QI The Book of the Dead

riding side-saddle to the French (thus showing off her shapely calves, one of her few visual strong points).
    Catherine’s other fashionable innovations were broccoli, artichokes, cauliflower and the fork. She also pioneered the wearing of perfume, hair-dye and underwear and, despite never touching alcohol, was an enthusiastic early adopter of tobacco. She was an avid collector, garlanding her palaces with imported china, minerals, dolls, stuffed crocodiles and a host of live pets, including her favourite, a long-tailed monkey from the Indies. She fussed over it continually, calling it her lucky talisman. *
    Catherine set a new European standard for opulent parties, masques and balls. Her entertainments, which deployed the finest artists, dancers, architects and musicians of the day, were known as ‘ les magnificences ’. One highly effective novelty was her ‘flying squadron’, a group of eighty ladies-in-waiting whose services added spice and intrigue to the conduct of international diplomacy. At one memorable magnificence in 1577, they servedsupper topless. These ladies also established the new fashion of not shaving or plucking their pubic hair, on Catherine’s strict orders (bald pubes might mean pox). Her rival, the straight-laced Jeanne, Protestant Queen of Navarre, wrote of Catherine’s court: ‘I knew it was bad, I find it even worse than I feared. Here women make advances to men rather than the other way around.’
    During her barren years, Catherine’s position as queen was under constant threat, particularly when Henry proved his virility by fathering a child with a servant. Roused by this, he took Catherine’s famously beautiful cousin, Diane de Poitiers, as a mistress. Catherine refused to give up trying to conceive, downing large draughts of mule’s urine, wearing stags’ antlers and dressings of cow dung, and consulting her friend Nostradamus for advice. She even bored a hole in the floor of her husband’s bedchamber so she could stand underneath to spy on Henry and Diane and pick up any practical tips. Some historians credit the royal physician, Jean Fernel, with the decisive breakthrough. He had noticed some ‘irregularities’ in the couple’s organs of generation and suggested a way to solve the problem. Whatever it was, after her first child was born, Catherine had no further trouble conceiving. She produced nine more children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Three of her sons became kings of France and two of her daughters married kings. She outlived all but two of them.
    Her sole aim through her years as consort, and then as the guiding power through the reigns of her three sons, was to keep the Valois dynasty of her husband in the ascendant. To do so, she had to navigate her way through the French Wars of Religion, which threatened to tear the country apart between 1562 and 1598, by shrewdly playing off Catholic against Huguenot. Indefence of political stability she was capable, when necessary, of acts of startling viciousness, even towards her own children. On discovering that her teenage daughter Marguerite was sleeping with the son of her arch rival, the Duke of Guise, she dragged her out of bed, ripping her nightclothes and pulling out handfuls of her hair. Later, when Marguerite was caught again (this time being unfaithful to her husband, King Henry of Navarre) Catherine had the lover executed, cut Marguerite out of her will and never spoke to her again.
    Catherine’s last months were plagued by bouts of gout and colic (she was always a big eater and once nearly died after consuming a vat of chicken-gizzard stew). After her death, a chronicler observed that ‘no more notice was taken of her than of a dead goat’. Her bones were later thrown into a pit by the Revolutionary mob. Her lavish buildings have mostly been destroyed. Even her power-broking and intrigue didn’t outlast her. Just eight months after her passing, 300 years of Valois rule ended with the murder of her son, Henry III. Her long-suffering son-in-law, Marguerite’s husband, became Henry IV of France, founding the Bourbon dynasty. Despite having suffered serial humiliation at the hands of both Medici ladies, he was surprisingly generous about his former mother-in-law, commending her ‘wise conduct’ and commenting, ‘I am surprised that she never did worse.’ Perhaps the best epitaph for Catherine’s ambiguous legacy comes from a contemporary who wisely chose to remain anonymous: ‘She had