The Sons of Francis
The "old rake" had seven children, all by Queen Claude. His eldest son, Francis, like his father, was handsome, charming and witty. Henri, born in 1519, was shy and withdrawn and resembled his brother only in misfortune. The humiliation of their captivity left a deep mark on both. Francis died six years after his release. Henri became still more reserved and shut in on himself, and turned away from the pleasures of the French court. His friends seldom saw a smile on his face. People said that his stay in Spain had made him a Spaniard.
Catherine de' Medici
Henri and Catherine de' Medici had not chosen one another freely or from love. Catherine too had had a hard youth. A few days after her birth her parents died of syphilis (1519), and until she married Henri she lived in suffering, shifted from place to place. When Florence drove out the Medici rulers it kept Catherine as a hostage, and when the Medici besieged the city its new rulers threatened her with death. Clement VII made her a bargaining piece with France, and at fourteen she was taken to Marseille and wed to a boy of fourteen who in all the wedding feasts spoke no more than a few words to her.
Arriving in Paris with a band of Italians, she was coldly received by the townspeople, who regarded her as "the Florentine," and for all her effort she could not win the people of Paris or her husband. Despite the hard work of physicians, she remained childless for ten years, and the doctors thought her barrenness came from a sickness inherited from her parents. In despair she went to Francis and, in tears, asked leave to part from her husband and spend the rest of her life in a convent. The king dissuaded her. At last she conceived, and then bore a child nearly every year. She bore ten, of whom Francis II married Mary Stuart; Elizabeth became the wife of Philip II; Charles IX ordered the massacre of St. Bartholomew; Edward, as Henri III, came to the throne and, with his ill fate, ended the Valois line; and Marguerite married Henri of Navarre. Henri lived with Catherine to the end of his life and had children by her, yet scarcely four years of their marriage had passed when he fell in love with Diane de Poitiers.
Diane de Poitiers
Among the mistresses of French kings Diane was without equal and played an effective part in her country's history. When seventeen-year-old Henri fell in love with her (1536), Diane was thirty-seven, her hair slowly whitening and the lines of her face showing her true age. She had no great beauty, but her kindness won hearts. She was no wanton or capricious woman and, it seems, remained faithful to her husband Louis de Brézé to the end of his life. The French did not reproach her morals, but they envied her wealth. Unlike Francis's beautiful, empty-headed mistresses, Diane was a cultivated woman of sound taste, agreeable manners and temperament, and beguiled men not by sexual allure but by force of mind.
She was a noblewoman, raised at the art-loving Bourbon court at Moulins. Her father, Jean de Poitiers, Count of Saint-Vallier, after trying to hold the Duke of Bourbon back from treason against the French king, was himself drawn into it. He was arrested in 1533 and condemned to death. Diane's husband, a favorite of Francis, persuaded the king to pardon his father-in-law. Louis de Brézé, grandson of Charles VII (through his mistress Agnès Sorel), a powerful and influential man, rose to military command and the governorship of Normandy. When he married the sixteen-year-old Diane (1515) he was fifty-six. After his death (1531) she built him a splendid tomb at Rouen with a tablet swearing eternal fidelity. She did not remarry and wore only black and white.
Diane first saw Henri when, not yet seven, he was handed over at Bayonne as a hostage to the Spaniards. The bewildered child was weeping. Diane, then twenty-seven, comforted him as a mother would; his own mother had died two years before. Eleven years later, when Henri met her again, he may have remembered her motherly caress. Although four years married, he was emotionally an immature, gloomy, withdrawn youth with no self-confidence. He needed a mother more than a wife, and Diane met the need with her warmth. Their relations were apparently chaste for a long time. By her feeling and suggestion Diane gave Henri confidence and prepared for rule a young man who was weary of the world. It was rumored that she had borne him a daughter, Diane de France, whom she raised with two other daughters left her by Brézé. She also adopted another daughter, borne to Henri by a Piedmontese girl. His last illegitimate child was the fruit of an affair with Mary Fleming, governess of Mary Stuart. Affairs with other women did not lessen Henri's attachment to Diane. He wrote passionate verses in her praise and gave her many jewels and wide estates.
Catherine suffered at seeing the heir to the French throne choose another woman, but hid her grief. Henri had not forgotten her; he usually dined with her and spent his evenings at her side. But she was distressed and troubled to see that Diane sometimes kept him from going to her bed (I soften the wording).
Power and Possessions
After Henri's accession Diane's power did not decline. He went on writing her letters full of humility, asking her to accept him as her slave. His infatuation made her as rich as a queen of France. He gave her the right to sell public offices and a share of the funds this brought the court. He gave her the jewels of the Duchess of Étampes, and when the duchess protested Diane threatened to accuse her of Protestant sympathies. Besides this he gave Diane 400,000 thalers that Francis had been secretly sending to the Protestant princes of Germany. With her wealth Diane turned the old château of Brézé at Anet, with the help of the famous French architect Philibert Delorme, into a vast and splendid palace. It became not only the king's second home but a gallery of art and a meeting place for poets, artists, statesmen, dukes, generals, cardinals, the king's mistresses and philosophers. In truth it was the seat of the country's "privy council," and Diane directed state affairs with skill and coolness. At Anet, Chenonceau, Amboise and the Louvre, the sign of Henri's devotion to her appeared on dishes, armor and works of art: two letters D, one over the other, with a stroke between forming an H. This rare and charming friendship, built on love and money, lasted to the end of his life.
The Huguenots Multiply
In the struggle of the Roman Catholic Church against Protestantism Diane sided with the Church. She had her reasons, for her daughter had married Francis's son, the Duke of Guise, and he and his brother, Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, were both famous men of Anet and leaders of the French Catholic Church. His stay in Spain had made Francis of Guise firm in the beliefs of his childhood. The Church in turn backed Henri, putting 3,000,000 gold crowns at his disposal to cancel his father's edict limiting the powers of church courts.
Despite the severity of Church and state, Protestantism spread quickly in France. The success of missionaries sent by Calvin and other Protestants alarmed French conservatives. By 1559 most of the people of several French towns, such as Caen, Poitiers and La Rochelle, and of many towns in Provence, had turned Protestant. A priest estimated French Protestants that year at a quarter of the population. A Catholic historian wrote, "The pact of Leo X and Francis I did not stop the falling away from faith, the corruption of the Church, but deepened it." The lower and middle classes turned Protestant out of hostility to a Catholic government that had trampled the autonomy of towns, laid heavy taxes on the people and squandered the country's wealth in wars. The French nobles, once holders of wide political powers, envied the Lutheran princes' victory over Charles V and thought that by rousing the people against a guilty state and Church they could restore feudalism to France. Prominent nobles such as Gaspard de Coligny, his young brother François d'Andelot, Prince Louis of Condé and his brother Antoine of Bourbon organized the Protestants' revolt.
French Protestants based their beliefs on Calvin's Institutes, because its language and author were French and its logic pleased the French mind. After 1550 the name of Luther was forgotten in France. The name Huguenots reached Provence from Zurich by way of Geneva. French Protestants grew so numerous that in May 1559 they held their general assembly in secret in Paris. In 1561 there were two thousand reformed or Calvinist churches in France, by the book's count.
The Burning Chamber
Henri II resolved to crush heresy. At his command the Parlement of Paris named a commission to prosecute apostates (1549). From then on the condemned were burned alive, and the new court set up for Protestants became known as the "Burning Chamber" (Chambre Ardente). The Edict of Châteaubriant (1551) made printing, distributing and reading heretical works a capital crime and set death for those who persisted in Protestantism. A third of the property of the condemned went to those who informed the court of their leanings. These informers were also required to report to the Parlement the judges who treated Protestants gently.
Holding public office required complete loyalty to the Catholic Church. In three years the Burning Chamber condemned sixty people to burning for Protestant sympathies. Henri asked Pope Paul IV for the Inquisition, as newly practiced at Rome, to be set up in France too, but the Parlement refused to hand its powers to others. One of its members, Anne du Bourg, boldly proposed that prosecutions for apostasy be suspended until the Council of Trent gave its final view on true doctrine. Henri threw him into prison and swore to burn him, but fate kept the king from carrying out the spectacle.
War with Charles and Philip
The king meant to renew war with Charles. He had not forgotten the bitter memory of the captivity of his father, his brother and himself in Spain, and he hated the emperor as much as he loved Diane. The Lutheran princes of Germany, having resolved to fight the emperor for religious and political freedom, worked for an alliance with Henri and urged him to take Lorraine. Their effort bore fruit in the Treaty of Chambord, allying the German Protestant princes with Henri (1552). With a swift and skilled thrust Henri took Toul, Nancy, Metz and Verdun. Charles, who preferred to come to terms with the German Protestants rather than see the house of Valois triumph, made a humiliating peace with the German princes at Passau and marched on Metz to besiege the French there. Francis, Duke of Guise, defended the city with rare stubbornness and courage. The siege of Metz lasted from 19 October to 26 December 1552, and at its end Charles, tired and ailing, with a white beard, left the field with his men, saying, "Fortune is like a woman who turns to the young king sooner than to the old emperor," and adding, "Before three more years of my life pass I shall join the Franciscan friars." In 1555 and 1556 Charles abdicated the Netherlands and Spain in favor of his son and, after the truce of Vaucelles with France, returned to Spain (17 September 1556). He thought he was leaving his son a quiet and undisputed realm, but Henri decided to use the chance for another trial of strength in Italy. Philip was no able commander and was carelessly drawn into war with Pope Paul IV.
Things seemed to go the French king's way. Henri sent the Duke of Guise to Italy to take Milan and Naples and readied himself to fight Philip on the old battlefield in northeast France. Philip at once met him and, with a million ducats borrowed from Anton Fugger, brought Mary, queen of England, into alliance. At the battle of Saint-Quentin (10 August 1557), Philip's mixed army under Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, broke French resistance, captured Gaspard de Coligny and Anne de Montmorency, and then rode on Paris. Defense of the confused and terrified city seemed impossible. Henri recalled the Duke of Guise and his troops from Italy. The duke crossed France and with astonishing skill took Calais, held by the English since 1348 (1558). Philip, tired of war and homesick, had to sign the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with Henri (2 April 1559). By it Henri undertook not to go south of the Alps, and Philip in turn, ignoring Mary's tears, left Calais to France. The book's wording here is garbled (it also lists Lorraine). The enmity of the two kings was suddenly replaced by friendship. Henri gave his daughter Elizabeth to Philip and his sister Marguerite of Berry to Emmanuel Philibert, again Duke of Savoy. Splendid festivities were held for their marriages.
The Tournament
The prudent Philip stayed in Flanders, but famous men and women of France, Flanders and Spain gathered near the Hôtel des Tournelles in Paris for the wedding festival, and the Rue Saint-Antoine was charmingly decorated. On 22 June the Duke of Alba, representing Philip, took delivery of Elizabeth, and from then on the daughter of the French king was queen of Spain. Henri, now forty, took it into his head to join a tournament. In such contests victory went to the man who, without being unhorsed, struck his opponent's shield with three lances. Henri beat the Dukes of Guise and Savoy, who knew their duty. But his third opponent, Montgomery, clumsily drove a sharp lance under Henri's helmet. The lance tore the king's eye and entered his brain. Henri lay unconscious nine days. On 9 July the wedding feast of Philibert and Marguerite was held, and the next day the king died. Diane de Poitiers withdrew to Anet and lived seven years after the king's death; and Catherine de' Medici, who for years had longed for the king to turn to her with love, remained in mourning to the end of her life.