Catherine de' Medici (1519‚1589)
Catherine, born in Florence, was the granddaughter of
Lorenzo the Magnificent. She married Henri II, King of
France. When she was born her parents consulted
astrologers, who predicted a life of sorrow, trouble and
storms, and said that she would be the cause, if she
lived, of very great calamities and finally the total
ruin of the house into which she married. It was
suggested that she be put in a basket and hung from the
city wall in the hope that a cannon-ball would kill her,
or that she be placed in an enclosed order of nuns, or
that she be put in a bordello. Instead, however, she was
married to Henri, whose father was Francis I of France,
as part of an elaborate bargain between the French and
Catherine's uncle, Pope Clement VII. The pope assured the
king that this marriage would strengthen the French and
Italian alliance against Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor,
while he promised Charles V that Catherine would weaken
and even destroy the French state. Catherine's husband
said she was the greatest trouble-maker in the world, and
warned that she would wreak havoc if she ever got into
government.
She
lived at the French court first as princess, then as
dauphine, as queen, and as regent to her son. The first
ten years of her marriage were barren, but with the
apparent help of drugs, astrology and sorcery, she later
had children, among them three who became kings: Francis
II, Charles IX, and Henri III. Her husband's most famous
mistress was Diane de Poitiers, whose nose Catherine once
considered having chopped off.
One
of Catherine's nicknames was Jezabel.
The
first step in Catherine's French political career was to
arrange for the death by poisoning of her brother-in-law,
FranÁois, heir to the throne, and she is noted for the
use of poison as a device, administering lethal fish
sauces and offering decorated apples full of poisonous
vapours. She, unattractive, even ugly, surrounded herself
with a flying squad of beautiful women who could trick
and charm her enemies.
She
became regent when Charles came to the throne at the age
of eleven. This was the time of the Wars of Religion, and
Catherine hatched plots in all directions, now against
Protestants, now against Catholics. On the death of
Charles, she realised her ultimate ambition of holding
complete power. She is most vividly remembered as the
force behind the Massacre of the Innocents on Saint
Bartholomew's Day.
August
in Paris is usually hot and sultry, and so it was on the
eve of the 24th, 1572. Aristocratic leaders of every kind
were gathered in Paris to celebrate the marriage, on the
18th of August, of Catherine's sister Marguerite to
Henri, King of Navarre, a Protestant. People were
relaxing with games such as tennis, and with tournaments,
banquets and masked balls. Catherine's new palace at the
Tuileries was now complete and contained a menagerie, an
aviary, fishponds, an orangery and a warren for breeding
game. On the eve of the massacre, all the visitors were
invited to see a new kind of performance, a
story‚ballet, Le Ballet Comique de la Reine. This was
presented at a banquet, and Catherine had written the
story herself, assisted by the designer Beaujoyeulx. Part
of the plot told how Henri, the bridegroom, was attacked
and beaten to death by members of the French royal
family, and how his soul was consigned to hell.
The
surface story of the ballet was that of Circe the
enchantress. The performance cost over three million
francs, lasted six hours, and displayed brilliant
costumes, fountains, airborne figures and a range of
music and song, as well as dance and mine and masquerade.
Queen Catherine, who was well known as a gifted dancer,
and her women posed as naiads on golden steps, and there
were chariots, magic gardens, sea horses, and a heaven
from which Jupiter came down. The choreography was worked
out on geometric principles.
Paris
then was a city of 210 000 inhabitants, contained by
gates and divided in two by the Seine. It could be used
as a trap. And it was.
The key victim of the massacre was Admiral
Gaspard de Coligny, the most powerful military and
political Huguenot and a central enemy to Catherine's
cause. Catherine had been trying to get rid of him for
ten years, poison and assassination plots having failed
during that time. Two days before the massacre, Catherine
had arranged to have Coligny shot, but that too failed.
The shot was fired in broad daylight when the admiral was
walking with a group of Huguenots. He was studying a
report and he suddenly stooped to adjust his slipper. The
bullet hit his arm and hand.
On the eve of Saint Bartholomew the city
gates were locked, boats were chained up to the
riverbank, arms were assembled, and the attacking
murderers tied white shirt sleeves to their left arms and
decorated their hats with white crosses. The houses of
Huguenots had been marked with a cross.
At around two in the morning, Catherine
ordered the tocsin to be rung, beginning with the great
bell of St Germain l'Auxerrois which had never before
been sounded except for royal masses. Assassins stormed
the house where Coligny was recovering, killed all in
their way and broke into the admiral's room wielding
swords, daggers, lances and muskets. When Coligny was
dead they threw him out the window. The tocsin rang from
all the belltowers of Paris, torches were lighted, and
there began a night of murderous rampage, looting and
burning all over the city. People were massacred in their
beds, or else pursued to the tops of houses and hurled
onto the cobbles; bodies were dragged along the streets
by ropes to be dumped in the Seine by ferrymen who took
them out midstream and tipped them in. Heaps of bodies
were collected outside the Louvre Palace. On bridges
victims were stabbed and then forced to walk the plank so
that billowing streams of blood followed the bodies as
they settled in the water. People who survived and began
to swim were stoned to death. Little children were tipped
from baskets into the water to drown, women dragged naked
along the cobbles until they died.
A pack of hounds was loosed, thirsty for
the blood that ran in the streets, and the king responded
to the slaughter with gruesome and repulsive glee,
revelling in seeing the corpses of Huguenot noblemen
delivered to him at the Palace. Catherine and the flying
squad and others at the Louvre ran from window to window
enjoying the spectacle below.
It was not long before looting began in
earnest, and before people were killing purely for the
purpose of robbing the dead. Jewellers, lapidaries,
money-changers, silversmiths and goldsmiths were
slaughtered in this wave of killings. Then ordinary
shopkeepers-shoemakers, hatters, silk merchants-and
children were butchered with their parents. Valuable
libraries were looted. A bookbinder was roasted alive on
top of a pyre of his books. And of course personal
vendettas were settled, members of families killed in
hatred.
By midday the Palace had issued an
official cease-fire, but the slaughter continued to some
degree and spread to other cities of France, where it
continued throughout September and October. Catherine had
succeeded in her plan, which was to gain power over her
son the king and to put in place mechanisms that would
eventually overthrow the rival house of Guise. On 2
September a horseman arrived in Rome from Paris with the
news of the success of the massacre. Pope Gregory XIII
was delighted and gave the messenger a hundred crowns as
a reward. A medal was struck bearing the pope's head on
one side and on the other the angel of doom.
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1998. All rights reserved.