved in an intrigue in Italy with her estranged cousin, Duke Cosimo of Florence. There was some rivalry between Cosimo and another Italian ruler. The Pope had gotten involved, which caused the Emperor to get involved on the other side. Charles proposed to form a great alliance of the Pope, Florence and the rebellious estates of the Netherlands with himself at its head. The Dukes advisors didnt take it very seriously. After they deduced that the offer came from the King alone, the Duke answered that perhaps Charles should consult about this with his mother. Now Charles turned sole attention to the Netherlands. Emperor Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 51
Charles V, when dividing his domains, gave the Dutch estates of his combined empire to Spain and his son Philip, rather than, as reason would suggest, to Germany and his brother, the Emperor Ferdinand. The Empire had reached a kind of modus vivendi regarding religion; even the Emperor Charles, militant Catholic that he was, realized that the days of a single church had passed. Furthermore, he had spent a considerable period among the Dutch and knew the people, their pride, and the desire of their elite that, above all, nothing should stand in the way of the trade and manufacturing that made the Netherlands so prosperous. Philip, raised a Spaniard, had none of that understanding,. His Councils of Blood had exported the Inquisition to the Low Countries and Spaniards occupied all important posts in the country. Independent of his mother, King Charles entered into secret negotiations with the chief antagonist to the Spaniards, the Prince of Orange. He wanted to declare war on Spain, help the Dutch achieve independence, draw closer to the English (who had also been supporting the Dutch rebels) and exact a little profit in the bargain. To these base goals Admiral Coligny added the rejuvenation of his own country. At the Kings invitation, the Admiral returned to court and together they talked about the feasibility of declaring war on Spain. Coligny, speaking as the military leader of the Huguenots, said that he had never heard such a fine plan, and promised that every member of his faith would jump at the chance to express their loyalty to the Crown by volunteering to fight that ancient enemy of France. The appearance of Coligny at court caused quite a stir. The Guise demanded justice for the assassination of the Duke of Guise during the First Huguenot War; his son and successor as duke begged the King for the chance to duel the man he believed behind his fathers murder. The King demanded he obey his earlier pledges; his mother had even given the Admiral the Kiss of Peace. It didnt matter anyway, because Charles had found in the Admiral the most gifted general of his generation andmore importantlythe one man who could stand up to his mother. Catherine knew what was going on from the day Coligny returned to court. She beseeched her son not to fight Spain. Charles, for the first and possibly only time in his life, showed some backbone. He demanded to know how she knew what was said in his private conversations. He told her that he trusted Coligny more than any man. With this state of affairs and her daughter Marguerite, who so many times acted as Charles conscience, about to become Queen of Navarre, Catherine decided on drastic measures, once again praying upon the fact that she could ride the tiger of terror back into power.
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St. Bartholomews Night

very notable Huguenot in France came to Paris on 18 August 1572 to celebrate the marriage of Henry, King of Navarre, and Marguerite de Valois. The ceremony was the usual stunning affair, officiated by the King of Navarres sole surviving elder, the Cardinal of Bourbon. The people of Paris, so militantly Catholic, remained calm as the Huguenots up from the provinces spent a good deal of money on lodgings and goods during the lavish proceedings. After the ceremony while the men of Navarres party discreetly stepped out, the royal family heard the Catholic mass. Charles had a medal struck in commemoration of the event. On one side it read, I bring you peace; on the other, Discord bound by this bond. Four days after the ceremony, life was returning to normal. The King had been unwell, and substituted his mania for hunting into a more benevolent kind of sport: tennis. Coligny had been his partner for the past few months, while they talked of war and hunting. On this day, the Admiral watched a match with a retinue of men as the King dusted off the Duke of Guise. As Coligny left the tennis court for his familys old apartments in Paris, a shot rang out from the barred window of a house. The Admiral was struck by pistol shot, which smashed his right forefinger and passed, by the physics of Lee Harvey Oswald, through his left forearm. The Admiral had his wits about him enough to point to the window from where the shot came. When told of the incident, Charles stomped on his racket like a Bugs Bunny cartoon and cried, Will I never have peace? The failed assassin was a fellow named Maurevel; his orders came from the Duke of Guise and Catherine de Medici. The Queen Mother had helped to restrain the Guise from seeking vengeance against Coligny, but that was before the latter had dared to step between mother and son. With the Admiral in the picture, she stoked young Henry de Guises hate, his lust for vengeance against the supposed murderer of the father he had barely known. Catherine was sure that, with time, she could massage Montmorency or Guise into giving her a share of power, as she had managed the Prince of Cond and Antoine de Bourbon a generation before. There was little question of manipulating the Admiral. And so she determined to rub him out.
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The planning of the assassination shows Catherine to be either a rank amateur or a crafty genius. The trail of the crime was picked up immediately by the Kings investigators and led straight to the Duke of Guise. The house that the shot came from was leased to the Dukes former tutor. The assassin had been introduced to the housekeeper by du Chailly, a wellknown servitor of the Guise. The assassin, Maurevel, escaped on a waiting horse, but everyone knew him too. He had attempted to assassinate the Admiral during the third war. Finding him too heavily guarded, Maurevel killed his aide, de Mouy, instead. For that he was decorated by the Parlement of Paris a hero, and for the pension he drew was popularly derided as the Kings Killer. Either Catherine had no idea how to go about covering her tracks ormore likelyshe intended Guise to take the fall all along. She had been working under the assumption, of course, that the assassin would succeed. Now she was sent into a scramble. The Admiral was wounded, but still alive and after some recuperation, expected to live. He was too wise not to see the logic behind the attack; with his new influence with Charles, Catherine wouldnt just be pushed into the background, but probably packed away to some convent in the country. With the deprivation of her most treasured asset on the line, Catherine reacted in characteristic fashion, with an act so terrible it stunned the entire world.
hree meetings were held the night following the attack on the Admiral. The leading Huguenots lingering in Paris after the wedding beseeched Coligny to leave the city, if not declare a resumption of war for this violation of the Kings guarantee of safety. Charles had earlier sent word to Coligny that an investigation was underway, and that the preliminary evidence led to the Duke of Guise. Coligny advised his uppity subordinates to wait with him. The surgeon said that to move at this point would lead to a great loss of blood and probably death. The King and Queen of Navarrenot exactly passionately in loveslept in adjoining rooms. Into Henrys room came the troupe of malcontents who had earlier been rebuffed by Coligny. Navarre bowed before the advice of the Admiral who had, after all, far more prestige and experience. In another part of the Louvre, shut off from the apartments of the newlyweds, another meeting was being held toward a very different end. This ad hoc council was called by Catherine and the Duke of Guise together with a singular purpose. To save themselves from disgrace, they wanted to massacre every single Protestant in France. They were joined by a motley council, only one of whom (Marshal Tavannes) had any real standing. He was also the only full-blooded Frenchman in attendance. In light of the Huguenot and Politique belief that the Queen Mother was allowing Italians page 54
to ruin the kingdom, it is enlightening to note the birth of each of the eight people in attendance that night. Fourthe Duke of Nevers, the Marshals de Retz and Birague, and Catherine herselfwere Italians, and the former three owed their riches and influence to her. Tavannes was French. The other threeCharles, his brother Henry, and the Duke of Guiseall had Italian mothers. This would be insignificant, had it not been noted by everyone vaguely aware of the composition of the council which decided such a climactic end to the Huguenot menace, particularly when these men searched to discover what the real goal of it was. Only Charles brother Henry and the Duke of Guise could be considered militant Catholics. It took seven hours to wear down Charles. They told him Protestants planned to enter the Louvre and kill the entire royal family, driving Catholicism out of his realm. Its doubtful Charles believed this. In the end, he lay his authority behind the most vile act to be done in his kingdom in a hundred years, betraying his new friends and abandoning his plan for personal independence, because he bent, as he had always done before, to the will and arguments of his mother. Thus the most violent single episode of persecution in France, named the Massacre of St.One of the few refugees to survive St.-Bartholomews Bartholomews Day for the unfortunate saint Night was none other than Count Montgomery, the Scot whose feast day it began on, happened not even who had killed King Henry II in a freak jousting accident for the rigid but pure motivations of religion, but so many years before. Absolved of any blame by Henry on so an aging mother could retain control over her his deathbed, Montgomery later converted to overgrown sons and wipe out those who were tryProtestantism and was one of Colignys most able coming to undermine it. manders. Nervous after the attempt to murder his mentor, The massacre began with its most important he had wisely withdrawn from the city and was warned by target. The Duke of Guise and his bodyguards a wounded Huguenot who swam the Seine to warn him waited in the courtyard of the Admirals apartwith his dying breath. A price was put on his head, and ments while three assassins entered and broke bounty hunters chased him all the way to England. down the door, killing anyone who tried to stop Catherine repeatedly requested his extradition. Queen them. A few moments later, they called down to Elizabeth replied, Tell the Queen Mother that I will not act the courtyard that they had killed Coligny. Guise as Frances executioner. Catherine seized her prize a few replied that they should throw the body through years later when Montgomery was captured after leading the window so everyone could be sure. Wiping the a failed insurrection in Normandy. No one was surprised blood from his face of the corpse, he was conwhen he was sentenced to death. vinced. His bodyguards severed the Admirals Waiting on the scaffold, Montgomery was informed that head. Sometime during the night, the Admirals by royal edict, his property would be confiscated and his body was grabbed by a mob, mutilated, and children deprived of their titles. The Scottish captain told dragged through the streets. his executioners, Tell my children that if they have not the The Duke of Guise had a busy night. Not yet ability to restore what was taken away, then I damn them distinguished for a single thing, he made his repufrom the grave. Compare/contrast the character of two tation that night as the commander of the slaughlives intertwined. ter of the defenseless. He rushed back to the palace to lead the guard in killing the rest of the Huguenot leadership lodged there. The Kings guard and the Swiss mercenaries ran through the halls of the Louvre, chasing unarmed men and run-
The Strange Life of Count Montgomery
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ning them through with swords, pikeseven clubbing them to death with bedposts. A Huguenot captain burst into Queen Margots bedroom, screaming Navarre! Navarre! Earlier that night, her sister Claude had begged Margot to stay with her, believing that the marauders would run through Margot and her new husband without prejudice. Catherine scolded them both and told Margot to go to bed. When Margot hesitated, her mother slapped her and pushed her physically out of the room. Now she was horrified as the captain, half-dead but determined to warn Henry de Navarre of the danger to his life, broke through her door and collapsed into her bed. Covered in blood, she recovered her senses and upbraided the guards who chased after the fugitive. Angered but conditioned to bow before royalty, they muttered profane apologies and left the room. Margot managed to hide the fugitive, tending to his wounds, until he was able to escape a few days later. By morning there was a pile of corpses stacked outside King Charles door. The Seine was choked through with thousands more. After finishing up in the Louvre, Guise, Tavannes and the only other prince connected with the event, the Duke of Montpensier, ran through the streets, ringing the tocsin and calling on the Parisians to cleanse the land of heretics. The mob sprang upon them with a ghastly ferocity. A bookseller was barbecued on a pile of his own wares. Old men were thrown out of bed and kicked to death. Diarists recorded scenes of unspeakable cruelty, of infanticide by soldiers whose victims were so young and unaware of their destiny that they played with the beards of their executioners like toys, and boys of ten dragging an infant by its bedclothes to drown in the river. The net was almost completely sealedamazing by the standards of the time, almost no one was able to escape Paris.
rom Paris the fever spread. Meux, Troyes, Orleans, and many other cities answered the call to purge the body of the kingdom of its toxins by gleefully massacring their own brothers. For quite often they were brothers; sometimes the victims were even Catholics. Numerous lawsuits were settled on that night, as were personal grudges, matters of honour and envy. There was no official count on the death toll in Paris or elsewhere, but historians have estimated ten to a hundred thousand perished. It is revealing to note, however, that no province governed by a Politique took part in the Massacre of St.-Bartholomew. The Marshal Montmorency himself was a target, but had by chance left Paris after the wedding for his ancestral estate in Chantilly. His survival, of course, meant a resumption of war. His younger brother Damville, Governor of Languedoc, was known as a supporter of his fathers militant Catholicism as opposed to his brothers moderation. In this case however, family ties were unbroken. He threatened to join the numerous Huguenots of his province after assassins were apprehended trying to gain admittance to his palace. A messenger bearing a letter from Catherine denying any knowledge of the plot was received by page 56
Damville sitting in a room with three trained wolves at his feet. Not trusting Catholics or Huguenots, he had recruited as his bodyguard several Albanians (yes, Albanians) who spoke no French and were led by a man reputed to be a giant. As a response to Catherine he wrote no letter, but had the messenger witness his giant in the courtyard, beheading a calf with a single swing of his cutlass. The two Huguenots left standing in Paris after St.-Bartholomews Night were King of Navarre and the Prince of Cond. As princes of the blood, they were allowed the chance to renounce their faith. They abjured in the presence of Charles and his mother. Together they took mass in Notre-Dame the next morning; when Henry de Navarre pronounced his support of the Holy Father as per ritual, Catherine turned to the Spanish Ambassador at her side and, so he wrote to his master, laughed heartily. As for Catherines activity on that night, we have no witnesses. Certainly she was not swinging a sword. Neither could she in good faith say, as she did on her deathbed, that she was only responsible for the deaths of a few mena phrase that historians have rolled on their tongues with sweet sarcasm. We do have one indication of her mindset on the night when she plotted the mass-murder of an entire religion. Dated from St.Bartholomews Day is a letter she wrote to the son of the Duke of Florence, recommending her chaplain to his service. While blood trickled beneath her bedroom door and stained the gutters of the city, Catherine apparently went about the business she did best.
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The Aftermath
he initial reaction to St.-Bartholomews Day came swiftly. It was sickening. The Pope cried with joy and retired to St. Peters to sing a Te Deum to the glorious deed. He also ordered several murals to be painted depicting the massacre of the heretics, in the place where Michelangelos glorious work ascended the heavens, where for three centuries they insulted every pontiff who went to the Sistine Chapel. The murals, which aesthetically speaking were almost as awful as their subject matter, were sanded off in the 18th century, though the remnants could be seen until they were covered in the 1970s. Philip of Spain congratulated Charles on fulfilling his duty as the Most Christian King. His enthusiasm was tempered the fact that the Huguenot threat might no longer cripple his chief rival. Within France itself, many public endorsements of the Massacre were hollow; good men, fearing that they might be next, publicly congratulated the King and Queen Mother for their vigilance. To an historian like de Thou, this was a crime only slightly less grave than the murder of the innocent. He indicted, by name, not only his friends but also his father. If de Thous recollection of his father is in any way ordinary, rather than ending the religious problem, St.-Bartholomews Day caused a nationwide crisis of conscience. He ascribes to the men who defended such a deed the verses of Statius: May the memory of the crimes of that day perish; may future generations refuse to believe them; let us keep silent and let the crimes of our own nation be covered by darkness.
There were a few voices in the wilderness who stated publicly their private thoughts. Emperor Maximilian wrote that The King and his mother have done the most ill advised and evil thing in the world. He elaborated on this later: The King of France has committed an act which will stamp upon him a shame which cannot easily be wiped off. God forgive those who are responsible. Even the Papal Nuncio in the French court, despite the pontiffs garrulous joy over the Massacre, wrote privately that the Vatican
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should expect France to be no more a good soldier in Christendom than before. After struggling with the evidence, he was convinced, despite his prejudices, that the Massacre had been unleashed only to cover the role of the Queen Mother in the attempted assassination of the Admiral.
he protection of the Politique governors allowed most Huguenots to survive their planned extinction. Together with many Politiques (taking arms for the first time against fellow Catholics; those who would fight would be called Associated Catholics, while those who remained begrudgingly in royal service kept the name Politiques), they rushed to the four cities allowed to them under the Edict of St. Germain and began a desperate fight for survival. Sancerre, Montanban and La Rochelle locked their gates. The Huguenot nobility of the south who had left Paris the day after the wedding rose in arms as well, even taking many towns and villages in offensives. The fall of La Rochelle was deemed the most important goal of the new administration. For, Charles, after collapsing in council and endorsing the plan to murder the Huguenots, fell back into complete submission before his mother. Camilo di Cavour, Machiavellis ablest disciple and the man who galvanized the squabbling Italian states in the 19th century to form a united Italy, once advised his king to Undertake repressive acts energetically, for there is no sense in appearing foolish as well as odious. Catherines method of governing, characterized by improvisation and sacrifice of long-term strategy to meet short-term goals, couldnt obey this evil but wise dictum. Logically, with Tavannes again on the Catholic side, the submission of the Huguenot strongholds should have been easy. But the duty of tearing down the defenses of La Rochelle wasnt given to him. Catherine instead promoted her second son, Henry. More capable military leaders grumbled, but the only man who openly criticized the delegation of this responsibility to a young and inexperienced prince was the Duke of Nemours, shortly thereafter killed in the trenches. The blockade of La Rochelle failed, due to the laziness or bad morale of underpaid royal troops, the squabbling of the Catholic generals and supplies sent by sea from England. Just a few months after cutting the flower of the Huguenot cause, Catherine sent out feelers for a peace treaty. Some historians have seen in Catherines constant pursuit of peace an ennobling character. Considering that she was also one who had pushed the conflict into open warfare as many times, its patently fraudulent to claim for her, as some have done, a role as a force of reconciliation. Putting a lid on the unrest which followed St.-Bartholomews Day doesnt begin to exonerate her for planning the massacre in the first place. The Huguenots now held sixty fortified towns throughout France. They would never trust the King of Frances kind words, or Catherine at all. They sent messengers who outlined the price of peace: repudiation of St.Bartholomews Day, the right to trial before their own judges, exemption Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 59
from all tithes sent to the Catholic Church, their own legal army, and two cities in each province of the country where they currently held none. Catherine cried that the late Prince of Cond would never have made such outrageous demands. Either, she may well have added, would Admiral Coligny. This state of affairswith the Huguenots, though without a unifying leader, stronger than everwas the outcome of the monumental blunder and crime of St.-Bartholomews Day.
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Kings, Fugitives and Fugitive Kings

sort of peace was agreed to, but most of the country was still in arms, localized conflicts still raging, and the overall state of affairs resembled, as it had before, a cease-fire rather than a cessation of hostilities. The reason Catherine pressed for peace at this time had nothing to do with the catastrophic state of the kingdom, to which she remained characteristically indifferent, but because she had succeeded in her long dreamed of goal of getting a throne for her second son, Henry. The Kingdom of Poland seemed like a sad consolation prize for a child of frustrated ambition. In many ways it was. The Poles had been elaborating a kind of political theory which was a precursor of the liberal movements of Western Europe a hundred and fifty years later. The King of Poland was but a President-for-Life, elected by the Diet to hold the crown until his death, but prohibited from passing it on to his heirs. The Diet also had a fair say in the governing of the kingdom. Equal rights were guaranteed to every member of the nobility which, in Poland, made up more than 10% of the population. It was a backward country from the perspective of one who had grown up in an absolute monarchy. In terms of politics and culture, it was one of the most advanced countries in the world. Poland was not the monoreligious, Catholic nation that it is today. The Protestant delegates in the Diet at first refused to back a man the whole world suspected of being a ringleader in the most murderous page of the Counterreformation to date. Eastern potentates like the Turkish Sultanwho had been a chief ally in Francis Is dayalso refused to back Henrys candidacy. Once his name was submitted, however, it would have been offensive to the pride of the mother and son to be defeated. Thus the French royal family poured a huge amount of money into the election, bribing the electors and the nation as a whole. Though they succumbed, the delegates did not accept the Valois king without strings. Conditional to his being accepted as King of Poland, Henry was committed to bring all of his annual revenues as Duke of Anjou from Franceabout half a million francsand add them to the budget of Poland. The state debt would be paid off from his own money, including
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back pay for the army which was in serious arrears. He was bound to outfit a fleet on the Baltic Sea and pay a years salary for a troupe of 4,000 French riflemen, from his own purse or that of his brother. In the end, it was the brother of the King of Franceand not Henry himselfwho the delegates wanted, which is probably why someone with Henrys morose character viewed the election more as an insult than flattery. Henry lingered in France for almost a year, despite Charles orders to go at once to claim his new crown. He did finally leave, in a long train of princes and clergy and a general feeling of despair for wearing such a lightweight crown. Both he and his mother cried. Catherine was not so overcome with the departure of her favourite son, who she treated rather like a lover, that she overlooked the latest plot by her youngest son. The Queen Mother had been informed that Alenon and the King of Navarre planned to wait for an opportune moment to bolt from the royal procession and lead the continuing insurrection of Huguenots and Politiques in the south. She kept them near her the entire time, even changing the route of the entourage at the last moment to prevent their escape. Henry de Navarre had been a rather useless kid. His uncle, the Cardinal de Bourbon, lamented that the boy had inherited all of his fathers foolishness and none of his mothers moral strength. Up until St-Bartholomews Day, Henry had done nothing which would suggest a strength of character or conviction. Named co-leader of the Huguenot armies with the Prince of Cond when the elder Cond had died, he hadnt distinguished himself in battle and showed a willingness to put off work and study in the pursuit of whores and pleasure. Admiral Coligny put up with it, as he himself was once a dashing young prince and didnt undervalue the virtues of sowing your oats. To his credit, the horror of St.-Bartholomews Day had a sobering effect on Henry. The death of the Admiral forced him into the forefront, as his mother had once been, as protector of the Huguenots. The abjuration of his faith was seen by many at the time as the final sin of this worthless youth. But renouncing his faith was for Henry de Navarre but a way to stall his enemies while he waited for a chance to escape. The transformation of this typical, debauched prince of the Renaissance into didnt happen overnight, but the scales were removed from his eyes on St.-Bartholomews Day. A great weight was placed on his shoulders, and he had not much time to grow strong beneath. As time went on, it became clear to ambassadors and others privy to the secret life of the Louvre that the King of Navarre was not staying with the royal family by choice. He awoke one morning to find the windows of his room barred and wasnt allowed to leave the palace without an armed escort. Early on he found a ready co-conspirator in Alenon, who had long been planning a glorious future for himself independent of his brothers. Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 62
Henry lost faith in Alenon after the latter broke down in front of his mother and confessed one of their plans for escape. In February 1576, he finally succeeded in breaking free of his captors and made his way to join his supporters in the south.
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The Death of Charles IX
ostradamus prediction that the House of Valois would soon be extinct bothered Catherine more than she led on. True, she believed in the words of charmers, even though time would make a liar of the prophet as it has so many times since (he predicted that all of Catherines sons would rule France; one, as we shall see, did not). As the winter of 1574 gave way to spring, a nagging illness Charles had contracted turned malignant. Fearing he had been poisoned, his mother ordered the arrest of the Marshal Montmorency (who foolishly placed his faith in a safe conduct granted by the King), which in turn led to a terrible rebellion in Languedoc led by his brother Damville. Later writers would diagnose Charles illness as tuberculosis; again, the idea that Catherine had poisoned him with arsenic sprinkled on the pages of a book on falconing intended for the King of Navarre is but a legend. During his death agony, it was said that he suffered terrible remorse for his role in the Massacre of St. Bartholomews Day. Henry de Navarre was fond of telling the story that eight days after the massacre a flock of crows perched on the Louvre. Rather than squawking, they made sounds not unlike the horrid screams of the dying Huguenots. Supposedly these voices tormented Charles every night until his death. It is wishful thinking, for one would like to think that Charles, who was not an evil man, was remorseful for consenting to the slaughter of his friends. According to Catherine herself, his last words were, My mother... She never saw his pathetic struggle to be free of her as anything more than a tantrum by an unruly little boy. Considering how much he had come to loathe his submission to his overbearing mother, its likely she didnt interpret the words as they were probably intended to be heard: as an expression of his greatest lament. Charles marriage to Elizabeth of Austria (who, unlike Catherine and other queens before her, had absolutely no role in court life) had given but a single childa girl, who did not long survive her father. His only son was
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illegitimate, ironically by a Huguenot commoner. According to the traditions of France and the law which gave him his throne, Charles now handed over the kingdom to his brothernow Henry III, King of France, presently King of Poland. Catherines letter to Warsaw announcing the death of her second son is remarkable for its coldbloodedness. Charles terrible death agony is unmentioned. In place of grieving there is another recital straight from the self-pity hall of fame, which opens the letter, followed by the main body, which is entirely concerned with the emphasis that Charles last wish was for her to be restored to full power once again: My Son, I sent you yesterday in great diligence a messenger to bring you piteous news for me who have seen so many of my children die. I pray God to send me death before I see any more die, because I thought I should become desperate to watch such a sight and see the love which he showed me at his end. He couldnt let me go; he begged me that I should send in all haste to get you and meanwhile, before you arrived, he begged that I should take administration of the kingdom and wanted me to do severe justice on the prisoners whom he knew were the cause of all the evil in the kingdom [she means the Montmorencys]. And afterwards he said good-bye to me and begged me to embrace him, which made me almost die. No man ever died in fuller possession of all his senses, in talking to his brother, to the Cardinal of Bourbon, to the Chancellor, to the secretary, to the captains of the guard, both the archers and the Swiss, commanding them all to obey me as they did himself until your arrival and that he was sure you would want to have it so...
Truly there is no other way to convince the judges of later times of the character of this woman than to let her hang herself with her own words. At the death of her piteous second son, who she had so often acted against, who she had, in so many ways, turned into an impotent, frustrated man with a boys emotions, her primary concern was for her own power to be acknowledged, endorsed by leading authorities, and respected. Often mothers tend to dotter over children born with fewer abilities than their more gifted siblings. In Catherines mind, they had become yet more toolsprecious tools, to be sure, but tools nonetheless. Henry had no desire but to obeyof course!his dead brothers wishes and return to France at once. The Polish Diet, meeting in emergency session, refused to allow him to go. Thus there followed the first of the many ignoble acts (if one doesnt count the disrespect shown to the Prince of Conds corpse at Jarnac or his role planning St.-Bartholomews Day) which would stain the reputation of King Henry III. With a few of his French followers, he fled his kingdom at midnight. While the Diet was in an uproar, many could hardly conceal their glee at having so easily redressed what they had come to believe was a monumental mistake. For they expected a warDegenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 65
rior-king, as Henry, the head of the French Army, was reputed to be. Instead they were sent a slender, effeminate boy in his early 20s, completely lost in a world without his mother, fond of dressing in furs and delicate outfits. Already in his personality there was a profound split between religious pretense and extravagant debauchery. He would spend days in a harem, fucking like a bunny on pillows sewn with cloth of gold, then retire to a monastery in a hairshirt to repent and practice the habits of the monk. If Charles was the most unstable, Henry was the most bafflingly enigmatic of Catherines children. He had to detour to Italy on his way back to France, out of fear of the Huguenot agents then levying troops in the German principalities, as well as of the Emperors men who would be too happy to deliver the captive king back to his Polish subjects. He met his mother at the French border and they cried together for some time. It probably wasnt over Charles. Henry had already been making many decisions contrary to the wishes of his mother, and the letter quoted earlier was probably her attempt to preempt his changeable mind, which was, she knew, somewhat capable of independent thought. He had announced that he was sacking her agent, the Marshal de Retz, from royal service. This man had followed Catherine from Florence as a penniless fugitive at the time of her marriage. Under her patronage he made a fortune. Among his numerous high offices (including being a Marshal of France, despite having no military experience), he was Royal Chamberlain and obliged to always be in the same room as the King. In this capacity he had supplied Catherine with daily reports of everything Charles had said or did, or anything anyone had said to him. She read these reports every morning before mass to keep him under control. Henry restored de Retz after hearing his mothers pleas but never gave him the access that Charles did. The third Henry of France returned to a kingdom in its most precarious state ever. The religious problem doesnt have to be mentioned. The finances had reached a new low, as the King of France was now the only monarch in Europethe infidels of Constantinople includedwho could not obtain a loan. The interest on the latest notes taken out by Catherine had grown to 10%; now the would not offer new loans at 15% interest. The army, unpaid for months, revolted and began to rob and plunder the country they were in the field to protect. Only a personal loan from an Italian favourite allowed Catherine to pay for food for her ladies-in-waiting.
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Judas Wore a Feather Boa
etoured at Avignon on the way to Paris, Henry indulged his taste for shows of religious piety by marching with an order called the Flagellants. The Flagellants werent a proper order of monks, but an informal society of men who would don masks and robes and wander through the streets beating each other with knotted ropes. Flagellant marches had been outlawed by certain popes, but in the time of the Reformation, bans were impossible to enforce. It became an opportunity and honour for a noble to march with Henry as it had been to hunt with Charles, with the participants beating the fuck out of each other and chanting the psalms of King David. One of the nobles who participated in the march at Avignon was the Cardinal of Lorraine. Now quite old, he caught cold during the night and died shortly thereafter. He was mourned by few people, least of all Catherine. Yet it couldnt have escaped her that all of the older generation to which she belonged was dying off. Of the great figures she sparred with, only the non-entities, like the Dukes of Nevers and Montpensier and the Cardinal of Bourbon were still alive. The reign of Henry III would be a struggle to retain her power and position against her old comrades sons and daughters.
atherines next few years were preoccupied by the misadventures of her unhappy boy, Henrys treasonous younger brother. Alenon was morally and physically weak but shared with his brother an insatiable ambition and pronounced neurotic tendencies. Catherine would talk at length with him, pointing out that all the accolades accumulated by Henry under Charles which would now naturally fall to him; that he was ruining his reputation; that Henry needed support with the kingdom so poor and torn asunder by strife. Alenon would listen and agree. He probably meant it. But the minute he was out of his mothers sight, he would begin plotting again with soldiers, disgruntled nobles and, most alarming of all, the Huguenots. The only way Catherine could keep him from doing something rash was finding out about it first and confronting him with the evidence, as she had done when his co conspirator was Henry of Navarre.
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But his discontent was so vocal and tactless, his hatred for his brother (and the feeling had been long since reciprocated) so intense, it was rumoured that Henry would lock him in the Bastille. No doubt Margot, who stayed behind at court for a time before joining her husband in Navarre, played an active role in mediation between the two brothers, earning a heaping helping of Catherines scorn. The captain of the guard was on alert to stop Alenon from leaving the Louvre without an escort. In spite of the scrutiny, Alenon donned a disguise and was able to slip out of the castle and away from Paris on a waiting horse. Hundreds of Huguenots and Associated Catholics rallied to his side and he marched through the kingdom, building an army of volunteers, discontented noblemen and common criminals. Catherine, the Iron Lady, had a nervous breakdown. She was out of sight for several days after Alenons escape, her condition a mystery even to those who never left her side. She recovered her senses and a few weeks later offered the Duke of Nevers a handsome reward if he would kidnap Alenon and bring him back to Paris, though apparently nothing came of it. Henry was infuriated by the audacity of his kid brother. This boiled over into rage when he heard that Alenon was raising an army of the discontent. Catherine convinced him to allow her to first meet with his brother before he unleashed the royal army, grown cruel from warfare and exacting their pay from the countryside. She took Margot with her, not out of comfort but because of the Queen of Navarres influence with her brother. Alenon, acting out of the instinct he would follow for the rest of his life, responded to his mothers mission of peace by running away. For two weeks she kept up the chase, before Alenon finally stood his ground and received his mother and sister. He characteristically yielded to her arguments, but only to an extent, agreeing to a six months truce. Other Huguenot leaders, who had thought his flight was the harbinger of the final war to avenge St.Bartholomew and depose Catherine and Henry, were astounded by his easy submission. They refused to lay down their arms. Alenon, as soon as his mother left, yielded to their arguments and continued on the warpath, surprising several towns. Worse for Catherine, her absence at court confirmed her greatest fear that the moment she left the side of her sons, a dangerous rival would take her place. The Duke of Guise was back after touring the Catholic provinces to great acclaim as the chief murderer of St.-Bartholomews Day. He argued for killing the rebellious prince together with the rest, then allying with Spain to stamp out the remnants of the Huguenots. Still away from Paris, Catherine began a barrage of letter writing, trying through the written word to right the mind of her son. Some of these letters were more than thirty pages long, written in several different hands which suggests her mouth was wearing out her secretaries. The only way he would be able to rule, Catherine told Henry, was by concluding a comprehensive peace with the Huguenots. Again, she wasnt a hippie, but a renewal of the war would involve one of her sons against the othera truly Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 68
nightmarish prospect. Her letters spell out clearly what Henry should do to convince the Huguenots of his good faith: It seems to me that it is not enough to set the marshal free from prison. You must win him over to your side and its no time to say, I cant put any constraint on myself nor dissimulate.... I want you to send for Montmorency and say, I set you free from prison believing in your fidelity and being sure that what you promise you will do... I didnt put you in prison and if I could have set you free earlier without injuring the reputation and the memory of the late King my brother I would have done it, as I have done it now, etc etc. ... And in saying this I beg that he may never find out that you have made sport of the way youve cheated him.
For Henry would often indulge in the humiliation of rivals. To this end Catherine notes in a letter sent the next day that if Alenon tells the Duke of Montpensier that you were in the habit of laughing at him and his son in an attempt to win them over, she has already defused the bomb by telling the old Duke that in hopes of gaining you to his side, he [Alenon] will tell you a lot of lies, for my son is a habitual liar. Catherine and Henry had earlier planned to kill Marshal Montmorency, either by strangulation or through a staged escape attempt. His release from prison could only be seen in terms of her policy of balance; he was the strongest Politique and persuasive enough to cancel out the Duke of Guise. In this she was successful. Henry didnt have the stomach for a comprehensive peace, but mollified the leaders of the rebellion, Alenon included, by giving them large tracts of land, as there was no money with which to bribe them. But lethargy was as dangerous as action for a character like Alenon. Plot followed plot, in such a stream that even Catherine stopped following them closely. On Mondays he wished to marry Elizabeth and make himself King of England. On Tuesdays he burned to lead the Dutch revolution. On Wednesdays he petitioned the King of Spain for permission to marry his own niece (and Catherines granddaughter) and become King of Sicily in the bargain. On Thursdays he rang up Navarre to join him in a general revolt. On Fridays he ordered the recruitment of soldiers to claim a long-lost French possession, the Italian city of Milan. On Saturdays he planned to upstage his brother and lead the persecution of the people he had been the protector of just a few months before, the Huguenots. On Sundays he sleptmost likely warming his scales on a hot rock. Though he provided her with ample reasons, Catherine could never come to hate her son, as she had come to hate her daughter Margot. Alenon was, eternally, the unhappy boy. If she showed her exasperation, she never revealed a dislike which the Guise or Montmorencys would leap upon to render a cleavage between the two surviving males of the House of Valois. Her true feelings were buried deeply; for Alenon was closer to her Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 69
in personality and appearance than any of her sons. He was a caricature of his mother, though one must wonder if looking at ones cartoon doesnt inspire feelings of affection but of disgust. Alenon finally did pay a visit to England to ask for the hand of Elizabeth in marriage. It bears no resemblance to the rather fantastic scene portrayed in the recent movie Elizabeth, where Cate Blanchett walks in on the Duke of Anjou (as Alenon was then known) queening out in a dress and make-up amidst the writhing bodies of flabby French whores. Elizabeth by this time was well into middle age, and had no intention of marrying Alenon or any other man, though she was willing to let them think she was. Alenon went home frustrated, bypassing his estates to visit his mother at court. Transvestitism was more the fancy of his older brother, Henry. All young children were dressed as girls in those days, and theres no reason to believe that Catherine prolonged the period to make her sons more effeminate. Henry on the contrary showed an early preference for dressing as a girl, showing up at a ball in drag when he was 14 years old. He returned from Poland determined to let his freak flag fly. He surrounded himself with a gang of unruly courtiers, mostly from the inferior classes, who he called his mignons. The Minions dressed in an extremely feminine manner (even for an era when men wore tites). They grew their hair long and pinned it up in buns, wore make-up and adopted the stiff, lacy, platter-like neckboard then in fashion among English women. Henry led the way, setting the fashion and spending far too much time on his wardrobe. By the third year of his reign, the Minions made up a whole new class, elevated by Henry above the nobles and clergy. Two of his favourite playmates he made dukes and soon they were more powerful than the Guise, Huguenots, Politiques, or Catherine herself. Nobody liked them, needless to say, but what they lacked in pedigree they made up for in haughty arrogance and superior cosmetics. The fresh wounds between Henry and Alenon were rubbed raw by his mignons, leading to several assassinations and duels between their followers. Finally, Henry was given what his chief Minion, the newly-decorated Duke dpernon, called truthful evidence of his brothers treason. Henry woke up his mother (it was well past midnight) and stormed into his brothers room after ordering the guards to break down the door. While his mother flew into hysterics, Henry dragged his brother out of bed, punched him to the ground and had the room searched. Finding a letter from the King of Navarre enquiring after his health, Henry ordered his brothers arrest. The ordeal of his arrest would have been understandable, even laudatory, had the Minions not orchestrated the whole thing. Guarded on all sides, Alenon returned to his childhood hobby of planning an escape. He was aided by Margot, who was subjected to the same scrutiny as her brother but managed to sneak a rope into the Louvre concealed inside a lute case, which he used to climb out of the window. Back in the lands granted to him after his last escape, which he ruled like the feudal lords of yore, Alenon assured everyone that he held no Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html
Costume of one of Henry IIIs mignons, without accessories
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grudge against his brother but refused to return. He had finally made up his mind (for the moment) and decided to answer the rather vague appeal of the Dutch estates to come to their rescue.
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Superfreak
lenons adventures in the Netherlands are rather convoluted, and the explanation for what happened there depends on who you believe. Though it wasnt kind, Catherine wasnt wrong when she called her son a liar. Therefore, its more plausible to believe the biased but overall convincing arguments put forward by the Dutch patriots and use their chronicles to guide our narration. The appeal for assistance from the Dutchchiefly, the Prince of Orangemade no guarantees to Alenon. Suffering under the Spaniards, they were desperate to somehow involve the King of France in their struggle but wary of what happened to the Polish, who had wanted the same thing. French influence in the Dutch estates had been non-existent since King Charles intrigues ended in the Massacre of St. Bartholomews Day, and no other suitable allies were willing to risk more than a small allowance on securing their independence. For a time it appeared that Elizabeth of England might send more substantial help, but after so many excuses the rebels came to the conclusion that notwithstanding her varying financial assistance, they were fighting alone. The Prince of Orange gambled that appealing to the King of Frances quarrelsome kid brother would force the state to back him to the hilt, and thats precisely what happened. Catherine tried to dissuade her son from his adventures, but once he was involved it was best to make sure he succeeded. She had no trouble convincing King Henry to support his brother; after all, Alenons success in the Netherlands would keep him from causing any more trouble at home. He seized the city of Cambrai after a brief battle, and even the predominantly Catholic estates, who had previously disavowed themselves of the rebels, joined in the fight. It wasnt the appearance of the disreputable French prince riding on a white horse that moved them, but the King of Spains ruthless exactions. For a time Alenons expedition was successful. In response, King Philip shrewdly granted the rights the estates enjoyed in his fathers day, agreeing to demobilize his army (once Alenon left) and to replace all Spanish administrators with native Dutch. Without popular support and money, Alenons army didnt have a chance to drive the Spaniards out of the Netherlands altogether. The Duke of Alva held back his troops and no major battles took place. Alenon
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became bored with life on garrison duty and little but the city of Cambrai to rule. Just six months after crossing the border, he left his troops and wandered home to France. Two years later, Philip hadnt fulfilled his promises to withdraw from the Netherlands by quoting the handy excuse that French troops were still in Cambrai. Alenon himself refused to come back and the Prince of Oranges own regiments were losing badly. With the agreement of the estates, the Prince offered Alenon the title of prince and lord of the Netherlands, and a crown as Duke of Brabant. Alenon hesitated, but his friends reminded him that a Duke of the Netherlands trumped a King of Poland. He couldnt argue with that logic, and with his mother and brothers blessing, Alenon returned to the Netherlands. Catherine and Henry gave him even more support this time, under the logic that though the Colignys failed assassin, Maurevel, had a checkered previous Dutch expedition had been a fiasco, career in the Kings service. Before his employment as an there was no turning back now that titles and assassin, he had been little more than a bandit. His earliheredity were involved. Alenon went looking for er murder of Colignys aide, de Mouy, made him a name war, but once again the Duke of Alva sought sheland gave him a pension and, for a time, popular acclaim. ter in the Catholic estates and counted on his adversarys stupidity to win the war for him. Its a wonder he didnt starve to death as a highwayman, Alva didnt have long to wait. Alenons talfor though he fired at point blank range, his shot almost ent for governing was minimal, his inclination to missed Coligny entirely. He made plans to journey incoggovern was nonexistent. Henry had agents among nito to New France, but the Massacre of St.-Bartholomews Alenons advisors, but despite their gentle prodDay made it clear that he would suffer no repercussions. ding the ill-starred Duke of Brabant did nothing But though he was safe from the law, his reputation even but dream of greater fortunes and piss away the among the Huguenots most ardent enemies sank. At the present. He was as outraged by the Dutch refusal siege of La Rochelle, none of the Kings generals wanted to follow the arcane rituals of deference to royal him in their regiments. Depressed and musing over the power as Philip had been, and convinced himself, fleeting nature of fame, he returned to obscurity. as all scoundrels do, that the witnesses to his failDuring the time of Alenons Dutch expedition, he was ure were to fault for the failure itself. His mothers spotted in the company of several rough fellows in the son to the end, Alenon plotted to overthrow the streets of Paris. Unfortunately for Maurevel, the man who Dutch estates by inciting the dormant religious recognized him was de Mouys son. With a filial civil war. vengeance seen earlier in the Duke of Guise, de Mouy On 17 January, 1583, about 500 of his followattacked him and his shot blew Maurevels head clean off. ers asked for permission to march through the city One of the fallen assassins comrades got off a shot that of Bruges. When they reached the city center, they killed de Mouy. Though everyone feared for the alwaysbrandished their swords and screamed, shaky peace of France, neither man had a son, and so the Catholics! Take arms and help us against the feud was ended. heretics! The citizens of Bruges, Protestant and Catholic alike, were unanimous on this issue: they took arms and attacked the French. After a little bloodshed, the stunned regiment was given the choice to perish or surrender. With merciful charity, the burghers of Bruges took the soldiers weapons and ordered them to leave the city. All over the Netherlands the farce was repeated. In Antwerp, the
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French killed one of the towns leading citizens, and the people retaliated by killing them all. In the game of civil war, Alenon definitely lacked his mothers finesse. Alenon gave an incredibly goofy reply to the estates demand for an explanation, saying that he had sent the soldiers to each city in read aloud a proclamation of the Duke of Brabants gratitude to the Dutch people for giving him the honour of leading their cause. The lame call to revisit St.Bartholomews Day, heard simultaneously in fifteen different cities, he had nothing to do with. The Prince of Orange, like others before him, pretended to believe the explanation of the Valois quisling to keep the troops and supplies from the King of France coming. Obviously, he wouldnt let Alenon have a say on anything from here on out. The unhappy boynow an unhappy dukegrew bored, as both Alva and the Prince of Orange were hoping, and returned to France. In a last show of his base character, he sent a few letters to Alva offering to sell Cambrai and the three other Dutch cities he still had troops in to the King of Spain for a small fortune.
hough she continued to whisper sweet nothings in her beloved Henrys ear, it was impossible for foreign ambassadors not to notice that Catherine was losing her power with age. Her health was failing, but more importantly her son listened less and less to her advice. The two were probably not unrelated, as more than a half-dozen different witness at different times noted that her health seemed to suffer when her sons treated her as a mommy rather than Dick Morris. Now her gouty disposition was made more painful by her growing irrelevance in the Kings daily life. He had finally dislodged her spy, Marshal de Retz, and exiled him from court. More than that, his strange behavior made it difficult for her to anticipate his next move. His reliance upon the Minions, both as advisors and partners in debauchery, was difficult to undermine. She had backed several intrigues directed at the prominent Minions, but Henry would agree that men who share eyeliner have a bond which holds up under such pressures. How he spent his time away from them was even more incomprehensible to his mother. He still marched as a Flagellant, though he was now more inclined to show off his piety at a special monastery he built and stocked with vegetarian monks mail-ordered from Marseilles. From the harem to the hairshirt, Henry was as peculiar as ever. Henry had his own farcical, Alenonesque moments. Once he had suggested to the royal council that the continuing budget shortfalls should be solved with new taxes. A modest and soft-spoken man, the Prior of Champagne, answered that four provinces had already defied his authority and refused to send any taxes to Paris, and that the people were too burdened to be expected to pay more. Henry, showing that wonderful temperament which made his brother Charles such a party animal, jumped up from his seat, shoved the Prior to the ground and grabbed at his sword to stab Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 74
him. Unfortunately, his sword was stuck in his scabbard. He struggled with it for a minute before throwing it to the ground, stomping on it and demanding his guards to give him a dagger. The Prior had in the meantime gotten up to his knees and begged the Kings forgiveness for whatever he had done to offend him. Without waiting for the knife, Henry rolled up a sheaf of papers and began beating the Prior on the head like a dog. Henrys gentle wife, who happened to hear the uproar, threw herself between the unfortunate Prior and her husband. If not for that brave woman, Henry might have tapped a man to death. He delighted in playing cup and ball, a childs game, and for an entire year he was never seen, in study or deciding delicate matters of state, without it. He gave away his brother Charles pack of prized hunting dogs and in their place filled the Louvre with small white poodles. The amount of attention and money showered on these creatures was astounding. Even animal lovers and people who defended the King were embarrassed by the care he showered on the forty-plus poodles he packed together and brought with him when he left Paris. Their luggage took up three whole carriages. Sick and more feeble politically than she had been at any time since Francis II, Catherine, who had once been almost painfully polite (the legendary Medici Charm: a smile with a dagger behind the back), no longer minced words. At the time of Alenons escape, when interrogating Margot, she had said, Think well what you say, for you will answer with your life. To a nobleman who ran off at the mouth about the virtues of the Associated Catholics, she said, Get out of here, or I will make you feel what it means to disobey the King and me. The threats, once veiled, were now out in the open. Her growing impotence was exacerbated by her tender feelings for Henry, always her favourite child, which made the distance he was keeping between them hurt all the more. Away from the King for a time, she describes her feelings for him, almost mistaking son for lover: Believe me, she wrote to an acquaintance, it is a terrible pain to be far away from one loved as I love him, and to know he is ill [Henry had a slight cold]. Its like dying by a slow fire, and I know it is not possible to have more pain and anxiety than I have had. Send me word every day how he is.
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Long Live the King(s)

s in our gentle age, a woman of sixty-six years wasnt expected to shoulder a heavy burden in the 16th century. Had Catherine lived in any other time, her eclipse by younger and more powerful members of the court would have signalled a gentle launch into the seas of retirement. But her remaining years would be full of adventures and relentless activity, missions of peace and missions of war, always trying to remain atop the waves. As one might expect, Alenon was behind the last great troubles of her life and France. The young prince brought from the Netherlands an unreconciled bitterness and rancor, and the first cells of the contagion which had killed Charles IX. The strain of heresy and the denial of certain basic rituals Tuberculosis ravaged his mind, though the draof the faith made the Catholic populace of the 16th centumas of his death agony werent populated with his ry ostentatious in public show of them. Though Henry III victims but his unfulfilled schemes. He died on 10 had digestive problems, he observed the Lentan fast so June, 1584, little mourned and even less beloved. scrupulously he would often double over from the pain of Besides Catherine, the only person who the special diet. seemed to weep at the death of Alenon was The following is from the transcript of a trial in Grenoble, Henry. He had not, in ten years of marriage, mandated 1575. A man who, it was noted, claimed diabolical aged to make a child. Though his mother never powers from an early age and was witnessed by several gave up hope of an heir, nobody seems to have witnesses jumping from high places after chanting a spell thought anything strange about this family of four to give flight, was on trial for the murder of four children. boys who together could not manage to come up He confessed the crime, and said that the flesh of little with a legitimate son. Whereas Catherine had boys gave him the power to change into a wolf. Yet his nearly been exiled for her sterility as a young homicidal crime is only slightly more offensive than the princess, the barren seed of her sons passed withfact that he ate their brains on a Friday: out comment or incident. With Alenon, then, would pass the hopes of He had killed the boy with intent to eat him, which he the House of Valois. Salic law which governed the would have done unless people had come along, the said French succession did not allow for the rule of a defendant being then in the form of a man and not of a sovereign queen (though commentators in wolf, in which human form he would have eaten the flesh Catherines day probably had reason to suspect of the said boy... not withstanding the fact that it was otherwise). By dynastic right, the next in line to Friday... the throne was Henry de Navarre, leader of the
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Huguenots. The King of Navarre was descended on his fathers side from Robert de Bourbon, a second son of Louis XII. His grandmother, furthermore, was Francis Is sister; therefore, he brought together, indisputably, the two branches of the kings descended from Hugh Capet. The problem was, of course, that he was a heretic. With the death of Alenon (take that, Nostradamus!), the kingdom lost one of its greatest scoundrels. New blasts of hot air filled the vacuum. The leading antagonist to Henry III was the greatest windbag of all: the Duke of Guise, more powerful than ever atop the pyramid of the Holy League of the Holy Trinity. The League had been originally formed more than ten years previously, in a conscious imitation of John Calvins secret network of churches. The brains behind it were well-known political intriguers, but it wouldnt have succeeded had it not had the support of defiant, militant Catholics. Normally these militants would have looked to the Guise as their defenders anyway, but the League organized them into a powerful, obedient force. Henry III was so alarmed by the League that he had, on his mothers advice, moved quickly to co-opt it and declare himself as its head. This stymied the tide of Catholic resentment for awhile. Alenons death and the very real prospect of Henry de Navarre inheriting the throne of France brought the League back to life. As is always the case where religion becomes a reason to kill, many of the Leaguers considered it a purely defensive body. They were terrified that Navarre would follow the path of Queen Elizabeth and outlaw the Catholic faith. The Guise bankrolled a series of lectures in public squares on the martyrdom of the English Catholics, complete with illustrations of tortures and blasphemies supposed to have taken place. These gruesome exhibitions were outlawed by the King, but private viewing continued in churches and the homes of the more prominent Leaguers. The Holy League received its birth certificate at a meeting of its most prominent members in Joinville in December, 1584. Though few people, and no one at court, knew the circumstances behind this meeting, they cast a harsh light on the motives of all those involved in this fraternal organization of faithful Catholics. For those in attendance included not only the entire Guise family along with the militant Catholic nobility, but emissaries from the King of Spain and the kinsman of the Guise, the Duke of Lorraine. Philip would pay for the activities of the League to the tune of 50,000 francs a month, the Duke of Lorraine about half that. In return, the Leaguers would hand over to Philip title to the Kingdom of Navarre and the revolted Dutch city of Cambrai, and Lorraine would be given the cities won from the Hapsburgs back in Henry IIs time. The Duke of Guise had, in fact, been receiving a pension from Philip for some years, and acted always as a faithful agent of Spain. During the subsequent events he would keep his foreign master Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 77
informed up-to-the-minute of his intentions, and carry out his demands with total fidelity. He was out of his league (so to speak) with Philip, who, as we shall see, had different desires than the abolition of heresy and a French throne for the foreigners in mind. The League had considerable support in the north, where Catherine had foolishly appointed militant Catholics as governors in order to prevent the unlikely prospect of a British invasion (of the non-musical sort). The dividing line for the nobility was the River Loire, those of the south being mostly of the Huguenot persuasion, and the purity of the north/south religious divide had been accentuated by the plundering and expulsions of the civil wars. But the cities were overwhelmingly in favour of Guise and his brethren, most especially Paris, where he was treated like a teen idol since his involvement on St.-Bartholomews Day. The King was well-informed about the growth and threatening menace of the League (which indirectly blamed him for not solving the religious problem long ago) by Poultain, one of the leading Leaguers of Paris who had confessed their plans the King and acted as a double-agent. He provided the government with detailed notes about the organization of the Holy League nationwide and in Paris, along with the names of its leading adherents. Henry III never acted on this information. There could be little doubt about Poultains credibility. He told Henry that most of the police and magistrates of Paris were members of the League, and that their influence was spreading. But Henry sat on his hands, played cup and ball, shampooed his poodles and never even considered a preemptive strike. Just four months after the meeting in Joinville, and less than a year after the death of Alenon, Guise thought the League strong enough to show its hand. He bypassed trying to intimidate the King with words and instead took to the field right away. He printed a manifesto which was distributed all over France. Along with the usual pledges to exterminate heresy, the document declared that no Protestant could sit on the throne of France, and proclaimed Henry de Navarres elderly uncle, the Cardinal of Bourbon, as the heir apparent (the priest would obviously die without an heir; at which time the Guise, which claimed some fanciful descent from Charlemagne, could take over). It ridiculed the Minions and demanded their arrest and prosecution for corruption. The League was taking up arms immediately, and invited the King to join them in their struggle to preserve French Catholicism. But it made clear he had much to lose by resisting. Before the ink was dry on their high-minded love note to the Huguenots, Guises adherents seized Vitry, Chalons and Rheims and immediately began a horrifying persecution of the Protestants. The manifesto had good things to say about the Queen Mother, possibly because of her avowed hatred for the Minions. Therefore, Henry sent her out to talk with the leading conspirators. She and the Duke of Guise Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 78
both wept as they assured one another of their pure intentions. With the Cardinal of Bourbon there was less emotion but more sincerity. The Cardinal had never been a friend to the Huguenots and, unlike his nephew, remained a militant Catholic to the end. He and Catherine had known each other for close to forty years; he was one of the only personalities of her youth left in the world. The Cardinal expected the other members of his family (besides Navarre, of course) to rally to his side, but it was apparent that they werent going to smack the hornets nest without covering their faces. Only the Cardinal came out for the League; his Catholic kinsmen either remained with the King or joined Navarre. With all this on his mind, the Cardinal told Catherine that every man is allowed one folly in his life, and this was his. He would never settle the internal war raging inside him between the loyalties of family versus the loyalty of faith, aggravated by the guilt he felt for leaving his nephews, Navarre and Cond, rudderless when they were orphaned at such a young age. Though he was amicable to her overtures, the Cardinal of Bourbon wasnt even a minor force in the League and peace wouldnt hold without winning over the Duke of Guise. The whole point of these negotiations, from his perspective, was to allow the League the time to seize more cities in the north. From her perspective, Catherine was secretly delighted to have a say in government once more, even if it came from a crisis which threatened to multiply the sides in the civil war and devour the Crown in the conflict. Catherine had originally advised Henry to ally with the King of Navarre to defeat the League, then changed her mind. This is what a lifetime of playing games with factions, balancing one force against another, one army against another, executing honourable enemies and unleashing warthis is what it all came down to. The House of Valois would be dead, her sons on their last legs, and the only choice left to make was between which rebel disgusted her less. Catherine could be accused of many things in her life and is guilty of at least half of them. One might judge her reactions, yet one cant deny that she usually saw things clearly. This last period of power was an aberration, however. Guise and Navarre were fighting for the future. Henry and Catherine were temporizing, blindly ignoring the long-term implications of their acts in favour of short-term gain. And then what? Is there any more important obligation of a leader than to improve what is flawed and preserve what is good for his successor? And for a King, if that successor was not his son, what point was there to preserving an authority which would in all likelihood be usurped? It was one of those rare moments when history takes on a palpable form, like the Hand of God reaching out of the sky. To be sure, Henry was in a difficult position. In a fight for the future, he was irrelevant. When everything was taken away from him, or his enemies went too far, he often make valiant retorts, that he would die rather than suffer these injustices. They were pretty words, but just words. The King of France could at any time have led an army into the field against rebels; many, as we shall see, would lose their Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 79
nerve on sight of the monarch and beg forgiveness for taking arms against the King. The Politiques, Associated Catholics and even some of the Duke of Guises followers would surely back Henry (one should say, would back even Henry). There was also a large body of men without a leader, without factions, who simply considered themselves servants of the King as the feudal oath of their ancestors stipulated. These men often sent deputations to court in the next few years to beg for instructions; nearly always they were turned away without an audience. Like his mother, Henry perhaps would be remembered with grudging respect had he carried out his hateful acts as energetically as Cavour advised. Like Catherine, his violent rhetoric would be enforced by action only half-way.
uise refused to give up the fight without the King declaring himself for the principles in the Leagues manifesto. Therefore, Catherine surrendered to all his demands in the infamous Treaty of Nemours. To call this a radical shift in policy would be an understatement. From the toleration of the Edict of St.Germain, Huguenots woke up to find out they were no longer French subjects. Heresy was outlawed, all preachers forced to leave immediately and all Huguenots must abjure or leave the kingdom within six months. Henry went before the Parlement of Paris and announced that no Protestant could inherit the throne, and declared war against Navarre. When Henry de Navarre heard the news of the Kings surrender to the League, he sat for a long time in his chateau in Nerac, his face buried in his hands. According to legend, when he looked up, his moustache had turned pure white. It was perhaps the last time he would question fate. From here on he took on the world with his bare hands. Six months later, when the Pope Sixtus V excommunicated him for heresy, he wrote out an angry rebuttal and had it posted on the statue of Pasquino in Rome (The statue of Pasquino was the subject of a bizarre Roman festival, during which it was dressed to form a likeness of a prominent public person and addressed with scandalous and often biting public statements.) Compared to his predecessors, who looked at each challenge as a personal affront, Sixtus admired Navarres pugnacious riposte. He would later consider Navarre and another wily Protestant, Elizabeth, as the only two monarchs in Europe who deserved their crowns.
y the summer of 1585, Henry III and the League were mobilized for war. The League was determined to carry the war out to its end, and all of France became the battlefield. The chroniclers and people who ascribe labels to such things had lost count of the number of wars over religion in France, and so they call this oneat ten years the longest, and most violent of them all Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 80
the War of the Three Henrys after Guise, Navarre and the King, the three childhood playmates turned bitter enemies. After Henry IIIs capitulation, the League carried out the most violent persecution ever seen in France in the territories they controlled. In Normandy, Champagne, and Brittany, hardly a Huguenot was left. Those who werent treated to summary justice were imprisoned, exiled, robbed of their property or forcibly converted. The rearguard secure, they now massed their forces on the River Loire, the dividing line between the two sides. The Treaty of Nemours and the long imprisonment of the Marshal Montmorency pushed many of the remaining Politiques into Navarres camp. Marshal Montmorency himself ably repelled royal incursions into Languedoc. Navarre secured the provinces of Gascony and Guienne as overall commander of the outlaws. The only setback on the rebel side was in the area held by the Prince of Cond, a feeble soldier whose army was defeated, dissolved, and sought shelter on the Island of Guernsey, where 250 years later Victor Hugo spent his republican exile. The war was accompanied by ravages absolutely biblical in nature. Crops failed after a record drought, famine swept through the countryside and plague lurked in the bottom of wells. Towns where one side chased out another were expected to pay full taxes, even if they had already paid them. This led to massive depopulation as there are no filing extensions when soldiers act as tax farmers. The kingdoms credit was so bad that new loans were taken out at a whopping 50% interest. Guise and the Leagues armies, of course, were being paid by Spain. Philips real interest in backing the Holy League was shown when the whole of Europe was stirred by his outfitting of the Great Armada, the largest naval fleet ever to take the seas. Though there was some consternation by Henry and Catherine that this might be used to support the League, their spies in Spain told them that it was in fact to be used against England. Philip was bankrolling the League because the civil war prevented Musketfire at a pious march of Leaguers from a France from coming to Englands aid. Even after his Great 16th century painting Armada turned into a Great Joke, its remnants, after circling the British Isles and returning to the Continent, were still powerful enough to attack the rebellious Netherlands, which it was able to do since Henry IIIs feet were nailed to the floorboards. Catherine persuaded Henry to give mediation another chance, and she set off, not to the headquarters of the League but to treat with the King of Navarre. Having important business at hand seemed to rejuvenate her. At sixty-eight, she was crippled with gout, colic and migraines, and so obese she could no longer mount a horse. Nevertheless she put up with all sorts of evasions and finally persuaded Navarre to sit down for several weeks of tense negotiations. Its difficult to nail down what the point of these talks were, since she had no authority to act on behalf of the League. On many occasions she Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 81
tried to convince Navarre to convert to Catholicism. Navarre was perfectly willing to play along, as he was waiting for a large body of mercenaries to finish assembling in Germany and the Swiss cantons. There were many witty exchanges between Catherine and the man who, to her surprise, surpassed the Admiral in obstinacy and ability and became her nemesis, but she was eventually forced to return home empty-handed. The League put a huge emphasis on stopping the German mercenaries at the border. The King, forced at last to concoct some sort of strategy, built upon marvelous blueprints but with faulty materials. One of his Minions, the Duke of Joyeuse, would be sent at the head of royal troops to fight the King of Navarre. Guise and the Leagues forces would meet the mercenaries at the border. The King himself would remain behind both of them at the head of his best troops, waiting. Should the mercenaries break through, the League would be defeated and the King would still be there to prevent them from going any further. The same was true if Joyeuse failed to defeat Navarre. He took leave of his mother, leaving her once again Regent in his absence, and went into the trenches.
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The King of Paris
ad the King sent Montpensier or Nevers instead of Joyeuse a man totally without accolades in military mattersthe chances are fair that his strategy would have worked. Instead this essential pillar of his plan collapsed, making him once more look like a fool. In the first clear-cut victory for the Huguenots in any of the wars, Navarres army totally annihilated the royal force, leaving a few straggling refugees to carry Joyeuses corpse back to Paris. The presence of the army under the King prevented Navarre from going any further, but it made the Duke of Guises fight with the mercenaries look all the more impressive. In truth it was nothing but a very minor skirmish which he was to capitalize on. The mercenary army was fractured when the Duke dEpernon, on orders from the King, convinced them not to fight. The Swiss contingent dropped their weapons and swore to never return to France except with the Kings permission. This diplomatic victory ripped the heart out of the mercenaries, who Guise now pounced on. They had earlier repelled him in a skirmish; now he attacked in a night ambush and beat them back beyond the Rhine. He had a certain talent for publicity, and his legend grew. Good strategy, bad execution. The King retired to Paris to pout and play cup and ball.
here was nothing now to prevent the hazard that had long been Catherines greatest fear. It had nothing to do with religion, everything to do with Guise. For three years, the Duke of Guise had been barred from entering Paris. The King said it was due to the unpredictable consequences an appearance by the head of the Holy League might provoke, but obviously it had to do with his massive popularity. His brother, the Duke of Mayenne, had previously broken the ban and was severely reproached. He apologized, saying he had merely come to see his tailor and order new clothes (a lame excuse, until one considers who it was said to. Henry, in his sartorial splendour, pardoned him.) In early Spring, 1588, the Duke of Guise appeared on the outskirts of
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the city, accompanied by a small entourage of nine bodyguards. This was just for show, because for weeks his troops had been trickling into the city incognito; Leaguers later estimated that about 2,000 were then in Paris awaiting his arrival. When he was recognized, it brought to mind stories of Christs entry into Jerusalem. Thirty thousand people poured into the streets, kissing the hem of his cloak and grasping to touch the man they adored more than anyone, Jesus notwithstanding. Without dismounting his horse, the Duke went immediately to see Catherine. She was pale and obviously nervous. She asked straight away why he had disobeyed the Kings orders not to come. Guise answered coolly that he had been slandered by certain men, and he had no choice but to kneel before the King and defend his reputation. Catherine, who was stricken by her gout, rode in a litter to the Louvre with Guise walking by her side. Henry of Guise wasnt as spineless as other notable personalities mentioned here, but he couldnt hide his nervousness as he passed the royal guard inside the Louvre. Catherine had sent a speedy messenger ahead, and the King sat perturbed with two or three advisors. One suggested killing Guise immediately, but the others, fearing the wrath of the Parisians, argued against it. The King was inconsolable and was shaken from his stupor only when he heard the Duke of Guise enter the adjoining room. Like Catherine, Henry asked why the Duke had disobeyed his commands. Guise answered that certain men, sometimes called his Minions, had slandered him and he had come to seek justice and defend his honour. Besides, he said, the order to stay away from Paris wasnt completely clear. Henry upbraided one of his advisors who delivered the ban (repeatedly) to the Duke of Guise, then turned back and denied that anyone had been slandering him. Just then, Catherine whispered something in her sons ear. The Duke of Guise feared what she told him (and nobody ever found out what she did say), and, claiming he was fatigued from a long journey, bowed and smiled his way out of the palace, a tiger in the lions den. Pope Sixtus V, when he read of this fateful meeting in the dispatches of the Papal Nuncio in France, cried aloud that Guise was a fool for walking defenseless into the home of the King he was insulting, and that Henry was a coward for letting him go. Immediately after the Guise left, the Kings double-agent with the League, Poultain, stepped forward. He said he would make the leading Leaguers of Paris confess to the treachery being planned, if only the King would arrest them. Henry, again ignoring Poultain, instead formed a militia of five companies who could be counted on to fight alongside the royal guards should conflict with Guise spiral out of control. These men, mostly Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 84
transients and criminals, were barracked in the Cemetery of the Innocents that night. By morning, only one of the companies was left. The other four had gone over to the League. Henry now began to take serious measures to counteract the conspiracy being formed, though characteristically he only went half-way. He ordered the army he had been leading behind Guise and Joyeuse, which was a few kilometers outside of Paris, into the Louvre. The mysterious movements of the Swiss and Scottish Guards caused some panic among the Parisians, and the rumour that the King had executed 120 of their members was widely believed. Messengers bearing letters from Catherine arrived to find Guises apartments in the city turned into a command headquarters, with soldiers coming with reports and departing with orders. Reports of carriages carrying stones and secret caches of arms upset the King even more. He divided his troops into seven groups and sent six out from the Louvre to seize key bridges and other buildings from the city police, most of whom were avowed Leaguers. No sooner was this done than the Parisians began to erect barricades. Some later interpretations suggest that the Parisians were reacting to the presence of the Kings troopsforeigners in the capital, as one put it. Yet the Kings bodyguard had long been made up for foreigners, and if the Italians around Catherine were despised, the Swiss and Germans had for so long staffed the armies of the Catholics that the sight of such men probably wouldnt have been unusual. With arms being shipped into the city and the Duke of Guise acting like a general in the comfort of his apartmentsand both of these occurring before the King sent his army into the cityits ludicrous to portray the Parisian mob, which had so delighted in the spectacle of drowning Huguenots, as patsies to the Kings provocations. For several hours, the guards sent agitated messages to the King, asking for permission to clear the streets before the barricades were completed. The King refused and Catherine made clear to each and every messenger that their commanders should not use violence. The King had been preparing for the worst, but now refused to believe it was actually happening. Soon the barricades were complete, spaced at a distance of fifty meters from each other. The Kings troops were isolated and surrounded at their posts. They had little choice but to surrender. In the tense, silent streets of the city galloped the Duke of Guise on horseback. He had been planning for this moment from the very beginning. He beseeched the people not to use violence and to remain calm. He ordered the captured soldiers back to the Louvre. Sixty who had held off surrender were massacred. The rest marched, bareheaded, their drums silent and their weapons dragging behind them in the traditional dejected march of prisoners of war. Writing to his master at the conclusion of what would be called the Day of the Barricades, the Spanish Ambassador painted the big picture: The plans of the Guise will make it certain that the King of France will have his hands so tied before the Armada sails that it will be impossible for him even in words, still less by deeds, to help the Queen of England. Sixteen years before, Henry, then Duke of Anjou, and Henry, still Duke Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 85
of Guise, convinced King Charles IX in a secret meeting to unleash the radical Parisian mobs on their Huguenot enemies. Now the King of France faced the same fate, at the hands of his old friend now popularly known as the King of Paris.
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Appointment for a Crucifixion

atherine once more was given the unhappy job of finding out what it was that Guise wanted. To be honest, its uncertain that even Guise knew for sure. By his restless ambition he resembled one of her own sons, and its true that for short periods after his father died he was raised with them. He probably didnt expect his victory over the King to be so easy, either. Just to get to Guise HQ, Catherine had to request permission from the city militia. They opened the barricades for her, though it still took nearly two hours to get her litter carried across town. Nothing came of that meeting, because the Duke of Guise refused to outline his demands. She tried again the next day. While she chatted amicably with Guise, a messenger came in and whispered something in his ear. The King had calmly walked out of the Louvre, mounted a horse, and sped off to Chartres. Guise turned on Catherine, who pretended to know nothing about it. It was, once again, a nice tactic, though there was nothing else behind it. Henry no longer felt so fenced in, but that was all of the benefit. He exploded with rage as Guise replaced the few royal loyalists remaining in the city administration of Paris with ardent Leaguers. But he never backed up his words, leaving his mother, once again, to make peace. The negotiations were long and took more than a month to complete, not least of all because the Guise was under orders from the King of Spain to stall and allow the Armada time to get to England. Eventually Catherine granted the League everything they asked. The Treaty of Nemours was reinforced. Guise himself was given a new office which combined the duties of the Constable, the Lieutenant-General of the Infantry, and several other positions into one, ensuring that no decision could be made without his say. The King blamed his mother for caving, though she hardly had a choice. Mocked and scorned like no King before, Henry III retreated into his own confidence. For the first time he showed his claws. On 8 September, 1588, he purged his entire government. In their place he brought in inexperienced men who belonged to no faction (one even had to ask which of the three men in the room was the King). Gone were the Minions who hadnt perished with Joyeuse, and the rest of the men who were Catherines appointees. Her insular son had finally gotten serious about government, which was the final death knell to the Queen Mothers influence. Just like that, more than thirty years in control of France (or at least the loyal part
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of it, which was ever-shrinking) was over. Her health took a turn for the worst.
he King had the idea to rally popular support by calling for a meeting of the Estates General. Unlike the English with the Parliament, the French Kings power was absolute, though the people always insisted that only an Estates Generala kind of representative body made up of the three orders of the clergy, the nobility and the commonerscould grant taxes and arbitrate extraordinary disputes. They met irregularly, and the election of representatives was normally gerrymandered in a way that rivaled even Florentine politics. Henry gave a flamboyant speech from the outset, setting the Guise of the defensive. But despite his efforts to rig the vote, Guise controlled all three orders of the Estates. More than 90% of the Third Estate were Leaguers, while the clergy elected his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, as their president. The Duke himself took control of the nobility. The Estates, instead of rallying behind the King, proposed now to give Guise another title: Chief Constable for War and for the Renewal of Religionking in all but name. The terrible suspicion between Guise and the King was intensified by their supporters, who were constantly warning their masters of assassination plots. Guise and his other brother, the Duke of Mayenne, had a terrible scene over a woman and the formers pissing away of their family fortune. After knocking one another to the ground, Mayenne left for Lyons. Now he sent word to the King to be on his guard around his brothers associates. Guise felt himself invulnerable. He never went anywhere without a strong bodyguard and, as he himself boasted to the Spanish Ambassador, he had bought so many of the Kings men that nothing was proposed without him knowing about it in advance.
s the Estates, held in the royal palace in the city of Blois, dragged on, Catherines condition became worse. She had a terrible cough and was bedridden. Moreover, her son, though he often visited her, refused to talk about matters of state and brushed off her advice. It was two days before Christmas, 1588. The royal council was meeting, to which the Duke of Guise, his brother the Cardinal, and the Archbishop of Lyons, their closest advisor, were invited. They arrived at half past seven in the morning. The Duke of Guise felt nauseous that morning, and sent a lackey to fetch his silver snuffbox. He was barred from reentering the chateau, and passed the snuffbox on through the guard. As the meeting got underway, a few drops of blood fell onto the paper Guise was reading. His nose was bleeding and he felt a sudden chill. After Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 88
stoking up the fire, he returned to the table. One of the secretaries tapped him on the shoulder and said the King wished to talk to him. As he entered the antechamber where the King was waiting, Guise saw 45 noble gentlemenparts of that section of the nobility allied to no faction but the Crownwaiting with swords drawn. The first one drove his dagger into the Dukes neck as another closed the door behind them. Guise managed to carry several men on his back like a wounded bull, even breaking one of his attackers nose with the silver snuffbox. The Archbishop and the Cardinal were arrested before they could escape. Several other members of Guises family were also arrested, as was the president of the Third Estate, the Cardinal of Bourbon and a dozen other Leaguers. The Cardinal of Guise was told he was being released later that night, but the hallway he was walking through turned into a gauntlet of hacking swords. One story had it that the bodies of the brothers Guise were sawed apart and cremated, another that they were consumed by quicklime in the cellar of the chateau. The melee had taken place in the room immediately above where Catherine lay, suffering from the final illness of her life. She asked repeatedly what the noise was. That night, Henry entered her bedroom, kneeled by her side and told his mother what he had done. Many people put words into her mouth, but the one who knew bestthe surgeonsaid she concealed her alarm and merely said, I hope it turns out for the best. Two weeks later, she was dead.
atherine de Medici de Valois, Queen Mother of France, Duchess of Urbino and Lady Protector of Cambrai (a title she inherited from Alenon), died after an extended bout with pneumonia on 5 January, 1589. At seventy-one years, she had outlived all of her contemporaries but the Cardinal of Bourbon, who was soon released from custody only to be taken prisoner by his nephew, the King of Navarre. Despite being a fixture in public life for more than fifty years, and in control of the state for thirty, her death passed almost without notice in light of the extraordinary events which followed the assassination of the Duke and Cardinal of Guise. Though this ends her life, this narration would be incomplete without mentioning the fate of the major personalities and the fate of the state of France. For though she had lived a more extraordinary life than perhaps any other woman in history (by longevity, if no other measure), the most extraordinary times were yet to come. If the night of 23 December makes one think of Michael Corleone, Henry could not say that he took care of all his familys outstanding business. Like mother like son, because if Henry hoped to cut the League down to size, he let too many fishes escape his nets. The assassination of the Guise Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 89
unleashed the most intense hatred for any French King in history. Not even the doomed Louis XVI suffered the insults directed at Henry III. He was burned in effigy, deposed and condemned to death by the theologians of the Sorbonne, whose vengeance would not wait for the bull of excommunication to arrive from Rome. The Duke of Guises estranged brother, Mayenne, swore revenge and took over command of the Holy League, which now declared war on the King. Henry remained locked outside of Paris, which was the center of resistance against him. He had no choice but to sign a truce with Henry de Navarre, which was to extend for a year. Ironically enough, the credit which he couldnt acquire as King of France was now extended to him as various states of Europe hedged their bets between the King, Navarre, and the Holy League. He was able to muster a troop of mercenaries from Germany and actually surrounded Paris. At that moment, the second Henry of the three fell, also by the assassins dagger. Nine months after taking out two of the Guise and letting most of his followers go, Henry was taken out by a zealous monk who had ingratiated his way into his armys camp, and whose name would send a shiver up the spine of Catherines corpse: Clment. The Cardinal of Bourbon had been proclaimed King Charles X by the League, but he was a prisoner of Navarre and died in captivity. Navarre himself lay waste to the armies of the League, earning a reputation as one of the most renowned generals in history. From fugitive degenerate to conquering prince, he took France by force of arms and won its Henry de Navarre: Not an attractive man people over by his personality. Believing that the reunion of the kingdom and the end of the wars was more important than whether he took mass or not, he did become a Catholic, though voluntarily, after all of his rivals were defeated; unlike his knife-point conversion on St.-Bartholomews Day, it was on his own terms. He then granted his former cohorts permanent security in the Edict of Nantes. As Henry IV, he became one of the most beloved kings in French history, and besides that the founder of the Bourbon dynasty which once ruled France, Spain, half of Italy and a good deal of the world besides, and still sits on the Spanish throne. Henry annulled his marriage to Margot, who had become a pathetic creature, penniless and disabused by everyone. But he treated her with extraordinary kindness, inviting her back to court and restoring her fortune. He married a second timeto another Medici, a descendent of Catherines hated cousin, Duke Cosimo, whose financial support contributed to Henrys victory over the League and their Spanish allies. But the greatest irony of all was the fate of the last of the Three Henrys, boyhood friends who fought one great duel for the French throne. Like Guise and the King, Henry IV too was felled by an assassins daggeryet another fanatical Catholic who did not believe the former Huguenot chieftain had truly converted. Degenerate - http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/index.html page 90
But of course, it was France that Karl Marx was describing when he coined the maxim that History repeats itself; first as tragedy, then as farce.
finis
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Catherine de Medici

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