Catherine de Médicis

/kannteu rddeen deuh may dee sees"/, (Caterina de' Medici)

1518-89, queen of Henry II of France (mother of Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III).

Also, Catherine de' Medici /kath"rin deuh med"i chee, may"di-, day, kath"euhr in/, Catherine de Medici.

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orig. Caterina de' Medici

born April 13, 1519, Florence

died Jan. 5, 1589, Blois, France

Queen consort of Henry II (1547–59), mother of Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III, and regent of France (1560–74).

A member of the Medici family, she married Henry in 1533 and bore him 10 children. She became queen when Henry inherited the crown in 1547, and she greatly mourned his accidental death in 1559. After their son Francis became king, she began a long struggle with members of the Guise family, extremists who sought to dominate the crown. After Francis's premature death in 1560, she became regent for Charles IX until 1563 and dominated the rest of his reign until 1574. She attempted to settle the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. She has traditionally been blamed for the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day, but, though she authorized the assassination of Gaspard II de Coligny and his principal followers, it appears that she did not authorize the massacre that followed.

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▪ queen of France

Introduction

Italian  Caterina de' Medici 

born April 13, 1519, Florence

died January 5, 1589, Blois, Fr.

 queen consort of Henry II of France (reigned 1547–59) and subsequently regent of France (1560–74), who was one of the most influential personalities of the Catholic–Huguenot wars. Three of her sons were kings of France: Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.

Early life.

      Catherine was the daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino, and Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne, a Bourbon princess related to many of the French nobility. Orphaned within days, Catherine was highly educated, trained, and disciplined by nuns in Florence and Rome and married in 1533 by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, to Henry (Henry II), duc d'Orléans, who inherited the French crown from his father, Francis I, in April 1547. Artistic, energetic, and extraverted, as well as discreet, courageous, and gay, Catherine was greatly esteemed at the dazzling court of Francis I, from which she derived both her political attitudes and her passion for building. Of the chateaus she designed herself—including the Tuileries—Chenonceaux was her unfinished masterpiece.

      In spite of Henry's abiding attachment to his mistress Diane de Poitiers, Catherine's marriage was not unsuccessful and, after 10 anxious years, she bore him 10 children, of whom 4 boys and 3 girls survived. She herself supervised their education. Thus occupied, Catherine lived privately though she was appointed regent in 1552 during Henry's absence at the siege of Metz. Her ability and eloquence were acclaimed after the Spanish victory of Saint-Quentin in Picardy in 1557, possibly the origin of her perpetual fear of Spain, which remained, through changing circumstances, the touchstone of her judgments. It is essential to understand this in order to discern the coherence of her career.

Political crises.

      Catherine's first great political crisis came in July 1559 upon the accidental death of Henry II, a traumatic bereavement from which it is doubtful that she ever recovered. Under her son, Francis II, power was retained by the Guise brothers. Thus began her lifelong struggle—explicit in her correspondence—with these extremists who, supported by Spain and the papacy, sought to dominate the crown and extinguish its independence in the commingled interests of European Catholicism and personal aggrandizement. It is also necessary to understand this political struggle of the Catholic crown with its own ultramontane extremists and to perceive its fluctuations in changing circumstances, in order to realize the fundamental consistency of Catherine's career. Her essentially moderate influence was first perceptible during the Conspiracy of Amboise (Amboise, Conspiracy of) (March 1560), an instance of tumultuous petitioning by the Huguenot gentry, primarily against Guisard persecution in the name of the King. Her merciful Edict of Amboise (March 1560) was followed in May by that of Romorantin, which distinguished heresy from sedition, thereby detaching faith from allegiance.

      Catherine's second great political crisis came with the premature death on Dec. 5, 1560, of Francis II, whose royal authority the Guises had monopolized. Catherine succeeded in obtaining the regency for Charles IX, with Antoine de Bourbon (Anthony Of Bourbon), king of Navarre and first prince of the blood, as lieutenant general, to whom the Protestants (Protestantism) vainly looked for leadership.

Civil wars.

      The 10 years from 1560 to 1570 were, politically, the most important of Catherine's life. They witnessed the first three civil wars and her desperate struggle against the Catholic extremists for the independence of the crown, the maintenance of peace, and the enforcement of limited toleration. In 1561, with the support of the distinguished chancellor Michel de L'Hospital (L'Hospital, Michel de), she began by trying to propitiate the leaders of both religious factions, to effect reforms and economies by unassailably traditional methods, and to settle the religious conflict. Religious reconciliation was the conveners' purpose of the Colloquy of Poissy (September–November 1561). Catherine appointed a mixed commission of moderates that devised two formulas of consummate ambiguity, by which they hoped to resolve the basic, Eucharist controversy. Possibly Catherine's most concrete achievement was the Edict of January 1562, which followed the failure of reconciliation. This afforded the Calvinists licensed coexistence with specific safeguards. Unlike the proposals of Poissy, the edict was law, which the Protestants accepted and the Catholics rejected. This rejection was one basic element in the outbreak of civil war in 1562, in which—as she had predicted—Catherine fell, politically, into the clutches of the extremists, because the Catholic crown might protect its Protestant subjects in law but could not defend them in arms. Thenceforth the problem of religion was one of power, public order, and administration.

      Catherine ended the first civil war in March 1563 by the Edict of Amboise, an attenuated version of the Edict of January. In August 1563 she declared the King of age in the Parlement of Rouen and, from April 1564 to January 1566, conducted him on a marathon itinerary round France. Its principal purpose was to execute the edict and, through a meeting at Bayonne in June 1565, to seek to strengthen peaceful relations between the crown and Spain and to negotiate for Charles's marriage to Elizabeth of Austria. During the period 1564–68, Catherine was unable, for complex reasons, to withstand the cardinal Lorraine (Lorraine, Charles de Lorraine, 2nd cardinal de), statesman of the Guises, who largely provoked the second and third civil wars. She quickly terminated the second (September 1567–March 1568) with the Peace of Longjumeau, a renewal of Amboise. But she was unable to avert its revocation (August 1568), which heralded the third civil war. She was not primarily responsible for the more far-reaching Treaty of Saint-Germain (August 1570), but she succeeded in disgracing the Guises.

      For the next two years Catherine's policy was one of peace and general reconciliation. This she envisaged in terms of the marriage of her daughter Marguerite to the young Protestant leader, Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France), and alliance with England through the marriage of her son Henry, duc d'Anjou, or, failing him, his younger brother François, duc d'Alençon, to Queen Elizabeth. The complexity of Catherine's position during these years cannot be briefly explained. To some extent she was eclipsed by Louis of Nassau and a group of Flemish exiles and youthful Protestants who surrounded the King and urged him to make war upon Spain in the Netherlands, which Catherine inevitably resisted.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (Saint Bartholomew's Day, Massacre of)

      The issue of war or peace in the Netherlands was closely linked with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in Paris on Aug. 23–24, 1572. Upon this occasion, following an abortive attempt against the life of the admiral Gaspard de Coligny (Coligny, Gaspard II de, Seigneur De Châtillon), he and a number of his principal lieutenants, together with several thousand Huguenots, were killed. Catherine traditionally has been blamed for these events, which have therefore fashioned the interpretation not only of her subsequent, but frequently also of her previous, career, resulting in the familiar myth of the wicked Italian queen. There are two principal reasons for this. First, after some hesitation and inconsistency, the King assumed the responsibility by a declaration of August 26 in the Parlement of Paris, and “the crown” has been taken to mean Catherine. The second reason for the traditional inculpation of Catherine is the work of the pamphleteers and the polemical nature of the historiography of the event. It is impossible to establish the origin of the assault upon Coligny, but, as a member of the court—the royal family and the council—Catherine was among those who appear to have authorized not the massacre itself but the death of the admiral and his principal followers. This and the subsequent royal declaration of August 26 are both explained by the danger of the situation—after the unsuccessful assault upon Coligny—in which the infuriated Huguenots allegedly threatened the court with extinction and the kingdom with war.

Last years.

      After the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, Catherine was more concerned with the election of Anjou to the throne of Poland (May 1573) than the prosecution of the fourth civil war. Upon the death of Charles IX a year later, she assumed the regency with the support of the Parlement until the return from Poland of Henry III in August. Catherine placed high hopes in her favourite, Henry, for the regeneration of France, for which she longed, but not without simultaneous misgivings, knowing his weakness of character and his previous subjection to the Catholics. For these reasons Catherine neither sought to dominate Henry nor to rule in his place but rather suffered him to exploit her and strove with unremitting pains to supply his deficiencies. Until the death of Alençon in 1584, much of her attention was devoted to restraining his dangerous ambitions, which again threatened to involve France in hostilities with Spain. After the Treaty of Joinville (December 1584) between the Guises and Spain, at Henry's bidding, Catherine, though gravely ill, returned to this dual threat. But after three months of continuous effort, in order to avert a public breach between the crown and the Guises, she was obliged, by the Treaty of Nemours (July 1585), to commit the King to making war against the Huguenots. Having failed with the Guises, the crown turned to Navarre, the Protestant leader who, as heir presumptive, had an interest in the preservation of the throne. In July 1586 Catherine undertook the arduous journey to see him at Saint-Brice near Cognac. But there was nothing to which Navarre could safely commit himself. Thus, despite the heroic efforts of Catherine's old age, France was sinking into chaos when she died at Blois eight months before the murder of Henry III. Nevertheless, her ultimate achievement was to have saved the kingdom just long enough to ensure the succession of the Bourbon Henry IV, by whom the royal authority was restored.

N.M. Sutherland

Additional Reading

H. de la Ferriere and Baguenault de Puchesse, Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, 10 vol. (1880–1909), with valuable introductions; Lucien Romier, Le Royaume de Catherine de Médicis, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1922), for background analysis; N.M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the European Conflict 1559–1572 (1972), distinguishes the role of Catherine from that of the King and the Cardinal of Lorraine; Paul Van Dyke, Catherine de Médicis, 2 vol. (1922), an old-fashioned account of Catherine's life and times.

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