Charles IX de Valois, roi de France

• en.wikipedia.org..., fr.wikipedia.org... ;
• Charles IX (June 27, 1550 – May 30, 1574) born Charles-Maximilien, was King of France, ruling from 1560 until his death. He is best known as king at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Biography

• He was born in the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, third son of King Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici, grandson of François I and Claude de France, and brother of François II and Henri III.
• He was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter on Sunday May 14, 1564 at St George's, Windsor, along with Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford and Sir Henry Sidney. That year, Charles IX issued the Edict of Roussillon fixing January 1 as the first day of the year.
• After the death of his elder brother, François II, in 1560, he inherited the throne and was crowned King of France in 1560 in the cathedral at Reims. The politics of that era were greatly influenced by his mother, Catherine de' Medici, who was regent for the ten-year-old Charles and by the power of the opposing religious faction leaders; the protestant-leaning House of Bourbon and the ultra-Catholic House of Guise.
• The first of the French Wars of Religion broke out in 1562-1563 when armed protestant troops seized many French cities following an attack on protestant worshippers by retainers of the Duke of Guise. After a four year peace, an attempt by Huguenot armies at Meaux to capture and control the king led to the Second War of religion from 1567 to 1568. A third war raged chiefly in south-western France from 1568 to 1570 with foreign intervention.
• On November 26, 1570 Charles married Elisabeth of Austria (marriage notification can be found here). They had one daughter, Marie-Elisabeth (October 27, 1572 – April 9, 1578). Charles IX also had an illegitimate son, the duc d'Angoulême, with his mistress, Marie Touchet.
• In 1572, Charles IX witnessed the massacre of thousands of Huguenots (Protestants) in and around Paris in what became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
• Charles IX did not long survive the Massacre. He had always been fragile, both emotionally and physically: Emotionally, his moods now swung from coarse boasting about the extremity of the Massacre, to claims that the screams of the murdered Huguenots kept ringing in his ears. Frantically he blamed his mother: "Who but you is the cause of all of this? God's blood, you are the cause of it all!" The Queen-mother responded by declaring she had a lunatic for a son.[1]
• Physically, Charles had never been strong, tending towards tuberculosis. The strain following the Massacres weakened his body to the point where, by spring of 1574, the hoarse coughing turned bloody and the hemorrhages grew more violent. He became bedridden and delusional,
• "What blood shed! What murders!" he cried to his nurse. "What evil council I have followed! O my God, forgive me...I am lost! I am lost!"[2]
• On his last day, 30 May 1574, at the Château de Vincennes, Val-de-Marne, Charles called for Henry of Navarre, embraced him, and said, "Brother, you are losing a good friend. Had I believed all that I was told, you would not be alive. But I always loved you...I trust you alone to look after my wife and daughter. Pray God for me. Farewell."[3]
• Charles was not yet twenty-four years old. The crown of France now passed to his brother, Henry III.

In Fiction

• Charles IX is a supporting character in Alexandre Dumas' historical fiction Queen Margot, which focuses on the marriage between Henri de Navarre and Marguirite de Valois. In the book, Charles' mother Catherine de Medicis accidentally causes his death by arsenic poisoning. She is attempting to assassinate Henri by means of a tainted book placed in his chamber but Charles finds the book instead and ingests a lethal dose of arsenic.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_IX_of_France
• Charles IX of France

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Charles IX

Charles IX around 1572, painted by François Clouet.

King of France

Reign 5 December 1560 – 30 May 1574

Coronation 15 May 1561

Predecessor Francis II

Successor Henry III

Spouse Elisabeth of Austria

Issue

Marie Elisabeth of Valois

Charles, Duke of Angoulême (illegitimate)

House House of Valois

Father Henry II of France

Mother Catherine de' Medici

Born 27 June 1550(1550-06-27)

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Died 30 May 1574 (aged 23)

Vincennes, France

Charles IX (27 June 1550 – 30 May 1574) was King of France, ruling from 1560 until his death. His reign was dominated by the Wars of Religion. He is best known as king at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Contents

[show]

   * 1 Life

         o 1.1 Childhood

         o 1.2 Accession to the throne

         o 1.3 First war of religion

         o 1.4 Armed Peace

         o 1.5 Second and third war of religion

         o 1.6 Marriage and children

         o 1.7 Coligny's ascendancy and the massacre

         o 1.8 Decline and death

   * 2 Book on hunting

   * 3 In fiction

   * 4 Ancestors

   * 5 Notes

   * 6 References

   * 7 Titles

[edit] Life

[edit] Childhood

He was born Charles Maximilian, third son of King Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici in the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He was immediately made Duke of Orléans upon his birth, succeeding his older brother Louis, his father's second son who had died in infancy the year before.[1]

He[when?] visited England and on 14 May made a Knight of the Order of the Garter at St George's, Windsor, along with Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford and Sir Henry Sidney.[citation needed]

[edit] Accession to the throne

His father died in 1559, followed in December 1560 by his eldest son, King Francis II (1544–1560). The ten-year-old Charles was immediately proclaimed King and, on 15 May 1561, consecrated as King of France in the cathedral at Reims. Government was dominated by his mother, Catherine de' Medici, who at first acted as regent for her young son. Antoine of Bourbon, himself in line to the French throne and husband to Queen Joan III of Navarre, was appointed lieutenant-general of France.

[edit] First war of religion

Portrait of Charles IX shortly after acceeding to the throne, by François Clouet.

Charles' reign was dominated by the Wars of Religion, which pitted various factions against each other. The Huguenots, the French adherents of Calvinism, had a considerable following among the nobility, while their enemies, later organised into the Catholic League were led by the House of Guise, a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine. Queen Catherine, though nominally a Catholic, tried to steer a middle course between the two factions, attempting to keep (or restore) the peace and augment royal power.

The factions had engaged in violence even before Charles' accession: a group of Huguenot nobles at Amboise had tried to abduct King Francis II and arrest the Catholic leaders - Francis, Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, followed by cases of Protestant iconoclasm and Catholic reprisals.[2] The regent tried to foster reconcliation at the colloquy at Poissy and, after that failed, made several concessions to the Huguenots in the Edict of Saint-Germain in January 1562[3], but war began when some retainers of the House of Guise - hoping to avenge the attempt of Amboise - attacked and killed several Huguenot worshippers at Vassy.

Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Conde, brother to the lieutenant-general and the suspected architect of the Amboise conspiracy, had already prepared for war and, taking Vassy as the occasion, assumed the role of a protector of Protestantism and began to seize and garrison strategic towns along the Loire. In return, the monarchy revoked the concessions given to the Huguenots. After the both sides' military leaders were either killed or captured in the battles at Rouen, Dreux and Orléans, the regent mediated a truce and issued the Edict of Amboise (1563).[4]

[edit] Armed Peace

French Monarchy-

Capetian Dynasty, House of Valois

(Valois-Angoulême branch)

Arms of the Kingdom of France (Moderne).svg

Francis I

Children

  Francis, Dauphin of Viennois

  Henry II

  Magdalene, Queen of Scots

  Charles of Valois

  Margaret, Duchess of Savoy

Henry II

Children

  Francis II

  Elizabeth, Queen of Spain

  Claude, Duchess of Lorraine

  Charles IX

  Henry III

  Margaret, Queen of Navarre

  François, Duke of Anjou

  Joan of Valois

  Victoria of Valois

Francis II

Charles IX

Henry III

Charles IX as an adult, by François Clouet.

The war was followed by four years of an uneasy "armed peace", during which Catherine tried to unite the factions in the successful effort to recapture Le Havre from the English. After this victory, Charles declared his legal majority in August 1563, formally ending the regency. However, Catherine would continue to play a principal role in politics and often dominate her son. In March of 1564, the King and his mother set out from Fontainebleau on a tour of the war-torn kingdom. Their tour spanned two years and brought them through Bar, Lyon, Salon — where they visited Nostradamus, Carcassonne, Toulouse - where the King and his younger brother Henry were confirmed —, Bayonne, La Rochelle and Moulins. During this trip, Charles IX issued the Edict of Roussillon, which standardised 1 January as the first day of the year throughout France.

[edit] Second and third war of religion

War again broke out in 1567 after reports of iconoclasm in Flanders prompted Charles to support Catholics there. Huguenots, fearing a Catholic attack was imminent, tried to abduct the King at Meaux, seized various cities and massacred Catholics at Nîmes. After the Battle of Saint-Denis saw both a Huguenot defeat and the death of the royal commander-in-chief, the short war ended in 1568 with another truce. However, the significant privileges granted to Protestants were widely opposed, leading to their cancellation and the resumption of war, in which the Dutch Republic, England and Navarra intervened on the Protestant side, while Spain, Tuscany and the Pope supporting the Catholics. Finally, the royal debt and the King's desire to seek a peaceful solution in August 1570 led to the another truce, which again gave concessions to the Huguenots.[5]

[edit] Marriage and children

On 26 November 1570 Charles married Elisabeth of Austria[6], with whom he fathered one daughter, Marie Elisabeth of Valois (1572–1578). In 1573, Charles fathered an illegitimate son, Charles, Duke of Angoulême, with his mistress, Marie Touchet.[7]

[edit] Coligny's ascendancy and the massacre

After the truce, the King increasingly came under the influence of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who during the war had succeeded the fallen Prince of Condé as leader of Huguenots. The Queen Mother became increasingly fearful of Coligny's unchecked power, especially since the Admiral was pursuing an alliance with England and the Dutch. Coligny was also hated by Henry, Duke of Guise, who accused the Admiral of having ordered the assassination of his father during the siege of Orléans in 1562.

During the peace settlement, a marriage was arranged between Charles' sister Margaret (1553–1615) and Henry of Bourbon, heir to the throne of Navarre and one of the leading Hugenots. Many Huguenot nobles, including Admiral de Coligny, thronged into Paris for the wedding, which was set for August 18. On August 22, a failed attempt on Coligny's life—the originator of which remains unclear—put the city in a state of apprehension, as visiting Huguenots and Parisian Catholics feared an attack by the other side.

In this situation, in the early morning of August 24, the Duke of Guise moved to avenge his father and murdered Coligny in his lodgings. As Coligny's body was thrown into the street, Parisians mutilated the body and then erupted into a full-scale massacre of all Huguenots, which was to last five days. Henry of Navarre managed to avoid death by converting to Catholicism. Over the next few weeks the disorder spread to more cities across France. In total, up to 10,000 Huguenots were killed in Paris and the provinces.[8]

Though the massacres severely weakened Huguenot power, it also reignited war, which ceased after the Edict of Boulogne in 1573 granted Huguenots amnesty and limited religious freedom. However, 1574 saw a failed Huguenot coup at Saint-Germain and successful Huguenot uprisings in Normandy, Poitou and the Rhône valley, setting the stage for another round of war.[9]

[edit] Decline and death

Coin of Charles IX, 1573.

Having witnessed the horrors of a massacre he had neither approved of nor predicted, the King's fragile mental and physical constitution drastically weakened. His moods swung from boasting about the extremity of the massacre to exlamations that the screams of the murdered Huguenots kept ringing in his ears. Frantically, he blamed alternately himself - "What blood shed! What murders! he cried to his nurse. What evil council I have followed! O my God, forgive me... I am lost! I am lost!" - or his mother - "Who but you is the cause of all of this? God's blood, you are the cause of it all!" The Queen-mother responded by declaring she had a lunatic for a son.[10]

His physical condition, tending towards tuberculosis, deteriorated to the point where, by spring of 1574, the hoarse coughing turned bloody and the hemorrhages grew more violent.

On his last day, 30 May, at the Charles called for Henry of Navarre, embraced him, and said, "Brother, you are losing a good friend. Had I believed all that I was told, you would not be alive. But I always loved you... I trust you alone to look after my wife and daughter. Pray God for me. Farewell."[11]

Charles IX died on 30 May at the Château de Vincennes, aged twenty-four years old. As his younger brother, Henry, Duke of Anjou had recently been elected King of Poland and was away from France, their mother Catherine resumed the regency until Henry's return from Poland.[12],

[edit] Book on hunting

Charles had an interest in hunting, and he wrote a book on the subject, La Chasse Royale, which was published long after his death, in 1625. It is a valuable source for those interested in the history of hounds and hunting.[13]

[edit] In fiction

Charles IX is a supporting character in Alexandre Dumas' historical novel Queen Margot, which focuses on the marriage between Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois. The book depicts Charles as a frail and sickly ruler, who is complicit in the massacres engineered by his mother and dies after reading a book poisoned with arsenic, which his mother intended for Henry of Navarre.

kNotes

  1. ^ Heritier, p. 48; Frieda, p. 69.

  2. ^ Salmon, p. 124–137. Sutherland, p. 111–138.

  3. ^ Knecht, p. 78-79.

  4. ^ Knecht, p. 86.

  5. ^ Jouanna et al., p. 181-185; Knecht, p. 151.

  6. ^ Saint-Amand/Martin, p. 245.

  7. ^ Saint-Amand/Martin, p. 282.

  8. ^ Jouanna et al., 196-204.

  9. ^ Jouanna et al., p. 213; Knecht, p. 181.

 10. ^ Durant, p. 355.

 11. ^ Guizot, p. 415.

 12. ^ Knecht, p. 190.

 13. ^ Charles IX, La Chasse Royale (1625).

[edit] References

Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles IX of France

   * Will Durant, The Age of Reason, Vol. VII, Simon and Schuster (1961).

   * Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici, Harper Collins (2003).

   * F. Guizot, The History of France, Vol. III, London (1887).

   * Jean Heritier, Catherine de Medici.

   * Arlette Jouanna, Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de religion. Collection Bouquins. Laffont, Paris (1998).

   * Robert J. Knecht, The French Civil Wars (Modern Wars in Perspective), Harlow (2000).

   * Imbert de Saint-Amand, Elizabeth Gilbert Martin, Women of the Valois court, Charles Scribner's Sons (1893).

   * J.H.M. Salmon. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century. Methuen, London (1975).

   * N.M. Sutherland, "Calvinism and the conspiracy of Amboise", History 47 (1962), p. 111-138.

[edit] Titles

Charles IX of France

House of Valois, Orléans-Angoulême branch

Cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty

Born: 27 June 1550 Died: 30 May 1574

Regnal titles

Preceded by

Francis II King of France

5 December 1560 – 30 May 1574 Succeeded by

Henry III

French royalty

Preceded by

Francis, Dauphin of France Heir to the Throne

as Heir presumptive

10 July 1559 – 5 December 1560 Succeeded by

Henry, Duke of Anjou

French nobility

Preceded by

Francis II of France Count of Provence and Forcalquier

as Charles V

5 December 1560 – 30 May 1574 Succeeded by

Henry III of France

Dauphin of Viennois, Count of Valentinois and Diois

5 December 1560 – 30 May 1574

Preceded by

Louis III Duke of Orléans

June 27, 1550 – 5 December 1560 Succeeded by

Henry III

This page was last modified on 1 June 2010 at 15:31

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_IX_of_France

Charles IX (27 June 1550 – 30 May 1574) was King of France, ruling from 1560 until his death. His reign was dominated by the Wars of Religion. He is best known as king at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Childhood

He was born Charles Maximilian, third son of King Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici in the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He was immediately made Duke of Orléans upon his birth, succeeding his older brother Louis, his father's second son who had died in infancy the year before.

He visited England and on 14 May was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter at St George's, Windsor, along with Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford and Sir Henry Sidney.

Accession to the throne

His father died in 1559, followed in December 1560 by his eldest son, King Francis II (1544–1560). The ten-year-old Charles was immediately proclaimed King and, on 15 May 1561, consecrated as King of France in the cathedral at Reims. Government was dominated by his mother, Catherine de' Medici, who at first acted as regent for her young son. Antoine of Bourbon, himself in line to the French throne and husband to Queen Joan III of Navarre, was appointed lieutenant-general of France.

First war of religion

Charles' reign was dominated by the Wars of Religion, which pitted various factions against each other. The Huguenots, the French adherents of Calvinism, had a considerable following among the nobility, while their enemies, later organised into the Catholic League were led by the House of Guise, a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine. Queen Catherine, though nominally a Catholic, tried to steer a middle course between the two factions, attempting to keep (or restore) the peace and augment royal power.

The factions had engaged in violence even before Charles' accession: a group of Huguenot nobles at Amboise had tried to abduct King Francis II and arrest the Catholic leaders - Francis, Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, followed by cases of Protestant iconoclasm and Catholic reprisals. The regent tried to foster reconcliation at the colloquy at Poissy and, after that failed, made several concessions to the Huguenots in the Edict of Saint-Germain in January 1562, but war began when some retainers of the House of Guise - hoping to avenge the attempt of Amboise - attacked and killed several Huguenot worshippers at Vassy.

Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Conde, brother to the lieutenant-general and the suspected architect of the Amboise conspiracy, had already prepared for war and, taking Vassy as the occasion, assumed the role of a protector of Protestantism and began to seize and garrison strategic towns along the Loire. In return, the monarchy revoked the concessions given to the Huguenots. After the both sides' military leaders were either killed or captured in the battles at Rouen, Dreux and Orléans, the regent mediated a truce and issued the Edict of Amboise (1563).[4]

Armed Peace

The war was followed by four years of an uneasy "armed peace", during which Catherine tried to unite the factions in the successful effort to recapture Le Havre from the English. After this victory, Charles declared his legal majority in August 1563, formally ending the regency. However, Catherine would continue to play a principal role in politics and often dominate her son. In March of 1564, the King and his mother set out from Fontainebleau on a tour of the war-torn kingdom. Their tour spanned two years and brought them through Bar, Lyon, Salon — where they visited Nostradamus, Carcassonne, Toulouse - where the King and his younger brother Henry were confirmed —, Bayonne, La Rochelle and Moulins. During this trip, Charles IX issued the Edict of Roussillon, which standardised 1 January as the first day of the year throughout France.

Second and third war of religion

War again broke out in 1567 after reports of iconoclasm in Flanders prompted Charles to support Catholics there. Huguenots, fearing a Catholic attack was imminent, tried to abduct the King at Meaux, seized various cities and massacred Catholics at Nîmes. After the Battle of Saint-Denis saw both a Huguenot defeat and the death of the royal commander-in-chief, the short war ended in 1568 with another truce. However, the significant privileges granted to Protestants were widely opposed, leading to their cancellation and the resumption of war, in which the Dutch Republic, England and Navarra intervened on the Protestant side, while Spain, Tuscany and the Pope supporting the Catholics. Finally, the royal debt and the King's desire to seek a peaceful solution in August 1570 led to the another truce, which again gave concessions to the Huguenots.[5]

Marriage and children

On 26 November 1570 Charles married Elisabeth of Austria[6], with whom he fathered one daughter, Marie Elisabeth of Valois (1572–1578). In 1573, Charles fathered an illegitimate son, Charles, Duke of Angoulême, with his mistress, Marie Touchet.[7]

Coligny's ascendancy and the massacre

After the truce, the King increasingly came under the influence of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who during the war had succeeded the fallen Prince of Condé as leader of Huguenots. The Queen Mother became increasingly fearful of Coligny's unchecked power, especially since the Admiral was pursuing an alliance with England and the Dutch. Coligny was also hated by Henry, Duke of Guise, who accused the Admiral of having ordered the assassination of his father during the siege of Orléans in 1562.

During the peace settlement, a marriage was arranged between Charles' sister Margaret (1553–1615) and Henry of Bourbon, heir to the throne of Navarre and one of the leading Hugenots. Many Huguenot nobles, including Admiral de Coligny, thronged into Paris for the wedding, which was set for August 18. On August 22, a failed attempt on Coligny's life—the originator of which remains unclear—put the city in a state of apprehension, as visiting Huguenots and Parisian Catholics feared an attack by the other side.

In this situation, in the early morning of August 24, the Duke of Guise moved to avenge his father and murdered Coligny in his lodgings. As Coligny's body was thrown into the street, Parisians mutilated the body and then erupted into a full-scale massacre of all Huguenots, which was to last five days. Henry of Navarre managed to avoid death by converting to Catholicism. Over the next few weeks the disorder spread to more cities across France. In total, up to 10,000 Huguenots were killed in Paris and the provinces.[8]

Though the massacres severely weakened Huguenot power, it also reignited war, which ceased after the Edict of Boulogne in 1573 granted Huguenots amnesty and limited religious freedom. However, 1574 saw a failed Huguenot coup at Saint-Germain and successful Huguenot uprisings in Normandy, Poitou and the Rhône valley, setting the stage for another round of war.

Decline and death

Having witnessed the horrors of a massacre he had neither approved of nor predicted, the King's fragile mental and physical constitution drastically weakened. His moods swung from boasting about the extremity of the massacre to exclamations that the screams of the murdered Huguenots kept ringing in his ears. Frantically, he blamed alternately himself - "What blood shed! What murders! he cried to his nurse. What evil council I have followed! O my God, forgive me... I am lost! I am lost!" - or his mother - "Who but you is the cause of all of this? God's blood, you are the cause of it all!" The Queen-mother responded by declaring she had a lunatic for a son.

His physical condition, tending towards tuberculosis, deteriorated to the point where, by spring of 1574, the hoarse coughing turned bloody and the hemorrhages grew more violent.

On his last day, 30 May, Charles called for Henry of Navarre, embraced him, and said, "Brother, you are losing a good friend. Had I believed all that I was told, you would not be alive. But I always loved you... I trust you alone to look after my wife and daughter. Pray God for me. Farewell."

Charles IX died on 30 May at the Château de Vincennes, aged twenty-four years. As his younger brother, Henry, Duke of Anjou had recently been elected King of Poland and was away from France, their mother Catherine resumed the regency until Henry's return from Poland.

Book on hunting

Charles had an interest in hunting, and he wrote a book on the subject, La Chasse Royale, which was published long after his death, in 1625. It is a valuable source for those interested in the history of hounds and hunting.

In fiction

Charles IX is a supporting character in Alexandre Dumas' historical novel Queen Margot, which focuses on the marriage between Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois. The book depicts Charles as a frail and sickly ruler, who is complicit in the massacres engineered by his mother and dies after reading a book poisoned with arsenic, which his mother intended for Henry of Navarre.

King of France (1560-1574)

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre happened under me

My mom CATHERINE DE MEDICI actually ruled