ANST - Musing on June 22: Kiss Me, Kill Me, Kate!

[j'lynn yeates]

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.. from the far west, the next installment of Sir. B's rather unique
and amusing take on medieval history.  for your continued enjoyment.

i particularly like ... "no matter how wonderful you are, kill 50,000
folks and that is all anyone remembers" (read on for context)

'wolf
.. the courier


On this date June 22, 1559 Philip II king of Spain took to wife
Elizabeth of Valois. Now that sounds like a happy occasion and you
can
bet there was plenty of great food and heavy drink to go around.
Phil
II was hardly a pimpled faced youth; he had two wives die previous to
Liz.  Both Phil and Liz were Roman Catholics so they were compatible.
No, really that matters! Understand that Liz was a pawn in her
mother’s
game. Who was Mommy Dearest? You may have heard of her: Catherine de
Médicis. Let’s talk about her.

Catherine de Médicis (1519-89), was queen of France (1547-59) and
mother of the last three Valois kings of France. She was the major
force in French politics during the 30 years of so-called Roman
Catholic-Huguenot wars and an instigator of the St. Bartholomew's Day
Massacre. More on that in a second.

Catherine, I always called her Kate, was born on April 13, 1519, in
Florence, Italy, the daughter of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de'
Medici, called Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was pretty darned
good:
a patron of the arts and light-handed ruler of the center of arts for
all of Europe.  In 1533 she married the duc d'Orléans, who became
king
of France in 1547 as Henry II. She twiddled her dainty thumbs during
the reign of her husband and that of her first son, Francis II, but
on
Frank's death in 1560 the government fell entirely into her hands.
Huzzah! She ruled as regent for her second son, Charles IX, until he
reached his majority in 1563, and she continued to dominate him for
the
duration of his reign. Hey, aren’t we all still 10 years old to our
moms? You really need to see the movie "Queen Margot" to get a feel
for
this. Pretty dysfunctional parenting.

In her righteous determination to preserve royal power at any cost,
Kate devoted her energies to maintaining a teeter-totter balance
between the Protestant group known as the Huguenots, a sort of a
cleanish rabble led by the French military leader Gaspard de Coligny,
and the Roman Catholics, led by the powerful house of Guise, sleazy
Cavalier types. During the religious civil wars that began in 1562,
Kate, a good Roman Catholic, usually supported the Church.
Sometimes,
however, "political expediency" led her to switch her support to the
Huguenots. This hard work also affected the personal affairs of her
family. After all she arranged for her daughter, Elizabeth of Valois,
to become the third wife of the powerful Roman Catholic Philip II. In
1572 Catherine found it somehow logical to marry another daughter,
Margaret (Margot) of Valois, to the Protestant king Henry of Navarre,
who later became Henry IV, king of France.

Later in 1572 she found the growing Huguenot influence over her son
Charles, the French king, a tad frightening –I mean Chuck was
treating
Coigny as a father figure. Somehow that custody battle was bound to
cause hard feelings. Accordingly, she "kind of suggested" the plot to
assassinate the Protestant leader Coligny that led to his death and
the
deaths of an estimated 50,000 other Huguenots in the St.
Bartholomew's
Day Massacre (1572). Those nice Protestant folk were in town for the
wedding of Margot and Henry. I guess it was one way to cut down on
the
catering bill.

After the death of Charles in 1574 and the accession to the throne of
her third son as Hank III, Catherine's power declined. She died in
Blois, France, on January 5, 1589.

Now some of you may have heard of Kate’s liking for poison. I say to
you, pish-and-tosh. Sure she gave folks gloves with arsenic inside of
them but it was a homeopathic treatment for arthritis. And those
books
with heavy metal inks? She was just ahead of her time as a
fontaholic.
Trust me.

And nobody much talks about Kate as a patron of the arts. Her
interest
in architecture was demonstrated in the building of a new wing of the
Louvre Museum, in initiating construction of the Tuileries gardens,
and
in building the château of Monceau. Her personal library, containing
numerous rare manuscripts, was renowned in Renaissance France.

What can we learn from Kate, her sons and her daughters? Sometimes it
is good to play both sides? Look for ways of economizing on those
dreadful wedding bills? Give your daughters away but keep your sons
where you can watch them? How about no matter how wonderful you are,
kill 50,000 folks and that is all anyone remembers?  Maybe we should
remember that old saying taught to me by Captain Penny out of
Cleveland, Ohio: "You can fool some of the people all of the time;
all
of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool Mom!"


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