Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (4 page)

The celebratory events for this grand occasion were a curious mixture of theological and classical entertainments, pageants, and masques, mixed with entirely secular pleasures such as masquerades and balls. And Agnès, whom the king had nicknamed the Queen of Beauty, presided over them all.

Charles adored Agnès because he considered her beautiful both inside and out. According to the contemporary chronicler Jean Chartier, “The love the King bore to Madame Agnès was, as everyone said, owing to her gaiety, her merry and laughing moods, and the purity and polish of her conversation, as well as to the fact that among ladies of fashion and beauty, she was the youngest and fairest ever seen. Besides all this, they said Agnès was very charitable, and gave large and liberal sums in alms, distributing from her own purse large gifts to the poor of the Church.”

Agnès eventually got as good as she gave. During the 1440s Charles bestowed upon his Queen of Beauty the Manoir de Beauté-sur-Marne
(the Castle of Beauty), built by his grandfather Charles V, as well as a number of other châteaux. She also received properties upon the births of each of their three illegitimate daughters, Charlotte, Marie, and Jeanne. A generation later, Charlotte’s son Louis de Brézé married Diane de Poitiers, who became the most famous royal mistress of the sixteenth century, owing to her affair with Henri II.

In the early months of 1440, Charles’s son and heir, the sixteen-year-old dauphin, Louis, participated in an unsuccessful uprising against his father called a
praguerie
, which took its name from the Bohemian dissensions created by the likes of Jan Hus. It was Agnès Sorel who armed the king and rallied supporters to his side. Louis never forgave her, both for aiding her lover, and for befriending his wife, Margaret of Scotland.

Charles let his heir stew for a while, but eventually pardoned him. He had bigger fish to fry, and in this he received Agnès’s moral support. Although Paris was in Charles’s possession, the English stubbornly refused to leave other regions of France, holding Normandy in the north and Gascony and Guienne in the south. In order for the king to defeat the English once and for all, he had to capture their headquarters, which was at Pontoise. Agnès accompanied her lover to the front in 1441, living at the camp with him. The siege of Pontoise was ultimately victorious for the French.

Queen Marie bore her husband’s very public infidelity with characteristic resignation. But a sovereign’s legitimate children often have no trouble expressing their open hatred of their parent’s lover. Siding with his long-suffering mother, the future Louis XI was no exception. One day in 1444, the twenty-one-year-old heir crossed paths with his father’s inamorata and cried, “By our Lord’s passion, this woman is the cause of all our misfortunes,” and then hauled off and hit Agnès in the face.

After this incident, she quit the court, withdrawing to the Château de Loches in Touraine. However, she would occasionally journey to her other primary residence, the Manoir de Beauté on the Marne River. There the king would secretly visit her, not just for lovers’ trysts, but to discuss matters of state as well.

They were wise to meet in secret, because it was not merely Louis’ outburst that had led to Agnès’s self-imposed exile. Public sentiment
was now very much against her because of the extent of her substantial influence with the monarch. Her biggest detractors were those who wished to control Charles instead: the dauphin Louis, the Scottish mercenary nobles, and the captains of his former bands, who had been his allies before Agnès had ever met the king.

Agnès may have left the court, but she did not abandon her lover. In the early days of 1449 she was pregnant with their fourth child when she set out from Chinon in the bleak winter cold to meet him at the front in Jumièges. The forty-year-old royal mistress became ill during the journey and died at six p.m. on February 9, 1449, at the farm of Mesnil, a dependency of the abbey at Jumièges. The abbey records state that “Charles VII had been at Jumièges for six weeks when Agnès Sorel was prostrated by an acute attack of dysentery.”

But soon after her death, the belief that she had expired from natural causes was dismissed, replaced by the theory that she had been killed by mercury poisoning, perhaps the victim of a murder. Her friend the jeweler-financier Jean Coeur was at first suspected, although he was never charged, and he does not seem to have had any motive to be rid of her. Agnès had languished for forty days; if she had deliberately been given a fatal dose of poison, wouldn’t she have expired a lot sooner?

Agnès Sorel’s remains were examined in 2005 by a French forensic scientist, Philippe Charlier, whose tests concluded that mercury poisoning was indeed responsible for her demise. But as mercury was a popular ingredient in cosmetics and it was also used to treat worms, he could not state with any certainty whether she had been murdered.

Although it would have been nice if Charles had elevated his beloved Agnès to the nobility when she was alive to enjoy the perquisites of rank, the king made her a posthumous duchess so that she could receive an appropriately opulent ducal burial. Her body was interred in Loches in the Church of St. Ours.

Charles survived Agnès by a dozen years, dying in 1461. Incapable of fidelity to his poor dishrag of a queen (who would outlive him by more than two years), he took a new paramour—Agnès’s cousin, Antoinette de Maignelais.

H
ENRI
II

1519–1559

R
ULED
F
RANCE
: 1547–1559

H
enri needed love from the beginning. He was only six years old when he and his older brother François were sent to the Spanish court as hostages, imprisoned in their father King François I’s stead after he was vanquished at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Upon their departure on March 17, 1526, one of the noblewomen in the French entourage was particularly touched by the sight of brave little Henri. She broke out of the crowd of spectators and took him in her arms, kissing the tearful boy au revoir on the forehead and wishing him Godspeed. For the rest of his life, the child would remember the maternal solicitousness of Diane de Poitiers.

The princes were held in captivity in increasingly squalid conditions for nearly five years while their dad blithely reneged on the terms of the treaty he had forged with Charles of Spain. When the boys were finally sent home to France and had difficulty reacclimating themselves to anything approaching normalcy, François scolded his sons, declaring he had no time for “dreamy, sullen, sleepy children.”

On October 28, 1533, just fourteen years old, as part of another deal his father cut with the king of Spain, as well as Henry VIII, and Pope Clement, Henri wed His Holiness’s niece, the homely, dumpy, and dusky Catherine de Medici—wealthy, but sullied by the fact that she was not of royal blood. Her family had made its fortune first in trade and then in banking. The couple had a miserable sex life; Catherine did not bear Henri their first child until they had been married for a decade. They eventually had ten children between 1543 and 1555, seven of whom survived to adulthood.

The August 2, 1536, death of the dauphin François made Henri the heir to the throne of France. Upon the death of his father he assumed the crown on his twenty-eighth birthday, March 31, 1547.

Much of Henri’s reign was spent in conflict. He fought foreign wars with Austria, in Flanders, and challenged Charles of Spain’s sovereignty over Italy. At home he persecuted the French Protestants, the Huguenots, confiscating their property and burning them as heretics.

Although Henri eventually came to respect his wife, the great love of his life was Diane de Poitiers, nearly twenty years his senior. Her elevation to the rank of duchess, let alone
maîtresse en titre
, was wound enough. But Henri’s passion for Diane humiliated Catherine de Medici on a deeper level, because the queen was unfortunately very much in love with her husband.

Henri’s death was foretold by the prognosticator Nostradamus as well as three other forecasters, who predicted he would meet his end during his forty-first year. Four years before the king’s demise Nostradamus had published the prophecy:

The young lion will overcome the old, in

A field of combat in a single fight. He will

Pierce his eyes in a golden cage, two

Wounds in one, he then dies a cruel death.

Like Julius Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, who warned the emperor to stay away from the forum that mid-March morning, Catherine urged Henri not to enter the jousting tournament on June 30, 1559.

But he laid no store by the predictions of astrologers. The contest was just one of many brilliant festivities organized around a double wedding: the marriage of Henri and Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth to King Philip II of Spain on June 22 and that of Henri’s sister Marguerite to the duc de Savoie, which would take place on July 2.

Henri handily triumphed over his first two opponents. But when he took the field against the third combatant—the captain of his Scots Guard, Gabriel de Montgomery—the king’s Master of the Horse warned him that his helmet was not properly fastened. And
his opponent had not realized that the metal tip of his lance was missing.

After his second pass, Henri had lifted his visor to mop his brow, but had failed to close the door to his “golden cage” before commencing the third pass. The riders faced off, spurred their mounts, and charged toward each other. De Montgomery’s lance struck Henri’s gorget, the armorial element that protects the throat, splintering the lance. Because the king’s visor had not been secured, a shard of wood pierced him above the right eye, penetrating his skull and exiting through his temple. Another splinter struck him through the throat. The king reeled in pain and shock; swaying from the force of the blow, he dropped his steed’s bridle.

Henri was taken from his horse and, according to the bishop of Troyes, “a splinter of a good bigness was removed” from his eye and temple. The renowned doctor from Brussels, Andreas Vesalius, was immediately sent for and was able to remove several splinters of wood and shattered bits of bone from the king’s skull. But part of the lance remained embedded in the wound, and the physicians dared not touch it. Henri took ten days to die, finally expiring on July 10, 1559, at the age of forty. He had reigned for twelve years, three months, and eleven days. He was buried in the Valois crypt at Saint-Denis and was succeeded by his frail fifteen-year-old son, François, who was married to the teenage Mary, Queen of Scots.

Henri’s queen, Catherine de Medici, became a regent to be reckoned with after Henri’s death. She succumbed to pleurisy on January 5, 1589.

H
ENRI
II
AND
D
IANE
DE
P
OITIERS
(1499–1566)

Henri became a bridegroom at the age of fourteen, which was not considered particularly young for the era. He was tall for his age, with a muscular, athletic physique, almond-shaped brown eyes, brown hair, a straight nose, and a somewhat olive but clear complexion, perhaps the greatest asset of all for an adolescent boy. Small wonder
that his little Medici dumpling of a spouse was immediately smitten. However, the physical attraction was not at all mutual. Catherine had not been warmly welcomed into the French court; her marriage to Henri was purely a matter of political back-scratching. She was short, dark, stout, plain, and a commoner, in a world where willowy, fair-skinned, blue-blooded blondes were the fashion. And Henri had eyes only for the lady who had been assigned to ease Catherine’s assimilation into the world of the Valois court. That woman was Catherine’s second cousin, who perfectly embodied the era’s
belle idéale
—the serenely beautiful Diane de Poitiers.

Educated according to the principles of humanism, Diane was a true Renaissance woman, cultured and literate, well versed in music, Greek, and Latin; her dancing was graceful and her conversation was elegant and witty. An avid huntress, like the Roman goddess who was her namesake, Diane also kept fit and glowing by swimming in cold water every day. To avoid wrinkles, she slept upright against a bolster and concocted her own facial masks from melon juice, young barley, and an egg yolk mixed with ambergris.

Diane’s connections to the court reached back to her childhood. In 1524, when she was barely five years old, her father’s life was spared at the last possible moment by Henri’s father, François I, after Jean de Poitiers had been accused of treason. Diane was born in the south of France in a region known as the Dauphiné, which borders Provence. At the age of fifteen, she was married to a man some forty years her senior, Louis de Brézé, seigneur d’Anet, who happened, appropriately enough, to be the royal Master of the Hunt. Louis was the grandson of King Charles VII—his mother, Charlotte, was the king’s oldest daughter by his
maîtresse en titre
Agnès Sorel. However, Charlotte’s disastrous marriage to Jacques de Brézé ended in a double murder when he came home one day to discover his wife (who, according to trial witnesses, was “moved by an inordinate lechery”) in bed with his Master of Hounds. Jacques immediately drew his sword and ran the pair of them through—one hundred times.

By the time Henri was old enough to know Diane, she was a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had also given Louis de Brézé, now governor and Sénéchal of Normandy, two daughters: Françoise (who
was only a year older than Henri), and Louise, who was two years younger.

The first scandal to enmesh Henri and Diane ensued when he was just a boy, during the March 1531 joust to honor the marriage of Henri’s father to his second wife, Eléanore, a princess of Portugal. The theme was a Spanish chivalric legend, the story of twelve-year-old Amadis, which hit bone-close to the prince, who was a few weeks shy of his own twelfth birthday. The plot revolves around the two young sons of the King of Wales exiled to a strange land and enslaved by a magician. The princeling falls in love with a lady fair and a fairy grants them eternal youth.