The Last Valois

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THE LAST VALOIS

A Tragic Story Robert Knecht describes the shortcomings of Henry III, the last Valois

king, and the circumstances that led him to become the firstbut not the lastFrench

monarch to die at the hands of one of his subjects

On July 31st, 1589, a young Jacobin friar, Jacques Clment, left Paris for the suburb of Saint-

Cloud where Henry III of France had set up his military encampment. The capital was held by

the Catholic League, an armed association which had rebelled against royal policy in 1588,

forcing the king to flee the city. At 8 am on August 1st, the friar, who claimed to be carrying an

important message for the king from one of his supporters in the capital, was admitted to his

presence. Henry was sitting on his close stool as the friar entered. Reassured by Clement'sclerical garb, Henry invited him to draw closer and lent forward to hear his message. As he did

so, the friar produced a knife that he had hidden in the capacious sleeve of his habit and plunged

it into Henry's abdomen. The king cried out, pulled out the knife and struck his assailant with it.

Royal guards drew their swords and fell on the friar, killing him instantly.

Henry died early the next morning bringing to an end the Valois dynasty that had occupied the

French throne since 1328. Henry III was the first king of France to be assassinated by one of his

own subjects. News of his death was acclaimed by the Catholic League as an act of God and

greeted with wild rejoicing in Paris: A new David has killed Goliath, a new Judith has slain

Holofernes' exclaimed a popular preacher. 'Good news, my friends!' shouted the duchess of

Montpensier from her coach as she toured the streets of the capital. 'The tyrant is dead! There is

no more Henry of Valois in France!' But why and how had Henry aroused such hatred?

Henry was the sixth child and fourth son of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici. Born at

Fontainebleau on September 19th, 1551, he was christened Alexander-Edward and only took on

the name of Henry at his confirmation. As duke of Angoulme, he shared the upbringing of his

siblings at Amboise and Blois and was taught by the classical scholar Jacques Amyot (1513-93).

After taking part in the so-called 'Grand Tour of France' with his mother and his brother Charles

IX in 1564-66, Henry became duke of Anjou.


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France had been embroiled in a civil war between the crown and its Protestant or Huguenot

subjects since 1562. In 1567 Henry took command of the royal army and in March 1569 won a

resounding victory at Jarnac, a success soon followed by another at Moncontour. At this stage he

seemed assured of fame as a military leader. His mother wanted him to marry the English queen,

Elizabeth I, but he would not hear of this: Elizabeth was too old for him; as the daughter of the

Protestant Anne Boleyn, he regarded her as a heretic and a bastard. He was also anxious to avoid

ridicule as Elizabeth's 'affair' with the earl of Leicester was the subject of much gossip at the

French court. The quest for her hand was taken up by Henry's younger brother, Francis, duke of

Alenon.

Henry was reputed to be a Catholic hardliner and in August 1572 he seems to have been

instrumental in preparing the plot to wipe out Admiral Coligny and other Huguenot leaderswhich led to the mass slaughter of their co-religionists on St Bartholomew's Day. Soon

afterwards he laid siege to the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. At this juncture, however,

his career took a radical turn. In 1573 he was elected king of Poland, a kingdom unusual at the

time for its culture of religious toleration. To be acceptable to his Polish subjects, Henry

abandoned the extreme Catholic line he had so far pursued. He also seems to have lost interest in

military matters. He travelled to Poland with an entourage, but during the summer of 1574 he

was informed of the death of his brother, Charles IX. He thus became king of both France and

Poland.

Without so much as bidding adieu to his Polish subjects, Henry made haste to return to France by

way of Austria and northern Italy. After being entertained in Vienna, he was given a spectacular

reception in Venice. Lavishly feasted and entertained by day, he tasted the Serenissa's more

dubious pleasures at night. In September he rejoined his mother and the rest of the French court

at Lyon and soon afterwards was crowned at Reims. In February 1575 he married Louise de

Vaudmont, a princess of the House of Lorraine, whose beauty had dazzled him on the eve of his

departure for Poland.

Though plagued by a variety of ailments for much of his life, Henry cut an impressive figure.

Tall like his father, he was slim as a young man and, even after putting on weight prematurely,

always retained an air of distinction. His noble and graceful bearing earned him much praise, as


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did his refined manners. He wore garments adorned with gold embroidery, precious stones and

pearls. His linen was of the finest quality and his hair elaborately styled. He was also obsessively

fastidious. No one slovenly dressed was admitted to his presence. No French monarch before

him had paid so much attention to his own image. As a result, portraits of Henry exist at every

stage of his life. As he grew older and wished to convey an impression of seriousness, he had

himself portrayed dressed in black with a high turned-back collar rather than the extravagant ruff

he had once espoused. He also liked to wear a small round Polish-style bonnet adorned with a

small plume.

The task that awaited Henry at his accession was daunting: he needed to reunite a kingdom that

had been torn apart, politically and socially, by religious division. Religious unity in the

sixteenth century was deemed inseparable from political unity. Whereas the people of France hadonce been united in the Catholic faith, they had become split between Catholics and Huguenots.

The situation had been aggravated by the accidental death of Henry II in 1559, which had left the

kingdom in the hands of his widow, Catherine de' Medici, and her young sons. As queen mother

under Francis II, then as regent under Charles IX, Catherine had tried to heal the religious schism

by peaceful negotiations and by limited tolerance of the Huguenots, but she had failed. In 1567

they had tried to kidnap her and the king. They had compounded their 'wickedness', as she

described their action, by blockading Paris. Thereafter the crisis had escalated, culminating in the

St Bartholomew's Day massacre of August 1572.

Henry Ill's rule was further complicated by a number of factors. The first was that he had no son

to succeed him. This fuelled the ambition of his younger brother Francis, duke of Anjou

(previously duke of Alenon), who had a large aristocratic clientle and a household to match the

king's. Violent quarrels often-broke out between the servants of the two rival households. The

death of Anjou in 1 584 eventually removed this threat to Henry's authority, but others remained.

In the absence of Henry begetting a son, the heir to the throne was his brother-in-law Henry of

Navarre (1553-1610), who, as a Huguenot, was unacceptable to the Catholic majority in France.

In 1576, a group of cities headed by Paris had formed an armed association, called the Catholic

League, aimed at excluding Navarre from the throne. It chose Charles, cardinal of Bourbon, as

its candidate for the monarchy and looked for effective leadership to Henry, 3rd duke of Guise


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(1550-88), whose father had been murdered by a Protestant nobleman in 1563. The family of

Guise, which had been all-powerful under Henry II and now felt excluded from royal favour,

seized the chance to reassert itself.

As king, Henry III was apparently well-intentioned towards his subjects regardless of their faith.As he returned to Lyon from Poland in 1574, he declared a wish to be at peace with them all, and

he seemed better equipped than his recent predecessors to succeed. He was probably the most

intellectually gifted of the later Valois kings. His former tutor, Jacques Amyot, compared him to

Francis I. Both kings, Amyot thought, were bright, but Henry, unlike his grandfather, had the

patience to listen, read and write. He was different from him in other respects too: he was less

interested in the arts and cared little for sport, hunting only spasmodically. Anxious to improve

his knowledge, Henry set up at the Louvre a kind of salon of learned men known as the PalaceAcademy. It brought together poets, scholars and philosophers to discuss a wide range of non-

political subjects. Their aim was to equip Henry intellectually and morally for kingship. He was

reminded of the Platonic adage that 'republics are blessed only if kings philosophize or if

philosophers govern'. Astronomy and cosmology were among the topics considered. Eloquence,

too, was discussed, though Henry had little to learn in this respect. His speeches were much

admired, though less for their content than for the manner of their delivery. He was also a

conscientious ruler who rose early in the morning to deal with state papers and to chair his privy

council. At a meeting of the Estates-General in 1576 he declared:

I know that one day I shall have to

account to God for my actions, but I

also want to protest before this

assembly that I intend to reign as a

good, just and lawful king over the

subjects He has entrusted to my care.

The task of ruling France that the king faced in 1574 was far from easy, as so much hatred had

arisen between Catholics and Huguenots and so many old scores remained to be settled, but his

disposition seemed to bode well. Yet within fifteen years Henry had become one of the most

detested rulers on the European stage, a man so reviled as to be identified with Satan. How did

this come about?


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For all his good intentions, Henry may be said to have committed every mistake in the manual of

good political conduct. First he departed from the accessibility that had traditionally

characterized the French monarchy; secondly he indulged in favouritism; and thirdly he

abandoned the nomadic way of life which the court had practised for centuries.

The French monarchy had always taken pride in its approachability. An ordinance of 1523 had

boasted that

a greater conglutination, bond

and conjunction of true love, pure

devotion, cordial harmony and intimate

affection has always existed between

the kings of France and their subjects than

in any other monarchy or Christian nation.

Except in time of plague when he was confined to his room, Francis I was easy to approach. The

same was true of his immediate successors. In 1562 a Venetian observer commented on Charles

IX's accessibility:

The king of France is so familiar with

his subjects that he treats them all

as his companions and no one is ever

excluded from his presence, so that even

lackeys of the lower sort are bold enough

to wish to enter his privy chamber in

order to see all that is going on there and

to hear all that is being said

This familiarity, if it makes the nation

insolent and arrogant, nevertheless inspires

love, devotion and loyalty to its prince.

Henry III did not share this sentiment. He evidently adhered to the notion that 'familiarity breeds

contempt'. The political climate had also changed since the early sixteenth century. Violence had

become common and a prince, even one claiming to be God's lieutenant on Earth, needed

protection. The king still ate 'in public' that is to say, people could watch him at his meal

times but one of Henry's first acts was to erect a barrier around his table in order to keep the


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public at bay. Such was the unpopularity of this move that many noblemen left the court in

disgust, forcing Henry to think again. The barrier was removed, only to be replaced later.

A loner by nature, Henry hated crowds. He believed that his authority would be enhanced by

distancing himself from his subjects. He set about introducing a rigid etiquette in his own court.In particular, he instituted a sequence of antechambers in the royal apartment that acted as a filter

for anyone wishing to see him. Courtiers could only approach him in carefully regulated stages,

passing from one room to the next at a given signal. While a few favoured courtiers were soon

admitted to the royal chamber, the rest had to wait their turn outside. Movement from one room

to the next was determined by social status.

Although Henry III valued privacy, he liked to surround himself with a select group of intimate

friends, mostly men of his own generation who came to be known as mignons. In the first half of

the sixteenth century the word simply meant 'companions', but during the second half it acquired

a pejorative meaning. The king's mignons were commonly portrayed as effeminate fops whose

morals were as loose as their clothes were extravagant. But the mignons, like the king, have been

largely misrepresented. They were essentially members of the lesser provincial nobility who,

unlike some richer noblemen of ancient lineage, were totally dedicated to serving the king: they

shared his pleasures, copied his manners and helped him assert his authority. Letters written by

Henry to his mignons are full of expressions of love baffling to a modern reader. He imploresthem to love him as dearly as he loves them. They, in reply, assure him of their readiness to

sacrifice their lives for him. Henry also gave them affectionate nicknames. Too much, however,

should not be read into these epistolary flourishes: hyperbole was fashionable at the time.

Almost inevitably the mignons aroused the jealousy of their social betters who felt unfairly

excluded from the royal circle. They also quarrelled among themselves, even to the point of

fighting duels. In April 1578 six of them fought a duel, known as the duel des mignons in which

two were killed outright, one fatally injured and another seriously wounded. The king expressed

his grief by according them funerals designed to immortalize their intimacy with him. They were

given superb tombs of black marble engraved with letters of gold in the church of Saint-Paul in

Paris. In time, two of the mignons Anne, duke of Joyeuse and Jean-Louis de Nogaret, duke of

Epernon, became particular favourites. Known as the archimignons, they were given precedence


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over all the other nobles at court save princes of the blood royal and foreign dignitaries. They

were allowed direct access to the royal bedchamber and to share the king's table. Joyeuse and

pernon became extremely rich as a result of the gifts showered on them by Henry. In addition

to controlling the court, they gained considerable authority over the armed forces. Joyeuse

became Admiral of France in 1582 and Epernon was appointed colonel-general of the infantry in

1581. Joyeuse's apotheosis was his marriage to Marguerite of Lorraine, the queen's half-sister, in

September 1581, which was accompanied by a series of lavish festivities lasting a fortnight,

including the famous Balet comique de la Royne, that cost an estimated 3,600,000 livres and had

not been paid for in full fifteen years later.

Henry's third mistake was to depart from the nomadic existence that the French court had

practised since time immemorial. In the reign of Francis I it had been on the move continuouslyexcept in winter when it had tended to stay put in or near Paris. Such nomadism had been

politically expedient as it had brought the king into close touch with his subjects across the

nation. Each progress, punctuated by civic entries, had enabled the townspeople to express their

allegiance by erecting temporary monuments such as triumphal arches, staging street theatricals

and presenting gifts to the sovereign in return for confirmation of their privileges. Henry III, by

contrast, disliked travel. He preferred to spend most of his time at the Louvre in Paris, though he

would sometimes retire to the privacy of Ollainville, a country house near the capital. Whereas

Charles IX had taken part in 109 civic entries during his 'Grand Tour of France' in 1564-66,

Henry had only four in his entire reign. He seems to have attached little importance to

establishing close ties with the urban authorities. He treated them with an indifference verging on

contempt. In 1578 he even refused an entry offered him by the people of Rouen and asked them

instead to hand over to him the money they had set aside to pay for it.

One result of the court's regular presence in Paris was to bring it into the public eye far more than

before. The capital was a hotbed of Catholic fanaticism and an important printing centre. The

court's extravagance at a time of severe economic crisis incurred much criticism, notably from

the diarist Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), a lawyer who avidly collected the printed pamphlets,

many of them stinging attacks on the court, that circulated daily in the capital. In September

1581 he wrote:


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Everyone was stunned by so much luxury

and such an enormous and superfluous

expense at a time which was

wretched and hard for the people who,

in the country, were being gnawed to

the bone by the soldiery and in the

towns by the offices, taxes and subsidies.

Henry's personality was marked by contradictions. One day he would dance at a ball like a gilded

butterfly and the next would take on the austere habit of a monk. Possibly influenced by Carlo

Borromeo, the saintly archbishop of Milan whom he had met in 1574, Henry took up penitential

exercises in a serious way, inflicting them on his mignons as well. In December 1583 he set up a

confraternity of Hieronymites in the forest of Vincennes, its seventy-two members drawn mainly

from his immediate entourage. They were given small cells into which they made occasional

retreats, each putting on a friar's garb and following a strict rule of austerity. In March 1584,

Henry left Paris with forty-seven penitents, each wearing a tunic, a white hood and a scourge at

his waist. They walked all the way to Chartres where they prayed for the king to be granted a

male heir. In March 1583 Henry set up a Congregation of White Penitents in Paris, and four days

later he and the mignons walked in procession through the streets of the capital. They wore tall

pointed hoods with holes for the eyes. Undeterred by heavy rain, they sang psalms and litanies

before falling on their knees at Notre Dame. On Maundy Thursday they repeated the exercise,this time at night and by torchlight which revealed their backs bloodied by self-flagellation.

Observers viewed these antics with a mixture of amusement and scorn. They dismissed them as

hypocrisy. A preacher at Notre Dame exclaimed:

Ah! You miserable hypocrites,

thus do you mock God beneath your

masks and the scourge you carry at

your belt is just for show.

The supreme irony of Henry Ill's reign was his failure to win over the capital by his presence.

Instead he turned the Parisians against him by a combination of aloofness, extravagance and

eccentricity. The king's penitential exercises prompted a flood of lampoons, most of them

fastening on the unnatural practices ascribed to him and the mignons. He allowed the Parisians to


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fall under the spell of Henry, 3rd duke of Guise, who formed an alliance with the Catholic

League that controlled the city's administration. On May 9th, 1588, barricades were erected in

the streets, forcing Henry and his friends to flee to Chartres. He hoped to stage a comeback at a

meeting in Blois of the Estates-General, but a majority of the deputies sympathized with the

opposition. Believing Guise to be plotting a coup d'etat, Henry decided to exterminate him.

Having lured the duke to his antechamber at Blois, the king stood by as his guards hacked Guise

to death. The duke's brother, the cardinal of Guise, was also killed. This cold-blooded murder

was by far Henry's biggest blunder. 'Alas! What has he done?' exclaimed his mother. 'Pray for

him, for he needs [your prayers] more than ever. I see him rushing to his ruin. I fear that he may

lose body, soul and kingdom.'

News of the assassinations unleashed a torrent of public anger in Paris. A preacher asked themembers of his congregation to swear that they would spare neither the smallest coin in their

purses nor their last drop of blood to avenge Henry's dastardly act. In January 1589 a mob

destroyed the tombs of the mignons and, a few days later, 10,000 children, dressed in white

processed to the cemetery of the Innocents, where they were joined the next day by adults

walking barefoot and holding candles in mourning for what had happened. A large painting in a

church of Henry III founding the Order of the Holy Ghost was burnt and replaced by another of

Christ at Emmaus. The Sorbonne, or Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, freed the

king's subjects from their allegiance and deleted his name from their prayers.

Henry Ill's only hope of regaining control of the capital was to join forces with his appointed

heir, the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre. They jointly laid siege to Paris. While Henry III

established his headquarters at Saint-Cloud, Navarre had his at Melun. When the latter was

informed of the attempt on the king's life, he hastened to his bedside. Henry had not been killed

outright; he survived for some hours. He was even able to scribble a note to the queen telling her

not to worry. His life, however, was ebbing away fast. A contemporary tapestry at the Muse

National de la Renaissance at Ecouen, shows Henry III on his deathbed appointing Navarre as

his successor, but the scene rests on a legend put out by the Huguenots to strengthen their

leader's claim. After visiting Henry, Navarre returned to Melun believing that the king would

survive. Henry died at 2 o'clock the next morning. Only then could Navarre claim the throne.

Neither intellect nor good intentions had been sufficient to gain Henry III the love of his


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subjects. His life had been a tragedy so that he can be fairly described, as he is by historian Pierre

Chevalier, as a 'Shakespearean king'.

PHOTO (COLOR): Henry III in front of a ruined monument that seems to hint at the state of

France during his reign.

PHOTO (COLOR): the parting of the ways; a 16th-century French print entitled 'the two paths of

religion, depiction of the divide between Protestantism and Catholicism: one of these is false and

is the Papist religion it is the long path leading to perdition and one must turn away from it.

The other is the true religion, the Christian one and is the narrow path which leads straight to

Holy Jerusalem.'

PHOTO (COLOR): the chteau of Amboise by the Loire, a favourite with the Valois monarchsin the early 16th century, and Henry's childhood home.

PHOTO (COLOR): a Brussels tapestry of a tournament, with Henry III, his mother Catherine de'

Medici and a dwarf standing in the foreground, and Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois

behind.

PHOTO (COLOR): the battle of Jarnac, March 13th, 1569, at which Henry's forces defeated the

Huguenots under Admiral Coligny.

PHOTO (COLOR): the massacre on St Bartholomew's Day, August 24th, 1572, in the planning

of which Henry took a hand.

PHOTO (COLOR): Carlo Borromeo (1538-84), archbishop of Milan, who had a powerful

influence on Henry's spiritual life, as well as those of Philip II of Spain and Mary, Queen of

Scots.

PHOTO (COLOR): Henry as king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1573-74, a post he

found frustratingly restricted and one he abandoned on inheriting the French crown.

PHOTO (COLOR): Anne, duke of Joyeuse (1561-87), one of Henri's mignons. The ball was held

on the occasion of his wedding in 1581.


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PHOTO (COLOR): the Catholic League process through Paris in 1593. The League led the

opposition to Henry in the final years of his reign, and hailed his assassination as an act of God.

PHOTO (COLOR): Nicholas Houel's drawing of Henry's queen, Louise, leaving the Louvre in

1584.

PHOTO (COLOR): the last of the Valois hands the sceptre to the first of the Bourbons: Henry III

gives the insignia of power to the future Henry IV.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): flagellation was taken up by Henry and his close associates in

1583, though it left his subjects unimpressed.

Further Reading

Jacqueline Boucher, La cour de Henri III (Rennes, 1986); Pierre Chevalier, Henri III, roi

shakespearien (Paris, 1985); R.J. Knecht, Catherine de'Medici (London, 1998); R.J. Knecht, The

French Renaissance Court (London, 2008); Nicolas Le Roux, La faveur du roi (Seyssel, 2000);

Nicolas Le Roux, Un rgicide au nom de Dieu (Paris, 2006).

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