The Rival Queens (3 page)

It took four years and as many tons of gold to secure the young hostages’ release. Upon their return to France, their father was surprised to find them much changed, particularly the younger boy, Henri. Henri was no longer the engaging and amiable sprite he had once been. On the contrary, he seemed… angry. He often acted out
or turned sullen and morose. His manners were rude, and he had difficulty assimilating into his old life. He had even forgotten how to speak French. This was not François’s idea of princely behavior. Nor did the relationship between the king of France and his second son improve when, a mere three years after his return from the Spanish prison, Henri, who, like François himself, warmed only to beauty, was forced to marry a short, homely, socially inferior foreigner in order to further his father’s improbable Italian schemes.
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Catherine, conditioned almost from birth to anticipate possible threats to her security, was quick to appreciate the precariousness of her position. Confronted with her new husband’s indifference and stripped by Clement’s death of the protection of her once-substantial dowry, she faced the very real prospect of repudiation. An annulment would ruin her; the marriage had already been consummated. She knew she could easily be returned to Italy trailing the shame of failure, reduced to scraping by off the grudging hospitality of distant relations or, worse, involuntary confinement to a nunnery.

But Catherine had occupied similar positions of vulnerability in the past and had developed the skills necessary for coping with adversity. As with the Florentine nuns, she assumed a guise of ingratiating amiability and pliancy. No matter how rudely or dismissively she was treated by her new relations or other members of the French nobility, no word of complaint passed her smiling lips. Every slight or insult—and there were many—was overlooked or met with unrelenting goodwill. She was so pathetically eager to please that, although very few among her acquaintances could be said to have actively liked her, she made no real enemies, which itself could be considered something of a victory at the court of François I. After a while, most of the royal circle seems to have simply given up and accepted her presence on the periphery. And since, to her husband,
she was ever the modest, retiring, adoring wife, happy only when he was happy, touchingly elated by any crumb of affection, even Henri was only lightly inconvenienced by this new, completely undemanding spouse, and simply ignored her.

Not that Henri’s opinion really mattered—nothing mattered in Renaissance France but the outlook, attitude, and sentiments of the king. In the little universe that comprised the French court, François I was not simply the sun that shone (or failed to shine) on the anointed royal companions, he was also the moon, the stars, the sky, the clouds. Catherine recognized that whatever protection would be available to her could come only from him. On his benevolence alone did her survival in France as Henri’s wife depend.

And so she scrutinized François I as a student at the University of Paris pored over a critical Latin text, as an animal stalked its prey, as a connoisseur studied a particularly valued objet d’art. It would be said later of Catherine that she was a devotee of Machiavelli, but if so she didn’t read him very closely. Instead she took instruction in the stratagems of power from her oversized, large-spirited, massively flawed father-in-law.

François I was a big man, especially by sixteenth-century standards.
A Welshman who saw him
for the first time reported in awe that the king of France stood six feet tall. His chest was strong, his legs long (although somewhat bandy), and the size of his nose singularly impressive.
His appetites
matched his stature; even as an infant he guzzled so much milk that he needed two wet nurses, and his mother nicknamed him Caesar. His great obsessions in life were gorgeous women, hunting, and Italy, although not necessarily in that order. He kept a corps of peerless aristocratic beauties around him at court, familiarly known as
la petite bande,
whose duty it was to soothe, amuse, and entertain the king. In addition to their many other talents, the women were all expert riders, as François spent most of his time (well, his days, anyway) on his horse, either actively engaged in a hunt or peripatetically moving the court back and forth across the kingdom in search of new, unexplored, more exciting forests in which to hunt.

His preoccupation with Italy dated from 1515, when, only twenty-one and new to the monarchy, he brazenly led his army through Piedmont, crossed the Ticino, and conquered Milan in a ferocious encounter at Marignano described by an eyewitness as a “
battle of giants
.”
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Italy was a revelation to the youthful François. The Renaissance was in full blaze. Everywhere artists and craftsmen worked with dazzlingly brilliant pigments of blue and green, or exotic silks from the Orient, or gold filigree and polished marble. New buildings in a splendidly novel style of architecture unknown in France were under noisy construction in all the principal cities. Humanists debated the wisdom of the Greeks while scholars toted around manuscripts recovered from the fall of Constantinople. The king of France took one look and understood that something thrilling was going on in Italy that was wanting in his native realm, and he resolved to rectify the imbalance.

And therein lay Catherine’s opportunity. She spoke Italian to the king and amused him with news from her relatives and artistic contacts in Florence, with whom she was in regular communication. She and her father-in-law shared a love of opulence and grand fetes, and she regaled François with descriptions of the papal court at Rome, its many entertainments and pleasures, the delicious dishes served at its multicourse feasts. She encouraged François’s dreams of an Italian empire and his determination to bring the region’s culture and scholarship to France. She faithfully rooted him on through his many interminable tennis matches. And, of course, she worked on her riding.

The king warmed to her. He began to call her “
my daughter
.” Eventually, he made an exception in her case and she was admitted, despite her relative plainness, into
la petite bande,
an honor that signaled François’s approval to the rest of the court and effectively
put her under his protection. This was fortunate, as Catherine was going to need all the help she could get, a state of affairs that became immediately apparent on a hot summer’s day in August 1536, less than three years into her marriage, when her husband’s older brother, the dauphin, drank a glass of ice water after a particularly strenuous game of tennis, abruptly keeled over, and, to the utter disbelief of the court and the kingdom, went into a coma and died eight days later, leaving Henri as heir to the throne.

A
S WITH EVERYTHING IN
Catherine’s life, being suddenly promoted to the position of future queen of France was a decidedly mixed blessing. In a stroke of particularly miserable luck, it turned out that the servant who had brought the dauphin the fateful cup of water was an Italian who had come to court as part of Catherine’s retinue. Although an autopsy revealed no evidence of foul play, the hapless cupbearer was nonetheless arrested and his rooms searched. A discourse on toxins being found among his possessions, he was subsequently tortured and executed in appropriately gruesome fashion. Suspicion then naturally fell upon Catherine, who had introduced the reviled assassin to court and who was known to be attracted to astrology and the occult. Her foresight in having so carefully cultivated a relationship with the king was swiftly made manifest when the issue was dropped because François refused to believe the allegations.

Being exonerated from the charge of poisoning, however, while gratifying, did not put an end to Catherine’s troubles. On the contrary, her ordeal was just beginning. She faced two formidable, seemingly intractable obstacles to her potential reign and happiness: her inability to conceive and her husband’s obvious and impassioned love for another woman.

The court’s preoccupation with Catherine’s barrenness—she was already seventeen and still childless at the time of the dauphin’s death—had been difficult enough to endure while she was only the wife of a younger son, but the pressure to provide an heir became
almost unbearable after she was suddenly elevated to the role of future queen of France. In her desperation to conceive, she tried everything—special diets of vegetables and herbs, mysticism and secret prayers, miraculous potions recommended by alchemists and conjurers. She seems to have made a habit of imbibing urine obtained from pregnant livestock. She wore a locket stuffed with a cremated frog. Somehow none of this worked. And just at this time, when she was most vulnerable, it became clear to her—as it was to the rest of the court—that her husband had become involved in an ardent, highly public love affair with a patrician bombshell nineteen years his senior named Diane de Poitiers.

Diane came from a high-ranking French family that had seen its share of political setbacks but had nonetheless managed to recover its influence at court. (Her father had been tried and condemned for treason and was only saved from execution by a last-minute pardon from the king.) She had been married at the age of fifteen to an extremely rich and powerful man of fifty-six, who helpfully instructed his child bride in the ways of the world before (equally helpfully) dying and leaving her an extremely rich and powerful widow of thirty-one. Catherine’s husband, Henri, had long admired Diane. He openly carried her colors at jousts and spent as much time as he could with her.
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And with good reason—although nearly two decades older than her lover, Diane was dazzling. She should have been: she certainly worked at it hard enough. Her beauty regimen was awe-inspiring. Up with the sun every morning, a cold-water bath, a little light broth, and then onto her horse for a brisk morning gallop of several hours’ duration, followed by a little light lunch, an early dinner, and an even earlier bedtime. This was a woman with a purpose.

And her purpose was to ensnare a king—specifically, France’s future king, Henri. Intelligent, mature, disciplined, sexually experienced, and politically adept, Diane was in her prime, and she knew it. Short, stocky, unsophisticated Catherine, whose habits were described by a court observer as slovenly and who ate
“
beaucoup
”
(although she tried to make up for it by incessant walking and riding), was no match for tall, lithe, condescending Diane.

So began one of the longest-running and bizarre marital farces in history. Catherine was Henri’s wife and the future queen of France in name only. Diane was Henri’s true spouse and soul mate and was treated as such by the court. To demonstrate this, after his older brother’s death and Diane’s capitulation to him (two events that would seem related, as Diane had held him off sexually while he was still only a second son), Henri, too, wore only black and white. He designed a special insignia celebrating their love through the interlacing of their initials and had it emblazoned everywhere. It was with Diane, and not Catherine, that Henri spent the majority of his time, his days—and his nights. Diane’s bedroom was situated directly under Catherine’s at the castle of Saint-Germain. According to Brantôme, a gossipy chronicler who followed court events closely, Catherine had one of her servants bore peepholes into her floor so she could spy on her husband and his mistress. She saw “
a beautiful, fair woman
, fresh and half undressed… caressing her lover in a hundred ways, who was doing the same to her.” Afterward, Catherine whimpered to one of her ladies-in-waiting that Henri had “
never used her so well
.”

But Catherine was powerless to object to the situation—worse than this, she had to pretend to
like
Diane, even to cultivate her. A movement was under way among a cadre of powerful aristocrats close to the king to have the new heir to the throne’s barren spouse replaced by a more fertile candidate. Catherine got wind of the intrigue and understood that she had to be proactive if she wished to remain Henri’s wife. François she handled by tearfully groveling before him with the offer to retire voluntarily into a nunnery if he
willed it, knowing that the king would not have the heart to repudiate her if she confronted him face-to-face. But she could not afford to offend the woman who exerted so much influence over her husband and who, she knew, would have no compunctions about supplanting her either in person or by proxy. So, as she did with all who could harm her, Catherine swallowed her hurt and pride and ingratiated herself with Diane, going to the lengths of spying for her and informing on her enemies at court.

The strategy worked. Diane, who had no wish to see Henri’s meek, unattractive, malleable wife deposed for a new, younger, more svelte, and potentially more assertive model, offered her support to Catherine. She assumed an almost maternal role, nursing the younger woman when she became ill, and, most important, advising her on alternative paths to conception. It was Diane who first identified Henri as the probable source of the couple’s infertility. Henri had a documented medical condition called hypospadias, which apparently caused his penis, when erect, to point downward. Diane, who was very familiar with Henri’s penis, sought to compensate for this by proposing that during coitus Catherine turn around and assume a sexual position known familiarly in France as
la levrette
.
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Because it was so important that Catherine provide an heir, Diane threw herself wholeheartedly into the problem. She knew that Henri found relations with his wife to be less than stimulating, so sex became a team effort. Diane would warm up her lover in her bed at night and at the optimal moment kick him out and send him upstairs to his wife, where Henri would do his manly duty in a few short minutes and then hop out of Catherine’s bed to return to Diane’s. They went through this charade, off and on, for somewhere between
five and seven years,
until January 19, 1544, when Catherine, age twenty-four, finally secured her position at court by giving birth to a son, whom the couple named Francis in honor of the king. Any
further doubts as to the dauphine’s ability to reproduce were effectively silenced the next year when she brought forth a daughter, Elizabeth, followed by another daughter, Claude, in 1547. In the end, the woman who, it was feared, could never conceive proved to be profoundly fertile, bearing ten children over a twelve-year period, of whom seven survived.