A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Catharine de Medicis
CATHARINE DE MEDICIS,
Queen of France, was the only daughter of Lorenzo de Medicis, Duke d'Urbino, by Magdalen de la Tour, and was born at Florence, in 1519. Being early left an orphan, she was brought up by her great-uncle Cardinal Giulio de Medici, afterwards Pope Clement the Sixth. In 1534, she was married to Henry, Duke d'Orleans, son of Francis the First of France. Catharine was one of the chief ornaments of the splendid court of her father-in-law, where the graces of her person and her mental accomplishments shone with inimitable lustre. At the same time, though so young, she practised all those arts of dissimulation and complaisance which were necessary to ingratiate her with so many persons of opposite characters and interests. She even lived upon terms of intimacy with Diana de Poictiers, her husband's mistress. In 1547, Henry became king, under the title of Henry the Second. Though childless the first ten years of her marriage, Catharine subsequently bore her husband ten children. Three of her sons became kings of France, and one, daughter, Margaret, married Henry of Navarre. During her husband's life, she possessed but little influence in public affairs, and was chiefly employed in instructing her children, and acquiring that ascendency over them, by which she so long preserved the supreme authority.
She was left a widow in 1559, and her son, Francis the Second, a weak youth of sixteen, succeeded to the crown. He had married Mary, Queen of Scotland, and her uncles, the Guises, had the chief management of affairs during this reign, which was rendered turbulent and bloody by the violent persecutions of the Huguenots. Catharine could only preserve a degree of authority by acting with the Guises; yet that their furious policy did not agree with her inclinations, may be inferred from her raising the virtuous Michael de l'Hospital to the chancellorship.
Francis the Second died in 1560, and was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Ninth, then eleven years of age. Catharine possessed the authority, though not the title, of regent; and, in order to counterbalance the power of the Guises, she inclined to the party of the King of Navarre, a Protestant, and the associated princes. A civil war ensued, which was excited by the Duke de Guise, who thereby became a favourite of the Catholics; but he being killed in 1562, a peace was made between the two parties. Catharine was now decidedly at the head of affairs, and began to display all the extent of her dark and dissembling politics. She paid her court to the Catholics, and, by repeated acts of injustice and oppression, she forced the Huguenots into another civil war. A truce succeeded, and to this a third war, which terminated in a peace favourable to the Huguenots, which was thought sincere and lasting. But the queen had resolved to destroy by treachery those whom she could not subdue by force of arms. A series of falsehoods and dissimulations, almost unparalleled in history, was practised by Catharine and her son, whom she had initiated in every art of disguise, in order to lull the fears and suspicions of the Protestants, and to prepare the way for the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, 1571, in which more than forty-five thousand persons are said to have perished in Paris and the provinces.
Charles, recovering from the fit of frenzy which his mother had excited, fell into a profound melancholy, from which he never recovered. He died in 1574, and Catharine was made regent till her favourite son, Henry the Third, returned from Poland, of which country he had been elected king. At this juncture, she displayed great vigour and ability in preventing those disturbances which the violent state of parties was calculated to produce, and she delivered the kingdom to her son in a condition, which, had he been wise and virtuous, might have secured him a happy reign. But a son and pupil of Catharine could only have the semblance of good qualities, and her own character must have prevented any confidence in measures which she directed.
The party of the Guises rose again; the league was formed, war was renewed with the Protestants; and all things tended to greater disorder than before The attachment of Henry to his minions, and the popularity of the Guises, destroyed the authority of Catharine, and she had henceforth little more than the sad employment of looking on and lamenting her son's misgovernment, and the wretched conclusion of her system of crooked and treacherous policy. She died in January, 1589, at the age of seventy, loaded with the hatred of all parties. On her deathbed, she gave her son some excellent advice, very different from her former precepts and example; urging him to attach to himself Henry of Navarre and the other princes of the blood, by regard and kind usage, and to grant liberty of conscience for the good of the state.
Catharine was affable, courteous, and magnificent; she liberally encouraged learning and the polite arts; she also possessed extraordinary courage and presence of mind, strength of judgment and fertility of genius. By her extreme duplicity, and by her alternately joining every party, she lost the confidence of all. Scarcely preserving the decorum of her sex, she was loose and voluptuous in her own conduct, and was constantly attended by a train of beauties, whose complaisant charms she employed in gaining over those whom she could not influence by the common allurements of interest Nearly indifferent to the modes of religion, she was very superstitious, and believed in magic and astrology.
Catharine resembled no one so much as her own countryman, Cæsar Borgia, in her wonderful powers of mind, and talents for gaining ascendency over the minds of others. She resembled him also in the detestable purposes to which she applied her great genius. Had she been as good as she was gifted, no other individual of her sex could have effected so much for the happiness of France.