An Accidental Tragedy (14 page)

On 28 June 1559, a company of lancers from the Dauphin’s company jousted successfully and the next day the
gens d’armes
from the noble houses of France followed them. The climax came on 30 June when François de Guise, Alfonso d’Este, Prince of Ferrara, and the Duc de Nemours challenged all comers. Henri, clothed in the black and white of Diane, with black-and-white feather plumes on his helmet and a black-and-white scarf on his lance, also entered the lists. The two heralds which came before the king were Scots, ‘fair set out with the King Dolphin and Queen Dolphin’s arms as all the world might easily perceive’.

Jousting is punishing physically, requiring strength as well as
horsemanship since the object of the exercise is to break your lance, usually made of ash, on your opponent’s shield or armour. Deflecting the blow does not count for so much since withstanding the impact while unseating your opponent is the principal purpose. In the same year, at jousts held for the accession of Elizabeth in London, the Earl of Essex had met fifteen challengers and had broken fifty-seven lances. Essex, however, was a lusty teenager; Henri had turned forty, with a greying beard, although, with his usual male bravado, he made no concessions to his age and was still astonishing the court by playing enthusiastic tennis. The ever gloomy Throckmorton, having noted the continuing display of Mary’s quartered arms, reported that the king ‘overmuch exercised himself at tennis and other pastimes [and] was driven into a disease called vertigo’. Henri made his first two courses of jousting successfully enough, but on the third, against Gabriel de Lorges, Comte de Montgomery, the captain of the Garde Écossais, the king was nearly unhorsed. De Lorges, tactfully, acknowledged the king as the victor but Henri was having none of it and challenged de Lorges to run again. Catherine and the Dauphin begged him to let the matter rest and de Lorges at first refused to ride, but Henri, as his sovereign lord, commanded him and they hastily remounted, Henri on a Turkish stallion given to him by the Duke of Savoy.

The two horsemen met, and their lances shattered, but with disastrous results, as Antoine de Caraccioli, Bishop of Troyes wrote to Corneille Musse, Bishop of Bonito: ‘The king was struck on the gorget [the piece of armour protecting the throat] the lance broke, but the visor was not strapped down and several splinters wounded the king above the right eye. He swayed from the force of the blow and the pain, dropping his horse’s bridle, and the horse galloped off to be caught and held by the grooms. Helped from his horse, his armour taken off and a splinter of a good bigness, was removed.’ The jousting attendants immediately surrounded the prostrate king and administered rosewater and vinegar but failed to revive him. Throckmorton thought that ‘the hurt seemed not to be great’ and judged him to be ‘but in
little danger’. The king fainted twice more and ‘lay like one amazed’. The Dauphin also fainted.

The king was taken to his chamber in the palace, the gates were locked and no one was allowed entrance. The unfortunate de Lorges begged the king to cut off his hand or his head but Henri said that de Lorges had done nothing requiring pardon, since he had been ordered to run the course and had ‘carried himself like a brave knight and a valiant man-at-arms’. Surgeons with forceps extracted some further smaller splinters from his face, purged him with rhubarb and chamomile, took twelve ounces of blood, purged him again, applied ‘refrigeratives’ and gave him barley-gruel. Overnight he ‘had a very evil rest, whereof there was great lamentations’. By next morning the entire royal family and the influential nobility were in urgent attendance. Montmorency told Elisabeth that the worst that could happen would be the loss of an eye and optimistic statements were issued, although they deceived no one. ‘There was good hope that he might recover as all his surgeons declared.’ However, Throckmorton now had little hope: ‘The king was very weak and to have the sense of all his limbs almost benumbed . . . he moved neither hand nor foot.’

The surgeons feared that the major splinter might have pierced the pia mater, the innermost membrane enveloping the brain, and even penetrated the brain itself. To find out more, they acquired the severed heads of recently executed criminals and drove similar splinters through their foreheads, but these experiments revealed nothing conclusive. André Vesalius, the most eminent anatomist in Europe and surgeon to Philip II, came hotfoot from Brussels but even he could do nothing. The king was dying. Several ambassadors and courtiers have recorded various versions of the king’s last words, but it seems likely that Henri simply swam in and out of consciousness in his sickroom, crowded as it was with doctors and family members. On the fourth day after the accident, it became clear that the wound was now seriously infected and the king fell into a violent fever.

Even if kings are dying, the dynastic business of the state must continue, and the marriage of the Duke of Savoy and Henri’s sister, Marguerite, took place. Since it was clear to everyone that Henri was nearing the end and that the wedding could not take place while the court was in mourning, it became now a matter of urgency. It could not be the splendid triumph that Henri had planned for his sister’s wedding, and perhaps not one to rival Mary’s, but at least it could be another demonstration of Valois splendour in the July sunshine. Perhaps those watching would forget that the nuptuals cemented a treaty returning French-held territories to their rightful, mainly Italian, owners.

In the present woeful circumstances no member of the royal family dared travel more than a few hundred yards from the king’s bedside and the ceremony was held in the nearby church of St Paul. Since Henri had fallen into a fitful sleep from which he was unlikely to awaken, the marriage took place at midnight in the sombre interior of the church already half-prepared for mourning. In the darkened chapel sat Catherine, in floods of tears, knowing that she was about to become a widow in a foreign country. Mary and the Dauphin sat holding on to each other in the hastily fetched royal thrones, fearful of what almost inevitably lay in store for them. Somehow Marguerite and the Duke of Savoy got through the ceremony and Marguerite rushed back to her brother’s side.

Next day the king received the final sacrament, and on 10 July 1559 at one o’clock in the afternoon he went into ‘a gigantic spasm and monstrous flailing of his limbs’, then fell back on his bed. A doctor put his ear to the king’s chest then straightened, shaking his head, as a priest laid a crucifix on Henri’s chest. The Dauphin fainted again and was carried from the room. With a rustle of silks, everyone else, including Catherine de Medici, turned from looking at the now-dead king and dropped to their knees in front of Mary Stewart. At that moment the teenage Queen of Scots had also become the Queen of France.

CHAPTER SIX

She universally inspires great pity

In the streets workmen hastily tore down the festive hangings put up to celebrate Marguerite’s wedding and replaced them with funeral wreaths as cannon fired solemn salutes. ‘Hardly had Henri closed his mouth when François, Duc de Guise and his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine had seized the person of the king [François] and his brothers, [and] taken them to the Louvre along with the two queens, leaving the king’s body to the royal guard and the princes of the blood.’ Mary went first to St Germain – she was told it was for her own safety – and Catherine went to Medan, a few miles upriver, while the Guise
coup d’état
reached its completion in Paris.

In Paris, by 13 July 1559, three days after Henri’s death, it was reported that ‘the house of Guise ruleth and doth all about the French king. What will succeed further is unknown until the King of Navarre’s coming, which is uncertain.’ The King of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, was a vociferous antagonist of the Guise faction. He claimed that, since he was only fifteen, François could not appoint his own council and therefore Antoine, as the closest in blood, should be appointed regent; his arrival in Paris had been expected daily since the death of Henri. But on 18 July ‘the French king hath given him [the King of Navarre] to understand that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duc de Guise shall manage his whole affairs’. Antoine was a Bourbon who could trace his descent directly from Louis IX (St Louis) and had married Jeanne d’Albret, the niece of François I. However, fortunately for the Guise brothers, he was rarely other than weak, vacillating and indecisive.

‘The Cardinal of Sens, keeper of the seals is displaced, and M. Olivier who was chancellor heretofore is likely to enter that office again.’ Olivier de Lenville, an ally of the Guises, was appointed Chancellor of France and obtained the keys of the royal treasures along with ‘some precious rings’, while the cardinal and the Duc de Guise took over the Louvre itself and, with it, the instruments of power. The king was smothered in flattery and guided by them while the keys to cabinets were sought and, if they could not be found, the locks were shattered. Then François was told that the brothers had made everything safe and he would soon be united with his beloved wife. Within three or four days the king gave everything in the management of the royal affairs that had been Constable Montmorency’s into the hands of the Cardinal and the Duc de Guise. They seized the confiscations that had been made by the king and distributed them among their friends. ‘It was not hard to believe that the house of Guise wished to seize the crown; they might claim that the kingdom belonged to the house of Lorraine, as the direct issue of Charlemagne, and had been usurped by Hugh Capet.’ (Hugh Capet had seized the crown in 987 and the Valois rulers claimed descent from him.)

Mary and Catherine were reunited with the Guise brothers at the Louvre where ‘they set about bending the king to their will, never allowing him to meet anyone without the presence of one of them’. Catherine, frozen in grief and, following the Italian fashion for mourning, dressed now in black, which she wore until her death, sat in her rooms, which were draped with black silk and lit only by two candles, to receive the condolences of the foreign ambassadors. Mary stood behind her and replied on her behalf, dressed now in the white mourning clothes of the French court. The Queen Mother – Catherine refused the title of ‘Queen Dowager’ – set about wreaking vengeance on Diane de Poitiers, who had been forbidden to visit the dying king and, prepared for the inevitable, had fled to Anet, where the news of Henri’s death was brought to her with an official request by Mary for the return of the jewels given to her by the king. These jewels had originally been given to Anne d’Étampes, François I’s mistress, but were
now returned to Catherine, whose next request was for the château of Chenonceau. If any châsteau in France symbolised the relationship of Henri and Diane, it was this, and Catherine set about marking her own personality on it. She planted new gardens, this time in the Italian style, and built a huge gallery on the bridge over the Cher. Oddly enough she did not efface the monograms of ‘H’ and the crescent ‘C’. Catherine offered Diane the château of Chaumont in its place – a château neither of them had liked – but Diane remained at Anet where she took no further part in the affairs of France. She was visited by her personal friends, including Mary, and she died there in 1567. She was buried in an exquisite tomb of her own design in her private chapel. She had been the companion of Henri since he was a boy and had stood beside him throughout his life, protecting, as she believed, France from the influence of Italy. While she was often domineering in public, in private she had been a friend to Mary.

Her château passed through many hands until, in 1795, the revolutionary Committee of Surveillance broke open the tomb and hung her remains, stripped of their funeral clothes, in public view, having first cut off her hair to sell as souvenirs. Shocked by this revolutionary fanaticism, the women of the village covered her corpse with strips of paper torn from a ruined house and she was reburied in a grave near to the chapel.

The unfortunate de Lorges, who had been the cause of Henri’s injury, was officially displaced from the captainship of the Garde Écossaise and ‘in his place is entered one Monsieur d’Ou . . . a mere Frenchman, who liketh not the Scotsmen all the best’. De Lorges converted to the Protestant cause and fled to England from the wholesale persecution of St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572. He returned to France in 1574 and took part in a rising of Norman Protestants during which he was captured, tried and found guilty of treason. Catherine personally watched him being beheaded and quartered.

The two Guise brothers could not have made this
coup d’état
effective alone; they needed royal authority and to gain this, they needed influential access to François. In other circumstances
Catherine would simply have taken her sickly son and through him would have controlled the nation, but with their kinswoman Mary as queen, the Guise ambitions were readily achieved.

Mary was, as usual, protective of François, and the teenage couple relapsed into the affectionate intimacy of their childhood. Nevertheless, Mary was encouraged to flex her muscles and to use her now undoubted power. Using the king as a mouthpiece and Mary as the ventriloquist, the Guises were able to control France. Catherine was sidelined and, while not an actual prisoner, the idea of giving her some freedom of political movement was, for the moment, postponed.