#francis I

[illustratus]

[tragediambulante]

Cellini's Saliera, Benvenuto Cellini, 1543

[ripstefano]

“Seid tapfer, Männer!”

“Mi?”

“Sta?”

“Che cosa?”

“Co?”

-An Austrian officer trying to command his multiethnic division.

Just a few scenes of battle of various divisions and their conflicts from Austrian Grenadiers and Infantry 1788-1816.

I found a great source on Guard selection in the Russian imperial army, like height and appearance, but it’s in French and hard to rip off the internet so I gotta brush up on both.

[damaseclipsadas]

Claude da França, primeira esposa e rainha consorte do rei François I.

[wonder-worker]

[Anne de Pisseleu] has almost entirely disappeared from historical accounts. Francis is generally considered the strongest and most impressive French Renaissance king. To acknowledge Anne’s political power would diminish his reputation. But for errors of political judgment in his waning years, Anne has [often] been blamed.

Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses in Renaissance France / Tracy Adams, Queens, Regents, Mistresses: Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources

"The Duchess of Étampes [Anne de Pisseleu] has been characterized over the centuries in reflexively misogynistic terms, and traces of the misogyny remain despite the scholarship of David Potter and Francis Nawracki demonstrating that that she was a central political figure during the last years of the reign of François I. She is described, for example, as “undoubtedly a detestable person, capricious, arrogant, taking advantage of her powers as favorite of a feeble, aged king,” and as “the duchess, insolent, capricious,” who “made sure that no one was unaware of the power that she held over [the king].” She was at “the heart of much in-fighting at court,” and she was “fickle.” Charges of greed and vainglory persist, as well: “Combining intelligence with beauty, she was also ambitious and grasping.” The reputation of Diane de Poitiers among historians has been different. She was much reviled immediately after her death, but, by the nineteenth century, she had been embraced as a romantic icon, and, ever since, she has been treated with sympathy or curiosity—the story that she ingested gold to preserve her beauty has garnered considerable interest in the popular press over the past few years—in recent biographies."

[isadomna]

Princess Mary and Francis I of France

It seems almost unbelievable that Henry VIII seriously considered giving his daughter to the French King. She was only eleven years old, and when the French ambassadors saw her in the spring of 1527, they concluded that she was “so thin, spare and small as to make it impossible for her to be married for the next three years”. Louise of Savoy, sensing that the marriage proposal might have been a trap to keep Francis out of the imperial alliance, suggested a solution that even the English ambassadors found shocking. If anyone believed that Princess Mary was too young to be married to the man twenty-two years her senior, Louise saw no danger because “she herself was married at eleven”. She suggested that Francis I and Henry VIII should meet in Calais, where the marriage between her son and the English King’s daughter should be solemnized. After the ceremony, Francis and Mary should consummate their match to ensure its validity; it didn’t have to be a long consummation, it sufficed that Francis might “abide himself for an hour or less with the princess”. Louise assured that her son was “a man of honour and discretion and would use no violence”. This, Louise claimed, would be means of assuring that Francis was legally married to the English princess and Henry VIII could take her back to England “unto such time as she should be thought more able”. The English ambassadors thought the proposal “very strange” and, indeed, such proceedings were unheard of even in the sixteenth century.

Princess Mary, small and undeveloped for her age, was probably not menstruating and thus wasn’t a fully grown woman in the eyes of her contemporaries. Although girls were allowed to marry at the age of twelve, sexual intercourse was advised to take place when a girl reached her sixteenth birthday. It stemmed from the belief that between twelve and sixteen, a girl was too young and too fragile to survive the perils of pregnancy and childbirth. Henry VIII’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, was the best example of what happened to a girl when her marriage was consummated too early. She gave birth when she was only thirteen years old, and this traumatic experience left her damaged and unable to have more children by her successive husbands. Bishop Fisher, Margaret’s friend and admirer, marvelled: “It seemed a miracle that of so little a personage anyone should have been born at all”. Margaret had certainly believed so as well because many years later she ensured that her young and fragile granddaughter, Margaret Tudor, was not sent to be married to the King of Scotland too early, lest her much older husband would not wait for her to mature “but injure her, and endanger her health”. She would have certainly felt the same way about Princess Mary, who, like her grandmother and aunt, was small for her age.

Princess Mary would have reached her twelfth birthday (the age of consent) on 18 February 1528, more than a year after the proposed consummation, and even this would not mean that she was able to have intercourse. Indeed, the English ambassadors who thought this proposal was outrageous were loath even to put it in writing. Needless to say that Henry VIII rejected it immediately, arguing that his daughter “was of tender age and there was plenty of time to talk about marrying her”.

Sylvia Barbara Soberton, Golden Age Ladies: Women Who Shaped the Courts of Henry VIII and Francis I

[cedyat]

Kinda wish there were more random anecdotes about these three during the campaigns of the 6th coalition war. Seems to me that they would have had a weird dynamic; you have one guy too shy to speak in grammatically correct sentences, one charismatic idealist and one guy who always seems 110% done with everything.

[katharinepar]

TUDOR WEEK 2023: Day 1: Favourite Tudor Rivalry

Henry VIII of England, Charles V, Francis I of France

'Despite appearances, [Henry VIII] had never really taken to Francis—who offered, apart from anything else, too much serious competition. For Charles, on the other hand—who was still only twenty—he felt a genuine affection. After his visit to England the young man had written a letter thanking him and Catherine warmly for their hospitality, and in particular for the advice Henry had given him “like a good father when we were at Cantorberi”; and it may well be that the King, who was, after all, already his uncle, did feel in some degree paternal—or at least protective—towards him. What seems abundantly clear is that Charles endeared himself not only to Henry but to all who were with him, in a way that Francis, with all his swagger, had completely failed to do.' (x)

[royalty-nobility]

Francis I Emperor of Austria

Artist: Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793-1865)

Francis II and I (12 February 1768 – 2 March 1835) was the last Holy Roman Emperor as Francis II from 1792 to 1806, and the first Emperor of Austria as Francis I from 1804 to 1835. He was also King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, and served as the first president of the German Confederation following its establishment in 1815.

[artschoolglasses]

Detail from the tomb of Maria Theresa and Francis I in the Imperial Crypt

Vienna, Austria

[princesssarisa]

The opera Rigoletto is based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse.

The character in the play who became the opera's Duke of Mantua is King Francis I of France. (The opera had to change the setting to Mantua and demote the king to a duke because the censors of the era wouldn't allow such a negative portrayal of a king, or a nearly successful attempt to assassinate him, to be shown onstage.)

King Francis I is also the king in the movie Ever After: A Cinderella Story – the father of Prince Henry, the future King Henry II. Obviously, by the time Ever After takes place, his days as the handsome womanizer Hugo's play depicts were behind him.

Ever After's heroine Danielle de Barbarac is a fictional character, but apparently she's loosely inspired by Diane de Poitiers, the real Henry II's beloved mistress. She was known as a highly intelligent woman and as Henry's unofficial advisor as well as his bedmate. The movie just sanitizes the situation and makes it fit the Cinderella story by removing Henry's arranged marriage to Catherine de Medici and having him marry Danielle instead.

And who was Diane de Poitiers's father? Jean de Poitiers, Seigneur de Saint-Vallier. In Hugo's play, he's the character who corresponds to Rigoletto's Monterone.

Of course Victor Hugo had entirely different goals in writing Le roi s'amuse than the screenwriters of Ever After did fort their "realistic fairy tale." It's hard to imagine the hot-tempered yet ultimately good-hearted old king in Ever After as having once been the charming yet ruthless young rake from Hugo's play and Verdi's opera, and whether either of them resembles the real Francis I or not I don't know.

I just think it's funny that this connection exists between Rigoletto and Ever After, of all things.

(P.S. I wonder what King Francis would think of the fact that not only does Verdi's opera demote a character who was meant to be him to a mere duke, but that so many modern productions of that opera have demoted him even further, portraying him as a Mafia boss, a movie studio mogul, a Frank Sinatra-style singer, etc.)

@leporellian

[illustratus]

Prison of Francis I by Giovanni Migliara

[tragediambulante]

Fointainebleau's Nymph, Benvenuto Cellini, 1542-43

[little-candy-store-of-horrors]

Theyre teen royalty. If 16th century Europe was Us Weekly they would always be on the cover.

🩷🩷🩷

I got Some Responses so I thought I'd post the drawing on the back cover 💅💅

[catherinesboleyn]

The Serpent Queen promo stills

1.02 (2022-)

[wonder-worker]

"[Francis I] appears to have met Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly on his return to France in 1526, and, soon afterwards, she was acknowledged as his favourite mistress. Her rise to political actor, however, did not begin until about 1538–1539, and she becomes a central figure in 1540–1541, when ambassadors to France, charged with keeping their lords up to date on François I’s attitude toward Henry VIII and Charles V, began to solicit her alongside other highly ranked contacts. Etampes’s credit only grew throughout the final years of the king’s life: in 1542 papal nuncio Dandino reports that the king was “completely in the thrall of Madame d’Étampes...”. By 1545, imperial ambassador St. Mauris complains to Charles V that Protestants at the French court were receiving great favour because Madame d’Étampes “inclines to the Lutheran discipline.” In October 1546, Étampes was still attempting to mediate an agreement between the English and the king, convinced that François I would break with the pope if Henry VIII would make the first move. Throughout her tenure, she performed her role as lady-in-waiting to Queen Eleanor of Austria with irreproachable deference."

Tracy Adams, "Agnes Sorel and the French Monarchy" / David Potter, "The Life and After-Life of a Royal Mistress: Anne de Pisseleu, Duchess of Étampes"

"Anne’s political influence and her role in influencing the king during the 1540s are no longer in doubt. Her relations with the king’s close advisers Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), Philippe Chabot de Brion (1492–1543), Claude  Annebault (1495–1552), and François de Tournon (1489–1562) were pivotal in the last decade of the king’s reign...The Imperial ambassador in 1541 reported that no councillor dared approach the king about anything without checking first with Madame d’Étampes if she approved it. The following year, though the king was with the army in Languedoc, dispatches from the front in Flanders were forwarded to her at Lyons. Her intervention in the appointment of Jean du Bellay as Archbishop of Bordeaux in 1544 was widely commented on at the time. In this period she employed the standard political tactics of a Renaissance politician: the placement of friends and allies at court, many drawn from her extensive kindred on her father’s side and from the relatives of her mother, the Sanguins. Her status is reflected by her inclusion — as the only non-royal woman — in a series of fifty or so woodcuts created by Hans Liefrinck the elder at Antwerp, which included the most powerful dynastic figures of the day."