History's Great Queens 2-Book Bundle: The Last Queen and The Confessions of Catherine de Medici (98 page)

I sigh, in long-awaited recognition.

Guise’s eyes are closed, his handsome face wiped clean of the blood that spattered him as he fought for his life. His muscled legs seem sculpted of ivory, monumental in their perfection. Dark wounds puncture his broad chest—the stigmata of forty-six daggers, plunged into his flesh. A silver crucifix rests in his veined hands. It seems impossible that this man, whose life has been interlinked with mine, from the time he first played with my children to the night I watched him lose his father, to the violence he unleashed on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, can be so still. He was the last of his kind; as powerful as they are, the Guise family will never recover.

In the end, despite all odds, France has won.

I step back. I turn away. The fever flares. My soul leaps in anticipation.

There is only one task left to do.

I
T IS OVER. AS THE OLD MAESTRO FORETOLD SO MANY YEARS AGO,
I have fulfilled my destiny. Already the fever rises and I can feel my heart falter. Soon my household will come to bid me farewell; my son will sit at my side and hold my hand as my ladies weep. The vigil will begin.

I have sealed my last letter to Henri. In it I remind him that the path to peace is now clear. If he seeks accord with his Bourbon cousin, Navarre will safeguard him and France’s future. He will let Henri rule, until the time comes for him to ascend the throne.

Now I must close my books. Lucrezia knows what to do; it is my duty, my final sacrifice. I must carry my secrets to the grave. Yet how reluctantly I leave these leather volumes, bleached by the seasons of my life: to bid them farewell is to surrender all I have loved and lost.

This is the final page of my confessions.

I mix the remaining vestiges of the Maestro’s gift into my draft of poppy. The vial is clouded, fragile yet deceptively hard; as I scrape powder from its sides into my goblet, I think how odd it is that so tiny an object can hold such power. There is only a little left; it cannot kill me
outright, weakened as it is by years of hibernation, but it might quicken my passage.

As darkness draws in, I close my eyes, and for the last time I summon my vision of Navarre, seated on his black destrier, the white plume in his cap. His beard is thick, coppery, his weathered face full of purpose. I watch the page rush to him, declaring, “Paris will not surrender,” and the flash of impatience in Navarre’s eyes as he hears these words. This time, I do not need to strain to hear his response: I do not lose the future’s promise in the evanescence of the present.

I see him toss back his head and he laughs, countering, “Refuse, do they? Well then, I must give them what they want, eh? After all, Paris is worth a mass!”

I sigh. So it is.

O
N JANUARY 5, 1589, AT SIXTY-NINE YEARS OF AGE, CATHERINE
de Medici died in the Château of Blois, in the Loire Valley. In her will, she left provision for her household and bequeathed the bulk of her estate to her grandchildren. Chenonceau went to Louise, Henri’s queen; Catherine’s other daughter-in-law, Charles’s widow, Isabel (known as Elisabeth) of Austria, resided there with Louise until her own death in 1592.

Henri inherited the remainder of his mother’s possessions. Catherine made no mention of her daughter Margot, who remained imprisoned in Usson until 1599.

Foreign ambassadors perfunctorily dispatched the news of Catherine’s death and continued with the business at hand. She had been alternately feared or despised and the City of Paris informed Henri that if he dared entomb her in the Basilica of St. Denis, they’d dig her up with “tenterhooks” and throw her into the Seine. She therefore lay in state in Blois for forty days before being buried nearby in the Church of Saint-Sauver. Years later, her remains were transferred to St. Denis. During the Revolution, mobs desecrated the Basilica and tossed the royal skeletons
into a common pit. However, the magnificent marble tomb that Catherine built for her husband and herself can still be viewed today.

A Capuchin monk allegedly hired by Guise’s vengeful sister stabbed Henri III to death in 1589. Before he died, Henri had concluded a truce with his Bourbon cousin, Henri of Navarre; whether his actions were prompted by a final exhortation by Catherine is speculative, but Navarre did ascend the throne as Henri IV and he became one of France’s most beloved, tolerant kings. It took him ten years, however, to take Paris. He eventually converted to Catholicism to win over the city, a decision that prompted his famous quip: “Paris is worth a mass.”

Leadership of the Catholic League, established by the murdered duc de Guise, was taken over by another of Guise’s brothers; the League continued to exert significant influence over Catholic France until January of 1596, when Henri IV signed a treaty that put an end to it.

The senior line of the Guise family became extinct in 1688.

Margot was released from house arrest only after she agreed to an annulment. She returned to Paris, where she resided in increasingly corpulent splendor, a legend in her lifetime and author of her own rather fanciful memoirs. She died in 1615 at the age of sixty-one, outliving her former husband by five years.

Henri IV took as his second wife Marie de Medici, descendant of a lesser family branch. In 1601, Marie bore the future Louis XIII. Like Catherine, she endured years of infidelity before rising to power as widowed queen regent for her underage son.

Henri IV ruled France for twenty-one years. Despite his conversion, he still declared circumscribed toleration of the Huguenots and did everything he could to retain religious stability. At the age of fifty-six he was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic in the rue St. Honoré, while riding in his carriage. He bled to death. With his passing, France again plunged into religious tumult. His descendants continued the Bourbon dynasty until its overthrow in 1793. Persecution of the Huguenots ended when the Revolution of 1789 gave them equal rights under the law.

To this day, Catherine de Medici remains shrouded in lurid myth. She’s been accused of some of the sixteenth century’s most heinous crimes, including the murders of Jeanne of Navarre and Gaspard de Coligny. Some allege she poisoned her husband’s elder brother and her
two eldest sons, as well as a host of secondary figures at court who resisted or defied her.

Is the myth true? Did Catherine ruthlessly eliminate anyone who stood in her way? Did she harbor “a passion for power”? Those who knew her personally expressed contradictory opinions; those who didn’t likewise disagreed. Elizabeth I once said that of all the rulers in Europe, Catherine was the one she most feared; had he been asked, Philip II of Spain certainly had cause to echo this sentiment. Oddly enough, when overhearing criticism of his late mother-in-law, it was Henri IV who retorted, “I ask you, what could the woman do, left by the death of her husband with five little children and two families who thought only of grasping the Crown—our own [the Bourbons] and the Guises? I am surprised she didn’t do worse.”

To portray Catherine, I had to delve beyond the historical archetype of the black-clad widow, conspiring to wreak evil. Her surviving letters fill volumes, as do those of her contemporaries. I also consulted numerous modern and period sources to augment my understanding of her and of the times in which she lived.

To my surprise, I discovered a brave young girl who survived a dangerous childhood and difficult marriage to become a humane woman with an astounding capacity for compromise. Catherine detested war and fought for peace; she was a queen and mother whose foremost goal was to ensure her dynasty’s survival. While she made grievous errors, I do not believe she planned the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; rather, she sought to eliminate Coligny, who can only be judged as a traitor by the standards of his era. In her haste and panic after her first anonymous attempt failed, Catherine failed to anticipate that sending Guise to kill Coligny and the other Huguenot leaders in his house would precipitate the slaughter of six thousand people in Paris and its environs and blacken her name for centuries to come. While not entirely a pacifist in matters of religion, her position was antithetical to that of the Guises, who advocated systematic persecution of heretics. Throughout her life Catherine abhorred the fiery fanaticism that prevailed in Spain and did everything she could to curb it in France. It was her misfortune that few of the men around her shared her commitment to conciliation.

Catherine’s interest in the occult is well documented; like most Renaissance people she had a profound belief in hidden forces. Her instances
of visions or “second sight” were recorded by her family and friends; several of the episodes I describe are drawn directly from their accounts. She patronized Nostradamus until his death; Cosimo Ruggieri was her personal astrologer and did in fact betray her. However, her reputed penchant for the dark arts and poison seems apocryphal; certainly, the legend that she kept a cabinet of poisons at Blois is an invention, the secret compartments still visible there today intended for personal documents, not potions. I found no concrete evidence that Catherine poisoned anyone or resorted to black magic, but many of the objects found at Chambord after his arrest indicate Cosimo Ruggieri may have. Catherine’s generosity toward her intimates, her lifelong friendships with her ladies and Birago, and her compassion for animals, unusual for her time, are corroborated by several contemporary sources.

Catherine’s barrenness following her marriage to Henri is a subject of endless speculation. Some sources believe the fault was Henri’s, who had to submit to a delicate penile operation in order to correct a defect in his ability to ejaculate; others say Catherine herself had a thick hymen that required surgical piercing. Of course, such medical anomalies are impossible to verify, and I believe the obvious explanation is the most likely: Diane de Poitiers curtailed Henri’s conjugal visits until she could force Catherine into a situation of utter compliance and establish her own power over the royal marriage. The fact that Catherine suddenly became pregnant at a time in her life when bearing a child had become a matter of survival seems too coincidental. Catherine of course went on to bear seven surviving children; I do not include in this novel the death of a months-old son and her miscarriage of twin daughters in 1556.

Catherine de Medici lived a complex life in a very complex age, and in the interest of sparing the reader a veritable labyrinth of events, names, and titles, I made some minor alterations. For example, I cite only three of her daughter Claude’s nine children; of these, the eldest son was named Henri and the second Charles. I switched their names to avoid confusion, given the plethora of Henrys populating the narrative. I also do not mention Charles IX’s illegitimate son by his mistress or François I’s second son, also named Charles, who died before François himself. And while Philip II of Spain loomed large in Catherine’s life, his meeting with her in Bayonne is fictional, though its context is not.
Catherine had almost the same conversation with Philip’s exigent representative, the Duke of Alba.

The sheer size of the Guise family poses particular challenges for a novelist; again, in the interest of clarity I kept family members to a minimum. A significant title alteration is that of le Balafré’s brother, Monsignor, who in reality was cardinal of Lorraine, not of Guise.

I also reduced the role of the Bourbon princes. Antoine, king consort of Navarre and father of Henri IV, caused significant disruption during François II’s reign; he and his brother Condé died in battle within a few years of each other. To facilitate the story line, Antoine is briefly mentioned, but Condé is not.

All other errors, alterations, and omissions, both deliberate and accidental, are my own.

To learn more about Catherine and her times, I suggest the following selected bibliography:

Castries, Duc de.
The Lives of the Kings and Queens of France
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.

Chamberlain, E. R.
Marguerite of Navarre
. New York: Dial Press, 1974.

Frieda, Leonie.
Catherine de Medici
. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.