Legacy of the Loire ladies
Some of history’s most notable queens and courtiers helped shape the region that typifies Frenchness. Anthony Peregrine introduces the chateaux where they lived — and some died
THE chateaux of the Loire are in the centre of France and also at the centre of Frenchness. Rising from a soft, prosperous landscape, their monumental elegance betokens power and fragility but comes with a flip-side of violence, skulduggery and debauchery.
Everyone knows that the Loire Valley was the stamping ground of late medieval and Renaissance kings. But their women — mothers, wives, mistresses and a lone virgin — also had vital roles, and not just as producers of babies (though, the virgin aside, they managed that at an alarming lick, too).
Joan of Arc beat the English; Catherine de Médicis effectively ran France for 25 years; and Anne de Bretagne was crucial to the power-play between Brittany, France and the Habsburg regime.
With the 500th anniversary of Anne’s death this year, what better time for a leading ladies’ trail through the region, taking in their chateaux? In fact, almost all the women were associated with several properties; it was the court’s habit to move around. For simplicity, we have linked each protagonist to the chateau with which she had the most visible, or dramatic, connection.
Joan of Arc (1412-31), Chinon
In 1429, a young woman rode from Lorraine to this vast, ridge-topping castle overlooking the Vienne River. She had come to tell King Charles VII that, if he was (I paraphrase) too much of a drip to boot the English out of France, she’d do the job for him. Celestial voices had so bidden her. All she needed was his army. She was 17. The real surprise was that Charles VII agreed. Shortly, the French were relieving Orléans, clearing the region of Englishmen and giving them a pasting at the battle of Patay. Some see it as the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years War.
And it started right here. Chinon had been a key 12th-century Plantagenet possession in France. It was a favoured spot of Henry II of England, who died here in 1189. King John finally lost the place to the French in 1205.
These days it remains a battered but utterly imposing veteran, which you would still not want to besiege. There is not much left inside, but what survives is good — and all the better for a recent £13-million makeover. And you may still stand where Joan stood, for that room remains.
Agnès Sorel (1422-50), Loches
Agnès was the temptress of the Loire Valley saga. She pioneered naked shoulders and a plunging décolletage — and was famously portrayed with one breast exposed. Little wonder that she entwined Charles VII. She thus became the first official mistress to a French king (while also lady-in-waiting to his wife, the queen).
Charles bestowed upon her the Logis Royal (royal quarters) at Loches. Within the citadel topping the town, this was a good and safe place to be. The citadel had a fortress at one end with a 35m keep that still looks like a fist raised at the sky.
At the other end, Agnès’s Logis Royal was among the first Loire chateaux built for leisure. It is posh, decorative and has a topless portrait of Sorel and lovely views over the valley. Anne de Bretagne was also here a century later; her oratory is perhaps the finest room.
Next door, the St Ours collegial church is the resting place of Agnès’s body. It has been moved about a bit and been much-desecrated since she died at the age of 28. In 2005, scientific tests confirmed she died from an overdose of mercury. Who killed her? No one knows for sure. And the recumbent figure of Agnès on her tomb gives nothing away, for her face is hidden by flanking angels.
Anne de Bretagne (1477-1514), Langeais
Anne was 11 when she was plunged into the snake pit of diplomacy. As the marriageable duchess of a mainly independent Brittany, she was a prize catch — and the Austrians thought they had landed her on her betrothal to the Habsburg Maximilian I. The French were
appalled. Thus the French king Charles VIII attacked Rennes, unilaterally annulled her marriage to Max, and bade her follow him to Langeais for the wedding in 1491.
Had it been a happier occasion, Langeais would have provided a lovely setting. The chateau presents a forbidding face to the town (the drawbridge still works) but it is much more sumptuous on the other side.
And, restored by a 19th-century businessman, it is pretty sumptuous inside too. Look out for some splendid tapestries, sacred paintings and a waxwork recreation of Anne’s wedding ceremony. The young couple — she was 14, Charles VIII 21 — look glum, as well they might.
The courtly, cultured Charles brought back artists and artisans from his Italian campaigns, thus generating the first rays of the Renaissance that came to define the Loire Valley. Then, after nutting himself on a low door, he died.
There was no heir and Anne was contractually obliged to marry the next king, Charles’s distant cousin, Louis XII. So she became queen a second time — but older and stronger. She stamped her authority on the court and brought to it clever women from good families. “Talking of her knowledge, no other queen compares,” wrote one modern chronicler.
Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566), Chenonceau
Diane was the Loire’s second-sexiest woman, and evidently remained so into middle age. She was governess to the future Henry II when he was 11 and she 31. Before too long, they were lovers. It has been claimed that she was simultaneously the mistress of Henry’s father, King Francis I, but this is now doubted.
Henry was obliged to marry Catherine de Médicis when both were 15 but he remained bewitched by Diane, who was amply rewarded — not least with Chenonceau, the loveliest of all “Loire chateaux” (though it is actually on the River Indre).
When Henry was killed in a jousting tournament, Catherine expelled Diane from Chenonceau and took it as hers. Catherine added a sublime gallery to the bridge that Diane had built across the river, and more gardens. Here she hosted parties to showcase monarchical power, with the men dressed as women and vice versa.
Today the chateau retains a feminine grandeur and Diane’s bedchamber remains seductive. As Gustave Flaubert, a house guest in the 19th century, wrote: “Sleeping in Diane de Poitier’s bed is worth more than sleeping with a number of palpable realities.”
Catherine de Médicis (1519-89), Blois
Catherine was stout, spoke with an Italian accent and, on marriage to the future Henry II, was dismissed as a “Florentine shopkeeper” by French courtiers who considered the Médicis decidedly arriviste. She also had to tolerate her husband’s preference for Diane de Poitiers. But as queen, then mother and regent to three subsequent kings, she was among the most powerful women in French history.
As such, she was all over the Loire Valley — but the Blois chateau remained a key royal base. Built around a courtyard, its four sides cover four distinct eras of Loire architecture — late medieval, through early Renaissance, then later Renaissance and on to Neoclassical.
Blois was a hub of Catherine’s efforts to resolve the Catholic-Protestant conflict then ripping France apart. One of her tactics was to send squads of beautiful young women off to calm down warlords and glean pillow secrets. The 1572 St Bartholomew massacre of thousands of Protestants happened on her watch.
Now restored to Renaissance splendour, Blois is heavy with colour and hangings. Catherine’s chamber is a rich cacophony of gold, red and green. She died there, aged 69. If she hadn’t resolved the religious wars, that was because their intractability demanded blood. Diplomacy, with or without nubile women and transvestite parties, was never going to be enough.
Mary Stuart (1542-87), Amboise
Amboise bills itself as the nursery of royals. Louis XI’s children, including the future Charles VIII, grew up there, as did Francis I — and all the offspring of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis who survived. It was for their eldest son, the future Francis II, that Mary Stuart was shipped across from Scotland at the age of five.
In France, young Mary was considered pretty, tall and gifted at music, poetry, riding, falconry and languages. She married Francis — a short, sickly stutterer — in 1558, when she was 15, he 14. They were based at Amboise. When Francis took the throne just over a year later, the couple were king and queen of both France and Scotland, with a decent claim, too, to the English crown.
Had things gone smoothly, history might have been remarkably different. But they didn’t. In the 1560 Tumult of Amboise, Protestant insurgents attacked the chateau, intending to kidnap the king. They failed miserably, and vengeance was merciless. Some 1 200 Protestants were executed and their bodies hung from the chateau façade. Within months, however, Francis was dead — at 17, of an ear infection. Mary grieved bitterly, then returned to Scotland and a no-less-troubled onward life as Queen of Scots.
Amboise’s eminence ensured it benefited from the very finest Renaissance attention on the part of Italian artists and architects, most notably Leonardo da Vinci. He crossed the Alps on a donkey (with the
Mona Lisa in his saddlebag), lived his final years at the Clos Lucé manor house close to Amboise, and is buried in the chateau’s St Hubert chapel.
Up here, perhaps more than anywhere else, you get a sense of the sheer majesty of the Loire Valley era.