Course XXVI - Teaching 11: The Court of Catherine of Médicis

The Inquisition suppressed the Military Orders, subjected other Orders to a sort of bondage, and destroyed any psychical research; then, the languishing Esoteric Orders incarnated in alchemists of the Renaissance, who had sought refuge in several European Courts, especially in that of France.
Catherine de Médicis reunites them around her, and the esoteric wisdom is preserved.
Extremely ambitious, Catherine of Médicis intends to re-establish the greatness of the Royal House and makes use of any system, whether good or bad, to get it. She is an authoritarian and fatalistic woman, and none can lead her: neither Catholicism nor Protestantism. She is submissive just before an astrolabe, magical mirrors and earthly circles. Always enigmatic and mysterious, good, bad or cruel (many times guided by occult sciences), alternately or simultaneously, wife, mother and dictator. Without any characteristic physical or moral weakness of her sex, she possesses the highest qualities of a leader of State.
Cornered between Huguenot republicanism and Catholic tradition, she is able to preserve the throne of the Valois by means of combinations whose art so far produces envy in the most skilled politicians. She is the strong authority, inflexible and clairvoyant, of quick decisions, fearless before ambushes, affronts and terrible actions against her. She exclaims, “more enemies dead, less enemies”; this sentence of a letter to De Cordes totally sums up her character of mother who places her dignity of Queen-Mother over any feeling.
Of moderate coquetry, she just loves her husband and her children. And she is tender with the latter just until an age when they cannot weaken her authority; and as soon as they are able to govern, her love falls away. But she collapses before Henry III, her son, who pays by ingratitude her profound affection. Therefore, her only ideal, duty dignity and pride is the crown of France. The scepter contains all her joys in spite of her daily struggles and perpetual duplicities that she has to create and destroy. Naturally formed by her contact with the revolutionary mob, Catherine belongs to fiery political Médicis, who live in conflict since her childhood, amid hatreds unleashed by her despotic father.
Men have been brutal with her: at the age of nine, prisoner in a convent, Battista Cei suggests to tie her naked to the ramparts of Florence, between two battlements, and Bernardo Castiglione deems that this proposal is insufficiently degrading, and to finish the discussion suggests her ignominious rape by the foreign soldiers. Before this, may Catherine deem that the existence is represented by the beauty of good, generosity and human mercy?
Her marriage is not happy. Henry II feels that she is just a useful being to perpetuate the race. His loving vibration and his tender admiration and submission is entirely for Diana of Poitiers. Catherine is the obliged complement, imposed by political demands and concerns of the throne.
To preserve the goodwill of his husband, Catherine comes to a compromise with his mistress. Her sterility –her obsession– first forces her to consult the physicians of the Court but, by because of their ignorance, she has to trust to the Great Mysteries that are so attractive by her atavism of family and race. She unites her consults to diviners and Tarots with magical and medicinal potions of any kind.
When apparently everything is in vain, Giovanni Fernel appears; he is a tireless and wise physician that sacrifices his wealth, pleasures and good physical condition both to the medical science of his time and to mathematics with exemplary conviction and unselfishness. Sick people going to his house are really so numerous that sometimes he must remain standing up while eating and listening at those persons, rich and poor, with enormous patience.
By the Fernel’s remedy prescribed to Catherine –seemingly, cohabitation for a while– she gives birth to her first son, ten years after their marriage. But later they have nine children more.
If during the first years of her reign passively she stands her rival, Diana of Poitiers, as soon as Catherine is mother, her jealousy remains behind and since then is a submissive and devoted mother who just takes care of her children. But on the occasion of Saint Quintin’s disaster, she reappears and, when all despair, she knows how to encourage, gets from the Parliament an important amount thanks to her smartness and eloquence, and conquers the minds of all in only one day.
But her entire power lies on his faith that she is a predestined woman who has masters to guide her. She dies of a sudden pneumonia, without great suffering, surrounded by her assistants, on January 15, 1589.
Twenty years later, her coffin of lead is carried to the royal sepulcher erected by her in the Basilica of Saint Denis, for in times of her death she was buried on earth with little pomp, and this was not usual with personalities in those days.
Henry III properly understood the tremendous loss caused by her death, and fortunately Catherine did not witness the collapse of her entire political work, some few months after her decease with the fall of the Valois.
This being whose life was so turbulent and so overwhelmed by her desire of ruling, as much intriguing as diplomatic, indulgent and implacable, superstitious and credulous, Catholic and Huguenot, shy and shrewd, always indiscernible, even possesses indisputable qualities of energy, fine intelligence and clairvoyance, which enabled her to be fearless before dangers and ups and downs of political and religious struggles, even though, fearing as much the humans as the time to come, she consulted oracles of astrologers and magi.
But her greatest merit is that she permitted the activities of men like Nostradamus, Girolamo Cardano, the Ruggeris, and others.