The Death of Henry II and the End of the Reign

On 30 June 1559, a tournament held on the Rue Saint-Antoine to celebrate the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis turned to tragedy: Henry II, wounded in the eye by Gabriel de Montgommery’s lance, lay dying for ten days before succumbing, leaving the throne to a fifteen-year-old son and the kingdom on the brink of the Wars of Religion.

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🏟️ The Tournament on the Rue Saint-Antoine

The weddings of Elisabeth of France to Philip II of Spain and of Margaret of France, the king’s sister, to the Duke of Savoy provided the occasion for several days of festivities meant to celebrate the peace just signed at Cateau-Cambrésis. Henry II himself organised a great tournament on the Rue Saint-Antoine, then the widest street in Paris, a few steps from the Hôtel des Tournelles, the royal residence where the court was lodging. Nobles and knights took turns there for several days, under the eyes of the courtiers and of part of the Parisian populace who had come to watch the spectacle.

On 30 June, having already broken several lances that day, the king wished to face Gabriel de Lorges, Count of Montgommery, captain of his Scottish Guard, one last time — the latter mounted for the occasion on a charger whose name, “Malheureux” (“Unfortunate”), was afterwards to take on an ominous ring.

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⚔️ The Fatal Accident

During the joust, both lances shattered on impact. Carried by his momentum, Montgommery failed to hold back the broken shaft of his own lance, which struck the king’s helmet violently at the very moment when the visor, improperly lowered, left his face exposed. A wooden splinter pierced Henry II’s right eye, and he was unhorsed, falling heavily to the ground. Still conscious despite the severity of the wound, he was at once lifted by the courtiers who rushed to his aid and carried to the Hôtel des Tournelles.

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🏥 The King’s Agony

A team of physicians took turns at his bedside: François Pidoux, the king’s ordinary physician, the royal surgeon Ambroise Paré, and André Vésale (Vesalius), personal surgeon to Philip II of Spain, summoned urgently from Brussels. Attempts to extract the wooden splinters, combined with the bloodlettings and poultices then in use, could not halt the infection. For ten days, from 30 June to 10 July, the king endured suffering that witnesses called atrocious, alternating between moments of lucidity and bouts of delirium, until he died on 10 July 1559, at the age of forty.

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📜 The Nostradamus Legend

Posterity soon linked this death to quatrain I-35 of Nostradamus’s Centuries:

The young lion shall overcome the old, on the field of war, in a single duel; in a golden cage, he shall pierce his eyes: two wounds in one, then to die a cruel death.

Both duellists bore a lion as their emblem, which fed the legend after the fact — but no contemporary chronicler, starting with Brantôme, mentions Nostradamus in connection with this episode, and the interpretation of the quatrain as a prophecy of the king’s death dates back only to 1614, several decades after the event.

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⚰️ The Funeral

The king’s body was embalmed, his heart and entrails carried separately to the church of the Célestins convent, where a monument known as the Three Graces was later to house the relic — today kept at the Musée du Louvre, the original copper vessel having been replaced by a wooden copy at the Restoration. Following the traditional ceremonial of the kings of France, a richly dressed royal effigy — closed crown, violet satin tunic strewn with fleurs-de-lis, ermine mantle — was displayed in public from 29 July onward, its meals served to it as though it were a living being; the body itself was then displayed from 5 to 11 August, before the procession reached Notre-Dame for two days of requiem mass, then the basilica of Saint-Denis, where Henry II was buried on 13 August 1559 beside Catherine de’ Medici, beneath a recumbent effigy sculpted by Germain Pilon in 1565. This tomb was desecrated during the Revolution: on 18 October 1793, the coffin was pulled from the Valois vault and the body thrown into a mass grave — only the effigy, a work of art that was spared, remains visible in the basilica today.

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👑 The Succession and Its Aftermath

His eldest son, Francis II, fifteen years old and married since 1558 to Mary Stuart, succeeded him at once, delegating power, with the agreement of his mother Catherine de’ Medici, to his wife’s uncles, the Guises — a veritable palace revolution that at the same stroke sidelined Diane de Poitiers, sent away from court as soon as the new king acceded. As for Gabriel de Montgommery, pardoned by Henry II on his deathbed, he was nonetheless banished from court and stripped of his command at the very first council of the new reign; taking refuge for a time in Venice, converted to Protestantism in 1562 after the Massacre of Wassy, he became one of the great Huguenot captains of the Wars of Religion alongside Coligny, before being captured in 1574 and beheaded at the Place de Grève on 26 June, in the presence of Catherine de’ Medici herself.

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• 30 June 1559: during a tournament on the Rue Saint-Antoine, Henry II is mortally wounded in the eye by Gabriel de Montgommery
• 10 July 1559: death of the king after ten days of agony, despite the care of Paré, Pidoux and Vesalius
• Nostradamus’s quatrain I-35, linked to this death after the fact, was only interpreted as prophetic from 1614 onward
• 13 August 1559: burial at Saint-Denis beneath a recumbent effigy by Germain Pilon; tomb desecrated in 1793
• Accession of Francis II at fifteen, power delegated to the Guises, Diane de Poitiers sidelined from court
• Montgommery, pardoned then banished, became a Protestant captain before being executed in 1574

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Next chapter: Francis II and the beginnings of the Wars of Religion.