4 Diane de Poitiers: An Idealized Mistress

Diane de Poitiers, one of the most famous French royal mistresses, demonstrates just how successfully a royal mistress could assume a queen's roles and representations. Making strikingly effective use of Renaissance arts, literature, and rhetoric, Diane not only constructed an image of herself as a paragon of virtue but also presented a new image of Henry II, less as family man and more as model of chivalric romance. Renaissance artists were avid to depict a mistress renowned for her beauty, and Diane came to embody Diana, the goddess of hunting, and to epitomize the artistic glory of the French Renaissance. So proficient was she at defining and exploiting those representations that they became virtually synonymous with her, and in large part, Henry's association with this goddess/mistress defined his reign. Diane remains an especially evocative figure; she has been used to romanticize Henry II, his reign, and the French Renaissance.

Diane also offers a compelling model of the power of myth over history. Mistresses of the Renaissance have provided material for intriguing myths and legends. These stories take on lives of their own, offering captivating, dramatic renditions that displace more reliable accounts of historical events. They then shape the subsequent histories of the woman, her age, the monarchy, and even France itself. The power of myth over history is especially evident in the case of Diane. She used the myth she constructed to solidify her status. To an unprecedented degree, she controlled her image. Her myth gave her contemporaries and subsequent historians ways to praise not simply a royal mistress but also a monarch.

Although Diane provoked controversy much as Agnès Sorel had, she lived in the full flowering of the Renaissance. As a result, a much more extensive historical record, providing fuller documentation of her life, makes it somewhat easier to distinguish history from myth. But certain features of the historical record complicate the telling of her story. Her few surviving letters to Henry are businesslike rather than revealing about their relationship or her character, and only a few of Henry's verses and letters to her remain.¹Close Conventions of the day required the gallant lover to destroy his lover's letters, and Henry apparently did so.²Close Thus we have few direct indications of the nature of their personal relationship.

Diane and Henry's thorough efforts to shape and control her public image were so effective that they continue to complicate the historian's work. That control dramatized her significance and crafted the public presentation of her character and her role. But historical writing immediately after Diane's life during the Wars of Religion was shaped by Catholic-Protestant polemics. Diane was a devout Catholic and a close associate of both the Guise and Montmorency families, two of the leading families during the religious wars of the late sixteenth century. As a result, she provoked some criticism from Protestants who used the indiscretions of French kings and their mistresses to claim the moral high ground and to argue that Catholics such as Diane were both immoral and intent on subverting the state. Finally, Diane is linked to stories so dramatic, compelling, and frequently repeated through the centuries that it is hard to assess them critically. Although readers might prefer to cherish these more romantic accounts, it is worthwhile to consider why these stories were told and how they were subsequently used in French history.

Diane raises some of the issues Agnès brought to the fore. Once again, contemporaries praised the mistress as extraordinarily beautiful. As we saw with Charles VII, physical description of monarchs could be unrelievedly harsh. Queens too were sometimes described in very unflattering terms. Contemporaries occasionally mentioned positive physical attributes or juxtaposed positive personal qualities against physical imperfections. But mistresses were almost always described in lyrical terms, perhaps to justify a king's infidelity. A mistress's stunning beauty allowed some contemporaries to counsel loyalty to the king or even adulation of his mistress. Just as Agnès did almost one hundred years earlier, Diane, tall and slender with very white skin, red-gold hair, and blue-green eyes, embodied contemporary standards of beauty (fig. 4.1).³Close She inspired artists who depicted her in full, classical glory; the display of her physical charms was no longer restricted to exposure of her breast.

One cannot help but wonder about the reports of Diane's beauty, which contemporaries proclaimed as not just extraordinary but also incredibly enduring, so that she was considered a great beauty until her death in her late sixties. BrantÔme claimed that she would remain beautiful if she lived to be 110.⁴Close The beauty of her skin was legendary and reputedly never touched by makeup. Such beauty, some insisted, could be due only to magic, which allowed her to bewitch men, especially to retain the interest of the king despite her advanced years. Others claimed no magic was necessary to preserve her looks: They cited instead a special beauty regime; Diane was devoted to exercise or bathed in milk or cold water. That alone, English writers gleefully noted, distinguished her from her unhygienic French contemporaries. Her recent exhumation revealed that her bones were full of gold, which she likely ingested as a beauty treatment.

But even this, perhaps her most enduring claim to fame, is debatable. The portraits and pen-and-ink drawings of the Clouet school do not show a woman of extraordinary beauty but instead a rather old, stern-faced woman. But they were done late in her life, and the artists may have been influenced by Protestant sympathies as well (fig. 4.2). The artists—Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Primaticcio, and Jean Goujon—who created such beautiful representations of her may also have been more concerned to perpetuate her legend than to portray her accurately.

Regardless of how attractive Diane actually was or how attractive we might consider her, her contemporaries were virtually unanimous in extolling her beauty. For them, her beauty set her apart and sanctioned her status, just as Henry's favor elevated her above other court women. During Francis's reign, Diane, the half-recognized mistress of the young heir apparent, competed for political influence with Anne, Francis's acknowledged favorite. Her sway over Henry provoked hostility, fueled in part by misogynist objections to women's meddling in politics. Her critics had cause. The king's devotion and the duration of their relationship gave Diane great political authority as his most trusted advisor, and more influence than any previous mistress. When Henry reigned, Diane, his long-standing, publicly acknowledged mistress, was much more prominent than his queen, Catherine de Medici.

Diane offered a different model of a relationship between a king and his mistress than had Charles VII and Agnès Sorel. A young, unmarried woman, Agnès was chosen by the king from a group of ladies-in-waiting, but Diane was a widow twenty years older than Henry; her age gave her authority over him for the rest of his life. Their relationship provoked other questions for their contemporaries and subsequent historians about the nature of their relationship. Some legitimated it as platonic, akin to that between mother and child or a chivalric asexual relationship between an idealized lady and her devoted knight. Others saw it as purely sexual, based on the crass manipulation of a young man by a grasping, older woman. Less critical studies present the relationship as a great romance; this version reigns in the popular imagination.⁵Close Diane's life too has been the stuff of romantic fiction; novels and plays told her story. The relationship between Diane, Henry, and Catherine de Medici remains of perennial interest to both historians and novelists.

Diane was born into an important noble family probably on January 9, 1500, although there is no exact record of the date or place of her birth.⁶Close The Poitiers family can be traced back to the estates they held in the twelfth century. In the Hundred Years War, they fought against the English and were richly rewarded with fiefs. Diane's father, Jean de Poitiers, was lord of Saint-Vallier and inherited numerous titles from his own father. He married Jeanne of Batarnay, a rich heiress.⁷Close The couple had five children—two sons and three daughters—and Diane was their oldest daughter. At a time when daughters were generally considered liabilities because of the drain on family finances their dowries entailed, Diane had an unusually close relationship with her father, perhaps because she was a tomboy, devoted to hunting and vigorous exercise. Her entire life, she rose at dawn, bathed in cold water, and went for long horseback rides—practices cited as sources of her extraordinary beauty.

As a young girl, Diane was sent to Anne of Beaujeu's court. Noble daughters often went to the households of more prominent nobles to complete their educations and enhance their prospects, and Anne was an especially apt choice for Diane's family. As the daughter of one king and the sister of another, Anne offered access to the highest echelons of the French nobility. She was also interested in the education of girls and wrote a volume of advice to her daughter, Suzanne, on how a woman of her social class should behave.⁸Close As we have seen, Anne was one of the most remarkable women of her day. Her father, Louis XI, entrusted her with the governance of his kingdom in preference to his son (later Charles VIII). Anne molded the powerful women of her age. Both Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria were raised and formed at her court. Brantôme, in fact, claimed that there were no great ladies of the time who were not educated by her, including his own grandmother.⁹Close Anne's tutelage might well have cultivated the skills Diane later demonstrated in maneuvering through the intricacies of the royal court in her best interests. At twelve, Diane became one of Anne's maids of honor. Anne not only fostered Diane's education but also advocated her marriage to Louis de Brézé.

Throughout Diane's childhood, the fortunes of her family increased, which enhanced her prospects for an advantageous marriage. An honored and accomplished soldier, her father had fought in the Italian wars of Charles VIII and Louis XII. (Later Jean's outstanding military service during the Italian campaigns led Francis I to appoint him captain of one hundred gentlemen of the king's house, a commission of great honor.) When Diane accompanied her father to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the royal chateau just outside Paris, for Francis I's marriage to Claude, Louis de Brézé caught sight of her and agreed to a marriage.

On March 29, 1515, Diane, an approximately fifteen-year-old legendary beauty, married Louis, fifty-six years old and described as old beyond his years, “ill-favored and a hunchback.”¹⁰Close Although this marriage might strike modern sensibilities as a mismatch, it was a phenomenal success in contemporary terms. Louis and his family could expect to reap certain advantages from his alliance with the Poitiers family; the Poitiers had acquired power through their association with Anne of Beaujeu and their ties to the constable Charles of Bourbon. But the Poitiers family could expect even greater benefits.

Louis was a member of one of the greatest noble families and of royal blood. His family's preeminence had increased greatly over the course of the fifteenth century. His grandfather Pierre de Brézé's military activities gained royal favor, and his ties to Agnès Sorel enhanced his status at court. As her ally, Pierre had access to the king, which brought him great rewards and provoked jealousy and lawsuits. For valor in the battle at Formigny in 1450, Pierre was rewarded with status and wealth as grand steward of Normandy.¹¹Close

Pierre's son Jacques married Charlotte, one of Charles VII's daughters by Agnès. Jacques and Charlotte's marriage was significant for several reasons. It reflected the great rise in status of the Brézé family: Pierre married into the royal bloodline. The fact that the daughter of a royal mistress married the grand steward of Normandy attested to the high status of a king's illegitimate daughter. This marriage came to a violent end when Jacques caught Charlotte in flagrante with his master of hounds and murdered them both in their bed. Jacques was imprisoned and so heavily fined that he had to forfeit his estates, although his sons, as nephews of the king, were entitled to regain them.

Diane's husband, Louis, was Charlotte and Jacques's oldest son. As the grand steward of Normandy, he was entitled to almost royal prerogatives. His wealth and prestige also gave his bride great status; she took precedence over most ladies of the court and became a lady-in-waiting to the queen mother, Louise of Savoy.¹²Close It might have been expected that such a misalliance in terms of age would soon make her a wealthy widow. But Louis lived another seventeen years, to the age of seventy-two, far beyond sixteenth-century life expectancy of about fifty. Insofar as the slight historical record can reflect the character of a marriage, it suggests that the couple lived in harmony.

Diane may well have absorbed Anne of Beaujeu's tutelage on marriage. Anne advised her daughter, Suzanne, that marriage “is a state of such beauty and so prized, provided it is honestly regulated, that it seems it cannot be honored enough or praised too much. And to achieve this state, you cannot devote yourself to it too much or conduct yourself too wisely or with too much gentleness, deference, and chastity … and you should not have any preferences, desires, or wishes of your own.”¹³Close Anne, who had married a man twenty years older than she and chosen by her father, also claimed that fortunes were maintained and great houses made through carefully arranged marriages: Successful marriages enhanced powerful, noble families.

When Diane was pregnant with her first child, her husband wrote a letter to Montmorency, which reflected the couple's affectionate relationship and ties to the king. Louis commented that he did not believe that Diane, already in her ninth month, could get any bigger and noted with pleasure his elevated position in the coronation ceremonies for Queen Claude.¹⁴Close When the king and queen later visited Rouen, Louis presented them with the keys to the city. Louis and Diane were a wealthy, influential couple, graced with the king's favor.

Diane bore two daughters, Françoise in 1518 and Louise in 1521. Diane's marriage at such a young age also restricted her fertility, since she was less likely to bear a child until she attained full maturity (probably at about eighteen in the sixteenth century)—no doubt an unintended consequence. When she was widowed in 1531, Diane had borne only two children—one at the age of eighteen the other at twenty-one. When she became involved with Henry, she was thirty-six, beyond the age of prime fertility. Thus Diane did not suffer the risks to her health that many pregnancies could have entailed.

Louis de Brézé was prominent in the chronicles of the day primarily because of the involvement of his father-in-law, Jean de Poitiers, in Charles of Bourbon's plot against Francis I. Louis became involved when two of the plotters were overcome with pangs of conscience and told the bishop of Lisieux, who then informed Louis. When Louis notified the king of the impending English invasion with the aid of “an important personage of this kingdom,”¹⁵Close he implicated his father-in-law, although it is unclear whether Louis knew of his involvement. Charles escaped, but many of his co-conspirators were arrested, including Jean de Poitiers, who bore the brunt of Francis's ire. No doubt Jean's great wealth, status, and the favor Francis had shown him made his betrayal galling. Jean protested his innocence to Louis: “The king has ordered me to be arrested for no reason … as a traitor” and appealed to his son-in-law and daughter for assistance.¹⁶Close He confessed to attending meetings between Charles of Bourbon and representatives of Charles V and Henry VIII to arrange Charles of Bourbon's marriage to Eleanor, Charles V's sister and later Francis I's wife. Jean's signature witnessed incriminating documents in the case. Tried and convicted, his goods were confiscated, and he was sentenced to death. But he was ultimately granted a reprieve, and therein hangs a tale.

The document granting Jean's reprieve credits the efficacy of his son-in-law's appeal. But a rumor, which has regularly fueled historiographical speculation, claimed that the price demanded by Francis in exchange for her father's reprieve was Diane's honor. The Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris deemed it “a sweet exchange to one who esteems honor less than life.”¹⁷Close Part of the fascination of this story is that, if it were true, Diane would have been the mistress of both father and son. The story also had great ideological value; anti-monarchists and Protestants could wring their hands over the debauchery of the Catholic king of France and his Catholic mistress. This story pitted the fidelity and virtue of a beautiful, young woman against the demands of a lustful king, with a father's life hanging in the balance. At issue was the king's reputation. For some, it was easy to believe that Francis, a notorious womanizer, would exact such a price. Several features of this story make it worth discussing.

Diane's immediate contemporaries rarely mentioned the incident. The most notable charge was made as early as 1552, at the height of Diane's political influence, by the Venetian ambassador Lorenzo Contarini: “Remaining young, widowed, and beautiful, Diane was loved and tasted by the King Francis I and others as well, as everyone says; then she came into the hands of King Henry II.” Contarini insinuated that her public presentation was a fabrication: “Thus Diane the prude, Diane the inaccessible had dissimulated, under an apparent coldness and a chastity loudly proclaimed, a temperament of fire.”¹⁸Close Francis inscribed a portrait of Diane as “beautiful to see, honest to frequent,” which seems to exonerate her of any such charges.¹⁹Close Although their contemporaries were clearly impressed that Diane and her husband procured a reprieve for such serious charges, they did not generally suggest that it depended on the granting of sexual favors. The crime was grievous: Jean was clearly aware of a plot against the king; and the evidence of his involvement was compelling. Under these circumstances, the request of Louis and Diane to spare this traitor was audacious.

And what of Diane's husband? Is it at all conceivable that Louis would have pleaded for his father-in-law's life if his wife's honor were at stake? We know little about Louis beyond his high political and economic status. Many of his contemporaries allowed themselves to be married and ennobled to facilitate such liaisons. Louis could have seen the king's attachment to his wife as advantageous, as did Anne de Pisseleu's husband, but Louis was not likely a compliant husband. His own father had murdered his wife for her adultery. Nor is there reason to believe that Louis would have taken his wife's honor lightly. Diane, married to a man ten years older than her father, might have found it acceptable to be singled out by the king, especially to spare her father's life. But her sense of her own honor, so evident throughout her life, makes it highly unlikely that she would have agreed to be the king's passing fancy. So while some contemporary practices make the story credible, there are compelling reasons, based on the character of Diane and her husband, to doubt it. Nor does it seem likely, especially given Francis's passion for Françoise at the time and his success as a gallant, that he would have exacted such a price.

Who told this story? The Venetian ambassador's charge of 1552 was picked up shortly thereafter by Louis Regnier de la Planche, who gave the tale its most influential form in The State of France under Francis I.²⁰Close The Protestant historian claimed that Diane began her career as a courtesan, bartering her chastity for her father's life, and used this presumed relationship to condemn her. Others told the story to praise her devotion to her father. In Brantôme's account, as Jean descended from the scaffold, he said, “God save the … [expletive deleted in original text] of my daughter who saved me so well.” Brantôme believed that the sexual encounter occurred but did not condemn it, citing an analogous Christian example: Saint Augustine doubted whether a Christian of Antioch sinned when he, being held prisoner for a large sum, allowed his wife to pay his debt with her favors. Brantôme concluded, “If Saint Augustine is of this opinion, what may not be permitted various ladies, widows, and maidens, who redeem their fathers and husbands … what harm or scandal can arise from this?”²¹Close Dramatic and polemically useful, the story is now considered highly dubious.²²Close An unsigned cache of letters from a woman to Francis I, previously believed to corroborate his relationship with Diane, was determined to have been written by Françoise de Foix.²³Close

If this story of seduction was likely a useful invention, Francis nonetheless had a good political reason to grant Jean a reprieve: Louis controlled men at arms in Normandy, where France was susceptible to invasion from England. Jean's life was spared but he remained in prison until the Treaty of Madrid of 1526 stipulated that he be released along with other supporters of the constable of Bourbon. After Jean's reprieve, Louis defended France against the English in Normandy, and Diane served the court. The successful appeal for Jean's life cemented the couple's friendship with Francis. Francis went to Normandy, where Louis and Diane entertained him, and he visited Diane after Louis's death. On one visit, the marriage contract between Henry II and Catherine de Medici was drafted—an ironic twist in light of Henry and Diane's subsequent relationship. Louis and Diane also promoted political positions; they favored peace with the Hapsburgs and the marriage between Henry and Catherine de Medici.²⁴Close Diane was related to Catherine (their grandmothers were sisters), and this marriage would bind Diane's family more closely to the royal family.

After sixteen years of marriage, Louis died in 1531, leaving a widow who was young, noble, beautiful, and prominent at court. Diane retained the financial assets of her husband, but without a male heir, her estates could have reverted to the crown.²⁵Close To preserve them, she took her case to Parlement to maintain her rights of inheritance. She received from Francis the exceptional right not to have to account to a guardian during her widowhood.²⁶Close Louis left her well provided with the means and the authority to dower and marry her daughters well. He had greatly enriched his family, increasing their land holdings and political connections. The further concentration of wealth and power in her family became one of Diane's chief concerns; she proved more than adept at the task.

Diane built a magnificent tomb for Louis, attributed to the famous sculptor Jean Goujon, in the cathedral in Rouen in the style of Renaissance royal tombs. That is to say, it had a carved figure of the deceased on a lower level with his living image above. In this case, Louis is on horseback flanked by four caryatids, representing victory, faith, prudence, and glory. The inscription proclaims his wife's devotion: oh! louis de brézé, diane de poitiers, stricken by the death of her husband, has raised this sepulcher to you. she was your inseparable and faithful wife in the marriage bed; she will be the same in the tomb (fig. 4.3).

Diane seemed intent on being just as virtuous a widow as she had been a wife. Her husband's funeral was appropriate for the greatest nobleman, his funerary art impressive, and the conduct of his mourning widow exemplary. Diane was now thirty-one years old and showed no interest in remarriage. She would have been sharply aware of her high status, her independence, and her position as head of her family. Diane might have been inclined to follow the advice of Anne of Beaujeu to widows that “when it comes to the government of their lands and affairs, they must depend only on themselves; when it comes to sovereignty, they must not cede power to anyone.”²⁷Close Brantôme too pointed out the advantages noble widows enjoyed: “They have the use of their own money, the management of the estate…. Instead of being servants as before, they are in command; they can pursue their pleasures and enjoy companions who will do as they wish. They remain widows in order to keep their grandeur, dignity and possessions, titles and good treatment.”²⁸Close

Once widowed, Diane wore mourning clothes of black and white for the rest of her life. Particularly becoming to her fair skin and blond hair, they set her apart from other women. Not surprisingly, this romantic guise attracted the attention of poets, whose early appreciations of Diane foreshadow the mutually beneficial relationship between beautiful mistresses and Renaissance artists that she came to embody.

Diane retained her prominence in Francis's court. Before her husband's death, she participated in the festivities of Francis's reign, where she was esteemed for her beauty, intelligence, and virtue. Later, as the widow of a preeminent nobleman, Diane had both authority and independence. At the end of 1531, she returned to the court as a lady-in-waiting to Louise of Savoy and, after Louise's death, to the new queen, Eleanor.

Given her subsequent involvement in Henry's life, Diane's relationship with him can almost seem preordained, but their close association did not actually begin until Francis I recruited Diane to socialize the adolescent Henry to court life when he was eleven. Henry's childhood had been especially difficult. His mother died when he was five years old. His father was captured by Charles V in the French defeat at the Battle of Pavia. To gain his own release, Francis's two oldest sons became Spanish hostages. The dauphin Francis was nine years old; Henry was just seven. Diane was among the women of the court who accompanied the young princes to Spain and embraced them before turning them over to Spanish officials. Although Henry's attachment to Diane may date from that farewell kiss, the story may well be apocryphal—told to foreshadow their future relationship.

Imprisonment for more than four years marked Henry, who thereafter tended to be silent and uncomfortable in social situations, qualities either produced or exacerbated by his captivity.²⁹Close Some twelve years after Henry's release, Matteo Dandolo, a Venetian ambassador, remarked that few had ever heard the young prince laugh.³⁰Close Francis seemed particularly unattached to Henry, perhaps for the very qualities his captivity either underscored or induced.

The Ladies' Peace stipulated that Charles V's sister Eleanor would return his ransomed sons when she came to marry Francis. Diane accompanied the young princes and the future queen back to France. In the tournament held to honor the new queen, Diane won a prize for beauty, although she shared it with Anne, the king's mistress. For this honor, Brantôme dubbed Diane “the beautiful among the beautiful,” since she won the prize for her beauty rather than by any need to curry favor with the king.³¹Close The young royal princes were dressed and armed as chevaliers, and each carried a standard; the dauphin Francis selected the new queen to champion, and Henry wore Diane's colors, probably in gratitude for escorting him on his return from Spain. When it was his turn, Henry knelt before Diane, indicating to all that he considered her his lady. Henry was smitten at a young age and remained so.

Despite Henry's chivalric gesture, Francis was concerned about his son's ability to assume a public position. As he came of age, Henry reveled in the life of a military camp more than that of the court. The Venetian ambassador Marino Cavalli emphasized, as did many of Henry's contemporaries, the brawn of the young prince (implying brawn at the expense of brains), describing him as “so well built that one would think he was made of muscle, indefatigable in exercises of arms or hunting.” Henry was not considered particularly intelligent, and “his father the king did not love him much,”³²Close the Venetian ambassador remarked. (Francis was devoted to his oldest son, Francis, and preferred his youngest son, Charles, known for his agreeable disposition.)

Legend has it that when Francis complained about Henry to Diane, she offered to transform Henry into a gallant and to initiate him into the ways of the court. She did so, it seems, by establishing between them a chivalric relationship, entirely chaste, in which she was his lady and he was her knight. Though this might seem a rather peculiar way to reeducate a young prince, Henry was a maladroit young man, deprived of his mother and neglected by his father. His relationship with Diane elevated him to fictional knighthood and gave him an intense personal relationship with a beautiful older woman. The invocation of chivalry also fit Francis's sophisticated court, which fostered both the Renaissance revival of the ancients and the new appreciation of women in court culture. The latter, which saw women as transforming feudal knights into Renaissance men, was so compelling, in part, because it could readily be grafted on to the older, courtly love tradition. Diane's chivalric approach to tutelage proved heady, as the young prince took his position as her devoted knight very seriously.

When Diane agreed to make Henry a gallant, what had she undertaken? She intended to help him develop a public persona appropriate to his station and to equip him for a more prominent position at court. When she took him in hand, Diane was thirty-one and Henry was eleven. Part of the reason Francis urged Diane to undertake Henry's social education was to prepare him for marriage. When Catherine de Medici was proposed as a bride, Diane spelled out for Henry some of the advantages of this marriage: The bride was rich and a descendent of Louis IX. Catherine's claims to territories in Italy would allow Henry a foothold from which to launch a crusade.³³Close Such a venture would put him into the lists of the great crusading kings—a persona guaranteed to appeal to Henry's romantic self-image. Diane was later commissioned to guide Henry's young bride as well in the conventions of the French court.

Diane's involvement in Henry's marriage negotiations was not the only sign of her political involvement. She also advocated an alliance between France and the papacy, which would have made Francis the champion of orthodox Catholicism against the Protestant princes. To advance this plan, she worked with Montmorency to promote peace between Francis and Charles V. But Francis rejected these diplomatic designs. He instead opened negotiations with the Protestants, a preliminary move in the renewal of warfare with Charles V, which repudiated the political positions Diane advocated.

Moving toward war, the house of Valois suffered a devastating loss that changed the future for Henry and Diane. The young dauphin Francis had been playing tennis when he got caught in a storm, drank a glass of cold water given to him by Simon Montecucculi, and died.³⁴Close Rumors that he had been poisoned warred with popular opinion that it was dangerous to drink cold drinks when overheated. The young heir had been popular, and great hopes for the dynasty had rested on him. Henry had not been viewed as a prospective heir; he had neither an engaging personality nor much to recommend him for the position thrust upon him. Suspicion for his brother's death fell on his young wife, Catherine de Medici, both because of the increase in her status and because of her Italian background. (Italians were considered especially adept poisoners.)

Diane immediately came to Henry's aid. As he took on new responsibilities, Henry could count on her to smooth his path and alert him to the dangers and traps of court life. With more than a hint of the pragmatic expediency that often guided the choices made by the women who became royal favorites, Diane seems to have singled out Henry for her sexual favors. Perhaps she had hesitated to sacrifice her virtue and reputation in a relationship with an awkward second son but would not refuse the heir apparent. By this time, Henry was sixteen years old to her thirty-six.

Up to this point, Henry had experienced short-lived liaisons with camp followers and almost three years of a less-than-successful marriage to Catherine. Henry's friend and Diane's ally Montmorency set the scene for the initial tryst at the chateau of Ecouen, in a room where the loves of Psyche were vividly depicted, although it seems unlikely that Henry required artistic inspiration to press his suit. He tied his destiny to devotion to his lady, writing,

Alas, my God, how much I regret

The time I lost in my youth

How many times I wished

To have Diane for my only mistress

But I feared that she, who is a goddess,

Would not want to abase herself

To value me, who, without her esteem,

Would have no pleasure, joy, or contentment….³⁵Close

In her new position as Henry's mistress, Diane was credited with transforming an awkward youth into a man who remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. Cavalli reported, “One affirms that this woman has undertaken to indoctrinate, to correct, and to counsel Monsieur the dauphin and to push him to all the actions worthy of him.” Diane cloaked her relationship with Henry in discretion and mystery. Although some contemporaries noticed the new intimacy between them, others wondered whether she simply offered him friendship. So discreet was Diane that, even more than ten years after she became sexually involved with Henry, Cavalli reported, “while for conversation, he [Henry] confines himself to that of the Steward of Normandy [Diane], who is forty-eight years of age. He entertains for her a sincere affection; but it is not thought that there is anything lascivious about it and that this affection is like that between mother and son.”³⁶Close

One fundamental function that Diane assumed was to urge Henry to fulfill his conjugal duties. Henry neglected Catherine for his mistress's company, but Diane did not want Catherine set aside to be replaced by a queen who might stir his passions. Royal couples generally married earlier than their nonroyal contemporaries in hopes of bearing children earlier and more frequently to secure succession. Childless after years of marriage, it seemed that Henry and Catherine might never have children. Diane would brook no neglect of his wife by Henry; she not only insisted that he spend his nights with Catherine but was also involved in the intimate relations between the couple. She brought Henry talismans and love potions and consulted astrologers, alchemists, and sorcerers on his behalf. Finally in 1544, Catherine gave birth to a son, a development Henry credited to Diane's advice, giving her fifty-five hundred livres for the “good and recommendable services that she had previously done for the queen.”³⁷Close

Over the next ten years, Catherine bore nine more children. Nonetheless, she was forced to abase herself before Diane and to act as Diane's spy in the court, knowing full well that she owed her continued position as queen to the support of her husband's mistress. Catherine's many pregnancies ironically provided greater justification in their contemporaries' minds for Henry to spend more time with Diane, who even assumed a maternal role as Catherine's children's official governor.

As soon as Henry became the heir apparent, Diane's situation changed dramatically; she remained his most trusted advisor, guiding him through the political and social shoals of court life as he took on more prominent positions and proved himself on military campaigns.³⁸Close Now dauphin and with Diane and Montmorency as allies, Henry was poised to assert himself. He took as his symbol the crescent moon with the motto, “When It Is Full, It Emulates the Sun.”

Diane's position as the acknowledged favorite of the future king brought her into direct conflict with Anne de Pisseleu, Francis's influential mistress. To discredit her emerging rival, Anne launched a campaign of personal invective against Diane in which she emphasized her rival's age, claiming inaccurately that Anne was born the day Diane wed.³⁹Close (Anne was only nine years younger than Diane.) In this rivalry, Diane cited her position as lady-in-waiting and cousin to Catherine (although it seems rather tactless to tout her blood relationship with her lover's wife) and pointed to her ancient lineage and alliance with the powerful Brézé family. Anne disparaged Diane's looks and commissioned the poet Jean Voulté, whose verses described Diane: “her face painted with wrinkles, her false teeth, and her ruined complexion.”⁴⁰Close Diane launched a counterattack on Anne's fidelity.

Henry not only vociferously defended his mistress but also became her agent in the campaign against Anne, spreading the rumor that Anne had slept with her brother-in-law Guy Chabot, the chevalier of Jarnac. Because of Henry's rank, Jarnac could not challenge his royal accuser to a duel. But François de Vivonne, lord of La Châtaigneraie, wanted to accept the challenge in Henry's stead. Francis I had not permitted the duel to take place, but Henry allowed it immediately after his father's death. In a gruesome six-hour duel, Jarnac, despite pleas to Henry to end the gory contest, was essentially forced to kill Henry's stand-in. La Châtaigneraie ensured his own demise by refusing to have his life-threatening wounds treated because of the ignominy of his defeat.⁴¹Close Contemporaries saw this inglorious incident as a telling example of the destruction wrought by women in politics. As Blaise de Monluc remarked, “The king should stop the mouths of women who tattle-tale at court…. A gossip caused the death of M. de La Châtaigneraie.”⁴²Close

This battle between the two mistresses had significant political ramifications. Their supporters polarized the court. Anne's pronounced influence with Francis led Henry increasingly to turn against his father and to oppose his policies. Father and son were frequently and more sharply at odds during the last ten years of Francis's reign. When Anne persuaded Francis that Diane was fostering Henry's disloyal support of Montmorency, Francis ordered Diane to leave the court. Henry went with her, and the estrangement between father and son hardened. When Francis toured Normandy, he visited Diane at her chateau of Anet, where she interceded to make peace between father and son. Shortly thereafter, Henry was readmitted to Francis's council. When Francis fell ill, he sent his son into battle in his place; Henry distinguished himself as a soldier. Just as Henry gained greater credibility (and, by association, so did his mistress), Francis's mistress faced charges of disloyalty, a situation Diane exploited to her advantage.

Near the end of his life, Francis tried to carve out territory for his youngest son, Charles, by arranging his marriage alliance with a Spanish princess. Anne supported Charles and actively lobbied for this marriage. Once again, the rivalry between mistresses was politically significant; each mistress worked to foster the interests of the prince she supported. Diane overtly opposed both a Hapsburg marriage and the peace as antithetical to Henry's interests. This division of opinion heightened tensions between the two factions at court and divided the royal family. Henry urged his father to make no concessions to the emperor. But when Charles V proposed that Francis's son Charles should marry his niece and be given Burgundy as his territory, Henry saw this peace as antithetical to his interests as the future king, as it detached Burgundy from his control and allied it with Spain. Francis agreed to this arrangement even though he had earlier worked so assiduously against just this development. But in this case, his son would hold Burgundy. Henry may well have also seen the peace as reflecting Anne's undue influence and Francis's partiality toward his younger son. Henry was so aggrieved that he filed a formal protest with Parlement on December 12, 1544, insisting on the inalienability of crown lands—a legal challenge to his father and his brother. One evening, surrounded by his friends, Henry speculatively reconfigured the government as he would if he were king. Henry's jester characterized it as “selling the skin before the bear was dead,” when he reported the event to an infuriated Francis.⁴³Close

Despite the growing hostility between father and son, Henry inevitably assumed greater political preeminence after his brother Charles died in 1545. With only one surviving royal son, there was no other focus for a rival political party. Anne's prior commitment to Charles left her without much influence.

The rivalry between Diane and Anne not only attests to their great influence at court but also reveals in dramatic fashion the ways mistresses could complicate political issues and family relations. But it would be a mistake to construe this rivalry as that of two women simply jockeying for prominence. With a clear and consistent political position, supporting rival princes and policies, they were influential enough to shape politics in the last decade of Francis's reign. But Anne was invariably condemned for meddling. Diane was not, even though, as long as Francis reigned, her positions did not prevail.

By 1546, as it became increasingly clear that Henry would soon succeed his father, the Venetian ambassador Cavalli expressed great optimism about French prospects: “His [Henry's] qualities promise to France the most worthy king it has had in a hundred years.” He noted that, although Henry was not well-spoken or given to repartee, he was nonetheless firm in his opinions. Even if “his intelligence was not the quickest,” Cavalli concluded, “those men often succeed the best.”⁴⁴Close

Francis offered his son some dying words of wisdom. He warned Henry to be on guard against the Guises because “they will strip my children to their waistcoats and my poor people to their shirts.”⁴⁵Close He asked Henry to treat Anne with respect and urged him not to let ambitious individuals, especially Montmorency, into his council. These words suggest Francis's prophetic vision of the evils that would befall France during the Wars of Religion. Deathbed advice, which seemed to predict the future so accurately, gave chroniclers a compelling way to construct their narratives. But these words were first attributed to Francis many years after his death to indict Henry, who had not implemented its recommendations. Henry recalled Montmorency as grand master of the household and constable of France. He banned Anne from government, confiscated her goods, and dismissed her supporters from court. He used suspicions of Anne's treason as grounds to confiscate the duchy of Estampes and return it to the crown. In 1553 the duchy and the title went to Diane.

Henry, at least according to the Venetian special envoy Matteo Dandolo, seemed to change with his accession to the throne: “He has become gay” and behaved “less as a good soldier and more as a captain.” Dandolo further reported Henry's desire “that if the crown he was going to take would promise good government and assure the well-being of his people, God would give him the grace to let him have it for a long time, otherwise He would take it from him soon.” Contarini too reported that the new king had a natural goodness and welcomed all. These reports were taken as signs of Henry's likely success as king. Several ambassadorial reports explicitly emphasized his relationship with Diane as indicative of Henry's seriousness of purpose. Contarini remarked, “As for the pleasures of the flesh, if we compare him to his father … one could call him chaste.” Cavalli noted, “He is not given over to women; his [Diane] suffices.”⁴⁶Close In other words, Henry's devotion to his mistress enhanced his stature as king.

With Henry's accession to the throne, Diane wielded ever-greater power. Saint-Mauris, the Spanish ambassador, reported to Charles V: “As for the king, he continues to yield more and more to the yoke of Sylvius [Saint-Mauris's code word for Diane] and has become her subject and slave entirely, which his people lament.” He complained further: “The worst is that the king lets himself be led and does everything that Sylvius and his lords advise, which drives the people to despair.”⁴⁷Close Diane was forty-eight years old, and her influence with the king was not simply that of a mistress over her lover but also of a trusted political advisor over an unsure king. As Cavalli noted, Henry was “born to be governed rather than to govern.”⁴⁸Close Saint-Mauris explicitly complained that Diane's preeminence was reflected in the way Henry spent his time. He had previously held audiences after dinner to hear the grievances of his subjects but now allowed no one to approach him, instead spending his time with Diane. “When he has given her an account of all of the business he has transacted in the morning and up to that moment, whether with the Ambassadors or other persons of importance, he seats himself upon her lap, a guitar in his hand, upon which he plays and inquires of the Constable or of Aumale [Francis of Guise] if the said Sylvius [Diane] ‘has not preserved her beauty’ touching her bosom from time to time and regarding her attentively, like a man who is ensnared by love.”⁴⁹Close

For her supporters Diane, like Agnès Sorel before her, epitomized the benefits of love: The king was more chaste, his court more praiseworthy, her effect on him salutary. On the other hand, Diane's critics charged, she distracted him from his duty, and her power superseded that of others—men who were implicitly more appropriate advisors. The love of a king for a mistress was thus a double-edged sword.

Diane did not allow her official status to undermine her reputation for respectability; she sought to be a model of propriety. Henry, less discreet than she and interested in proclaiming their relationship, made the illusion of her respectability difficult to maintain. To make their association clear, he adopted black and white as his colors (fig. 4.4). The letters that adorn virtually every surface associated with his reign, including the embroidery on his clothing, even his coronation robe, are themselves ambiguous. They should perhaps be considered an apt reflection of the triangulated nature of his personal life. There are almost as many opinions about what the letters are and what they mean as there are people who have written about them (fig. 4.5). The symbol has an H. Each H is crossed with something, but just what that is has produced contested interpretations. It might be crossed with the crescent moon, Henry's symbol of his growing power but also a symbol of the goddess Diana. And a crescent imposed on an H can also form Ds on Hs. That D could be for Diane but it could also connote Henri Deux or Henry II. The crescent itself is the same shape as a C. Some crescents, especially in Catherine's castles, are much more rounded into a shape closer to the letter C, with more prominent marks on the ends—more clearly Cs than crescents or Ds.⁵⁰Close Thus debate over this emblem has persisted. The general division is between those who have seen it as an H and two Ds and those who have seen it as an H with two Cs.

Giovanni Capello, the nephew of the Venetian ambassador, remarked in his travel diary on his reading of the letters on Henry's clothing. “One sees at first an H…. One can see there also two Ds, which are the double initial of the Duchess of Valentinois…. Her true name is Diane, and the illusion is well manifested in these two crescents so united and so joined in the embrace of the two Ds, even as the two souls of the two lovers are united and reunited.”⁵¹Close The Hs and Ds, the colors black and white, and the ubiquitous crescent moon were consistent features of Henry's iconography tying him to Diane.

Catherine used her initial with Henry's as well; it even adorned her tomb. She may have appropriated it to efface Diane's relationship with her husband. If so, this effort became more effective after Henry was dead and Diane gone from the court. Some historians insist that the symbol cannot be associated with anyone but Catherine and Henry because royal symbols could only refer to the queen. That argument is not entirely persuasive because the symbol so often appears in black and white, colors emphatically associated with Diane, because it is so prominent in Diane's chateau of Anet, and because Henry used it to sign his letters to Diane but not to his wife.⁵²Close Henry was clearly willing to violate precedent in Diane's interest. Some distinguish two kinds of crests: an H with two Cs from an H with two crescent moons for Diane, although it is difficult to distinguish between them consistently or decisively.⁵³Close If the letters remain ambiguous, that ambiguity is something Diane might have fostered; it underscored her importance but obliquely.

Once Henry became king, Diane epitomized the power that a royal mistress could exert. Within days of the new king's ascent, four of her supporters gained positions on the council—two members of the Guise family and Saint-André and Montmorency, who led factions during the subsequent Wars of Religion. Diane's supporters received rich rewards for themselves and members of their families—governorships of provinces, chateaux, honors, and pensions. In 1539, Diane's daughter Françoise married Robert de La Marck, prince of Sedan and member of the Montmorency family. In 1547, when Diane was at the height of her authority, her younger daughter, Louise, married Claude de Lorraine of the Guise family. This was not only a brilliant alliance; it also bound Diane to the Guise faction, later leaders of the Catholic party in the Wars of Religion. She then advanced the career of her son-in-law, to whom Henry gave command of the army. These marriage alliances connected Diane to the two most important families in Henry Il's government.

Diane's support for Montmorency and the Guises, critics charge, was a gross misjudgment on her part. Her advocacy entrapped Henry in the clutches of those who later warred against his sons and tried to rob them of the crown. Their critics hold Francis's mistress Anne and Henry's mistress Diane responsible for the horrific unfolding of the Wars of Religion.⁵⁴Close These men were indeed the most powerful nobles in France, and their sons later warred against Henry for political and religious reasons. But neither these mistresses nor any other political leader could have foreseen the development of several features essential to the outbreak of religious warfare. Most importantly, they could not yet have been aware of how politically divisive Calvinism would be. Its dramatic spread, especially among elites, with its inherent call to theocracy and its explicit justification of the overthrow of kings in the name of religion, occurred slightly later. These mistresses, by supporting powerful men, preserved their own power and neutralized that of their rivals by playing them off against each other. Nonetheless, Diane's support of the Guises might explain some of Catherine's later hostility toward them. Catherine might have also observed Diane's willingness to play Montmorency off against the Guises to prevent either of them from exercising more power over Henry than she did—a strategy Catherine later deployed.

Throughout Henry's reign, Diane's influence at court grew ever more obvious and extensive. After the ninety official days of mourning his father's death, Henry made a triumphal entry into Reims on July 24, 1547. Apparent everywhere was the silver crescent moon, symbol of the goddess Diana, which he had taken for himself. From the earliest days of his reign, the interlaced letters or symbols appeared on every new public building. Henry had a gold medal struck with Diane's head on one side and the goddess Diana on the other, with the legend i conquered him who conquered all.

When Henry made triumphal entries, cities were eager to show Diane the deference the king expected. These ceremonial occasions thus presented his relationship with his mistress in elaborate, allegorical, public tableaux (fig. 4.6). Most notably, on his entry into Lyon in 1548, the municipal leaders paid obvious tribute to Diane. As the king processed through a forest, he was met by an entrancing young woman dressed as the goddess Diana, accompanied by a group of lightly attired nymphs. “Diana” led a lion by a black-and-white leash. Representing both the city and the sovereign, it was tied by love to Diana. This was the first public presentation of the mistress as a goddess connected to the king.⁵⁵Close On an obelisk, constructed in the center of town, victory crushed the furies and love extinguished the torches of discord. The beneficent effect of love on the kingdom was the overriding theme of this triumphal entry.⁵⁶Close “One cannot say to what point has come the grandeur and omnipotence of the duchess of Valentinois”⁵⁷Close (the latest and highest of Diane's many titles), the ambassador Contarini remarked on this occasion.

Catherine entered the city later that day. While it was customary for kings and queens to have separate entries to honor each, in this case, the Spanish ambassador reported the slight to the queen: “It is indeed true that little could be seen when the queen made her entry, because night came on and the people say that, as she is not good looking, the king gave orders that her pageant should be kept back until a late hour so that her highness should pass unnoticed.”⁵⁸Close Henry's love for his mistress, not his wife, elevated the kingdom.

Although Catherine again feared that she would be put aside, Diane still did not want a different wife who might be less indebted to her or of more interest to Henry. Catherine was useful as her spy within the court, not daring to refuse any service Diane exacted. Diane exerted her influence with Henry to ensure that Catherine was finally formally crowned queen of France in 1549.⁵⁹Close Although this measure enhanced Catherine's status, Diane was as prominent as the queen at the coronation; the event clearly took place with her approbation.

Although Catherine's often-cited “Never did a wife who loves her husband love his whore”⁶⁰Close is perhaps the most stinging indication of the hostility she felt for Diane, the relationship between the two women bears analysis. While there is no doubt that Catherine rankled under Diane's authority over her husband, the relationship in which they were both tied to Henry was one of mutual benefit in ways that might seem peculiar to the modern reader. Diane, as much as anyone, prevented Catherine's repudiation and, as Henry explicitly acknowledged, fostered Catherine's pregnancies by insisting that he spend some nights with her. When Diane attained her greatest preeminence, she and Catherine seemed to have a rapprochement best reflected in the activities Diane undertook on behalf of Catherine's children. Diane was present at their births and baptisms. She concerned herself with their well-being, choosing their wet nurses and controlling appointments to their households. When there was an epidemic near the chateau of Blois, the royal children were sent to stay with Diane. When Catherine's son Charles did not tolerate milk, Diane had him nursed with cider and beer. She commissioned artists to paint the children's portraits, arranged the funeral of one of Catherine's sons, and even tended Catherine during her near-fatal bout with scarlet fever.⁶¹Close

Diane maintained her political influence over Henry by making sure that no one, especially Montmorency, could usurp it. Although Montmorency had been Diane's ally in her battle with Anne, he now seemed a threat, for she wanted political as well as personal control over Henry. In 1552 Contarini remarked on Montmorency's growing power and the enmity between the mistress and the constable.⁶²Close Their enmity flared into open hostility when Montmorency sought to displace Diane by bringing to Henry's attention the lovely Jane Fleming, the illegitimate daughter of James IV of Scotland, who accompanied the young Mary Stuart when she arrived to marry the dauphin, Henry's son Francis. Although Diane benefited from Henry's great loyalty to his friends, so did Montmorency, and it was thus unlikely that Henry would repudiate him as Francis I had. But Diane secured her position and weakened Montmorency's by fostering the Guises as rivals to him and then working to hold the balance between them. The Spanish ambassador reported that Diane, “between the two enemies was a sort of all-powerful pivot.”⁶³Close Francis, the duke of Guise, and his brother Charles, the cardinal of Lorraine, were well positioned to enhance the status of their house, and they well understood the benefits of currying favor with the royal favorite. Diane advanced them to check rather than to negate Montmorency's power. She deployed this strategy more successfully than Catherine would later, largely because the religious conflict had not yet so clearly encroached on the political. Commenting further on the rivalry between the king's minister and his mistress, Contarini noted: “The person, without a doubt, whom the king loves and prefers is Madame de Valentinois [Diane]…. She is a woman of intelligence, who has always been the inspiration of the king.” The king's attachment to Montmorency, he concluded, was much subordinated to his need for Diane, which had a love “more lively” as its source.⁶⁴Close

Diane had unprecedented impact for a royal mistress—on the royal family, the court, and the politics of Henry's reign. She can reasonably be compared to Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's powerful mistress, in that she ruled, or aspired to rule, the country as well as the king.⁶⁵Close So extensive was her authority that all deferred to her. The king consulted with her on every issue, and ambassadors courted her: She knew all state secrets, all matters of council deliberation, and the content of all diplomatic dispatches and even signed some official correspondence HenriDiane.

Diane's political preeminence led Protestant polemicists to indict her for the renewed intensification of Protestant persecution during Henry's reign. Blaming Diane allowed Protestants to criticize royal policy indirectly but effectively. Henry was intent on persecuting heretics when peace allowed it, and Diane, as a staunch Catholic, doubtless supported his efforts. More reprehensible, she benefited directly from religious persecution; among her many sources of revenue were the confiscated goods of persecuted Protestants and Jews.

Diane's new titles and chateaux attested to her rising status. Not only had she profited from the confiscation of Anne de Pisseleu's goods, but she was also the beneficiary of an extraordinary tax collected explicitly on her behalf, which yielded three hundred thousand écus—revenue that ordinarily would have gone into the public treasury.⁶⁶Close The paulette, a special tax on the French Church levied, in this case, on each church bell, also raised revenue for Diane. As François Rabelais commented, “The king had hung all the bells in the kingdom around the neck of his new mare.”⁶⁷Close Diane was already the grand steward of Normandy when Henry made her the duchess of Valentinois. The more besotted the king, the worse the state of the kingdom's treasury; Henry's willingness to divert state funds to her was unprecedented. He gave her the gem of Renaissance chateaux, Chenonceau, which belonged by law to the crown and was thus inalienable. The conditions of the gift reflected Henry's concern for his mistress. He was not giving away crown property, he insisted, but simply transferring to Diane the property rights of Thomas Bohier, the chateau's original owner, in recognition of her husband's service to the crown. (Despite Henry's care, the legal status of this gift was challenged after his death.) Diane's sons-in-law also received important positions, and she cultivated an extensive patron-client network.⁶⁸Close

Unquestionably, Diane used her position to increase her wealth and the status of her family. Most of the sources we have in Diane's hand are accounts, demonstrating her meticulous attention to finances. She was as efficient a guardian of her financial interests as were male officeholders of the day. Even though Diane was one of the most successful royal mistresses in acquiring wealth, she was rarely condemned as venal, as Anne had been. Diane did not engage in the obvious influence peddling Anne had and was somewhat more subtle in her exercise of power. Equally significant, Diane's position as the king's mistress was not challenged by his son's mistress, as Anne had been. By the time Henry reigned, Diane's interest was completely aligned with his; his success as king magnified hers. Thus Diane retained her lofty reputation for great probity, virtue, and even purity.

Diane's charitable activities too contributed to her positive reputation; she, like Agnès, was to some degree redeemed by them. She founded and endowed a chapel, built a poorhouse for twelve women and six girls, and provided money for the girls' dowries. In her will, she left instructions for masses and ordered that one hundred poor persons be dressed at her expense. (The parish church in Anet still touts her piety.)

Diane was also extolled for her beneficial effect on the character of the court. Under her aegis, Henry's court was transformed from the freer court of Francis I. Diane introduced a new reign of austerity with fewer feasts and festivities. The court turned its attention to “thoughts, wise and virtuous,” as the poet Ronsard put it, praising Diane as “a wise woman of wise counsel and gentle courage.”⁶⁹Close This striking transformation heightened Diane's irreproachable reputation. When Madame de Lafayette wanted to criticize the decadence of the court of Louis XIV in her novel The Princess of Cleves, she contrasted it with that of Henry II: “At no time in France were splendor and refinement so brilliantly displayed as in the last years of the reign of Henry II. The monarch was courteous, handsome, and fervent in love: though his passion for Diane de Poitiers, Duchess de Valentinois, had lasted far above twenty years.”⁷⁰Close

Diane had faced losing her personal influence over Henry only once when he was much taken by Jane Fleming. Catherine and Montmorency had encouraged the relationship to diminish Diane's ascendency.⁷¹Close While Montmorency sought greater political power, Catherine wanted a mistress who might both captivate her husband and threaten her status as queen less than Diane. If Henry spurned Diane, Catherine would no longer be beholden to her and might carve out a political arena for herself. It is disconcerting enough when a mother promotes a mistress, as Louise did for Francis, but even more so when a queen promotes a new mistress for her husband in hopes of gaining some greater legitimacy for herself.

When Diane learned of the relationship, she was able to force a definitive break, even though Jane, who bore a son whom Henry acknowledged and named Henry d'Angoulême, had clearly hoped to supplant her. When Jane returned to Scotland, the English ambassador reported, she “departed hence with child by this King and it is thought that … she shall come to fetch another. If she do so, [there] is like to be combat…. The old worn pelf [Diane] bears thereby to lose some part of her credit, who presently reigneth alone and governeth without impeach.”⁷²Close Neither this affair nor Henry's other short-lived sexual relations undermined Diane's influence.⁷³Close His reliance on her showed no signs of abating. As Contarini reported, Diane had been Henry's inspiration, and he was bound to her and continued to love her despite her age.⁷⁴Close Other ambassadors were tactless enough to comment on Diane's fading looks. Although Contarini claimed she was “far from looking as old as she is,” Saint-Mauris noted that she was “very wrinkled and did not fool anyone.”⁷⁵Close Late in Henry's reign, when Diane was in her late fifties, she spent more time away from court, preferring to be at Anet. So throughout the 1550s, Henry and the court too spent much time there. Diane supervised the renovations of her holdings, including Chenonceau, notably building the bridge over the Cher River.

A decisive change occurred in Henry's reign when the long-standing conflict between Valois and Hapsburg, which Francis I and Charles V began and Henry II and Philip II continued, was finally set aside in 1559 so that both monarchs could more effectively stem the spread of Calvinism. Henry could dedicate himself to eradicating Calvinism, and Phillip II could try to halt its spread into the Low Countries. The marriage of Henry's daughter Elisabeth to Philip II would ratify the peace.

As part of the festivities celebrating the peace, a tournament was held in the Place Royale in Paris (now the Place des Vosges). Catherine de Medici, a great believer in astrology, tried to persuade Henry not to participate in the joust, because astrologers had warned her that the king should “avoid combat on a closed field in his forty-first year.”⁷⁶Close And Nostradamus predicted that “a young lion would overpower an old one on a field of battle in singular combat … his eyes gouged … to die a cruel death.”⁷⁷Close Diane, not much inclined to credit superstitions, did not try to dissuade Henry from participating. He went into pseudo-combat with Montgomery, the captain of the Scots Guard, wearing Diane's colors. As the two combatants approached each other, Montgomery's lance lifted Henry's visor and pierced his eye with its tip, accidentally inflicting the fatal wound. Henry lingered in agony for ten days. Ambrose Paré and Andreas Vesalius, respectively the most important surgeon and anatomist of the day, were called to his bedside but held out no hope of his recovery. During this time either Catherine prevented Diane from going to his side or Diane avoided going to Henry for fear of being shunted aside by the queen.⁷⁸Close

With Henry's death, Diane, like other official royal mistresses, lost her influence, although her status was protected to some degree by her daughters' marriages into the Guise and Montmorency families. The chateau of Anet, although constructed with state funds, had been built on the property of the Brézé family, and thus Diane could retain it and retreat to it as a refuge. Some of her supporters, notably the Guises, rallied to the young king and his wife, their niece, and turned against Diane. The duke of Guise immediately appropriated her apartments in the Louvre. Catherine made sure that the crown jewels and the chateau of Chenonceau, which Henry had given Diane, again became crown property. (Catherine gave Diane the chateau of Chaumont-sur-Loire in exchange—an exchange financially advantageous to Diane.) Only after she attained firm control during Charles IX's reign could Catherine recoup some of the severe losses to the royal treasury due to Henry's favors to his mistress. But Diane retained most of the enormous wealth she had amassed.⁷⁹Close

Diane retired to Anet, her spectacular Renaissance chateau in the center of Normandy. There she worked to preserve the goods she had acquired from her father, her husband, and her lover to enhance the position of her children and their offspring. She had accomplished much in pursuit of this goal; she was a very wealthy duchess, tied by marriage to some of the most powerful and influential families of France. Ultimately her offspring would be joined in marriage to the royal houses of Europe. A grandchild married a prince of Savoy. By the sixth generation, one of her descendants, Victor-Amadeus, was king of Sardinia; his daughter married Louis the duke of Burgundy; their son was Louis XV.⁸⁰Close

When she was sixty-four, Diane had a serious riding accident from which she never fully recovered. She died two years later in seclusion at Anet.

As prominent as Diane's political role was, her image as the goddess Diana, presented consistently throughout Henry's reign, was equally significant. It not only sanctified her but also ratified Henry's choice of her as a most fitting consort. His subjects either subscribed to this depiction of their relationship or considered it expedient to feign to do so.

Classical allusion was a significant feature of Renaissance literature and artistic representations, and depictions of Diana the huntress were common. But when Diane appropriated the goddess, she explicitly emphasized her virtue. As one of the twelve Olympians, the goddess Diana retained her virginity, which allowed her to exert authority over men—and, by association, so could the king's mistress. While Diane was often depicted in classical garb (or lack thereof) with bow and arrow, her body was not directly exposed to the viewer's gaze; instead it was usually slightly turned to suggest her reticence and chastity. Representations of her embodied sixteenth-century standards of beauty—tall, blond, and lithe. Depictions of Diane used these conventions to present her as ethereal, approaching the divine; the association of the mistress with the chaste, beautiful goddess heightened her authority.

Diane's appropriation of Diana the goddess not only played on classical tropes but also added new elements to create a cult particular to the French Renaissance, which underscored her relationship with Henry. She was frequently depicted in an affectionate relationship with a stag representing Henry, but the stag had fallen victim not to a hunter but to love. Several notable paintings, including one by François Clouet, depict Diane surrounded by other goddesses, as the king on horseback, clothed in black and white, looks on from afar, replicating the myth of the goddess Diana surprised by the hunter Actaeon (fig. 4.7).⁸¹Close

Diane was also associated with Venus, the goddess of love, and occasionally Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. These varied representations all placed her firmly in the realm of the ideal—of beauty, love, and wisdom. Some Catholic apologists even went so far as to compare her to the Virgin Mary, but poets firmly reattached her to love.⁸²Close They waxed lyrical about her beauty and goodness, extolling her lofty status, generosity, hostility toward heretics, solicitude for widows and orphans, and piety.⁸³Close Ronsard apostrophized her: “Your sun decorates you with its rays; you spread happiness everywhere on France.”⁸⁴Close

The goddess Diana offered Renaissance artists, poets, and courtiers, to say nothing of Diane herself, a rich array from which to choose. Her identification with the classical goddess elevated her above other royal mistresses and made her an important public symbol. The consistent emphasis on her chastity and virtue tied her to the integrity of the monarchy and the well-being of the kingdom. It suggested that the greater the appreciation of Diane's virtue, the more disinterested and beneficial her effect on the state, and as a result, the more appropriate and even commendable Henry's involvement with her.⁸⁵Close The close relationships between the images of Diane, the idealization of her relationship to Henry, and the glory and credibility of his reign were ones she fostered, Henry endorsed, artists replicated, and the court embraced.

Thus Diane's image did not simply redound to her personal credit; it also fostered crucial dimensions of Henry's kingship. Especially compelling was the understanding of their relationship as a chivalric romance. Henry's notion of himself as king and partner in his relationship with Diane was fifthly rooted in chivalry. His earliest association with Diane played on chivalric themes, but during his reign the court was completely captivated by its reading of the romance Amadis de Gaula. This multivolume novel by Garcia Rodriquez de Montalbo, published in 1508, was based on fourteenth-century tales by the Portuguese writer João de Lobiera. His protagonist, Amadis, epitomized the true knight; he was constant in love and in his defense of the defenseless. The book told the tale of two brothers, sons of a mythical king of Wales, who were abandoned, exiled to a foreign country, and enslaved by a magician. Amadis fell in love at the age of twelve with Oriane, the daughter of the king of the Britons who gave him a sword that allowed him to triumph over his enemies. He did not marry Oriane because of a conflict with her father. But, because his love was true, his sexual relations were blameless or even inspiring; his love inspired his feats of glory. Was this not, in essence, Henry's story?

Amadis had an immediate and obvious appeal to Henry, for he, like the king, was jousting, making war, or making love. Henry understood his role as the devoted knight of his ladylove and his relationship with Diane as a lived version of the chivalric romance. This fiction was then staged and ritually reenacted in the court. Brantôme reported that Henry and Diane spent afternoons reading the tales of Amadis aloud to each other. The French translator of the eleventh volume not only dedicated it to Diane but also took pains to compare her to the heroine.⁸⁶Close Diane, like Oriane, recast the chivalric lady as both ideal and sexual. The novel played a crucial role in creating a literary representation of the royal relationship, and Henry was eager to promote this understanding. Each volume, as it appeared in French translation over the course of his reign, became an instant best seller, offering, as one literary scholar has suggested, “less a mirror in which a generation was reflected than a model it chose to emulate.”⁸⁷Close

Diane's image is perhaps most strikingly apparent today at Anet, her refuge (fig. 4.8). Constructed as a palace of love for a king and great lady, the chateau offered a veritable stage set on which to array the panoply of her images and to enshrine her relationship with Henry. Although it was built on land she inherited from her husband, Henry financed the ancient chateau's elaborate Renaissance reconstruction by Philibert Delorme, the most notable architect of the French Renaissance. The chateau was full of great artistic treasures, commissioned by Henry to portray his mistress, including Jean Goujon's famous sculpture originally in the courtyard of Anet, now on display in the Louvre (fig. 4.9). The famous relief by Benvenuto Cellini stands over the central entry, with the Latin inscription, which translates as: this ample dwelling has been consecrated by phoebus to the good diane who is grateful to him for what she has received (fig. 4.10). The chateau also housed a fabulous collection of books. Francis I had decreed that every book published in France be placed in the royal depository; Henry amended the decree so that a second copy went to Diane. Anet thus stands as a powerful example of the symbiotic relationship between Renaissance artists and a powerful, wealthy royal mistress.

Even more striking than the representations of Diane found in her chateau is her prominence in the décor of the royal chateau of Fontainebleau, where one of the side chapels, reserved for dignitaries, is decorated with hers and Henry's initials with the legend she attained everything she attempted. In the royal ballroom on either side of the throne, frescoes depict her virtues and her ability to overcome the vices afflicting the kingdom.

Unlike Agnès Sorel, who took several centuries to find a place in the historical literature, Diane remained prominent. Her positive image was created over Henry's lifetime and retained its allure. His contemporaries praised the refinement of his court, and Diane was credited with fostering Henry's appreciation of the arts. Diane's positive reputation was due to her assiduous cultivation of her image and to Henry's unwavering support both for her and dedication to burnishing her image. Protestant polemicists, like Théodore de Bèze and Jean Crespin, portrayed Diane as a dishonored woman, but they did so to discredit her religious views. Although he was a very young man when Diane reigned at court, Brantôme both praised her and recognized the religious basis for opposition to her: “Aside from her beauty, she was very clever and generous…. Being what she was, she could only persuade, counsel, and preach to the king things that were great, high, and generous…. And above all, she was a good Catholic and hated those of the [Protestant] religion; and this is why they so hated and maligned her.”⁸⁸Close

When a band of revolutionaries destroyed Diane's tomb and exhumed her, they reported that she remained beautiful. (The miraculous preservation of royal mistresses seems common to hagiographical treatments of them.) Diane has retained a reputation for sanctity—a mistress who redeemed a king, making him bolder, manlier, and a better ruler. Her emphasis on propriety cloaked her in virtue, and her ethereal beauty made her worthy of a king's devotion.

The dramatic story that Francis demanded her honor to save her father inspired literary interpretations. But the story redounded to her credit. In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo used it to condemn the cruel exploitation of a beautiful, devout young woman by a rapacious, tyrannical monarch. In his The King Amuses Himself, her father denounced the king for having “tarnished, blighted, soiled, dishonored, and broken Diane de Poitiers”; but, by his actions, the king revealed himself as a tyrant.⁸⁹Close The tale also was the basis of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto.

Fiction then shaped subsequent historical accounts. Rather surprisingly, Michelet was quite entranced by every laudatory, romantic story told about Henry Il's mistress and could not resist the drama of this one. Accepting the story as valid, he enhanced the conventional account, suggesting that their relationship became one of mutual respect: “The Lady, who was twenty-eight years old, endowed with style and grace, with a very virile spirit, went straight to the king and walked with him. In saving her father, she took a solid political position as a friend of the king.”⁹⁰Close He was almost tolerant of Diane's preeminence, but significantly, because he saw it as primarily cultural and thus more benign than female political power. Once the mistress was safely consigned to the realm of romance, she could be extolled and her myth further burnished.

It is as an image that Diane remains a most distinctive royal mistress. Despite the extent of her influence and the duration of her reign over Henry's heart, the actual relationship between them remains somewhat obscure. Although Henry's devotion to her was obvious, Diane's sentiments and motives are less apparent. The historical record suggests little of the actual woman but instead details her impact and her acquisition of wealth. Diane's deliberate emphasis on her moral probity also protected her private sentiments from scrutiny. Her effective manipulation of her image in works of art and literature cloaked the emotional and the personal by presenting Diane as idealized and ethereal. She was unquestionably the mistress most adept in enhancing her status and creating her image. Diane's construction of her image not only protected her position but also played an important role in shaping Henry's cultural legacy. In important ways, the image became the reality. Diane constructed a court culture in which her relationship with the king embodied the ideals and, ironically, the moral authority of courtly love. Renowned for her virtue and probity, Diane was praised as a model of the beneficial effects of women on the Renaissance court.

Henry's association with Diane enhanced his image and shaped the understanding of his reign. For their contemporaries, Diane's virtue made Henry virtuous. This was not simply an example of myth triumphing over reality; Diane was deemed to have elevated the court by effectively regulating the king's sexuality. Henry was devoted to one mistress (with only a couple of other affairs documented with pregnancies). As a result, his court was less licentious than his father's had been. Appreciations of Diane's incomparable virtue legitimated her political advice, making it more credible and authoritative. Shaped by such advice, the political actions of the king too were more praiseworthy. Diane's virtue thus purified the court and elevated the monarchy.

The virtues of this mistress also recast the royal family. Henry's relationship with his wife, Catherine, was relegated to the merely prosaic, mundane, and pragmatic. To an almost unprecedented degree, Diane usurped the status and roles of the queen and reduced Catherine to royal consort. As Diane was idealized to the point of the ethereal, Henry's relationship with her was tinged by her divinity, and their adulterous relationship became the public face of the monarchy.

The idealized image, specifically of Henry as chivalric king, could be deployed to respond to the political realities of the sixteenth century as well. Late in his reign, Henry turned his attention from war with the Hapsburg monarchy to war on Protestants. As the chivalric king assumed the mantle of crusader against the new, Protestant infidels, Diane, a firm advocate of Catholic interests (and the beneficiary of all seized Protestant property), was heralded as the inspiration behind Henry's religious zeal.

What made these ways of presenting the king compelling to his contemporaries, especially since it is obvious to us that they offered a very particular, not to say peculiar, version of reality? These myths were so powerful because they reinforced an idealized vision of the monarchy that the king wanted to cultivate and that some Frenchmen were eager to believe—that their monarch was valiant and a fitting heir to a crusading past. In the sixteenth century, French kings were still trying to extend the territory under royal control and to challenge the feudal aristocracy for power. A crusading, chivalric king, cloaked in quasi-divinity, even if through association with his mistress, was clearly above mere mortal nobles. Such a king also gave France a privileged status among nations.

These public presentations of the mistress and her relationship with the king worked because they built on a heritage of myth and allegory shared by French elites. They used images that could be read by their contemporaries. Ability to “read” them then attested to one's education and sophistication. Images of the royal relationship used the newer cultural models of the Renaissance effectively. While we use the term humanism to describe the intellectual movement associated with the Renaissance absorption and adaptation of classical texts, in the sixteenth century the most influential form of humanism was a particular variant—courtly humanism, which moved out of Italy into the courts of northern Europe. Not surprisingly, it focused on the court as the purveyor of culture and the monarchy as the highest form of political life, explicitly rejecting the civic humanism of Italian republics. It was particularly indebted to Plato's idealization of the philosopher king.

Images of Diane and her relationship to Henry reflected courtly humanism by explicitly invoking Neoplatonism. Diane occupied the realm of Platonic ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Her relationship with Henry was cloaked in myth, obscured by a literary and artistic veil, suggesting the Neoplatonic vision of this world as a reflection of the heavenly. This mystification could only work in a culture nourished by mythology—where elites and royals had themselves portrayed as Greek and Roman gods, for example, as in the depiction of courtiers as gods surrounding Diana (fig. 4.11).

The court of Henry and Diane clearly appreciated and assumed the moral authority courtly humanism ascribed to it. Castiglione famously presented the court, adjudicated by women, as the vehicle for civilizing society but especially for transforming the warrior into a veritable Renaissance man. In The Book of the Courtier, a man was not simply strong but also sophisticated, proficient in fighting and writing, wrestling and dancing.⁹¹Close Women who scorned earlier, feudal models of masculinity and endorsed those of the Renaissance courtier controlled this transformation. The benefits of Diane's tutelage first on the young Henry and then on the court were prime examples of the civilizing mission of courtly humanism. Their relationship not only epitomized the new authority of women in the Renaissance court but also allowed Henry to be seen as the model Renaissance prince.

Diane's image empowered her, shaped Henry's cultural legacy, and in important ways became the reality. She presented Henry to the court and ultimately the country as a valiant, devoted chivalric hero, and herself as his virtuous (almost chaste) lady worthy of devotion. These images enhanced Renaissance kingship, and the court ritually reinforced this morally and politically elevated notion. These images of Diane remain the most prominent and evocative of Henry's reign.⁹²Close They serve still, as they did in his time, to define it. Although Diane's chastity, not surprisingly, has fallen out of current accounts, their relationship as a great royal romance retains its allure and captivates many—from French schoolchildren to modern popularizers.

The idealized depiction of the royal relationship may not reveal their actual relationship (or even Diane's actual physical appearance), but it is significant for several reasons. First, the French Renaissance constructed some of its most significant and durable images and myths around influential and powerful women, which proved effective ways to praise or disparage their power and authority and the men associated with them. Secondly, we should not assume that these images were powerful because sixteenth-century Frenchmen were naive. Instead, we should appreciate the very sophisticated cultural context required for interpreting the complex allegories and rich cultural allusions on which they relied. It would be a mistake to assume that those who produced these images or recognized their implications were anything but sophisticated interpreters of their culture and, indeed, their inheritance from classical antiquity. These images were successful in part because they relied on the effective presentation of persuasive ideas. They display the great skills of Renaissance artists and writers and the sophistication of mythmakers in using the media at their disposal, and we should not fail to recognize these qualities. But we might draw a more sobering lesson from this case: It is an example of the power and duration of images, constructed to serve personal and political interests, which over time solidify into myth. Images and the myths they enshrine remain most potent when they serve the interests of those who subscribe to them as well as those who promote them and when their constructors have great access to wealth and power—as did Henry and Diane.

Diane offered a much fuller image of the royal mistress and her roles than Agnès Sorel had. Subsequent idealizations of Agnès may be indebted to the larger role later played by Diane. Diane so enhanced the credibility of the royal favorite that Gabrielle d'Estrées will not only present herself as the goddess Diana but also be emboldened to envision a future as queen. After all, Diane was accorded the dignity of a queen, while Catherine was forced to assume, as long as Henry lived, the lesser role of legal concubine.⁹³Close