greeted her with tears in his eyes. Within months, he had wangled her engagement to Henry, Duke of Orleans, second in line to the French throne. Pope Clement was delighted. With the usual Medici gift for understatement, he proudly announced “the greatest match in the world.”
Henry’s father, Francis I, was also pleased and very keen to help. On the couple’s wedding night in 1533 he stayed in their bedchamber until he was sure “each had shown valour in the joust.” Despite this promising start, it was ten years before Catherine bore Henry a child. That she survived as his wife bears testimony to her strength of will and shrewd political instincts.
It certainly wasn’t her looks that did it. Although she was said to have “delicate features,” she was short with a “too large mouth” and the trademark bulging eyes of the Medici. Despite her trim figure and a beauty regime that involved applying a daily face mask of pigeon dung, the Venetian ambassador was moved to say that she looked good “only when her face is veiled.” Yet she had a definite sense of style, shocking the French court with her racy two-inch-high heels and her steel corsets, made by her husband’s armorer and the secret of her thirteen-inch waist. She was a game girl, too—she hunted enthusiastically until she was well into her sixties and introduced riding sidesaddle to the French (thus showing off her shapely calves, one of her few visual strong points).
Catherine’s other fashionable innovations were broccoli, artichokes, cauliflower, and the fork. She also pioneered the wearing of perfume, hair dye, and underwear; and despite never touching alcohol, she was an enthusiastic early adopter of tobacco. She was an avid collector, garlanding her palaces with imported china, minerals, dolls, stuffed crocodiles, and a host of live pets, including her favorite, a long-tailed monkey from the Indies. She fussed over it continually, calling it her lucky talisman.[4]
Catherine set a new European standard for opulent parties, masques, and balls. Her entertainments, which deployed the finest artists, dancers, architects, and musicians of the day, were known as
During her barren years, Catherine’s position as queen was under constant threat, particularly when Henry proved his virility by fathering a child with a servant. Roused by this, he took Catherine’s famously beautiful cousin, Diane de Poitiers, as a mistress. Catherine refused to give up trying to conceive, downing large drafts of mule’s urine, wearing stags’ antlers, and dressings of cow dung, and consulting her friend Nostradamus for advice. She even bored a hole in the floor of her husband’s bedchamber so she could stand underneath to spy on Henry and Diane and pick up any practical tips. Some historians credit the royal physician, Jean Fernel, with the decisive breakthrough. He had noticed some “irregularities” in the couple’s organs of generation and suggested a way to solve the problem. Whatever it was, after her first child was born, Catherine had no further trouble conceiving. She produced nine more children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Three of her sons became kings of France and two of her daughters married kings. She outlived all but two of them.
Her sole aim through her years as consort, and then as the guiding power through the reigns of her three sons, was to keep the Valois dynasty of her husband in the ascendant. To do so, she had to navigate her way through the French Wars of Religion, which threatened to tear the country apart between 1562 and 1598, by shrewdly playing off Catholic against Huguenot. In defense of political stability she was capable, when necessary, of acts of startling viciousness, even toward her own children. On discovering that her teenage daughter Marguerite was sleeping with the son of her archrival, the Duke of Guise, she dragged her out of bed, ripping her nightclothes and pulling out handfuls of her hair. Later, when Marguerite was caught again (this time being unfaithful to her husband, King Henry of Navarre), Catherine had the lover executed, cut Marguerite out of her will, and never spoke to her again.
Catherine’s last months were plagued by bouts of gout and colic (she was always a big eater and once nearly died after consuming a vat of chicken-gizzard stew). After her death, a chronicler observed that “no more notice was taken of her than of a dead goat.” Her bones were later thrown into a pit by the Revolutionary mob. Her lavish buildings have mostly been destroyed. Even her power broking and intrigue didn’t outlast her. Just eight months after her passing, three hundred years of Valois rule ended with the murder of her son, Henry III. Her long-suffering son-in-law, Marguerite’s husband, became Henry IV of France, founding the Bourbon dynasty. Despite having suffered serial humiliation at the hands of both Medici ladies, he was surprisingly generous about his former mother-in-law, commending her “wise conduct” and commenting, “I am surprised that she never did worse.” Perhaps the best epitaph for Catherine’s ambiguous legacy comes from a contemporary who wisely chose to remain anonymous: “She had too much wit for a woman, and too little honesty for a queen.”
If part of the appeal of monkeys for royalty was their rarity and peculiar miniature-human quality, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that real miniature humans also found themselves at court. Catherine de’ Medici practically farmed her troupe of dwarfs, keeping them dressed in finery and making sure they had a whole retinue of servants to look after them. She even arranged inter-dwarf marriages and encouraged them to breed. The strange fascination that dwarf sex exerted is another link with monkeys: Both were seen as helpless victims of animal lust. Getting monkeys and dwarfs to play together was even more fun. Here’s an account of a wrestling match between a dwarf and a monkey, arranged for the entertainment of Cosimo I de’ Medici not long after he became Duke of Florence in 1537:
The dwarf had two injuries, one in the shoulder and the other in the arm, while the monkey was left with his legs crippled. The monkey eventually gave up and begged the dwarf for mercy. The dwarf, however, didn’t understand the monkey’s language and having seized the monkey by the legs from behind kept beating his head on the ground. If My Lord the Duke hadn’t stepped in, the dwarf would have gone on to kill him. The dwarf fought naked, having nothing to protect him except a pair of undershorts that covered his private parts. Suffice it to say that the dwarf was the victor and he won ten scudi in gold.
Cosimo’s great-granddaughter, Henrietta Maria, Charles I of England’s queen, was another monkey and dwarf enthusiast. Her court favorite was the most celebrated of all English little people, Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1619–82), keeper of the royal monkey.
Jeffrey Hudson was born in Oakham, Rutland. He was the son of a bull-baiting butcher “of lusty stature” and no one could understand why he was so small. Local theories ranged from his mother’s choking on a gherkin while pregnant to dark rumors about his parents keeping him in a box. Actually, he suffered from growth-hormone deficiency, caused by a misfiring pituitary gland.
At the age of eight he had reached only eighteen inches in height. His father, sensing an opportunity for betterment, took him to his employer, the Duke of Buckingham. The duchess, Katherine, was entranced. Her husband was the king’s “favorite” at the time and very probably his lover, too. This did not please the queen, so the duchess decided to present Jeffrey to her as a gift: a peace offering from one wronged wife to another. She arranged for the little man to arrive at court inside a cold venison pie. Jeffrey then leaped out, bowed, and marched up and down the table in a full suit of armor. He was an instant hit. The queen invited him to enter her service, gave him a servant of his own, and put him in charge of her pet monkey, Pug.
Jeffrey soon found his niche as a court entertainer, making friends with a 7?-foot-tall porter called William Evans. They developed an act together where Evans would pull a loaf of bread out of one pocket and Hudson out of the other and proceed to make a sandwich. The two were often seen together in public and a number of London pubs were named in their honor. Together with a later arrival, Thomas Parr, who claimed to be 151 years old, they were known as the Three Wonders of the Age.
Jeffrey was more than just a curiosity: He was bright and audacious enough to act as a diplomat for the Stuart court. At the age of eleven, he was part of an embassy sent to France to bring back a midwife for the pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria. The ambassadors were granted an audience by Marie de’ Medici, the queen’s mother, who was so taken with Jeffrey that she presented him with $3,000 worth of jewelry. This was an enormous sum of money (equivalent to almost $20 million today). Jeffrey’s father, by comparison, probably earned around $15 a year as a butcher.
In the 1620s and 1630s, the French coastal town of Dunkirk was an independent Flemish state and a notorious pirate base. It was these “Dunkirkers” who intercepted the royal ship on its way back across the Channel,
