French Wars of Religion (Intro) - A Fateful Tournament

This is the first article of a planned series on the French Wars of Religion, covering the fateful tournament held to celebrate the royal marriage between the Houses of Valois and Habsburg.

Paris: June 30, 1559

The mood was festive. Paris was celebrating as it hadn’t for quite some time. The occasion of their jubilation was the recent peace between France and Spain, now to be secured in the upcoming marriage between King Henry II’s eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and King Philip II of Spain. For as long as most anybody in France could remember, the Kingdoms of France and Spain had been bitter rivals, at war more often than at peace. During those bloody years of conflict, all else came to a standstill.

Farmer boys beat their ploughshares into swords, young nobles bade their mothers and sweethearts farewell, and with each campaign season, the cream of France’s youth marched off to war. Sometimes it was to the distant battlefields of Italy, where they shed their blood to seize cities and villages they had never heard of. In other years the battle was closer to home, and the soldiers struggled to protect France’s extensive frontiers against invading Spanish or Imperial troops.

Promising young lives were snuffed out, limbs were lost, hopes crushed, and dreams shattered during those years of the sword. Everyone in France felt the strain of war. From the highest ranks of the nobility, who were expected to serve the king on the battlefield with their bodies and sons; to the merchants, who suffered the frequent seizure of their goods, trade embargoes, and loss of investments; down to the lowliest peasants, who indeed, suffered the most when an enemy army came marching through their land, plundering, and burning – none remained untouched. The people had grown tired of war, tired of the bloodshed, tired of the never-ending taxes imposed upon them by the conflict.

But now, those long years of war were finally coming to an end. Earlier in the year, French and Spanish negotiators at Cateau-Cambresis had agreed on a mutually acceptable framework for a lasting peace between their two kingdoms. Unlike previous treaties between the two powers, Cateau-Cambresis was not intended to be a stopgap peace, a peace just long enough to allow the two sides to re-arm for the next round of conflict. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis was intended to put a decisive end to the Valois-Habsburg wars, and it contained several clauses to ensure that the peace would be maintained. One of those clauses was this royal marriage.

The joining of two royal houses in matrimony was one of the most potent diplomatic manoeuvres available in a time and place where the institution of monarchy reigned supreme. When two royal houses married into one another, they made as extreme a statement of friendship and peace as was possible during those turbulent times. So now, the people of Paris were turning out for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, of the House of Valois, to the Habsburg King Philip II of Spain.

Outside, the city celebrated. Wine flowed like water, the sound of musical instruments filled the air, and the common people gawked at the ostentatious displays of wealth by the royalty and nobility, whose carriages clattered through the city’s crowded streets as they wended their way towards the royal pavilion.

Over in the pavilion, there was a very different form of entertainment underway. A tournament was being held, and the assembled nobility, eager to win fame and glory via this carefully regulated and contrived form of warfare, quickly joined the lists. King Henry II himself, still relatively young and vigorous – he was 40 at the time – threw himself into the jousting with gusto.

Wearing the favours of his mistress on his lance rather than those of his wife, the king performed quite well in the lists. However, on his final joust, the king was unsatisfied with his performance, as no lance had been shattered. He challenged Gabriel, Lord of Lorges and Count of Montgomery, Captain of the King’s Scotch Guards, to a final tilt. Both Montgomery and the Queen tried to protest, but the king overruled them, and so it was that the Count of Montgomery found himself hesitantly mounting his steed to ride once more against his liege, for better or for worse.

The adversaries stared one another down across the field before lowering the visors of their magnificently plumed tournament helmets. The heavily armoured horses whinnied and pawed the ground in anticipation of the charge. The two men, resplendent in their gleaming armour, began trotting along the tilt. As the distance between them narrowed, they picked up their pace, moving into a brisk canter and finally a full speed gallop. As the two horses thundered towards each other, the riders lowered their lances and braced for impact. The two riders hurtled towards one another, colliding in a cloud of dust and a clash of steel.

Montgomery trotted on, his lance shattered. The king, however, reeled wildly in his reinforced saddle, swaying like a drunkard before finally slumping down over his pommel, arms wrapped around his destrier’s neck. Everyone rushed on the field, where the king’s armour was quickly removed. When they took off Henry’s shattered helmet, they saw that a gigantic splinter from Montgomery’s lance had driven deep into Henry’s right eye, reaching back to his brain.

The king lay paralysed, unable to move hand or foot. He was hurriedly rushed into his private chambers, where a team of doctors immediately set to work trying to save the king. Within days, they were joined by Philip II’s personal physician, a world-famous doctor named Vesalius. The physicians worked frantically around the clock as the queen, Catherine de Medici, anxiously hovered nearby. They experimented on the heads of several felons previously convicted to death, who had been hurriedly decapitated for that very purpose.

The king, for his part, hovered on the brink of consciousness, gripped by a raging fever. After four days of tireless efforts, Henry’s condition began to improve, and soon his fever abated. He had regained his faculties, and the doctors started to hope that Henry would survive the ordeal, losing only his right eye. Henry, in one of his conscious moments, instructed that his daughter’s wedding ceremony should proceed without him and pardoned the distraught Gabriel de Montgomery, who had been arrested immediately following the tournament.

However, by the time the marriage took place, the king had relapsed, losing his faculty of speech and slipping back into unconsciousness. By the next day, July 10th, Henry was dead, cut down in his prime by a freak accident. His widow, Catherine de Medici, adopted a splintered lance as her emblem, with the motto of “lacrymae hinc, hinc dolor” (My tears come from this; from this my grief). Henry II’s sudden and untimely death was to herald in three decades of misery, war, and unrest, the likes of which had never before been seen in France. Three million Frenchmen would die of war, famine, disease, or massacre by the time the dust would settle.

Henry was interred with his forefathers in a solemn ceremony in the cathedral of St Denis. After the burial was completed, the master of arms stood up, looked at Henry’s young 15-year-old heir, and proclaimed in a loud voice: ‘The King is dead! The King is dead! Long live the King; the thrice-Christian Francis, second of his name; by the grace of God, King of France!’

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