Henry II (1547-1559)
Francis I’s eldest son, Francis the Dauphin, died in August 1536 after having drunk a cold cup of water after a game of tennis. Oddly enough, tennis (the jeu de paume) had long been a dangerous game for the French monarchy –Louis X died after a strenuous game, Charles VIII died after being struck in the head while on his way to watch a match, and now the eighteen-year-old Dauphin of France had also died after a game. Popular speculation assumed the boy had been poisoned, but more recent theories suggest he may have actually contracted tuberculosis. At any rate, the crown of France now fell to Francis’s second son, Henry, the former Duke of Orléans. He had previously been held hostage for over four years in exchange for his father returning to France over the Italian Wars (young Henry was released after the Treaty of Madrid, which his father Francis later repudiated).
Henry married Catherine de’ Medici in Marseille (in what was reportedly an exhausting wedding) and the following year, at the age of fifteen, he became romantically involved with a thirty-five-year-old widow, Diane de Poitiers –a friend and distant relative of his wife Catherine– who quickly became one of the most powerful women in France (occasionally she was even known to sign royal documents in the king’s name). At first, Diane was a loyal servant of the crown, but in time Catherine grew jealous of their intimacy, especially after Henry gifted Diane the Chateau d’Anet (one of the loveliest Chateaux near Paris; it was featured in Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bete as well as the James Bond film Thunderball). He also later gifted her Chenonceau which also drew the ire of Queen Catherine.
Henry continued his father’s policy persecuting the Protestant Huguenots. Many were sought out and burned at the stake, or if they were lucky, their tongues were cut out. Determined to stop the spread of Protestantism during the reign of the boy king Edward VI in England, and thereby attempt to prevent any semblance of an Anglo-Scottish reconciliation abroad, Henry married his eldest son, Francis, to Mary Stuart (the child Queen of Scotland). He also often sought to undermine Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire (or Charles I of Spain), whom he never forgave for imprisoning him during the Italian Wars, and he expanded France’s growing relationship with Sultan Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire. But, despite mutual hostilities, a temporary peace with the Holy Roman Empire finally came in April 1559 with the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis after the death of Charles in 1558 (it was signed by Charles’s son Philip II) and the treaty finally settled the dispute over control of the Italian peninsula.
It wasn’t long after this that Henry met his untimely demise. On July 1, 1559, he was jousting at the Chateau de Tournelles in Paris when the lance of his opponent, Gabriel Comte de Montgomery, shattered and hit a once in-a-million strike in which a splinter slipped under Henry’s visor and pierced his eye before penetrating deep into his brain. He died of sepsis ten days later when the doctors decided to take a “wait and see” approach with respect to his eye. During the joust, he was wearing the colors of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, but the jealous Queen Catherine forbade Diane from seeing her dying king in his bedchamber, despite his loud demands to see her. Diane was then exiled to her properties for the rest of her life.
Despite the unexpected death of the king, at this point the French crown seemed all but secure for the future –Henry II had left behind three surviving young sons who all had bright futures ahead of them. None would suspect that in a matter of decades, the crown would be facing bankruptcy, vicious sectarian religious war, and a succession crisis.
“The French writer Andre Maurois maintained that Henry II was one of France’s greatest kings. It is hard to agree with him” (138).
Francis II (1559-1560)
For the next twenty years, there were three successive kings in France, all of them brothers, sons of Henry II. First was the frail fifteen-year-old, Francis II, whose wife was the indefatigable Mary Queen of Scots. Though he may not have needed it, a regency was appointed for the boy consisting of his ambitious uncles, Francis Duke of Guise and Francis’s brother Charles Cardinal of Lorraine –both of whom would cast a large shadow over French history over the next few monarchs. But Francis’s reign would not see much of it, his kingship lasted a mere seventeen months. It was marked by austerity (the nation was nearly bankrupt due to years of war against the Empire), and rising persecution of the Huguenots (there were now daily house searches and arrests of Protestants). By now, much of the nobility had quietly grown at odds with the commons and there was even plot by some Huguenots to kidnap the king and arrest the Guises –when the plotters were caught, twelve to fifteen-hundred of them were horribly executed, their remains displayed publicly on city walls and trees.
“Then, on 5 December 1560, King Francis died of an infection in his ear. A pathetic figure, blown this way and that by others stronger and more intelligent than himself, he had reigned for less than five months, but he had never ruled. His influence on the country had been negligible. His marriage to Mary of Scotland if anything had emphasised his inferiority: he was abnormally short, almost dwarfish; she stood a fraction under six feet. Whether the marriage was ever consummated we cannot tell, but it seems unlikely. Mary, as we know was to have two more husbands, neither of them entirely satisfactory; but both, one feels, must have been distinct improvements on her first” (142).
Charles IX (1560-1574)
Since Francis and Mary had no offspring of their own, the crown of France fell to Francis ten-year-old brother, Charles. He was crowned Charles IX but was given the regency of his mother (this time, Queen Catherine successfully pitted the Bourbons and the Guises against each other so that she could secure the crown away from their prying hands). Though Queen Catherine was a devout Catholic, she sought to cut a middle path in the exploding religious war in France. With the Edict of Saint-Germain in 1562 she recognized the existence of Protestantism in France and allowed for its practice (albeit not in public places). However, this remarkable edict was not enough to prevent open Civil War which exploded when Francis the Duke of Guise got into a confrontation with a small group of Huguenots who were holding a Protestant service in a barn in the village of Vassy. When he was denied entry, Guise set fire to the barn, killing sixty-three and wounding a hundred others. A brief period of war followed, with Protestant towns facing off against the greater Catholic community. In 1567, civil war broke out again with England, Navarre, and the Dutch Republic coming to aid the Protestants, while Spain, Tuscany, and Pope Pius V supported the Catholics. There was also an attempt to abduct the king at Meaux, as well as a hideous massacre of Catholics at Nimes, and all the while the king had gradually come under the influence of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a prominent Huguenot leader (this caused great concern for Queen Catherine). The final straw came with the arranged marriage of the king’s sister, Margaret of Valois, to the Huguenot Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV). This was simply intolerable for Catholics, and when the day of their wedding in Paris arrived, temperatures were running high as Huguenots arrived in the city en masse.
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572)
Four days later, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was attacked in his bed in the middle of the night by Duke Henry of Guise and his followers (having already survived a previous assassination attempt). Coligny was stabbed numerous times and he was hurled out of an upper story window into the lower courtyard below where his corpse was decapitated and disemboweled before being paraded around the streets. That day was the Feast of St. Bartholomew (August 24th) and the ensuing unrest led to a general outright massacre of the Huguenots, almost certainly planned by the Guises, perhaps even with the permission of Queen Catherine. As violence breaking out in towns and cities all over France, estimates suggest some thirty-thousand people were brutally murdered in hideous displays of cruelty –one sect of Christianity slaughtering another. Chains were set up around homes in Paris preventing Huguenots from escaping while bands of commoners destroyed buildings and business belonging to Protestants, and after three days or so of bloody, vicious mob murders, the bodies of the victims were all left collectively strewn about the streets. The corpses were eventually tossed into rivers which then ran red with blood and the rest were piled onto carts to be led away.
News of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre spread quickly across Europe. The situation was met with elation by Philip II, who called it ‘one of the greatest joys of my whole life,’ and Pope Gregory XIII ordered a special singing of the Te Deum to celebrate the massacre. Meanwhile, Protestant monarchs like Queen Elizabeth went into mourning. As for King Charles IX, he was tormented by the massacre, his moods swung violently, and he claimed to be haunted by the voices of tortured Huguenots ringing in his ears. Queen Catherine dismissed her son as a lunatic. And before he could sufficiently mount a response to the massacre, the young king died at the age of twenty-three in 1574, likely of tuberculosis.
Henry III (1574-1589)
Charles IX had fathered two children, though neither of them was by his wife, and thus the crown was passed to Charles’s younger brother, the third surviving son of Henry II, Henry III (who was, oddly enough, King of Poland at the time since no one believed he would ever seriously accede the throne of France). He was married to the unremarkable Louise of Lorraine with whom he never produced an heir –in fact, all evidence suggests he was likely homosexual, always surrounding himself with what has been called a band of effeminate young men, or his “mignons,” who wore large earrings, small muffs, and accompanied him everywhere he went. Some have suggested this attempt to paint Henry III as gay and effeminate was a clever ploy of the king’s enemies. Scholarly debate persists to this day as to the nature of the mignons and Charles IX’s sexuality.
During his reign, the nightmarish religious civil war raged on. The king’s youngest brother and heir presumptive, Francis Duke of Anjou, died suddenly in 1584 (perhaps of malaria). The next person in line to the succession was amazingly the king’s ninth cousin, Henry King of Navarre, son of Anthony of Bourbon and direct descendant in the male line of Saint-Louis. However, since he was Protestant, the Guises forced Henry III to annul Henry of Navarre’s right to the throne. But despite acquiescing, the young king knew the Guises were gaining too much power over his crown, and so a plan was needed. Henry III got his vengeance shortly Christmas 1588 when he invited the Guises to the Chateau of Blois where he had them surprisingly murdered in cold blood by members of the royal guard. The reaction to this shocking strike was stark and immediate –Queen Catherine was appalled and went into mourning. She took to her bed and died there three weeks later. Then the whole of Catholic France rose up against its king –the streets of Paris were filled with a candle-lit vigil as the city vociferously rejected Henry III. The king fled to Tour where he regrouped with the King of Navarre (his brother-in-law, married to his sister Margaret). They launched a joint attack on Paris in the hopes of reclaiming the city, but, in the end, they made it no farther than Saint-Cloud where on August 1, 1589 a fanatical Dominican friar named Jacques Clement (posing as a courier) was given a private word with the king when suddenly pulled out a knife and stabbed Henry III in the stomach. The king died the next morning after declaring the King of Navarre (Henry of Navarre) as his successor. Needless to say, the people of Paris were ecstatic at the king’s death.
House of Valois-Angoulême (1515-1589)
- Henry II (1547-1559)
- Francis II (1559-1560)
- Charles IX (1560-1574)
- Henry III (1574-1589)
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.