The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (34 page)

The tiny princess joined her brother at Blois in the care of Monsieur and Madame Jean II d’Humières,
¹⁵
the children’s governor and his wife, an excellent couple chosen by Diane de Poitiers and answerable
to her. Diane would refer to them as “my allies,” and she was always in contact concerning the Children of France. D’Humières and his wife already had charge of the dauphin’s little daughter, Diane de France. Once again Catherine renounced her right as a mother and allowed Diane to take over, but she must have thought her cousin a little too zealous in her care of her children.

_____________________

1
. They became the parents of Mary, Queen of Scots.

2
. Chrestien, Guillaume.
Livre de la nature et etilite des mays des femmes et de la curation des maladies qui en surviennent
. Paris, 1559.

3
. Calanius, P.
Traité excellent de l’entretenement de la sante
.

4
. A
levrette
is a small greyhound bitch.

5
. This marriage was never consummated since the bride was too young. It was annulled in 1545 and the wedding gifts returned. In 1548, Jeanne d’Albret married Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, and was extremely happy. Their son was the future King Henri IV of France.

6
. According to Brantôme and the Italian ambassador Contarini.

7
. Following the birth of Henri’s heir, Jean Fernel was officially given the credit and a pension for life.

8
. Diane de Poitiers would assist at the births of all the future royal children, just as she assisted at the birth of their father.

9
. There is no historical proof of her guilt.

10
. Many epidemics were described as “plague” at the time.

11
. Claude de Lorraine and Antoinette de Bourbon had eight sons and four daughters. A pair of twins died in infancy and one son was still too young to attend the court. Their son Claude de Mayenne would become duc d’Aumale.

12
. Most writers incorrectly put the marriage date during the reign of Henri II, based on the writings of Peer Ensile, published at the start of the eighteenth century. See Patricia Z. Thompson, “
De nouveanx aperçus sur la vie de Diane de Poitiers
” in
Le Mythe de Diane en France au XVIe Siècle, actes du colloque
(E.N.S. Bd Jourdan [Paris], 29–31 mai 2001) edited by Jean-Raymond Fanio and Marie-Dominique Legrand; ouvrage publié avec le concours du Centre National du Livre Niort (Paris: Association des Amis d’Agrippa d’Aubigné, distributed by Librairie Honoré Champion, 2002).

13
. The king’s Scottish guards protected the person of the monarch. They were mounted and were the oldest military unit in the French army.

14
. Baschet, Armand.
La Diplomatie venitienne: Les Princes de l’Europe au XVIe siècle
.

15
. Jean II d’Humières was a distant cousin of Diane de Poitiers.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Death of the Renaissance King

I
n June 1546, the Treaty of Ardres was signed between France and England. François purchased Boulogne from Henry VIII for a considerable sum, to be paid over eight years.

The king spent the rest of the season traveling on horseback inspecting the perimeter of his frontiers. This must have caused him the most terrible pain; the abscess on his prostate was said to have grown very large and to have five heads, all suppurating. To ease their patient’s discomfort, the doctors resorted to the traditional remedy of bleeding him. This did little to help, so they decided to open four of the heads on the abscess, release the poison, and cauterize the openings. The pain was no doubt intense, but afterward François at least felt some relief. By Christmas 1546, the abscess had closed and the doctors had to operate again. This time the improvement was so marked that François took Anne d’Etampes to bed. Under the circumstances, one has to wonder whether she was driven by passion or ambition to have consented.

The king returned to his peripatetic lifestyle. After visiting his palace at Compiègne in the north, he stopped at Villers-Cotterêts in
Alsace-Lorraine at the beginning of February, and there he heard the news of the death of Henry VIII on January 27, 1547. The English king had died of complications due to blood poisoning from an abscess on the leg. In his last weeks he could not walk and had become so obese he had to be carried about in a large basket made of iron, winched up by chains when he wanted to move from one floor of his palace to another. His open ulcers smelled horribly and he suffered great pain.

The English king died just as these two great monarchs had become allies. Although François was said to have rejoiced with the court that France’s enemy was dead, Martin du Bellay, who was at the king’s bedside, writes in his memoirs: “[It] occasioned the king much sorrow … because they were almost of an age, and of the same constitution; and he feared that he must soon follow him.… Those, moreover, who were about his person perceived that from that time he became more pensive than before.”

Shortly after François received the news of Henry VIII’s death, a royal messenger arrived from London with a letter Henry had written just before he died saying that “they” too were mortal and would die like any other men. The French king was profoundly moved by this message, and developed a fever.

On February 17, François was on the move again, passing by Saint-Germain, and headed toward the duchesse d’Etampes’ château at Limours, where her brother was the bishop of Condom. Three days later, he was well enough to join in a hunt. On March 1, he arrived at Rambouillet, but was unable to move on as he wished. However, the king still had business on his mind and gave instructions for the fortification of Provence in case the emperor returned to reconquer Piedmont.

By March 20, François was bedridden. The doctors hoped that if the abscess was opened again, he would improve. The operation revealed so much infection that it was impossible to do anything. François developed septicemia and, like Henry VIII, began to succumb to blood poisoning. Henri was at Anet, his sanctuary, but on the insistence of Diane and the Guise brothers, he left to be at his father’s bedside at Rambouillet.

Two days before the end, Anne d’Etampes came to say her farewell. She knew her time had come and that with the king’s death her reign would be over. Still young, blond, and beautiful, her future could only be exile. She knew how badly Françoise de Foix, her predecessor, had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had shut her up and mistreated her until she died. There was so much doubt about the circumstances of her death that the king had sent Montmorency to investigate. He announced that she died of natural causes, but the fact that Françoise’s husband made Montmorency his only heir cast some doubt on his conclusion.

Anne d’Etampes made a dramatic scene at the king’s deathbed, throwing herself on the floor and loudly begging the earth to swallow her. For once, the king could not accommodate her demands; he requested she leave the court and retire to Limours. Only then could he receive the Last Sacraments.

In his parting words to his dauphin, François assured Henri he had been a good son and he was satisfied with him. The king gave Henri his blessing and asked his son to remember him. François declared, ingenuously, that he was dying without any remorse concerning the justice of his reign, as he had never treated anyone unfairly, but he admitted that on some occasions he had made war on slight pretexts. He also regretted that he was not kinder to his poor neglected queen, Eleonore. Henri’s mother, Claude, had been long forgotten. François urged his son to “preserve the purity of the Catholic doctrine,” and not to recall the Constable Anne de Montmorency.
¹
In the sole, oblique reference to Diane, he warned his heir against placing his will too much in the hands of others as he himself had done. His final request was that the duchesse d’Etampes be treated with courtesy, as “she was a lady.”

The dauphin was so moved that he agreed to everything, and begged his father for his blessing again. This he was given on three occasions in the king’s last days. During the night of March 30, Henri fainted on his father’s bed, and the king, half embracing him, would
not let him go. François asked his priest for a particular homily to be read and still had enough presence of mind to know he was hearing the wrong one. Among his last requests was that Henri should find a fitting husband for his sister, Marguerite (Marguerite), defend the Faith, and not overtax his subjects.

At two in the afternoon of March 31, 1547, having defied the predictions of his doctors for years, the Salamander King, François I, patron of the French Renaissance, died at Rambouillet. He was fifty-two years, six months old, and in the thirty-third year of his reign. His last words were: “Into your hands I commend my spirit … Jesus Christ” (spoken in Latin). The only members of his family missing from the king’s deathbed were his wife, Queen Eleonore, and his sister, Marguerite de Navarre. Eleonore had simply been overlooked, and it took two days for her to learn of her husband’s death. Marguerite was in retreat in a convent in Navarre. After she heard the news, she remained there for some months. With the passing of his father, Henri collapsed at the end of the bed sobbing, his head in his hands. It was his twenty-eighth birthday. He rose only when twelve large white candles were brought into the room. The king was dead—Long live the king!

Henri crossed to the antechamber where Catherine was weeping and consoled her. With François’ death, she was queen of France, something neither her cousin Pope Clement VII nor her illustrious Medici ancestors could ever have believed possible. But her friend and protector was dead, and her husband was more devoted to and dependent on his mistress than ever. Henri himself also needed consolation and comfort. He sent messengers to Diane and Montmorency to meet with him at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and left Rambouillet to join them there.

It is not certain that François I died of venereal disease, but he certainly had it. Doctors have argued for centuries about his symptoms. The autopsy showed he had blood poisoning from an infection of the urinary tract. He also had a diseased lung and a huge abscess in his stomach. His kidneys were wasted, his intestines decayed, and his throat cankered. It is more likely that he had gonorrhea, and also quite possibly cancer.

T
HE achievements of the man described by one historian as a “brilliant spoiled child”—and by his mother, Louise de Savoie, as “my Caesar”—were formidable. He was a man who had genuinely loved honor, despised treachery, and adhered to his belief in chivalry and Humanist ideals. He had helped France take its place as a modern power; his alliances with the Sultan Suleiman and the Lutheran princes of Germany were bold and intelligent moves for France at the time; and to have been consistently outmaneuvered by the Emperor Charles V, generally acknowledged the cleverest politician in Europe, was not such a disgrace. The king’s Italian wars cost his country a great deal, but they also brought France in contact with the Renaissance.

François I was a splendid patron of the arts and father of letters. He not only imported the great Italian masters—Leonardo, Cellini, Primaticcio, and many more, but also acquired their works. The artistic circle that made up the School of Fontainebleau, which dictated the taste and style of his era, was a remarkable assembly. Critics decry his high spending, but without the patronage of the king and his court, the wonder of the French Renaissance would never have existed.

François I was responsible for great buildings, including the marvelous châteaux of Fontainebleau, Rambouillet, and Chambord. He embellished Blois, Amboise, and the Louvre. With the help of Girolamo Delia Robbia, he built the delicious little château de Madrid in Paris, a monument to his release from captivity and to the Treaty of Madrid. A model for Fontainebleau, tragically, it was destroyed during the French Revolution. The king inspired the building boom of the early sixteenth century, when classical, open, comfortable houses replaced existing fortified, inward-looking buildings.

As a Humanist, François I set up lectureships from which the College de France derives its origin. The king’s library formed the nucleus of the future Bibliothèque Nationale. His edict making French, not Latin, the language of all legality transformed the ponderous machine of the law in France. The king subsidized the voyages of Jacques Cartier and delighted in his discoveries in the New World, particularly
the great river he called the St. Lawrence. As a result of all the expeditions to the New World, François I gave his country a navy.

The whole of François I’s reign was a struggle to control the balance of power in Europe. The French king has been criticized for his never-ending wars against the Emperor Charles V, but he feared that France would be encircled by the empire and cut off from the rest of Europe. To keep his exit to Italy open, the king did all he could to stir up trouble within the German part of the Holy Roman Empire. Because they shared the same vulnerable borders, France was as much of a danger to the empire as the empire was to France. It was essential for François I to woo England as an ally in order to tip the balance between France and the empire.

The Renaissance king is also criticized for his treatment of heretics. He was accused of being “Catholic at home, Protestant abroad” because he protected and used the Protestants when he needed them. At his coronation, François I swore to uphold the Catholic Faith. The 1520s, the early days of his reign, were a period of religious anarchy. As a committed patron of Humanism, the king tried to ignore the issue by handling it over to the Sorbonne and the
Parlement
, but he never condoned heresy. The “affair of the placards” in 1534 was a turning point in the king’s attitude. He felt his royal authority had been challenged and regarded his persecution of the reformers as a way of honoring his solemn coronation vow. By the end of the reign, the Church, state, Sorbonne, and the
Parlement
had all united against heresy. On his deathbed, the Most Christian King told his heir he felt “no remorse” because he genuinely believed he had lived according to his principles and reaffirmed the authority of the monarchy.

T
HE day François I died, the new king gave instructions for the simultaneous burial of his father and his two brothers. The late dauphin’s body had remained at Tournon where he had died, and Charles d’Orléans’ body was still at Beauvais. According to an ancient French belief dating from the time of the Roman emperors, the soul of the departed ruler did not leave his body for some weeks. To show evidence
of the king’s earthly presence, an effigy had to be made. On the evening of his death, the king’s official portraitist, François Clouet, was summoned to make a funeral mask and take measurements to build the most lifelike effigy possible. This took two weeks to complete. Overnight, Mendicant friars stood vigil and prayed by the body, and in the morning the autopsy was carried out. The king’s heart and entrails were placed in separate caskets while his body was embalmed and placed in a coffin.