The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
THE PASSION
By the time Francis I came to the throne in 1515, the licentiousness of the French court – which Charles VII had highlighted so publicly – was well established. Of his immediate predecessors, Charles VIII was a philanderer and Louis XII was, according to a contemporary, “more nourished in lubricity and lasciviousness than in virtues”. Generally, Francis was an altogether more impressive figure. The epitome of a Renaissance king, he was an intellectual and an art collector, obsessed with Italy and antiquity. He built – or rebuilt – some of the most spectacular of the Loire châteaux, transforming them from castles into pleasure palaces. The many towers and turrets of Chambord mark the peak of his extravagance.
Francis was also good-looking, talented and powerfully built. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold – the fabulous showpiece summit held jointly with Henry VIII in 1520 – he thoroughly embarrassed the English king when Henry rashly challenged him to a wrestling match and was quickly thrown and defeated. Like Henry VIII, he also loved to surround himself with beautiful women – “a court without women is like a year without spring,” he once declared. And he couldn’t resist a party. The Loire palaces – and especially Amboise – became backdrops for feasts, balls, tournaments, pageants and hunting, and he recruited probably the most overqualified events manager in the whole of history – Leonardo da Vinci – to plan some of the most spectacular.
Francis’s young queen, Claude, died at Blois aged just 24, severely weakened after producing seven children in eight years (and probably also by syphilis contracted from her husband). He took solace in an intense affair with Françoise de Foix, a high-born court beauty who abandoned her aristocratic husband for the king. When her spouse beat her in a fit of jealous rage, Francis was so furious that he threatened to behead him.
But Francis was not known for his constancy and by 1526 Françoise was displaced in his affections by the 17-year-old Anne de Pisseleu. Blonde, witty and charismatic, Anne was dubbed “the most beautiful of the learned women and the most learned of the beautiful women”. But she was low born, so Francis married her off to a count and then quickly got rid of him by dispatching him to the Auvergne.
Francis seems then to have got a taste of his own medicine. Anne scandalised the court by taking lovers of her own before being caught in flagrante by the king himself. An inscription, still visible scratched into a window at Chambord (“Women often change, woe to him who trusts them”) is often attributed to an embittered Francis, though it would be highly ironic given his own record as a lover.
HENRY II AND DIANE DE POITIERS: KING AND COUGAR
When Francis died in 1547, his son and successor Henry II wasted no time in confiscating Anne’s jewels and property and re-assigning them to his own mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Theirs was a highly unusual relationship – complicated by the fact that Francis had probably already slept with her (he is rumoured to have demanded Diane’s virginity in order to spare her own father from the guillotine), a 20-year age difference and what amounted to a ménage à trois with his wife, Catherine de’ Medici.
The romance began when Henry was 11 and Diane was 31, after Francis asked her to oversee his “chivalric education”. It isn’t entirely clear when the physical side developed, but by the time Henry became king, Diane was still his favourite at the age of 47, and they were apparently still lovers by the time of his death in 1559 when she was 60. He was accidentally killed in a joust while wearing her black and white colours.
Tall, thin, with “red-gold” hair and blue eyes, Diane had an extraordinary beauty regime which involved bathing in milk and cold water and, it seems, ingesting pure gold. Recent analysis of her remains revealed traces of the metal in her bones. But she was also highly educated and a consummate politician.
She seems to have allowed Henry to become besotted with her, yet remained totally pragmatic about her ultimate status. She was involved in negotiating his marriage to Catherine at the age of 13 and, when the young couple seemed to have problems in bed, she concocted love potions and joined them between the sheets.
Henry showered Diane with jewels and, best of all, the achingly romantic Château de Chenonceau. Catherine proved less than grateful. As soon as Henry was off the scene, she reclaimed her jewels and Chenonceau and Diane was forced to retire to the Château d’Anet (chateau-d-anet.com), her late husband’s feudal castle to the west of Paris.