I love history, and I especially love French history.
I’ve noted before that my favorite centuries (not in this order) are the 1400s, the 1500s, and the 1600s, with the 1700’s and the 1800’s pretty high on the list as well. It was the Renaissance and a time of enormous change. The Eastern Roman Empire finally fell in 1453, when the Ottomans took Constantinople, changing power politics in Europe forever and creating a significant degree of upheaval and fear across the continent. There was the splintering of Christianity and the wars of religion that raged for centuries, that started in the early 1500s when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the cathedral doors. Henry VIII tore England out of allegiance to Roman Catholicism after defending it vigorously for decades. Spain united and drove the Moors out–even though the Spanish nations remained independent, united only in the person of their monarch. Charles V presided over the largest world empire of all time until the British Empire rose after the final defeat of Napoleon. And the sixteenth century, which opened with Queen Isabella the Catholic of Castile proving that a woman could rule as wisely as a man–and could lead an army just as well, too. The sixteenth century saw the highest concentration of royal power being welded by women in history–and a lot of them were Hapsburg women, descendants of Isabella who always looked to her as a role model.
France was no exception in this century of powerful women–beginning with Henri II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and after his death, his widow Catherine de Medici took power. Her youngest daughter, Marguerite de Valois, is one of the forgotten women of history. She too was a queen–Queen of Navarre, married off to the Huguenot leader in an attempt to make peace on the religious question, but her wedding also kicked off the ST. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. She was also a power player in French politics from the time of her marriage on, but she isn’t really remembered much–and if she is, the calumnies about her sexuality were always used to demean and diminish her, and most of it was slander. She is perhaps best known because Alexandre Dumas wrote about her in Queen Margot. I had a Dumas period as a teen, and I loved Queen Margot.1 I had also read about her in Jean Plaidy’s bio of her husband, Evergreen Gallant, which also painted her as a horny slut controlled by her lusts and passions. I’ve never been a fan of slut-shaming–if men could be promiscuous, why not women–and so was always interested in her, just as I was interested in her mother.
Catherine had a rather shitty life until 1559, both her childhood in Italy and the first twenty-five years of her marriage. This colored the rest of her life, when she became ruthless when it came to protecting her family and the throne of her sons. (Afore-mentioned St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, anyone?) She didn’t seem to much care for her two youngest children–Marguerite and Francois-Hercule–who wound up bonding because no one else cared about them. Catherine wasn’t royal, so the French court and people despised her as “the banker’s daughter,” and there was never any question that this marriage only came about because the French needed the money and her uncle was pope2. For ten years she was hated and ignored, constantly worried about being set aside for a princess–particularly when the Dauphin conveniently died and her husband became heir to the throne. But then she had a son, and then had ten more children over the next fifteen years. Henri II’s sudden and unexpected death caught the entire nation unprepared; Catherine smoothly maneuvered the hated mistress out of his life as he died and, once he was in the grave, seized her jewels and best estates and exiled her from court. Her motto was said to be “hate, and wait.” Jean Plaidy, tireless writer of fictionalized biographies of royalty, devoted a trilogy to Catherine: Madame Serpent, The Italian Woman, and Queen Jezebel, in which she tried to be apologetic about Catherine and her decades of misrule, murder, and conspiracies. Catherine could be weak, and always dissembled, cried and lied as she manipulated her nobles, her people and other heads of state–not always successfully. Catherine, niece of a pope, felt no problem allying herself with heretics if it was in her best interest. Her power and influence faded during the reign of her favorite son, Henri III3.
But perhaps the worst thing Catherine ever did was how she treated her youngest daughter.
The book carries the subtitle Catherine de Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom.
The betrayal was an attempt, by Catherine, to put an end to the religious strife in France by marrying her youngest daughter to her cousin, currently third in the line of succession, King Henry of Navarre, who was a Huguenot. Neither Henry nor Margot wanted this marriage–despite her mother’s apparent lack of religious conviction, Margot was very much a devout Catholic–and Catherine tried to use the occasion of the wedding to murder Admiral Coligny, leader of the Huguenots and a trusted advisor to her son, Charles IX. She wanted to remove his influence over her son and take out the enemy leader at the same time. The assassination failed, and resulted in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which Margot herself hid and saved her husband and some of his friends from the mobs killing Huguenots. This threw Margot directly into power politics, and she never trusted her mother or her brothers again. Once she was involved, she proved herself to be not only smart but a very capable conspirator whose life was in danger from that moment on–until her own brother finally was killed in 1589 and her husband became king of France. They had their marriage annulled, and oddly enough, she became very close friends with her former husband, his second wife, and their children. She bore the honorific of queen for the rest of her life, and she was very wealthy and quite beloved; her mother was so hated her funeral was conducted secretly; all of Paris turned out for Margot’s.
It’s a very interesting period, but as I read this, I did take note that in many cases–all this political intriguing and diplomacy and duplicity? Wouldn’t really make for a great novel, because it takes years for things to happen; they spent most of their time sitting around, worrying, waiting for news. This is why shows like Reign and The Serpent Queen inevitably fail; they have to speed things up substantially to maintain suspense and viewer interest. I encountered this before when thinking through a couple of historical espionage thrillers (one having to do with Catherine’s Flying Squadron, beautiful women trained to be seductress spies for the Queen Mother; the other having to do with the Babington Plot in England); these things inevitably take months because of the great distances and medieval ways of traveling and sharing information. The great adventures of Margot’s life took seventeen years to pass. That’s a long fucking time for a suspense narrative, isn’t it?
The book is quite good. Nancy Goldstone is a good writer; the words all flow together and she arranges her researches in an excellent order for a brisk narrative. (She uses Margot’s memoirs, royal letters of her mother’s, and so forth to tell the tale.) The stakes are also very high–the future of France is at stake as the Valois dynasty slowly but surely dies out in the second half of the century.
One of the more interesting aspects of the 1300’s and 1400’s was that most nation’s problems during those years was too many members of the royal family, which led to strife; while the 1500s and 1600s were marred by royal sterility.
Highly recommended for fans of history and those who might be interesting in two women who don’t get nearly as much attention as they should.
Queer and Loathing in America 