The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (52 page)

The next day, July 1, the king seemed better and was able to eat and drink a little and to sleep. All present noted his courage and stoicism. The following morning, Henri asked to see his captain Montgomery, but he was told that he had fled. Why? asked the king. He had done nothing wrong. But Montgomery was a Protestant who knew the temper of the queen and the Guise brothers. Meanwhile, the Guises had begun blaming the Constable, who was officially in charge of the king’s armor and therefore responsible for the incorrect fastening of the visor.

Throughout Paris, votive processions of people chanting and praying wound slowly through the grieving city. In her house next to the palace, a frantic Diane waited for news; when none came, she humbly requested to see the king. Permission was coldly refused. Henri belonged to Catherine at last. One can only imagine Diane’s suffering and her fear for the future.

When the accident took place, Emmanuel Philibert de Savoie immediately sent a fast courier to Brussels to fetch Andreas Vesalius, the renowned doctor of Philip II, and the queen called for the best surgeon in France, Ambroise Paré. Vesalius was the first to arrive, on July 3. He removed several splinters of wood and shattered bone from Henri’s skull. The efforts of the king’s doctor and the others had prevented his fever from rising throughout the 3rd and 4th, and for two days there was hope. The king asked for music and vowed, if he was cured, to make a pilgrimage on foot to Nôtre-Dame-de-Cléry. He also dictated a letter to the pope telling him of the arrest of several “Lutherans” in Paris and that he intended to use force if necessary to bring an end to the heresy spreading through the country.

Vesalius was not a surgeon and did not dare operate. Instead, he administered a mix of egg white, rhubarb, a special kind of tar from Egypt, and petroleum, all mixed into a paste to clean the wound. At last Ambroise Paré arrived. He was the most eminent surgeon of his
time and specialized in wounds to the head. It was Paré who had extracted piece by piece the broken weapon from the head of François de Guise, who, despite a horrific scar, had survived the torture, to live and prosper.

Henri remained conscious and never complained. Paré’s success with the duc de Guise did not give him enough confidence to perform the same brutal operation on the king; he feared he lacked sufficient practical knowledge. By July 5, the king had developed a fever, but the surgeon still hesitated to operate. Vieilleville tells how, in her desperation, the queen ordered six condemned men to be decapitated in prison, so that Paré could insert a similar long, thick splinter into their heads to imitate Henri’s injury and devise a strategy for surgery.

As nothing seemed to ease his pain, Henri asked for musicians to play, a common request at deathbeds. Even if Henri was not soothed, perhaps it helped those around him: the queen, the Constable, the duc de Savoie, the Duke of Ferrara, the duc de Guise, the duc’s brother the cardinal de Lorraine. The only person missing was the one he loved most in the world: Diane de Poitiers.

Blind and barely able to speak, Henri knew he was dying, but wanted to ratify his Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis and worried that his sister Marguerite and Emmanuel Philibert de Savoie had missed their wedding. Despite his pain and delirium, Henri ordered Catherine to proceed with the marriage. Then he slipped into a coma. The small, poignant wedding ceremony took place at midnight on July 8, in the little church next to Les Tournelles. It was entirely draped in black, and all parties were in floods of tears.

That same day, a messenger came from the queen to the duchesse de Valentinois asking for the return of the crown jewels. “Is the king dead?” Diane asked. She was told no, but that it would not be long. Brantôme quotes Diane as refusing the request, saying: “So long as there remains a breath of life in him, I wish my enemies to know I do not fear them. As yet there is no one who can command me. I am still of good courage. But when he is dead, I do not want to live after him; and all the bitterness that one could wish me will be but sweetness beside my great loss.” As Diane was so much older than Henri, naturally
she had expected to die before him. All her life she had planned for every eventuality but this. It was her tragedy that the situation was reversed.

As he watched the infection progress, Ambroise Paré contemplated trepanning the king’s skull to drain the poison but decided to spare him the pain. The operation might have saved him.

On July 9, Henri asked for the Last Sacraments and to speak to his son. The king blessed the dauphin François, and just like Henri at the deathbed of his father, the dauphin fainted and was carried from the room. Still conscious, Henri dictated a letter to Philip II asking for his protection for the dauphin and for his people—in effect, an open invitation to his son-in-law of Spain to interfere in the affairs of France. It was the sort of political naïveté from which Diane de Poitiers and Anne de Montmorency had always protected him.

At one o’clock in the afternoon of July 10, 1559, twelve days after he had been wounded, Henri died. For most of the previous two days he had lain in a coma, his body paralyzed and swollen with infection. Henri II, king of France, had reigned for twelve years, three months, and eleven days.

On the orders of the queen, all his calls for “
Ma Dame
” had been ignored.

I
N the preceding months, Catherine had been aware that she had won some measure of approval from Henri, especially during her regency and after her successful appeal for war funds. At sixty, Diane could not expect to live much longer and it is probable that, upon her death, Henri would have turned to his wife for guidance. After so many years of neglect, the Medici queen had felt herself on the brink of sharing the throne with her husband; but a cruel fate denied her this rightful place by his side. For all the twenty-five years of her arranged marriage, Catherine de’ Medici had been robbed of her husband “by Diane de Poitiers in the sight and knowledge of everyone.” Now the queen lost him to death.

Did Catherine love her husband? She was certainly devoted to him and his wishes, and her grief was terrible and sincere; but hatred of Diane was surely the stronger emotion. Was it
love
that had her deny him, on his deathbed, the sight of the person he cherished the most? Catherine had met Henri for the first time at their wedding and had fallen in love with him on that day. Known as a cold woman, she was said never to have shown warmth to friends or even to her children. Catherine was an intellectual who had learned from an early age to control her emotions. She had controlled her love by hating and waiting, and now it seems her
grande passion
had become jealousy and hatred, but not love. Can a woman in despair over her husband’s suffering be thinking about the jewels he has given his mistress, and demand their return at such a time? A one-sided passion is almost impossible to sustain. Perhaps Catherine wept more for her lost future than her lost love. Of all her children, only the future Henri III became her obsession, and even he was said to have secretly called her “
La Serpente
.”

The next day at dawn, the queen’s revenge began. She urged Mary, Queen of Scots, now queen of France, to send a messenger to the duchesse de Valentinois, the beautiful lady who was the first to befriend
her when she had arrived at age six in France. Diane was to return the crown jewels
⁴
and the keys to Henri IPs strong room and desk. The duchess de Valentinois, who was composed and prepared, returned everything in a casket, together with a meticulous inventory. She included a letter in which she humbled herself before Catherine, begging her pardon for her offenses and wishing her well. There is an entry in the Venetian diplomatic correspondence
⁵
which alleges that it was François II, and not Mary, who “sent to Diane that for reasons of her bad influence over his father the late king, she deserved great punishment, but in his royal clemency he would not trouble her further. However, she had to return to him all the jewels that his father the king had given her.” He also banished Diane, her daughter Françoise, and her husband, the duc de Bouillon, from the court.

For the queen, the years of silent waiting were over. The new king, in awe of his responsibilities, asked his mother to rule in his place. Cleverly, Catherine declined, inviting the Guises to join with her in advising her son. The queen-dowager had learned from her rival how black and white flattered the older woman, and instead of the usual white mourning robes reserved for queens, she wore black velvet with a train, adding an ermine collar but no ornaments.
⁶
She was also wearing a black veil that covered her face. Accompanied by her son, the new King François II, and his queen in her white wedding dress, worn now in mourning, and Mary’s triumphant Guise uncles, Catherine immediately left Les Tournelles for the Palace of the Louvre. Far from remaining in retreat for the traditional period of royal mourning in the place of the king’s death, the queen-dowager urged the Guises to take control of the government before the deputation from the
Parlement
arrived. The takeover by the Guises was completed by installing the young king in the Louvre in apartments next to their own. Not to be marginalized, Catherine moved in as well.

The chancellor, Jean Bertrand, protégé and friend of Diane de Poitiers, was obliged to give up the royal seals of state, and François
Olivier, who was close to the cardinal, was reinstated in his former position. The English ambassador noted: “The House of Guise ruleth and doth all about the French king.”

At the Louvre, according to contemporary reports, Catherine sat “in a room that was entirely black; not only the walls but also the floor had been covered. There was no light except for two church candles burning on an altar that was covered by a black sheet. The queen’s bed was covered in the same way. Her Majesty wore the most austere clothes. The queen of Scotland, now The Most Christian Queen Mary of France and Scotland, was in the same room, but wore entirely white. Also there was Marguerite, duchesse de Savoie, the dead king’s sister; and then the daughters of France—the queen of Spain; the duchesse de Savoie; and their young sister, Marguerite, all dressed in white, and obliged to observe fourteen days of mourning.” The queen mother spoke in the name of her group, but her voice was so choked and weak that no one could hear what she said no matter how hard they listened.

The Guise family, whom Diane had raised to power, turned against her. The duc de Guise claimed her apartments in the Louvre, while his brother, the cardinal, took over the Constable’s. As Grand Master, Montmorency was obliged to remain with the body of the king at Les Tournelles, and was powerless. With only young and weak sons to inherit, the death of Henri II created a power vacuum which the Guise brothers rapidly filled. It was not long before Montmorency lost his post as Grand Master of the Household to François de Guise, ensuring that François and the cardinal now controlled the court.

Montmorency retired to his estates, but he was still Constable, as well as being the richest nobleman in France. Alienating him would not have served Catherine’s purpose to control the Guise family. She had persuaded the Constable to relinquish the post of Grand Master by making his son, François, a marshal of France. Diane’s nephew the bishop de Meaux had to resign his office as
grand aumônier
. The duc d’Aumale, husband of Diane’s other daughter, Louise, almost lost his position as governor of Normandy, but he was spared—leaving him indebted to his Guise relations. No further move was made to interfere with Louise’s inheritance.

Carefully, with the sharpest scalpel, Catherine began to pry Henri’s
name away from that of his beloved mistress. The duchesse de Valentinois received no invitation to the funeral, and therefore watched the procession from a window in her house near the Palace of Les Tournelles, noting with dismay the prominence of the assembled Guise family. As the coffin passed by below her, she could see that the king’s effigy (once again the work of François Clouet) wore not black and white but a crimson satin shirt, a tunic of purple satin covered in
fleur-de-lys
, and a cloak of purple, not black velvet, decorated not with silver crescents but with the
fleur-de-lys
of France. Nor was the king’s riderless horse draped in the black saddlecloth with the silver “HD” cipher; but the crescent was still there under Henri’s initial “H” on the chariot bearing the coffin.