Sabbatical One: Historical Background of 16th Century France
(aka -- Don't get me started on the Valois kings)
Okay look, I’m only going to explain this once...
Once upon a time, there was a King of France named, appropriately enough, Francis. In many ways the pattern of a Renaissance prince -- ambitious, learned, passionate, cultivated, cunning, brooking no opposition, a patron of everything from silversmithery to South American exploration -- his overriding obsession was the overthrow of the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty. He had a devoted older sister named Marguerite, who was a bit of a bluestocking but otherwise a model of everything a royal sister should be. As part of Francis’s Spanish concerns, Marguerite was married, en secondes noces, to the King of Navarre, Henri d’Albret. An independent principality along the Pyrenees, Navarre owed feudal allegiance to the King of France, but was not part of the French kingdom. Holding the mountain passes that would make either French invasion of Spain or Spanish invasion of France possible, the d’Albret monarchs found their influence larger than the size of their territories might warrant. About three quarters of lowland Navarre south of the Pyrenees had been invaded and annexed by Spain (Spanish it remains to this day), and Henri d’Albret wanted it back. Marrying Marguerite to Henri was a simple way for Francis to convince d’Albret that his desire to see Navarre reunited was sincere, without a big investment in troops or capital.
While Marguerite found Henri and his Gascon demesne a little earthy for her Paris-educated tastes, she did what she could to make the courts of the d’Albrets in Nerac and Pau as refined and lively as she could. A significant part of her hospitality was providing “some country air” for religious reformers who were finding Paris a little hot for their tastes. Marguerite herself never made a formal break with the Catholic church, but Navarre became known as the intellectual heart of the reform movement that was soon to coalesce into Protestantism. In her spare time, she wrote a rip-off of Bocaccio’s Decameron, called the Heptameron and produced an heir to the throne of the d’Albrets. An heiress, actually -- little princess Jeanne. Remember her -- Jeanne d’Albret.
With his foothold in southwest France secured, Francis boldly went forth to invade Spain -- and got his imperial butt kicked in the Battle of Pavia, where, ultimate humiliation, he was captured himself. Marguerite tirelessly worked to get him free, but the treaty the French were forced to swallow was humiliating in the extreme. Francis slunk back to Versailles, sickened and died, leaving his crown to his son, Henri the Second.
Henri had been one of the hostages sent to Spain after the Battle of Pavia, when he was an adolescent; when he returned, contemporaries agree that he was never quite “all right” again. Henri Valois was very little like his father, with virtually no interest in art, science or philosophy. An iron-fisted boor, orthodox to the point of bigotry, he had no patience for reform or innovation. The first ten years of his marriage to Catherine, one of the ubiquitous Medici girls who wormed their way onto every royal tree on the Continent, were childless, then they started spawning like salmon. Seven children -- four princes, three princesses -- survived to adulthood. Catherine could breathe easy -- it wouldn’t be her fault if the Valois line wasn’t safe.
Meanwhile, back in Navarre, little Jeanne d’Albret had grown to marriageable age. She had fallen head over heels for Antoine de Bourbon, distant kin to the Valois and a notable hanger-on of the court. A devil-may-care ne’er-do-well ten years older than Jeanne, he had apparently done little to provoke her passion but did not object to it. The prudent d’Albrets had bigger fish to fry in disposing of their daughter in holy matrimony -- they chose the Duke of Cleves as her mate, an alliance that would strengthen their ties to the anti-Hapsburg resistance. Displaying the take-no-prisoners obstinacy that would earn her the title of “stubbornest woman in Christendom” in her maturity, Jeanne had to be carried in to the wedding ceremony on a blanket, having refused to get out of bed and get dressed. Within two years, the Duke of Cleves was begging the Pope for an annulment. Jeanne promptly scooped up Antoine de Bourbon and declared herself a Protestant -- both acts of rebellion against her mother Marguerite, whom she never forgave for that early violation of her integrity.
Jeanne and Antoine were happy enough to start with, but significant differences in their style and characters soon became apparent. Jeanne, as you may recollect, was immovable when she thought she was right and more than a bit of a prig -- we’d call her a Type A personality today. Antoine swayed like seaweed in every passing current of the Zeitgeist and had no morals to speak of. It was inevitable that, once children came -- as they did, with Henri in 1553 and Catherine a couple of years later -- there would be major conflicts.
Meanwhile, back in Paris, the Valois family seemed to be flourishing. With the support of the Guise family (the uncles and cousins of their celebrated daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots), northern France was presenting a remarkably united face. Any little contretemps down in southern France with the Huguenots would no doubt be adjusted in the course of the summer.
Well, some things are eternal. At the family picnic, old Dad can’t resist one more inning of softball, pulls a groin, and ends up in the emergency room instead of watching “Sixty Minutes” that night. On the occasion of wedding his daughter Elizabeth to the King of Spain and his sister Marguerite to the Duke of Savoy, Henri the Second insisted on one last joust before packing up the coolers and heading for the parking lot. His opponent’s lance splintered against his shield -- one of the splinters flew into his eye and worked its way into his brain (I’m not making this up) -- and he died raving in agony three days later.
First of the Last of the Valois: Francis the Second, Mr. Mary Queen of Scots.
The Dauphin was just barely of age when Papa saddled up for his ill-fated joust. All Henri’s sons had been kept far away from the business of government, and the only adjective that anyone had ever applied to Francis was “sickly.” The Queen Mother had no political experience whatsoever -- her big hobby up to that point had been making life hell for the King’s mistresses (at Chenoceaux, you can still choose between pro-Catherine de Medici and pro-Diane de Poitiers tour guides) -- but her Medici pedigree hypnotized the French court into thinking her a competent unofficial regent until she actually became one.
Catherine de Medici is still reviled by some as a master manipulator and an architect of genocide, but it was a motherlove so huge it can only be called monstrous that was the driving factor in all her actions. Protecting the French crown and its authority was protecting her children -- and no tigress ever had stronger instincts to protect her children. Her fundamental problem was that she never thought anything through -- she did the first thing that came into her head without looking at a larger landscape that might have shown her where her real interests lay.
To no one’s surprise, Francis shuffled off this mortal coil -- his widow, the saucy auburn flibbertigibbet, was kept around for a couple of months to make sure she wasn’t going to bear a surprise heir, then shipped off north to play out her not-uneventful destiny. Charles the Ninth, a ten-year-old boy, was now King of France.
Sectarian violence was now endemic to the whole of France, both north and south. Emboldened by the bigotry of Henri the Second and the strict orthodoxy of Catherine, functionaries of both church and state stepped up persecution of heretics both prominent and humble. Methods of punishment were medievally straightforward -- confiscation of property and titles (where appropriate), torture to elicit confession, then a clean hanging for those who “cooperated”, burning for the recalcitrant. Royal soldiers took to setting fires in Huguenot worship places -- while Huguenots were worshipping in them. Long-standing treaties of toleration, establishing certain cities as zones of free worship, suddenly weren’t worth the paper they were written on as the king’s men moved in to confiscate property and burn dissenters. Persecution forced France’s most innovative citizens into underground, harried lives, turning their creativity and obstinacy into thwarting the state rather than aiding it, and ruined the French economy as the armies of the two faiths trampled over the countryside again and again.
The ties that had bound the Valois and the d’Albrets had long since dissolved as the Navarrese monarchs became the political heads of the Huguenot movement. With typical multiple loyalties, Antoine de Bourbon went back and forth between the Catholic and the Huguenot factions, untrusted by either group. This grieved Jeanne greatly, but she had come to expect no better from her spouse, and in any case, she had her hands full running a full-scale civil war from the chateau at Pau. What had started as simple enforcement of the treaties of toleration granted to the great Huguenot stronghold cities by the French crown, had turned into a war of offense as Protestants proved they could be just as bigoted and intolerant as Catholics when they gained some power. Most of the great families of the south, including the Condes and Montmorencys, aligned themselves with the Huguenots -- not wholly for spiritual gain. Many of them saw this as an opportunity to re-establish the independent Occitan of their forefathers, where they would be permitted to rule without interference from those boorish Franks up north.
Catherine de Medici, as regent for the boy-king Charles the Ninth, had three balls to juggle in her quest to keep the throne safe for her child -- it was in her best interests to keep them balanced, for each represented certain threats and certain assets to the French crown and only by playing them off each other could she keep any one faction from becoming dominant and overwhelming the fragile monarchy. The first were the Huguenots who, despite being heretics and rebels, had control over a goodish amount of property, capital and trade, and were led by princes of the blood (Bourbon and Conde) and other talented former members of the French administration. It was a shame not to have use of so much of the cream of France’s intellect.
The second were a group of Parisian bourgeois called the politiques, who favored a national church something like England’s, owing technical allegiance to the Papacy but maintaining control of the finances and administrative details within France, seeking a middle path to reduce papal abuses without going in boots and all for Calvin. It was a reasonable solution in an unreasonable time, offered distinct advantages to the crown by placing a large portion of ecclesiastical finance under its management, and could have given opportunities for dissent that were not synonymous with treason. The only thing the movement lacked was leadership, money and influence.
The third ball was an insidious group called the Catholic League, organized by the wily Guises and funded by Philip the Second and the Spanish Hapsburgs -- their motto, “We don’t want to take over France, no, really.” The Guises, still smarting from the chagrin of not having their niece/cousin Mary Queen of Scots become Mary Queen of France from the sheer bad luck of marrying the scrawniest of the scrawny heirs to the French throne, were playing on the anti-Huguenot hysteria of Paris like a fine violin. Ostensibly France’s most loyal family, the Guises were privately rustling up their own claimant to the throne -- old great-uncle Claude, a conveniently elderly and celibate bishop who would be only too glad to make Henri Duc d’Guise his heir.
The wars of religion dragged on for years. France grew poorer and poorer, and more vulnerable to depredations from within (Guises) and without (Hapsburgs). Catherine and Jeanne, with mutual distaste but equal determination to put an end to the long, wearisome troubles, hammered out a marriage treaty that would tie Jeanne’s Protestant son and heir Henri to Catherine’s Catholic daughter Margot and put paid to the civil war. In what was surely one of the most nerve-wracking meeting of mothers-in-law in European history, it was decided that the ceremony would take place outside of the cathedral of St. Denis in Paris -- the Catholic members of the party would pop indoors for a mass while the Huguenots cooled their heels outside.
Jeanne’s unexpected death a few months before the marriage was disconcerting, but not a deal-ender. Henri was not an idealist when it came to politics -- he knew what this marriage was to accomplish and he was determined to accomplish it.
I have to admit I rather fell in love with Henri of Navarre while doing research -- it’s the extra biographies I read of him that originally pointed me in the direction of Navarre as the primary setting for my tale. When we think "French king," we usually think of the Sun King. However the French consider Henri the Fourth as their quintessential monarch. His were the only statues of a monarch left unmolested during the revolution. He was a man of remarkable intelligence and common sense. As is often the case of the progeny of two people of widely divergent characters, Henri was an interesting blend of attributes, an alloy much stronger than the original metals of Jeanne and Antoine. He had the ability to appear very flexible -- flexible to the point of spineless -- but underneath was a sense of self and focus that was made of granite.
The biggest stumbling block to wedding France to its Protestants through the proxies of the d'Albrets and the Valois was the bride. Margot Valois was, on the face of it, a real catch. Lovely, lively, accomplished, artistic, pious, funny, fashionable, she possessed all the finest attributes of a Renaissance princess. She was also a fabulously indiscreet slut.
How did she ever get it into her head that she was allowed the sexual freedom of her father, brothers and uncles? Why did no one ever set Margot down and say, “Look, honey. Do you want to be Queen of France, or do you want to lapdance the Italian ambassador? Could we just have one official royal banquet where the big subject of conversation the next day isn’t ‘where were Margot’s hands during dessert?’” She was literally oogling the Duc of Guise on the steps of the cathedral during the marriage ceremony. Henri was prepared to be indulgent, but these were insults too great to be ignored. As a very great lover of women, choosing mistresses with character and intellect and remaining friends with them often for a lifetime, he had to have been deeply hurt by Margot's very public rejection.
But there were larger issues at stake than the compatibility or incompatibility of the young couple. Nearly every prominent Huguenot aristocrat accompanied the King of Navarre to Paris for his nuptials. It was a great celebration, where France would finally be forced to acknowledge its Protestants as full citizens. And a funny thing happened when the greatest of the great Huguenot lords came to make their devoirs... The King of France fell in love with a Huguenot admiral.
Charles had been cowed by his father and cosseted by his mother. He had been of age for several years when Margot and Henri plighted their ill-matched troth, but his participation in the governance of France was minimal. His helping from the Valois buffet of physical defects was a thyroid disorder which propelled him into mad bouts of physical activity -- hunting ten, twelve hours at a stretch, for example -- followed by days of stuporous prostration. He was by no means the sharpest tool in the shed.
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the head of the Huguenot military organization, answerable only to the King of Navarre, was a tall, comely man, learned, courteous, courageous, pious. He had presence -- he had authority -- he had dignity. He had commanded fleets, been involved in the first European explorations of Brazil, and had governed several French provinces before his conversion to Protestantism. He was everything a royal father should have been -- and hadn't been. To everyone in the court, it became obvious within days that the King of France had, without any sexual connotations, a terrible crush on Gaspard de Coligny. He hung on Coligny’s every word, even -- heaven help us -- deferring to the opinion of the notable Huguenot. What was the world coming to?
This was not on anyone’s agenda. Catherine was fit to be tied at the thought of her son admiring and taking the advice of that heretic... After working so hard to establish political control for her sons, Catherine now viewed losing control as the same as defeat. She was not going to be defeated by Coligny.
The Guises were even less pleased. Somehow or other they had gotten it into their thick collective skulls that Coligny was personally responsible for the assassination of the older Duc de Guise. They were not a family that ever forgot or forgave.
We’ll never know exactly how Catherine and the Guises came together to plan the murder of Admiral de Coligny, nor what damning evidence of collusion the Guises retained from that meeting. An assassin was hired, but had the bad luck to not only fail to kill Coligny -- his shot only shattered the admiral’s forearm and badly mangled some fingers -- but also to be captured. Good help is so hard to find.
The state of the Queen Mother and the Guises was perilous now. Charles was livid at the idea that someone had taken a shot at his new idol -- once the hapless assassin had been tortured into confessing his employers, they were going to have some mighty fancy explaining to do. They had to move fast. They locked themselves up with the poor jumpy angry monarch and told him lies, for hours. The emotional battering was simple and severe. The Huguenots were going to kill them all. Coligny wanted the throne for himself. All his honeyed words had only been designed to lure the King into a false trust. After hours of pounding home their lies, they got their wish -- they provoked a thyroid storm that blew like a sirocco over the king’s reason. “Kill them! Kill them all!” These were the words that would stop his mother from yelling at him. The Guises hustled out into the streets to alert their elite troops of Catholic Swiss mercenaries. It was time for the slaughter to begin. In the early morning hours of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, Gaspard de Coligny was hauled from his bed and murdered. He was the first victim of a notable piece of genocide.
Figures vary widely on how many people died in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. All things considered, tens of thousands is as close as we'll get. Many Protestants were already leading clandestine lives, outside parish and government records, so they were already officially invisible before their deaths. The Seine was choked with bodies -- men, women, children, stripped and mutilated. The palace was no protection -- nearly all of Henri’s personal retinue were butchered in the halls and bedrooms of the Louvre. (Margot, in her very lively autobiography, remembers with pained annoyance, getting blood on the hem of her nightgown walking back to their bedroom that night, being pounced on by friends of her husband running for their lives.) Henri and his second in command the Prince of Conde, were offered a Mass or a sword. They choose a Mass.
Catherine had to figure out how she was going to re-weight her balancing act, now that one side was several thousand bodies lighter. Once again, she had done the first thing that came into her head, and it backfired on her. A generation of Huguenots, the younger brothers and cousins and children of the retinue slaughtered in Paris, now had a deadly hatred of everything Valois and would never, ever make treaty with a French monarch again -- they were fighting to the death, in the name of their lost loved ones. The Guises were strutting around Paris in full ascendancy, with their Catholic League flunkies panting at their heels -- you could practically see them taking the measurements of the Louvre and planning where their furniture was going to go. Charles was losing his mind from remorse and thyroid, oozing in and out of consciousness without being able to make decisions or reassure his supporters. Her favorite child Henri was far away -- she’d wangled an election to make him King of Poland, so he wouldn’t be jealous of Charlie’s title, but hadn’t quite figured the Poles were going to want him on the premises. She was tired and ready to call it a day.
Charles survived the Massacre of St. Bartholomew by less than two years. Henri Valois sprinted back to Paris, pursued by a posse of hopping mad Poles who couldn't believe he was going to desert them for the crown of France. Henri of Navarre had been hanging around the court, pretending to care only about chasing stags and chasing skirt, arguing with Margot and showing up at enough Masses to keep himself out of trouble until the chance to escape presented itself. The Guises figured they had to get old Uncle Claude on the throne before he died and all their elaborate fantasies about his lineage superceding the Valoises became for naught. Thus the scene became set for the War of the Three Henris (Valois, Navarre and Guise).
Henri the Third was probably the most active and politically competent of Catherine's brood. Unfortunately, his personal habits -- the adjective "fruity" hardly scratches the surface -- made him wildly unpopular with the conservative Parisians. There were demonstrations in the street. The Guises clapped their little hands in delight, the Hapsburgs back in Seville twirled their mustachios. Watching their monarch prance around the Tuilleries playing flagellation games with his chiffon-robed boy “mignonettes,” nobody had any great hopes of royal issue. With the death of the last remaining Valois prince, the duc d’Alencon, it suddenly occurred to someone to look up who was next in line for the throne.
"Uh, guys...."
Suddenly, Henri of Navarre, the son of sleazy bootlicker Antoine de Bourbon and the queen of the heretics, was heir to the crown of France.
This wanted thinking out.
Henri Valois's last great act of unpopularity was to order his bodyguards to assassinate the current duc de Guise. Suddenly angry mobs with torches and cudgels were surrounding the palace and oh what an embarassment, but it became necessary to call Henri of Navarre and his newly resurgent Huguenot army to come in and rescue the beseiged monarch. As the two Henri's began to negotiate exactly how formally investing Navarre as heir to the crown was going to work, Henri Valois was assassinated by a mentally unstable monk named Jacques Clement. Henri of Navarre was king of France.
In name only. It took eleven years of hard fighting for Henri the Fourth to take command of his country. Even then, it was necessary for him to convert to Catholicism before Paris would accept him as soverign -- providing the occasion for one of his famous Gascon quips, "I suppose Paris is worth a Mass..." He had a difficult job to build a working coalition to rebuild France -- the economy was a disaster, and the infrastructures crumbling. Catholics didn't trust him since he placed Huguenots -- the political advisors he knew best and who had the experience necessary to administer massive public works projects -- in every key position within his government; the Huguenots didn't trust him since he was now a Catholic.
Hardly had he unpacked his bags in the Louvre than he applied for an annulment to his marriage with Margot. They hadn't seen each other in years -- Margot having been pensioned off to a quiet castle in the Aquitaine with a squad of discreet and robust bodyguards -- but actually carried on a very cordial correspondence for the rest of their lives. Henri needed to bolster his appearance of orthodoxy to get loans from the Papacy and other Catholic sources of gelt, to finance ambitious projects to get France's economy moving again. What's the quickest way to do that? Marry a Medici girl perhaps?
Marie de Medici, shipped in from Florence, was a yeasty-looking heifer who was clearly destined to provide a lot of heirs to the Bourbon throne, and not give Henri any lip. She was also lavishly orthodox -- she wouldn't even eat with Henri's Huguenot cabinet members. Satisfied with that end of things, Henri turned to the business of bringing France into the seventeenth century. His plan was to rebuild and reorganize the entire infrastructure of France -- from highways to tax collection to water supplies -- placing ruinously high taxes on imports to force his citizens into new areas of industry to meet demands for goods that could no longer be bought from bordering countries. Had he lived another twenty years, France would have taken a leading role in the industrialization of Europe, instead of remaining a primarily agricultural nation well into the twentieth century.
But alas, Henri was assassinated by a religious maniace named Ravaillac in 1611, at the age of fifty-eight. Marie pink-slipped all her husband's Protestant advisors almost before he was buried, replacing them with her own coterie of Italian Catholics, who had little understanding and less interest in understanding the problems of the French economy. Marie and Henri's son Louis, brought up in an environment of rigid orthodoxy, completed the political destruction of the Huguenots by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the great codex of toleration established by his father upon mounting the throne, by which tens of thousands of families took their talents and industry out of France and into surrounding countries and the New World.