The World полностью

* Catherine started to negotiate the marriage of her sons, Charles, Henri or Hercule-François, to Elizabeth of England. The rival queens were tough politicians who approached family differently. Elizabeth, a Protestant queen regnant, treated as illegitimate, possibly molested by her guardian, harassed by her half-sister, regarded family – and marriage – as perilous. A Catholic mother and wife, Catherine, far from her Italian roots, based everything on her sons, whose marriage to Elizabeth could avoid civil war in France, balance Spain and win England: Catherine’s son François had been married to Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant to the English throne. Now Catherine played the aspiring mother, Elizabeth the prospective daughter. The candidate was first Charles, who was seventeen years younger than Elizabeth; then Henri, eighteen years younger, who disdained Elizabeth as ‘putain publique’; then, much later, in 1559, when the machinations also involved the leadership of a new Dutch state, Elizabeth, now forty-six, hosted and flirted with Hercule-François, duc d’Alençon, twenty-four, and at least pretended to be engaged.

* On the way, Catherine met Nostradamus, Michel de Nostredame, astrologer, necromancer and physician, born of a family of Jewish converts, paying him 200 écus for his horoscopes of her sons. But he noticed instead one of her pages, Henri of Navarre. The hierophant ‘read’ the moles on his torso. He was sixth in line to the throne, unlikely to be relevant. Yet Nostradamus predicted that he would be king.

* The name Sea Beggars originated when a Dutch delegation called on Margarita. ‘Fear not, madam,’ said an adviser, ‘they’re only beggars.’ The Beggars adopted the beggar’s pouch as a rebel symbol. Within four years, there were eighty-five privateers in action, precursors of the armed trading corporations.

* But his moniker – Terrible – only became current in the seventeenth century, when it meant ‘awesome’ rather than the modern meaning of ‘atrocious’, and his atrocities were not so different in cruelty from those of Catherine de Medici or Henry VIII or Cesare Borgia. In many ways, he was a man of his time.

* This colossal state of Poland–Lithuania – forgotten because it has no modern equivalent – became a Serene Republic under the presidency of a king elected by the Sejm of the nobility. The nobility formed around 15 per cent of the population, so there was an electorate of over 500,000, larger than anything in England or France until the 1830s. It most resembled the oligarchy of Venice, dominated by magnates, but religious tolerance, even for Jews and other minorities, was guaranteed. This Złota Wolnos´ć – Golden Liberty – lasted for the next two centuries.

* Amazingly the St Bartholemew’s Massacre did not end Catherine’s marriage negotiations with Elizabeth who in 1579, now over forty, entertained the youngest Valois, the duc d’Alençon whom she flirtatiously called ‘my frog’. But Alençon died soon after this futile trip.

* Henri IV the Great settled the religious wars by granting toleration to the Protestants, laying the foundations of modern France. He divorced Margot and married Marie de’ Medici, the plump, plain but masterful and tumultuous daughter of the grand duke of Tuscany, a marriage that paid off his debts. Henri’s mistress called her ‘the fat banker’. Henri and Marie de’ Medici fathered the future Louis XIII and Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England. As for Margot, irrepressible and sensual, she took ever-younger lovers into her fifties, dying in 1615.