RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA
1510-1575
RENÉE, daughter of Anne of Brittany, was, like her mother, destitute of any sympathy with the intellectuality of the period in which she lived. But the Renaissance brought about the reaction of the Reformation, and Renée’s life is interesting as the story of the domestic difficulties confronted by an individual sympathetic to the new doctrines during their first calamitous strivings in Italy. The danger to a person of the same views in France has been seen in the life of Margaret D’Angoulême.
Renée’s Italian career is interesting, besides, as the intimate history of a stubborn, unimaginative, and unadaptable temperament in a married life betraying from the commencement extreme incompatibility of disposition. The circumstance may occur to any one, and each woman deals with it according to her nature. Exactly how she does so, is one of the clearest tests of her valour and her intelligence. A true woman of the Renaissance—Vittoria Colonna and Isabella of Mantua, for instance, carried a dignified marital complaisance to heroic extremities—would have preserved surface amenities, however distasteful the husband. But Renée, brought up by people to whom she was simply a dull and undesirable orphan, never learnt that small accommodations of behaviour are among the primary and desirable virtues. Her father had been rich in them, but the self-willed spirit of her mother, Anne, was more noticeable in the character of her second daughter than the paternal trait. To have lived with Renée would undoubtedly have rendered affection difficult. But to know her without the irritation of daily intercourse, as a perplexed, mistaken, blundering, wistful, and unloved woman, is to be drawn into a reluctant sympathy. She was, to begin with, ugly, and there is nothing in its consequences more pathetic than a woman’s ugliness. She was also, almost from her babyhood, without one single person who truly loved her. From the outset her character had been chilled and bleakened.
Born on October 25, 1510, though she came disappointingly enough to the woman craving for a son, Renée was made welcome with a careful pomp that bordered almost upon tenderness. Her baptism became the pretext for a magnificent pageant, and in an account of the expenses incurred for her childish household, she is called the king’s “very dear and much loved daughter, Renée.”
Two years after Renée’s birth Anne died. At five years old Renée was an orphan, and with her sister Claude, the patient, piteous, and most mishandled wife of Francis I., passed into the care of Louise de Savoie. They were the children of Louise’s most persistent enemy; she could not, therefore, have done otherwise than dislike them. Brantome says that she was extremely harsh to both, and it is certain that Renée, plain, delicate, and deformed, never became to anybody a person of sufficient importance to be coaxed into prettiness of ways and feelings. The gentle Claude must have loved her smaller sister while she lived, but Claude died of consumption almost immediately after Francis I. started for Italy, when Renée was only fourteen years of age, and from that time until her marriage the girl knew no one prepared to do more than a cold and pleasureless duty towards her.
In justice to Louise it must be admitted that every effort was made to procure Renée a suitable husband. They promised her at one time to the Archduke Charles, but already her want of average good looks rendered some apologies necessary. The life of any girl towards whom such an attitude has to be assumed must possess an undue measure of painfulness. Before presenting the bride to the Archduke it was considered imperative to tell him that “the charm of her conversation greatly atoned for her want of beauty.” The proposal came to nothing, and after several other unavailing negotiations Francis settled upon a marriage with Ercole of Ferrara, the son of Duke Alphonso and Lucrezia.
It was not a good match for a girl in whose veins ran the blood of a king of France. Mezeray said of it, “The king arranged a very poor match for this princess, and sent her into a far country, lest she should ask him one day for a share in Brittany and in the patrimony of Louis.”
