The House of Valois and 'Hamlet'

Could Hamlet have been influenced less by Danish politics and more by the French-Italian-Spanish political feuds of 1588 centered around the Spanish Armada?

First, let's dismiss Denmark. The timing is right. Frederick II completed Kronborg castle in Helsingør (which sounds like Elsinore) in the 1580's and he died in 1588, to be replaced by his son, Christian IV. But, there was none of the family drama of Shakespeare's play. This is Kronborg today: beautiful and not nearly gloomy enough.

With France, on the other hand, Shakespeare would have known of the Gothic brouhaha unfolding across la Manche. In May 1588, the unpopular King Henri III (shown up top and who is our Hamlet figure) was forced to flee Paris for the royal Château de Blois (shown below), when the Duke of Guise, the founder of the extremist Catholic League and our Claudius figure, engineered a coup d'état, in Paris, with Spanish encouragement.

The Spanish fleet left Spain a few weeks later for Flanders and the invasion of England. The French coup seems to have been designed to distract the Huguenots from interfering. The popular Guise was the son of Anna d'Este of Ferrara and, when he was offered the French Crown, Guise (unlike Claudius in Hamlet) refused it. The portrait below is of the Duke of Guise, nicknamed Le Balafré ("Scarface").

But the Armada was defeated in early August and, by Christmas, Henri III had regained the upper hand. After dithering, Hamlet-like, he succeeded in having Guise and his brother murdered in December 1588, when they were visiting Blois at his request.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes. - Montaigne

The Gertrude figure in this melodrama is Henri III's mother, Catherine de' Medici (above), perhaps the most powerful woman in 16th century Europe, but by the time of her death in January 1589 she was effectively sidelined. It seems she was horrified by Guise's murder by her son.

Henri III himself was the last of the Valois kings. He was assassinated later in the year by a fanatical follower of the Catholic League, so everyone ends up dead one way or another. Henri's queen spent the next few years wandering the rooms of Chenonceau like Ophelia, a ghost dressed in white - the mourning clothes of French royalty. Unlike in Hamlet though, she outlived them all, dying in 1601. They had no children.

That left only Henri of Navarre (above), the leader of the equally extreme Huguenot side, but he was a pragmatist. After Henri III's murder, he agreed to convert back to Catholicism ("Paris is well worth a Mass") in order to become King - the first of the Bourbon kings.

The reason he agreed to this shrewd move is attributed to his influential mistress in the years that followed - Gabrielle d'Estrées - a very impressive woman, who appears in the next two paintings below. In the first one, she is on the right, holding a ring (is it Henri's?), with her sister in the bath: Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa soeur la duchesse de Villars. It is dated around 1594, when Henri was crowned King. Why is her sister tweaking her nipple? One theory holds that this implies she is pregnant (d'Estrées had three children with Henri).

This painting above, of d'Estrées, copies an earlier painting that some critics see as satirical of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whose mother was from the House of Guise:

After d'Estrées' sudden death in 1599, possibly from poison (a Hamlet trademark), the King's marriage to Marguerite de Valois was annulled and he married Marie de' Medici in 1600, which ensured the continued dominance of the Medicis for another generation. He too would be assassinated - in 1610. (In one of those curiosities of history, Henri married Marie in Florence but it was a proxy wedding since Henri was too busy to actually attend.)