The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (14 page)

Suddenly, the muttering from the crowd ceased as a royal courier galloped into the square, waving a letter sealed with green wax and shouting to stop proceedings in the name of the king. Perversely, François had hesitated until the very last moment; the prisoner was semiconscious by the time the royal reprieve arrived. Nevertheless, Brantôme alleged that when the king’s courier arrived, the prisoner cried out, thanking “God and his daughter’s ‘allure’ for saving his life.”

It seems that the king had never intended to execute Jehan de Saint-Vallier. Diane’s father was arguably the least guilty of the conspirators and François would have heard the popular rumor that Saint-Vallier had opposed the Constable’s treachery. The pardon commuting Saint-Vallier’s sentence to life imprisonment “at the king’s pleasure” had been signed by him at Blois the same day, and was read aloud to the mystified, grumbling crowd. It explained that the sovereign’s clemency was due to the Poitiers family’s long history of service to the crown and to the entreaties of his son-in-law, the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy, Louis de Brézé, who had uncovered the plot.

One month later, Saint-Vallier was moved back to the fortress of Loches, where he was well treated and permitted to receive visitors. He remained there for two years, when he was released, pardoned, and had his lands and privileges restored. Jehan de Saint-Vallier remarried and lived another fifteen years. François continued with the punishment of the Constable’s other accomplices, leaving the sentence of death hanging
over them like a sword of Damocles. In his absence, Charles de Bourbon was sentenced to death by decapitation.

The suddenness of Saint-Vallier’s royal reprieve, and the fact that he had cried out thanking God for his daughter’s intercession, began a rumor so often repeated in print that it must be addressed. That inveterate and colorful court gossip and chronicler Brantôme could not resist recording the scurrilous story that a certain highborn traitor, whose head had been on the block for over an hour, had been reprieved because his daughter had given herself to the king. Although Brantôme mentioned no names, this report gave rise years later to the story that Diane had thus saved her father, despite the contrary opinions of other contemporary writers such as Arnoul le Ferron and François Belleforest.

Brantôme’s story was later spread by Victor Hugo in his novel
Le Roi s’amuse
, which was subsequently used as the basis of the plot for the opera
Rigoletto
. One of the Italian ambassadors, the Venetian Lorenzo Contarini, a notorious gossip, writing twenty years after the event, devoted one short paragraph to the episode, implying that Diane had been loved and “sampled” by François I.
⁸
For this to have been true, the king and Diane would have had to meet with extreme discretion—something for which François I was not known at all in his
amours
.

The sixteenth-century historian Belleforest gives some credence to the affair, but as he was born eight years after the supposed incident, it is more likely that he picked up the rumor many years later and embellished it at a time when it was politic to discredit Diane. Her father was said by Belleforest to have been so distressed that he died of “Saint-Vallier fever,” no doubt referring to his recorded trembling on the block; but this was a recurring illness; moreover, he did not die for several years. Most historians, including the eighteenth-century Georges Guiffrey, who edited Diane de Poitiers’ correspondence, Helen Henderson, and R. J. Knecht, François I’s most recent biographer, all discredit the so-called
affaire
. As for the claim that Louis de Brézé turned a
blind eye to the king’s lust for his beautiful wife—this would deny the great dignity and honorable nature of the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy.

It was the discovery of seventeen unsigned love letters addressed to the king that was partly responsible for the gossip. These letters were published as having been written by Diane de Poitiers. In fact, they have since been proven to be the work of François I’s first
maîtresse en tître
, Françoise de Foix, comtesse de Chateaubriant.
⁹
The letters were signed with the same endearments she used in her known letters to the king: “the hand of which the whole body is yours.”

Diane was probably with the court at Blois at the appointed time of her father’s execution and certainly kept abreast of developments. There is no doubt that the comtesse de Brézé would have been highly vulnerable had François I made her virtue the price for her father’s head. At the time, she was twenty-four, noble, beautiful, and destined for a royal liaison. The “Chevalier King” was an irresistibly charming rake of twenty-seven, debonair and immensely, almost heroically dissolute. Under the circumstances, a brief affair would have been excused at a court where adultery was commonplace.

The rumormongers suggested that Brézé, moved by loyalty and hopes of preferment, closed his eyes to the king’s lust for his young wife. And yet this was a man whose father had killed his own unfaithful spouse without hesitation, even though she was his king’s sister, and in the knowledge that retribution was sure to follow. Louis de Brézé would never have allowed his wife to do something so dishonorable to them both, and Diane would not have dared to act without his permission. When the king himself heard the rumor, he replied that the pardon was in no way due to Diane de Poitiers, and demanded whether he was considered to be so cowardly as to exchange the life of a man for the honor of his daughter.

_____________________

1
. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, was a grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Pope Leo X was the latter’s son.

2
. A pencil sketch of Diane at this time shows a face of classic symmetry and calm, more striking for its strength than its beauty.

3
. The term “lists” refers to the long barrier placed lengthwise in the center of a wide aisle. Two contestants galloped toward one another on opposite sides. Leveling a long, blunt wooden lance (tipped with metal to prevent it splitting) across the neck of his horse, the rider aimed at the shield or armor of his opponent, hoping to unseat him with the force of the blow.

4
. Hereafter I will call her Catherine. “Romula” was in memory of Romulus, legendary frounder of Rome and Florence.

5
. The first “crown of Charlemagne” was probably made for Emperor Otto I, crowned in 962. It was used by all the Holy Roman Emperors and later for the German kings, until 1804, when it was replaced by the crown of the Austrian Empire. French kings were crowned with another “crown of Charlemagne”—a tiara that was said to date from 1180 but was perhaps made in the thirteenth century. It was reputed to have been used to crown twenty-three kings of France and was kept in the Treasury of Saint-Denis. As it was destroyed in 1590 and its replacement was destroyed during the Revolution, the figure of twenty-three is apocryphal. After the Revolution, yet another “crown of Charlemagne” was made. The medieval closed “crown of Charlemagne” used for the ceremony of the Holy Roman Emperor is in the Imperial Schatzkammer in Vienna—see Richard A. Jackson, “
Vive le roi
” 1937:
A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

6
. Swearing loyalty to one’s liege lord was a solemn undertaking to faithfully serve one’s feudal superior.

7
.
Procès criminal de Johan de Poytiers, seigneur de Saint-Vallier
.

8
. Lorenzo Contarini, “
Relazione di Francia
” in E. Alberi,
Relazione degli ambasciatori veneti
. Florence, 1860.

9
. Françoise de Foix entertained other lovers besides the king. Hearing him approach her room one day, she hid one of them behind an arrangement of leaves in her fireplace. After making love to her, François urinated “copiously” into the fireplace.

CHAPTER FIVE

Defeat and Capture at Pavia

J
ust as autumn of 1523 was turning the forests of the Touraine into shades of gold, the fruit that bore the queen’s name—a new species of sweet green plum called the
reine claude
—ripened like the six children who played at her feet.
¹
With her health failing, Queen Claude spent more and more time away from the court and remained with her children at Blois. After the birth of her youngest, Marguerite,
²
on June 5 that year, the queen had little strength to continue. All she could manage was to be half-carried from one armchair to another, from bedroom to nursery. Claude had married at fourteen, and her still growing body was not strong enough to overcome the inevitable calcium deficiency and onset of osteoporosis after giving birth to seven children in nine years. She had always limped, but after these births her hips became deformed, and walking was a torment. Because she was always modest and self-effacing, no one really noticed her absences from court, assuming her to be once again in childbed.

Claude’s greatest pleasure had always been to stay with her children at Blois, where she had spent her own childhood, playing in the gardens and enjoying the good air heavy with the scent of wild roses. For some years now, Diane de Poitiers had been in waiting to the queen, and Claude liked to keep her near. Diane’s quiet good sense and experience as a mother was a comfort to the frail queen and her children.

In 1523, Claude’s eldest child, Charlotte, was eight years old. The dauphin François was a dreamy, gentle child of six, and the energetic and contentious Henri d’Orléans was one year his junior. It was his grandmother Louise de Savoie who had named Henri in honor of the English king, whom she made the baby’s godfather in the vain hope that this gesture would help an alliance with England. There was also three-year-old Madeleine (the future queen of James V of Scotland), and little Charles d’Angoulême was just beginning to walk. The baby
Marguerite was still swaddled in her cradle. The nursery at Blois, Amboise, or Saint-Germain-en-Laye was always crowded with the servants traditionally needed to look after royalty of any age. There was no less than forty household staff to attend to the needs of these six Children of France, and seventy domestics just for the nursery quarters.

With the entire court installed at Blois that autumn, the manic round of festivities and hunts did not slacken on account of the queen’s illness. At the same time, the news of the Constable de Bourbon’s treason traumatized the court. How was it possible that the king’s most trusted friend and servant could betray him? Had Bourbon not always been loyal and had he not distinguished himself by his courage fighting at Marignano, and later in defeating the Swiss mercenaries? Had the king not recognized his value and bestowed on him the title of “Constable of France,” which had not been used for some fifteen years? Slowly, the whole sordid story emerged. The winter was harsh and the king remained with the court at Blois into the new year.

Nor did the building works at the château halt because of the presence of the court. Not only did François I build a number of new châteaux in the region of the Loire, but he altered and improved many of the existing ones. Possibly the most famous of these alterations is the staircase at Blois: its double helix is an almost feminine touch, for it was indeed built for the queen. As sovereign duchess of Brittany, Claude used the white ermine of that state as her symbol, one of the few creatures in nature that mate for life. As long as she lived, François added her device to his salamander symbol—that mythological lizard with blood so cold it could walk through fire unscathed.

The Renaissance was a time when such conceits were popular: if your blood was hot, as the king’s surely was, then take as your symbol the opposite example. Not known for modesty, François I plastered his châteaux in the Loire with these lizards, and became known as the “Salamander King.”
³
When the young Federigo Gonzaga, future Duke of Mantua, came to stay at the French court, he admired this device of the king’s and took it for his own. The salamander can be seen
on the ceilings and walls of his Palazzo del Te in Mantua—symbol of another hot-blooded prince of the same name.

I
N Italy in the late autumn of 1523, another child’s life was about to change dramatically. On November 19, Giulio de’ Medici, cousin of Pope Leo X, was elected Pope Clement VII.

First and foremost, Clement VII was a Medici. He was industrious and worked hard to achieve his triple ambition: to secure the city of Florence; to secure his new domains, the Papal States; to defend Europe against the infidel Turk. To this end, he supported a royal alliance with France continuing the policy of his Medici uncle and predecessor Leo X, who had promoted the marriage of Clement’s first cousin, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, a kinswoman of the French king.

The young Giulio de’ Medici had been brought up by his uncle Lorenzo and governed Florence from the time of Lorenzo’s death in 1519. Devout, scholarly, interested in the arts, Giulio, together with Catherine de’ Medici’s grandmother, Alfonsina Orsini, had been appointed by Pope Leo X to take care of the baby Medici heiress. Catherine was the sole legitimate descendant of Lorenzo the Magnificent and heiress to the Medici hegemony of Florence; she had to be preserved. Her only young Medici cousins, Ippolito and Alessandro, were both illegitimate. Alessandro had been born to Giulio when he was still a cardinal by a beautiful black slave girl—hence his dark skin, tight curls, and nickname “
de Maure
,” “of the Moor.”

After Clement’s election, Alfonsina Orsini brought her tiny granddaughter to Rome so that the pope could guard this fragile hope of a Medici succession. Ambassador Marco Minio reported home to Venice that when Clement VII saw the frail baby in the arms of her grandmother, he said with tears in his eyes, “
Recens fert aerumnas
”—“This child bears the sorrows of the Greeks” (in other words, her life will bear the hallmarks of a Greek tragedy).

Alfonsina Orsini died the following year, 1524, and Catherine’s Medici aunt Clarissa Strozzi took her place as her guardian. The
scholar Eugène Alberi wrote that “an astrologer was called in to draw up little Catherine’s horoscope. It was said that he predicted for her a life full of sorrows, agitation, and storms, a life that was to be a perpetual sacrifice for the sake of French unity.”

Indeed, once the French king’s dream of a strong alliance with the Medici was destroyed with the deaths of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, François tried to take charge of the orphaned Catherine, but Pope Leo refused him her custody. In 1525, at the age of six, Catherine returned to Florence with her cousin Alessandro, where she lived in the Medicis’ Riccardi Palace.
⁴
While we can assume she spent the summer months at Poggio a Caiano, a Medici villa in the cooler hills surrounding Florence, no further details are known about her early childhood. Clement VII wrote to François I forbidding Catherine’s uncle the Duke of Albany from administering her La Tour possessions, and insisting that the papal nuncio in Paris claim for Catherine the pension promised her by François I at her birth. Clement VII took his role as Catherine’s guardian seriously!

I
N December 1523, Emperor Charles V, encouraged by the defection of the Constable of France to his side, began to move into French territory. Outside Milan, he encountered Admiral Bonnivet, the favorite of François I, who had suffered one defeat after another while fever, plague, famine, and cold decimated his troops. Montmorency had raised a relief army of Swiss to come to Bonnivet’s aid, but the snow over the Alps prevented him from accomplishing his mission. Bonnivet could have taken Milan with a final assault, but he preferred to negotiate which gave the city time to reinforce its walls and the imperial army of Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples, a chance to relieve its forces. The king was in Paris when he heard the news that his admiral had retreated to await the Swiss reinforcements he had been promised. With the outer corners of his kingdom under attack, François I immediately rode out at the head of his army to defend his
most prized possession, Milan. Meanwhile, Bonnivet and Montmorency missed their rendezvous due to being hounded by the Spanish and the duc de Bourbon. A badly wounded Admiral Bonnivet gave up his command, and the French were forced to retreat over the Alps.

Fighting in the French rearguard, the famous Pierre du Terrail, chevalier de Bayard, known as “
Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche
”—“The knight without fear or blame,” who had knighted the king on the field at Marignano, was shot by a Spanish
arquebusier
and lay dying beneath a tree.
⁵

According to Guillaume du Bellay, Bayard turned his face toward the enemy lines to await death, which was surely coming. His followers erected a tent over him and he ordered them to leave him as the Spanish were approaching. Bayard saw that the leader of the Spanish troops was the Constable de Bourbon, who approached stiffly and said to the dying hero: “It grieves me to see you in this state, you who have been such a courageous and virtuous knight.” “Sir,” replied Bayard, “do not pity me, for I die a righteous death. It is I who pity you, to see you serve against your prince, your country, and your solemn oath.”
⁶

In the spring of 1524, Charles de Bourbon, at the head of an imperial mixed army of Spaniards, Germans, and Italians numbering twenty thousand men, along with three hundred knights and eighteen pieces of artillery—a modest force at the time—invaded Provence, together with the Italian army of the viceroy of Naples, Charles de Lannoy. While Bourbon’s troops ravaged the south, the imperial fleet attacked and pillaged along the coast. Town after town fell to the imperial army and Charles de Bourbon took the title “Comte de Provence.”

After a most severe winter, the summer of 1524 brought a terrible drought, and bush fires erupted all around the Touraine, putting the harvest in jeopardy. One great fire destroyed the ancient city of Troyes in the northeast, and rumors spread that the agents of Charles V had begun the blaze. Inevitably, after the drought came the floods, high winds, and earth tremors.

While the fires were raging and the king was leading his army to Lyons against the invasion of France by Charles de Bourbon, Queen
Claude died at Blois on July 24. Her many pregnancies had sapped her frail body, and her weakness was complicated, so it was whispered, by a disease she had caught from her husband. The king cried when he heard the news, and mourned his queen sincerely, declaring that he would give his own life to bring her back.

According to François’ close friend Fleurange, he went into deep mourning, as did his mother and their entire suite. Fleurange wrote that the king was right to grieve for his wife, as there had never been a “more honest princess on earth, nor one more beloved in all the world, and everyone, young and old, believed that if she had not gone to Paradise, then few would go.…”