Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French History
Introduction
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 608, six cent huit.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast: Catherine and Marie De Medici
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks, diving into the extraordinary lives of two of the most powerful and misunderstood women in French history, Cahterine de’ Medici and Marie de Medici.
We unpack the schemes, the scandals, and the sheer political muscle it took for these queens to survive in a world built to keep them powerless.
Support and Announcements
Annie: Before we start, this show runs on listener support. If you want to work with [00:01:00] me directly, I do itinerary consults, I also wrote eight tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, and I offer custom day trips around the southwest of France, where I live. Everything’s at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing, but helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie: There won’t be a magazine part of the podcast today because this recording ran very long and because I was away all week visiting southern Brittany.
My thanks to all my current patrons, and if you’d like to join this wonderful group of supporters, go to patreon.com/joinus. And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
Next week on the podcast, an episode with Sasha Cohen, who discusses how she moved to Paris.[00:02:00]
Quite a story, as you shall hear.
Why the Medici Women
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: We have an amazing topic today that was suggested by a patron of mine who said she would like to understand better the Medici women, and that is quite a doozy of a topic.
Elyse: It’s a doozy of a topic indeed.
Annie: So I’m very glad that you agreed to tackle it, because I did read a book. I listened to a great course, you know, the great courses that you can purchase. I listened to one about, all about the Medici family, and it was very interesting as a matter of fact, but so complicated. And we want to specifically talk about the Medici women
Elyse: yes.
Annie: … who had such a big influence on French history and the arts and all sorts of things. So [00:03:00] this is really important for people to understand, is that these De Medici women really had a big impact on France, and we want to understand why. So Elyse, I’m glad you did the research.
Elyse: Well, it fried my brain a little bit by the end because, even I, who have for years been talking about various things connected to each of them, have always had to stop and think who did what because the story of these two women is fascinating, and we’re talking about basically the entire 16th century, practically going into the beginning of the 17th century, and the influence that they had, which was enormous both on the politics and the arts.
But it is, I have to admit, sometimes difficult to keep them apart, to tell them apart, and to understand who did what.
So, this is for all of you out there who are going to visit certain places and, or have visited certain places, I tried very hard to figure [00:04:00] out a way of suiting associations, but I don’t think it really works. So we’re just going to take this from the top, and we’re going to deal with this double whopper of a podcast, you know?
Annie: All right.
Elyse: Okay.
Queens and Power in France
Elyse: So we have in the history of France, of course, there have been lots of queens, but you know, in France, queens don’t reign. This is one of the things about France that’s very special in relation to almost every other country in Western Europe, England, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even in Spain there have been queens who have really reigned officially, and in France, that has not happened.
Annie: Right. We are a little bit narrow-minded, shall we say?
Elyse: Yeah. Mm.
Annie: A tad. A tad.
Elyse: Yeah. There’s a certain chauvinism involved in all this, but you know, queens have an official status. And of course their function is largely to produce future kings.
Annie: Sure. Make babies, woman.
Elyse: Make babies. And of course, the [00:05:00] intermarriage between all of these royal families went on for centuries and centuries and centuries.
Medici Wealth and Alliances
Elyse: So the Medici family, which is a family that had a long history in what was basically a city-state in the northern part of Italy, I am absolutely not going to go into the details of Italian history, but they are a family that is extraordinarily wealthy and extraordinarily powerful.
Annie: Definitely.
Elyse: Rich and producing popes and producing children that wind up getting married off left and right, and so of course this is what starts to happen in relation to France.
Annie: At one point in Italian history, there was a law against marrying into the Medici family because they were so worried about diluting their power. So they actually passed a law in the 1400s saying, “No, you cannot marry into our family and then inherit.”
Elyse: Ah.
Annie: Yes. Yes.
Elyse: They wanted to keep the money for [00:06:00] themselves, basically.
Annie: Definitely. The whole time they were concentrating power and wealth, in a very efficient way, which is something we see today as well. We have some people who are very good at concentrating wealth into their own hands these days.
Elyse: Yes, we do.
Annie: Yes. One of them is called Mark, and then another one’s called Elon, and you know. There’s people like that who do that.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: But the story of the two Medici women, they are cousins, okay? They are cousins actually only to, what I’ve tried to figure out, because this is really complicated, more or less to the third degree. But between the two of them, they cover the entire 16th century, which is the 1500s, and the beautiful entrance of the Renaissance in every sense of the term, and a little bit beyond into what is actually the time of the Baroque into France.
Catherine Arrives in France
Elyse: So let’s start with the first one, and that is [00:07:00] Cahterine de’ Medici. There are two, Catherine and Marie. Catherine is the daughter of the head of the Medici family, and unfortunately for her, her parents die when they are very young, and she is literally an only child.
Now she is the daughter of this incredibly wealthy banker, and interestingly enough, the Medici family were the bankers for the kings of France, which is part of the story of what happens to these two women, you know?
We’re at the beginning of the 1500s, and the King of France is an extremely important person in the history of France, especially around this time in the Renaissance, and that is François I.
And François I is at war constantly with his cuz, the King of Spain, king of the Holy Roman Empire, but it’s very easy, just say the King of Spain, it makes it a lot easier to understand.
And one of the things that happens is that François I is introduced to [00:08:00] Renaissance, Renaissance ideas, Renaissance art, Renaissance architecture, by being taken prisoner in the north of Italy. So one of the things that happens is when he is released and he is brought back to France, he has to, of course, find wives for his sons.
Annie: Of course.
Elyse: And, unlike a lot of other kings, he decides that one of the Medici daughters or one of the members of the Medici family, who are their creditors, actually, would be a good wife for not his first son, who is destined to be king, but his second son, a young man named Henry.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And the reason why is for his second son is because in spite of her being the daughter of, I think it was considered to be the council or the Dukes of Medici, I don’t even know, of Urbino and then Florence, she was not considered to have enough royal blood.
Annie: I see. Not quite good enough.
Elyse: Not quite good enough. It wasn’t blue [00:09:00] enough for him, for the first son.
Annie: Rich, rich, but…
Elyse: Exactly.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: You know, the greenbacks were there, but not the blue in the blood, you know?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: So he arranges a marriage between his second son, Henry, and this young woman named Catherine, who is an orphan and who is being taken care of by her uncle, who is the Pope.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: He protects her because there’ve actually been assassination attempts against her as a young child because she is the inheritor, she is the heiress of this enormous, enormous, enormous fortune.
They are considered to be some of the richest people in all of Europe, in spite of not being kings. Okay? So she is 15 years old.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And François’ son, the second son, is also 15 years old.
Annie: Handy dandy.
Elyse: Handy dandy. And this is the age of getting married, of course, for royals. You have 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds, sometimes even [00:10:00] 13-year-olds getting married. So she doesn’t have much to say about it, obviously. She is officially engaged and then sent to be married to this young man who is exactly her age, which is already not too bad considering some of the mixes and matches that are set up with these royal families.
Annie: Yeah, that’s better. I mean, that’s…
Elyse: It’s better.
Annie: … that’s got to be better. They’re the same age. Yeah.
Elyse: She’s apparently well-educated, extremely cultivated, because in Italy it is much more advanced in terms of culture, in terms of the arts, in terms of she knew languages, she knew about mathematics, she knew all of these things. And she arrives, obviously, with hopes of whatever is going to happen to her being a happy life.
Annie: Okay. Very good.
Elyse: What I find interesting is in all these stories, and this of course is not just the Medici women, but in general, all of these women, including Marie Antoinette, they know that this is what their destiny is.
Annie: Right, they were raised to do this, I guess.
Elyse: They were raised. They were [00:11:00] objects to be bartered off in exchange for something, you know, in exchange for land, in exchange for money, whatever. They don’t really have anything to say about it.
Annie: Right. But if her parents were dead, maybe she had more to say about this?
Elyse: Not much.
Annie: Not much, okay.
Elyse: Not much. But at least she had the protection of her uncles.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: So she arrives in Paris, and she meets this young man. Actually, it wasn’t in Paris, but it doesn’t matter. They meet, and she assumes that everything is going to be fine.
Diane de Poitiers Shadow
Elyse: But what she discovers upon arriving in the court, which is basically Fontainebleau, this is the court of François I, this is not yet Versailles, is that her young fiance, who is a charming young man at 15, and who is already a good soldier, he is incredibly enamored of his tutor/governess, who is 19 years older than him.[00:12:00]
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: A woman by the name of Diane de Poitiers.
Annie: Aha, yes, I’ve heard of her.
Elyse: You’ve heard of her? Ah. This is a part of what happens to Catherine and becomes a, an intricate part of the feeling she has and how she conducts herself later on for the rest of her life. But what we have is the immediate attraction she has for her young husband.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Which should be fine.
Annie: Yeah, that’s better than not being attracted.
Elyse: It’s better than not, right? So they get married. She lives with her husband and her father-in-law, who appreciates her enormously. They apparently have an extremely good relationship. He treats her like a daughter. He’s really happy to have this young, very cultivated woman come and stay with them and add something to the court. His son is more involved in jousting and in being a soldier, than pretty much anything else. But poor Catherine, [00:13:00] in spite of all of this, she finds herself involved in what is a threesome.
Annie: Aha.
Elyse: And this threesome is a threesome that lasts for quite a long time.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Because even after several years when Diane de Poitiers is no longer actually the lover, I mean, can you imagine? He’s 15, and she is what? She is 34. Okay?
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: She is his advisor, and she has his ear, as they would like to say in French, you know, so that this is, she’s the one that’s basically keeping him company. And to make things worse- She advises her as well.
Annie: Oh, so she can’t get rid of her.
Elyse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. She literally can’t get rid of her. And not only does she have to deal with the shadow of this woman who is extremely important at the court, and is basically overbearing, but she has to deal with a certain amount of jealousy of the entire court that is the [00:14:00] entourage of the king and of his sons and daughter, who consider her to simply be the stupid Italian banker’s daughter.
Annie: Well, that’s not nice.
Elyse: It’s not very nice, no.
Annie: No. That’s very snooty.
Elyse: It’s very snooty. Well, the French court really was very, very snooty. Yes.
Annie: Yes, tough word, tough word. It wasn’t good. I wouldn’t have liked it at all.
Elyse: No, I don’t think you and I would’ve done very well in the court. I don’t think, really, you know. Absolutely everything is looked at and scrutinized and criticized, and it was horrible for her. She was really miserable.
Heir Crisis and Breakthrough
Elyse: And what happens is, on top of everything else, she has no children. She’s now 18 years old. Three years, he has been sleeping with her. I mean, this is not the case, there have been some cases of these princes and the eventually kings who basically ignore their queen, who is basically an official function more than anything else. But she is not getting pregnant, and it’s starting to worry [00:15:00] her, and it is starting to worry François I on top of everything else because they have to have descendants. This is how you keep the dynasty going, right?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: In 1537, after three years of marriage, something strange happens that changes everything, and her destiny and the destiny of everything for France. And that is the older son, François, who was supposed to be the new king, he dies.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: He dies very suddenly, and all of a sudden her husband, Henry, who was never destined to be king, is now going to be the king.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: This means that she is the queen. They were not supposed to have an Italian queen in France. This changes everything.
Annie: Well, that’s true. That would be, yeah, that would be a sudden biggie.
Elyse: It’s a biggie. And so she lives for years with two problems. One [00:16:00] is she has not yet had a child, and second, the absolute amazing humiliation of being teased and basically disregarded by the court, and having this woman, Diane de Poitiers, who stays there forever and ever and ever.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, she was like the sore…
Elyse: She was there, and Henry II, who is now the official heir to the throne, he makes no bones about having her next to him, in spite of the fact that Cahterine de’ Medici is there as well.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: She’s in danger of being repudiated, which could happen.
Annie: Because she doesn’t have any children?
Elyse: She has no children, and her only function really, let’s face it, unfortunately, aside from filling the bank again for France, is to produce heirs.
And then after 10 years of marriage, and apparently, I was doing some research about this, it’s, I’m not going to go into the details, but there were apparently physiological [00:17:00] reasons why there was a problem for her to get pregnant, and they went to see some, the equivalent to what would’ve been a medical doctor at the time, who examined them both and decided that there was a functional problem that could be taken care of. And when that functional problem, which literally means that they had to try doing it in a different kind of way, to be as, as explicit as you can about this.
Annie: I’m thinking, I’m thinking.
Elyse: Okay. It was an anatomical problem, okay? So there was apparently something wrong with either or both of them that it turns out that by changing the way they had sex, she was able to get pregnant.
Annie: That’s position problem.
Elyse: Position problem.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Okay? Okay. This is cute. We never really talk about stuff like this on the podcast.
Annie: No.
Elyse: And so miracle of miracles, after 10 years, she gives birth to her first child.
Annie: Mm. Mm.
Elyse: And guess what happens. From then on, she [00:18:00] produces 10 children.
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: 10.
Annie: So she was not infertile at all.
Elyse: She was not infertile at all.
Annie: Neither one of them was.
Elyse: Neither one, no. No. And apparently, and in spite of the fact that he had this Diane de Poitiers hanging around, he never had children with her. It wasn’t like what happens later on with Henry IV, who has children with every woman he sleeps with, I mean, basically, you know. So what happens is she produces all these children, and François I is delighted.
Annie: Maybe he was doing it wrong with Diane de Poitiers as well.
Elyse: It’s very possible.
Annie: Maybe.
Elyse: It’s very possible.
Annie: Maybe he had bad habits.
Elyse: He had bad habits.
Annie: Okay, let’s move on.
Elyse: We move on. Let’s move on.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Henry II Reigns and Tragedy
Elyse: So what happens then, of course, is in 1547, François I dies, and Henry becomes king.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: She is in love with her husband. This is [00:19:00] one of the strange things of the history of Catherine de’ Medici. Unlike many of the other women who become the queen and the queen consort, she actually is in love with her husband, and she suffers all these years from the fact that he basically, we don’t even know what he thinks of her, to be honest. We have no idea. She was there, but so was this other, and then eventually there were others as well. And so what happens is she lives with this, but she puts all her energy from this point on, and we’re in the middle of the 16th century, she focuses on her children.
And she has, of her 10 children, seven live to adulthood, which is enormous for the time.
Annie: It’s good, yeah.
Elyse: And she has three sons. So I was thinking about this this morning as I was getting dressed. If you asked a bookmaker what the probability was that with seven children and three adults sons, what are the chances that none of them would be the progenitor of [00:20:00] the rest of the dynasty? The, probably the chances are almost zero.
Annie: Yeah, yeah. When you have three sons, you think that’s good, yeah.
Elyse: That’s good. You got two backups. You got two extras, as Harry the prince has actually said, you know? And you don’t worry about it.
Well, Catherine decides that she’s going to make sure that their dynasty is continued. And now that she has sons who are growing up and clearly have survived early childhood, she wants to instill in them some of her ideas. She was brought up, in spite of being Catholic, with very humanistic ideas at first.
She was very much into understanding equality, understanding equality between men and women, understanding basically a certain amount of tolerance, even in terms of religion.
It’s very interesting. She came with very open ideas, and little by little, what happened was she closed in. And this is the rest of the destiny of Cahterine de’ Medici. Over the years, various events make her [00:21:00] more bitter and make her not the person she was when she first arrived in France.
Annie: Hmm. Hmm.
Elyse: She lives with Henry, who is now the king, Henry II, who is more involved in jousting and soldiering, and a certain amount of repression of the Protestants, who have, of course, developed in the middle of the 1500s. But it’s not very bad. There are not yet real wars. There’s no yet war of religions in France.
Annie: I think I know where you’re going.
Elyse: But what happens is he has an accident one day.
Annie: Right, the jousting accident.
Elyse: The jousting accident in 1559. They have been married for 25 years. That means she’s 40 years old. They’re both 40 years old.
Annie: Right, right, right.
Elyse: He likes to play jousting, literally, you know, and he has one of the men that’s one of his soldiers, one of his captains, who jousts with him.
Well, nobody knows really exactly what happened.
Annie: But we know where it happened. In front of the Hotel du Sully.
Elyse: [00:22:00] Yes.
On boulevard Saint-Antoine.
Yeah.
Annie: Right. Yeah.
Elyse: Just behind the Place des Vosges.
Annie: Right. So if you walk my Marais tour, I’ll tell you all about it in that tour, yeah.
Elyse: And in fact, at that time, it’s not yet the Place des Vosges because it’s Henry IV afterwards who does it. And he gets pierced in the eye.
Annie: Yeah.
Unfortunate.
Elyse: Unfortunate, and he gets infected.
Annie: Right, because what happened, briefly, is that his lance, the lance of his, of the guy he was competing against, Montgomery, I think was his name.
Elyse: Montgomery, yeah.
Annie: …broke. And normally you would stop the joust at that point, but he didn’t want to stop. He kept at it.
Elyse: Because he’s an idiot.
Annie: Yeah. He was wearing a helmet, but the…
Elyse: It lifted it up.
Annie: … The lance lifted up the visor, and he got himself impaled in the eye.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: Not a good thing.
Elyse: Not a good thing. And it became a ‘septicemia’, and 10 days later…
Annie: Yeah, he went septic.
Elyse: … he died.
Annie: In [00:23:00] agony. Yeah, it was a terrible painful death, yeah.
Elyse: It was horrible. It was a horrible death. And she was devastated, absolutely devastated.
Annie: Yeah, that must not have been a good sight.
Elyse: It was not a good sight, but also she… this is when the court really realized how much she was attached to her husband, and from that day on, for the rest of her life, which was another 29 years, she wore black.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: And she wore a veil. And she was called the Black Widow.
Annie: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Regency and First Son
Elyse: And so from this point on, what happens?
Here is her son, her first, the oldest of these three sons, who is about to become the new king, and she does what she has probably always wanted to do, and that is she becomes what is known as the regent.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: Which basically means she runs it because he’s not yet adult.
Annie: Right. This happened a lot, yeah.
Elyse: [00:24:00] And she wants to rule because she was brought up to believe in her own intelligence. And this is the one thing about both of these women, who are cousins, who basically have destinies that are, in some strange way, very, very similar, is that they are not brought up to think they are inferior.
And one of the things that I’ve, after doing all this research, it’s like one of the things I find the most remarkable is that whatever posterity has made of these two women, and it’s not the greatest in terms of, you know, the reputations that they’ve left behind them for different reasons, but they were incredibly interesting women, and they were women who, in another age would’ve been far more accepted and far more powerful than they actually were.
Annie: Hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: So what begins is this period of time that is for the next, basically, 30 years of her trying to guide her sons one after the other [00:25:00] as they become kings. Because what happens is that the first son, and that is the son that is a minor, he only lives a year and a half before dying. Nobody really knows what he dies of, but they think that he died of pleurisy, which apparently was very common at the time. But before he died, he had been married off to, or she had been married to him. He was married to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland.
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: Yeah. Yeah, we get these connections. There’s, now you start seeing the little spiderwebby things that come out in every different direction.
And Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Catholic who was the descendant of the Guise family.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: For those of you out there who don’t know anything about this, just keep in mind two things. When you hear the name Guise, go ‘sss’.
Annie: Boo.
Elyse: [00:26:00] Boo. Boo, a boo.
Annie: Pretend you’re in a panto.
Elyse: There we go. Boo, boo, and boo, okay? Because the Guise are going to create a lot of trouble in the near future. And what happens then to this young king, who is François, is that he doesn’t live long enough to do anything.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And Marie, or Mary, Queen of Scots, who has been actually brought up in the court in France, she leaves and goes back to Scotland, and that takes the care of us in terms of dealing with Mary, Queen of Scots.
Annie: And she had a very interesting life and story there.
Elyse: And she had a very interesting life as well, you know. So we’re talking about Elizabethan times as well, n’est-ce pas?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: There, there we go. All right.
Charles IX and Religious Tensions
Elyse: So we come to her second son.
In 1560, it’s the second son, Charles, who takes the throne, and he’s only 10.
Annie: Oof. That’s too young. Don’t do that.
Elyse: And so she is really the power behind the throne.
Annie: Yes, yes, [00:27:00] of course.
Elyse: The problem is, is that we are really in the midst of the enormous amount of tension that is being created by the Guise and by other families that are conservative Catholics in relation to the growing Protestant movement in France.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And so Cahterine de’ Medici finds herself in the midst of what is starting to become a very serious and very, very, very dangerous situation. There are attacks. There are attacks by the Guise army, because they have created their own army.
Annie: And they are ultra Catholics.
Elyse: They are ultra, ultra, ultra Catholics. They are the equivalent of what would be the most conservative arch-Catholic you could possibly imagine, and they want to rule the country. They are dukes. They are very wealthy. They are a whole other… They’re just a whole thing with the Guise, you know. And so what [00:28:00] happens is she tries to counter their influence, and she does so at first by trying to reason with them, and she surrounds herself with people who are very interesting. A man named Michel de l’Hospital, who is apparently a humanist, all these kinds of people. But little by little, what happens is there is too much tension, there is too much bloodshed, and she discovers that she really doesn’t have the power or influence she would like to have.
Grand Tour and Civil War
Elyse: So what happens is there was a first massacre called the Massacre of Vassy, and she decides that there’s, they’ve got to do something to try and stop the country from dissolving into this incredible civil war.
And so in 1564, with this second son, Charles IX, she undertakes what is called the Grande Tour.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: She rode for 28 months, that’s more than two years.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: She and her son, [00:29:00] and unfortunately also their entourage travel all over the country. Literally, I followed the route. I mean, they literally don’t leave out any part of the country, including, of course, really going a lot into Aquitaine and Languedoc and Provence, which is where there are more Protestants than in the north.
And she tries to make peace by encountering all of the different rulers of the different parts, and she takes her son with her, because of course, she’s really running the ship in terms of all of this.
And she feels like she’s making headway, but at the same time, there are places where there are massacres, where the Catholics attack the Protestants, where the Protestants attack the Catholics.
And then, to make matters worse, Charles dies also at the age of 23…
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: … after reigning for 13 years, but basically with his mother reigning for him.
She never allowed him to make any decisions without her, and he leaves [00:30:00] no children. He actually was married, but he has one illegitimate child, and that doesn’t count.
Annie: Right, right.
Elyse: So-
Annie: What’d he die of?
Elyse: They think he died of tuberculosis or pleurisy again. I mean-
Annie: Okay, okay.
Elyse: Apparently it was really rampant at the time, you know. So here we are.
She’s… how old now? I don’t even remember anymore. She’s in her 50s, and she’s just lost two of these three adult children. Who would’ve thought, right?
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Marriage Politics and St Bartholomew
Elyse: Meanwhile, to try and appease the population, she takes her daughter, Marguerite, and marries her against her will to a prince who is the, basically the Prince of Béarn in Gascony, who is another Henry, who is indeed Henry IV.
Annie: Ah, okay.
Elyse: Okay?
Annie: Okay, so now we’re going to skip, we’re going to go to another dynasty, I guess.
Elyse: What happens [00:31:00] is she just is assuming that by forcing the two of them to marry, because neither of them wants to do this, that she’s trying to appease the Protestant population because Henry has been brought up by his mother, who is a princess, and who is indeed a Protestant, right?
Annie: Right, right.
Elyse: But she still has her third son.
Annie: Yeah?
Elyse: And so the third son becomes king.
Annie: How old is he?
Elyse: He’s actually 23 when he becomes king.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: But the problem is he is Henry III. Doesn’t matter, it just he’s Henry, he’s another Henry, before we get to the good King Henry IV.
But he’s been made King of Poland, and he’s married to someone from the Duchy of Lorraine. So he’s basically not even in the country anymore, and what happens is he’s a soldier, and he’s apparently quite refined and actually well-educated, but he basically has been living for several years out of the country, and she brings him back. The court brings him back, and of [00:32:00] course she’s still fighting with the influence of the Guise and all of the people who were following the Guise, and she says to him, “You’ve got to rule.”
Annie: You’re King of France now.
Elyse: Yeah, now you’re King of France. There’s nothing you can do about it, I’m sorry. I mean, you didn’t want to be, but this is what it is, you know. You are the King of France.
In the meantime, in 1572, there is the very famous and extremely horrible Massacre of Saint Bartholomew in Paris.
Annie: Yes, yes.
Elyse: And she is considered to be responsible, even though she was not responsible for it. What happens is very complicated, but basically they had made a conference bringing in the leaders of the Protestants to Paris, and this includes, of course, royal blood. We have princes that are involved in this who have moved over to the new religion, and the Guise prepare a massacre.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: And she winds up being blamed for it. She is involved in a certain kind of way, but it is definitely not her fault that there is this massacre, but thousands of people are killed, and then of course, in 1572, this spreads to everywhere in France.
Here in [00:33:00] Toulouse, the Catholics kicked the Protestants out. In Montauban, which is the city next door, the Protestants kicked the Catholics out, and they killed each other off, and it was horrible in 1572 and 1573.
Henry III and Catherine Final Years
Elyse: So her son, the last of these sons, he comes in 1574 and she says, “I’m going to help you rule. We have to get this taken care of. We have to create a kingdom of peace.
This is… whatever, you know? But what happens is that he is not really ready to be king.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And he starts resenting the fact that she is basically the power behind the throne.
And when she has married off Marguerite to this other Henry, who is of course a Protestant, there is more and more tension instead of being less tension.
In fact, she really is the victim of the circumstances that she lived in, in terms of what was going on in France.
And so what happens is, that he decides that he’s going to try and deal with it on his own, and she is [00:34:00] told to basically back off, to get out of the… out of the realm of the power. He sends her to the Château of Blois. And what happens is, that he stays in power, but he creates more problems and more tension, and then she decides that she can’t deal with any of this anymore, and she basically withdraws from any attempt to rule the country, and she stays in Blois, where she dies in 1589 at the age of 69.
Annie: Hmm, hmm.
Elyse: When she dies, her son is still king.
Annie: And which one is he? Is… is Henry II?
Elyse: This is Henry II.
Valois Dynasty Ends
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: But, and there’s always a but in this… he gets assassinated by the Guise family just a few months after she dies.
Annie: Okay, hmm, hmm.
Elyse: So all of her efforts and [00:35:00] all of the second part of her life that had been attempting to create some kind of a peaceful situation in France and trying to be basically a queen are for naught.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: And what happens is when Henry II dies, there are no more sons left.
Annie: Right. They got to go find a king somewhere else in another family.
Elyse: They got to go find a king somewhere else. Guess who becomes king?
Annie: Henri IV.
Elyse: Henri IV.
Annie: Henry IV.
Elyse: Henry IV, the good king, the good Protestant king, Henry IV.
Marie Medici
Elyse: And this is how we segue to the second Medici, who is Marie.
Annie: Right, okay.
Elyse: Because Henry is married to Marguerite. Yes, yes.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Yes, yes, Marguerite, the daughter of Catherine.
De Valois. So this is the end of the dynasty of the Valois. No more Valois. This is now Henry de Bourbon.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Okay? A different part of the family that goes all the way back to St. Louis, okay?
Henry IV Needs an Heir
Elyse: The [00:36:00] problem is, Henry and Marguerite hate each other. She doesn’t live with him.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: They never have had any children together.
Annie: That’s not a good marriage.
Elyse: It wasn’t, it was not a good marriage. It was not even really what we could call a marriage. They really basically spit at each other. They were like two hissing little animals, you know?
Annie: You said they didn’t want to get married to begin with.
Elyse: And what happens is, he has, in the meantime, Because he’s not a kid now, he’s in his 20s, right? He has had lots of illegitimate children.
Annie: Uh-huh.
Elyse: Because Henry IV is a, what the French like to call un chaud lapin.
Annie: A hot bunny.
Elyse: A hot bunny, okay? He’s a hot bunny. And over the years, because he actually really likes all of these children, he keeps them at the court.
Annie: Oh, okay.
Elyse: And he legitimizes them.
Annie: Okay, okay.
Elyse: But not a one of them [00:37:00] can become king.
Annie: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wrong mom, wrong mom.
Elyse: Wrong mom, born out of marriage. They cannot become king.
But there are a slew of them, six or seven of these children, and they all become eventually, you know, dukes and this and… whatever. I mean…
Annie: They’ll do fine.
Elyse: Never mind. And it’s rare, in fact, that this happens, but he actually loves them all. It’s very strange, but this is one of those things. And it sounds like he’s someone who probably, if he hadn’t been born into this particular situation, probably would’ve been just as happy to not ever get married again, and that would’ve been the end of it. The court has decided that he has to have an official wife, and Marguerite is no longer, she’s out of this, I mean.
So what they do, they help him appeal to the pope to get an annulment.
Annie: Yeah, right.
Elyse: And she’s perfectly fine with this, by the way. I mean, she couldn’t have cared less. She does never have children in the rest of her life.
But he [00:38:00] gets an annulment from Marguerite, and here he is now. He’s going to be crowned king. This is 1589. The court says, “You have to have an heir. We have to find you a wife.”
Annie: Sure.
Elyse: “Someone who can produce children. You know, you have children, but never mind. They’re not good enough, okay?” And so, this is the irony of all of this, is that there was a man named Ferdinand I, who is actually a Medici, and he is married to … This is complicated, okay? He’s married to a sister-in-law of Henry IV.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Basically. And remember, Catherine has had seven living children. Besides the three sons, she has four daughters that she’s basically married off in various places, right? And one of them is married to Ferdinand I, a Medici.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And so Ferdinand I says to Henry, “I have a niece.” [00:39:00] “She’s a nice girl,” you know?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: She’s also very rich.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And it turns out to be little Marie de’ Medici.
Annie: How old was she?
Elyse: Oh, she wasn’t that little. She was actually over 20, which is extremely old at this point.
Annie: Right, to become a queen of France, yes, that’s old.
Elyse: To become a queen of France, this is extremely old. But by this time, we’re talking about a man who is in his 40s.
Annie: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Marie de Medici Chosen
Elyse: So what happens is at first, basically the reaction is, “No, not another Medici,” ah? You know, “We’ve already dealt with one.”
Annie: The Guise family was probably not pleased.
Elyse: They were not pleased. A lot of the court was not pleased. After all, this is not someone worthy of the king.
But it turns out that Marie, who is a distant cousin of Catherine’s, who was born in 1575, is the granddaughter of the King of Spain.
Oh, boy. Oh, boy, oh, [00:40:00] boy. We never, we’re not going to talk about incest and all the inter marriages of all of these different kings and queens. So it turns out, by dint of being the granddaughter of the King of Spain, she has royal blood. Her blood is blue.
Annie: Ah. It’s good enough.
Elyse: It’s good enough. And the poor girl, young woman, to be honest, she is not a happy person. Marie de’ Medici was actually the youngest of six children, but four of them died very young. Her parents died when she was young as well, and the last of her siblings, her sister, was married off when she was quite young. And so she spends a good part of the last years of her adolescence and as a young adult basically alone. And she is considered to be the heiress now of what is the most enormous fortune imaginable.
And under the different kings, that were the children of Catherine de’ Medici, they were more [00:41:00] and more in debt because they were making war with the English, and then they were making war with the Spanish, and then they were making war of left and right. And so the debt that the France has towards the Medici is absolutely phenomenal. And so Henry IV is convinced by his counselors and accepts the idea that he can marry this young woman, and by doing so, eliminate part of the debt.
Annie: Oh, okay. Well, that’s an interesting arrangement.
Elyse: It’s a very interesting arrangement. She is told that she is about to be sent to France to marry the king, and she will be Queen of France. This is a young woman who is 24 going on 25, which means she’s very, very old, and it’s strange that she’d not been married off to somebody before. And she knows nothing about what the situation is in terms of what Henry IV is like, what has happened before, but she is, like her predecessor, someone who is imbued [00:42:00] with Renaissance, with the arts, with music, with architecture. This is the world she grew up in.
Proxy Wedding Shock
Elyse: And so they send her, a contract is made, and they send her with an entourage of over 1,000 people…
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: … to Marseilles, where she is married in proxy, because Henry IV doesn’t even deign to come down to Marseilles to meet her.
Annie: That is very bizarre.
Elyse: Yes, and well, and unfortunately, it does happen, and it did. And, he has this, I can’t remember the name of the, he was one of the members of the nobility who comes down and takes his place, and they sign these contracts, and that makes her officially now married to Henry IV, and then they take her with them.
Annie: She hasn’t even met him.
Elyse: She hasn’t met him. She has never seen him. She has no idea. You know, in those days, what they sometimes would do is they would take a portrait and painting, and they would have an envoy send it to somebody so that they could see what they looked like.
Of course, that meant that they had to really do a [00:43:00] reproduction that was faithful to what the person looked like, you know? One of the problems with somebody like Henry IV was that he was an extremely intelligent, and actually a very interesting person, but he was basically what the French would call “chaud lapin” he was brought up in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
He apparently, and this is notorious, he stank of garlic. He always, every single day, he ate cloves of raw garlic as a way of warding off the evil spirit, you know, whatever you want to… you know.
Annie: What?
Elyse: Yeah. And apparently, was not exactly the epitome of hygiene in general.
Annie: Ugh, okay. Hmm.
Elyse: Okay?
Annie: Yeah. No, not good. Not good.
Elyse: Here we have this refined woman coming from the part of Europe that is the epitome of culture, really.
Annie: Right. In Italy, I mean, they, just look at their churches, at their palaces. They’re amazing.
Elyse: And the painters, and the musicians, and everything else, you know?
I mean, this is the time of, this is where we’re [00:44:00] finished with Michelangelo. We’ve got Caravaggio. We’ve got all the people that come after that. I mean, it’s just flourishing. And she arrives in Paris and discovers that…
Annie: A smelly husband who eats garlic
Elyse: She has a smelly husband who not only has a slew of children there with him in Fontainebleau.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: I mean the… you know, the poor woman, right?
Annie: Icing on the cake.
Elyse: No, the icing on top of the icing is that his new official mistress is also there.
Annie: Oh, goodness.
Elyse: This is a man who had one official mistress after the other, okay? Well, but the biggest difference, in a strange way, between what happened with Catherine and what happens now with Marie, who is of course now, you know, much older, 10 years older than Catherine was when she arrived to be married, is that Henry, since he is a he does sleep with [00:45:00] her immediately, and within the year, she gives birth to her first child.
Annie: Okay. He has the technique down.
Elyse: He has the technique down. He’s good. I mean, how many he eventually produced, we don’t even know, to be honest, you know, how many children. But what happens is that they are married for 10 years.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And in 10 years, she has six children.
Annie: That’s a lot.
Elyse: That’s not bad. So Henry is extremely happy because he now has legitimate descendants.
Annie: Right. So some boys, some girls, some of both?
Elyse: Yep, some boys, some girls, some of both. Actually, if I remember correctly, it’s two boys and three girls, because the last of her pregnancy was a terrible pregnancy with a stillborn.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: And that was the end of that. She didn’t have any pregnancies after that.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: The first of their children is a Louis.
Ah, this is the man who becomes Louis XIII.
Annie: Aha.
Elyse: Aha. And what happens is that [00:46:00] Catherine, I’m sorry, that Marie, who of course-
Annie: Oh, you only did it once this whole time.
Elyse: I only did it once. I only did it once. Goddamn, you know.
Life at Court Humiliation
Elyse: She is basically, lives an absolute humiliation during the time that they are together, okay? Because not only is she called the banker’s daughter behind her back, people make fun of her. She has a strong Italian accent. She brings with her two advisors that are Italian, and the court resents enormously the fact that these people are there to advise her, as opposed to having French advisors. There are French advisors in the court, but she brings with her a woman who has been her only really faithful friend, a woman named Leonora, and the man she has married, a man named Concino Concini.
Annie: Oh, I’ve heard about him.
Elyse: Yeah. Well, they move into the palace. [00:47:00] And they are her closest advisors. And of course, Henry IV is basically the king who tries to create a peace in the country.
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: He is the person who has signed the Edict of Nantes. He is the person who has grown up as a Protestant, converted to Catholicism so that he can be king, but who is really trying very, very strongly to create a more or less appeased atmosphere all over the country.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: But what happens is that the Guise are still in power, and they are extremely influential. And the fact that Henry IV is king, a man who had been Protestant, and who ostensibly becomes Catholic just to be able to be king, they cannot abide this at all. And unlike her predecessor, Marie de’ Medici is very pious.
Annie: Ah, okay.
Elyse: Okay? So she’s kind of caught in between being [00:48:00] faithful to the politics of her husband, Henry IV, and suffering a bit of the influence of the Guise, who get to her a little bit, you know?
Annie: Mm-hmm.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Coronation Then Assassination
Elyse: But what happens is, is that she wants to be made queen.
Now, she is not officially queen. That is, she is queen by virtue of being married to the king, but she has not been coronated.
Annie: Oh, I see.
Elyse: And the coronation is an official act that really gives you a certain amount of power. Cahterine de’ Medici was coronated, okay?
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: So Marie de Medici, she wants to be coronated. Henry IV keeps putting it off. Everything I read, it’s not very clear to me exactly the reasons why. I’m not even sure.
Annie: Well, seeing that they were married, he wasn’t there when they got married, they couldn’t have coronated her at the time, right?
Elyse: No, but later on she keeps insisting that it’s time for her to be coronated.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And so what happens [00:49:00] is that after 10 years of marriage, in the year 1610, on one day in May of 1610, Henry is about to go off to fight a battle somewhere. It’s not even sure exactly where. I think it was about to go fight up near Belgium, you know, fighting with the Spanish in what there was a possession of the Spanish, which was the, at the time the Pays-Bas, which was the Netherlands, okay?
And she says to him, ” I need to have some authority, because if you’re not here, it is me who’s going to be signing the papers.”
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: “It’s me who’s…”
Annie: Okay, yeah, yeah
Elyse: … going to be doing all of these things.
And so, finally he agrees that she should be coronated. And so on May 13th of 1610, she is officially coronated, and she is made Queen of France.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And it is the next day, the 14th of May 1610, that Henry IV is [00:50:00] assassinated.
Annie: Oh, goodness.
Elyse: Oh, yes. Okay. He is riding in his carriage, going through Paris, when a fanatic Catholic named Ravaillac stabs him.
Annie: I hadn’t remembered the date, but this story is in my Île de la Cité tour.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: So I did know the story, but I wasn’t remembering the dates.
Elyse: Yes. So to this day… to this day, what year are we in? To this day, nobody can prove one way or the other whether there is cause and effect between the two events.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah.
Elyse: Okay? But as you can imagine, the suspicion is enormous, right?
Annie: Yeah, but Ravaillac was kind of nutty.
Elyse: He was nutty, but there is a certain amount of, how can this be just coincidence? I won’t even venture to speculate.
Annie: Yeah, we don’t know. But it’s an interesting coincidence.
Elyse: It’s a very interesting coincidence.
Regency and Catholic Alliances
Elyse: And guess what [00:51:00] happens? She is now queen, and her son, the oldest of her children, Louis, is only eight.
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: And so Marie de Medici becomes the regent. But unlike Catherine, she really, really, really wants to be the ruler. She really wants to be queen.
Annie: Uh-huh, yeah.
Elyse: She feels as though she merits it. She feels as though she has the ability to do it. She feels as though she has the intelligence to do it. And on top of that, and I was doing all this reading, it’s really quite amazing to me, it turns out that Louis was not her favorite child, and he was much more attached to his father, in spite of the fact that he had all these half siblings, than he was to his mother. He and his mother never, ever really got along. She favored his brother, and she favored his sisters.
Annie: Okay. Yeah, that’s difficult.
Elyse: It’s very [00:52:00] difficult.
Annie: I mean, he’s only eight, right?
Elyse: And he’s only eight, and she’s running things. And so what does she do? Because she is much more of a Catholic than her, certainly her husband was, and certainly Catherine de’ Medici, who was her predecessor.
Annie: But, I mean, Cahterine de’ Medici was also Catholic, but just not as devout.
Elyse: Not as devout. So what Marie de Medici decides to do, and she has the power to do it because she is now queen, is she proceeds when her son Louis is eight, to agree by contract to marry him to the daughter of the King of Spain, who is the most ardent Catholic of all, and she marries her first daughter to his son. That is, both her first son and her first daughter are married to the son and daughter of the King of Spain to make sure that the Catholic alliance is as strong as possible against the Protestants.
And to add injury to all of that, she brings the [00:53:00] Concini in as her head advisors.
In 1614, Louis is 12 years old, and believe it or not, is considered to be an adult. And so he officially takes the throne, and he cannot stand his mother.
Basically, he cannot stand her ruling things. He cannot stand, I don’t have any idea. I don’t really know what it was like for him. I really don’t. But what happens is that the court is aware of all the tensions between the mother and the son, and he resents more and more the intrusion of the Italians.
And in the court, they talk about the Italians, you know, with that kind of nastiness. You know, it’s the Italians that are doing this, the Italians that are doing that. And one of the things that happens is that when he becomes officially king in 1614, he basically tells her, “You are no longer regent.”
Annie: Okay, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: “I’m going to run.”
He cuts her off. He [00:54:00] says, you’re my mom, you’re the queen, but now I’m king and you’re the queen mother, and go have a good time,” you know, basically, you know?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: “Go enjoy yourself,” you know. She doesn’t want to enjoy herself. She wants to be the ruler. And so what she does is, since she is no longer regent, she makes herself head of what is called the king’s council. And he can’t keep her from being a member of the council. But because the tensions between the Catholics and the Protestants are brewing again, and he decides, because he is brought up as a strong Catholic, that he’s going to revoke the Edict of Nantes, there are different groups who are trying to influence him, left and right.
Annie: We should say briefly that the Edict of Nantes is what gave Protestants the right to practice their religion.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: It kind of said: “We’re going to try and be open-minded here. You could be a Protestant if you wanted to.”
Elyse: You could be a Protestant, although interestingly enough, it’s a whole other thing, but they could only practice their religion in certain places. It’s super complicated, the whole thing, right?
Concini Murder and Exile
Elyse: And so what [00:55:00] happens is Louis decides that the only way to get rid of his mother is to get rid of her two Italian advisors.
Annie: Ah, okay.
Elyse: And so he has Concini assassinated in the courtyard of the Louvre.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: Which of course was one of the places that they lived in at the time, you know? Which was way before it becomes a museum. You know, this is still one of the royal residences in Paris. And he has Concini stabbed, and he has his wife brought to trial as a traitor, and she is actually publicly executed.
Annie: The wife of Concini?
Elyse: The wife of Concini, yeah. A very bloody, very bloody kind of situation. And he exiles his mom, the queen, to the chateau in Blois.
Annie: Well, it’s not that far, but okay.
Elyse: I guess in those days it was considered far enough. You know, it was like, “Get her out of here,” you know?
Escape and Power Struggles
Elyse: And what does she [00:56:00] do? This is a very famous story, and it’s apparently, it’s hard to imagine, but you really see it as something in a film. She is in Blois, and but she says, “There’s no way he’s going to keep me locked up here. I mean, I’m not retired.” She’s 43 years old, okay?
Annie: Right, she’s still young.
Elyse: She’s still young. She has her followers. She has people who are really, really loyal to her, and she has them arrange for her to escape by climbing out a window of the Chateau of Blois. There are descriptions of what it was like. They set it up literally almost like, you know, with hanging drapes knotted together or something like that. She was agile. She was a very good horsewoman, so she was extremely athletic. She was able to climb out the window, and she created an uprising against her son, the king.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: And to counter her effect, I mean, this is the rest of the history of Marie de’ Medici. It is so strange that you [00:57:00] imagine that this was the destiny of a woman who was basically sent to France to be the king’s wife so that she could produce children and continue a dynasty. For the rest of her life with her son, they were at war, and one of the ways he countered her influence was by bringing to the court a man named Richelieu.
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: We’re not going to talk about him today.
Annie: Now, hang on, hang on, hang on. This, which Henry is this?
Elyse: This is Louis XIII.
Annie: Oh, Louis XIII. Okay, okay. I had lost the count there. Okay, Louis XIII.
Elyse: Louis XIII.
Annie: Right, right.
Elyse: This is the beginning of the Louis.
Annie: Right, right. So Louis XIII and Richelieu, of course.
Elyse: This is the Bourbon dynasty, and what happens is, for the rest of her life, she is constantly trying to find a way of getting back the power. What happens is by escaping from Blois and trying to deal with Richelieu, at first her son decides that the [00:58:00] best thing he can do is to keep her under his thumb, so he brings her back to Paris, and she begins the building of the building that is, of course, so amazingly connected to her, and that is the Palace of Luxembourg.
Annie: Yeah. Okay.
Elyse: The gardens. She gets the land, she hires the architects. He says to her, “Occupy yourself with doing something like that.” She brings, she has balls. She brings in these painters, she brings in all these artists, just like her predecessor had done. And Louis thinks that by keeping her busy this way, she will stay out of the politics of running the country. Wrong. Wrong and wrong. All right? Her obsession is really being queen.
Day of the Dupes Fallout
Elyse: And one of the things that happens on this famous Day of the Dupes is that Louis decides once and for all that he can try and get rid of his mother by lying to her.
And so he brings her into this, the office or the room where the king is, [00:59:00] and he also brings in Richelieu, who is by this time someone extremely powerful and influential, and who basically is really running the politics of the country. First he tells her that Richelieu is going to leave, and then, I don’t exactly understand how this happens, but she finds out that he’s been lying to her. She listens at the door. She’s coming, she’s gone out, she listens at the door. There are people who’ve written the story of this in absolute detail, and she hears her son saying to Richelieu that he’d just lied to his mother and that he was basically just wants to get rid of her so that she will leave him alone.
And she decides that she will never be able to trust either her son or Richelieu again. And so she leaves Paris, and she goes to one of their chateaus, and she decides that the only way she can get back the power is if she can organize an army of people who are actually enemies of the country. So she’s a very complicated woman, right?
Annie: [01:00:00] Yeah. Yeah.
Exile Across Europe
Elyse: So in 1630, she leaves and goes to Brussels. Meanwhile, because she has married her other children off, they are all parts of the royalty of the various other countries that are surrounding France.
Annie: Sure, yeah.
Elyse: She spends her time going from one country to the other, seeing if she could organize basically an army to go back and take back the power from her son.
Annie: That’s crazy.
Elyse: It’s crazy.
Annie: Yeah, she really was like a bulldog.
Elyse: She was like a bulldog. And it’s hard to know why, whether it was just this need that she had for the, to be queen and run the country, what was really the deep problem that she had, of course, with this particular child, because she apparently was fine with her other children, although the girls all got married off to somebody else anyway.
So she spends the next 12 years of her life, that is until the end of her life, [01:01:00] going from one country to another, because what happens is that Louis, when she leaves, he cuts off her money.
Annie: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: So she’s now dependent on all of her children and all of her family in every place, and she’s got family in Germany, she’s got family in Spain, she’s got family in England. As she goes from one country to the next, she goes to the Spanish Netherlands, then she spends three years in England, then she goes to Germany, and she never stops trying to get back her influence to get back to France. And because she has made such good friends with the painter Rubens…
Annie: Oh, yeah, yeah!
Elyse: … Who is Flemish, but who is apparently now living in Cologne, in Köln, in Germany, which is, of course, at that time in Prussia, she goes to visit him. And he is very wealthy. Rubens is famous for being one of these artists who really had, who was flashy, you know. He was a brilliant painter, and he was the one who had painted these enormous paintings of her and the whole [01:02:00] mythology of the story of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV that are now, of course, in the gallery in the Louvre now, and they were designed to be put into the Luxembourg Palace, you know. So she goes to visit him, and it is there that she gets very ill.
Death and Lasting Legacy
Elyse: She’s 67, and she gets the equivalent of a sort of a pneumonia, and she dies.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: She dies without ever having come back to France. And her son does not want her to have a state funeral.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: It’s hard for us, I think it’s certainly hard for me, after all that I was reading, to understand the animosity that was so deep between the two of them. Irony of sorts is that Richelieu dies five months after her… and her son one year later.
Annie: Oh, okay. So yeah.
Elyse: The man that follows him is, in fact, Louis XIV, we’re in the Bourbon dynasty.
[01:03:00] So it is very strange, the destiny of this woman, this destiny of these two daughters of bankers who brought to France huge advances in painting, in the arts, in architecture, in music. Apparently, the myth of Catherine de’ Medici introducing all kinds of foods was not necessarily true. She didn’t bring Italian chefs with her, but she did bring a certain refinement. She brought the fork. She brought all kinds of things that existed in Italy that did not exist in France at the time.
And Marie de’ Medici was really more the person who wanted the power. She wanted to be known as queen and not just as the wife of.
The irony of all of this for me is that apparently when Henry IV died, assassinated mind you, the day after she was nominated and made queen, is that he’d left as a will that her heart be put together with his where he was [01:04:00] buried when he died.
Annie: Mm, okay.
Elyse: So her body was taken to Saint-Denis, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, because she was of course queen, one year after she died, but her heart was taken out, and this was typical at the time, and it was not just, you know.
Annie: Yeah, yeah. They did weird things.
Elyse: They did weird things like that. And put with his in a place called La Flèche.
Annie: Okay, where’s that?
Elyse: It’s some place on the outskirts of Paris. It’s a monastery of sorts.
Annie: Oh, okay, okay.
Elyse: Which is very strange. During the Revolution, their remains, her remains particularly, but I think the others too, a lot of their remains, you know, were dug up, especially in the mausoleum in Saint-Denis.
And, I don’t know how they found them, but when the Revolution ended and the Restoration began, their remains were brought back. And so of course her remains are in Saint-Denis, just like Henry IV’s and all of them.
In the end, what I find so amazing and [01:05:00] fascinating, and it’s just that these two daughters of the Italian Renaissance, both of whom were insulted and treated as bankers’ daughters, you know, they were just there for the money. Both of them had this enormous influence, both politically and artistically, on what happened to France.
And of course, Marie de’ Medici winds up being the mother of the entire Bourbon dynasty that follows afterwards, you know.
Annie: Yeah, yeah. That’s insane.
Elyse: So for those of you, and then we’ll end, because I know this has been very long, keep in mind just this. Catherine de’ Medici is the one who made the Tuileries.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: She had a palace built, and she put in these gorgeous, what she called Italian gardens, which is the beautiful park of the Tuileries that is still there, right?
Annie: Right, because the palace is gone.
Elyse: Because the palace is gone. It was destroyed, right?
Marie de’ Medici is the one who did the Jardin of Luxembourg.
Annie: All right.[01:06:00]
Elyse: And the Palace of Luxembourg, which is now the Senate of France.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: And if you want to get an idea of what Marie de’ Medici thought of herself… thought of herself, and thought of Henry IV, because it’s kind of ironic, if you go to the exquisite gallery of the Rubens paintings of the mythology of Marie de’ Medici and Henry IV at the Louvre, and it’s really worth spending some time looking at these paintings, you see the entire history of her life with Henry IV and her, I’m putting this into quotation marks, “beloved son,” Louis XIII.
Annie: Yes, and the Fontaine de’ Medici in the Luxembourg Garden, that would be Marie, right?
Elyse: That is Marie.
Annie: Yes, yes, yes. Wow. Wow.
Elyse: The lesson to be learned is never marry a French king with an Italian heiress.[01:07:00]
Annie: It makes for fun stories. That was fascinating. Thank you so much. I learned a ton, and it’s nice to have the narrative like this to imagine the lives of these women.
Elyse: I would not have wanted to be either one.
Annie: Correct.
Elyse: Quite honestly. I mean, in spite of the education, in spite of the wealth, what strange lives they had.
Annie: Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Elyse.
Elyse: You’re welcome, Annie.
Annie: Au revoir.
Elyse: Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:08:00][01:09:00]
Subscribe to the Podcast
Apple YouTube Spotify RSSSupport the Show
Tip Your Guides Extras Patreon Audio ToursRead more about this transcript
Episode PageCategory: French History