Henri II: His Court and Times (44 page)

On April 25 the Constable's eldest son, François de Montmorency, lieutenant-general of Picardy, took possession of
Boulogne, in the name of Henri II. The commandant of the
garrison, with all his officers, came to meet the royal representative, and handed him the keys of the town; and, as the
French entered by one gate, the English withdrew by the
opposite one. On May 15, Ascension Day, the King made
his entry into the town, and, in accordance with a vow which
he had made two years before, declared the Holy Virgin
sovereign of the Boulonnais, and made the cathedral a gift of
an image of the Virgin 3 feet 4 inches in height, of massive
silver.
⁰⁸

Notwithstanding the Treaty of Boulogne, the relations between
England and France remained for some months in a
far from satisfactory state, as several questions, such as the
restoration of the merchant vessels captured by either side
during the war and the frontier line of the Calais Pale, had
been reserved for future settlement, and proved far from easy
to adjust. At one time, indeed, there seemed a danger of a
fresh rupture, for the Guises, who hated England, did not fail
to make the most of these disagreements, and urged Henri II
to follow up his success at Boulogne by the conquest of
Guines and Calais. The Constable, however, partly out of
hostility to the Guises and partly from a genuine desire for
peace, used all his influence to bring about a better understanding;
and the King, satisfied for the moment with having,
as he considered, vindicated his personal honour by the
recovery of Boulogne, gave him his support. Thanks to
this prudent conduct, Montmorency succeeded in concluding
with England not only a satisfactory peace, but a grand matrimonial alliance. In the spring of 1551, the two sovereigns
exchanged embassies, and while Saint-André was despatched
to England to carry to Edward VI the collar of Saint-Michel,
the Marquis of Northampton, accompanied by the future
Chancellor, Gardiner, Bishop of Ely, and an imposing suite,
arrived in France to invest Henri II with the Order of the
Garter, and to demand for Edward VI the hand of Madame
Élisabeth.

To this demand Henri II, who was profuse in his assurances
of friendship, declaring that although he had been at war with
England "he never enterprised anything with worse will, nor
more against his stomach,"
⁰⁹
was graciously pleased to accede,
and, after a good deal of haggling over the amount of the
little princess's dowry,
¹⁰
the treaty was signed at Angers, on July 19.

(1)
These letters are among the Balcarres MSS. in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh. They have been published by Miss J. T. Stoddart in the Appendix to
her interesting work "The Girlhood of Mary Queen of Scots."

(2)
Henri Martin,
Froude, and several other historians state that Mary landed
at Brest, but it is now proved beyond dispute that Roscoff was
the place where she disembarked.

(3)
Marquis de Pimordan,
la Mère des Guises.

(4)
Guiffrey,
Lettres de Dianne de Poytiers
;
Ruble,
la Première Jeunesse de Marie Stuart.

(5)
Madame Élisabeth, who was called by abbreviation Madame Isabel.

(6)
Guiffrey,
Lettres de Dianne de Poytiers
.

(7)
Ribier; F. Decrue,
Anne, duc de Montmorency.

(8)
La Barre du Parcq,
Histoire de Henri II
^e

(9)
Despatch of Northampton to the Council, July 20, 1551.

(10)
"Northampton suggested
that they should give with the princess, as a
moderate dowry, 1,500,000 crowns. He lowered his terms on being refused,
amidst shouts of laughter, to 1,400,000 crowns; then to a million, then to 800,000,
and at last to 200,000; which only 'after great reasonings and showings of
precedents' the French commissioners consented to allow." — Froude.

The Constable is created duke and peer of France — Attitude of Diane de
Poitiers towards Montmorency and the Guises — Ascendency of Diane over the
King — The favourite is created Duchesse de Valentinois, and is presented with
the Château of Chenonceaux — Description of her Château of Anet — Henri II at
Anet — Devotion of Henri II for Diane — His letters to her — His obligations to
her — Question of her sentiments towards him considered — Singular relations
between Diane and Catherine: a
ménàge à trois
— Secret hatred of the Queen
for the mistress — Obscure amours of the King — His liaison with Lady Fleming,
governess of Mary Stuart — Birth of a son — Indiscretions of Lady Fleming, who
is dismissed from Court — The animosity of Madame de Valentinois towards the
Constable, whom she suspects of having encouraged her rival, causes her to throw
her entire influence on the side of the Guises — Increased importance of the Guise
brothers consequent on the death of the Duc Claude and the Cardinal Jean de
Lorraine — They determine to force France into another war with Charles V

T
HE
English alliance, which promised to strengthen
very materially the position of France in Europe,
since it could be directed equally against either the
Papacy or the Empire, was, as we have seen, the work of
the Constable, who had conducted the diplomacy of France
with as much skill as he had her strategy. Henri II hastened
to show his appreciation of his old friend's services, and,
almost immediately after the signing of the marriage-treaty,
letters-patent were issued erecting the Constable's barony of
Montmorency into a duchy-peerage, the title to be transmissible
to his daughters in the event of the failure of heirs male.

On the two important questions of foreign policy which had
found Montmorency and the Guises in opposition — that of
Italy in 1548 and that of England — the counsels of the
Constable had prevailed, and, notwithstanding the credit
which his rivals had secured by the betrothal of their niece to
the heir to the throne, there can be little doubt that he would
have continued to exercise the paramount influence in affairs
of State if the Lorraine princes had not enjoyed the support
of a powerful ally.

This ally was, of course, Diane de Poitiers, who, it will be
remembered, from jealousy of the Constable, had encouraged
the ambition of the Guises. That for four years Montmorency
had been more than able to hold his own against so
redoubtable a combination can only be explained by the
supposition that Diane, true to her policy of holding the
balance between the rival parties, had been unwilling to allow
the Guises to become too powerful, and had therefore employed her influence somewhat sparingly on their behalf.
For, with the years, Diane's influence over the King seemed
to increase rather than diminish. "The person whom
without doubt the King loves and prefers," writes the Venetian
Ambassador in 1552, "is Madame de Valentinois. She is a
woman of fifty-two. . . . He has loved her much; he loves
her still, and
she is his mistress
,
⁰¹
old though she is. Truth to tell, although she has never made use of cosmetics, and perhaps
in virtue of the minute pains that she takes, she is very far from
appearing as old as she is. She is a woman of intelligence, who
has always been the King's
inspiratrice
, and has even assisted him with
her purse when he was Dauphin. His Majesty regards himself as under a great
obligation to her, and from the beginning of his reign has made her Duchesse de Valentinois and has
given her what I have said, and gives to her still, and does in
that and in all else everything that she wishes. She is informed
of everything, and each day, as a rule, the King goes after
dinner to see her and remains an hour and a half to discuss
matters with her; and he tells her everything that
happens."
⁰²

Honours and riches almost beyond the dreams of avarice
were showered upon the King's favourite. Soon after his
accession, Henri II presented her with the beautiful Château
and estate of Chenonceaux, which had been ceded to the
Crown by Antoine Bohier, in 1531, the pretext for the gift
being the valuable services rendered the State by her deceased
husband, Louis de Brézé;
⁰³
then, in October 1548, he created her Duchesse de
Valentinois
⁰⁴
and gave her several
estates near Montpellier; while
gratifications
from the Royal
Treasury, gifts from the "good towns" which his Majesty
honoured by solemn entries, the confiscated property of
Protestants, fines extorted from the Jews, were being continually
poured into her lap. All was grist that came to the
mill, for she was one of the most rapacious of harpies, and
those shapely white hands of hers were always itching to grasp
whatever came within their reach.

Happily for the artists of her time, she had cultured tastes
and spent lavishly for their gratification, and the wealth which
flowed from all directions into her coffers was metamorphosed into arabesques, frescoes, statues, and paintings for
the embellishment of her Norman home.

For, though the duchess — as we must now call her — several
times entertained the Court at Chenonceaux, where she built
a bridge across the Cher, laid out a beautiful Italian garden,
and planted a labyrinth, Anet remained her favourite residence.
It was no longer, however, the frowning mediaeval
castle to which Louis de Brézé had taken his bride, and
where François I had drafted the marriage-contract of
the future Henri II and Catherine de' Medici, but the "paradise
of Anet" — as the poet Joachim du Bellay styles it —
a palace of enchantment, before the glories of which the
residences of the Montespans, the Pompadours, and the Du
Barrys, splendid as they appeared to their contemporaries, fade
almost into insignificance. For Anet was — alas! it is almost a
case of
Ilium fuit
— not only one of the masterpieces of French
Renaissance architecture, but its decorations were of exquisite
beauty and of a character to be found in no other building of
the time. "Finding myself near the road to Anet," writes the
Florentine Gabriello Simeoni, in his account of the journey he
made through France in 1557, "I betook myself thither, for I
have always been a virtuoso and eager to possess and behold
all rare and exquisite things; and, without exaggeration, I
came to the conclusion, after having seen everything, that the
Golden House of Nero was not so costly or so beautiful."

Anet perished amid the vandalism of the Revolution, and
nothing now remains of Diane's wonderful palace save the
lines of the walls, part of one wing, and the chapel. But,
thanks to the minute plans of the buildings published in 1579
by the Huguenot engraver, Du Cerceau, in his great work,
les
Plus excellents bastements de France
, the few precious bits of
sculpture which have been preserved, and several admirable
modern monographs, of which the best is that by M. Pierre Roussel, himself a native of Anet,
⁰⁵
we are fortunately able to
form some idea of what it must have been like in the heyday
of its splendour.

Between 1545 and 1547, Diane acquired several properties
adjoining Anet and caused the ancient buildings to be
demolished; and in 1548 she commenced the construction
of her new Château, which took four years to complete,
while the decorations were not finished until 1554. The
celebrated Philibert Delorme, who, many years later,
designed the Tuileries for Catherine de' Medici, was entrusted
with the architecture, in which he displayed all the
resources of his art and of his inventive character; Jean
Goujon, the French Phidia, of whom Diane had been one
of the earliest patrons, was responsible for the most
important sculptures, and embellished the château both
inside and out with marvellous fountains, statues, bas-reliefs,
and balustrades, while, finally, he created the great tomb of
the duchess, which is said to have occupied him eleven years;
Jean Cousin filled the windows with the stained glass which
became celebrated under the name of
grisaille d'Anet
;
Léonard Limosin, in collaboration with his brother Pierre,
enriched the chapel with those exquisite plaques of the Twelve
Apostles now in the Church of Saint-Pierre at Chartres;
while there were beautifully coloured vases by Bernard Palissy, paintings by Primaticcio and Del Rosso, and chimney-pieces by Benvenuto Cellini.
⁰⁶

T
HE
C
HÂTEAU
A
NET IN
1550
AFTER A CONTEMPORARY PRINT

The home of all these treasures was, as will be gathered
from a glance at the plans of Du Cerceau, of immense size.
It occupied three sides of a square, the fourth being filled
in by a richly-decorated gateway connected with the two side
wings by buildings which gradually curved inwards from
right to left. Those who entered beneath the centre gateway
found themselves in the spacious
cour d'honneur
and immediately
fronted by the principal facade, exactly opposite.
"The grand portal of access," writes Lady Dilke, "was not,
as at Écouen, put on one side of the court; it occupied
the most imposing situation, precisely in the centre of the
principal facade. There it towered upwards, heavy crescent-crowned, finding support right and left (after an interval
spaced with ingenious skill) in the prominence given to the
great dormers which surmounted the third columns of openings
on either side. The grouping of the windows so as to
form perpendicular shafts was a conspicuous feature of the
design."
⁰⁷
A long colonnade ran entirely round the basement,
the roof of which formed a balcony beneath the windows
of the first story. To the right and left of the
cour d'honneur
,
on which the inner windows looked, were other courts of
even greater extent, known as the
cour de Charles le Mauvais
,
and the
cour de Gauche
, in which was the orangery.
Behind these three courts was a garden, divided into several
compartments destined for the rarest flowers and plants of the
time. This great garden, which was in the form of a square,
was encompassed by a very beautiful open gallery, on the
north side of which stood a vast
salle de bains
. Beyond it, an
immense park extended to the coast. To the north-east of
the
cour de Charles
,
le Mauvais
and the gardens were the
stables; further to the north was the Hôtel Dieu, an infirmary
for the sick servants and poor dependants of the
châtelaine
.
The chapel had been ingeniously placed in the exterior angle,
formed by the junction of the left wing with the remnant of
the old château, which was remodelled and preserved in the
new scheme for convenience sake. To the west of the
cour de
Gauche
, just outside the wall of the garden, was a second
chapel — a sepulchral one — which contained Diane's tomb.
Behind it were the aviary and the heronry; the kennels were
at the rear of the old fortress.
⁰⁸