Born into an aristocratic family in January 1500, Diane de Poitiers grew up with every advantage, her family closely tied to the French throne. Her father, Jean de Poitiers, was one of the most cunning nobles of his day, and Diane inherited both his intelligence and his ambition—two dangerous qualities for a woman of her time. At fifteen, her family placed her on the marriage market, hoping for an advantageous match. Their plan succeeded beyond expectations when Diane caught the eye of Louis de Brézé, a grandson of the old King Charles VII.
They married in 1515, with the de Poitiers family rejoicing in the great catch they had secured for their daughter. But the wedding was a horror story for the barely teenage bride: her new husband was nearly forty years older than her, practically with one foot in the grave by the life expectancy of the day. For a beautiful, spritely girl like Diane, it must have felt like a prison sentence. Perhaps that explains why she began to act out in a big way.
Diane was already famous for her boundless energy, and her marriage to Louis increased that nervous activity tenfold. In 1523, just as Diane might have been settling into her role as a married woman, her life was ripped apart. Her husband, ever the obedient royalist, uncovered a plot against the reigning King Francis I and exposed the men involved. But Louis was unaware of one crucial detail: Diane’s father, Jean, was right in the middle of the conspiracy.
The king immediately sentenced Jean to execution. Diane and her relatives worked overtime to save the family patriarch, and her always-persuasive appeals eventually convinced King Francis to stay the execution. Even so, the damage was done—Jean went to prison for years afterward, and his health was never the same again. Diane must have been none too happy with her knucklehead of a husband, but she would get her revenge in time.
When King Francis’s son Henry was only seven years old, Diane, then a blossoming woman in her twenties, made quite an impression on the boy. In 1526, when the young prince went to Spain as a diplomatic hostage, it was Diane—serving as lady-in-waiting to his grandmother—who gave the boy a ceremonial goodbye kiss. It was a small gesture with enormous effects. Historians now believe that following this moment, little Henry began to develop a massive crush on Diane de Poitiers.
As it happened, Henry spent four long years in Spain as a hostage, and he spent every one of those years yearning for Diane, idealizing her in his mind as the perfect gentle woman. In 1531, Prince Henry had his long-awaited homecoming, and he and Diane immediately set tongues wagging. At the coronation of his new stepmother, Queen Eléanor of Austria, all of Henry’s family wore the new queen’s colors as a gesture of respect—except Henry. Instead, the twelve-year-old wore Diane’s colors in a public declaration of his obsession.
Just months after the prepubescent prince returned to France and started trying to seduce the thirty-something Diane, her elderly husband finally died. Diane broke free from her patriarchal shackles and wasted no time reinventing herself as a single woman. She was also concocting a devious plot. Even a fool could see how in love Prince Henry still was with her, and Diane was no fool.
She craftily used his not-so-little crush for her own benefit, keeping herself at arm’s length from his bed but nonetheless getting closer and closer, consolidating her power over him. Then came a big bump in her plan. Every prince needs a wife, and in 1533, Henry’s family married the fourteen-year-old off to Catherine de Medici, an Italian noblewoman from the notorious and notoriously wealthy Medici clan. At first, Diane might have thought she was in big trouble, with Catherine actually being Henry’s age and fully endorsed by his royal parents.
But Diane put her plot into action. In many ways, Catherine played right into Diane’s hands. For one, Catherine wasn’t particularly good-looking, while Diane was a noted beauty. For another, while Diane came from aristocratic stock, people sniffed at the new bride’s common merchant origins.
Diane understood that Catherine was an asset she could control. Just months after Henry’s marriage to Catherine, Diane committed an act that has gone down in infamy. At thirty-five years old, many historians believe Diane slept with the now fifteen-year-old Henry, finally giving the princeling what he had wanted for so long. After years of machinations and playing the long game, Diane de Poitiers was officially a royal mistress.
Catherine was wild with jealousy, but Diane knew what to do. She positioned herself as, if not Catherine’s friend, then at least an experienced adviser to help her learn the ropes of the new court. Catherine’s duty as Henry’s wife was to give him an heir, but there was one huge problem. As the months rolled into years, then rolled into a decade, Catherine and Henry remained childless.
This was very bad news for Diane too, who feared having to ingratiate herself with a new queen if there was a royal divorce. Diane started recommending all sorts of fertility treatments for the increasingly despondent Catherine, including drinking mule urine. Throughout these years, Henry was so glued to Diane’s side that she had to start insisting he go to Catherine and his marriage bed more frequently, hoping he could finally get a legitimate heir. In 1543, Catherine was pregnant at long last, and in January 1544 gave birth to a coveted boy, Francis.
Incredibly, nine other children followed in short succession, with Catherine pretty much constantly pregnant for over a decade afterward. But if Catherine thought this meant she had gotten rid of Diane de Poitiers, she was wrong. With Catherine’s fertility issues resolved, Henry proved his love to Diane with a grand gesture in 1544. An enemy of Diane’s at court accused her of being involved in a plot against the current King Francis I.
As a result, Francis banished Diane from Paris. Henry was absolutely furious. He and his followers left the royal court and went to Diane’s château, with Henry refusing to even speak to his father for a year. In 1547, Diane got what she always wanted.
That year, Henry’s father died, making her boy toy the king of France. The minute he took the reins, Henry swept Diane back up into the court’s inner circle and banished many of the enemies who had exiled her. Diane de Poitiers was on top of the world, which meant there was nowhere to go but down. Her reign as the shadow queen of France started out gloriously.
She even got a legendary dig at the newly minted Queen Catherine when the pope sent Catherine the customary Golden Rose bouquet—a ceremonial floral sculpture—and also made sure to include a pearl necklace just for Diane. As Diane settled in as chief mistress to the king of France, she took to the role like a duck to water. She had always been whip-smart and had proven it by amassing a tidy fortune over the years. It was only natural that Henry relied on Diane for advice, even getting her to write letters for him and signing them under a joint name.
While Henry was giving Diane political power hand over fist, he staunchly kept Catherine away from his affairs. Then, mad with lust and love, Henry gave his mistress—not his wife—the literal crown jewels of France, infuriating Catherine. Then he went and gifted his favorite girl with the gorgeous Château de Chenonceau, a palace both Diane and Catherine had their eyes on. Never one for modesty, Diane immediately moved in and started throwing lavish parties, rubbing it in Catherine’s face.
To Catherine, this was the final straw. The gloves were now off, and it would be Diane’s doom. In public, Catherine restrained herself, but her private life reveals a dark truth: the queen of France was spitting with bitterness at Diane. People always considered Diane a beauty, and as she grew older, she somehow kept the glow of youth.
Obviously, Diane had good genes to spare, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t getting a little external help on the side. Rumor has it that Diane would drink liquid gold in the hopes that it would provide her with eternal beauty. Just as Diane was about to turn sixty, her whole world changed. In 1559, Diane was still living as a royal mistress and was attending a jousting tournament to watch her lover, King Henry, try to best all the men of his court.
Naturally, the king was insultingly wearing Diane’s signature black and white colors as he jousted. But on that day, karma was finally coming for them. As Diane looked on at her knight in shining armor, she was met with the shock of her life. When the king faced the rookie Count of Montgomery, the upstart almost knocked the monarch right out of his saddle.
Annoyed, the king demanded they ride again so he could prove his dominance. He should have just walked away. On the next run, Montgomery’s lance splintered right into the king’s face. When the dust settled, horror rained down.
Diane watched as Henry’s face gushed with blood and wooden splinters embedded themselves in his eye. The sight was so gruesome that the hardened Diane, as well as Catherine and her son Prince Francis, all fainted the minute they realized what they were seeing. Attendants immediately rushed to the fallen king and brought him to a doctor. The news was gut-wrenching: five splinters of the lance had buried themselves in his head, and one in particular had pierced through his eye and into his brain.
The next few days were agony for everyone involved as King Henry’s life hung in the balance. Diane de Poitiers was nowhere to be found. Catherine had taken full control of the situation, and Diane kept away from Henry’s sickbed for fear that Catherine would embarrassingly dismiss her anyway. Despite not being able to see her lover, Diane likely held out hope that since Henry survived the initial blow, he would pull through.
For a while, it looked like the king would indeed make a miraculous recovery. Some days he could talk, he often listened to music, and he even dictated letters from his bed. Diane’s prayers were coming true until it took a cruel twist. In July, a month after the jousting incident, Henry’s health and mental state went into decline, and he gradually lost everything—his sight, his sanity, and then his life.
On July 10, Diane’s constant companion had passed at the age of forty, and her rival Catherine de Medici was now the powerful queen mother to Henry’s young legitimate son, Prince Francis. Diane’s influence at court depended completely on Henry’s devotion to her, and after his passing she experienced a very rude awakening. Catherine de Medici was in full-on vengeance mode, and she set her sights squarely on Diane. She not only forced the former mistress to give back those coveted crown jewels, but she also yanked back Diane’s beautiful Château de Chenonceau.
Having watched Diane make a name for herself at court, Catherine had learned a thing or two about image management herself. In what was almost certainly a dig at Diane, as well as plain good propaganda, Catherine immediately took up an image of a broken lance as her emblem after her husband’s death—the lance that Henry had decorated with Diane’s colors at the time of the accident. The end of Diane de Poitiers’s life was even more tragic than her fall from grace. After losing favor at court, the cunning woman knew it was game over and retreated into the background to her château, watching from afar as Catherine meddled in France’s affairs.
It’s possible the great mistress could have made a comeback, only she didn’t live long enough to stage one. Soon after King Henry II’s untimely demise, Diane suffered a horrific fate that mirrored her lost lover’s. Ever the athlete, she stubbornly refused to stop riding horses with all the vim and vigor of a woman forty years younger. Just like Henry, this stubborn arrogance cost Diane the ultimate price.
In 1565, when she was sixty-four, Diane was out riding when she fell off her mount, incurring enormous injuries. She never quite recovered. The infamous mistress tried her best to keep going but died a year later, all while Queen Catherine was at the height of her powers in France. But this wasn’t Diane’s last indignity.
Hundreds of years after she died, her enemies got in one final blow. During the French Revolution, citizens opened up Diane’s tomb, desecrated her remains, and threw them in a mass grave along with other aristocrats of France’s bygone age. This dishonor also opened up a stunning discovery. With Diane free from her stately tomb, modern historians were able to take full advantage of more liberal access to her remains, and in 2009 their findings shocked the world.
French experts reviewed her body and discovered traces of gold in her hair. This discovery fundamentally alters Diane’s story. Although previously historians believed her riding injuries led to her demise, the gold suggests something else. Not only are the stories of Diane drinking gold likely true, but this dangerous beauty regime also may have led to her sharp decline.
Queen Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers had one of the bitterest rivalries in royal history, but it was Catherine who struck the most hateful blow. We now know that the entire time King Henry II of France knew he was dying, he called out for Diane to comfort him on his deathbed. Catherine’s response was devious. Cold-hearted and bitter, Catherine staunchly refused to let her heart-sick husband even see Diane in his final moment, and the lovers never got to say goodbye.
Perhaps even more cruelly, Catherine also barred Diane from Henry’s funeral, leaving his most devoted companion bereft at his passing.