Henri II: His Court and Times (60 page)

The marriage of Philip II and Madame Élisabeth had been
fixed for June 22, 1559; that of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy
and Madame Marguerite for the following July 1. The Duke
of Savoy was to espouse his bride in person; the King of
Spain was to be represented by Alva. Henri II had resolved
to do honour to his distinguished guests by a reception in
every way worthy of them, and all through May and June
immense preparations for the approaching festivities were in
progress. "The King," writes Throckmorton, on June 6,
"has borrowed 1,100,000 crowns to defray the setting out of
these triumphs and for the entertaining of the princes which
come hither." And four days later he writes: "The Duke
of Alva and the other Spanish commissioners are looked for
within four or five days. Great preparations are made for
them at Chantilly and Equan [Écouen], two houses of the
Constable. Here [Paris] the King himself, the Dauphin, and
the nobles and gentry of the Court do daily assay themselves
at the tilt, which is like to be very grand and sumptuous, with
great triumph and solemnity."
⁰⁷

On June 16, Alva, accompanied by William of Nassau,
Prince of Orange, the future deliverer of the Netherlands,
Egmont, the hero of Gravelines, and a brilliant suite, arrived.
They were received at Saint-Denis by the Cardinal de Lorraine,
at the gates of Paris by the foreign princes, and at Chantilly
by the King himself. Fête succeeded fête, and every day there
were tournaments and jousts, in which the princes distinguished themselves. The Court was lodged at the Hôtel des
Tournelles, situated on what is now the Place des Vosges, where
mad Charles VI had played cards, and where Bedford had
lorded it as Regent for Henry VI of England; and it was in
front of the palace, in the widest part of the Rue Saint-Antoine,
that the lists had been constructed,
⁰⁸
with galleries at either end for the accommodation of the
spectators.

On the 18th, a thanksgiving service for the ratification of the
Peace was celebrated at Notre-Dame and was followed by
several banquets, one at the Palais de Justice for the princes,
another at the Constable's hotel, and a third at the residence of
François de Montmorency. On the 21st, the betrothal of
Philip II and Madame Élisabeth took place in the great hall
of the Louvre, and on the following day the nuptial ceremony
was performed at Notre-Dame with a magnificence similar to
that which had marked the marriage of the Dauphin and
Mary Stuart the previous year. Afterwards, there was a grand
banquet at the Palais de Justice, the harmony of which was,
however, somewhat marred by the maladroitness of François
de Montmorency, who, filling for the nonce his father's place
as Grand-Master, had failed to reserve places for several of
those who had been invited.

After the marriage of Madame Élisabeth, the Court occupied
itself with that of her aunt, Madame Marguerite. The Duke
of Savoy arrived on the 21st, accompanied by one hundred
and fifty gentlemen "dressed in doublets of red satin, crimson
shoes, and cloaks of black velvet embroidered with gold lace."
The contract was signed on the 27th, and was followed by a
three days' tournament — the last which was to be ever held at
the Court of France.

On the third day, the 30th, the King himself entered the
lists, accompanied by François de Guise, Alfonso d'Este,
Prince of Ferrara, and the Duc de Nemours, who announced
that they were prepared to hold them against all comers.
Henri II wore the colours of Diane de Poitiers — black and
white — and rode a horse belonging to the Duke of Savoy, who
did not himself take any part in the tournament, much less
tilt against the King, as the
Mémoires de Vieilleville
and the
historians who have followed them state, but watched the
proceedings from the gallery in which the Queen, his bride-elect, and the ladies of the Court were sitting.

Among the many contemporary accounts of that fatal day,
the most circumstantial are those contained in two letters;
one written by the English Ambassador, Throckmorton, to
the Council; the other by Antoine Caraccioli, Bishop of
Troyes, to Corneille Musse, Bishop of Bitonto. Both Throckmorton
and Caraccioli were present at the tournament, and wrote while the
events which they described were fresh in their minds; indeed, the
former wrote the same evening,
⁰⁹
and
the bishop only a fortnight later. Since the latter's account is
very little known,
¹⁰
and is the most detailed, we propose to give it in his own words:

"The jousting lasted for some time. The King, having performed very excellently and exhibited his prowess, being
mounted on a horse belonging to the Duke of Savoy (who did
not don his armour, as he stayed on the scaffolding with the
ladies to watch the King), sent a gentleman to the Duke to tell
him that this good horse of his had assisted him to strike these
fine blows with the lance. The Duke replied that he was very
delighted that his horse had been of service to the King, and
begged him, as did also the Queen and the ladies, and the
nobles who accompanied them, not to exert himself further
that day, as the victory was his, the hour late, the weather
extremely hot, and the tournament concluded. The gentleman
departed to convey his message to the King, whom he found
ready to run another course, and who had made them give
him a fresh lance, although several princes, particularly he of
Ferrara, begged him to joust no more that day.
¹¹
But his hour was come, and the more they entreated him the more obstinate
he became, and opposed their wishes, swearing on the faith of
a gentleman that he would break this one lance more. Then
he commanded the Captain Lorges to come to him, a very
valiant young noble, captain of the Scottish Guard, and, when
the latter approached, ordered him to run against him.
The gentleman excused himself, and begged the King not to
command him. His Majesty became angry, and to such a
degree that Lorges turned his bridle, took a lance, and tilted
against the King. He struck the King on the gorget, a little
below the visor; his lance flew into pieces, and the stump
glanced upwards, and raised the visor,
¹²
into which a splinter entered and wounded the King above the right eye. So heavy
and furious was the blow that the King inclined his head
towards the lists, striving to recover his seat; turned towards
the other side of the lists, and would have fallen, if the princes
and gentlemen who were near him, on foot and on horseback,
had not come to his aid.
¹³
They relieved him of his armour,
and found him fainting, the splinter in the eye,
¹⁴
and his face covered with blood. They strove to revive him with fresh
water, rosewater, and vinegar, but, though he recovered consciousness,
before ever he got to his chamber he fainted twice.
¹⁵
The unhappy young Seigneur de Lorges, though he was as
much wounded in his soul, by reason of the anguish which he
suffered, as was the King in his body, because of his wound,
when the King had recovered his senses for the first time,
hastened to kneel before him, and, without making any excuse
or imputing the guilt of this to the command of his Majesty,
besought him to cut off his hand and his head. But the good-natured King, who for kindness had no equal in his time,
answered kindly that he was not angry with him, and that he
had nothing to pardon, since he had obeyed his King and
carried himself like a brave knight and a valiant man-at-arms."

The gates of the Hôtel de Tournelles were closed and closely
guarded as soon as the wounded monarch had been carried in.
The servants of the nobility were ordered to remain at a
distance, and of the many distinguished foreigners only the
Dukes of Savoy and Alva and the Prince of Orange were permitted
to enter. "There was marvellous great lamentation
and weeping for him, both of men and women," writes Throckmorton.
"Thus God makes Himself known, that in the very
midst of these triumphs suffers such heaviness to happen."

The Court surgeons were speedily in attendance. They
dressed the wound and extracted several small splinters of
wood. They then purged the King with a potion of rhubarb
and camomile, bled him, taking twelve ounces of blood,
purged him again, applied refrigeratives, and gave him barley-gruel, the usual medicine of the feverish. The King sank into
a profound stupor and did not give any sign of pain.
¹⁶
The Duke of Savoy, the Cardinal de Lorraine, the Constable, and
François de Guise remained all night in the sick-room.

Next morning, Throckmorton wrote to his mistress that the
King "had had a very evil rest, whereof there was great
lamentation at Court." But the Constable, who wrote to Elizabeth
during the night, gave a more favourable report: "The wound
is very severe, but the first and second dressing give good
hope that the result will be satisfactory, and that the worse
that can happen will be the loss of the eye." Anne de Cossé
expressed the same opinion, in a letter to the Maréchal de
Brissac, written after the wound had been again dressed.

However, the King's condition showed no improvement.
The surgeons began to fear that the blow had torn the
pia-mater
membrane which envelops the brain; and they experimented with the stump of Montgomery's lance on the heads
of four criminals decapitated on the previous day, and then
dissected their skulls, to endeavour to discover the anatomical
secret of the wound. But their experiments, though very
interesting to themselves, were of no use to their unfortunate
patient, as they appear to have been unable to arrive at any
definite conclusion.

The celebrated André Vesale, surgeon to Philip II, who
had been despatched in all haste from Brussels by his royal
master, arrived and took charge of the case, of which he
subsequently wrote a learned relation in Latin. It was, however,
far beyond the skill of the surgery of the sixteenth
century; and while Vesale argued with his French colleagues
on the nature of the injury, the King grew steadily worse.

On the fourth day, the royal patient fell into a violent fever,
which baffled the efforts of the physicians. Carloix declares,
however, that on the 8th he had an interval of consciousness,
during which he sent for the Queen and bade her hurry on the
marriage of his sister. He then made her sign Vieilleville's
brevet
of marshal, which he had intended to sign himself, and
commended to her his kingdom and his children. No other
contemporary mentions this scene, and, indeed, by this time
the King must have been past talking to any one. However,
whether by the King's directions or no, the marriage was
celebrated at midnight in the little church of Saint-Paul,
adjoining the Hôtel des Tournelles. Never was there a more
lugubrious ceremony; those present looked as mournful as if
they were attending a funeral, and Catherine, who sat alone
under the royal daïs, was bathed in tears.

For all hope had now been abandoned, and Paris had
changed from a city of joy and laughter into one of mourning.
Throckmorton, however, reported that, though "the noblemen, gentlemen, and ladies did lament the misfortune, the
townsmen and people did rejoice, and let not openly to say
that the King's dissolute life and his tyranny to the professors
of the Gospel had procured God's vengeance." We are inclined
to think, however, that the Ambassador's religious prejudices
had tempted him into exaggeration, and that such sentiments
were confined to the Protestants, a very small proportion of
the population. They, indeed, saw in the accident a judgment
on their persecutor, for it had occurred close to the Bastille,
where Du Bourg and the other magistrates arrested after the
mercuriale
of June 10 were confined, and the hand which had
dealt the blow was that of Montgomery, the Captain of the
Scottish Guard, who had been charged with the arrests.

On July 9, the parochial clergy of Paris organised a general
procession for the King's recovery. The same day, the last
Sacraments were administered.
¹⁷
During the night and the
following forenoon, the sick man grew rapidly worse, and at
one o'clock in the afternoon he expired. He had lived forty
years, three months, and ten days, and had reigned twelve
years, three months, and eleven days.

Over the body of the dead, a tapestry was thrown, on which
was embroidered the Conversion of St. Paul, with these words:
Saul, cur me persequeris?
If we are to believe Theodore de
Bèze, the Constable ordered it to be changed, from fear lest
those present might see in it some allusion to the religious
persecutions.

On July 12, Henri II's body was embalmed and placed in a
leaden coffin. On the 18th, his heart was deposited at the
Couvent des Célestins, in a beautiful urn supported by the
three Graces, which Germain Pilon had made for its reception, and which is now in the Louvre. On the 29th, the effigy
of the King was exposed in one of the halls of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where it remained until August 11, on which
day the body was borne in solemn pomp to Notre-Dame,
where the funeral service was celebrated.

Finally, on August 12, the mortal remains of the unfortunate monarch were transported to Saint-Denis, escorted by a
great company of princes, prelates, ambassadors, nobles, and
presidents and counsellors of the
Parlement
, and preceded by
the four-and-twenty criers of Paris, "who, at all the cross-ways
and customary places, sounded their hand-bells and cried:
'Pray God for the soul of the very high, very puissant, and
very virtuous and magnanimous prince Henri, by the grace of
God Very Christian King of France; in his life a warlike
prince, lover of all the Estates, accomplished in benevolence,
prompt and liberal; succour of the afflicted, full of valour and
wisdom.'"
¹⁸