Catherine was originally from Florence, a daughter of Lorenzo II. She entered history at 14 in 1533 when she married 15-year-old Henry, second son of King Francis I of France. She had been brought up quite strictly -they say that once, when she was six, she was forced to witness the agony of her dogs, which had been poisoned, as a punishment. After her wedding, and as per tradition, bride and groom were accompanied to the nuptial bed by several members of the Royal entourage (including the King and Pope Clement VII, a Medici himself and uncle and tutor of Catherine since her own father’s death years ago. They were the pleased to witness the sexual union between the two youngsters.
Problems between the couple arose soon after. The reason was the affair that Henry still had with his lover Diane of Poitiers, a courtesan 20 years older than him who had also been Henry’s father’s concubine, and who had him completely subdued. To make matters worse, Diane was much more accepted both by the court and by the population than Catherine, a foreigner, something which could be seen in all protocol events, where the position and influence of the royal lover was much more relevant than that of the legitimate wife. All that placed Catherine in a significantly lower position, which became a constant source of public humiliations for years. Nevertheless, it was here where Catherine’s true character surfaced. Conscious as she was of the enormous power of her rival and her own weak position, Catherine never confronted Diane, pretending to accept the subordinate place in which her husband had placed her. In the meantime, she earned the trust of both her father-in-law and Diane herself, with whom she acted affectionately and submissively –Catherine wasn’t a consummated reader of Machiavelli for nothing, stating frequently that one had but to smile to a rival. Thus, in the shadow, pretending to be friends with her rival and accept the ménage à trois, she earned a formidable influence that would give her later on the access to power.
Her precocious ability to scheme was one of the causes for everybody to suspect her when her brother-in-law the Dauphin Francis (the heir apparent to the throne of France) died. He had officially died after drinking a glass of iced water following a stifling ball game. But the fact that the person who served him the glass was an Italian waiter and that Catherine’s husband, Henry, automatically became the successor to the throne gave rise to the suspicion that he had been poisoned. Such rumor was not gratuitous. Catherine was extremely refined in many areas, and besides importing the fork from Italy (to which she added a long handle in case the fellow dinner wanted to use it to scratch his back) she had also introduced an Italian fashion for perfumes, which made many popular perfumists (like Renate of Florence) travel to France and open up a store in Paris. Back then the alchemy used to make good perfumes was extremely linked to the alchemy for making poisonous substances, and Catherine was known to profess a strange keenness towards both chemical practices.
Certainly, in 16th century Europe poisonous substances were very fashionable, being used frequently in political murders due to the difficulty of proving their presence. Even Shakespeare makes references to poisonings in many of his works, which shows how commonly poison was used in certain circles. Specifically, the rumor around Catherine was that she had spread the use in France of the mysterious “poison of the Medici”.
But what is certain is that Catherine had imported from Italy the belladonna (beautiful woman in Italian), a plant that dilates pupils, making for a more attractive gaze, and which contains atropine, a drug that accelerates cardiac rhythm and which is fatal in high doses.
It was also known to the Court that Catherine was keen on trying out her potions, together with their possible antidotes, with those sentenced to death, carefully writing down their effects. Such eagerness to experiment was extended to a plant newly brought from America, the tobacco, which the French Ambassador in Lisbon, Jean Nicot, sent her in order to fight severe headaches. This way she transmitted the habit of smoking to the entire French Court. Tobacco was also called back then as “Nicot’s herbs”, and its main alkaloid was called “nicotine”, still its name nowadays.
Years went by without the Royal couple having children -Catherine running the risk of being repudiated. In order to solve this problem, she acted in two fronts. First of all, she made sure that the conjugal visits took place more often, and thus she looked after her beauty like never before: she plucked her eyebrows, she used belladonna to dilate her pupils, she applied rice powder on her face and she put on lipstick. She also devoted some time to spy on her husband’s sexual encounters with Diane in order to study her sexual techniques –which apparently made her so irresistible, and, pretending friendship, she even went as far as asking her for help so that, for the good of France, Diane pushed Henry to the marital bed. On the other hand, she turned to every doctor, magician and sorcerer, who provided her with all kinds of potions and recipies.
They finally had their first child in 1543, to whom another nine followed. Such miracle was attributed to doctor and futurologist Nostradamus, an astrologist and charlatan who Catherine incorporated into her closest circle, for she had realised that Nostradamus exerted a strong suggestion power over a large sector of the Court with his popular and ambiguous star sign predictions. Nevertheless, it is more likely that the actual source of her cure was the surgeon Ambroise Paré, who operated her of a vaginal malformation. Catherine, needless to say, was extremely careful to place her children out of Diane’s influence, despite the latter’s appointment as “tutor of France’s children”.
Without a doubt, her capacity as instigator leaped forward when,in 1547 and following her father-in-law’s death, she became Queen of France. The truth is that Catherine had become a skilled politician, with a great capacity to dominate her husband and thus be able to control, largely, French politics –although all her actions were presided by a single obsession: to preserve the throne for her children.
While her husband lived Catherine played an active role in foreign affairs, which was centered especicially in the wars against [Spains' King] Charles V and later against Philip II, even sending the latter Nostradamus’ star sign prediction, which the Spanish King rightly burnt before opening. Nevertheless, everything changed after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, which established, among other things, the wedding between Philip II (by then already widower of Mary Tudor) and the eldest daughter of the Kings of France, Elizabeth of Valois. During the cellebrations Henry II suffered a fatal accident: a spear broke and a piece went through his helmet, lodging itself in the King’s brain. Catherine took charge of the situation quickly. After the emergency cure, the King’s health did not improve, and it was established that a splinter had stayed in his head. Not knowing how to proceed, Catherine ordered for the wound to be replicated in 10 convicts sentenced to death, to whom a splinter was inserted into an eye. Doctors treated them, albeit unsuccessfully. When they all died soon after, they were decapitated in order to study them and try to find a solution, but to no avail. Henry died in 1559 at 52. The only consolation for Catherine, in mourning clothes for life, was that a few days later she could perpetrate her much-longed-for revenge: after her husband’s death, Diane of Poitiers was made to return all the jewels that both Catherine’s father-in-law and her husband had given her, and was forever confined to the countryside, far away from the Court.
Catherine’s son Frances ascended the throne at 16. He was sickly and weak, for which his mother, her mind made up to keep the throne for him, took the reins of government. Back then France was threatened by the tensions between the Catholics, headed by the Duke of Guise, and the Huguenots, whose leader was Gaspard of Coligny. Both were more powerful than the King, and they aspired to control and manipulate him. Catherine understood that the only thing that could save the throne for her son was the balance between both sides, and in order not to fall under the influence of Catholics, who were initially more powerful, she gave more power to Protestants, which gave rise to the religious division of the country, and with it, civil war.
But Francis II died in December 1560, amid powerful earaches apparently caused by tuberculous meningitis. His brother Charles IX became his successor, barely 10, and given his young age, Catherine officially took up the Regency. In order keep a tight hold on power se reverted to what she knew best: espionage and intrigue. She established a network of spies and informers in which many ladies in waiting had prominent places, who became lovers of potential adversaries. They duly informed Catherine of all their lovers’ plans. She did not hesitate to even make two nobles share the same courtesan, seeking confrontation. Word has it that her circle of young ladies grew to as many as 150, and the worst rumor suggests that even the Regent herself participated many a time in lesbic sexual encounters with her own pupils.
Although she managed to keep the throne for her son, her ploys could not prevent the violent outburst of a civil war, plunging France into social chaos and bankruptcy. During the war Catherine saw how the Huguenot leader Coligny dangerously increased his influence over her son the King. When the latter became of age, the Protestant leader proposed him to restart an aggressive political attitude towards Spain, something that Catherine perceived as a suicide action, given the ruinous situation of the kingdom. Getting rid of the Huguenots became a matter of urgency for her.
She found the opportunity in August 1572, when Paris welcomed the thousands that were going to attend the wedding of Henry of Navarre with Marguerite, daughter of Catherine and the King. Days earlier Coligny had been slightly wounded in an assassination attempt also instigated by the Queen Mother. Without letting herself to be discouraged by the failure, she convinced her son of the existence of a conspiracy on the part of Huguenots to avenge the Coligny’s assassination attempt, which would come in the shape of an uprising that would kill the King after the wedding. Thus, she suggested her son the need to advance themselves, eliminating the main leaders. Accordingly, and with the support of Charles IX, right after the bell tolls of Saint-Germain’s Church the new Duke of Guise, Henry the Scarred, headed the mob, which killed 4,000 Protestants in Paris. Coligny was taken in bed, and after being speared he was thrown to the backyard through the window, where de Guise cut him up. Henry, Catherine’s new son-in-law, saved his life by suddenly converting to Catholicism. The massacre extended to other French cities with similar results. They say that Philip II, back then also a son-in-law of the instigating French Queen Mother, broke out in laughter when he found out about the massacre, while in the Vatican Pope Gregory XIII ordered to conduct a Te Deum [Latin hymn to God], make a commemorative coin and have the painter Giorgio Vasari paint several massacre scenes for his own personal delight.
Catherine had thus managed to expunge the threat posed by the Huguenots, but her son the King was still incapable of producing an heir. That is the reason why she assigned him a lover –to awaken the sexual appetite necessary to procreate, which he apparently lacked. Despite all these efforts, though, Charles IX died childless at 24. He officially died of tuberculosis, but many chronicles insist on stating that he was poisoned. The perpetrator would not have been any other than his own mother, who had seemingly impregnated a falconry book with poison. The book was destined to her son-in-law Henry, who she feared could end up occupying the throne in detriment of her sons (as it did happen in the end) and who was extremely fond of such books. Nevertheless, the one to accidentally take the book and leaf through was it her son Charles, who perished a few days later. Catherine’s possible responsibility is well founded, for it was well-known that she still used her poisoning skills against her rivals, like she did with Joan Queen of Navarre –Henry’s mother and therefore Catherine’s sister-in-law, a Huguenot fan who mysteriously found death after receiving a present from Catherine, a pair of beautiful perfumed gloves, made by a prestigious Italian artisan. The official statement was that the demise had been caused by a deadly pleurisy.
In order to succeed to Charles IX, Catherine ordered the return of his eccentric son from Poland, who would reign as Henry III. He was her favourite –she usually referred to him as “the apple of my eye”. Nevertheless, his openly homosexual behavior would soon make her realise that she could not obtain offspring from him either. All her attempts to separate him from his male friends and to tempt him with young girls were in vain. Moreover, it was established that the King had caught syphilis, which made a possible paternity even more difficult. To top it all, Henry’s almost absolute lack of interest on government tasks made his mother to keep the reigns of power. In the meantime, another of her sons also died in a militar incursion.
During the last years of Catherine’s life, France got involved in the War of the Three Henrys, which confronted the King, the Duke Henry of Guise and Henry of Navarre. When Henry III managed to kill his rival the Duke he euphorically ran towards his dying mother’s bed to give her the news. Catherine, sceptical and let down, replied: ‘It is not all about cutting, my son, it is also necessary to sew’. Finally, Catherine died in early 1589, and only three months later the King was murdered.
It was obvious that her efforts to keep the throne for her sons had been in vain. She was a King’s wife and mother of three Kings, but none of them had produced heirs. Moreover, she saw all of them die except Henry. It was as if fate had mocked her: not only her manoeuvres, spionage and schemes had been useless, but the problems she once had to conceive had been passed on to her own offspring like a witch’s curse. To top it all, the one she had tried to eliminate, Henry of Navarre, was made heir to the throne after the death and lack of offspring of all her male children. Henry of Navarre would become the future Henry IV. Without a doubt it was a cruel mock of destiny, the perfect punishment for a cold and calculating woman who had not hesitated to use the most criminal means in order to achieve her goals –but who in the end could not prevent the extinction of the House of Valois.
Translated from “El veneno de la Belladonna”, by Juan Carlos Losada in El País Semanal, published on the 27th November 2005 ( available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/veneno/Belladona/elpeputec/20051127elpepspor_16/Tes)
By JUAN CARLOS LOSADA
EL PAÍS SEMANAL – 27-11-2005
