The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (53 page)

Perhaps the cruelest of Catherine’s petty acts of revenge was to deface the ciphers she could not remove so that they now read “HC”; there are many examples of this at Chenonceau, the Louvre, and other royal châteaux.

Although Diane de Poitiers had sincerely tried to ease Catherine de’ Medici’s difficult situation and had always shown her every respect, she was fully aware of the intensity of Catherine’s jealousy, and expected to be arrested. It did not happen. The duchesse de Valentinois could not be treated like the duchesse d’Etampes; Diane had committed no crime, and had helped Henri rule wisely and well. During her twenty-five years at the king’s side she had formed many influential friendships, and through the marriages of her daughters she had forged links with Catherine’s allies. The queen-dowager rightly judged that she could not afford to alienate these great French families, and limited her revenge to banishing Diane from the court, leaving her free to
live at Anet. This Diane did, according to all accounts, with exemplary dignity.

Perhaps it was inevitable, however, that in spite of all Henri’s attempts to secure Chenonceau for Diane, Catherine would one day seize it, and out of feminine spite she did just that. Catherine knew she could not rule without the help of the Guises. Mindful of Diane’s powerful alliances, the merchant-queen gave her Chaumont-sur-Loire in exchange for Chenonceau. The papers were signed on April 27, 1560.

No one would have appreciated better than Diane the irony of finding herself the châtelaine of Chaumont instead of Henri’s coronation gift of Chenonceau. But when she visited Chaumont for the first time, she was appalled to find the disgusting evidence of the queen’s necromancy in a room still full of alchemists’ tools. Perhaps to frighten Diane, no effort had been made to destroy the proof of Catherine’s pagan practices. A pentacle was clearly marked on the floor, and Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew characters decorated an altar on which was placed a skull. All around the room, jars of powders, liquids, and pickled animal parts in bottles lined the shelves, as well as strange books, parchments, and the remains of animal sacrifices. Utterly repelled, Diane ordered everything to be burned and sent for a priest to exorcize the place.

The servants, when questioned, confirmed her worst fears, and the real horror of where Catherine’s obsession had led her during the last years became clear. In the account by the historian Jehanne d’Orliac,

According to popular legend, it seems that the vision appeared on the forty-fourth night after the spell began. One wonders if Catherine waited there. In later life, the queen maintained that Henri had predicted the future of his dynasty and that she had indulged in sorcery because she wanted to know more for the sake of her sons. The story of the mirror and the four princes appears in a number of sources in connection with Catherine de’ Medici, and is cited as the reason for her insistence on the marriage of her youngest daughter, Margot, with Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV of France. Catherine de’ Medici hoped that through their union, some Valois blood would remain on the throne of France. It was not to be. Margot was barren, and Henri IV subsequently married Marie de’ Medici, increasing the Medici blood, not the Valois, on France’s throne.

Diane ordered Chaumont closed. She never went there again. It was left in her will to the children of her daughter Françoise de Bouillon.

As the luckless Captain Montgomery was a Protestant, suspicion quickly spread that the king’s death had been part of a heretic plot. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants rose to dangerous levels, which Catherine tried to ease by letting Montgomery go. Banished from France, the brave captain of Henri’s Scottish Guard became a soldier of fortune. Fifteen years later, fighting as a mercenary for England, Montgomery was tricked into capture by the French—Catherine had always kept an eye on him. After a courageous defense of his stronghold, he and his ten thousand soldiers were promised their lives if they surrendered. Montgomery agreed, only to be arrested and brought to Paris for trial.

Catherine de Medici had never ceased to “Hate and Wait” for her husband’s killer, who had caused her reversal of fortune. With Henri’s death, she abandoned her emblem of a rainbow and adopted instead a broken lance. At last, she could avenge Henri’s death and destroy the man who had taken him from her forever. Her face as expressionless as
a mask, Catherine watched as the valiant Montgomery was tried for high treason, condemned, beheaded, and quartered in the Place de Grève.

F
RANÇOIS II reigned for less than one year. He died in Orléans on December 5, 1560, leaving Mary, Queen of Scots and France, a young widow. It was whispered that the royal physician Ambroise Paré had slipped some poison into his ear since Catherine de’ Medici “saw no other way of assuring her authority.”

As Catherine’s next son, Charles IX, was too young to rule, she convinced the Princes of the Blood that she should act as regent. Nor was there any longer a place at court for the enchanting young queen-dowager of France, who, as a child, had dared to mock Catherine’s origins. Ravishing in white, “
la Reine Blanche
,” as the French called Mary, remained in mourning for her husband in Orléans for the traditional forty days. There was an immediate diplomatic movement to find a new husband for Mary; even the new king of France, Charles IX, was mooted, as well as the feeble heir to the Spanish throne, Don Carlos. Catherine was not at all well disposed to an alliance of Scotland and Spain. How could it help her gentle daughter Elisabeth to reign as queen there if her contemporary, the ravishing Mary Stuart, was married to the
heir
to the throne? Comparisons would not favor her daughter, to whom she wrote, referring to Mary as “
le gentilhomme
,” urging her to do all in her power to hinder the union.

If Catherine genuinely felt grief at the death of her eldest son, she managed to set it aside for the moment. To deter the proposed marriage of Mary with the heir to Spain, the queen-regent of France offered Philip II the hand of her youngest daughter, Margot, for the stunted, crazy Don Carlos. After all, her sorcerer might have been wrong: her sons might produce heirs and Henry of Navarre might not become king of France. With serpentine cunning, Catherine maintained her mask of friendship toward her daughter-in-law Mary, and pretended no knowledge of the Spanish negotiations. The regent had never forgotten or forgiven Mary for her snobbish slight on her arrival
in France so many years ago, and the tension between them had surfaced once Mary became queen of France.

The young queen-dowager, Mary, set out for a lengthy visit to her Guise cousins at their various properties, “to the spite” of Catherine and her “rigorous and vengeful dealing.” According to Mary Stuart’s envoy, Sir James Melville, Catherine alleged that “she was despised by her good daughter, during the short reign of king François her husband, at the instigation of the house of Guise.” Melville goes on to allege that “the Queen-mother was glad at the death of King Francis her son, because she had no guiding of him, he being wholly counseled by the duc de Guise and the Cardinal his brother … so that the Queen-mother was much satisfied to be freed of the government of the house of Guise; and for this cause she entertained a great grudge at our Queen.” As Mary saw her friends being disgraced, she withdrew from the court and traveled within the country. While staying with her relatives, Mary fell ill. She was unable to attend the coronation of Charles IX and only returned to the court after a crucial absence of three months.

According to Mary Stuart’s marriage contract, Catherine’s inner hostility could not deprive her daughter-in-law of the right to remain in France and maintain herself with her income from her marriage portion duchies. But being a woman of instinct, Mary sensed that there was not room for two dowager-queens in France. Rather than remain in a country where she was clearly not welcomed by the ruling house, she bravely decided to take the gamble and return to Scotland, to an unknown future in a Protestant country she had not seen for thirteen years. Although she had spent most of her life in France, various ambassadors noted that Mary was extremely eloquent in her own language. Then, to the surprise of everyone, Queen Elizabeth I refused her cousin a safe-conduct to cross the Channel. Nevertheless Mary set sail from Calais on August 14, 1561, accompanied by the three Marys—Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, and Mary Livingston—who had all come to France with her as children. Sharing her voyage was James, Earl of Bothwell, and the chronicler Brantôme.

“
Adieu, France! Adieu France! Adieu donc, ma chère France.… Je pense ne vous revoir jamais plus
” (“Good-bye, my dear France.… I fear I shall never see you again”), she cried, as she sailed toward her
tragic destiny. In France it was said that without Diane de Poitiers and Mary, Queen of Scots, “the smile of the court disappeared.” Many years later, during her imprisonment in Scotland, Queen Mary recalled her happy childhood experiences at Anet and Chenonceau, and worked Diane’s famous symbols into her embroidery. With her heart always on her sleeve, a smile that lit up any room, the enchanting Mary of Scots was a slave of her emotions, seemingly drawn to misfortune. Neither her “crimes” nor her tragic end have diminished the admiration of succeeding generations.

A
FTER Henri’s funeral, Diane returned to her beloved Anet to reminisce on the fabled
douceur de vivre
they had shared in this enchanted château. Here Catherine could not erase the evidence of Henri’s love, which had embraced Diane for twenty-nine years. She had her memories, and nothing else mattered. A number of historians maintain that Diane was isolated at Anet and that many of her friends were too afraid of the Medici queen’s rage to comfort or console her. But her account books show that she often visited Paris and frequented the Montmorency, Bourbon, and Guise families as well as the Bouillons and the Nevers. Anne de Montmorency and his wife, Madeleine de Savoie, were regular visitors.

Directly after Diane’s return to Anet, the villagers were unsure if the queen-regent would wreak her vengeance on them, but they soon proclaimed their love for their duchesse de Valentinois. Diane rewarded her people by building a small hospital in the village, as well as homes for unmarried mothers, orphans, destitute girls, and widows.