Henry IV of France's Wives and Mistresses - Marie De' Medici

Marie De' Medici

In October 1599, the parlement of Paris officially petitioned that Henry marry a princess worthy of his dignity. Henry took note and began considering candidates from several foreign states. According to Sully, however, he ruled out a German wife, on the grounds that it would feel like going to bed with a wine-barrel. Henry was keenest on Maria de' Medici, the niece of Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the daughter of the previous duke, Francesco I de' Medici. What he found particularly attractive about Maria was her enormous wealth.

On 17 December 1599, the Archbishop of Arles pronounced the annulment of Henry's marriage to Marguerite of Valois. The Medici marriage contract was signed in April 1600, pledging a huge dowry of 600,000 écus, part of which was subtracted to pay Henry's debts to Ferdinando. Henry played his part by proclaiming undying devotion to Maria in a series of letters, though he was sending similar love letters to Henriette d'Entragues, telling her in one that he wanted to kiss her a million times. A proxy marriage took place in Florence in October 1600, and then Maria—to be known in France as Marie—sailed in great pomp for Marseille, where she disembarked on 3 November. Henry, on campaign in Savoy, rode to meet her at Lyon, where he found her at supper. He visited her afterwards in her chamber; according to Ralph Winwood, secretary to English ambassador Sir Henry Neville:

She met him at the door, and offered to kneel down, but he took her in his arms, where he held her embraced a long time ... He doth profess to the World the great Contentment he finds in her, how that for her Beauty, her sweet and pleasing carrriage, her gracious behaviour, she doth surpass the relation which hath been made of her, and the Expectation which he thereby conceived.

The couple underwent a second marriage ceremony in Lyon; and Marie finally reached Paris on 7 February, already pregnant. She found her new home, the Louvre, so shabby that at first she thought Henry was playing a joke. She gave birth to a son, Louis, at the Palace of Fontainebleau on 7 September 1601, to the delight of Henry, who had rushed from military duties to her bedside to serve, he joked, as one of her midwives. The moment Henry was told that the child was a boy, he ushered two hundred courtiers into the chamber to share the euphoria. The baby was fed a spoonful of wine and handed over to a governess, Baroness Monglat, and to the physician Jean Héroard, an expert on the bone structure of horses. According to Winwood, the baby was a "strong and a goodly prince, and doth promise long life". The birth of a dauphin, as the first son of a French king was known, inspired rejoicing and bonfires throughout France.

Marie believed that after bearing a son, she "would begin to be a queen". However, a few weeks later, Henrietta d'Entragues also produced a son, and Henry not only made just as much fuss over this son but declared that he was better-looking, not fat and dark like Louis and the Medici. In the words of biographer David Buisseret, "the royal couple was well embarked upon nine years of mutual recrimination and misunderstandings, in which the fault plainly lay with the king".

Henry had made Marie's position clear to her from the first. When she began by pressing him to accept the decrees of the Council of Trent, he told her to keep her nose out of state business and look after herself. Shortly after Marie's arrival in Paris, Henry had introduced Henriette d'Entragues to her, reportedly pushing Henriette further towards the ground when her curtsey was not low enough. He housed his senior mistress close to the Louvre and was seen dining with the queen and d'Entragues together. Marie also had to cope with a second public mistress, La Bourdaisière, as well as with Henry's continued visits to Zamet's house for services provided by "la belle garce Claude". In the next nine years, Marie bore Henry six children; but he also sired five more by d'Entragues, Jacqueline du Beuil, and Charlotte des Essarts. Nonetheless, Henry often wrote affectionate letters to Marie and in other ways treated her with respect.

Henriette d'Entragues never reconciled herself to Henry's marriage, and she drove Marie to tears by calling her his "fat banker", claiming her own children were Henry's legitimate heirs and branding the dauphin a bastard. Henry's devotion to d'Entragues was tested during the revolt of Marshal Biron in 1602, in which her half-brother, Charles, Count of Auvergne, was implicated and she was compromised. Though Biron was executed, Henry released Auvergne to please Henriette. In 1604, she was at the heart of a Spanish-backed plot to install her son by the king as heir to the throne. Her father, the sieur d'Entragues, was involved in this plot, along with, again, her half-brother. Henriette d'Entragues was sentenced to confinement in a convent, but Henry was moved to spare her even that and allowed her to retire to her estate at Verneuil. Despite the king's clemency, Henriette d'Entragues may have continued to plot further against him. According to a government report of 1616, a former companion of d'Entragues, Mlle d'Escoman, had claimed in 1611 that d'Entragues had met François Ravaillac, Henry's assassin of 1610. However, this evidence is compromised by the fact that, at the time she made this accusation, Mlle d'Escoman was in prison on another charge .

The dauphin, Louis, turned out to be a difficult and temperamental child, and some historians have blamed this on his parents and the circumstances of his upbringing. He was raised just outside Paris at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not only alongside Marie's other children by Henry but, as Henry insisted, with several children of Henry's mistresses. Henry always seemed to get his mistresses pregnant at the same time as Marie. Just as Marie was in constant competition with Henry's mistresses, so her children were forced to compete with their children for his affection. The fact that Henry's three children by Gabrielle d'Estrées were older than the heir to the throne caused particular problems of rivalry. César and Alexandre were later to rebel against Louis when he was king. He did not hesitate to throw them into prison.

Louis shared his father's stubbornness, but he may have inherited his temper tantrums from his mother, who often gave Henry tongue-lashings in public. Although Marie has been accused of lacking affection for her children, a study of her letters reveals the contrary, though she was a stern disciplinarian. She wrote to the dauphin's governess, for example, asking her to avoid whippings when the weather was hot and to beat Louis only "with such caution that the anger he might feel would not cause any illness". On another occasion, she reprimanded her middle daughter, Christine, for being ill, accusing her of not following the advice of her doctors. Marie personally educated the children in practical matters, such as etiquette. After Henry's assassination in 1610, she became regent of France and retained influence over Louis XIII until he finally rejected her in 1617.

Henry's last passion was for Charlotte of Montmorency, the fifteen-year-old wife of Henry, prince of Condé, First Prince of the Blood. The king had arranged Charlotte's marriage to Condé for his own convenience, in order to sleep with her himself when he pleased. To escape from this predicament, the couple fled to Brussels. The king was enraged and threatened to march into Flanders with an army unless the Habsburg governors returned Condé and his wife at once. At the time, he was also threatening war with the Habsburgs over the succession to the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, so historians are unsure how crucial in itself Charlotte's return was as a reason for war. Condé continued to provoke Henry from Flanders. When asked to drink to the queen of France, he replied that there seemed to be more than one queen of France, maybe as many as four or five.