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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
Dr. Oona McElvena
mom, can you tell me a story?
- [00:37]
Carvana Advertiser
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- [00:40]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Was she brave?
- [00:41]
Carvana Advertiser
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:47]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [00:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Nope.
- [00:49]
Carvana Advertiser
She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [00:52]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Was it scary?
- [00:53]
Carvana Advertiser
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [00:56]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:57]
Carvana Advertiser
It did, actually.
- [00:58]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Okay, good story.
- [00:59]
Carvana Advertiser
Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [01:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Paris, 24th of April, 1617. A morning much like any other for Concino Concini, Marquis d', Ancre Marshal of France. He's striding through the Louvre as he has done a thousand times before. Self assured, magnificent and utterly contemptuous of those around him, he has survived seven years of intrigue, rebellion and noble fury. He has made an unmade minister's part, pocketed governorships and bent the regent, Queen Marie de Medici, so completely to his will that France has come to feel like his personal estate, solely existing to be plundered at his leisure. Concini does not realize that the young king has had enough because 16 year old Louis XIII has been simmering for months, humiliated by this Florentine upstart who treats the French court like conquered territory. Prodded by his own favorite, Charles d' Albert du Luynes, Louis has settled upon a single brutal solution. Concini cannot simply be arrested. He commands a private army of more than 7,000 men. So the order passes quietly to the captain of the royal Guard, Nicolas de l', Hopital, Baron of Vitry. Take Concini out. Vitry and his accomplices position themselves at the drawbridge of the Louvre and wait. It is not long before Concini approaches, surrounded by attendants, unhurried, expecting the world to part before him. He is almost across the bridge when suddenly Vitry steps forward, blocking his path. Concini barely has time to register the obstruction before the guns of Vitry's accomplices roar out. And near point, point blank range, Contini is hit three times in the head and crumples dead before the echo of the pistols even leaves the courtyard. When news of Concini's killing reaches Louis xiii, he weeps with relief. I thank you, he tells Vitry. From this hour, I am king. But Contini's story is far from over. What follows is savage. A terrifying act of mob vengeance against the corpse of this foreigner who has gorged himself on their country for years. And that is nothing compared to the fate of Concini's wife, Leonora Dori Galligai, the woman whose 30 year intimacy with the Queen made her husband's career possible. What then follows is an unprecedented propaganda campaign for that weaponises print culture to justify murder and establish an entirely new political order. My guest today is Dr. Oona McElvena, Associate professor in English at the Australian National University and an Australian Research Council future Fellow. Her book, Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores how women have been collectively slandered for centuries. And her most recent work, Singing the News of Death Execution ballads in Europe 1500-1900, looks at the fascinating and long lived tradition of execution ballads. It won the 2023 Catherine Briggs Award from the Folklore Society. Together we're going to explore the assassinations of Concino, Concini and spoiler Leonora. A calculated coup d' etat that transformed Louis XIII from a powerless teenage prince into something like an absolute monarch. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors From History hit. Dr. McElver, welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
- [05:30]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Thank you, Susanna. It's lovely to be here.
- [05:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, let us start by finding out more about Concini. Who was he? What was his background? How did he come to be in Paris?
- [05:43]
Dr. Oona McElvena
So Concino Concini is a Florentine nobleman. He's born into a noble family that has a history of public service, particularly in diplomacy for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. So his father has been ambassador, his brother, and so it's kind of expected that he will do something like this. The moment that really comes for him is this fantastic news that the niece of the Grand Duke of Tuscany is going to marry the French king, Henry iv. And so a lot of Florentine noblemen and noblewomen think this is my moment to go to the incredibly powerful court of France, where I can seek my fortune like so many have done already at the court of Catherine de Medici and afterwards.
- [06:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how did his rise to power begin once he got to the court?
- [06:36]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Well, it begins a few months before he gets there, because of course, they take a few months on ships to get to France, stopping many times along the way, this huge sort of train of nobles. And on that boat next to the queen, the future queen, the imminent queen, is a young woman called Leonora Dorey. She is the companion, the very close companion of the young queen to be. And he falls for her very conveniently. She is the queen's best friend since childhood. She's got quite an interesting. Because she's a commoner, she has no noble history at all, no lineage like that. But when Maria Medici is quite young, she loses a lot, many members of her family, and her stepmother eventually feels sorry for her and gets her this little friend to play with when she's about 11, who's a few years older. And the one thing that we know about her is that she does Maria de Medici's hair. That's the one thing that everyone says about her. These two girls are inseparable and will remain so for the rest of their lives. They're really, really close. And that's the most important thing to know about her. So Concino meets this girl, they seem to hit it off. It's convenient for him that he is now in a romantic relationship with the woman who is by the Queen's side 24 hours a day.
- [08:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how, given that they have been married and are close with the queen, how does that translate into winning the trust of Henry iv, Henri iv, the
- [08:18]
Dr. Oona McElvena
king at the time, I mean, it's not automatic. And the important thing to understand is that a whole bunch of these Italian nobles go to the court, but only a select few will be allowed to stay. So Concino really has to kind of play a good game here. He does. One of his qualities is that he's really charming, he wins people over. He's a real gentleman. He knows exactly how to be a courtier, how to say the right things. He clearly gets the judge of Henry IV's personality quite quickly. He's got a good sense of humor, at times a bit coarse. But Henry IV is an old style nobleman. He likes that, he likes his filthy jokes. He sees that Concino was a master negotiator. One of the things that is a real Issue when they arrive is that Henri IV is on his second serious mistress, at least. He's had multiple mistresses and is very used to this. He's a man in his 50s, remember, Marie is much younger than him. He is not prepared to give up his mistress just because he's got a new queen, because she's a political appointee sort of thing. So his mistress, Henriette d', Angraig, he's absolutely committed to her. He has several children with her and he's absolutely not giving her up. And that's a real problem for Marie de Medici. She cannot abide this idea, this insult. It becomes a real problem. And it's the Concinis who kind of work to resolve that. They convince Henriette to become friendly with Leonora because she's got the Queen's ear, et cetera, and they kind of manipulate that situation and everyone wins. And so Henri is very happy about that and kind of starts to really recognize the usefulness of the Concinis at court.
- [10:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So they're becoming more ensconced, they're becoming more powerful. What happens then?
- [10:07]
Dr. Oona McElvena
They start to amass very quickly some incredible fortunes. Now, it's important to understand that, of course, that's what's going to happen to any courtier. The closer you are in proximity to the monarch, the more positions and money you will receive. But it really is quite something. It starts out he gets these sort of smaller positions. One of the things that becomes quite lucrative is that they're given the right to, or the access to fines that people have to pay. And so they kind of like, oh, I'll take a bit of that, I'll take a bit of that. They start to get more and more positions, and of course, she's next to the Queen constantly. And that kind of proximity is very important. One of the things that is important to understand, though, because it becomes important, important later on, is that Leonora is a sort of thin, frail, sickly woman. She's never very well. It starts in spurners from sort of winter, 1602, so a year or two after she's arrived. And it's also around the time of her first pregnancy, so that might be in the mix there as well. She gets very sick, seizures, she can't breathe. It's really bad. So they try everything. They try all the kind of standard medical treatments that doesn't work. They turn to public prayer. The Queen is freaking out that her lady in waiting, that she is at her best friend, is going to die. The people of Paris are told to Pray for this woman, for the Queen's lady in waiting. That doesn't work. They then think, oh, maybe she's got demons. You know, Satan is believed to work, you know, his bad magic in the world. So they try exorcisms, which are more acceptable at this point, but they're still a bit like. People don't really know what to do with those. They don't work. So the most extreme, this might not. This might seem weird, but the most extreme is that a Jewish doctor is called. Now, importantly, Jews are not allowed to practice their religion in France at this point. Haven't been allowed for about 20 years. This Jewish doctor, Montalto, who has an enormous reputation all over Europe, he comes, he prescribes what sounds to us like pretty straightforward, you know, bed rest, good air, nice diet, but it works, cures her. They desperately try to get Montalto to stay, but he can't because he can't be at court if Jews aren't allowed to practice. So she's getting better, they have children, things are going well and they're more. They're getting closer to the royal family all the time.
- [12:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And then we get to 1610, and I mean 10 years after becoming queen, Marie de Medici is crowned. What happens the next day and why?
- [12:43]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Yeah, really. Shockingly, Henry IV is assassinated. He has just crowned his queen. He's about to set off on a kind of military expedition that's going to be quite strategic importance for France and for Europe. And a man grabs him as he gets out of his carriage and stabs him several times. He dies almost instantly. Francois Ravaillac is the name of this guy who says, I had a vision, you know, I was told to do this. Claims to be acting on his own, but many observers don't believe that because this isn't the first attempt on Henry IV's life. And there's a lot of belief that the Spanish are behind this, if we understand, France at this point is surrounded on all sides by Habsburgs, there's the Spanish Habsburgs. On the south, there's the Holy Roman Empire, run by Habsburgs. You know, just two different branches of the same family. On the east, even the Netherlands is at this point controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs. So everyone assumes that it's gotta be something to do with them. They torture Ravaillac. He never gives up any accomplices or any other motive than just sort of acting in his own God's interest. But it's an enormous. It's a massive event for Europe because Henry IV has Importantly, been able to. He is the guy who kind of brought the wars of religion to a close. He fought against the royal forces in order to take on his hereditary role as king. And then, you know, as a Protestant, he's born and raised a Protestant, but then in order to just kind of assuage everyone, he converts to Catholicism. Probably not really, but he does it in order to make everyone happy. And he manages to kind of play off those big powers in Europe against each other. He knows the power of the Habsburgs. Even though, you know, France is Catholic, they don't want this huge kind of Catholicism dominating across France. So he cultivates and negotiates with Protestant leaders in the Holy Roman Empire to form a kind of union that can act as a bit of a bulwark against this mass of the Spanish Habsburgs. So with him gone, it's potentially chaos and Spain is a real issue.
- [15:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we also have a new king, an eight year old Louis xiii, and his mother, Marie de Medici, acting as his regent. How do Concino and Leonora benefit from this new arrangement?
- [15:18]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Immediately Marie is confirmed as regent. Not the first time this has happened. What's kind of ironic about French history in this period is that there's quite a few mothers acting as regents for their young sons who are kings and indeed Medicis. Right. You know, this is. We're kind of used to it by now. Marie knows that her now dead husband did a really good job and so initially tries to really keep his model and work with the same guys in the Council of the King. And she does that and they go in and they, you know, they make their discussions and she spends all day. People are really impressed that she goes from having no rule whatsoever to working very, very hard. But then at the end of the day, she goes back into her private quarters with just Leonora and they spend two hours debriefing. And then she'll come out of those meetings with Leonora and go, actually, I've changed my mind about what we decided. And this starts to happen more and more and it becomes clear that Leonora has really the ear of the queen and is in her ear. Everyone is coming to Leonora. All of the nobles, the princes, the officers, everybody, ambassadors, everybody wants to talk to her. Now, there is, of course, a role played by those ladies in waiting of queens who are that access point. But it seems like maybe there's more going on here, that this woman has way more power than she's supposed to. And of course, so does her husband. Because what starts to happen is that the minute that Henry is assassinated, they start to really ramp up in terms of their income, in terms of their positions at court. So they've already had this sort of control over certain kinds of incomes that are coming in, but that kind of takes off. They get control over revenues for the public purse. So say, for example, some lands are sort of sold and there's money to be paid off to different people. They are allowed to do that, those reimbursements or disbursements. But there doesn't seem to be any kind of scrutiny over who they pay. So they get to build a client base. Like they don't just keep all the money for themselves, but they buy off people. So they start to amass this really, really powerful clientele without any real scrutiny. And then there's all kinds of deals that sound a bit dodgy. They get at one point. So September, it's about four months after the King is dead, there's an amount that comes in that's 385,000 livres, like an enormous amount. We're talking about millions in today's money. 14,500 goes into the Queen's coffers and the Concinis get their rest. So they are really coming into enormous amounts of money. They start to buy property. She buys the Chateau Lasigny near Fontainebleau. She can host the court when it comes by. They're, you know, blown away by it. It's very beautiful. She's buying all kinds of nice things, tapestries, furniture, jewelry, you name it. Money is starting to be placed in banks all over Europe. She's keeping it in Amsterdam and various nice places. Meanwhile, of course, Leonora can't accrue a position at court. She's not noble. Her husband, though, can. So he starts to set his mind really strategically to that. He first in September, gets a seat on the Council of Finance. So he actually then gets entry into the King's council, which means it's sort of like a privy council. Foreigners are not supposed to be on the privy council, right? That's not supposed to happen. So there's already scandal there. Then, same month, he is made into the first gentleman of the King's chamber, Right? So one of these really, really high officers, the only people who precede him in royal ceremonies are the literal princes of the blood, the heirs to the throne, or the very high great officers of the kingdom. So this is an enormous honour that he's been given. The next year, they're given land, they're allowed to build a house that literally backs onto the Louvre. He has a secret entrance into the Louvre right on the Seine. But he knows that if you want to really become French nobility, they've got to get French lands, they've got to get in their ownership of it. So they're given. Marie gives them the lands of Ancre, which are in Picardigne, sort of north of France. They become the Marquis and Marquise of Ancre. He says, that's not enough. I need a ministry of power as well. He buys the governorship of Peronne, so lands nearby, because all of these positions are of course bought. There's venality of offices. You don't just get given it. So he does a bit of negotiation, but because he's got this money from Marie, he has that kind of negotiating power, people are like, yeah, I'll take that money. So he buys the governorship of Peron and then he becomes the Lieutenant General of the whole province of Picardy. So he's the second most important person in the province after its governor. And that's a point of friction. That's not enough for him. He wants to be in charge of Amiens, which is the capital of Picardy. So he buys the governorship of the Citadel, the fortress, and then the Bayaj, which is, I think it translates as bailiwick, but it means it gives him judicial power as well. So he is both military. He has both military and judicial power of this whole region. So it's really. He's done it very, very quickly and
- [20:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
very strategically and he's creating a fiefdom, in other words.
- [20:51]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Yes. That really brings him into conflict with the Governor of Picardy, who's not impressed with what's happening at all.
- [20:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And I was thinking, you know, this concentration of power and influence in Florentine hands is going to have an impact on the native French nobility. There may be some reaction to it.
- [21:11]
Dr. Oona McElvena
You Betcha. Eventually, in 1614, so we're talking just a few years later, he is given one of the great offices of the kingdom. He is given the role of Marechal or Marshal of France, which is an office that is given to a glorious former soldier who has led multiple military campaigns. There are a few of them. These guys are all white haired, they're all, you know, decorated former soldiers. This guy walks in, he's young, he's Italian, he's never fought in a battle. It is even to my mind, it's outrageous. It's outrageous that he becomes the Marechal de Rancour and that really, really starts to set off some major Friction with the high nobility in France.
- [22:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I want to ask you also about the way in which they are creating a kind of bureaucracy and administration. How significant is it in terms of the influence it might have on later court structures at Versailles, for example? Yeah.
- [22:17]
Dr. Oona McElvena
So as I said, Marie begins with the same kind of counsel of the King and even with the same men who had served her husband for years and had been really good at the job. Bit by bit, those men are forced out in quite scandalous ways. And it becomes, it seems to feel like to the nobility that the Concinis and they're often referred to in the plural. And I think that's really telling. The Marechaud of France. So, like the plural of Marechal is marechaud, which means the two marshals of France, which is him and his wife. The people who are most upset about that are what come to be known as the princes. Right. So there are the princes of the blood who are the heirs to the throne, who led by the Prince of Cond? And there's a few others. There's also the, as I said, Henry IV already has illegitimate sons. The, the Vendome brothers, who are also, you know, have been legitimized and are in line for the throne, and a bunch of other really high ranking members of the noble families of France. They are furious that they seem to have no role in the King's council, which is standard practice. So they're really upset about that. They're really upset about the fact that the role has been taken by a Florentine instead of a French person and his wife, who's a commoner. Like, it's outrageous. They also can see that this money is just flooding out of the Crown's coffers and that it all seems to be going to the same people. You know, there's a little bit of irony there because those guys, those princes, are quite happy to take that money whenever it's offered to them as well. But one of the really big problems is the Spanish marriages. So one of the ways in which Marie does turn away from her husband's general policies is a rapprochement with Spain. And she does that by trying to get her son, this young Louis XIII married to the Infanta of Spain and his younger sister married to an heir to the Spanish throne. So too Spanish marriages, this, you know, people are looking to the future and saying, well, at one point, the whole of Europe could be controlled by Habsburg Sudan if we let this happen. So there's super strong opposition to that. The other thing of Course, to remember is that as princes of the blood, they feel that they should be regents, not a woman who's Italian. Right. So they really feel like that's always a problem with all of these kind of regencies that I've talked about. They feel those men feel that that's their role to take on the regency. So they show their discontent by leaving court. And that's not just like leaving in a huff. I mean, it is, but it's more than that, because they go back to their lands around the provinces where they have thousands of supporters, right? And they can go back there and start to foment unrest and rebellion and revolt. So every time they leave and they kind of leave en masse and one of them goes, and then the others all go, that's a real moment of stress. And you start to get, we're building towards civil war. So they leave multiple times and come back multiple times, always with the same reasons. But what happens as well is that when they go, they start writing these pamphlets or having these pamphlets published that are kind of open letters, you know, a remonstrance to the King or the Queen Mother about why we've left and all the things that are going wrong at court, and this is why we're leaving. In protest, the Queen Mother then publishes response pamphlets. So you get this sense that she's defending the decisions that are being made and saying, oh, the Concinis are great. So you get the sense that this is a debate being waged in public for everyone's benefit, and these pamphlets are being translated into other languages as well. Right? So there's a war of pamphlets going on at the same time that there's this military war going on. The one thing that changes, I mean, it's exactly the same things that they get mad about every time. And in fact, one of the pamphlets is even just reprinted verbatim the following year, because nothing has changed. But the one thing that does change is that the criticisms of the Concinis get more explicit, explicitly directed at them, and they get more violent. So it starts out, we don't like that the Queen Mother and the King are getting bad counsel. And then it becomes, we don't like that they're getting counsel from foreigners. And then it's, we don't like it that they're getting from these Concinis. And then they start to say, these Concinis are devils, they're terrible, they're poisoning. We need to get rid of them.
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Dr. Oona McElvena
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- [29:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What about the young king in all of this? By 1617, he would have been 16 and would have reached the age of majority. So why is he still being politically marginalized by his mother?
- [29:29]
Dr. Oona McElvena
He has never really shown much interest in any of the things that go on up until this point, including even his own marriage. That's been a bit of a disaster. Cause he just doesn't want to spend any time with her. What he wants to do is spend time hunting and hawking. His sort of closest advisor and mentor, a man who's a good more than 20 years older than him, is the Duc de Luvigne. Sorry, he's not the duke at this point. He's just Shaz or something of Luvin. And he is a great hunter and a great kind of very kind fatherly. Figure to a young boy who's lost his father, of course, and who doesn't spend any time with his mother, really. Luin and his two brothers are at court. They are very, very influential in Louis's life. And they are also watching what's happening and starting to say to Louis, you need to maybe think about taking on some responsibility here. The constant back and forth between the Crown and the Princes results in an Estates General, which is a calling of all the three estates of France. It doesn't really get anywhere. They don't really resolve much. But one real moment of tension shortly after that is that the plans to attack Concini get more and more severe, more threatening and dangerous. Concini hears that there's a plot to kill it and realizes that maybe this is getting out of hand. He comes back to court, tells them that there's a plot to kill. Concini says, you know what? I'm going to give up all of my things, but as long as you give me a seat on the council, I'll do that. So he's happy. And then what they realize, what Marie and Concinis realize is that now the fox is in the hen house, this man is sitting inside and these princes are coming back and now they do have the power. And so she has Conde arrested and that is when everything really the, you know, hits the fan, as it were, because this is the heir to the throne. This is, I don't know, like arresting Prince Harry and locking him in the Bastille, you know, it's really, really bad and very, very controvers. And it's at that point that really around that time young Louis gets sick and he spends a good kind of month or two in bed rest being taken care of. They really think he's going to die. And that seems to really freak people out. Luynes gets in his ear and says, you really need to, when you get better, you need to fix this problem. They're out of control. They've now got Conde in the bastine. So he comes back from his sickness and clearly is ready to take over and has had enough of Concini. There's little mentions of his genuine hatred for him. So he's now really ready to challenge for his own power. You know, he wants to become king finally instead of his mother.
- [32:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what do you make of Luynes motives? Do you think he has ambition for himself or is his relationship with Louis one that's genuinely supportive and affectionate? It's both.
- [32:34]
Dr. Oona McElvena
I think there is, you know, from all accounts, there's a lot of affection. They really share a lot of maybe like paternal affection for this young boy. He spent a lot of time with him. But to be ambitious at court is not like a bad thing, you know, it's what you're supposed to. And so what he thinks is that this is a young man who's supposed to be king and that's not happening. And instead some other people are and he needs to become king. And of course that's going to benefit me. I'm his, you know, at this point now I've been made grand falconer of the king. He is very much the favorite, right? Like Concini is the favorite of Marie. So there's a little irony there. But I think, yeah, he's. He is ambitious and he definitely wants to get rid of Concini. And he actually, he and his brothers start the serious plotting to get rid of Concini and start to bring in different people and say, this is what we need to do now.
- [33:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Was Concini oblivious to Louis feelings for him that they've reached such a point of hatred?
- [33:40]
Dr. Oona McElvena
A bit, yeah. It's kind of crazy. You have to understand there are pamphlets every day flooding the streets saying, Concini is a monster, he's a tyrant, we need to get rid of him. His wife, she knows what's coming. She is sending all her stuff back to Italy with the approval of the Queen, who's also going. Things are getting really bad here. She is making plans, she wants to get back to Italy, sending her money into different banks and things like that. Really making plans. The sort of civil war that's going on at this point, Concini is just completely obsessed with that. He is convinced that he can, you know, he's locked up Cond and he's going to get these other guys and they're going to show them how strong they are. So he is convinced somehow that they're not. They can't touch him. He does travel with a large group of, I think it's like 10 gentlemen, you know, armed gentlemen, and then there's 12 soldiers that surround his carriage. But, you know, we find out later on that he doesn't wear chain mail, he doesn't wear anything underneath, which is the kind of like, you know, body armor that you would wear if you thought you were at risk. So he's weirdly like, cut the blinkers on or something because things are getting really, really fiery. There are people getting executed. There's two guys executed very shortly beside each other. One is a Scottish guard. These are the kind of the royal guards Supposed to take care of the king. He's accused of being a spy for the princes. The other guys, he's executed in front of the Louvre. A Norman lord is executed for fomenting revol. They put gallows up on the Pont Neuf to scare people, to say, don't you be like these two, you know, so this is a really, really fraught moment, and yet he doesn't think much of it. He is, of course, at this point, fighting the civil war in Normandy, as this, what we now know is going to be his death day is approaching. So they're trying to work out how they can get rid of him. And so they decide that they can. They'll call him back.
- [35:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so then we come to the day of the assassination and obviously I've given some idea of what happens on that day, but pick up the story, what happens? Concini is murdered, but what happens to his remains?
- [36:04]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Oh, this is the part where if you're a little bit queasy, you might want to just turn the volume down. They say they're going to arrest him. Everybody knows what they're going to do. They get this really violent king of the head of the guards to do it. They shoot him, he's dead. Immediately, they dump his body. I mean, they bury it in a church, but they don't do any ceremony, no one prays or anything. But it's in the church of St. Germain Le Joie, under the slab, near the organ. The local people go, what do you mean he's in the church? That's hallowed ground. He doesn't deserve to be there. So they go. The local people dig him up and start dragging his body, his corpse through, his naked corpse, through the city. They know what they're doing. They take him on routes through very significant symbolic places in Paris where executions happen, where punishments happen, in front of the houses of some of his supporters, things like that. They eventually bring him to Pont Neuf where they hang him upside down, cut off his ears and his nose and his genitals, and then, you know, he's already been dragged around, so his body is pretty mutilated. They then eventually will burn him, what's left. There are some accounts of people cutting out internal organs and cooking them and eating them. We don't know how much to believe that. But this is not the first time this has happened in Paris or even in Europe. Coligny, during the wars of religion, the Admiral de Coligny, who was the leader of the Protestants, had a similar thing happened to him and was also hanged his corpse was mutilated and then hanged upside down at the gibbet of Montfaucon. The Parisian populace detest this man. They come out, you know, yelling, vive le roi, Vive le roi. And they're thrilled at the mutilation of this body. And again, it's something that you see a few decades later. I'm in the Netherlands right now, and it happened very famously here in the Netherlands to the de Witt brothers, who in the, you know, disaster year of 1672, exactly the same sort of thing, mutilated corpses.
- [38:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Where does this contempt spring from? How did the people even know what Concino and Leonora were like?
- [38:22]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Because of these pamphlets that had been circulating by now for years, that, as I said, only got more and more vitriolic as the years went by and more and more focused on the Concinis as devilish, as monstrous, as usurpers, as tyrants. And of course, that word tyrant keeps getting used a lot because you're allowed to, for many people, allowed to assassinate someone who's a tyrant. There's also what's really interesting about the pamphlet stuff that comes out is the kind of genres, the extraordinary variety of genres in which these things are printed. It's not just long treatises for educated people. There's all kinds of songs and poems and plays and things like that. That would be entertainment for anyone. Anyone can hear a song whether they can read or not. There's lots of nicknames that they give him. In particular, Cruillon is one of them, which has a bit of a rude connotation. It means sort of coward or scoundrel. But it's sort of a play on the letters of his name that gets used a lot. So there's all kinds of ways in which the average person can participate in this real politics of slander that's going on and has been going on for a very long time.
- [39:45]
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- [40:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, Concini is dead, but there must be a question. What are they going to do about his widow? What do they do?
- [40:42]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Well, she's immediately arrested. She still thinks through pretty much all of this that she's going to be eventually allowed to go back to Italy. There's no way they're going to let that happen because they've always believed her to be just as equally implicated in this. And the thing is, though, she didn't have a role in government technically, so they can't, you know, they can't point to a specific thing that she did. So the only thing they can charge her with is sorcery. And that's why all of this thing, because she did eventually, at one point, get that Jewish doctor to come and live at court. They changed the rules so that he could come back. So she has been surrounded by foreigners, Jewish foreigners, people who work, believe in, are scholars of astrology. And of course, we have to remember that astrology is seen as a science, as part of astronomy in this period. But there is something about the secrets of the. Particularly the Hebrew faith, the Kabbalah, these kinds of words that keep being brought up, that there's something secret that therefore is mistrustful. And so she is able to say, you know, there's lots and lots of witnesses called and they say, I never saw her do anything that looked anything like sorcery, et cetera, but it doesn't really matter. It's like Marie Antoinette later on, this is being decided in advance. So they convict her of sorcery. She's lucky, because she is considered at this point a noblewoman, that she will just be decapitated, but her body will be burned.
- [42:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You've made it very clear that this witchcraft, this sorcery trial, is transparently political. And obviously her power over Marie de Medici must have been part of it, because people want to explain how someone can have so much influence. How did she try to defend herself?
- [42:40]
Dr. Oona McElvena
I mean, did she? Yeah, I mean, she did have this extraordinary power over her because she was just. They were very, very close. And so that is the kind of question, the line of questioning that's used all the way throughout all of these witnesses. You know, there's a probably apocryphal quote by someone as there's. It's quite hard because there's so many commentators after the fact who are trying to say, you know, I knew what was happening all along. And one of them says, oh, she said at one point, well, obviously I had power over the Queen because she wasn't very clever, you know, and I don't think she would have said that. They were genuinely very, very close. She just defends herself by saying, no, I'm doing what a lot of people do, which is consulting my stars. I have a Jewish doctor. There's nothing secretive about it, but there isn't really much defense against that.
- [43:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So she's beheaded, her body burnt. What impact does the assassination of Concini and the judicial murder of Leonora have on the king's mother? What's her status now that her favorites are out of the way and her son is stepping into his power as monarch?
- [43:42]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Well, she is immediately also arrested. Well, she's sort of arrested. She is effectively imprisoned in the Louvre in the immediate sense. She sends messengers to her son, I need to talk to you. He said, absolutely not. So for several days that happens and then she is told that she has to go to Blois, she's got to leave court and she's not allowed to take anyone with her. So she goes to Blois where she stays for it's less than two years and then she escapes. It's very dramatic. She escapes like climbing a rope out of a window. Makes her way back to Paris and begins to have this kind of crazy rivalry between her and her son. This sort of all out war begins. What becomes really fascinating and ironic about this is that Luynes, who's been made a duke by this point, has become, has assumed exactly the role that Concini had for Marie. He's taken on exactly that role for Louis xiii. People are really annoyed about that. So he starts to have to fight off all of those same sorts of accusations. People who are against Luynes, of course, turn to Marie de Medici and go, she'll be on our side. So she gets involved in these back and forth. There's two wars that break out between mother and son over the next few years. Eventually it's the Cardinal de Richelieu who has moved in very slyly all the way through this and has managed to just stay on the right side of the right people at the right time. A very smooth operator. And he kind of manages to smooth it out between the mother and son and eventually gets that conflict resolved with the peace treaty. But she never stops trying to stick her nose in it. She really does feel that she should be making those big decisions Now.
- [45:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One thing you've written about and are researching still, I think, is the fact that if the pamphlets before continuous assassination had been multiple, the assassination itself produces the pamphlet explosion, this huge propaganda campaign. Can you tell me about that?
- [46:00]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Yeah. So it's actually, of course, if you think about it, a bit of a PR nightmare for the crime. Because you haven't put this guy on trial. If he was so bad, why didn't you arrest him and put him on trial and go through the proper things? Instead you secretly assassinated him and buried him. Why didn't you do the right things? So they very quickly realized they've got to control the narrative. They've got to spin doctor this massive potential disaster. And so this pamphlet explosion starts that is, I think, unprecedented at this point. And everything is produced in 1617. It's like within the few months after this has happened and the variety of genres becomes even more extraordinary. Like I said, there's treatises in multiple languages. So every court we've got them in English, French, Italian, German, you name it, Latin. Because everyone at Europe needs to understand exactly what's happened here. They need to be coached in this narrative of why this had to be done this way. And there's also all of these. There's the songs, there's the verses, there's the plays on words, there's, you know, acrostics, and there are images of all kinds, usually of them as monsters. There are horoscopes, even, you know, these sort of symbols. Early modern astrology that I had someone decode for me and they said they're just nonsense, they don't mean anything. So I think it's kind of a. If you're someone walking the streets and maybe has limited literacy and you see one of these pamphlets with a horoscope on it, you go, ah, that's that Concini, you know, he was always up to something, you know, the occult. So it's completely one sided. So all of the other pamphlet wars of course had been a debate about what the Crown was doing. This is one sided. There was only one thing that happened and we got rid of the bad guys. And so it is clearly a very concerted, calculated propaganda campaign that seems to do the trick.
- [48:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that's fascinating. Is this the first time that we've got pamphlets weighing in so heavily on one side to ignite prejudices, to sort of instrumentalize popular feeling in a certain direction?
- [48:16]
Dr. Oona McElvena
It's not the first time they've had pamphlets. And you know, I think that, you know, one of the things people, when people talk about French history and you know, why did the French Revolution happen? There are centuries by this point of practice in how you desacralize the monarchy, you desacralize something. This is, to me what happens is in this particular moment it becomes a very one sided propaganda campaign. And I think it would be Extremely ill advised for anyone to try and defend Conchini at this point. So there's no, there's no response is what's interesting about it. And I think it's just that sort of domination of the market that no matter who you are, you will learn this narrative of what the King did. Right.
- [49:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what is the depiction of Leonora in this? There's clearly a bit of a racial or a xenophobic element to the attacks on her. But can we talk about the role of misogyny?
- [49:16]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Oh yeah. I mean the French are very experienced by this point in misogyny. They of course had. I mean, you know, you mentioned my first book was about the satirical attacks on the court of Catherine de Medici, particularly the ladies in waiting as well as Catherine. And there are tropes that you find again and again and again, the occults. You know, Catherine de Medici was accused of poisoning everyone. The anti Italianism is absolutely rife, particularly because of course the Italians are really powerful at the French court because they're providing all the money. So the Medicis get to be queens of France because they're providing the funding for all of these things that the French court want to do. So there's a lot of resentment about that. The fact that France has a Salic law, which is this idea that only men can be the ruling monarch, unlike England, we can get Mary and Elizabeth as ruling monarchs in their own right. That doesn't happen in France. So what inevitably happens is that the queens of France are foreign born princesses who marry into the French royal family. So they're constantly under attack in the same way they're bringing their loyalties are really with their origin country, they're bringing their foreign ways with them. If they're Italian, that means they're bringing sexual deviance. So you know, there's all that kind of, there's something wrong with how they have sex or who they have sex with, et cetera. They're bringing occult beliefs, they are underhanded, they're not to be trusted, etc. Etc. The concini gets a lot of that himself, but because his wife is a woman, she will get also those accusations of sorcery, etc. She is depicted in one of the pamphlets, she's depicted as having a dialogue in hell with a kind of evil demon. So there's really a sense that they are monstrous and that those kinds of attacks on women in particular have a very, very nasty history that will continue right through the 19th century. I was kind of astonished when I was looking at My execution songs, the way that the French press was nasty about women in a way, even female victims of murder in a way that no other language was. So it's. Yeah, they're very well practiced.
- [51:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what's the spread of these pamphlets? I mean, are they even spreading outside France?
- [51:36]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Yeah, yeah, they are. There are multiple. I just had a quick look on the early English books online and there are 20 pamphlets about concini in English and then there's loads in Italian. There's loads in, you know, I have huge spreadsheets of all of these various pamphlets that are. Yeah, manufactured deliberately, consciously to spread this news across as far a place as possible. I've got a Dutch song with a very intricate engraving showing the story of that mutilation of the body and how it was the right thing to do with a song below explaining that in Dutch. So, yeah, everyone in Europe knows this story and because there's no pushback against is very convincing.
- [52:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. So this is a systematic use of propaganda to justify the government's actions and to manage public opinion at home and abroad. Well, that must be one of the reasons why the Concini assassination is so important in French history. But as we come to an end, perhaps you can tell me why else we should remember this moment in April 1617 and its long term impact.
- [52:56]
Dr. Oona McElvena
I think it is a moment in which I don't think we can think of Louis XIII necessarily as a fully absolutist monarch, but it sows those seeds for how you do that. He will of course be criticized for not doing that himself, but what Luynes will do when he gets to become his favorite will. He will start to really push away those princes and remove from them the kinds of defenses that they have if they need to ever challenge the monarch again. He becomes extremely unpopular for that because Richelieu and Luynes together really change how that relationship between the monarch and his nobles, especially his leading nobles, operates. And of course, once you get to Louis xiv, you then have that system at Versailles where no one can question the king whatsoever, not even those nobles who felt for centuries that that was their role, to question the king or to be someone that serious that he had to seriously consider. And that use of pamphlets, of course, will absolutely dominate all the way through all of the conflicts that go on from this point, from the Fronde and then on to the French Revolution itself.
- [54:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Dr. McElverny, thank you so much for talking to me about this moment. And I think it's something that for so many people is not going to be something they've heard of before, but we now understand how important a moment it was in French history and beyond.
- [54:30]
Dr. Oona McElvena
Thank you and you're very welcome.
- [54:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at Not Just the tudors@historyhit.com and I look forward to to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [55:09]
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