C16th makeups: Catherine de’ Medici
Catherine de’ Medici
Catherine de’ Medici (1519—1589) was born in Florence as Caterina Maria Romula di Lorenzo de’ Medici and was orphaned within weeks of her birth. In 1533, at the age of fourteen, she married the Dauphin Henry. Under the gallicised version of her name, Catherine de Médicis, she was queen consort of King Henry II of France from 1547 to 1559. Throughout his reign, Henry excluded Catherine from participating in state affairs and instead showered favours on his chief mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who wielded much influence over him.
Henry’s death in 1559 thrust Catherine into the political arena as mother of the frail fifteen-year-old King Francis II. When he died in 1560 she became regent on behalf of her ten-year-old son King Charles IX and was granted sweeping powers. After Charles died in 1574 Catherine played a key role in the reign of her third son, Henry III. He dispensed with her advice only in the last months of her life.
Catherine’s three sons reigned in a period of almost constant civil and religious war in France. The problems facing the monarchy were complex and daunting. At first, Catherine compromised and made concessions to the rebelling Protestants, or Huguenots as they became known. She failed however to grasp the issues that drove their movement. Later she resorted, in frustration and anger, to hard-line policies against them. In return she came to be blamed for the excessive persecutions carried out under her sons’ rule, and in particular for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris and throughout France.
More recently some historians have excused Catherine from blame for the worst decisions of the crown, arguing that though evidence for her ruthlessness can be found in her letters her policies were pragmatic albeit sometimes desperate measures to preserve the Valois monarchy. Certainly in practice, her authority was always limited by the effects of the civil wars and factional power. But it is unlikely that her sons would have remained in power – or even survived as long as they did – without her. The years in which they reigned have been called ‘the age of Catherine de’ Medici’ and one of her biographers as described her as having been the most important woman in sixteenth-century Europe.