Books: Mother in Politics

CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI—Ralph Roeder —Viking ($3.75).

The career of Catherine de’ Medici, one of the biggest career women of the Reformation, was a long time starting, came as near as nothing to never starting at all.

Orphaned within a month of her birth (1519), she was such a sickly infant that her Great-Uncle Giovanni (Pope Leo X) was doubly disgusted with her. What was needed at that point in the Medici fortunes was a healthy boy. Having at last attained the Papacy, the Medici clan were in imminent danger of petering out. But useless as she might be in her own small person, Uncle Giovanni planned to use her as a political pawn, schemed how to marry her to best Medici advantage.

Cousin Giulio, who succeeded Giovanni in the Papacy, wangled a more brilliant match for little Catherine than old Pope Leo had dared to dream about. At 14 she became the bride of heavy-lidded Henri, second son of the King of France. For a long time she was unable to conceive a child, and her sterility became important when the Dauphin died and her husband became heir to the throne. By trying everything once she managed, after ten barren years, to become a mother. Thereafter she triumphantly proved her ability by producing nine more children.

Europe was having its troubles, but Catherine let Europe take care of itself. As a model wife and mother, she had her hands full at home. Henri had never made any secret of his infatuation for Diane de Poitiers, who was old enough to be his nurse, and Catherine even had to share her children with her rival. Only very occasionally did Catherine let her feelings come to the surface. Once Diane found her reading, asked what the book was. Said Catherine: “I am reading the chronicles of France, and I find that from time to time, at every period, the affairs of Kings have been governed by strumpets.” As Henri’s Queen, she showed what she thought of strumpets by never interfering, by doing her quiet queenly duty to the King’s taste. Henri liked his exercise and was proud of his prowess at tilting. One unlucky day he ran one course too many with the Captain of his Guard and got the point of a lance in the eye.

With his death Catherine had her chance to pay off old scores. All she did was make Diane give up the crown jewels, retire to her estates.

At 40 Catherine was the widow of one king, mother of another, but she was still not even an amateur of politics. As a widowed mother with a large family to look after, she gradually turned as professional as a U. S. Postmaster General.

During the reign of her first son, sickly Frangois II, she waited and watched; at his death she declared herself Regent for her second surviving son, 10-year-old Charles IX. Now she found that her family affairs were the parlous state of the nation. Bled nearly white by protracted wars, griped by religious dissension, rumbling with revolt, France was apparently tottering toward dissolution. “With all its normal resources mortgaged [the government] was reduced to a point at which it functioned for the sole benefit of the international financiers.”

With desperate maternal shrewdness Catherine tried, by one opportunistic scheme after another, to stave off the collapse of her royal house. She tried to balance the religious diet by enforcing toleration of the Huguenots, she tried to raise money by appealing to theStates-General. When these expedients failed and civil war broke out between the Catholics and the Protestants, she was nothing daunted, crossed each bridge when she came to it, and just in time. She was grimly pleased when the first civil war ended in a stalemate, pleased that she could say, “I told you so.” Altogether she and France had to survive eight civil wars. Survive them she did, though by the time they were over her purely maternal policy had involved her deep in gory deeds. For the treacherous massacre on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Biographer Roeder makes her directly responsible, attempts to show that the massacre was no part of a settled policy but a suddenly-enforced expedient to save her weak-kneed royal son.

By noon of the first day’s killing in Paris (the massacre spread later to other towns), 3,000 Protestant men, women and children had been killed. Wrote the Spanish Ambassador to his King: “As I write, they are killing them all, they are stripping them naked, dragging them through the streets, plundering the houses, and sparing not even children. Blessed be God who has converted the French princes to His cause! May He inspire their hearts to continue as they have begun!” When the good news reached Rome, the Pope held a solemn Mass of thanksgiving. A contemporary diplomat thus reported how Catherine emerged from the bloodbath she had ordered: “She looks ten years younger and gives me the impression of a person emerging from a grave illness or who had just escaped from some great danger.” Once again—this-time she was 55— Catherine sat by the deathbed of a son who was also King of France. And again she had one to take his place. Henri III fled from his unwanted job as King of Poland and came home to see what he and his mother could salvage. He had to borrow 100,000 francs from a Florentine merchant to get to his coronation. The sands were rapidly running out. With the help of his maternal adviser and by judicious getaways and judicious murders, Henri managed to hold on to the crown for 14 years. A few months before an assassin’s knife finished Henri III and with him Catherine’s family, Catherine herself had faded quietly out of the picture, at 70.

Her onetime enemy, Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV of France in spite of all Catherine’s maternal machinations, gave the old lady her due. Said he: “What could the poor woman do, with five little children on her arms, after the death of her husband, and two families in France, ours and the Guises, attempting to encroach on the Crown? Was she not forced to play strange parts to deceive the one and the other and yet, as she did, to protect her children, who reigned in succession by the wisdom of a woman so able? I wonder that she did not do worse!” The Author— Forty-six-year-old Ralph Roeder was in John R. Tunis’ celebrated Class of 1911 at Harvard (TIME, Sept. 14) though he “never spoke to a living soul” while he was there, returned to his native Manhattan to join the Washington Square Players, drove an ambulance in Italy in the War, stage-managed in Paris for Jacques Copeau, returned to the U. S. to act in Greek tragedies, work in a publishing house. Three years ago he published a graphic, scholarly presentation of four Renaissance figures (The Man of the Renaissance, TIME, Dec. 4, 1933). Longer (629 pp.), less brilliant, Catherine de’ Medici is also more ambitious, seeks to unravel the mazy meshes of one of the most tangled periods in European history.

The book’s subtitle (The Lost Revolution) gives Author Roeder’s thesis: that the revolt of the Huguenots, though it ended in failure, “bred a revolutionary consciousness which matured for 200 years,” ripened at last in the French Revolution.