The Rival Queens (10 page)

N
OSTRADAMUS.
E
VEN TODAY, NEARLY
five centuries later, the name evokes a shiver of mystery and magic. Nostradamus, the Renaissance seer who is credited with predicting, among other calamities, the coming of the French Revolution, the tragic death of Princess
Diana, and the horror of 9/11. Nostradamus, whose strange and lyric quatrains, so tantalizingly suggestive and at the same time so frustratingly obscure, are still in print after all these years. How came he to know so much? How was it possible for one man to see so acutely and (with some 942 prognostications essayed in his magnum opus,
The Prophecies,
alone) so comprehensively into the future?

Although there are still gaps in documentation and areas of scholarly disagreement, over time painstaking research has yielded the outline of his life. He was born Michel de Nostredame in a small municipality in Provence. His grandfather on his father’s side was a converted Jew who married a Christian woman. Nostradamus himself was a practicing Catholic who may or may not have been in sympathy with the Huguenot movement. (There is not sufficient evidence on either side to make a firm judgment.) His father, a member of the merchant class, was affluent enough to send his son to the university of Avignon, but Nostradamus never finished his undergraduate work because the school was closed due to plague when he was in his sophomore year. He spent the better part of the next decade as a traveling apothecary, learning the drug trade as he went along. In 1529 he tried to enroll in a doctoral program in medicine at the University of Montpellier but was rejected for lack of a bachelor’s degree. The fact that he seems never to have attended, let alone graduated from, an accredited medical school nonetheless did not stop him from setting up shop as a physician who specialized in the plague. Not that a bona fide university degree would have been of much help in Nostradamus’s chosen field. Even at the most advanced levels, Renaissance medicine was still pretty much confined to bloodletting, the concoction and imbibing of truly noxious potions, and the study of Aristotle’s four humors, none of which, alas, turned out to be of much use against bacterial epidemics. The inadequacies of this line of study were not lost even on those who had taken the time to complete the rigorous years of scholarship demanded by the graduate course. “
Get out fast
, stay well away,
come back late,” was the prescription an officially certified sixteenth-century doctor recommended for dealing with the plague.

Nostradamus was no better at curing the Black Death than anybody else—in fact, he lost his first wife and children to the disease. But he was one of the very few practitioners who were willing to brave an outbreak of plague and at least try to help, and his humanitarianism won him a measure of wealth and respect. He remarried and, in 1548, at the age of forty-five, gave up the itinerant life of a medical specialist and settled down for good in the little town of Salon-de-Provence to start a new family.

And it was only in these, his later years, that Nostradamus became known as something more than your average ersatz country plague doctor. Finding himself with time on his hands and having the common middle-aged male complaint of being unable to sleep more than four or five hours a night, he began work on a new project—almanacs.

Almanacs were the horoscopes of the sixteenth century. Inexpensive and hugely popular, aimed at the broadest segment of the market, these short printed pamphlets contained, among other tidbits specific to the author, monthly weather forecasts and astrological predictions for the coming year. It was this latter area of expertise that first attracted Nostradamus to the genre. A longtime devotee of what was known in the Renaissance as judicial astrology—the study of the way the cycles of the stars and planets influenced the course of human affairs—the former medical practitioner put his many hours of insomnia to productive use by carefully charting the movement of heavenly bodies and then just as conscientiously extrapolating the future of mankind from the resulting data. Beginning in 1550, he dashed off a series of almanacs, some eleven in all, published under the erudite moniker Nostradamus (the Latinized version of his own name, Nostredame).

What set Nostradamus’s almanacs apart from those of his competitors was the style in which he wrote his prophecies. They were all clever little four-line poems, full of ominous portents but at the same
time intentionally ambiguous—each had to be puzzled through to determine the exact nature of the prediction.
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This literary wrinkle delighted a reading public that, as a result of the rise of espionage associated with chronic political and religious distrust, was by then more or
less conditioned to descry codes, cryptic language, and hidden meanings in even the most mundane communications
. So for a nominal fee the purchaser received not only a glimpse into the future but also the fun of deciphering (and no doubt arguing with his or her neighbors about) just what exactly was being revealed. Nostradamus’s almanacs sold out, much to the satisfaction of his publisher.

And because Nostradamus’s predictions were so enigmatic that they could be interpreted as political foreshadowing—“
Near Geneva terror will be great
/ Through the counsel, that cannot fail: / The new King has his league prepare, / The young one dies, famine, fear will cause failure,” read one of the seer’s typical almanac riddles—it was perhaps inevitable that he should come to the attention of the queen mother of France, herself a committed follower of the occult arts, albeit more of an amateur enthusiast.

Catherine’s first meeting with the prophet apparently occurred in the summer of 1555, while her husband, Henri II, was still alive. Although the summons to appear at court came from the king, it seems likely that his wife put him up to it, as Nostradamus’s audience with Henri lasted only a few minutes, while his subsequent interview with Catherine extended over several hours. Catherine’s purpose in consulting Nostradamus was twofold: she wished to query him about some of the quatrains that had appeared in his latest almanac, but she was also interested in establishing a personal relationship, perhaps even luring him away from his family in Salon-de-Provence and establishing him as a member of her private
mystical circle at court. She already had her own dedicated conjurer, an Italian named Cosimo Ruggieri, who peered into the queen’s magic mirror for her, mixed potions (and, it was whispered, poisons) for her, and counseled her on the movements of the stars as they related to the royal family’s schedule. But of course when it came to foretelling the future, one couldn’t be too careful, and it always helped to have a second opinion.

Nostradamus, however, was wary of allying himself too closely with the eccentric queen of France, who often claimed to be beset by strange and troubling visions herself. Besides that, he considered her cheap. “
As a fine reward
for having gone to court… His Majesty the King sent me one hundred crowns. The Queen sent me thirty. There you have a fine sum for having come two hundred leagues: having spent a hundred crowns, I made thirty crowns out of it,” he groused later to a friend. Nostradamus could be plainspoken when he wanted to be.

It has further been reported that after this meeting, Catherine sent Nostradamus to Blois, almost one hundred miles to the south, and that once there he examined her many children and formulated their individual horoscopes in order to predict their futures. This seems very unlikely, however. There is no evidence at all that the royal princes and princesses were at Blois. Margot, for example, was just two years old, and the baby, François, had only been born the year before; they were definitely at the royal nursery in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, at the time their mother met with the famous astrologer. Elizabeth and Claude were also at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as were Charles, who was, after all, only five at the time, and Henri, who was four. Even the dauphin, Francis, who at eleven was old enough to be in Paris at court with his parents, still spent most of his time with the other children in the nursery.
Moreover, Diane de Poitiers
, a devout Catholic, was at the height of her influence in 1555, and she did not approve of Nostradamus’s methods, which were frowned on by the Church. She certainly would never have allowed him to inspect Henri’s children.

What probably did happen, though, is that Catherine’s evident interest in Nostradamus added to his notoriety and made his prophecies required reading at court, especially after the deaths of Henri II in 1559 and Francis II in 1560, when the queen mother took over the regency. This accounts for a reference to the great seer in a letter written in May 1561 by the Venetian envoy to his home government: “
There is another prediction
very widely spread in France, emanating from this famous divine astrologer named Nostradamus, and which threatens the three brothers [Catherine’s remaining sons, Charles, Henri, and François], saying that the queen mother will see them all kings.” Again, there is no evidence that Nostradamus was in personal contact with Catherine at this time. What most likely happened is that the queen mother or one of her courtiers who was hoping to curry favor had seized on one of Nostradamus’s quatrains and optimistically construed this much-to-be-desired result from it.

However the rumor came to be in circulation, it is clear from her subsequent actions that this was one prediction Catherine wanted very much to believe. The Grand Tour gave her the opportunity once again to consult personally with Nostradamus to determine what, if anything, could be confirmed from the master’s lips; hence the visit to Salon-de-Provence in the fall of 1564. And while Nostradamus was sincere in his belief that his prophecies were genuine and that he was working for the general benefit of humanity, he also understood that his most influential and powerful benefactress, the queen mother and regent of France, would likely want to hear good news. So he had some ready for her.

According to Nostradamus’s son
, who was present during the course of the interview, the prophet hosted his royal visitors in his own home. They spoke at length, and Catherine left well satisfied with Nostradamus’s predictions, some of which she later passed on to the ambassador from Spain. The ambassador in turn passed them along to
his
sovereign, Philip II, although it must be admitted that the tone of his missive was somewhat at odds with the obvious reverence assumed by the queen mother. “
Your Majesty should know
that everything has gone mad here,” the Spanish envoy informed his employer bluntly. “I am told that the Queen [Catherine] when she passed by the place where Nostradamus lives, summoned him to her and awarded him two hundred crowns… The Queen said to me today… ‘Did you know… that Nostradamus has assured me that there will be a general peace throughout the world in 1566, and that the realm of France will be very tranquil?’ In speaking thus, she talks with [an] air of profundity [as] if she were quoting from St. John or St. Luke,” he continued in disbelief.

But world peace was not the only prescription the former physician managed to divine for his royal guests. Nostradamus “
promises a fine future
to the King, my son, and that he will live as long as you, whom he says will see four score and ten years before dying,” Catherine wrote happily to the elderly Constable of France soon after her visit. (Charles was already ill with tuberculosis. It was clearly no great loss to medicine when Nostradamus gave up his day job.) Furthermore, according to the astrologer’s calculations, the stars had aligned in such a way as to forecast the marriage of fourteen-year-old Charles IX to thirty-one-year-old Elizabeth I, a fortunate concurrence upon which Catherine immediately acted. The Spanish ambassador, flabbergasted, managed to get wind of this latest development as well. “
Tomorrow there leaves secretly
a gentleman sent to the Queen of England. The first day that the King and Queen saw Nostradamus he declared to them that the King would marry the previously mentioned Queen,” he moaned in yet another damning message home to his sovereign.
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It is a common misconception that those who lived in the distant past were as a rule superstitious and credulous and that Nostradamus was universally admired, but this was not in fact the case. The magus was a figure of controversy, derided as often as he was applauded. “
Ere I forget
, or further forage / He writes his verse like stirring porridge /… Born beneath such a sign and season / As to have neither sense nor reason,” ran a typically scathing critique from a contemporary pundit. Catherine’s unquestioning acceptance of the prophet and her eagerness—her insistence, really—on acting upon his calculations was an extreme reaction, particularly for a member of the educated class. There was a competing judicial astrologer, John Dee, operating on the fringe of the royal court in England at this time who was sometimes called in for consultation by the English government, but this was mostly because he was an expert on codes and counterintelligence tactics. With regard to Dee’s other, more esoteric, interests, Elizabeth’s attitude was one of tolerant amusement, and she made a point to keep him at arm’s length. But Catherine’s gullibility was a different story: the degree to which mysticism influenced the queen mother of France was well known both at home and abroad, and this made her less credible as a ruler. The Spanish ambassador was not the only consul to consider her ridiculous.

Other factors contributed to undermining Catherine’s policies. There was the small problem, for example, that as she traveled around the kingdom the queen mother expediently told Catholics one thing and Protestants another. To the faithful, she sighed that the Edict of Toleration was only an interim measure that she was forced to implement because otherwise it was “
thought by the King
that this might cause the Huguenots to revolt,” while to the Huguenots she explained that “
the King undertakes
this journey in order to make everybody so clearly understand his intention to enforce this Edict that nobody can be able to allege any pretext nor occasion to break it.”