Charles IX of France

Much like many of the other mad royals that have been discussed on the podcast through the years, Charles IX of France was prone to fits of rage so intense that people at court feared for their lives.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy. You Wilson and Tracy. Has been
a little while since we've done a Mad Royals episode
we have. That's a theme that kept cropping up in

(00:22):
previous hosts shows and then it just carried over into
our work too. Yeah, more than anything else, ours is
more of like a cranky, temperamental probably doesn't have control
of his emotions kind of royal, but we'll fit it
into mad there, you could say he was mad uh
and much like many of the other Mad Royals that
we've discussed on the podcast throughout the years, Charles the

(00:43):
ninth of France, as I just hinted, was really prone
to fits of rage and these could be so intense
that people at his court feared for their lives. And
for a quick sort of fun background ebit that's not
really super important to his biography, Charles at ninth was
allegedly nicknamed the Snotty King, and that was because of
a birthmark that he had on his upper lip that

(01:04):
apparently made it look like he had a perpetually running nose,
which seems like a terrible thing for a child to bear,
but uh, he eventually grew a mustache to cover it
up once he became an adult and was able to
grow facial hair. But that's only the tip of the
iceberg on this one. Uh. And going by his famous
portrait from when he was just a boy, uh that
was painted by friend Sue, either this birth birthmark wasn't

(01:28):
even that noticeable or the artist downplayed it. But that's
just kind of a fun little factoid. As we go
into this story about Charles the Knight, he was also
the son of Catherine de Medici. So his story brushes
up against the series that previous hosted on the Medici Family. Uh.
Katie and Sarah talk a lot about Catherine in previous episodes,

(01:48):
and they bust submiths about her reputation. But we're gonna
look at this story and this piece of history as
it relates specifically to her son, Charles. Charles was born
Charles Maximilian on June fifty near Paris, and his parents,
as we already mentioned, were Catherine de Medici and Henry
the second of France. Uh. And as he said, Catherine

(02:11):
was covered at length back in the Katie and Sarah dates,
and the couple also had an older son, Francis the
second as well. They had other children, But this is
just to kind of make it clear that at this
point Charles was not immediately next in line for the throne.
As a child, Charles was really coddled by his parents.
His mother ordered numerous portraits of her children, and she'd

(02:32):
often hire in troops of actors and other performers just
to keep them entertained. And that's not unusual for royal
families at the time, but she is usually described as
being really quite doting on her children on Some historians
kind of suggest that that is what kind of fosters
some of their bad behavior as they grew up, that

(02:52):
they just were kind of spoiled um. The castle was
also filled with entertainments of its own. They had a
private zoo of exotic creatures and many of domestic animals
available for the young children's and amusements, and they also
had companion children the family would kind of hire in
and keep handy so that each of the royal children

(03:13):
had another child their same age that they could play with.
As you would probably expect, the royal siblings were very
well educated as a child, Charles showed some natural artistic ability,
and he seemed to really enjoy literature and writing, but
he wasn't that eager about being a scholar. His school
work had more to do with making his mother happy

(03:34):
than learning things for himself. So in the summer of
fifteen fifty nine, Catherine and King Henry the Second's daughter Elizabeth,
who was four years older than Charles, was married to
King Philip the Second of Spain in a proxy ceremony,
and during this celebration, uh King Henry participated in a
joust and there was an accidents. Unfortunately, his opponent's lance

(03:56):
actually shattered and the King's face was penetrated by splinters
from this damaged weapon in multiple places. Over the course
of the next eleven days, Henry became progressively more and
more ill due to infection and swelling and a lot
of various problems going on, and he eventually succumbed to
those wounds and died on July tenth nine. When Henry

(04:19):
the second died, his son, Francis the Second, became the
king of France, but Francis, who was married to Mary,
Queen of Scott's, did not reign for very long, just
seventeen months. During that time, the teenage king was really
influenced by Mary's family, and while the Protestant Huguenots of
France wanted religious freedom, Mary's uncles were very, very Catholic

(04:42):
and very against this idea. Eventually, Francis, his uncle's in law,
engineered the execution of fifty seven Hugueno conspirators who were
put to death for treason. Charles, of course, being a
young boy and and part of this royal family, witnessed
the entire spectacle of this execution along with the rest

(05:03):
of his family. Francis the second, who had tuberculosis, died
of an abscess behind his ear on the evening of
December five, fifteen sixty and at that moment the crown
went to his younger brother Charles the night and before
we get onto kind of Charles as a child king,
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(05:23):
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To get back to Charles's story. He was only ten

(06:49):
when his brother died, so his mother, Catherine was named
as regent, and in this role, she did everything that
a ruler would normally do, and she stayed by her
son's side at almost all times. For the rare occasions
when she wasn't with Charles, the servants, of course, were
expected to report back to her on even the most
minute details and what he was up to. And again

(07:12):
that that's one of those things that people will talk
about in history when they're talking about royal families, but
it really is not that unusual. I think most royal parents,
particularly as you go further back, the habit was kind
of to keep constant tabs on their kids as they
were doing things. I'm using the air quotes on their
own because they were never really on their own. But

(07:33):
from early on, Charles had shown some signs of mental illness.
And this really manifested initially, is these fits, uh, that
could be attributed to the frustration of a child, like
we have all seen a toddler kind of hit the
wall where they can't they don't have the language skills
to like explain themselves, so they just kind of have
these rage fits. But the problem was that this continued

(07:55):
for Charles long past the age where that behavior is
considered normal and part of the growing cycle. He was
also physically pretty weak, although he enjoyed being physically active
at the same time. He also wasn't the only one
in his family who was prone to developing infections and
displaying these kind of rage tantrums. His brothers had the

(08:15):
same characteristics. Yeah, this is pretty consistent throughout the family.
H Charles was also obsessively interested in hunting. Uh hunting,
you know, very popular, but he was really obsessed with it,
and the sight of blood during these excursions got him
really excited, and he seemed to start to crave that excitement,

(08:36):
almost like an addiction. He got lots of excitement outside
of hunting. Due to the ongoing religious tensions in France.
In fifteen sixty two, Francis of Gieves, who was one
of the same uncles of Mary, Queen of Scott's, who
had been so influential over his older brother, briefly kidnapped
Charles and his mother, threatening that if the young king

(08:57):
entertained any ideas about becoming a Protestant, they really had
no qualms with getting a new king. Yeah, you can
imagine how that would be a terrifying event for a
young child. You know, again, he was only ten when
his when he became king, even though he wasn't really
ruling at that point. So this is a lot to
deal with. Uh. Three years after Frances had died, so

(09:20):
Charles would have been on the on the throne, but
with his mother ruling his regent. UH. Charles turned thirteen
and shortly after this he was proclaimed king without his
mother's regency. And you may think that this would have
been a problem for Catherine, but you would be wrong,
because she still held the power. Charles was very young
and indecisive and as we said, kind of physically weak,

(09:42):
and he already showed these signs of mental illness. And
now Catherine was in this position where really she was
still making the decisions. She had that much influence, but
Charles was the one that was ultimately held responsible for them.
Charles had been named king in August of fifteen sixty three,
and starting in fifteen sixty or he started a two
year tour of France at the insistence of his mother.

(10:04):
In part, this is intended to show off the strength
of the royal house and really try to unite the
French under the king, but the Catholics and the Huguenots
continued their bitter conflict. And during this sort of tour
of France and these travels, one of the first real
acts of violence on Charles's part took place at one

(10:25):
of the first times that we have actual documentation of
him kind of being violent outside sort of a normal
scenario like hunting. Um While he and his mother and
his entourage were traveling from their starting point of Fontainebleeu
to their next destination, Charles came across a pig that
had recently given birth, and he wanted to try to

(10:48):
pick up one of the piglets, and when he tried
to handle it, the sow attacked him, and his reaction
was incredibly brutal, and he killed the pig and orphaned
the litter and kind of left it at that, and
it was again outside sort of the uh, you know,
it wasn't like going on a hunt. It was killing
this mother animal and orphaning all of her piglets. And

(11:08):
it's really the first time that we see him just
being brutal in kind of a senseless way throughout the
rest of the royal tour, he performed various acts of diplomacy,
and he made public appearances. Some of the meetings he
and his mother took with the Catholic royals of Spain
really stirred the pot with the French wars of religion,
because the Hugenos saw these meetings is likely being alliance

(11:31):
meetings with their enemies. At this point, we should point
out that Charles did not remain physically weak for the
entirety of his life. We mentioned as a child he
was kind of frail um, and as he passed through
adolescence he grew a great deal, although he did always
stay very thin, but he became quite tall um, and
he just wasn't seen as so much frail, although I
don't think anyone would ever describe him as like a

(11:52):
hulking uh specimen of strength and fitness. But as his
physical stature grew, his mental state really kind of took
the opposite track and started to deteriorate. He was very
close to his younger sister, Marguerite, who you'll also see
with that as Margaret and sometimes even Marco, and his
behavior was peppered more and more with these angry rages.

(12:17):
It started to seem like his sister was the only
one who was safe from this and who could help
calm him down. Even his mother started to gradually fear him. Yeah,
I mean he was always sort of like a hair
trigger kind of potential violent person to be around, which
I can imagine is no fun whatsoever. Charles also contracted tuberculosis,

(12:40):
just as his brother Francis had, and he came quite
near to dying from it in eight but he did
recover from that, although after that point his health was
fairly inconsistent. Eventually he developed an abscess in one of
his arms from being bled routinely in an effort to
fight this tuberculosis, but even so he managed to recover

(13:02):
and continue his reign. As he recovered from this prolonged illness,
Charles found love. He met Marie Touchet, and although she
was from a bougeois family, Catherine approved of her son
taking her as a mistress. She seemed to truly care
for Charles, and she helped calm his unsettled temper. Yeah,
much like his sister, Like basically anybody that could be

(13:23):
around it would help keep him a little more relaxed
and a little less likely to be violent. Catherine was
game for that plan. But soon after, in fifteen seventy,
the twenty year old Charles also got married, so he
kept Touche as his mistress, but he married Elizabeth of Austria.
And Charles is said to have actually loved both Elizabeth

(13:43):
and Marie Touche, and the three of them seemed to
get along fine. You know, Touche understood her position as mistress,
and she was very respectful of his wife, and the
wife didn't seem to have, you know, any real issues
of animosity or jealousy over the mistress. Like the kind
of all worked it out. Charles and Elizabeth had a
daughter named Marie Elizabeth, and this was two years after

(14:05):
they got married, but unfortunately the child died at the
age of six. Charles also had a son, Charles de Vaudois,
with his mistress Marie, the year after Marie Elizabeth was born,
and that son lived to adulthood and he eventually became
Duke of Angouleme. And before we hopped to some of
the more important kind of political events that were happening

(14:27):
at the time of Charles's reign. So the series of
religious conflicts between French Catholics and Protestants went on in phases.
We referred earlier to the French Wars of religion, and
these are they? Uh, And these went on from April
fifteen sixty two to May. But they were kind of
in pockets. It wasn't always continuous. There would be moments
of peace and then it would break into another you know,

(14:50):
fight again, and then they would reach an accord and
that wouldn't last. But during the reign of Charles the Ninth,
when Catherine de Medici was still incredibly powerful, the politics
of French were actually a huge factor and influence in
these wars. Charles's younger brother, Alexandra Eduard, the Duke d'Anjou,
defeated the Huguenos in battle in fifteen sixty nine. Has

(15:13):
made nineteen year old King Charles a Second incredibly jealous,
and it shifted his sympathies over to the Huguenos. Not
only did he not possess the military or physical prowess
that his brother did, his brother was also clearly his
mother's favorite, so Charles was doubly irritated by his success. Yeah,
so it kind of had more to do with a

(15:33):
this switch in kind of sympathies towards the Huguenot had
more to do with this brotherly rivalry than it really
had to do with the actual religious and political stuff
that was going on. But in one Charles met with
nobleman and Huguenot military leader Gaspard de Coligni, and Coligny
had this plan to go up against the Netherlands in Spain,

(15:54):
and he wanted the king to form an alliance and
unite the country's warring religious groups to do so. And
Charles was actually game for this uh and he was
extremely fond of Colony and is said to have actually
sometimes called him father. But Charles's mother wasn't really enthusiastic
about her son's political friends. While she had initially taken
a stance in favor of reconciliation with Huguenos, particularly after

(16:18):
Mary's Catholic uncle had kidnapped her and Charles, Catherine felt
threatened by the influence that Gaspard Dick Colony had over
her son. While there's some debate over who exactly ordered
the move, it's believed by a lot of historians that
Catherine conspired to have Colony assassinated. That effort ultimately failed

(16:40):
and he was only wounded. The Hugano Protestants were of
course angered at this attack, and King Charles the Second
promised to investigate. And irritated by the failure of her
move against Colonny, Catherine kind of took the situation as
it was and took a new tactic. She advised her
son that the safest course of action was to have

(17:01):
all of the Hugueno leaders killed and to strike decisively
and quickly. Charles agreed to this plan sort of. Her
haranguing had sent him into a fit of rage, eventually
until he finally yelled, kill the admiral if you wish,
but you must kill all the Huguenos so that not
one is left alive to reproach me. Kill the lot,

(17:22):
Kill the lot, killed the lot. Conveniently, during all the scheming,
the king's sister, Marguerite de Valois, was marrying Henri of Navarre,
who was the leader of the Huguenos, so that meant
all of the other Hugueno leaders were in town to
celebrate their wedding. But before we get to the massacre,

(17:42):
I want to talk a little bit about this wedding, uh,
and not in a romantic Let's discuss the dress going away.
But if you think Charles's sister, Marguerite was miffed at
being married off to Henri of Navarre, you would be correct.
While the two siblings, Charles and Argo had been close
when they were younger, in fifteen seventy, Margot had been

(18:04):
caught alone with a lover in the in a bedroom
of the royal home, and Charles was so enraged by
this event that he brutally beat his sister in front
of their mother until she lost consciousness. Her lover, Henri
de Guiz, was soon married off to a wealthy noblewoman
and kind of gotten out of the picture. The rift

(18:24):
between the brother and sister stayed around for the next
two years, but then it widened into a gulf when
it was announced that Marguerite would be married to Nri
of Navarre. The bride and groom had known each other
since they were children, and there was absolutely no affection
between them. Marguerite was fastidious and obsessed with cleoonists, and
Henri was not. He had a reputation for his odor yeah,

(18:50):
and she had the opposite reputation. She is uh alleged
to have been one of those rare people who bathed
every single day during this time, which was not necessarily
common uh And during the marriage ceremony, Margot is said
to have stood silent rather than utter the words of
consent to the union when the Cardinal asked it of her,
and this became an uncomfortable silence, and eventually Charles, who

(19:13):
had just grown furious at her behavior, stepped behind her
and pushed her head forward and down in a not
of consent. So the massacre and the pre dawn hours
of August colony was thrown from his bedroom window. He
had already been severely beaten and stabbed, and he was

(19:33):
beheaded in the street. This, along with the murders of
additional key figures of Hugeno leadership, many of whom were
slain in the Royal Palace where they were wedding guests,
set off a chain reaction of events now known as
the St. Barth Almew's Day Massacre. As news of the
Hugeno leadership's demise spread, Catholic mobs began attacking and killing

(19:56):
Huguenos throughout the city. The slaughter was just rutal, and
it went on and on. On August twenty, Charles was
attempting to put an end to it by means of
a royal order, but no one paid any attention. As
the weeks went on, the carnage spread out from Harris
into the country. It went on for almost two months.
A rough estimate of the death toll is about seventy

(20:17):
thousand Huguenot Protestants. Several of those were in Paris alone.
And I wanted to take a side note here. This
is actually the first use of the word massacre in English. Uh.
And a lot of the people who were killed were
just like working at their shops, are going about their
normal daily lives when people burst in and and cut

(20:37):
them down. Um. The reason I know that is because
back when we did our episode about the Boston massacre,
which had an extremely small number of people who were killed,
a lot of people that got angry that we didn't
approach that with the proper gravita or like massacres weren't
that big at the time. No, this is the first
time that the word massacre appeared in English, and it

(20:59):
was horror bowl. Yeah. And I will say there are
debates over the accuracy of those counts. Uh. Some people
will say the seventy thousand estimate is way too high
and that the several thousand that were in Paris may
or may not be accurate as well, but we know
that it was tens of thousands, So even if it

(21:19):
was half that, you're still talking about a great deal
of people. Uh. Honri of Navarre, however, despite being a
Huguenot leader, actually survived the massacre because he converted to Catholicism.
He was kind of swept away, uh by royal guards
and kind of given this option. It sounds like, uh,
he would eventually rule France with Marguerite's queen, but that

(21:43):
wouldn't be for a bit. Then. This move was also
intended to quell the Huguano uprising, but what it really
did was to kick off the fourth of the eight
French religious wars. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, those those
wars kind of ebbed and flowed and went on and
would erupt in in individuals sort of what they call wars,
but they went on through this long period of time,

(22:03):
and they're all linked, all eight of them, as the
French religious wars. We mentioned earlier that Charles had developed
this serious passion for hunting, which is kind of a
very gentle way to put it, and it seems that
his obsession with it intensified as he grew and became
angrier and angrier, and he kind of developed this blood

(22:23):
lust for the hunt. His preference was to kill with
a knife because he wanted to be close to the
blood uh, and this seemed to help him sometimes vent
off his violent impulses, but it did not work long term.
He also developed a taste for torturing animals UH, and
he liked to lash servants rather violently. The stress of

(22:45):
his position, this ongoing physical problems, and the h the
tumult of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre all really took
a tole on Charles. His temper became increasingly hair triggered,
and he would just fly into violent rages without any warning.
And as winter came on at the end of fifteen
seventy three, he was at this point really quite incredibly

(23:07):
frail uh, in constant pain as tuberculosis really took a
toll on his body. And his spring of fifteen seventy
four came on. He said to have been sweating blood
almost continuously, and he finally died on fifteen seventy four,
just a month shy of his twenty fourth birthday. It's
believed that Charles remained very melancholy about his involvement in

(23:29):
the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre for the rest of his
short life, although I was not really mentioned when he
gave his confession on his deathbed, and he was after
he passed, succeeded by his brother Henry the third. So
that is our mad Royal du jour. And as I
said at the beginning, I was a little you know
um in the mad royal zone. He seems so much

(23:52):
to be an angry royal and I would be reluctant
to diagnose him as insane, but he certainly seems like
someone that is that un lest he must be dealing
with some severe mental illness. Uh, but that is the scoop.
But in peppier things, I have listener mail I have
to uh. One is our first is from Anne Marie

(24:14):
and she says good morning. As I'm catching up with
old episodes. I heard a bit of listener mail about
seeing lots of stray dogs in Egypt, and you two
mentioned people seeing them in other countries. While I was
in Belize last year, I asked our tour driver about
the number of doghouses we saw and mentioned how funny
it was to me to see a house with an
identical little mini dog house in the yard, and he

(24:34):
was surprised that we didn't have doghouses all over the US.
I said that since my boyfriend and I live in
an urban area, people keep their dogs indoors overnight, and
he found that very funny and said that it was
quite standard in his area to just let your dog
roam around town. So just because you see a dog
out on its own doesn't mean it isn't being fed
and loved. People may just have an entirely different approach
to pet ownership in different cultures. That's a good point,

(24:56):
a Marie. I'm glad you brought it up, because I
know I tend to look at it from the point
of view of being a little bit of a crazy
cat lady and a crazy animal lady, where I'm very
into the pampered pet thing. I also have another fun
piece of listener mail. Listen just makes me delighted because
it's on one of my pet uh subjects. And this
comes from our listener Lisa, and she says, harkening back

(25:20):
to here two parter on the Beloved Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
I remember you talking about the hat Box Ghost, which
existed only very briefly when the mansion first opened, but
has been absent from the Happy Haunts since nineteen sixty nine,
thereby becoming a Disney fan favorite. You have probably already
heard the good news, but just in case you haven't,
I wanted to tell you that for disneyland sixty celebration,

(25:40):
which began on Friday, even though the actual anniversary isn't
until July seventeen, the wonderful people at Walt Disney Imagineering
have restored the hat Box Ghost to the Haunted Mansion attraction.
He's located on the right, just as you exit the
attic and start down into the graveyard scene. I saw
it today for the first time, and I am so excited.
I tried to get a decent photo of it to

(26:01):
send you, but my camera was not up to the task.
I did find Disney's official YouTube video about it, however,
which you can watch here, and she gives the link.
I was lucky enough. We've gotten several letters about the
hat Box ghosts and people letting us know that he
is back, and I was so fortunate because it just
worked out schedule wise, I was already planning to be
there on May nights, so I got to see him

(26:23):
on his first day back. Several times. It is very
hard to get a good photograph of him. At one point,
um when I was writing the following day, prankish Spirits
even stopped our doom buggies and I was almost directly
in front of him, and I still couldn't get a
good picture, even in stillness. So he's tricky to photograph,
absolutely beautiful like they did such a gorgeous job, uh

(26:46):
with reintegrating him back into the mansion, so I do
know about it. I'm super excited about it. I was
so delighted when I saw him. I was almost near
tears because I'm a big dork. But thank you for
everyone that's been writing us and sharing, and I love
hearing about everybody's experiences seeing him for the first time,
because it really is sort of just a delight and
a treat. And he's put in a really beautiful position

(27:08):
you cannot miss him, and you kind of get several
seconds of seeing him and his his wonderful little animation
and what happens to him. It's I could wax rapsodic
about it for a long time, but I will not. Instead,
I will tell you that if you would like to
send us your accounts of visiting hat box Ghost, you
can do that at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. You can also connect with us at Facebook,

(27:30):
Facebook dot com, slash missed in History, on Twitter at
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you can do that at missed in History dot spreadshirt
dot com. If you would like to research a topic
related to what we talked about today, you can go

(27:52):
to our parents site, how stubb Works. Type in uh
the word the phrase St. Bartholo Musday Massacre and you're
going to find an article ten Big Cases of Revenge,
which includes that massacre as well as nine other interesting
historical events. And if you would like to visit us online,
you can do that at missed in history dot com,
where we have a archive of all of our previous episodes,

(28:14):
including ones long before Tracy and I were here. We
have show notes from the time Tracy and I have
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can do that again at missed in History dot com
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(28:36):
it has to have Works dot