La mye du roi: Françoise de Foix

Way back when, I set out to do a series of posts on the women in François I's life. I wrote about his mother, Louise de Savoye; his sister, Marguerite de Navarre; his first wife Queen Claude; his second mistress, Anne d'Heilly, Madame d'Étampes. With Valentine's Day just past, I've decided to get back on track and introduce Françoise de Foix, the king's first maîtresse en titre, or official mistress, a woman whose life has engendered many a romantic legend.

Born in 1495 in Brittany, Françoise de Foix was second cousin to the reigning queen of France, Anne de Bretagne, and spent much of her youth at Anne's court. A well-educated, dark-haired beauty, she captured the heart of nineteen year old Jean de Laval, Seigneur de Châteaubriant, when she was only eleven. The queen provided a dowry for her impoverished cousin, and Françoise and Jean, who possessed one of greatest fortunes in Brittany, were formally affianced in 1505. But in a move highly unusual for the time, Jean took Françoise to live with him at Châteaubriant before the marriage ceremony took place. The couple lived in this irregular union for more than two years, celebrating the birth of a daughter in 1507 before officially marrying in 1509.

Head over heels in love (so the story goes), Jean and Françoise kept to their secluded manor house in Brittany. Being of a rather possessive and even violent temperament, Jean resisted, for as long as possible, pressure to bring Françoise to the court of the new king, François I. Intrigued by rumors of Françoise's beauty and learning, the king summoned the couple in 1516 and appointed Françoise lady-in-waiting to his wife, Queen Claude. Enamored of the Breton beauty who dared resist him, François showered favors on her family. He made her husband commander of a royal company, elevated two of her brothers to high military positions, and appointed her eldest brother governor of the newly reconquered duchy of Milan. Françoise finally succumbed to his blandishments and became la mye du roi, the king's "sweetheart," around 1518. She and Jean de Laval assisted at the baptism of the dauphin in 1519, with Françoise occupying a place of honor near the royal princesses. Cuckolded Jean, generously rewarded for his compliance, returned home to Bretagne in 1520, leaving Françoise behind to reign supreme over François's heart and court.

During her ten-year reign as François's official mistress, Françoise wielded an influence more cultural than political. Madame de Châteaubriant set the bar for elegance in dress at court. As early as July, 1516, her style made such a splash that a description of one of her gowns made its way into a diplomatic letter to Isabella d'Este:

That Sunday, the king threw a banquet and feast and had fourteen ladies dressed in the Italian manner, with rich garments that his Majesty brought from Italy. Twelve of the ladies were in the queen's service and two in the service of Madame de Bourbon; among those of the queen was Mademoiselle de Châteaubriant, Monsieur de Lautrec's sister, dressed in a gown of dark crimson velvet embroidered all over with gold chains bearing silver plaquettes well placed within the chains, on which were inscribed devices.

Françoise accompanied the king to the sumptuous Field of Cloth of Gold summit in 1520 where he met, feasted, and wrestled with Henry VIII of England. One source claims she encouraged François to spend extravagantly on tents and livery and spectacles for the affair, incensing his frugal royal mother, Louise de Savoye.

Louise resented Françoise's dominion over her son and ever searched for a way to dislodge her from François's affections. The king's captivity in Spain from 1525-26 provided the perfect opportunity. Louise managed to prevent Françoise from accompanying the court to Bayonne to welcome the king upon his return and encouraged François to take up with the much younger and, in her opinion, more biddable, Anne d'Heilly in Françoise's absence. Newly sprung from monk-like captivity, François was only too happy to oblige. For the next two years, Anne and Françoise competed for the king's affections, amusing the court with their very public squabbles. François eventually tired of the drama and informed Françoise he was relegating her to second place. Unable to accept this loss of stature, she left court in 1528 to return to her husband's manor in Brittany. When a triumphant Anne d'Heilly demanded the return of the jewelry François had given her, Françoise complied by melting down the gold and returning it to the king in the form of ingots. The mottos that had adorned the jewelry were too precious for anyone else to wear, she claimed, so now they were engraved solely in her heart. Impressed by her moxy, François allowed her to keep the gold.

Despite their separation, Françoise and the king continued to correspond well into the next decade. François appointed her husband governor of Brittany and visited the couple several times at their home. Françoise's sudden death from illness in 1537 gave rise to speculation that a vengeful Jean had men disguised as doctors slit her veins and allow her to bleed to death. (Legend has it that each year at midnight on the anniversary of her death, she appears in her chamber, hand-in-hand with the king; behind them a band of demons leads Jean de Laval in chains.) Whether through guilt or love or simple duty, Jean erected an elaborate tomb for his errant wife in the church of the Trinitarians in Châteaubriant. Clément Marot, witness to her glory at court, inscribed the epitaph:

"Here lies a nothing, that once triumphed over all" -- one final, enduring motto for the king's sweetheart, Françoise de Foix.

[Sources: R. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron; Françoise de Foix]

The Captive King

Last we saw of King François, he had been taken prisoner by imperial forces at the disastrous Battle of Pavia (24 February 1525). French troops, fighting to recapture the duchy of Milan that François's predecessor Louis XII had lost, were surrounded and roundly defeated by Charles V's army. The King of France's captivity at the hand of the Holy Roman Emperor would last a little over a year and color the two monarchs' relationship for the duration of their reigns.

After the battle, François was taken to the Castle of Pizighettone near Cremona, where he remained for three months in the custody of the Spanish captain. Captured companions accompanied him, including his childhood friend Anne de Montmorency (who would remain François's most trusted counselor and eventually rise to the most powerful political position in France). These men were eventually given safe-conducts that enabled them to travel back and forth between Italy and France to negotiate the king's release. François appointed his mother, Louise de Savoye, regent during his absence. Louise established her court at Lyons, near the Italian border, to facilitate communications with her son and the emperor.

If François and his mother had hoped that Charles would quickly release him for a cash ransom, they were mistaken. Charles presented a long list of demands that included paying Charles's debts to Henry VIII, abandoning French claims to Milan and Genoa, and most importantly, ceding the duchy of Burgundy. The emperor planned to seal the settlement through the marriage of his niece, Mary of Portugal, to the Dauphin. Although François appeared amenable to some of the terms, he refused to negotiate as long as he continued to be held prisoner. He forwarded Charles's terms to Louise, who rejected them outright.

Hoping to cut short negotiations made all the lengthier by the distance separating the two courts, François begged for a face-to-face meeting with Charles. In June, he was taken to Spain on a fleet of galleys decorated in his honor, given a royal welcome in Barcelona, then moved to Valencia. He asked that his sister Marguerite be given safe-conduct to negotiate a peace, that he be moved closer to the site of negotiations for easier consultation, and that a truce be declared while the talks were in progress. Charles agreed to all three requests, yet continued to avoid meeting with François in person.

When the French ambassadors met with Charles in Toledo, the emperor continued to dismiss any discussion of a ransom. He was willing to make some concessions in his original demands, but claimed there could be no lasting peace as long as Burgundy remained in French hands. France, however, refused to consider surrendering the region; in fact, François, now in Madrid, made a secret declaration to the French ambassadors that he would never surrender Burgundy freely and that, if forced to do so, his action would be null and void.

Charles almost lost his opportunity to profit from the situation when François nearly died in September from a combination of acute depression, anorexia and a nasal abscess. The French king ran a fever for twenty-three straight days and lapsed into a semi-coma after Charles did, finally, come to see him. Later in the month, the abscess burst and François unexpectedly recovered. Peace talks resumed, this time facilitated by Marguerite, who had arrived during her brother's illness, but were suspended once again when Charles found the proposals unacceptable.

By the end of the year, the strain of the king's absence was growing too great for the kingdom. Louise de Savoye decided to abandon Burgundy and convinced François to accept Charles's terms. On January 14, 1526, the parties signed the Treaty of Madrid. In return for his freedom, François ceded Burgundy and abandoned his claims to Italy. He also agreed to hand over his two oldest sons as hostages until the terms of the treaty were fulfilled. In return, he demanded the hand of Charles's sister Eléonore in marriage, in order to keep her from marrying Charles de Bourbon, the prince of the blood who had sided with Charles during the war. Charles, swayed by advisors who believed the French king could be trusted, agreed. Little did he know that two days before the French king signed the treaty, he had made another secret declaration nullifying the surrender of Burgundy.

Betrothed by proxy to Eléonore in January, François remained in Madrid until mid-February, possibly for health reasons. Charles arrived, and together they traveled to meet Eléonore. A few days later, Charles set off to Seville to marry Isabella of Portugal, and François began the long journey back to France with his Spanish escort. The heartrending exchange of the monarch for his two young sons, which deserves a post of its own, was set for March 17 on the river Bidassoa.

[Source: The material for this post was condensed from R. J. Knecht's account in Renaissance Warrior and Patron, pp. 216-48.]

Two by Two

The important women in François I's life seem to come in pairs. The king spent the first two decades of his life in close relationship with his mother and sister. As an adult, he married twice and had two official mistresses. Even his daughters followed the pattern: of the four he fathered, two died extremely young and two lived long enough to marry off. Over the next few weeks, I'll briefly sketch these pairs for you and try to give you a glimpse of what life as a women in the French court was like.

François's mother, Louise de Savoye, devoted her life to seeing her son, whom she called her "César," named king. François's father, Charles d'Angoulême, died when François was only two, leaving his nineteen year old wife, Louise, a widow with two small children (François and his sister Marguerite). The Angoulêmes were a minor branch of the House of Valois, but, unless the aging reigning monarch, Louis XII, produced a male heir, François was next in line for the throne. Louis allowed the widowed Louise to retain custody of her children, but only if she agreed not to remarry and to live under conditions imposed by him. Louise accepted the terms and lived with François and Marguerite as virtual house prisoners under the tight surveillance of Pierre de Rohan, seigneur de Gié, for years. During this time, Louise provided her children a broad humanist education, laying the foundation for the love of learning and the arts that would inspire François throughout his reign. Louis, meanwhile, fathered two daughters, Claude and Renée; his only son was stillborn in 1502. In 1506, Louis finally affianced Claude to François; the marriage took place in 1514 and François ascended to the throne the following year.

Louise never did remarry, even after her son became king. She remained active in politics during the early years of his reign and served as regent in 1515 and in 1524 when François went to war. Her influence in foreign affairs was great. Wolsey referred to Louise as "the mother and nourisher of peace." An English ambassador in 1521 described her influence over the king:

I have seen in divers things since I came hither, that when the French king would stick at some points, and speak very great words, yet my Lady would qualify the matter; and sometimes when the king is not contented he will say nay, and then my Lady must require him, and at her request he will be contented; for he is so obeissant to her that he will refuse nothing that she requireth him to do, and if it had not been for her he would have done wonders. [Quoted in Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron 113]

Louise was one of the principal negotiators of the Treaty of Cambrai, known as the "Paix des dames" ("Peace of the ladies") in 1529, which put an end to the second Italian war between François and the head of the Hapsburg dynasty, Charles V. She died in September, 1531 at the age of fifty-five. François was not with her when she died, but gave her a magnificent funeral. Her body was taken to he abbey at Saint-Maur-des-Fossées, where her wax effigy was displayed. After a funeral service at Notre Dame in Paris, she was buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis, where French royals were customarily laid to rest. With her passing, François lost one of his greatest supports and the woman who had formed him as man and king.

Next up, François's sister, Marguerite de Navarre. But as my next post will be my hundredth, she'll have to wait until the festivities have ended!