Catherine de Medici: The Serpent Queen and Her Flying Squadron of Spies
With the release of The Serpent Queen on DVD and Blu-Ray on 12 May, we have dug into the archives to bring you more about Catherine De Medici and her seductive Flying Squadron of Spies.
Boasting a stunning lead performance from BAFTA winner Samantha Morton (The Last Panthers, The Walking Dead), The Serpent Queen chronicles Catherine de Medici’s journey from an orphaned Italian noblewoman to the powerful Queen of France. Facing betrayal, political intrigue and religious turmoil, Catherine uses her wit, cunning, and ruthlessness to secure her position and protect her family, weaving a dark, feminist tale of survival in the 16th-century French court.
To celebrate the release of The Serpent Queen on DVD and Blu-Ray on 12th May, Inside History dug into our archives to re-release this amazing article by Melissa Barndon who reveals more about Catherine de Medici and her seductive Flying Squadron of spies.
Pre-order your copy of The Serpent Queen here from Amazon
The Flying Squadron of Catherine de Medici
Melissa Bardon
On 9 June, 1577, a lavish ball was celebrated at the sublime and enchanting Château Chenonceau, in the heart of the Loire Valley. As guests mingled and imbibed amidst the glowing lanterns on the terraces, “the most beautiful and charming women of the court were employed as serving-ladies, being half naked with their hair down loose like brides." As the night went on, seduction was the name of the game, and many couples were seen discreetly slipping into the bushes for romantic encounters. For a long time, historians have focused on this tale as proof of the licentiousness of the court of Catherine de Medici; that she sought out the most charming and beautiful noblewoman and used them to beguile and seduce men of the court to do her bidding. This network of Renaissance female spies became known as Catherine Medici’s escadron volant, or ‘flying squadron’. But did they actually exist, and what was their purpose?
According to historical sources, the ladies of the royal court of Catherine di Medici were ‘a true paradise in the world’. Catherine loved beauty, and art, so it seems perfectly natural that her ladies-in-waiting would also dress themselves richly as the occasion arose. Pierre de Bourdeille, a nobleman who frequented the royal court of Catherine de Medici and her son Henry III, and from whose memoirs can be discerned the origins of the myth of the flying squadron, wrote at the time: “Nothing was ever seen finer, more dazzling, dainty, superb...All this shone in a ballroom of the Tuileries or the Louvre as the stars of heaven in the azure sky. The queen-mother wished and commanded her ladies always to appear in grand and superb apparel.”
However, a satirical pamphlet from 1584 described her entourage as such: “Catin, you are fortunate/To have a stable of whores!”. According to contemporary publications, Catherine ordered her debased and immoral women to seduce and spy on influential noblemen, and her court was more often than not an orgy of decadence and sexual depravity. These were no ordinary women - they were supposed to have been specially trained by Catherine “for the services she required of them, in disregard of all moral principles and feminine modesty”.
By the time of her death, in 1589, Catherine Medici had been the wife of a king and mother to three kings. Born in Italy in 1519 to a French mother, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, and Lorenzo II of the outrageously wealthy Medici family, she stepped foot on French soil for the first time at the age of 15, as the bride of future monarch Henri II. After performing her duty and producing twelve royal children, seven of whom survived infancy, she was widowed at the age of 40 when Henri II was pierced in the eye during a jousting tournament. Catherine now found herself thrust into the spotlight as the Queen Mother.
The new king was her son, the 15-year-old Francis II. Whilst Francis was old enough to rule on his own, he showed little interest in the running of the kingdom, preferring to spend his days hunting for game in the royal forests. His sickliness, with which he had been inflicted since birth, also rendered him somewhat incapable of leadership. His reign was short, and he died in 1560, with less than two years on the throne. It was with the ascendancy of her next son, the 10-year-old Charles IX, that Catherine began her own dominance of the French monarchy, proclaiming herself “Catherine by the grace of God, Queen of France, Mother of the King”. Catherine began carving out a new and unique role for herself, and her powers were far superior to those of a regent. She was effectively the absolute monarch of France. But the France over which she took power was one riven with religious conflict, between the fervent Catholics and the puritan Protestants, and the stories of history tell us that she sent her escadron volant to fight in battles of the heart.
The beauty of the aristocratic Louise de la Béraudière was legendary. Known as la belle Rouet, she was maid of honour to Catherine, and supposedly commissioned to seduce Antoine de Bourbon, the King of Navarre and a Huguenot (French Protestant). Antoine was king only through his marriage to Jeanne d’Albret, the Calvinist queen of Navarre. The affair between Louise and Antoine was long-standing; Louise gave birth to their son in 1554. Rumours abounded that Catherine had “commanded her (la Béraudière) thus to seduce him and to please him in any way she could, so that, forgetting his own affairs he upset many people".
Louise de la Béraudière’s task was simple - convert the King of Navarre to Catholicism, in order to weaken the Huguenot cause and prevent the Wars of Religion. Antoine de Bourbon was promised the island of Sardinia in return for his conversion, where he could laze on the sun-drenched island surrounded by the local beauties, accompanied by la Bérauderie. The events surrounding the King of Navarre’s conversion travelled outside of France, and reached the ears of the Protestant reformer John Calvin himself. Calvin’s scathing assessment of the situation was thus: “He (Bourbon) is all in Venus ... the matron, who is experienced in this art, took from her harem the one who could trap the soul of our man in her nets”. Unfortunately for Antoine de Bourbon, he died in battle in Rouen in 1562, before his life of idle bliss could begin.
In 1563, the dashing and energetic Louis de Bourbon (the younger brother of Antoine de Bourbon), also known as the Prince de Condé, the leader of the French Huguenots, met the bewitching noblewoman Isabelle de Limeuil, one of Catherine’s filled damoiselles, and was instantly smitten. The queen mother at this time was trying to persuade Louis de Bourbon to sign the Peace of Amboise, to end the first War of Religion. With tensions high between Catholics and Protestants all over the kingdom, Louis de Bourbon neglected his wife and his duty to the Huguenots with his constant attention to Isabelle and his presence at the royal court. John Calvin, becoming exasperated with the Bourbon brothers and their love affairs, wrote Condé a letter in September 1563: “ We do not believe that evil is being committed that would directly offend God, but when we are told that you are making love to women, such a claim will seriously damage your authority and reputation”. The Huguenot poet Agrippa d’Aubigné was also not impressed: “If such complaints managed to reach the prince of Condé, the Queen’s caresses and Limeuil’s affections took up all his spirit”. Fairly quickly into their relationship, Isabelle became pregnant and, causing quite the scandal, gave birth to a baby boy whilst the royal court was stationed in Dijon, and was hurriedly dispatched to a suitable convent.
Charlotte de Beaune, Baronne de Sauve, another jewelled ornament in the Queen’s fabled squadron, was supposedly tasked by Catherine to seduce Henry of Navarre, the new king from 1572. The deed was done, the affair was begun; Charlotte allegedly gained his trust and his secrets during pillow talk. But there was more: Catherine’s youngest son, the Duke of Alençon, was somewhat wayward, and his friendship with the King of Navarre was considered to be dangerous if they were to join forces and overthrow King Henri III, Catherine’s favourite son. So Charlotte apparently became the ardent lover of the Duke of Alençon, at the behest of his mother, as a means of driving a wedge between the two friends and ensuring there would be no royal plotting. Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of Catherine who was forced to marry Henry of Navarre, wrote in her memoirs: “‘She (Charlotte) treated them both in such a way that they became extremely jealous of each other … to such a point that they forgot their ambitions, their duties and their plans and thought of nothing but chasing after this woman”.
In a letter to her son, the future Henri IV, Jeanne d’Albret described the French court as a place where “it is not the men who invite the women here but the women who invite the men”.
The phrase escadron volant, or flying squadron, to describe the ladies of Catherine’s court was not used until 1695, where it appeared in an anonymous chronicle titled Les amours de Henri IV, roi de France, a century after the events it recounts: “This princess [Catherine], who thought of nothing but her ambition, and who held modesty and religion to be of no value, had always a Flying Squadron, if I am permitted to speak in such a manner, composed of the most beautiful women of the court, whom she used by any means to amuse princes and lords, and to discover their most secret thoughts”.
It is not difficult to see why Catherine’s women were labelled as a ‘squadron’; taking orders, forming battle stations, working to achieve a military or political goal. An 1885 biography noted that “Catherine would not, could not, do without her flying squadron, that battle-hardened militia of love”.
But the biggest question of them all remains - was Catherine de Medici’s flying squadron merely a myth? Most biographies of the queen, even recent ones, have not challenged the idea, handed down over the centuries. Nor have they attacked the accuracy of the historical records, and continue to reinforce the notion that she trained her women to spy, seduce and steal secrets for her own selfish gains. Recent historical studies recognise that the multitude of literature which heaps scorn on the rule of Catherine and reduces her royal court to a writhing mass of immorality dates from the Saint Bartholomew Massacre of 1574, in which thousands of Huguenots in Paris and other parts of France were slaughtered, and in which Catherine de Medici was largely held to be responsible. The picture at this time which emerges, and which has coloured most portrayals of the queen mother since 1575, is that of a scheming Italian woman consumed with ambition and governed by her appetites, an unnatural wife and mother, a poisoner, and one destined from birth to destroy France. The libellous pamphlets and chronicles which depicted the women of the court of Catherine as cuckolding their husbands at every turn, engaging in public scandal and serving dinner half undressed with their long hair flowing, are merely historical satire, not historical fact, and should therefore be taken as such.
Catherine was also a strong and powerful female, and as it has been throughout history, her authority to rule was discredited by utilising stereotypes of sexual deviance, and purporting that as a woman, she had to rely on underhand methods to acquire power. There’s no denying she wouldhave used espionage to seek information, to steal secrets, there’s not a ruler who has not done the same, but the idea of a highly trained network, a bevy of beauties specially selected for their looks and their intelligence, is not supported by the historical records.
Pierre de Bourdeille, in his memoirs, wrote that King Henry of Navarre said of Catherine: “ I ask you what a poor woman could do, left by the death of her husband, with five little children on her arms, and two families in France who were thinking to grasp the crown. Was she not compelled to play strange parts to deceive first one and then the other, in order to guard, as she has done, her sons, who have successively reigned through the wise conduct of that shrewd woman? I am surprised that she never did worse".