She governed France in the name of a boy who needed to put both hands to his crown to keep it steady. Marie de' Medici was his mother and his regent. The difficulty would come when he wanted to govern for himself.
On 17 October 1610, Louis XIII was crowned in the cathedral at Reims. He was nine, with a birthday only twenty days behind him and a father murdered five months earlier. His mother was regent. The crown belonged to the child; the business of keeping its authority intact fell to her.
Marie had worn a crown of her own that spring. On 13 May, she had been anointed and crowned at the abbey of Saint-Denis, nearly ten years after her marriage to Henry IV. She was a daughter of the ruling Medici family of Tuscany, brought from Italy to become a French queen. Her marriage had supplied the dynasty with children, including the son who would succeed his father. At Saint-Denis, her position had been given the full ceremony it had long lacked.
The following day, Henry was assassinated in Paris.
Louis became king at eight. Marie became a widow with a kingdom to govern. The great nobles had armies, ambitions and grievances, and a dead king offered opportunities that a living one had kept inconveniently out of reach. She negotiated, distributed money and honours, and asserted royal authority where she could. Governing for her son meant dealing with men quite prepared to profit from his childhood.
That October, the king travelled to Reims. Eleven days before the ceremony, at his lessons, he had been arranging his lead soldiers into squadrons on the table. On coronation morning, he was awake at five and placed in a ceremonial bed, where the peers came to collect him. He entered the cathedral at half past nine. Around noon he received the anointing, and when the peers came forward to kiss him, Louis raised both hands to keep the crown steady on his head.
The ceremony ended in the afternoon. He was tired, and said he was hungry. Once he had dined and gone back to his room, he had his lead soldiers brought to him and began arranging battalions again.
The next day, at the ceremony for the new knights of the Holy Spirit, a cardinal refused to take his place behind a prince of the blood, and the quarrel was brought to the king. Louis sent it elsewhere. "I must speak to the Queen my mother," he said. "I cannot settle that."
Marie governed for that boy. She made appointments, rewarded supporters and built up the position of Concino Concini, an Italian courtier married to Léonora Galigaï, her companion since childhood. His wealth, honours and influence grew together, and so did the number of men who resented them. The government conducted in Louis's name was increasingly identified with his mother and her favourite.
In 1614, at thirteen, Louis reached his formal majority. The regency ended. Marie's control of government continued. A birthday could settle the legal question; it did rather less to persuade an established government to make room for the person whose name appeared on its orders.
Louis made his own arrangements.
On 24 April 1617, Concini approached the Louvre and was confronted by the captain of the guards. He was shot dead. The killing had been arranged by Louis and his favourite, Charles d'Albert de Luynes. The king dismissed his mother's ministers. He was fifteen. This time he did not refer the matter to the Queen his mother.
Marie remained confined in her apartments at the Louvre while her son refused to receive her. The woman who had governed in his name could no longer obtain an audience with him. In May she was sent to Blois, where soldiers watched her and she was forbidden to leave the château. She had a household, attendants and the title of queen mother. She had lost the right to decide where she went.
She escaped in 1619 and joined powerful nobles opposed to the king's government. Settlements followed, then another armed confrontation. Louis's forces defeated those of his mother and her allies in 1620. Their quarrel had acquired soldiers on both sides.
Yet Blois was not the end of her political life, or of their dealings with each other. Reconciliation restored her influence at court. She helped advance Richelieu, a churchman who had served her and would become her son's principal minister. She also commissioned Peter Paul Rubens to paint her life for the Luxembourg Palace she had built in Paris. The woman removed from government was having her government set out on an immense scale.
One canvas showed Louis at the helm of a ship representing the state, with Marie inclining before him. She had yielded the helm; he was steering. It was a handsome version of the transfer of power, painted after the shooting at the Louvre, the confinement and the battles.
The next great struggle concerned the man she had helped to promote. Marie turned against Richelieu, whose policies she opposed and whose influence with Louis had become formidable. In November 1630, at her Luxembourg Palace, she pressed her son to dismiss him. The cardinal reached mother and son through a private entrance, and the confrontation continued in his presence. Later, Louis summoned Richelieu to his hunting lodge at Versailles and renewed his confidence in him.
Marie had failed to remove the minister. Her own removal followed. Sent to Compiègne, she escaped in 1631 and crossed into the Spanish Netherlands. This time there would be no return to court. She continued to seek allies and to ask permission to come back to France, eventually reaching Cologne, where she died in July 1642.
At Reims, the boy who put both hands to his crown had sent a question he could not settle to the Queen his mother. In the eleven years left to her, she asked to come back to France. That question was his to settle. He never allowed it.
