Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici

Una McIlvenna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032402505
• eBook ISBN: 9781317059318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt.

Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage.

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.

1
Introduction

Catherine de Medici and the Myth of the ‘Flying Squadron’

In September 1577, in the château of Poitiers, René de Villequier, chief adviser to the French king Henri III, stabbed to death his pregnant wife Françoise de La Marck, a lady-in-waiting to the queen mother Catherine de Medici. He did so after supposedly discovering a letter written to her by her lover, the seigneur Barbizi, in which the latter claimed to be the father of her unborn child. In his entry for that month, the Parisian diarist Pierre de L’Estoile described the public reaction to the murder, its protagonists and the pardon that Villequier subsequently received from his master:

… it was said that Villequier had discovered a plot of his wife to poison him, just as the said Barbizi had already poisoned his wife, so that they could marry each other afterwards; and that he [Villequier] had found in his wife’s belongings the mixture or paste with which he was to be poisoned.

This murder was thought to be cruel, committed as it was on a woman who was pregnant with two children; and odd, committed as it was in the King’s lodgings where His Majesty was, and more so at court, where whoring is publicly and notoriously practised among the ladies, who hold it to be a virtue. But the granting and ease of the grace and pardon which Villequier obtained, without any difficulty, led some to believe that there was behind this a secret commandment or tacit consent of the King, who hated this woman (even though he had been sleeping with her for a long time, so it was said, with the co-operation of her husband who acted as her pimp), because of a report that had been made to him saying that she had spoken ill of His Majesty in public.¹

It is a splendidly lurid account of a real event, but L’Estoile’s version of this scandal is more than scurrilous gossip. It introduces several important themes around the representation of the court and its female members that this book will discuss. First, in this early modern version of an honour killing, a male courtier kills his wife because of her alleged adultery and intent to poison him. Second, L’Estoile refers to the wider reputation of the ladies of the court as notorious whores. The court acts as a site of prostitution, with the king as an active participant. Lastly, the many references to public opinion (‘so it was said’, ‘murder was thought to be cruel’, ‘a report that had been made to him’, ‘she had spoken ill of His Majesty in public’) highlight the very publicised nature of the intimate domestic life of courtiers.²

The scandal of the murder of Françoise de La Marck produced a torrent of literary output in the form of verse libels. L’Estoile mentioned ‘many and diverse sorts of poems and epitaphs’ on the subject, and copied 12 into his journal ‘which’, he claimed, ‘fell into my hands’.³ That the information about an early modern scandal was disseminated, discussed and analysed almost exclusively in the form of verse, with several written in Latin, is a historically specific phenomenon within the development of early modern news culture that has important consequences for historiography. The rationale behind the choice of verse, its stylistic features and its ramifications for our understanding of court scandal will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2. For now, what the La Marck verses reveal is an extraordinary knowledge beyond the court of the most intimate details of the affair: two refer to Barbizi, one mentioning his letter, several mention La Marck’s pregnancy, all discuss her promiscuity and her husband’s tolerance of it, and L’Estoile himself related the detail that her servant was also stabbed as she helped her mistress dress. What is also striking is the diversity of opinion within the poems, with some portraying La Marck as an innocent victim of her own beauty and her husband’s jealousy, while others view the noblewoman simply as a whore: one verse, a mock epitaph, reads ‘I received the death, Passerby, which my life merited’.⁴ It seemed that everyone in Paris had an opinion about the intimate life of Françoise de La Marck.

Whatever their perspective, however, most of the verses assume the debauched environment of the court, as indicated in the following verse written in the voice of La Marck herself:

If it is a fault that would offend the gods,
Blame this court where I was raised.
Trained by the head of an infinite troupe
Following the slender firebrands of Cupid,
Many lovers were rewarded by me.
If it is a common evil, why should I be punished?⁵

The reference to ‘an infinite troupe’ trained by its leader to follow Cupid and reward lovers is a direct reference to the female household of Catherine de Medici, of which La Marck was a member. It was a household whose negative collective reputation is the focus of this study. Catherine’s role as queen mother and regent-governor of France in the sixteenth century has traditionally been depicted as dependent on her inherently ‘Italian’ and ‘female’ skills of manipulation, deception and corruption, culminating in the legend of the wicked Italian queen that reached its zenith in the nineteenth century with Michelet’s famous description of Catherine as the ‘maggot born in Italy’s tomb’.⁶ The attacks on her rule were present much earlier: a poem in the 1573 Huguenot polemical pamphlet Reveille-Matin des François et de leurs voisins called Catherine ‘that high born whore, / The blood infected with the buggers of Italy, / Nursed by the milk of a horrible fury’.⁷ Here, xenophobic stereotypes of sexual deviance were employed to attack Catherine’s political skills. Explicit Italophobia was common in sixteenth-century France, inspired by the large numbers of Italian immigrants, many fleeing the upheaval caused by the Franco-Italian wars, who found a haven in the court of the Medici queen. Anti-Italian polemic depicted them as sexually deviant and prone to underhanded means of acquiring power, particularly the use of poison to kill enemies. These stereotypes were extended to describe Catherine’s manipulative exploitation of her ladies-in-waiting, known colloquially by later historians as her escadron volant (flying squadron). She allegedly ordered these women to seduce and spy on influential noblemen, and some were eventually involved in scandals around poisoning, adultery, incest and illegitimate births. The scandals have been collectively used to discredit Catherine’s abilities as both a negotiator and a leader, and to depict the Valois court as a hotbed of debauchery and corrupted morality, where Catherine used any means necessary to further her own selfish ambitions. This study explores how these stereotypes of Machiavellian corruption and deviance were deployed to construct a myth about the dangers of women in power at the early modern French court, and why such a myth would endure for so long.

Although she was the daughter of a French princess and had lived in France since the age of fourteen, Catherine was unable to avoid attacks on her Italian heritage. But Italians were not the only source of discontent for sixteenth-century critics of the crown. The inexorable rise of the Reformed faith in France, supported by French Calvinist exiles in Geneva, found followers at the highest levels of the nobility, tearing apart families both aristocrat and peasant and causing an endless series of crises through which Catherine attempted to steer a tolerant middle path. The massacre of Huguenot worshippers by the troops of the duke of Guise at Wassy in 1562, only three years after the death of Henri II had left Catherine as regent for her young sons François II and Charles IX, sparked almost four decades of bitter civil and religious war.⁸ Catherine’s responses to the new religion inevitably met with severe criticism from parties on all sides of the conflict, but particularly from those who sought to capitalise on the power vacuum left by a young king ruled by his mother. The religious conflict infiltrated every level of society: Each of the scandalous cases explored in this study hinged on the discord caused by the differing confessional beliefs of the nobles involved, and the threat of violent clashes that such differences engendered. While those who attacked the queen mother may have had sincere and profound complaint with her approach to the political and religious issues she faced, they regularly expressed their dissatisfaction through attacks on her household and on the reputations, both individual and collective, of her ladies-in-waiting.

These attacks on Catherine’s household were given greater impetus by the behaviour of Henri III, Catherine’s son, who ascended the throne in 1574 and promptly began to restrict court offices and favours to a select group of his close companions, known as his mignons, to the detriment of many of the leading families of the kingdom. His simultaneous introduction of formal measures designed to prevent access to the person of the monarch also provoked great resentment among leading nobles, many of whom left the court in protest. Much of the resentment expressed itself in attacks on Henri and his mignons, whose increasingly flamboyant appearance was read as a sign of their effeminacy and possible homosexuality.⁹ Henri’s inability to produce an heir not only confirmed his critics’ suspicions, but also created a succession crisis, as the next in line for the throne was his Protestant cousin, Henri de Navarre. As Henri III refused to nullify Navarre’s claim on the basis of his religion, the Catholic League, created to prevent a heretic on the French throne, offered its own candidate, and its supporters began to produce a wave of polemical literature depicting Henri III and his mignons as perverse and depraved.¹⁰ The court was depicted as a locus of sexual deviance, where the monarch’s power and authority had been usurped. There occurred a simultaneous rise in satirical literature portraying the ladies of the court as equally debauched, the women in Catherine’s entourage acting as the female counterparts to the despised mignons, cuckolding their husbands and engaging in deviant sexual behaviour. For example, the Pasquil Courtizan of 1581 opens with a criticism of the excessive amounts spent on the recent wedding of the king’s favourite, the duke of Joyeuse, but eventually evolves into a litany of the adulterous escapades of the women of the court.¹¹ Simultaneously, the anti-monarchical bent of the League literature provoked a backlash, and L’Estoile’s journal thus abounds with verses satirising League partisans, some of whom were high-profile women of the court. Although it is at times difficult to discern the political leanings of the authors, both sides combined criticism of the men of Henri’s household with attacks on Catherine and her household. The result was a tide of satirical literature that portrayed the women of the court as licentious and scandalous.

While recent research has begun to rehabilitate Catherine’s reputation by revealing her tolerance, commitment to peace and compromise on religious matters, as well as her neo-Platonic aspirations and contribution to the arts, no study has yet explored the recurrent image of her ‘flying squadron’ and the lascivious and scandalous reputation of the women of the Valois court.¹² This study therefore may be the final act in Catherine’s historiographical rehabilitation, but it is more than the simple revelation that she was an effective ruler. Rather, I use the case of a small but significant group of elite women in the early modern period to draw conclusions in two different but overlapping fields: women’s studies and literary history. One thread of this study examines the image of the ‘scandalous woman’ and exposes it in all its varied and multiplicitous appearances, while the other thread concerns the literary, intellectual nature of scandal. This book tracks the negative historiography about Catherine de Medici, showing how the libellous attacks on her and her ladies coalesced into a myth about her ability to govern. Out of dissatisfaction with Catherine’s attempts to appease both sides of the confessional divide, critics both Catholic and Protestant produced satire of courtiers that relied upon tropes of debauchery and the occult. This book reveals how their satirical representations came to be treated as genuine descriptions of life at court by historians; in other words, how satirical fiction became historical ‘fact’ at the expense of Catherine’s reputation.

‘Scandalous Women’ and the Gendered Nature of Scandal

Through the use of three case studies, I explore how both individual and collective reputations were constructed, attacked and defended at the early modern court. By investigating scandal as it affected these women, one can discern a gendering of accusations to discredit high-profile figures. While their male counterparts could be mocked as cuckolds, women were regularly accused of poisoning, and allegations made about their promiscuity and infidelity, with none of these accusations necessarily based on anything more than scurrilous hearsay. This study demonstrates that such accusations were traditional literary tropes employed against women whose political influence, public profile or superior education made them socially transgressive. From Cleopatra to Anne Boleyn to Catherine the Great to Marie-Antoinette, throughout history powerful w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Catherine de Medici and the Myth of the ‘Flying Squadron’
• 2 Court Life and Its Critics: The Rise in Satirical Literature
• 3 The Dissemination of Scandal: News Culture in Early Modern France
• 4 Venomous Rumours: The Scandal of Isabelle de Limeuil
• 5 Word of Honour: Françoise de Rohan versus the Duke of Nemours
• 6 The Triumph of the Matriarch: Anne d’Este, Duchesse de Guise, Duchesse de Nemours
• 7 Conclusion: A Re-assessment of Scandal
• Bibliography
• Index