And now, at last, it seemed that Catherine’s luck had finally turned. This marriage, to a member of the French royal family, was considered a significant achievement for a girl of her lineage. For although her mother descended from majesty, her father’s ancestors hailed from the plebian merchant class. Two centuries earlier the Medici had been mere shopkeepers and moneylenders. Despite the family’s current undeniable wealth and political power, they were still considered parvenus by most of the crowned heads of Europe. Prince Henri was only a second son and his father’s least favorite child—there would have been no chance at all of Catherine’s marrying the heir to the throne—but still Clement had to throw in all sorts of extra incentives to accomplish this impressive feat. Catherine was dowered (clandestinely, of course, as the pope did not wish to cause unnecessary distress to those of his countrymen who might object to being arbitrarily handed over to the French in this manner) with half a dozen cities in Italy, including the important town of Pisa. Clement further privately agreed to tangibly aid François I in his enduring quest to reconquer affluent Milan, and threw in the duchy of Urbino as a special honeymoon present to the bride and groom. This in addition to a munificent dowry of one hundred thousand gold écus and so many jewels and strands of pearls that Catherine would have had trouble standing up straight if she put them all on at once.
Eventually, despite some sharp bargaining on both sides—“This man is the scourge of God,” one of the French cardinals complained when Clement tried to wriggle out of the expense of the dowry—negotiations for Catherine’s marriage to the French prince were brought to a successful conclusion, and the wedding, a five-day extravaganza, took place in Marseille at the end of October 1533. The brilliance of Catherine’s trousseau and retinue, calculated to distract from the disparity in rank between bride and groom, fooled no one, not even the bride, who on her first meeting with her future father-in-law fell to her knees and humbly kissed his feet in recognition of her unworthiness of the honor conferred upon her by an alliance with his family. The marriage contract was signed on October 27; the nuptial Mass, solemnly conducted by Clement, who made a point of attending the wedding, was held on the morning of October 28; and the customary wedding banquet, a raucous masked affair that ended in the small hours of the morning with many ladies uncovering their breasts, if not their faces, followed that evening. The bride and groom missed the more uproarious aspects of the entertainment, having been shunted off to bed at the earliest opportunity. As this match was effectively a declaration of war by the French king against the emperor’s holdings in Italy, it was imperative that the marriage be consummated at once to preclude the possibility of a later annulment. To ensure that the two fourteen-year-olds did their duty, François I remained in the bedroom to observe their efforts, so, as a final indignity, Catherine was forced to lose her virginity in front of her father-in-law.
Less than a year later, Clement was dead, the papal alliance with France was repudiated, the promised Italian cities never materialized, and the majority of Catherine’s dowry went unpaid. All that was left was an ungainly fifteen-year-old girl who spoke poor French with a heavy Italian accent and whose remaining relatives were of dubious value. François I was not pleased. “The girl has come to my court buff naked,” the French king snorted.
AND YET, AS ROILED as Catherine’s youth had been, she turned out to be the less damaged partner in her marriage. Catherine’s childhood experience was positively nurturing compared with what her new young husband, Henri, Marguerite’s future father, had endured.
Henri was only two weeks older than his Florentine wife. He had been born at his father’s favorite hunting lodge at Amboise at the end of March 1519. Until he was five years old, he had lived a carefree and cosseted existence. He and his brother, the dauphin, only two years older, were close companions; his gentle mother adored and indulged her children; and his father was one of the most important kings in Europe. Henri’s personality reflected the warmth and stability of his upbringing. He was outgoing, happy, and charming.
Then, two catastrophes followed in quick succession. His tender, loving mother died, and his father was captured in battle and became a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. To extricate himself from the unpleasantness of a cramped prison cell in Madrid, François I signed a treaty that contained a number of territorial concessions highly unfavorable to France, then pledged his two young sons as surety that the terms of the peace would be honored. Henri and his brother, the dauphin, ages six and eight respectively and both just over the measles, were immediately summoned to take their father’s place in the Spanish jail as hostages to his good intentions. A rendezvous was arranged, the children were ferried across a river, and the affectionate parent was allowed to go free. “I am a king again!” François reportedly exulted as soon as he set foot on French soil and galloped off to spend time with a new mistress.
Unfortunately for the boys, their father never had any intention of abiding by the terms of the treaty, a state of affairs that the emperor was not long in discerning. To induce the French king to honor his commitments, his children were subjected to a series of ever-increasing deprivations and deteriorating prison conditions. Eventually, Henri and his brother were transferred to an austere, isolated stone fortress, where they lived in two small cells with high, barred windows. There was no heat in the winter and no cooling breeze in the summer. They were denied fresh air and exercise; their food was poor; they were often ill. Except for their Spanish guard, they were completely alone.
It took four years and as many tons of gold to secure the young hostages’ release. Upon their return to France, their father was surprised to find them much changed, particularly the younger boy, Henri. Henri was no longer the engaging and amiable sprite he had once been. On the contrary, he seemed… angry. He often acted out or turned sullen and morose. His manners were rude, and he had difficulty assimilating into his old life. He had even forgotten how to speak French. This was not François’s idea of princely behavior. Nor did the relationship between the king of France and his second son improve when, a mere three years after his return from the Spanish prison, Henri, who, like François himself, warmed only to beauty, was forced to marry a short, homely, socially inferior foreigner in order to further his father’s improbable Italian schemes.*
Catherine, conditioned almost from birth to anticipate possible threats to her security, was quick to appreciate the precariousness of her position. Confronted with her new husband’s indifference and stripped by Clement’s death of the protection of her once-substantial dowry, she faced the very real prospect of repudiation. An annulment would ruin her; the marriage had already been consummated. She knew she could easily be returned to Italy trailing the shame of failure, reduced to scraping by off the grudging hospitality of distant relations or, worse, involuntary confinement to a nunnery.
But Catherine had occupied similar positions of vulnerability in the past and had developed the skills necessary for coping with adversity. As with the Florentine nuns, she assumed a guise of ingratiating amiability and pliancy. No matter how rudely or dismissively she was treated by her new relations or other members of the French nobility, no word of complaint passed her smiling lips. Every slight or insult—and there were many—was overlooked or met with unrelenting goodwill. She was so pathetically eager to please that, although very few among her acquaintances could be said to have actively liked her, she made no real enemies, which itself could be considered something of a victory at the court of François I. After a while, most of the royal circle seems to have simply given up and accepted her presence on the periphery. And since, to her husband, she was ever the modest, retiring, adoring wife, happy only when he was happy, touchingly elated by any crumb of affection, even Henri was only lightly inconvenienced by this new, completely undemanding spouse, and simply ignored her.
Not that Henri’s opinion really mattered—nothing mattered in Renaissance France but the outlook, attitude, and sentiments of the kin
g. In the little universe that comprised the French court, François I was not simply the sun that shone (or failed to shine) on the anointed royal companions, he was also the moon, the stars, the sky, the clouds. Catherine recognized that whatever protection would be available to her could come only from him. On his benevolence alone did her survival in France as Henri’s wife depend.
And so she scrutinized François I as a student at the University of Paris pored over a critical Latin text, as an animal stalked its prey, as a connoisseur studied a particularly valued objet d’art. It would be said later of Catherine that she was a devotee of Machiavelli, but if so she didn’t read him very closely. Instead she took instruction in the stratagems of power from her oversized, large-spirited, massively flawed father-in-law.
François I was a big man, especially by sixteenth-century standards. A Welshman who saw him for the first time reported in awe that the king of France stood six feet tall. His chest was strong, his legs long (although somewhat bandy), and the size of his nose singularly impressive. His appetites matched his stature; even as an infant he guzzled so much milk that he needed two wet nurses, and his mother nicknamed him Caesar. His great obsessions in life were gorgeous women, hunting, and Italy, although not necessarily in that order. He kept a corps of peerless aristocratic beauties around him at court, familiarly known as la petite bande, whose duty it was to soothe, amuse, and entertain the king. In addition to their many other talents, the women were all expert riders, as François spent most of his time (well, his days, anyway) on his horse, either actively engaged in a hunt or peripatetically moving the court back and forth across the kingdom in search of new, unexplored, more exciting forests in which to hunt.
His preoccupation with Italy dated from 1515, when, only twenty-one and new to the monarchy, he brazenly led his army through Piedmont, crossed the Ticino, and conquered Milan in a ferocious encounter at Marignano described by an eyewitness as a “battle of giants.”* Italy was a revelation to the youthful François. The Renaissance was in full blaze. Everywhere artists and craftsmen worked with dazzlingly brilliant pigments of blue and green, or exotic silks from the Orient, or gold filigree and polished marble. New buildings in a splendidly novel style of architecture unknown in France were under noisy construction in all the principal cities. Humanists debated the wisdom of the Greeks while scholars toted around manuscripts recovered from the fall of Constantinople. The king of France took one look and understood that something thrilling was going on in Italy that was wanting in his native realm, and he resolved to rectify the imbalance.
And therein lay Catherine’s opportunity. She spoke Italian to the king and amused him with news from her relatives and artistic contacts in Florence, with whom she was in regular communication. She and her father-in-law shared a love of opulence and grand fetes, and she regaled François with descriptions of the papal court at Rome, its many entertainments and pleasures, the delicious dishes served at its multicourse feasts. She encouraged François’s dreams of an Italian empire and his determination to bring the region’s culture and scholarship to France. She faithfully rooted him on through his many interminable tennis matches. And, of course, she worked on her riding.
The king warmed to her. He began to call her “my daughter.” Eventually, he made an exception in her case and she was admitted, despite her relative plainness, into la petite bande, an honor that signaled François’s approval to the rest of the court and effectively put her under his protection. This was fortunate, as Catherine was going to need all the help she could get, a state of affairs that became immediately apparent on a hot summer’s day in August 1536, less than three years into her marriage, when her husband’s older brother, the dauphin, drank a glass of ice water after a particularly strenuous game of tennis, abruptly keeled over, and, to the utter disbelief of the court and the kingdom, went into a coma and died eight days later, leaving Henri as heir to the throne.
AS WITH EVERYTHING IN Catherine’s life, being suddenly promoted to the position of future queen of France was a decidedly mixed blessing. In a stroke of particularly miserable luck, it turned out that the servant who had brought the dauphin the fateful cup of water was an Italian who had come to court as part of Catherine’s retinue. Although an autopsy revealed no evidence of foul play, the hapless cupbearer was nonetheless arrested and his rooms searched. A discourse on toxins being found among his possessions, he was subsequently tortured and executed in appropriately gruesome fashion. Suspicion then naturally fell upon Catherine, who had introduced the reviled assassin to court and who was known to be attracted to astrology and the occult. Her foresight in having so carefully cultivated a relationship with the king was swiftly made manifest when the issue was dropped because François refused to believe the allegations.
Being exonerated from the charge of poisoning, however, while gratifying, did not put an end to Catherine’s troubles. On the contrary, her ordeal was just beginning. She faced two formidable, seemingly intractable obstacles to her potential reign and happiness: her inability to conceive and her husband’s obvious and impassioned love for another woman.
The court’s preoccupation with Catherine’s barrenness—she was already seventeen and still childless at the time of the dauphin’s death—had been difficult enough to endure while she was only the wife of a younger son, but the pressure to provide an heir became almost unbearable after she was suddenly elevated to the role of future queen of France. In her desperation to conceive, she tried everything—special diets of vegetables and herbs, mysticism and secret prayers, miraculous potions recommended by alchemists and conjurers. She seems to have made a habit of imbibing urine obtained from pregnant livestock. She wore a locket stuffed with a cremated frog. Somehow none of this worked. And just at this time, when she was most vulnerable, it became clear to her—as it was to the rest of the court—that her husband had become involved in an ardent, highly public love affair with a patrician bombshell nineteen years his senior named Diane de Poitiers.
Diane came from a high-ranking French family that had seen its share of political setbacks but had nonetheless managed to recover its influence at court. (Her father had been tried and condemned for treason and was only saved from execution by a last-minute pardon from the king.) She had been married at the age of fifteen to an extremely rich and powerful man of fifty-six, who helpfully instructed his child bride in the ways of the world before (equally helpfully) dying and leaving her an extremely rich and powerful widow of thirty-one. Catherine’s husband, Henri, had long admired Diane. He openly carried her colors at jousts and spent as much time as he could with her.* And with good reason—although nearly two decades older than her lover, Diane was dazzling. She should have been: she certainly worked at it hard enough. Her beauty regimen was awe-inspiring. Up with the sun every morning, a cold-water bath, a little light broth, and then onto her horse for a brisk morning gallop of several hours’ duration, followed by a little light lunch, an early dinner, and an even earlier bedtime. This was a woman with a purpose.
And her purpose was to ensnare a king—specifically, France’s future king, Henri. Intelligent, mature, disciplined, sexually experienced, and politically adept, Diane was in her prime, and she knew it. Short, stocky, unsophisticated Catherine, whose habits were described by a court observer as slovenly and who ate “beaucoup” (although she tried to make up for it by incessant walking and riding), was no match for tall, lithe, condescending Diane.
So began one of the longest-running and bizarre marital farces in history. Catherine was Henri’s wife and the future queen of France in name only. Diane was Henri’s true spouse and soul mate and was treated as such by the court. To demonstrate this, after his older brother’s death and Diane’s capitulation to him (two events that would seem related, as Diane had held him off sexually while he was still only a second son), Henri, too, wore only black and white. He designed a special insignia celebrating their love through the interlacing of their initials and had it emblazoned everywhere. It was wit
h Diane, and not Catherine, that Henri spent the majority of his time, his days—and his nights. Diane’s bedroom was situated directly under Catherine’s at the castle of Saint-Germain. According to Brantôme, a gossipy chronicler who followed court events closely, Catherine had one of her servants bore peepholes into her floor so she could spy on her husband and his mistress. She saw “a beautiful, fair woman, fresh and half undressed… caressing her lover in a hundred ways, who was doing the same to her.” Afterward, Catherine whimpered to one of her ladies-in-waiting that Henri had “never used her so well.”
But Catherine was powerless to object to the situation—worse than this, she had to pretend to like Diane, even to cultivate her. A movement was under way among a cadre of powerful aristocrats close to the king to have the new heir to the throne’s barren spouse replaced by a more fertile candidate. Catherine got wind of the intrigue and understood that she had to be proactive if she wished to remain Henri’s wife. François she handled by tearfully groveling before him with the offer to retire voluntarily into a nunnery if he willed it, knowing that the king would not have the heart to repudiate her if she confronted him face-to-face. But she could not afford to offend the woman who exerted so much influence over her husband and who, she knew, would have no compunctions about supplanting her either in person or by proxy. So, as she did with all who could harm her, Catherine swallowed her hurt and pride and ingratiated herself with Diane, going to the lengths of spying for her and informing on her enemies at court.
The Rival Queens Page 2
