SYMHC Classics: Catherine de' Medici and the Scarlet Nuptials

In this classic 2010 episode of the Medici super series, Katie and Sarah follow up on the further adventures of Catherine de'Medici. Listen in and learn how the St. Bartholomew Day's massacre contributed to Catherine's notorious reputation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and happy Saturday. As we promised last week, today
we are concluding the story of Catherine de Medici, including
her connection to the St. Bartholomus Day massacre. Look forward
to Catherine coming up again on our new episodes of
the show this week as well, And if you're interested
in hearing the other episodes that are referenced in today's show,
we'll have a link to all the Medici episodes from

(00:24):
both this super series that these two episodes were part
of and from later hosts will have that in the
show notes of today's episode. Welcome to Stuff you missed
in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,

(00:45):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm
Sarah Dowie. And when we left Katherine de Medici in
our previous podcast, she was a grieving widow. Her husband
had just been killed in a jousting accident, a terrible
jousting accident which going to take the opportunity to relive
one more time. He receives a lance in the eye

(01:06):
through the brain and it takes him ten agonizing days
to die. So that's where we left off and it's
where we're gonna pick up again. I can see why
you want to relive up Sarah. She's left as regent
for her sickly weak minded fifteen year old son, Francis
the second, who ended up married to Mary, Queen of
Scott's which connects our meta cheese series to our Tutor

(01:29):
Stuart series, which that's the key, that's why this is
a super series which we've been so excited about. Um.
But Catherine replaces her cheery personal symbol of a rainbow
with that of a broken lance. She starts wearing exclusively
black morning attire, usually with a white ruff to set
it all off for the rest of her life, for
the rest of her life. And and she gets to work,

(01:50):
and she effectively rules France through three successive sons who
are a king until she dies just shy of seventy
years old. But don't think there wasn't any trouble, because
there definitely was. The first son, Francis, didn't live very
long at all. He died at sixteen, and he was
succeeded by his ten year old brother, who became Charles

(02:12):
the Ninth. And Catherine took this opportunity to seize full
control of the regency using her very excellent scheming skills
to remain in control of her kid amid these jostling
factions in France. Yeah, and she promotes him to majority
at age thirteen, which is a year earlier than normal.
But she she wanted a real king of France because

(02:35):
these factions were so contentious at this time. And she
takes him on a grand progress of the country and
it's a big deal. It's twenty eight months of traveling,
moving between chateau and tents and taking barges and horses
and having all these elaborate festivals and banquets. And Catherine
is kind of an elaborate lady. Anyways. We learned in

(02:56):
Leonie Frieda's book Um Catherine de Medici, Renaissance Queen of France,
that she keeps bears in her retinue. And you know
how much Katie and I love bears, but a woman
after and these are kind of sad bears though they
have pierced noses and their their chain to her leader,
but they follow her around. I mean, how crazy is
that She's also got a monkey a parent, and an

(03:18):
entire household of dwarves who are brocades and fur and
have their own footman and tutors, which they all hang
out with her constantly. But the point of this tour
is is not just to to show off and show
off how magnificent the crown is, but to have the
king meet and mingle with his people, and to keep

(03:38):
the nobles entertained, keep them away from their their country
houses where they could, I don't know, cook up plans
against the monarchy, and um just try to bring the
country back together. And she's hoping that everyone will ultimately
rally around the king and rally together for France. And
this is something the country really needs at the time,

(03:59):
right because when Henry the Second died, he'd had the
personal loyalty of all of their nobles, and once he
was gone, the country is split again by feuding noble factions.
Each of them wants control of this young king. Yeah,
they're loyal to the crown still, but they don't have
that personal loyalty that they had to the to Charles

(04:20):
and Frances before him, to their father. So the principal
nobles we're going to keep an eye on here are
the Geese family and they are the ultra Catholics. And
then there's the Bourbon family, who are princes of the blood,
which makes them, uh, the second family in France after
the royal family itself, and the Bourbons are Protestant. So

(04:42):
just remember those two sides throughout this whole thing, and
the issues between these two groups of nobles are also
representative of religious issues in the country as a whole.
So we're gonna give you a little background on that
to make it easier to understand. Yeah, the Reformation, of
course got it start in fifteen seventeen, two years before
Catherine was even born, um, when Luther posted his ninety

(05:05):
five theses, and then the zealous Protestant John Calvin is
largely responsible for spreading the new religion in France. Um.
And just to get a scale of how quickly things
happen here, by the fifteen fifties we have the first
French Reformed churches, so this takes off from forty years
for the whole thing. And Catherine's husband, Henry the Second,

(05:28):
who as we learned in our previous podcast, was obsessed
with his foreign wars, was a little bit too distracted
to deal adequately with these religious fractures, and he also
underestimated them and their power. And then you know, right
after he made his foreign peace. He died with a
lance in his eyes, so that cut that short anyways, definitely.
So we're left with these weak child kings and Catherine

(05:51):
trying to patch everything up, patch up these feuding nobles
and country split by religious difference is and she's trying
to protect her children's throne. She's trying to defend her
own religion. She's a Catholic of course, and deal with
the factions, and she can't please everyone. Nobody can juggle
all of that. And contrary to Catherine's later reputation as

(06:16):
this crazed ultra Catholic whose intent on spilling Protestant blood,
would like to do a little myth busting here, because
she really strived for moderation whenever she could, and she
granted freedom of conscience and limited access to worship, which
was a big, big deal. It's basically separating sedition from heresy,

(06:36):
and no one is happy. Still. The Catholics think she's
capitulating or maybe she'll even become a Protestant horror of horrors,
and the Huguenots think that it's still not enough. Yeah.
So it's weird though, because this piece that she tries
to establish the freedom of conscience and the limited access
to worship is what we end up with decades later,

(06:57):
after nine civil wars of her jen Um, you end
up with the same thing. It's crazy. But that's not
to say that her reputation for Florentine tactics, which by
we mean murdering people and interest in the occult, wasn't deserved,
because even though she was a devout Catholic, she relied
heavily on medici, astrologers, magic, and her own dream visions

(07:21):
another podcast theme. She had consultations with Nostradamis, but her
main astrologers were the Florentine Ruggieri brothers, who were magicians, necromancers,
and men who are known for being very skilled in
the black arts. And just this weird magic mirror story
that Catherine supposedly shortly after her husband died, she um.

(07:44):
She consults one of the Ruggieri brothers. Um wants to
have him foretell her son's futures, and in this mirror
he pulls out, she sees her son's faces circling by,
and Ruggieri tells her that each circle they make will
stand for how many years they'll rule the kingdom. She
sees Francis go by once, her second son, Charles the Knight,

(08:06):
goes by fourteen times, and then her third son, who
is later Henry the Third, goes by fifteen times. In
the final faith she sees is Henry, Prince of Navarre.
So it's really spooky and kind of a bad uh,
a bad omen for Catherine. She also had a guy
in her life, Metro Renee, who mixed up potions for

(08:28):
her and supposedly poison gloves and poison rouge. And although
it's likely that Catherine had people taken out, you know,
had her own little hit list, she probably didn't poison
any fellow queens with poison gloves. But this is the
kind of stuff that earns her her nickname the Black Queen.
And that massacre were about to discuss, Yeah, that's a

(08:51):
really big part of it. We're gonna set the stage
for the massacre. While there are eventually nine wars of
religion in France at the time of the massacre, which
is in fifteen seventy two, we've only had three so far,

(09:12):
and the wars have polished off the main Bourbon Protestant leaders,
leaving two young princess figureheads. And that's the Prince de
Conde and Henry of Navarre, who we've already mentioned um
and Catherine has just arranged a peacemaking marriage kind of
I think, uh the Yorks and the Lancasters sort of
like that, between Henry of Navarre and her daughter Margaret,

(09:35):
who is known as Margot. And this marriage is going
to unite the Vala family, the royal family with the Bourbons,
so that's uniting the senior in the junior branches of
the royal line. And it's also going to unite the
Catholics and the Protestants, because of course Margot is a Catholic,
Henry of Navar is a Protestant. So it's this great

(09:56):
um symbol of peace and goodwill, and thousands of people
are going to come into Paris, nobles, regular people of
both religions to see the nuptials. And we have another
important player in this setup. Since the Bourbon Huguenot leaders
are dead, we have a guy named Admiral Gaspar, the
second Coligni, at the head of our movement. He had

(10:20):
just returned to court about a year earlier and had
begun currying favor with the king, and his uncle had
been a great trusted adviser to Henry the Second. So yes,
so guess Bar's idea is that maybe he can take
on a similar role with Charles the Ninth, who, as
a young man, is starting to get ready to take

(10:42):
on more responsibility, take over some of it from his
mom and upstage his younger brother's glamorous military reputation. So
Gaspar has a plan, and he's hoping that it will
bring him personally closer to the king, but he's also
hoping that it will give the Huguenots more recognition, more rights,
more respect in France. And the plan is to take

(11:05):
French Catholics and French Huguenots and together fight the Spanish
in the Netherlands. And the wedding ceremonies that are going
on in Paris offer the perfect opportunity for Gaspard to
discuss this plan with Charles and to try to get
his approval. But unfortunately for him, Coligni is very unpopular

(11:27):
with the other members of the court. The very Catholic
Gee family doesn't want war with Spain and they hate
Collini because they consider him responsible for a murder in
their family, the murder of Francois de Guise ten years earlier,
and Catherine doesn't want war with Spain either. She thinks
it could be disastrous, and she doesn't like Collini's influence

(11:47):
on her son. So this isn't just a religious issue.
It's a it's a mixture of personal vendettas and political problems.
But going into this, we have two things happening, this
big marriage between Margot and Henry and the arrival of
Coligny to attend the wedding and discussed the plans for
the war against Spain. So Catherine had long banned the

(12:11):
Geezes from enacting their revenge on Collini for this murder.
He may not even have been involved by the way
his name got roped into it, and yeah, he probably
didn't have much to do with it. But then she
lifts this band so he's basically back on a possible
hit list, and approves the plan to assassinate him the
day after the wedding ceremonies end, So we have a

(12:34):
brief interlude here of the happy peacemaking wedding. On August
fifty two, Margot and Henry Nvar marry outside of Notre Dame,
and then she has a mass inside with her brother
by proxy because of course Henry, as a Protestant, cannot
take part in a mass, and she wears an ermine

(12:54):
trimmed crown and a coat with a thirty ft train.
We just thought we'd throw in a few we like
fashion details before things get really bloody here. And the
festivities gone for days, you know, kind of like the
wedding we talked about earlier of Henry the Second and
Catherine Um just grand festivities, days and days of them,
and Colleeny himself isn't a big party or so, he's

(13:17):
not really taking part in a lot of this celebration,
and he doesn't even really want to be there. In fact,
his wife's just had a baby. But he's hanging around
so that he can talk to the king about this
Spanish expedition he'd like to get going, and he's becoming
increasingly angry because Charles keeps putting him off and putting
him off, and eventually he warns him that they might

(13:38):
soon be discussing civil war rather than foreign war if
he doesn't get his meeting, and he also hears the
plot might be hashing. I mean, you know, word is
going to spread in these times, but it doesn't bother
him too much. He's gonna stick around in Paris because
he really wants to talk to Charles. So Friday August

(13:58):
the celebrations end and Coligny is out on a walk
when the gee assassin strikes and it's a shot from
a window above the street, but right at that moment,
Colony bends down to adjust his shoe, so the shot
misses him. It just strikes his arm, breaks it and
almost shoots off his finger, but he's not killed. There's

(14:21):
a lesson there, maybe to always tie your shoe, I'm
not sure. But the Huguenots, of course, are enraged by
this incident, and Charles, who didn't know about it, promises
that he'll find the parties involved, not realizing of course,
that his mother is behind it. And remarkably, Coligny stays
in town instead of leaving, which I would have done,

(14:42):
because he trusts Charles and trusts that he'll figure this
out and set things right, believes him well, and fleeing
would have been a huge insult to the King once
he asked him to stay. And by this point too,
things are starting to get kind of scary in Paris.
The Huguenots are obviously furious that their leader has had
this assassination attempt, and the Catholic Parisians are starting to

(15:06):
get kind of angry too. I think they're tired of
the Huguenots being around. This party has gone on too
long by this point. But Catherine's involvement in this failed
assassination attempt cannot be found out, so she meets with
nobles secretly to determine what to do next, and their
decision is to kill all of the Huguenot nobles and

(15:30):
captains who are still in Paris, which makes you wonder
how they came to such a radical decision. And this
is where things get a little bit dicey. Historically, supposedly
the Royalists, you know, Catherine and her nobles, had heard
that the Huguenots were about to attack them, so in
order to avoid a coup, they decide, okay, well will

(15:52):
attack first. But later historians have said that it's probably
unlikely there was a major Protestant coup in the works
this time, although I watched an interesting video from historian
Barbara at Diefendorff at Boston University, and she said it
didn't really matter if the Protestants were actually going to

(16:12):
stage a coup or not. Just the fact that Catherine
and the other nobles thought it might happen was enough
to to warrant their strike in their eyes at least.
And this is there. Let me think about it. You
have all of the powerful Huguenots in your own capital,
some of them them are staying in your own palace
to love, and in a few days they're all going

(16:33):
to go home, back to their own palaces, maybe raise
their own armies. If they're planning a coup, it's the
time to strike. This is reminiscent of the Pozzi conspiracory reminiscing. Okay,
so they've made their decision, but they need the king's
approval to go through with it. And they break to
him that actually they were behind the plot the whole

(16:54):
time and convince him that the Huguenots are about to
try to pull this coup. And he's basically bullied into
giving his assent to execute a select list of people
to kill, and he supposedly says kill them all, kill
them all, or maybe one of the geezes says that
later as a direct quote of the king. But um,

(17:18):
we should emphasize that his ascent is to kill the
people on the list, and just the people on the
it's not consent to the massacre that ends up happening.
The killings are planned for the early morning on St.

(17:40):
Bartholomew's Day, August, and they're to be carried out by
the King's royal bodyguards and GIS troops. At the same time,
militiamen would be guarding the city's gates and barges would
block the sin so they're shutting off the city, and
the signal would be the three am bell of the
Palais de Justice. But the massacre starts and it earlier

(18:00):
when a bell rings out from a different church, and
the first one to be killed is COLLEENI, one of
the first major major leaders, and he's very disdainful of
his Geese guard assassin. He says, I should at least
be killed by a gentleman and not by this boar,
and then he's run through with the sword thrown out

(18:20):
the window, alive and later beheaded, and at the louver
there's all out slaughter going on. Henry of Navarre had
woken up early. He couldn't sleep, decides to play a
little game of tennis with his friends while he waits
for Charles to wake up, and on the way to
the tennis courts, he and his friends are stopped by
the King's men and separated. His companions are probably all

(18:43):
taken away and killed immediately, but Navarre is locked up
with his cousin, the Prince of Conde, for safety. These
two are going to be spared. They're not going to
be killed in this massacre of Protestants. The Huguenots staying
in the palace are dragged from their beds and have
their throats slit. Some try to hide some time to
run in the courtyard, but they're shot down by archers

(19:04):
or pushed toward the line of Swiss guards. And a
sad note about katherine daughters Margot Um. She's now, of course,
the wife of a Huguenot, and she's in the middle
of all of it. Yeah, her sister had tried to
warn her something was going on, didn't give her details
of the plot, but had begged her mother to let
Margot stay with them for the night, and Catherine wouldn't

(19:27):
allow it because she figured if her if her daughter
didn't return to the Huguenot apartments Um, the Protestants might
realize something was up. So yeah, Margot is in the
middle of all this. She's actually in bed when one
of her husband's men comes running in covered in blood
and clings to her for dear life being pursued you know,
by an assassin right behind him. The guy actually spares

(19:51):
his life, and Margot personally petitions for a couple more
of her husband's men. But by five am, nearly all
of the major French Protestants have been killed, so the
list has been killed by five By five am, but
the killing doesn't stop with the list. The rest of
the populace gets involved. Lots of French Protestants have brought

(20:15):
their families into town for the wedding and they can't escape.
Their homes are rated, their children are killed, their bodies
are thrown in the river, and personal issues that have
absolutely nothing to do with religion were also settled in
the chaos. Because if everyone's getting killed, who's going to know?
If you kill your creditor, or your enemy or your wife,

(20:35):
it's a good time to take care of things. Nobody
will notice. Um. So Charles obviously was not intending for
this level of bloodshed to happen, and he asks the
people of Paris to please stop, and they don't. It
goes on for three days, and then it spreads to
the provinces, where it goes on until October. And Katie

(20:56):
and I were talking about what sort of message would
that be. You have a guy rides out and says
they're killing everyone in Paris, you should do that where
you are. We're not sure how that works. The final
tally is a bit up in the air. A Catholic
apologist puts it at only two thousand, a Huguenot puts
it at seventy thousand, but it's likely that there were
at least three thousand people killed in Paris alone, and

(21:19):
a few senior Huguenots do manage to escape. A few
people have decided that they might want to move their
quarters across the river, you know, just in case trouble
broke out between all the Catholics and all the Huguenots
that were in Paris at once, and a few of
them ended up being able to escape, and uh they
were the seeds for new rebellion. So the aftermath is

(21:44):
that the Valvois cannot get their story straight about what happened.
Charles is telling contradictory tales to the Protestants, he says
that it was a popular uprising organized by the Geese.
You're just a personal vendetta, y'all. And then to the Catholics,
he says it was something that he specifically ordered to
prevent a conspiracy against the crown. But of course some Catholics,

(22:08):
like Philip the Second in Spain and the Pope in
Rome see it initially as oh, great France has finally
started a religious war, and they're really happy. Philip even
does a little jig supposedly, which seems very unlike him. Um.
But they realized pretty quickly that no, it wasn't a

(22:29):
religious for it was politically motivated, and stop being so congratulatory.
And many Protestants had been sticking to the line that
they were loyal to the king, thinking that he just
had bad advisors, that it wasn't him. But now they
decide that they can't be loyal to the man who
accepts responsibility for the massacre, understandably, and the Huguenots throw

(22:52):
off Calvin's views towards royal allegiance, which makes rebellion justifiable. Now,
so we have the is pamphlet battle that begins too,
and this is probably must of the engravings you've seen.
Maybe Catherine standing there in black over piles of dead babies.
This is from this time period, and Charles is depicted
as a maniacal king who laughed when he watched his

(23:16):
people killed from his window. Or maybe he's this emotionally
disturbed man who is manipulated by his foreign mother, who's
the Black Queen, and who is not just foreign, she's Italian,
which makes it doubly bad. So ultimately we just have
these caricatures of these people instead of who they really were,

(23:37):
and Catherine de Medici has retained this reputation throughout much
of history. Charles was haunted by the massacre, actually and
chronically ill. He died soon afterward, and his brother became
Henry the Third, and Catherine, always involved in her children's lives,
continues to promote her son's thrown This is her favorite
son too, by the way, and mainly her role for

(24:00):
since he is a full grown man, is to rein
him in from his kind of dangerous inclinations sometimes. But
she dies in fifteen eighty nine, and eight months later
he's murdered by a deranged friar and he dies without children.
So the crown goes to a junior branch of the family,

(24:21):
the Bourbons, and his cousin, Henry of Navarre. Henry the Fourth,
he was the groom at the pre massacre wedding festivities,
who's married to Margot Valvois. But Margot and Henry, who
were never interested in each other in the first place,
to be honest, ultimately annul their marriage, which allows Henry
to make a new match, and with this new wife

(24:42):
he goes on to found the Bourbon line of kings
that ends nearly two hundred years later with Louis the
sixteenth and the French Revolution. And who is his wife,
Marie de Medici. Of course, thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an

(25:04):
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