Catherine de Médicis

Queen

• Born: April 13, 1519
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: January 5, 1589
• Place of death: Blois, France

Queen of France (r. 1547-1559)

Catherine de Médicis contributed to maintaining a strong centralized monarchy in spite of challenges from noble and religious factions. Her attempts to balance Roman Catholic and Calvinist interests in France also encouraged at least a minimum of toleration in the seventeenth century.

Area of Achievement Government and politics

Early Life

The father of Catherine de Médicis (MEHD-eh-chee), Lorenzo de’ Medici, was capo dello stato in Florence, gonfalonier of the Church, and, after a victorious expedition, duke of Urbino. His uncle, Pope Leo X, hoping to restore the Medicis to their earlier status, arranged a marriage between Lorenzo and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a distant relation of Francis I, king of France. The young couple was married at Amboise in 1518, and within a year their daughter was born. Two weeks later, Madeleine was dead of puerperal fever, and five days later Lorenzo also died.

The baby Catherine was the last legitimate heir of the family. Immediately, she became a tool in the hands of her guardian, Pope Leo X, and of his half brother Giulio, later Pope Clement VII, to recoup the Medici fortune. Catherine’s childhood was spent in Rome and Florence, where she was at times ignored and at other times the center of attention. In 1527, during a Florentine revolution, she was the hostage of anti-Medici forces and handled her desperate situation with great diplomacy. At the age of ten, she returned to Rome, where Pope Clement VII negotiated a marriage between Catherine and Henry, the second son of Francis I.

On October 26, 1533, Catherine and Henry, both fourteen years of age, were married at Avignon. Small and thin, with strong rather than beautiful features and the bulging eyes of the Medicis, Catherine was vivacious, self-assured, witty, bright, and eager to learn. As a new wife, she traveled everywhere with the French court and joined a group of young women, protégées of her father-in-law, to study Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, science, astronomy, and astrology. She hunted, danced, and rode using a sidesaddle she invented. Still a child when she married Henry, she had to call on all her habits of diplomacy to handle two major crises. The first was her husband’s attachment to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Catherine handled this problem by being a patient wife and by making an ally of her rival. The second difficulty was more critical and became especially important in 1536, when Henry’s older brother died and Henry became the heir to the French throne. That difficulty was her inability to bear children and the possibility that Henry would obtain a divorce to marry a fertile bride and leave Catherine without resources. Catherine’s charm and vivacity saved her from this fate, and, after ten years of marriage, she presented Henry with an heir.

During the next thirteen years, Catherine bore ten children, including four sons, and settled into a mutually respectful relationship with Henry and Diane de Poitiers. When Francis died in 1547, Henry arranged a coronation ceremony for Catherine, an unusual innovation for sixteenth century French kings. In 1551, when Henry went to war in Burgundy, he left Catherine as his regent, and, although Diane was his chief adviser, he also consulted with Catherine. In 1559, Catherine was one of the architects of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, which temporarily calmed the Franco-Spanish rivalry. The new amity was sealed with the marriage of Philip II of Spain and Catherine’s daughter Elizabeth. A tournament was held to celebrate this alliance, and, during one event, a splinter from a broken lance pierced the French king’s eye and he died.

Life’s Work

Although she did not know it at the time, Catherine’s life’s work began with the death of her husband. Francis became king at the age of fifteen. A year earlier, he had married Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots), a niece of the Guises, a prominent French noble family. Mary’s relatives assumed responsibility for advising the young king. If Francis had lived, Catherine would not have become an important political figure in France. When Francis died, Charles IX, aged ten, assumed the throne. After observing the arrogant despotism of the Guises, Catherine determined to become regent to her son.

During her years as regent, Catherine responded to two major crises in the face of four significant enemies. One struggle was to preserve royal authority against two noble families the Guises and the Bourbons who were determined to dominate the king and the royal family. The Bourbons were the hereditary kings of Navarre and the next in line to inherit the throne after Catherine’s sons. The other major crisis for Catherine was the religious conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestant Calvinists, called Huguenots, in France. To complicate her task, the Guises became associated with the Roman Catholic position and often looked to the Spanish for assistance, while the Bourbons at least the queen of Navarre and her brother-in-law the fiery prince of Condé openly adhered to the Protestant faith. Even before Francis II’s death, the prince of Condé had mobilized Huguenot support against the Guises in a conspiracy aimed at kidnapping the king and executing his Guise advisers. His efforts failed, but the lines of conflict were drawn. Catherine also faced a powerful Spanish king, Philip II, who would act in his own dynastic interest even though he was Catherine’s son-in-law. Finally, she had to deal with an inadequate treasury and the imminent bankruptcy of the Crown. As a woman and a foreigner, Catherine’s task was doubly difficult.

The queen mother’s response to the religious difficulties was to organize a national religious council to mediate between French Protestants and Catholics. The Colloquy of Poissy, which met in 1561, succeeded in getting the French religious parties to talk together, but it also polarized them. The Guises and other staunch Roman Catholics united and sought help from the Spanish king to challenge royal efforts at mediation. Religious passions intensified. In January, 1562, when Catherine issued the Edict of Toleration granting government protection to the Huguenots, the Catholics left the royal court, and the first of the French religious wars began.

During the next ten years, France was torn by three major civil wars motivated by religious and noble rivalry. Catherine tried desperately to maintain a balance among all these forces, but she failed. The third and most savage of the first set of religious wars ended in August, 1570, with the Peace of Saint-Germain and a backlash against the Guises and their Spanish allies. A new party, the Politique Party, grew out of this disgust with foreign influence. Composed of Roman Catholic and Huguenot moderates who believed that the integrity of the state was more important than religion, this party reflected Catherine’s own position.

Catherine’s diplomatic expertise became especially important in 1572, in negotiating defense treaties with the English and the Ottoman Turks against Philip II and in gaining the throne of Poland for her third son, Henry. As Henry departed for Poland, Europe was rocked by news of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The occasion was the wedding of Catherine’s daughter Marguerite to Henry, king of Navarre, heir to the French throne after Catherine’s sons. All the important nobles of France were gathered in the capital, including the Huguenot leaders. Whether Catherine and Charles IX intended to kill all the Protestants in Paris on August 23, 1572, or whether Catherine only meant to kill one or two of the Protestant leaders, the result was a massacre of Protestants by Catholics in the capital city and in other cities throughout the nation. War broke out again and, in spite of their losses, the Huguenots managed to retain several key fortresses. After Charles IX died in 1574 and Henry III returned from Poland, the new king was also unable to seize the Protestant strongholds and to subdue the opposition. In 1576, peace was negotiated on the basis of the status quo. Henry III, Catherine’s favorite son, was an adult when he came to the throne, and Catherine no longer played an important policy-making role. Since the king was unmarried and preoccupied with war, his mother continued to direct the ambassadors and to send and receive letters from agents and diplomats throughout Europe.

In June of 1584, Catherine’s youngest son died of influenza. Thus, the Protestant Henry of Navarre would inherit the throne if Henry III were to die. War raged, and, fearing the Spanish king would send in troops, Henry III was forced to put himself at the head of the Catholic League in order to control its excesses. The Estates General refused to grant the government more money to fight the wars they did not want. On December 23, 1588, Henry III summoned the cardinal of Guise to the royal chamber, where armed guards killed him. Shortly thereafter, Henry had the duke of Guise assassinated as well. Catherine was in the castle at Blois that evening, on her deathbed, when Henry carried news to her of the death of the Guises. She was not pleased; by destroying one faction, Henry had put himself in the hands of the other, and he no longer had a weapon against the Bourbon and Protestant nobles. The collapse of Spain would give Geneva and the Calvinists the victory.

Catherine died less than two weeks later, on January 5, 1589, and her son was assassinated before the end of the year. Henry IV, the Protestant king of Navarre, officially inherited the throne, but the war continued until 1595, when he had reconquered the north and converted to Catholicism. Henry was able, however, to protect his Huguenot friends and relatives by issuing the Edict of Nantes that granted the Huguenots several armed cities and freedom to worship.

Significance

Catherine de Médicis set out to destroy the resistance to royal power, to secure for her sons the French throne, to build a government with a centralized power in the hands of the French monarchy, and to limit the authority of the nobles. She succeeded in gaining those ends but failed to achieve them peacefully and permanently. Accused by contemporaries and historians of being a Machiavellian, Catherine must at least plead guilty to being a realist in her exercise of power. She changed sides, made secret agreements, and even sent ambassadors to the Turks to negotiate a treaty against the Spanish in 1570. She met with all parties and used every means available to achieve her ends. She condoned war and murder in the interest of her duty as the regent of France.

It may have been her failure to balance the dynastic and religious conflicts that brought on the civil wars, but it was her success at identifying the factions in the conflict and her attempts to balance them that allowed Henry IV to obtain his throne intact with Huguenots alive to tolerate. The religious civil wars were horrible, but some of the changes resulting from the wars moved France closer to the centralized, bureaucratic state that was more nearly modern than was the sixteenth century dynastic structure. The wars served to redistribute the land from the hands of a few large noble families to those of a number of smaller families who were loyal to the monarchy. The most significant result of the civil wars, however, was the creation of the Politique Party, a party that recognized the need for a strong monarchy regardless of religious affiliation and regardless of noble demands for power. Catherine’s contribution to French government in the sixteenth century was the principle of centralized power in the hands of the monarchy.

Bibliography

Frieda, Leonie. Catherine de Medici. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. Extensively researched, well-written attempt to rejuvenate Catherine’s reputation and produce a balanced evaluation of her place in history. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Héritier, Jean. Catherine de Medici. Translated by Charlotte Haldane. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963. Long biography of Catherine as a great national and moderate leader who preserved for Henry IV a kingdom which was battered but intact.

Knecht, R. J. Catherine de’ Medici. New York: Longman, 1998. Biography of Catherine produced more as a work of historical documentation than a literary narrative. Contains many useful details and facts. Includes maps, genealogical tables, bibliographic references, index.

Kruse, Elaine. “The Woman in Black: The Image of Catherine de Medici from Marlowe to Queen Margot.” In“High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Survey of representations of Catherine from the Renaissance to the present, investigating the uses to which she has been put as a literary character.

Neale, J. E. The Age of Catherine de Medici. New York: Harper & Row, 1943. Reprint. London: J. Cape, 1971. Short and colorful presentation of Catherine’s rule as foolish, misguided, and middle class.

Roeder, Ralph. Catherine de Medici and the Lost Revolution. 2d ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1964. Presents the problem of sixteenth century France as the inability of Catherine to balance the dynastic and religious conflicts of the age.

Sichel, Edith. Catherine de’ Medici and the French Reformation. London: Constable, 1905. Reprint. London: Dawsons, 1969. Presents Catherine as the evil nemesis of the rightful rulers of France, never quite in control of her plans. Sichel also relates the art and literature of the period of the French Reformation to Catherine’s reign.

Strage, Mark. Women of Power: The Life and Times of Catherine de’ Medici. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. A conventional rehash of the story focusing on Catherine’s relationship with Diane de Poitiers and Margaret of Valois.

Sutherland, N. M. “Catherine de Medici: The Legend of the Wicked Italian Queen.” Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 45-56. An analysis of the attitudes of historians about Catherine de Médicis and her role in history from her contemporaries to the present day.

Van Dyke, Paul. Catherine de Médicis. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. General study of Catherine within the context of her time. Catherine is held responsible for not solving the religious and political problems but not through inherent malice.

Related article in Great Events from History: The Renaissance & Early Modern Era

January 1-8, 1558: France Regains Calais from England; March, 1562-May 2, 1598: French Wars of Religion; January 20, 1564: Peace of Troyes; August 24-25, 1572: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; July 7, 1585-December 23, 1588: War of the Three Henrys.