SYMHC Classics: Charles IX of France

Today we revisit a 2015 episode about French royalty. 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 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. Our network has another new show
coming out. This one is called Noble Blood and it's
sort of combines history with the true crime show in
a show that's hosted by Danish Wartz and it is
produced by Aaron Bankey. So, as its name suggests, it's
all about royalty, there's also maybe some crime involved might
not have been considered crime at the time, but maybe

(00:24):
and so to go along with the theme of that show,
today's classic is on Charles the ninth of France. He
was prone to just terrifying periods of rage. You can
stay tuned at the end of this episode for a
peek at Noble Blood, although just be forewarned it's a
little more graphic in the gory details than our show
tends to be. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History

(00:48):
Class a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy.
If you sin and Tracy, it's been a little while
since we've done a Mad Royals episode we have. That's
a theme that kept cropping up in previous hosts shows

(01:09):
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 ninth of France, as I just hinted,

(01:31):
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
e bit 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 apparently made it look like he
had a perpetually running nose, which seems like a terrible

(01:55):
thing for a child to bear. But uh, he eventually
grew a mustache to cover it up as 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 Frenchie, either
this birth birthmark wasn't even that noticeable or the artist

(02:15):
downplayed it. But that's just kind of a fun little factoid.
As we go into this story about Charles the Ninth,
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, and they bust Smiths
about her reputation. But we're gonna look at this story

(02:37):
and this piece of history as it relates specifically to
her son, Charles. Charles was born Charles Maximilian on June
near Paris, and his parents, as we already mentioned, were
Katherine de Medici and Henry the second of France. Uh.
And as you said, Catherine was covered at length back

(02:57):
in the Katie and Sarah dates, and the couple all
so 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 often hire in

(03:18):
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 suggests that
that is what kind of fosters some of their bad
behavior as they grew up, that they just were kind

(03:38):
of spoiled um. The castle was also filled with entertainments
of its own. They had a private zoo of exotic
creatures and plenty of domestic animals available for the young
children's and amusement, and they also had companion children the
family would kind of hire in and keep handy, so
that each of the royal children had another child the

(04:00):
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 than learning

(04:20):
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 accident. Unfortunately, his opponent's lance actually shattered

(04:42):
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 nine. When Henry the Second died,

(05:05):
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 and very against this idea. Eventually, Francis,

(05:31):
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 of his family. Francis the Second,
who had tuberculosis, died of an abscess behind his ear

(05:54):
on the evening of December five, fifteen sixty and at
that moment the crown went to his younger brother, Charles
the ninth. And before we get on to kind of
Charles as a child king, it's a little early, but
I want to go ahead and do a sponsor break
here because that way we can keep kind of the
next chunk of the story altogether. So is that cool

(06:14):
with you, Tracy, it is, let's do it. To get
back to Charles's story, he was only ten when his
brother died, so his mother, Catherine was named as regent,
and in this role she did everything that a ruler

(06:36):
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
in what he was up to. And again that that's
one of those things that people will talk about in
history when they're talking about royal families. But it really

(06:58):
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 from
early on, Charles had shown some signs of mental illness.
And this really manifested initially is these fits, uh that

(07:22):
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
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.

(07:44):
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
same characteristics. Yeah, this is pretty consistent throughout the family.
Charles was also obsessively interested in hunting. Uh. Hunting, you know,

(08:05):
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, 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 Gives, who was one of the

(08:26):
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 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.

(08:48):
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 Francis had died, so 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

(09:11):
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, 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

(09:32):
that was ultimately held responsible for them. Charles had been
named king in August of fifteen sixty three, and starting
in fifteen sixty four, he started a two year tour
of France at the insistence of his mother. In part,
this was 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

(09:53):
bitter conflict, and during this sort of tour of France
and these tr levels, one of the first real acts
of violence on Charles's part took place. It's one 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 this

(10:17):
entourage were traveling from their starting point of Fontainebleu to
their next destination. Charles came across a pig that had
recently given birth, and he wanted to try to 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 that and it was

(10:40):
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 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 appearing. Is some of the meetings he

(11:01):
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
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

(11:22):
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
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

(11:45):
close to his younger sister Marguerite, who you'll also see
listed as Margaret and sometimes even Margot, and his behavior
was peppered more and more with these angry rages. 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,

(12:07):
I mean, he was always sort of like a hair
trigger kind of potential violent person to be around, which
I can imagine has no fune whatsoever. Charles also contracted tuberculosis,
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

(12:30):
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
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

(12:52):
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
around that 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,

(13:12):
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
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

(13:36):
issues of animosity or jealousy over the mistress, like they
kind of all worked it out. Charles and Elizabeth had
a daughter named Marie Elizabeth, and this was two years
after 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

(13:58):
he eventually became Duke of Angouleme. 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 and these went on from April

(14:19):
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,
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 court were actually a huge factor and influence

(14:42):
in these wars, Charles's younger brother, Alexandra Eduard, the Duke d'Anjou,
defeated the Huguenos in battle in fifteen sixty nine. That's
made nineteen year old King Charles a Second incredibly jealous,
and it shifted his sympathies over to the Huguenos. Not
only did not possessed the military or physical prowess that

(15:02):
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 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

(15:26):
and Huguenot military leader Gaspar de Coligni, and Coligny had
this plan to go up against the Netherlands in Spain,
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 Coligny and is said to have actually
sometimes called him father, but Charles's mother wasn't really enthusiastic

(15:50):
about her son's political friends. While she had initially taken
a stance in favor of reconciliation with Huguenos, particularly after
Mary's Catholic uncle had kidnapped her and Charles, Catherine felt
threatened by the influence that Gaspard de Colony had over
her son. While there's some debate over who exactly ordered

(16:11):
the move, it's believed by a lot of historians that
Catherine conspired to have Colony assassinated. That effort ultimately failed
and he was only wounded. The Hugeno Protestants were, of
course angered at this attack, and King Charles the Second
promised to investigate. And irritated by the failure of her

(16:31):
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
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

(16:53):
until he finally yelled killed the admiral. If you wish,
but you must kill all the Huguenos so that not
one is left to a lot of to reproach me.
Kill the lot, kill the lot, kill the lot. Conveniently,
during all the scheming, the king's sister, Marguerite de Vala,
was marrying Henri of Navarre, who was the leader of
the Huguenos, so that meant all of the other Hugueno

(17:16):
leaders were in town to celebrate their wedding. But before
we get to the massacre, I want to talk a
little bit about this wedding, uh, and not in a
romantic Let's discuss the dress coin of way. But if
you think Charles's sister Marguerite was miffed at being married
off to Henri of Navarre, you would be correct. While

(17:37):
the two siblings, Charles and Margot had been close when
they were younger, in fifteen seventy, Margot had been 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 Guise,

(17:59):
was soon mary it off to a wealthy noble woman
and kind of gotten out of the picture. The rift
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 there were children, and there was absolutely no affection

(18:19):
between them. Marguerite was fastidious and obsessed with cleoonis and
Ri was not. He had a reputation for his odor yeah,
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

(18:43):
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
had just grown furious at her behavior, stepped behind her
and pushed her head forward and down in a knot
of scent. So the massacre and the pre dawn hours

(19:04):
of August colony was thrown from his bedroom window. He
had already been severely beaten and stabbed, and he was
beheaded in the street. This, along with the murders of
additional key figures of Hugano 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

(19:25):
the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. As news of the Hugueno
leadership's demise spread, Catholic mobs began attacking and killing Huguenos
throughout the city. The slaughter was just brutal, and it
went on and on. On August, Charles was attempting to
put an end to it by means of a royal order,

(19:46):
but no one paid any attention. As the weeks went on,
the carnage spread out from Paris into the country. It
went on for almost two months. A rough estimate of
the death toll is about seventy thousand Hugueno Protestants. Several
of the as were in Paris alone. And I wanted
just to take a side note here. This is actually
the first use of the word massacre in English. Uh

(20:09):
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
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

(20:29):
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
was horrible. Yeah. And I will say there are debates
over the the accuracy of those counts. Uh. Some people
will say the seventy thousand estimate is way too high,

(20:50):
and that the several thousand that were in Paris h
may or may not be accurate as well. But we
know that it was tens of thousands, So even if
it was half that, you're still talking about a great
deal of people. Uh. Henri 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

(21:15):
royal guards and kind of given this option. It sounds like, uh,
he would eventually rule France with Marguerite's queen, but that
wouldn't be for a bit. Then this move was also
intended to quell the Hugueno uprising, but what it really
did was to kick off the fourth of the eight
French religious wars ya. As I mentioned earlier, those those
wars kind of ebbed and flowed and went on and

(21:36):
would erupt in in individuals, sort of what they call wars,
but they went on through this long period of time,
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 came

(22:00):
angrier and angrier, and he kind of developed this blood
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

(22:20):
he liked to lash servants rather violently. The stress of
his position, this ongoing physical problems, and the UH, the
tumult of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre all really took
a toll on Charles. His temper became increasingly hair triggered,
and he would just fly into violent rages without any warning.

(22:41):
And as winter came on at the end of fifteen
seventies three, he was at this point really quite incredibly 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 seventy four, just a month

(23:02):
shy of his twenty four birthday. It's believed that Charles
remained very melancholy about his involvement in the St. 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

(23:23):
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 to be an angry royal,
and I would be reluctant to diagnose him as insane,
but he certainly seems like someone that is that blood
lusty must be dealing with some severe mental illness. Uh,

(23:44):
but that is the scoop. Thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is
from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at history podcast at how Stuff

(24:06):
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
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Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for

(24:27):
my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. She was
the fifteen child of the Empress Maria Teresa and was
only gifted with the prize role of Dauphin of France
thanks to random happenstance, an unlikely circumstance be following her

(24:48):
older sisters. Her education up until that last minute betrothedale
had been minimal, but even if she wasn't studious. She
was beautiful and charming and agreeable. She would be happy
in France, marrying the awkward young prince only a few
months her senior. But even if she wasn't, her happiness
wasn't the point. She was a pawn to secure an

(25:10):
alliance between Austria and France. Twenty two years after she
became a French princess, after two decades of decadence in
the most cultured and luxurious palace in the world, Marie
Antoinette was alone in a cell in the heart of Paris,
with mobs outside calling for her head to join that

(25:31):
of her husband and her friends in the guillotine. Marie
Antoinette's prison cell at the Conciergerie was not a place
of warmth and kindness, but the jail keeper, Madame Rochard,
tried to make the woman who had once lived in
a palace comfortable. Madame Richard, who ran the Conciergerie with
her husband, had watched the queen hang a small golden

(25:53):
watch on the wall of herself, the only bit of
adornment in the dark room, where the walls dripped and
owning could be heard from all hours of the night.
It was a gift from long ago from her mother,
the Empress Maria Therese. Madame Richard had also watched the
guards confiscate the watch five days later. The Queen was

(26:14):
mostly quiet after that, Her hands stayed in her laps.
She thanked the guards and they brought her food, and
thanked Madame Richard when the jailer brought fresh flowers to
the cell. Before those two were banned. One afternoon, to
try to cheer up the queen, Madame Rochard brought her
own son to the prison. Marie Antoinette had always famously

(26:36):
loved children. She once stopped her carriage to help a
poor boy on the street, paying for his boarding and education.
She had clutched her own children to her so tightly
and for so long that Versailles had wagged their tongues
at her over indulgence. When Madame Richard's son, Fan Fan
arrived at the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette burst into tears for

(26:59):
the first time in weeks. Her voice rose above a whisper.
She wailed while hugging the boy, pulling her arms tighter
and tighter around him. It was a cry of misery.
Van Van was seven at the time, the same age
as Marie Antoinette's son, Louis Charles, imprisoned somewhere far away
being re educated by revolutionaries. When Madame Richard took her

(27:22):
son's hand and led him back into the hall, she
confessed to a maid that she had made a mistake
and she would never again bring fan Fan to visit
Marie Antoinette. Six months prior, Marie Antoinette's family had all
been together for what would be the last time. It
was the night before the former King Louis the sixteenth execution,

(27:43):
and the man now called Louis Capette was permitted one
last meal. Marie Antoinette and louise younger sister Elizabeth cried
the entire evening, while the children, a boy and a girl,
looked up at their stoic father with wide watery eyes.
Promise me, the once king said to his children that

(28:03):
you will not seek revenge for those who do this
to me. Little Louis Charles nodded his head. Marie Antoinette
would not stop her weeping. She and her husband had
been married for twenty three years. Louis the sixteenth had
never taken a mistress. Perhaps if he had, things would
have been easier for his queen some one else to

(28:25):
deflect the gossip and attention. But it was far too
late to try to imagine how things might have been different.
Louis the sixteenth had been sent into to death, and
his head would be on the guillotine the next morning.
To stop his wife, and his sister and his children
from crying, Louis promised that he would see them tomorrow morning,

(28:45):
that he would say one final goodbye. This was just
good night. We'll say goodbye to morrow morning, he lied.
The next morning, Marie Antoinette, now called the Widow Capette,
was taken to a new prison cell. Noble Blood is

(29:06):
a co production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey.
The show is written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and
produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(29:29):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.