LA SERPENTE: A MEDICI QUEEN IN FRANCE
On to July 1559, celebrating their daughter’s wedding on the Place des Vosges, Catherine watched her husband Henri Il, son of Le Grand Nez, seated on his horse Unhappy and wearing the colours of his long-time mistress Diane de Poitiers, snap his vizor shut and lower his lance.
Catherine asked him not to continue but he shouted back, ‘It’s precisely for you that I fight.’ The two riders, wearing full armour, galloped towards each other.
Jousting was built into their marriage: the erotomane King François was said to have monitored their wedding night. ‘Both, he adjudicated, ‘showed valour in the joust.’ But the death of her uncle, Pope Clement, cancelled the dowry. Worthless to France, regarded as a scheming Italian from a family of traders, Catherine, ‘her mouth too large and eyes too prominent and colourless for beauty but a very distinguished woman with a shapely figure, watched her husband fall in love with Diane de Poitiers, nineteen years older than her; Medici called her the Old Lady. Henri talked of repudiating Catherine when no pregnancy ensued, though Diane encouraged Henri to visit his wife. Catherine drank mule’s urine to guard against sterility, painted her ‘source of life with poultices of ground stags antlers and cow dung embellished with crushed periwinkle and mares’ milk – hardly the perfumes to encourage lovemaking.
Finally a sensible doctor examined the couple and discovered slight abnormalities of their sexes that he managed to correct. Catherine became pregnant, surviving nine births. Six children lived to adulthood, four sons and two daughters, including Isabel, high spirited queen of Spain. Three sons became kings, all sickly and unbalanced, perhaps from inherited Medici syphilis, but their births gave Catherine prestige.
When Henri succeeded his father, Catherine had to please his mistress Diane, remembering later, ‘It was the king I was really entertaining, acting sorely against the grain, for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore’.
But she tolerated it because I loved him so much.’
The jousters clashed with the horrendous crack of splintered lance. Catherine screamed; the crowd gasped, Henri tottered; his vizor gaped open, blood gushing from splinters sticking out of his eye and from pad temple. Wife, mistress and son all fainted. Philip’s doctor Vesalius” was summoned; Henri howled as doctors tried to remove the splinters. It was a dangerous moment for a divided France: 10 percent of the population were Huguenots – as French Protestants were known – led by Queen Jeanne of Navarre and Admiral Coligny of the Montmorency family, and Henri was determined to exterminate the ‘Protestant vermin’.
Catherine rushed to her weakling son, François. My God, how can I live, he sobbed, ‘if my father dies?’ Septicaemia set in.
The new king, François II, was married to the sixteen-year-old Mary, the diminutive, impulsive, half-French Scottish queen, descended from Henry VIII’s sister, and handed power to her ultra-Catholic uncles, the Guise brothers, who were determined to destroy the Huguenots.
When after sixteen months François himself died of an ear infection, Catherine took power as governante de France for another meagre son, Charles IX, aged ten, nicknamed the Brat. If Catherine’s orphaned youth personified the plight of women in power families, her adulthood demonstrated the opportunities for exercising power.
‘I was not loved by the king your father as I wished to be, ‘ Catherine confided in her daughter Isabel, ‘and God … has left me with three little children and a divided kingdom where there is not one man I trust. Catherine believed she must compromise with the Protestants to preserve France for her sons,” but the Guises traduced her to Philip, claiming that she was compromising with heretics. He called her Madame la Serpente. Therefore, my daughter, my friend, don’t let your husband the king (Philip ) believe an untruth, Catherine beseeched Isabel. ‘I don’t mean to change my life or my religion.’
In January 1562, Catherine appeased the Huguenots with her tolerant Edict of Saint-Germain, which disgusted Philip. That March, in a clash at Vassy, seventy-four Protestants were killed by François, duc de Guise, leading to full-scale civil war and then to the assassination of Guise. When Catherine proposed a summit with Philip, he refused to see La Serpente, sending Isabel, who defended him against her mother. Catherine proposed marrying her daughter Margot to Philip’s bizarre son, Don Carlos. But Philip had a new family member to promote instead of his demented son. He summoned a boy of twelve named Geronimo.
‘I was delighted to learn that he is my brother,’ Philip wrote. He was the emperor’s illegitimate son by a German serving girl, raised in obscurity. Philip asked him if he knew who his father was. ‘No,’ said Geronimo. Philip kissed him, granted him his own court and renamed him Don Juan of Austria. Don Juan was brought up with his cousin Carlos, who was exactly the same age.
But they were very different. Don Juan grew up into a competent and flashy paladin; Carlos was deteriorating into a murderous maniac. But both craved power.
Source ~ The World A Famous History ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore
Image 📸 Liv Hill as Young Catherine (Photo: Starz) ‘The Serpent Queen’