In the summer of 1642, an old woman died in a rented house in Cologne, far from the country she had once ruled, attended by a small and shabby household and pressed by debts she could not pay. She had been a French queen, the regent of the kingdom, the wife of one of the greatest French kings, the mother of another, a daughter of the Medici, and a granddaughter of emperors. She had commanded armies, reversed the policy of a dead king, married her children into the royal houses of Europe, and raised from obscurity the most formidable minister in France’s long history. At the end, she died in exile and near poverty, abandoned by her son and broken by the very statesman she had made. She was a queen with no court and a mother with no welcome in her own land. Her name was Marie de’ Medici, and her death closed one of the strangest and most cautionary tales of the 17th century.
At the start, it seemed she had been born to have a different destiny. A century after her family seized the reins in Florence, and two generations after another Florentine Medici, Catherine de’ Medici, had governed France as queen mother through its wars of religion, Marie de’ Medici followed the same path from the banks of the Arno River to the throne of the Bourbons. She came to France as a bride bought with a fortune, intended to mend the finances of a king who needed her dowry more than he desired her as a person. She bore him the heir he required, endured his mistresses and his coldness, and was crowned at last the day before an assassin’s knife made her a widow and a ruler. For seven years, she governed France in her young son’s name, and for years after that she fought him and his minister for the power she had lost, until the long struggle ended in her ruin.
History has not been kind to her, and much of the unkindness is deserved. As a ruler, Queen Marie de’ Medici was stubborn, shortsighted, and easily led, governed in her turn by grasping favorites, and she squandered much of the strength her murdered husband had labored to build. Her one great act of political consequence, the elevation of Cardinal Richelieu, recoiled upon her with terrible force, as the man she raised to serve her subsequently became the master of France and the architect of her destruction. She lost the contest with her own son, lost the contest with her own creation, and ended her life a wanderer.
Three times in less than a century, a foreign-born woman governed the French kingdom in the name of a child king, and Marie de’ Medici stood in the middle of that sequence, between Catherine de’ Medici before her and Anne of Austria, her own daughter-in-law, after her. It was a role without firm legal foundation and without natural support, as the French distrusted the rule of women and distrusted foreigners more, and a regent who was both had to govern a proud and turbulent nobility that conceded her authority only so long as it was bought or feared. Catherine had met that challenge with a lifetime supply of cunning, and Anne of Austria met it later with the help of a great minister, but Marie met it with neither sufficient skill of her own nor lasting control of the ministers she employed.
Ironically, the woman who failed so completely in politics left behind a monument that has outlasted every minister and every king of France. During the years of her power, she commissioned the legendary artist Peter Paul Rubens to glorify her life in a vast cycle of canvases, an apotheosis in oil that turned a terribly flawed queen into a goddess attended by the deities of Olympus. The paintings hang today among the treasures of the Louvre, and the palace she built to house them still stands in the heart of Paris as the world’s foremost art museum. There is a deep irony in it all, because the painted Marie, serene and triumphant, is the opposite of the real one, defeated and exiled, and the gap between the two is the truest measure of her life.
