HATE AND WAIT

The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King
By Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent
(Simon & Schuster 405pp £20)

Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent has written a moving account of a love triangle in Renaissance France. It is an extraordinary story.

The first half of the sixteenth century was a time of giants: the dazzling François I on the throne of France, a young and still handsome Henry VIII on the throne of England, a youthful (and less good-looking) Charles V as the Holy Roman Emperor, and two Medici popes holding sway, one almost after the other, in the Vatican. These powerful Christian rulers had to contend with Sulieman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Emperor, amid all the confusion and strife brought about by the Reformation. Political machinations would actually lead François I, and later his son Henri II, to form alliances with Sulieman, the infidel, against the Holy Roman Emperor.

The curious subplot to these great events that Princess Michael has taken as her subject is the extraordinary love affair between the beautiful Diane de Poitiers and the future king of France, Henri II, who was eighteen years her junior. He loved her until he died (of wounds received in a tournament), aged forty, and despite all the efforts of his wife, Catherine de’ Medici.

The splendid pageantry of the early part of François I’s reign could not last, as Charles V threatened France. At the Battle of Pavia in 1525 the King was defeated and taken prisoner to Spain. To fulfil the terms of a treaty allowing his return to France, his two eldest sons, the Dauphin and six-year-old Henri d’Orléans, were taken as hostages in their father’s place. As their mother had died, it was Diane who comforted the younger boy when the exchange of prisoners was about to take place. On his return he became her young knight and she gently mothered him, helping him with his interrupted education.

The treaty François I had negotiated with Charles V was ruinous for France, and the King invited himself to Anet, a chateau in Normandy, to ask advice of its owner, his old friend Louis de Brézé (Diane de Poitiers’s husband). It was de Brézé who recommended the marriage of the fourteen-year-old Henri to the cousin of the ambitious new pope Clement II, the orphaned heiress Catherine de’ Medici, who was also fourteen. Henri did his duty by Catherine but was not prepared to do more and continued his respectful adoration of Diane, Madame de Brézé, who became a widow in the same year. Four years later the Dauphin died, and Henri took his brother’s place. At eighteen Henri was handsome and athletic, and Diane a still beautiful thirty-six. It is not surprising that they fell in love and continued their discreet affair, possibly the greatest romance in French royal history, all Henri’s life.

Catherine was unattractive and despised at the French Court, and her marriage to Henri was considered a mismatch by all. While the famed beauty Diane cultivated her image as Diana the Huntress and Goddess of the Moon, Catherine’s scheming led her to be called ‘La Serpente’ – the secret motto she chose for herself was ‘Hate and Wait’. Part of her insecurity resulted from the fact that in ten years she had failed to produce an heir. Curiously, with Diane’s guidance, children were born to the royal couple. Diane had recommended ‘some alternate positions for intercourse that would compensate for her retroverted uterus and Henri’s hypospadias. Diane suggested to the Dauphine that she make love à levrette.’ (A levrette is a small greyhound bitch; and hypospadias, a birth defect of the urethra in the male that involves an abnormally placed urethral opening.)

However, when Henri came to the throne in 1547 he ruled as one with Diane rather than his queen, their emblems and signature black-and-white colours emblazoned on everything. When Henri died after a jousting accident in 1559, Diane retired to her late husband’s Normandy chateau. She died in 1566 and is buried there in a magnificent tomb.

Princess Michael is no stranger to palace intrigue and is descended from both Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers. In this her third book, and definitely her best, she has woven a captivating story of love, war, betrayal and persecution.

Christopher Ondaatje