The general extent to which Catherine de Medici is known today is as the manipulative queen mother who presided over the massacre of French Huguenots on St Bartholomew's Day, 1572. In this sympathetic and gloriously detailed biography, Leonie Frieda tries to rehabilitate France's "Black Queen".
Although a scion of the great Florentine banking dynasty, Catherine's beginnings were inauspicious: both her parents died within a month of her birth in 1519, probably of syphilis. But her Medici uncle Clement VII was pope, and Catherine - though plain - provided a useful bargaining tool. In 1533, when Catherine was 14, Clement pulled off what he described as "the greatest match in the world", marrying his niece - a mere merchant's daughter in the eyes of caste- conscious European nobility - to Henri of Orleans, second son of Francois I of France. The marriage was even more advantageous than Clement realised: in 1536, after a vigorous game of tennis, the heir to the French throne dropped dead, making Catherine the dauphine of France. Eleven years later, she was queen.
From the outset, Catherine adored her husband. But Henri was too devoted to his beautiful mistress, Diane de Poitiers, to interest himself in his dumpy Italian wife. Nineteen years his senior and originally his governess, Diane enjoyed total sway over Henri. Humiliatingly, it was frequently due only to Diane's intervention that Henri visited Catherine for sex at all. To learn how to please, Catherine - who needed to conceive if she was to remain queen - even resorted to spying on Henri's lovemaking with Diane. Her efforts paid off: ultimately she bore him ten children.
Another sporting accident ended this chapter. In summer 1559, while jousting, Henri was struck in the face by his opponent's lance. From the day he died, his 40-year-old widow wore only black, and Diane was not seen at court again. Now regent, Catherine displayed formidable political nous, keeping her children on the throne by playing France's three most powerful families - the Guises, the Bourbons and the Montmorencys - against each other. Previously rather prim, she surrounded herself with a half-naked "flying squadron" of the court's loveliest ladies, all primed to seduce information from their admirers.
However, Catherine's greatest test came with the emergence of Protestantism. And here she displayed her ruthlessness to the full. In 1572, she married her daughter Margot to Henri, the Protestant king of Navarre. Margot might well have felt relieved by her mother's choice: Catherine had previously tried to marry her to Don Carlos, the brain-damaged and homicidal son of Philip II of Spain. But Catherine used the marriage to gather together the leaders of the ever-rebellious Huguenots in Paris, and in the small hours of 24 August, six days after the wedding, she had them eliminated. The killings sparked a massacre, and roughly 30,000 Hugue-nots were slaughtered as the Catholic population of Paris turned violent.
The irony of Catherine's life is that the children she fought so hard to promote were corrupt and sickly. All three who became king suffered from weeping sores and tuberculosis; Charles IX and Henri III both appeared to have an incestuous interest in their sister Margot. Strangely, it was Henri III - a flamboyant cross-dresser who frequently sported a lower decollete than the ladies at court - whom Catherine loved best; after he came to the throne in 1574, she worked tirelessly for her favourite son, yet he increasingly ignored her in favour of the handsome mignons who made up his entourage. When Catherine died in January 1589, aged 69, she had been pushed from power into a marginal position, and knew that her son's sexuality precluded the production of an heir to the Valois. But at least her death spared her witnessing the ignominious end of her line six months later, when a schizophrenic dressed as a priest stabbed Henri as he sat on the commode.
Catherine's aims, as Frieda writes, "had always been simple: peace and prosperity inside France, obedience to the king, glorious alliance-building marriages for her children, and a return to the days of a powerful monarchy such as it had been under her late husband". Unwittingly, she achieved the last: Henri of Navarre, who came to power on Henri III's death, established the Bourbon line, which ruled until the revolution of 1789.
