Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (5 page)

The pressure for Catherine to bear a child now became greater than ever. Initially, there was consensus that any infertility was Catherine’s fault. Indeed, Henri performed a deliberate and public show of his own virility: upon his return from a military campaign in Italy, he claimed to have fathered a child with one Filippa Ducci, the daughter of one of his groomsmen. Henri proudly legitimized this daughter, placing her under the tutelage of his mistress and symbolically naming the child Diane of France. The child’s mother was given a pension and spent the rest of her life in a convent.
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As anxiety about the lack of an heir increased, rumors emerged that Catherine could be replaced. Lorenzo Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to the French court in 1551, recounted a story that is in turn reported without question by most of Catherine’s biographers. According to Contarini, François and Henri were both contemplating the divorce, so Catherine proactively appealed for the king’s sympathy by offering to step aside. François was said to be so impressed by Catherine’s submissive offer that he assured her, “My daughter, do not doubt that since God wants you to be my daughter-in-law and the wife of the Dauphin, I do not want it otherwise, and perhaps it will please the Lord God to bestow on you and me that which we desire most.”
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However, as Katherine Crawford points out, Contarini’s report came several years after the conversation allegedly occurred and seems so intent on promoting a view of a virtuous Catherine that it may have overstated the actual security of her position.
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Pierre de Bourdeille, the Abbé de Brantôme, also reported some years later that “there were a large number of people who tried to persuade the King and Monsieur le Dauphin to repudiate her, since it was necessary to continue the line of France.”
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Whereas it is difficult to ascertain exactly how precarious Catherine’s position was at that point, she certainly understood the importance of conceiving, for she approached the task with a fervid mixture of desperation and resourcefulness. Catherine was devoutly religious but she also had a lifelong obsession with astrology and the occult. Finding no incompatibility in these two avenues, she appealed to both the superstitious and the sacred, calling on magicians and seers at the same time that she turned to priests and prayers. Catherine began to amass an extensive collection of sacred relics and manuscripts and devices for celestial prognostication; when her trove was inventoried upon her death, one of the items was said to be a talisman “made of human blood, the blood of a goat and the metals that corresponded with her birth chart.”
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Catherine also claimed to have some prophetic powers of her own; years later, her daughter Marguerite wrote in her memoirs that Catherine would accurately predict when one of her children was near death and would call out in her sleep, “Dieu, garde mes enfants!” (God, protect my children!)
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In addition to prayers and incantations, Catherine resorted to many popular fertility remedies: she sprinkled special herbs in her food and wine, ate the powdered testicles of cats, deer, and boars, and drank the blood and urine of pregnant animals. Not everyone was optimistic about the efficacy of these potions. The Venetian ambassador, Matteo Dandolo, wrote: “The most serene dauphine is of a fine disposition, except for her ability to become a mother. Not only has she not yet had any children, but I doubt that she will ever have them, although she swallows all possible medicines that might aid conception. From this I would deduce she is more at risk of increasing her difficulty than finding the solution.” Dandolo’s postscript is a reminder that a queen’s fertility crisis was a matter of public concern: “I do not think there is anyone here [who] would not give their blood for her to have a son.”
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Another popular myth cautioned against riding a mule because the animal could transfer its own infertility to the passenger, so Catherine refused to travel on muleback when she was trying to conceive.

Catherine also turned to her female companions for help, particularly her dear friend Marie-Catherine Gondi. Also known by her maiden name, Marie de Pierrevive, Madame Gondi had hosted an illustrious literary salon in Lyons before marrying Antoine de Gondi, a Florentine merchant who served in Henri’s court.
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Madame Gondi had several children of her own and advised Catherine on pregnancy, childcare, and financial matters; her sound advice and expertise were so valued that Catherine later named her administrator of her personal finances and public building projects.
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Even more significant is the advice and assistance Catherine received from her husband’s mistress. Although much has been made of the enmity between the two women, Diane shrewdly understood that her own position at court could be compromised were Catherine replaced by a less compliant queen. Thus, Diane became one of Catherine’s most important allies during her fertility crisis and urged Henri to sleep with his queen regularly. One story circulated that Catherine ordered a carpenter to drill two holes in the floor above Diane’s bedroom so she could observe the coital positions of her husband and his mistress.
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Furthermore, Diane called on the help of renowned physician Jean Fernel who is praised for ultimately resolving the royal couple’s fertility problem. Diane had become familiar with Fernel when he attended her during a serious illness in 1543.
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In recent decades, historians have traced the development of obstetrics and gynecology during the early modern period from a private, female-centered sphere to a male-dominated realm of scientific medicine.
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Although the picture of a harsh, masculine takeover of an idyllic women’s community oversimplifies this complex transition, it is the case that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “both gynaecology and fertility were being seen as men’s business”
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and that the advice of female friends and midwives often clashed with the expertise of male physicians.

In the case of Catherine de Médicis, however, both male and female energies combined to help the queen achieve her goal. Indeed, Diane’s own interest in medicine and her efforts as a caregiver were sufficiently known so that in 1559 Guillaume Chrestien dedicated to her his translation of Jacques Dubois’s Latin treatise on menstruation. Chrestien claimed that his dedication was to honor Diane’s concern for the health of the king and the queen and he noted that Diane “worked alongside the physicians” as they attended Catherine.
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Fernel examined both Catherine and Henri and found that the king had a condition now diagnosed as hypospadias, a congenital malformation of the penis, which can “lead to infertility from failure of semen to reach the vaginal canal due to either improper meatal position or inability to achieve penetration from penal curvature,” while Catherine may have had an inverted uterus.
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Henri’s condition was apparently the subject of court gossip: Brantôme commented on it as did seventeenth century author Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac: “It is sufficient to say that the cause was solely in Henry II” and “nothing is commoner in surgical experience than such a malformation as the prince’s, which gave rise to a jest of the ladies of the Court.”
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Today, most severe cases of hypospadias are treated through surgical procedures, but it is doubtful that such intervention would have been employed in the sixteenth century, particularly for royalty. Although the precise details of Fernel’s recommendations are not known, he is said to have examined the couple’s “conformation in time,” and recommended different coital positions. Helen King notes that in his subsequent publication, 
Physiologica
(1567), Fernel wrote that conception depends upon “a cleansed woman, eager for semen, to clasp and hold around what has been drawn... The prime need is for the male semen to be ejected straight and in sufficient quantity.” Fernel mentions no patients in particular, but while maintaining professional discretion, he may well have had his royal clients in mind.
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Soon after their consultation with Fernel, Catherine became pregnant. She eventually had ten children, two during the reign of her father-in-law, François, and eight more in the next twelve years of Henri’s reign. Seven of her children survived to adulthood; three sons became kings of France—Francois II, Charles IX, and Henri III—and two of her daughters, Elizabeth and Marguerite, became queen consorts. Fernel was appointed official court physician to both Catherine and Henri and he assisted at the birth of several of her children, so it appears that the couple was pleased with his advice. Some biographers have cited “an alternative account” to the narrative of Fernel’s intervention in which Madame Gondi’s childbirth advice “was seen as the salvation of the royal line,” but it is generally Fernel’s expertise that is credited with solving the royal couple’s infertility.
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Holly Tucker suggests that the lavish christening gifts fairies receive in early modern tales symbolize the handsome recompense that midwives and doctors typically received for their assistance at royal births.
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It is recorded that Fernel was well paid for his services at the royal deliveries and received a substantial pension for his role in ensuring the French succession.
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Following the deaths of Catherine’s husband and then her three sons who reigned successively as kings of France, Catherine’s sonin-law, the estranged husband of her daughter Marguerite, became the next French monarch. Henri IV’s marriage to his second wife, Marie de Médicis,
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produced an heir, the future Louis XIII, whose marriage to Anne of Austria resulted in a period of royal infertility that was even more prolonged than Catherine’s. Louis XIII and Anne of Austria were also married at the age of 14 and they endured over two decades of reproductive anxiety. Their often contentious relationship resulted in only intermittent periods of sexual intimacy and Anne’s few pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. According to Gelis, the royal couple resorted to prayers, pilgrimages, and natural resources. Their physician sent them to Forges-les-Eaux, “whose iron-bearing ‘sanguine’ springs were supposed to cure anemia and infertility. In the same year, the Queen went, alone, to sit ritually on the stone of Saint-Fiacre... But if they made trial of water and stone, they also engaged in devotions more suited to orthodox Christian conduct...and never ceased praying to the Virgin or to any saint with any reputation for curing infertility.”
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In September 1638, 22 years into their marriage, their wishes were realized with the birth of the future Louis XIV. A popular contemporary explanation of his conception is sentimental enough to seem apocryphal: one stormy night in the winter of 1637, the weather prevented Louis XIII from visiting his mistress as planned, so he was forced to spend the night at the Louvre with Anne in the only royal bed available.

Nine months later, the rest became proverbial history. Ruth Kleinman explores the plausibility of this story and similar anecdotes, and suggests that the “incident may actually have occurred though with some slight variation.” However, Kleinman adds that this royal couple’s fertility problem most likely resulted from too little cohabitation and too much discord.
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At any rate, after such a long period of childlessness, Anne’s successful delivery was greeted as a miraculous conception. According to Holly Tucker, some of the seventeenth-century fairy tales alluding to infertility, such as Jean de Preschac’s “Sans Parangon,” Murat’s “Le Palais de la Vengeance,” and several tales by d’Aulnoy were direct references to Anne of Austria’s reproductive difficulties. However, in many of these tales, the royal pregnancy results in the birth of a daughter rather than of a son, thus subverting patriarchal expectations for proper succession, particularly given France’s Salic law on which its male monarchy depended.
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Fortunately, Anne of Austria’s long period of infertility, like Catherine de Médicis’, resulted in the birth of a son, and her quest to provide an heir was fulfilled. Not only were the king and queen relieved, but according to national legend, so was the entire country, which had been so anxious about a secure succession.

The longing to bear a child could be so intense that it could also result in a phantom pregnancy, a condition most famously associated with England’s Mary I, though other early modern queens and aristocratic women shared the same experience. Mary suffered two false pregnancies during her marriage, episodes which have unfairly led to her characterizations as desperate and hysterical.
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During her short reign, Mary Tudor longed to conceive a child with her consort, Philip of Spain. Mary was 11 years older than Philip and her love for him was not returned in equal measure, but they both understood the importance of providing an heir to restore and secure a Catholic England. Unlike Catherine de Médicis or Anne of Austria, Mary did not endure a long period of infertility, but she was also a middle-aged spouse and would have understood how limited were her childbearing years.

On July 25, 1554, Mary and Philip were married in an elaborate ceremony at Winchester Cathedral. The wedding between the Catholic monarchs, the 38-year-old English queen and the 27-year-old Spanish prince and heir to the Hapsburg Empire, took place just days after they met for the first time. Two months later, on September 18, Simon Renard, the English ambassador for Mary’s father-in-law, Charles V, announced in one of his dispatches, “One of the queen’s physicians has told me that she is probably with child and if it is true everything will calm down and go smoothly here.”
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Renard’s qualifier “probably”—in addition to his haste—may well have cast doubt on the news. A more confident report came on October 2 from Ruy Gomez, one of the Spaniards in Philip’s entourage: “The Queen is with child; may it please God to grant her the issue that is so solely needed to set affairs right here...this pregnancy will put a stop to every difficulty.”
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Both Renard and Gomez’s grand claims allude to their hope that an heir would calm religious turmoil and ensure England’s commitment to Catholicism, another reminder of the public and political investment in a queen’s pregnancy.