Catherine de' Medici and the French reformation

Preface

THE greater functions of history, the discovery of new documents, the revelation of new facts, demand great scholars. To the achievement of such ends a study hke the present one — a study of persons, not an ordered narration of events — makes no kind of pretension. But history has its bye- Daths and its lesser purposes, and one of the chief tasks of 'he minor historian is to read the books that no one has leisure :or. It is customary to question the use of writing fresh ivorks when so many have already been written. But we too frequently forget how many of these books are no books.

There are unknown contemporary records, buried either in remote publications or between the dusty covers of incon- :eivably tedious tomes, which have to be gone through for the sake of the solitary paragraph, perhaps the solitary sentence, that may serve the occasion in view. And there are always the volumes, old and modem, which are compiled, not written, out of which a book might be evoked. To gather together some such old fragments, to prevent waste of truth, to rescue the few vivid facts and impressions embedded in ruinous remains — still more, if possible, to throw some light upon the characters of an age, and thus, indirectly, upon its events — these seem aims not altogether incompatible with usefulness, or with the modest means at an ordinary chronicler's disposal. A.nd if the following pages, which disclaim any larger ambition, should succeed in lending vitality to a single personage, a single occurrence of the past, they will not have been written in vain.

My thanks are due to Messrs. Longman and to the editor of the Edinburgh Review for permitting me to reproduce parts of an article on " The Women of the Renaissance," published in that periodical last April.

EDITH SICHEL.

Contents

PAGE

CHAPTER X Catherine and the Prince de Conde .... 205

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER I Lettres de Catherine de' Medici

Biographical Introductions — Le Comtc de la Ferriere,

Relations de la Diplomatic Venitienne — Baschet.

Catherine de Medecis — Capefigue.

Catherine de Medecis — Bouchot.

Memoirs de Vielleville.

Memoirs de Tavannes.

Memoirs de Guillaume de Tavannes.

Memoirs de Marguerite de Navarre.

Les femmes de Brantome — -Bouchot.

Les femmes de la Renaissance — Maulde de la Clavihe.

Histoire de France — Michelet.

Histoire de France — Martin.

Dictionnaire de Bayle.

* Mr. Whitehead's scholarly Gaspard de Coligny appeared after the completion of this work.

CHAPTER I

A TIME of decadence is a time of over-attention to detail — a time when the large outline of life is effaced and fine ideals are lost sight of, when great means are used for little ends and small issues are taken for big ones. In such phases of the world's history the whole spiritual currency becomes debased ; observance is substituted for religion, common-sense for wisdom, intrigue for statesmanship, while art degenerates into artifice and a noble generosity into an ignoble extravagance. For beauty itself loses rank, and from being the true servant of the princes who once bowed before it becomes the insignificant slave of tyrannical caprice. That a period of abnormal energy of mind tends to produce abnormal enervation in the succeeding age is no new discovery ; nor need we go far to find proofs of it in modern history, whether we seek them in the corruption of the Stuart Restoration following upon the great political upheaval, or in the laxity and nuUity of the Directoire — the immediate sequel of the French Revolution.

But nowhere is this truth so strongly embodied, so plainly visible, as in the latter half of the sixteenth century — the period born of the Renaissance — in France and in Italy. The impressionable Latin races, highly strung for good and evil, fell the most easily a prey to the emotional excesses and moral disorders belonging to a time of febrile exhaustion, when will was weak, and temperament defenceless,

The richer the summer, the completer and the deadlier its autmnnal decay. Miasmic vapours and chill mists close round us, and strange scents of dead leaves oppress us as we follow the last hectic pomp, the pale gold funeral pageant of the dying Renaissance.

In Italy, where the movement first began and soonest reached maturity, it also showed most quickly signs of degeneration, and the earlier half of the sixteenth century had already witnessed its decline. But in France, where it developed later, its splendour was maintained throughout the reign of Frangois I, and, indeed, it may almost be said to have continued through that of his successor. For if we except a growing decadence in art and an absence of romance in life, the general degeneration was hardly felt till the death of Henri II and his wife's accession to the Regency, in 1559.

Every movement has its person, its representative ; and since men are entangled in actions and actions disguise motives, it is in women, the clear mirrors of current feelings and tendencies, that integral types of an age will be found. In Italy the prevaiHng corruption was so subtly interwoven with poetry, its women were surrounded by so rich a glamour, that real outlines are hard to distinguish ; but in France, with its brilliant scepticism, its dry, scintillating atmosphere of matter-of-factness, types stand out as crisp and lucid as French aphorisms. In France, therefore, we shall not be slow to find figures that sum up whole periods : women who are, as it were, epigrams, expressive of profound experience.

If Margaret of Angouleme, the sister of King Francois, queen, poet, philosopher, sesthete, mystic, was the epitome of the Renaissance, no less was Catherine de' Medici, regent, pohtician, trimmer, patroness, cynic, the epitome of the decadence.

Half French, half Italian, the daughter of a Bourbon princess and of a degenerate Medici prince, the niece also of Leo X, a characteristic Renaissance Pope, Catherine had every aid by nature and by training to become an accompHshed cynic. She has hitherto figured as a kind of stage- villain, a mysterious figure surrounded by astrologers and secret drawers of poison-bottles, an effect to which Dumas and occasionally Michelet, in a day when history was still an art and not a science, have contributed not a httle. Nowadays science has mercilesslv exterminated the race of villains and replaced them by the victims of constitutional infirmities. Perhaps truth lies, as usual, between two extremes. Her poison-cupboard at Blois, which once made history and is now proved to be a fable, is but a symbol of a whole mythology that has gathered round her name. Personages who intensify the tendencies of their time, more memorable than their neighbours, are often made responsible for the crimes of their more anonymous contemporaries and we shall see that most of the sensational accusations against Catherine are based on no solid foundation. We may be sure that people — especially women — must always have seemed possible to themselves, and hence monsters are necessarily unhistorical. Hence, too, whatever work of clearing helps to free the picture and make it tone with its surroundings, whether it be cleared from layers of encrusting black or of whitewash, must be a work in the cause of truth. History is not written in black and white, but in subtle greys and half-tints, and studying some character from the past is often like looking at a figure in a faded fresco on which we cannot get a full light.

At first we see its robes as black ; then, as we search more closely and grow accustomed to the obscurity, we find that the draperies are not of one colour, but of manifold twilight shades, and it is only for the sake of convenience that we use positive terms at all. Catherine, with Medician craft in her veins, was far too diplomatic to be anything positively. Frankness, even in sin, would have been to her a breach, not of morals, but of manners. She dealt in negative evil — a disease no less actual, and perhaps more poisonous, than the common sort ascribed to her. This sixteenth century princess was very like " der Geist der stets verneint." She was indeed as great, if not as startling a villain as tradition has made her, not, as tradition says, from having bad feelings, but from having no feelings at all. Catherine de' Medici was a mass of indifference. Indifference was the dominant note of her character — was no longer a negative quality, but a positive power — and entire indifference means entire cynicism. The person who becomes a cynic is often no more than a sentimentalist in disguise, but Catherine was a serious cynic, because she was an unconscious one, a person who sees things as they are, never as they may be. She drove common-sense to its absolute conclusion and judged every issue by its standards. Perhaps there is not one of her alleged crimes which condemns her so severely as does the Spanish envoy's description of her a few days after

St. Bartholomew's Eve : " She has grown ten years younger," he wrote, " and always seems to me like one who has come out of a bad illness."

Even her finer characteristics, when examined, seem rather due to the absence than the presence of a quality. It is remarkable that she should have kept her reputation intact, living, as she did, at a time of signal immorality, when illegitimate love affairs were part of the normal life of every lady of position. It would have been impossible for a princess to go unscathed by malicious tongues ; the scandals breathed against Catherine, however, such as her rumoured connection with Frangois, Due de Guise, obtained scant credence even at the time and were manifestly the invention of her enemies. She was indeed the most respectable bad woman on record, but her respectability is due to a want of incHnation, of emotion, not to any standard of conduct. That she had no standard is evident from her dealings with other women, as with her "Flying Squadron " of attendants, for whom she deliberately planned liaisons de convenance for political purposes. Her severity was reserved, not for the crime, but for the criminal who allowed it to be found out. Before a breach of decorum or any moral clumsiness she was implacable, and the ladies who could not keep their faults to themselves were rigorously expelled from her Court. Her own immunity from blame shows that she was not, at any rate, the slave of low impulses, but it proves no sort of moral scruple. To say that she was free from prejudice is to say little : she was incapable of forming any judgments save those dictated by convenience. This freedom produces the effect, to some extent real, of a large mind. But the largeness that proceeds from fine proportions is one thing, that which comes from emptiness another ; and Catherine's mind had the width of an unfurnished room in a marble palace — vast, mysterious, unlived in, and perilously cold.

The tolerance which distinguished her (for all her acts of persecution were matters of political tactics), the Renaissance impartiality which should have served the world in good stead, ever fell short of nobility ; for it came from no moral outlook, no intellectual philosophy, but from a lack of conviction ; and since life is dignified only by conviction, her life remains undignified. The same may be said in many cases of her extraordinary self-control, even during the most trying period of her married life and of her rivalry with Diane de Poitiers — the period through which we shall follow her in these pages with admiration but with hatred. For her patience under contumely, her friendship with her husband's mistress , her long waiting for the moment of her power and her prompt use of it when it came, were all helped by her lack of spontaneity as much as by her Medician skill in dissimulation. The brutality of the later Medici lurked in her too. When self-control no longer served a purpose ; when the Court retired and she dropped the amazing etiquette to which she clung as a defence against her own violence, she sometimes gave way to accesses of blind rage which were almost insane. Her children, even the bold Princess Margot, learned to dread them and shrank before the loud insulting tones and rough indignities to which their mother subjected them. ''' Elle jetait feu^'' wrote this daughter, " et disait tout ce qu'une coUre outr&e et demesuree peut jeter dehors^ But the distant step of a courtier readjusted the balance and brought back her queenly demeanour. It is only when we have glimpses of the savage in her that we can realize the strength of her grip over her own nature ; or the effort she made to sustain that impenetrable calm on which she reckoned in herself. It was thus that she appeared to the world : " She from whose soul prudence was never parted, who moderated her actions according to her desire, demonstrating plainly that the discreet person doeth nothing he willeth not to do ; she who, in truth, never deigned to amuse herself by showing her pleasure to others," so again wrote Princess Margot, who ought to have been a true reporter, since she had often been the victim of her mother's wrath.

Catherine de' Medici, once removed from the footlights, cannot but be a baffling figure ; and perhaps the only way to know her better is to get some general outline of her before entering upon the tangled and crooked story of her life. Most great ladies keep their public self apart from their private one. Catherine de' Medici perhaps united the two characters more closely than most people, but how she did so and where her two roles resembled one another will best be understood by looking at her in both aspects — by passing from Catherine the woman to Catherine the Regent.

Moral indifference, as we saw, had possession of Catherine's nature ; but one desire was hers, by no means a moral one, which governed her quite as potently as her apathy and perhaps with more obvious effect. " AH her actions," wrote a

Venetian ambassador, describing her to his government, " have ever been ruled and guided by a most powerful desire — the desire to reign " : '^ un affetto poteniissimo . . . un affetto di signoreggiare." It is this " affetto " alone which makes Catherine comprehensible in her private, as in her public capacities. Like a strong weed, it usurped the place of every other desire and exhausted the soil around her. It gave her a terrible vitality. It made her policy and guided her religious views. It destroyed all confidence in her neighbourhood, creating enemies and withering friendships for her. Her children, and the Prince de Conde, so willing to be loyal to her, and Coligny, who might have been her support, were all sacrificed to it, and every bad deed she committed may with truth be ascribed to its workings.

It has been already said that crimes not her own were probably ascribed to her. That profound historian, Bishop Creighton, has pointed out how this happened in the case of Alessandro Borgia ; and his conclusion that the frequent ascription of such crimes to high personages was a proof, not of their guilt, but of the low morality of their day, applies as much to Catherine as to the Borgias. We must remember that she lived at a moment when the classics and the history of later Rome were diligently searched for models of life, no longer with the scholar's zeal of the young Renaissance, but with the desire of the sated to find a new sensation ; that she kept Roman empresses as ideals before her eyes and easily adjusted their standards to those of the cardinals around her. Each age sets up its own virtues to admire, and common -sense and a determined policy, rather than mercy and honour, were the idols that her contemporaries had chosen to imitate. Macchiavelli was no Mephistopheles, but the normal philosopher and voice of his generation, and C?esar Borgia, strong, prudent and self-contained, was to him the pattern prince. Catherine was not the only Medici who was this great casuist's pupil, and Jesuitry applied to things temporal is, after all, not so shocking as Jesuitry applied to things spiritual. She certainly did not find much that was better than herself in her immediate surroundings. Diane de Poitiers and the Guises kept a special staff of doctors at Paris to put an unobtrusive end to the owners of benefices ; and Margaret of Angouleme, the patroness of Reformers, was forced to celebrate mass in her bedroom so as to avoid the poison which a prelate in high place was anxious to administer to her in the Communion cup.

And in addition to such facts, we must also bear in mind the religious conviction of kings that kings could do no evil, that they were part of the eternal order of things — a belief which even at funerals robed all Crown officials in red, the colour of eternity. It is small wonder that the actions of sovereigns waxed insolent and that they credited the Deity with their own indulgence for rank. " I think this very strange," wrote Catherine, when the Pope refused to make a cardinal of the Bastard of Angouleme, Henri II's illegitimate son — " and surely the College should feel it a high honour to count among their ranks the natural son of so great a king. I think that herein the Pope judges very badly, for he should rather buy such a noble chance than refuse the King and myself such a just and reasonable demand." This is the opinion not only of Catherine but of her whole generation, and though in her abnormal nature she was worse than her time — and than most times — she can hardly be said to be worse in her actual deeds. Of course, the heinous conception of St, Bartholomew's Eve, perhaps the most heinous ever imagined by a woman, must be excepted. But St. Bartholomew's Eve cannot be taken as a measure of her actions, for it was not a deliberate plan, but a forcing of her hand through her own shortsightedness. She had made the mistake natural to her. She had underrated Coligny and his power, which threatened to vie with her own. His removal became necessary and the Guises were only too willing to be her agents in the matter. It was when they failed to kill him, when the rumour ran that the Protestants vowed an instant and general vengeance for this plot against their chief, that panic seized her. She felt she must effectually forestall them, and the result was the massacre. At this point it would be premature to enter into the strange pact, made seven years before, between her and Alva ; nor is it possible to say whether or how she would have fulfilled it,hadnot fear precipitated her into action. But thus much may here be hazarded — that St. Bartholomew's Eve would not have been the form of the fulfilment, and that therefore this terrible achievement of hers throws no real light upon her nature, excepting as it proves that she felt no bar in herself to such a business. It could hardly, however, have been the result of cold-blooded meditation, for she herself, who desired peace at almost any price, would have been the first to reject it as a blunder.

The two murders for which she can be charged for certain are those of Coligny and LigneroUes. It may be held, indeed, that intentions count as crimes and that a letter like the following ranks as manslaughter : " Try at whatever price to ruin his House " (so she writes to Tavannes about Maligny, the Protestant conspirator) ; " if it is needful, put your hand upon his collar and — if you can catch him — have him taken . . . secretly to some place so safe and hidden that no one can have news of it, and let me know of this with the utmost diligence." Catherine would have exculpated herself by the saving clause, "If it is needful." At all events, this cannot be reckoned as one of her direct deeds. Let us come to such as are direct.

We know her motive and the means she took for the death of Coligny ; the reason for Lignerolles' disappearance was much the same. Once a " Mignon " of Henri, Duke of Anjou's, but fallen into disgrace, " he betrayed himself to King Charles, imprudently prated against the Queen-Mother, and proposed that the King should escape from her tutelage. His Majesty, incapable of so great a design, repeated everything to his mother, who, with the full consent of her children, had him killed ..." This is the matter-of-fact account of a contemporary diarist — wonderfully devoid of dark lanterns and stage-effects. As for the other enormities of which she was accused, it would be as tedious as it is unnecessary to go through the long list of them, for they are all founded on scandal invented by her foes, chiefly by the Huguenots, and there were no greater scandal-mongers than the Huguenots. She shared the brunt of such evil reports with every monarch and prominent prelate of her day. There was a good instance of this when she and Charles V were both charged with poisoning the young son of Frangois I, who died suddenly at Angers. Yet his death was obviously from pleurisy. He had overheated himself by jousting and had drunk a glass of iced water with speedy ill consequences. Catherine was far away at Fontainebleau. There was not a shadow of evidence against her, except the fact that the murder would make her Dauphine. The impeachment at this date, not many years after her marriage, was simply the result of the popular hatred for her as " the Florentine " and the general suspicion of her as a Medici. It was little better in the case of the Emperor. A Spaniard, under torture, confessed that Charles V had ordered him to poison the prince, but after the moment no one of weight gave credence to this unaccredited outburst from a poor pain-stricken wretch.

These details are worth considering, not in themselves, but because they reveal how full then was men's consciousness of murders and sudden death.

It was unlucky for Catherine that she happened to have a taste for astrology and to have established an Italian astrologer in a tower near her room. Yet nothing was more natural. Like all her contemporaries, she had a profound belief in stars and their influence. Astrologers were consulted in as commonplace a way as doctors about the welfare of actions, expeditions, or even human affections. Such consultations were bound to take place in private, and love-potions and magic medicaments were their normal accessories ; but because, like other ladies, Catherine kept a store of phials in her sumptuous drawer at Blois, it does not follow that they need all be labelled " poison."

These mysteries have also surrounded her with an atmosphere of moroseness. Yet this is far from the truth. To be, like her, devoid of the power of charming and yet to bend men and women to her will as she did, she must have possessed some strange fascination. And so it was. Her indifference did not betray itself socially. She was brilliant, acutely alive. She had French wit and Italian verve in conversation, and she must have known how to amuse, or she would not, in the early days of her marriage, have been the constant companion of Frangois I. Her wit, salt and shrewd, was of the broad colloquial kind, well suited to cheer a jaded monarch. She understood how to laugh, not often, but aptly. " Then," wrote a Venetian envoy, " she began to laugh a great deal, as she always does when something takes her fancy." . . . " Elle riait son saoul comme un autre, car elle riait volontiers,''^ reports Bran tome, '''' et aimait a dire le mot et rencontrait fort Men, et connaissait Men ou il fallait jeter sa pierre et son mot et ou il y avait d redire^ Her power lay not so much in what she did as in her science of doing. She knew the right moment for laughing, and for weeping. For Catherine was, if we may say so, immensely feminine, and none grasped better than she that a woman's strength is in weakness. Several times ambassadors found her in tears, sometimes, more effectively still, with the tears in her voice.

" One day she said to me " (writes the same envoy), " that if her misfortunes had happened to her, alone, amongst all the queens of France, she would think herself the unhappiest woman in the world, but she was consoled when she remem-

II bered that during the minority of kings, the great always plotted to get power .... And she added that she had once read at Carcassonne ... a manuscript chronicle which told how the mother of the King, St. Louis, who was left a widow with a little son of eleven, immediately encountered the opposition of all the great nobles of the kingdom ; for they rose in revolt to escape being ruled by a woman, above all, by a foreign woman ... It pleased God to give the victory to King Louis . . . Her Majesty, when she told me these things, applied them to the affairs of to-day ; she saw herself a stranger, without any one near her she could trust, and with a child between eleven and twelve years old . . . Whereupon I said to her : ' Madam, Your Majesty should feel a great consolation in your heart, for since the things of the day seem, as it were, a mirror of the things of the past, you may be well certain that their end also will not be unlike ' . . . ' But,' she answered me, ' I should not like any one to know that I had read this chronicle, for they would say that I was acting according to the example of this lady-queen, who was called Blanche, and was the daughter of the King of Castile.' "

The part of the pathetic widow evidently impressed the ambassador and probably helped Catherine to get something she wanted out of Venice. And the intimacy, the bonhomie which this remote woman knew how to assume, must have been very endearing. She would invite the envoys to walk with her in the palace gardens, and pacing up and down the rich grass-paths and pleached alleys of the Tuileries, where Palissy's majolica toads and dragons peered out at unexpected corners, she would discuss matters of State with them. " With those in whom she has confidence she gladly becomes expansive," so writes one of these diplomats. " You see with what confidence I talk to you," she said to another ; " well, I will say this much — that the Pope is no more than a man who understands nothing about State affairs." This looked like an indiscretion, but she probably meant the envoy to repeat it, and to set his government by the ears with the Pope. This vaunted expansiveness of hers was not always the best sign. Her courtiers were alarmed when she called them man ami, for they knew that it meant she was angry, or that she thought them fools. "I entreat you. Madam," said one thus addressed, " to say Mon ennemi at once."

It must be added that her tears and smiles were not exactly hypocritical ; they were always near at hand. She was an

Italian, and therefore demonstrative, emotional. Little Mary Stuart, writing to her mother who was harassed by insurgents in Edinburgh, dwells on Catherine's sympathy : " The Queen" — she says — " did you the honour to cry bitterly." It is astonishing to find how caressive, how almost exaggerated in expression she becomes to the few friends she chose from among her relations and dependents. " If 570U care for my life," she wrote to her sister-in-law, " take care of your own health " ; and she begins a letter announcing a change of plan to an official, with a deprecatory, " I'm afraid you will be angry." Sometimes she is almost high-spirited : " You are having such good cheer where you are," she says to a friend, " that you quite forget to send me any news of you. And as I know that your good husband and your good brother and you make up only one person, like the Trinity, I am not going to write three letters." Or again she writes to Montmorency :

"My good gossip — Lansac told me that you asked if the King and I were going to stop more than one night at Chantilly. If you ask me for a day, I will give it you, on condition that I see you. As for more, now that you have heard me talk I am sure you will chase me from your house, though such is by no means your custom. Votre bonne cousine, Catherine."

Her amenity was no doubt her best policy and deportment was part of her creed, but there must have been a real social amiability about her and a visitor at her Court is probably truthful when he tells us that she had " a most beautiful manner, and that both in her words and her gestures she made for pleasing everybody." This " need of pleasing " brought her plenty of work. The letters which she wrote, like most princesses of her day, to plead for numberless proteges, or to get them suitable posts, were a work if not of kindness, at least of benevolence. Directly moral sympathy came into play Catherine was at a loss, and her letters of condolence are shocking to our modern notions. " I advise you while you are at home to dress yourself as comfortably as possible . . . and to grieve as little as you can for things that cannot be mended." This is how she wrote to a lady who had just lost a much-loved parent. She had, it must be confessed, the qualities of her failings. Her mental endurance, her unruffled stoicism were admirable. Like many Stoics, she had no faith in doctors for herself and often neglected her health, " for that she was of her nature very slow to complain." Thus vmtes her son Charles IX, who saw her in every contingency.