Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. Our network has another new show coming out. This one is called Noble Blood and it's sort of combines history with the true crime show in a show that's hosted by Danish Wartz and it is produced by Aaron Bankey. So, as its name suggests, it's all about royalty, there's also maybe some crime involved might not have been considered crime at the time, but maybe and so to go along with the theme of that show, today's classic is on Charles the ninth of France. He was prone to just terrifying periods of rage. You can stay tuned at the end of this episode for a peek at Noble Blood, although just be forewarned it's a little more graphic in the gory details than our show tends to be. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy. If you sin and Tracy, it's been a little while since we've done a Mad Royals episode we have. That's a theme that kept cropping up in previous hosts shows and then it just carried over into our work too. Yeah, more than anything else. Ours is more of like a cranky, temperamental probably doesn't have control of his emotions kind of royal, but we'll fit it into mad. There you could say he was mad. Uh. And much like many of the other mad Royals that we've discussed on the podcast throughout the years, Charles the ninth of France, as I just hinted, was really prone to fits of rage and these could be so intense that people at his court feared for their lives. And for a quick sort of fun background e bit that's not really super important to his biography, Charles at ninth was allegedly nicknamed the Snotty King, and that was because of a birthmark that he had on his upper lip that apparently made it look like he had a perpetually running nose, which seems like a terrible thing for a child to bear. But uh, he eventually grew a mustache to cover it up as once he became an adult and was able to grow facial hair. But that's only the tip of the iceberg on this one. Uh. And going by his famous portrait from when he was just a boy, uh that was painted by Frenchie, either this birth birthmark wasn't even that noticeable or the artist downplayed it. But that's just kind of a fun little factoid. As we go into this story about Charles the Ninth, he was also the son of Catherine de Medici, So his story brushes up against the series that previous hosted on the Medici Family. Uh. Katie and Sarah talk a lot about Catherine in previous episodes, and they bust Smiths about her reputation. But we're gonna look at this story and this piece of history as it relates specifically to her son, Charles. Charles was born Charles Maximilian on June near Paris, and his parents, as we already mentioned, were Katherine de Medici and Henry the second of France. Uh. And as you said, Catherine was covered at length back in the Katie and Sarah dates, and the couple all so had an older son, Francis the second, as well. They had other children. But this is just to kind of make it clear that at this point Charles was not immediately next in line for the throne. As a child, Charles was really coddled by his parents. His mother ordered numerous portraits of her children, and she'd often hire in troops of actors and other performers just to keep them entertained, and that's not unusual for royal families at the time, but she is usually described as being really quite doting on her children on some historians kind of suggests that that is what kind of fosters some of their bad behavior as they grew up, that they just were kind of spoiled um. The castle was also filled with entertainments of its own. They had a private zoo of exotic creatures and plenty of domestic animals available for the young children's and amusement, and they also had companion children the family would kind of hire in and keep handy, so that each of the royal children had another child the same age that they could play with. As you would probably expect, the royal siblings were very well educated. As a child, Charles showed some natural artistic ability, and he seemed to really enjoy literature and writing, but he wasn't that eager about being a scholar. His school work had more to do with making his mother happy than learning things for himself. So in the summer of fifteen fifty nine, Catherine and King Henry the Second's daughter Elizabeth, who was four years older than Charles, was married to King Philip the Second of Spain in a proxy ceremony, and during this celebration, uh King Henry participated in a joust and there was an accident. Unfortunately, his opponent's lance actually shattered and the King's face was penetrated by splinters from this damaged weapon in multiple places. Over the course of the next eleven days, Henry became progressively more and more ill due to infection and swelling and a lot of various problems going on, and he eventually succumbed to those wounds and died on July nine. When Henry the Second died, his son, Francis the Second, became the King of France, but Francis, who was married to Mary, Queen of Scott's, did not reign for very long, just seventeen months. During that time, the teenage king was really influenced by Mary's family, and while the Protestant Huguenots of France wanted religious freedom, Mary's uncles were very, very Catholic and very against this idea. Eventually, Francis, his uncle's in law, engineered the execution of fifty seven Hugueno conspirators who were put to death for treason. Charles, of course, being a young boy and and part of this royal family, witnessed the entire spectacle of this execution along with the rest of his family. Francis the Second, who had tuberculosis, died of an abscess behind his ear on the evening of December five, fifteen sixty and at that moment the crown went to his younger brother, Charles the ninth. And before we get on to kind of Charles as a child king, it's a little early, but I want to go ahead and do a sponsor break here because that way we can keep kind of the next chunk of the story altogether. So is that cool with you, Tracy, it is, let's do it. To get back to Charles's story, he was only ten when his brother died, so his mother, Catherine was named as regent, and in this role she did everything that a ruler would normally do, and she stayed by her son's side at almost all times. For the rare occasions when she wasn't with Charles, the servants, of course, were expected to report back to her on even the most minute details in what he was up to. And again that that's one of those things that people will talk about in history when they're talking about royal families. But it really is not that unusual. I think most royal parents, particularly as you go further back, the habit was kind of to keep constant tabs on their kids as they were doing things. I'm using the air quotes on their own because they were never really on their own. But from early on, Charles had shown some signs of mental illness. And this really manifested initially is these fits, uh that could be attributed to the frustration of a child, Like we have all seen a toddler kind of hit the wall where they can't they don't have the language skills to like explain themselves, so they just kind of have these rage fits. But the problem was that this continued for Charles long past the age where that behavior is considered normal and part of the growing cycle. He was also physically pretty weak, although he enjoyed being physically active. At the same time, he also wasn't the only one in his family who was prone to developing infections and displaying these kind of rage tantrums. His brothers had the same characteristics. Yeah, this is pretty consistent throughout the family. Charles was also obsessively interested in hunting. Uh. Hunting, you know, very popular, but he was really obsessed with it, and the sight of blood during these excursions got him really excited, and he seemed to start to crave that excitement, almost like an addiction. He got lots of excitement outside of hunting. Due to the ongoing religious tensions in France. In fifteen sixty two, Francis of Gives, who was one of the same uncles of Mary, Queen of Scott's, who had been so influential over his older brother, briefly kidnapped Charles and his mother, threatening that if the young king entertained any ideas about becoming a Protestant, they really had no qualms with getting a new king. Yeah, you can imagine how that would be a terrifying event for a young child. You know. Again, he was only ten when his when he became king, even though he wasn't really ruling at that point. So this is a lot to deal with. Uh. Three years after Francis had died, so Charles would have been on the on the throne, but with his mother ruling his regent. UH. Charles turned thirteen and shortly after this he was proclaimed king without his mother's regency. And you may think that this would have been a problem for Catherine, but you would be wrong, because she still held the power. Charles was very young and indecisive and as we said, kind of physically weak, and he already showed these signs of mental illness. And now Catherine was in this position where really she was still making the decisions. She had that much influence, but Charles was the one that was ultimately held responsible for them. Charles had been named king in August of fifteen sixty three, and starting in fifteen sixty four, he started a two year tour of France at the insistence of his mother. In part, this was intended to show off the strength of the royal house and really try to unite the French under the king. But the Catholics and the Huguenots continued their bitter conflict, and during this sort of tour of France and these tr levels, one of the first real acts of violence on Charles's part took place. It's one of the first times that we have actual documentation of him kind of being violent outside sort of a normal scenario like hunting um. While he and his mother and this entourage were traveling from their starting point of Fontainebleu to their next destination. Charles came across a pig that had recently given birth, and he wanted to try to pick up one of the piglets, and when he tried to handle it, the sow attacked him, and his reaction was incredibly brutal, and he killed the pig and orphaned the litter and kind of left it that and it was again outside sort of the uh you know, it wasn't like going on a hunt. It was killing this mother animal and orphaning all of her piglets. And it's really the first time that we see him just being brutal in kind of a senseless way. Throughout the rest of the royal tour, he performed various acts of diplomacy and he made public appearing. Is some of the meetings he and his mother took with the Catholic royals of Spain really stirred the pot with the French wars of religion, because the Hugenos saw these meetings is likely being alliance meetings with their enemies. At this point, we should point out that Charles did not remain physically weak for the entirety of his life. We mentioned as a child he was kind of frail um, and as he passed through adolescence he grew a great deal, although he did always stay very thin, but he became quite tall um, and he just wasn't seen as so much frail, although I don't think anyone would ever describe him as like a hulking uh specimen of strength and fitness. But as his physical stature grew, his mental state really kind of took the opposite track and started to deteriorate. He was very close to his younger sister Marguerite, who you'll also see listed as Margaret and sometimes even Margot, and his behavior was peppered more and more with these angry rages. It started to seem like his sister was the only one who was safe from this and who could help calm him down. Even his mother started to gradually fear him. Yeah, I mean, he was always sort of like a hair trigger kind of potential violent person to be around, which I can imagine has no fune whatsoever. Charles also contracted tuberculosis, just as his brother Francis had, and he came quite near to dying from it in eight but he did recover from that, although after that point his health was fairly inconsistent. Eventually he developed an abscess in one of his arms from being bled routinely in an effort to fight this tuberculosis, but even so he managed to recover and continue his reign. As he recovered from this prolonged illness, Charles found love. He met Marie Touchet, and although she was from a bougeois family, Catherine approved of her son taking her as a mistress. She seemed to truly care for Charles and she helped calm his unsettled temper. Yeah, much like his sister, Like basically, anybody that could be around that would help keep him a little more relaxed and a little less likely to be violent. Catherine was game for that plan. But soon after, in fifteen seventy, the twenty year old Charles also got married, so he kept Touche as his mistress, but he married Elizabeth of Austria, and Charles is said to have actually loved both Elizabeth and Marie Touche, and the three of them seemed to get along fine. You know, Touche understood her position as mistress and she was very respectful of his wife, and the wife didn't seem to have, you know, any real issues of animosity or jealousy over the mistress, like they kind of all worked it out. Charles and Elizabeth had a daughter named Marie Elizabeth, and this was two years after they got married, but unfortunately the child died at the age of six. Charles also had a son, Charles de Vaudois, with his mistress Marie, the year after Marie Elizabeth was born, and that son lived to adulthood and he eventually became Duke of Angouleme. So the series of religious conflicts between French Catholics and Protestants went on in phases we referred earlier to the French Wars of religion, and these are they and these went on from April fifteen sixty two to May. But they were kind of in pockets. It wasn't always continuous. There would be moments of peace and then it would break into another, you know, fight again, and then they would reach an accord and that wouldn't last. But during the reign of Charles the Ninth, when Catherine de Medici was still incredibly powerful, the politics of French court were actually a huge factor and influence in these wars, Charles's younger brother, Alexandra Eduard, the Duke d'Anjou, defeated the Huguenos in battle in fifteen sixty nine. That's made nineteen year old King Charles a Second incredibly jealous, and it shifted his sympathies over to the Huguenos. Not only did not possessed the military or physical prowess that his brother did, his brother was also clearly his mother's favorite, So Charles was doubly irritated by his success. Yeah, so it kind of had more to do with a this switch in kind of sympathies towards the Huguenot had more to do with this brotherly rivalry than it really had to do with the actual religious and political stuff that was going on. But in one Charles met with nobleman and Huguenot military leader Gaspar de Coligni, and Coligny had this plan to go up against the Netherlands in Spain, and he wanted the king to form an alliance and unite the country's warring religious groups to do so. And Charles was actually game for this, uh, and he was extremely fond of Coligny and is said to have actually sometimes called him father, but Charles's mother wasn't really enthusiastic about her son's political friends. While she had initially taken a stance in favor of reconciliation with Huguenos, particularly after Mary's Catholic uncle had kidnapped her and Charles, Catherine felt threatened by the influence that Gaspard de Colony had over her son. While there's some debate over who exactly ordered the move, it's believed by a lot of historians that Catherine conspired to have Colony assassinated. That effort ultimately failed and he was only wounded. The Hugeno Protestants were, of course angered at this attack, and King Charles the Second promised to investigate. And irritated by the failure of her move against Colonny, Catherine kind of took the situation as it was and took a new tactic. She advised her son that the safest course of action was to have all of the Hugueno leaders killed and to strike decisively and quickly. Charles agreed to this plan sort of. Her haranguing had sent him into a fit of rage eventually until he finally yelled killed the admiral. If you wish, but you must kill all the Huguenos so that not one is left to a lot of to reproach me. Kill the lot, kill the lot, kill the lot. Conveniently, during all the scheming, the king's sister, Marguerite de Vala, was marrying Henri of Navarre, who was the leader of the Huguenos, so that meant all of the other Hugueno leaders were in town to celebrate their wedding. But before we get to the massacre, I want to talk a little bit about this wedding, uh, and not in a romantic Let's discuss the dress coin of way. But if you think Charles's sister Marguerite was miffed at being married off to Henri of Navarre, you would be correct. While the two siblings, Charles and Margot had been close when they were younger, in fifteen seventy, Margot had been caught alone with a lover in the in a bedroom of the royal home, and Charles was so enraged by this event that he brutally beat his sister in front of their mother until she lost consciousness. Her lover, Henri de Guise, was soon mary it off to a wealthy noble woman and kind of gotten out of the picture. The rift between the brother and sister stayed around for the next two years, but then it widened into a gulf when it was announced that Marguerite would be married to Nri of Navarre. The bride and groom had known each other since there were children, and there was absolutely no affection between them. Marguerite was fastidious and obsessed with cleoonis and Ri was not. He had a reputation for his odor yeah, and she had the opposite reputation. She is uh alleged to have been one of those rare people who bathed every single day during this time, which was not necessarily common uh. And during the marriage ceremony, Margot is said to have stood silent rather than utter the words of consent to the union when the cardinal asked it of her, and this became an uncomfortable silence, and eventually Charles, who had just grown furious at her behavior, stepped behind her and pushed her head forward and down in a knot of scent. So the massacre and the pre dawn hours of August colony was thrown from his bedroom window. He had already been severely beaten and stabbed, and he was beheaded in the street. This, along with the murders of additional key figures of Hugano leadership, many of whom were slain in the Royal Palace where they were wedding guests, set off a chain reaction of events now known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. As news of the Hugueno leadership's demise spread, Catholic mobs began attacking and killing Huguenos throughout the city. The slaughter was just brutal, and it went on and on. On August, Charles was attempting to put an end to it by means of a royal order, but no one paid any attention. As the weeks went on, the carnage spread out from Paris into the country. It went on for almost two months. A rough estimate of the death toll is about seventy thousand Hugueno Protestants. Several of the as were in Paris alone. And I wanted just to take a side note here. This is actually the first use of the word massacre in English. Uh And a lot of the people who were killed were just like working at their shops, are going about their normal daily lives. When people burst in and and cut them down. Um. The reason I know that is because back when we did our episode about the Boston massacre, which had an extremely small number of people who were killed, a lot of people that got angry that we didn't approach that with the proper gravita or like massacres weren't that big at the time. No, this is the first time that the word massacre appeared in English and it was horrible. Yeah. And I will say there are debates over the the accuracy of those counts. Uh. Some people will say the seventy thousand estimate is way too high, and that the several thousand that were in Paris h may or may not be accurate as well. But we know that it was tens of thousands, So even if it was half that, you're still talking about a great deal of people. Uh. Henri of Navarre, however, despite being a Huguenot leader, actually survived the massacre because he converted to Catholicism. He was kind of swept away uh by royal guards and kind of given this option. It sounds like, uh, he would eventually rule France with Marguerite's queen, but that wouldn't be for a bit. Then this move was also intended to quell the Hugueno uprising, but what it really did was to kick off the fourth of the eight French religious wars ya. As I mentioned earlier, those those wars kind of ebbed and flowed and went on and would erupt in in individuals, sort of what they call wars, but they went on through this long period of time, and they're all linked, all eight of them, as the French religious wars. We mentioned earlier that Charles had developed this serious passion for hunting, which is kind of a very gentle way to put it, and it seems that his obsession with it intensified as he grew and came angrier and angrier, and he kind of developed this blood lust for the hunt. His preference was to kill with a knife, because he wanted to be close to the blood UH, and this seemed to help him sometimes vent off his violent impulses, but it did not work long term. He also developed a taste for torturing animals UH, and he liked to lash servants rather violently. The stress of his position, this ongoing physical problems, and the UH, the tumult of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre all really took a toll on Charles. His temper became increasingly hair triggered, and he would just fly into violent rages without any warning. And as winter came on at the end of fifteen seventies three, he was at this point really quite incredibly frail, uh in constant pain, as tuberculosis really took a toll on his body. And his spring of fifteen seventy four came on. He said to have been sweating blood almost continuously, and he finally died on seventy four, just a month shy of his twenty four birthday. It's believed that Charles remained very melancholy about his involvement in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre for the rest of his short life, although I was not really mentioned when he gave his confession on his deathbed, and he was after he passed, succeeded by his brother Henry the third. So that is our mad Royal du jour. And as I said at the beginning, I was a little you know um in the mad royal zone. He seems so much to be an angry royal, and I would be reluctant to diagnose him as insane, but he certainly seems like someone that is that blood lusty must be dealing with some severe mental illness. Uh, but that is the scoop. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. She was the fifteen child of the Empress Maria Teresa and was only gifted with the prize role of Dauphin of France thanks to random happenstance, an unlikely circumstance be following her older sisters. Her education up until that last minute betrothedale had been minimal, but even if she wasn't studious. She was beautiful and charming and agreeable. She would be happy in France, marrying the awkward young prince only a few months her senior. But even if she wasn't, her happiness wasn't the point. She was a pawn to secure an alliance between Austria and France. Twenty two years after she became a French princess, after two decades of decadence in the most cultured and luxurious palace in the world, Marie Antoinette was alone in a cell in the heart of Paris, with mobs outside calling for her head to join that of her husband and her friends in the guillotine. Marie Antoinette's prison cell at the Conciergerie was not a place of warmth and kindness, but the jail keeper, Madame Rochard, tried to make the woman who had once lived in a palace comfortable. Madame Richard, who ran the Conciergerie with her husband, had watched the queen hang a small golden watch on the wall of herself, the only bit of adornment in the dark room, where the walls dripped and owning could be heard from all hours of the night. It was a gift from long ago from her mother, the Empress Maria Therese. Madame Richard had also watched the guards confiscate the watch five days later. The Queen was mostly quiet after that, Her hands stayed in her laps. She thanked the guards and they brought her food, and thanked Madame Richard when the jailer brought fresh flowers to the cell. Before those two were banned. One afternoon, to try to cheer up the queen, Madame Rochard brought her own son to the prison. Marie Antoinette had always famously loved children. She once stopped her carriage to help a poor boy on the street, paying for his boarding and education. She had clutched her own children to her so tightly and for so long that Versailles had wagged their tongues at her over indulgence. When Madame Richard's son, Fan Fan arrived at the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette burst into tears for the first time in weeks. Her voice rose above a whisper. She wailed while hugging the boy, pulling her arms tighter and tighter around him. It was a cry of misery. Van Van was seven at the time, the same age as Marie Antoinette's son, Louis Charles, imprisoned somewhere far away being re educated by revolutionaries. When Madame Richard took her son's hand and led him back into the hall, she confessed to a maid that she had made a mistake and she would never again bring fan Fan to visit Marie Antoinette. Six months prior, Marie Antoinette's family had all been together for what would be the last time. It was the night before the former King Louis the sixteenth execution, and the man now called Louis Capette was permitted one last meal. Marie Antoinette and louise younger sister Elizabeth cried the entire evening, while the children, a boy and a girl, looked up at their stoic father with wide watery eyes. Promise me, the once king said to his children that you will not seek revenge for those who do this to me. Little Louis Charles nodded his head. Marie Antoinette would not stop her weeping. She and her husband had been married for twenty three years. Louis the sixteenth had never taken a mistress. Perhaps if he had, things would have been easier for his queen some one else to deflect the gossip and attention. But it was far too late to try to imagine how things might have been different. Louis the sixteenth had been sent into to death, and his head would be on the guillotine the next morning. To stop his wife, and his sister and his children from crying, Louis promised that he would see them tomorrow morning, that he would say one final goodbye. This was just good night. We'll say goodbye to morrow morning, he lied. The next morning, Marie Antoinette, now called the Widow Capette, was taken to a new prison cell. Noble Blood is a co production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. Our network has another new show coming out. This one is called Noble Blood and it's sort of combines history with the true crime show in a show that's hosted by Danish Wartz and it is produced by Aaron Bankey. So, as its name suggests, it's all about royalty, there's also maybe some crime involved might not have been considered crime at the time, but maybe and so to go along with the theme of that show, today's classic is on Charles the ninth of France. He was prone to just terrifying periods of rage. You can stay tuned at the end of this episode for a peek at Noble Blood, although just be forewarned it's a little more graphic in the gory details than our show tends to be. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy. If you sin and Tracy, it's been a little while since we've done a Mad Royals episode we have. That's a theme that kept cropping up in previous hosts shows and then it just carried over into our work too. Yeah, more than anything else. Ours is more of like a cranky, temperamental probably doesn't have control of his emotions kind of royal, but we'll fit it into mad. There you could say he was mad. Uh. And much like many of the other mad Royals that we've discussed on the podcast throughout the years, Charles the ninth of France, as I just hinted, was really prone to fits of rage and these could be so intense that people at his court feared for their lives. And for a quick sort of fun background e bit that's not really super important to his biography, Charles at ninth was allegedly nicknamed the Snotty King, and that was because of a birthmark that he had on his upper lip that apparently made it look like he had a perpetually running nose, which seems like a terrible thing for a child to bear. But uh, he eventually grew a mustache to cover it up as once he became an adult and was able to grow facial hair. But that's only the tip of the iceberg on this one. Uh. And going by his famous portrait from when he was just a boy, uh that was painted by Frenchie, either this birth birthmark wasn't even that noticeable or the artist downplayed it. But that's just kind of a fun little factoid. As we go into this story about Charles the Ninth, he was also the son of Catherine de Medici, So his story brushes up against the series that previous hosted on the Medici Family. Uh. Katie and Sarah talk a lot about Catherine in previous episodes, and they bust Smiths about her reputation. But we're gonna look at this story and this piece of history as it relates specifically to her son, Charles. Charles was born Charles Maximilian on June near Paris, and his parents, as we already mentioned, were Katherine de Medici and Henry the second of France. Uh. And as you said, Catherine was covered at length back in the Katie and Sarah dates, and the couple all so had an older son, Francis the second, as well. They had other children. But this is just to kind of make it clear that at this point Charles was not immediately next in line for the throne. As a child, Charles was really coddled by his parents. His mother ordered numerous portraits of her children, and she'd often hire in troops of actors and other performers just to keep them entertained, and that's not unusual for royal families at the time, but she is usually described as being really quite doting on her children on some historians kind of suggests that that is what kind of fosters some of their bad behavior as they grew up, that they just were kind of spoiled um. The castle was also filled with entertainments of its own. They had a private zoo of exotic creatures and plenty of domestic animals available for the young children's and amusement, and they also had companion children the family would kind of hire in and keep handy, so that each of the royal children had another child the same age that they could play with. As you would probably expect, the royal siblings were very well educated. As a child, Charles showed some natural artistic ability, and he seemed to really enjoy literature and writing, but he wasn't that eager about being a scholar. His school work had more to do with making his mother happy than learning things for himself. So in the summer of fifteen fifty nine, Catherine and King Henry the Second's daughter Elizabeth, who was four years older than Charles, was married to King Philip the Second of Spain in a proxy ceremony, and during this celebration, uh King Henry participated in a joust and there was an accident. Unfortunately, his opponent's lance actually shattered and the King's face was penetrated by splinters from this damaged weapon in multiple places. Over the course of the next eleven days, Henry became progressively more and more ill due to infection and swelling and a lot of various problems going on, and he eventually succumbed to those wounds and died on July nine. When Henry the Second died, his son, Francis the Second, became the King of France, but Francis, who was married to Mary, Queen of Scott's, did not reign for very long, just seventeen months. During that time, the teenage king was really influenced by Mary's family, and while the Protestant Huguenots of France wanted religious freedom, Mary's uncles were very, very Catholic and very against this idea. Eventually, Francis, his uncle's in law, engineered the execution of fifty seven Hugueno conspirators who were put to death for treason. Charles, of course, being a young boy and and part of this royal family, witnessed the entire spectacle of this execution along with the rest of his family. Francis the Second, who had tuberculosis, died of an abscess behind his ear on the evening of December five, fifteen sixty and at that moment the crown went to his younger brother, Charles the ninth. And before we get on to kind of Charles as a child king, it's a little early, but I want to go ahead and do a sponsor break here because that way we can keep kind of the next chunk of the story altogether. So is that cool with you, Tracy, it is, let's do it. To get back to Charles's story, he was only ten when his brother died, so his mother, Catherine was named as regent, and in this role she did everything that a ruler would normally do, and she stayed by her son's side at almost all times. For the rare occasions when she wasn't with Charles, the servants, of course, were expected to report back to her on even the most minute details in what he was up to. And again that that's one of those things that people will talk about in history when they're talking about royal families. But it really is not that unusual. I think most royal parents, particularly as you go further back, the habit was kind of to keep constant tabs on their kids as they were doing things. I'm using the air quotes on their own because they were never really on their own. But from early on, Charles had shown some signs of mental illness. And this really manifested initially is these fits, uh that could be attributed to the frustration of a child, Like we have all seen a toddler kind of hit the wall where they can't they don't have the language skills to like explain themselves, so they just kind of have these rage fits. But the problem was that this continued for Charles long past the age where that behavior is considered normal and part of the growing cycle. He was also physically pretty weak, although he enjoyed being physically active. At the same time, he also wasn't the only one in his family who was prone to developing infections and displaying these kind of rage tantrums. His brothers had the same characteristics. Yeah, this is pretty consistent throughout the family. Charles was also obsessively interested in hunting. Uh. Hunting, you know, very popular, but he was really obsessed with it, and the sight of blood during these excursions got him really excited, and he seemed to start to crave that excitement, almost like an addiction. He got lots of excitement outside of hunting. Due to the ongoing religious tensions in France. In fifteen sixty two, Francis of Gives, who was one of the same uncles of Mary, Queen of Scott's, who had been so influential over his older brother, briefly kidnapped Charles and his mother, threatening that if the young king entertained any ideas about becoming a Protestant, they really had no qualms with getting a new king. Yeah, you can imagine how that would be a terrifying event for a young child. You know. Again, he was only ten when his when he became king, even though he wasn't really ruling at that point. So this is a lot to deal with. Uh. Three years after Francis had died, so Charles would have been on the on the throne, but with his mother ruling his regent. UH. Charles turned thirteen and shortly after this he was proclaimed king without his mother's regency. And you may think that this would have been a problem for Catherine, but you would be wrong, because she still held the power. Charles was very young and indecisive and as we said, kind of physically weak, and he already showed these signs of mental illness. And now Catherine was in this position where really she was still making the decisions. She had that much influence, but Charles was the one that was ultimately held responsible for them. Charles had been named king in August of fifteen sixty three, and starting in fifteen sixty four, he started a two year tour of France at the insistence of his mother. In part, this was intended to show off the strength of the royal house and really try to unite the French under the king. But the Catholics and the Huguenots continued their bitter conflict, and during this sort of tour of France and these tr levels, one of the first real acts of violence on Charles's part took place. It's one of the first times that we have actual documentation of him kind of being violent outside sort of a normal scenario like hunting um. While he and his mother and this entourage were traveling from their starting point of Fontainebleu to their next destination. Charles came across a pig that had recently given birth, and he wanted to try to pick up one of the piglets, and when he tried to handle it, the sow attacked him, and his reaction was incredibly brutal, and he killed the pig and orphaned the litter and kind of left it that and it was again outside sort of the uh you know, it wasn't like going on a hunt. It was killing this mother animal and orphaning all of her piglets. And it's really the first time that we see him just being brutal in kind of a senseless way. Throughout the rest of the royal tour, he performed various acts of diplomacy and he made public appearing. Is some of the meetings he and his mother took with the Catholic royals of Spain really stirred the pot with the French wars of religion, because the Hugenos saw these meetings is likely being alliance meetings with their enemies. At this point, we should point out that Charles did not remain physically weak for the entirety of his life. We mentioned as a child he was kind of frail um, and as he passed through adolescence he grew a great deal, although he did always stay very thin, but he became quite tall um, and he just wasn't seen as so much frail, although I don't think anyone would ever describe him as like a hulking uh specimen of strength and fitness. But as his physical stature grew, his mental state really kind of took the opposite track and started to deteriorate. He was very close to his younger sister Marguerite, who you'll also see listed as Margaret and sometimes even Margot, and his behavior was peppered more and more with these angry rages. It started to seem like his sister was the only one who was safe from this and who could help calm him down. Even his mother started to gradually fear him. Yeah, I mean, he was always sort of like a hair trigger kind of potential violent person to be around, which I can imagine has no fune whatsoever. Charles also contracted tuberculosis, just as his brother Francis had, and he came quite near to dying from it in eight but he did recover from that, although after that point his health was fairly inconsistent. Eventually he developed an abscess in one of his arms from being bled routinely in an effort to fight this tuberculosis, but even so he managed to recover and continue his reign. As he recovered from this prolonged illness, Charles found love. He met Marie Touchet, and although she was from a bougeois family, Catherine approved of her son taking her as a mistress. She seemed to truly care for Charles and she helped calm his unsettled temper. Yeah, much like his sister, Like basically, anybody that could be around that would help keep him a little more relaxed and a little less likely to be violent. Catherine was game for that plan. But soon after, in fifteen seventy, the twenty year old Charles also got married, so he kept Touche as his mistress, but he married Elizabeth of Austria, and Charles is said to have actually loved both Elizabeth and Marie Touche, and the three of them seemed to get along fine. You know, Touche understood her position as mistress and she was very respectful of his wife, and the wife didn't seem to have, you know, any real issues of animosity or jealousy over the mistress, like they kind of all worked it out. Charles and Elizabeth had a daughter named Marie Elizabeth, and this was two years after they got married, but unfortunately the child died at the age of six. Charles also had a son, Charles de Vaudois, with his mistress Marie, the year after Marie Elizabeth was born, and that son lived to adulthood and he eventually became Duke of Angouleme. So the series of religious conflicts between French Catholics and Protestants went on in phases we referred earlier to the French Wars of religion, and these are they and these went on from April fifteen sixty two to May. But they were kind of in pockets. It wasn't always continuous. There would be moments of peace and then it would break into another, you know, fight again, and then they would reach an accord and that wouldn't last. But during the reign of Charles the Ninth, when Catherine de Medici was still incredibly powerful, the politics of French court were actually a huge factor and influence in these wars, Charles's younger brother, Alexandra Eduard, the Duke d'Anjou, defeated the Huguenos in battle in fifteen sixty nine. That's made nineteen year old King Charles a Second incredibly jealous, and it shifted his sympathies over to the Huguenos. Not only did not possessed the military or physical prowess that his brother did, his brother was also clearly his mother's favorite, So Charles was doubly irritated by his success. Yeah, so it kind of had more to do with a this switch in kind of sympathies towards the Huguenot had more to do with this brotherly rivalry than it really had to do with the actual religious and political stuff that was going on. But in one Charles met with nobleman and Huguenot military leader Gaspar de Coligni, and Coligny had this plan to go up against the Netherlands in Spain, and he wanted the king to form an alliance and unite the country's warring religious groups to do so. And Charles was actually game for this, uh, and he was extremely fond of Coligny and is said to have actually sometimes called him father, but Charles's mother wasn't really enthusiastic about her son's political friends. While she had initially taken a stance in favor of reconciliation with Huguenos, particularly after Mary's Catholic uncle had kidnapped her and Charles, Catherine felt threatened by the influence that Gaspard de Colony had over her son. While there's some debate over who exactly ordered the move, it's believed by a lot of historians that Catherine conspired to have Colony assassinated. That effort ultimately failed and he was only wounded. The Hugeno Protestants were, of course angered at this attack, and King Charles the Second promised to investigate. And irritated by the failure of her move against Colonny, Catherine kind of took the situation as it was and took a new tactic. She advised her son that the safest course of action was to have all of the Hugueno leaders killed and to strike decisively and quickly. Charles agreed to this plan sort of. Her haranguing had sent him into a fit of rage eventually until he finally yelled killed the admiral. If you wish, but you must kill all the Huguenos so that not one is left to a lot of to reproach me. Kill the lot, kill the lot, kill the lot. Conveniently, during all the scheming, the king's sister, Marguerite de Vala, was marrying Henri of Navarre, who was the leader of the Huguenos, so that meant all of the other Hugueno leaders were in town to celebrate their wedding. But before we get to the massacre, I want to talk a little bit about this wedding, uh, and not in a romantic Let's discuss the dress coin of way. But if you think Charles's sister Marguerite was miffed at being married off to Henri of Navarre, you would be correct. While the two siblings, Charles and Margot had been close when they were younger, in fifteen seventy, Margot had been caught alone with a lover in the in a bedroom of the royal home, and Charles was so enraged by this event that he brutally beat his sister in front of their mother until she lost consciousness. Her lover, Henri de Guise, was soon mary it off to a wealthy noble woman and kind of gotten out of the picture. The rift between the brother and sister stayed around for the next two years, but then it widened into a gulf when it was announced that Marguerite would be married to Nri of Navarre. The bride and groom had known each other since there were children, and there was absolutely no affection between them. Marguerite was fastidious and obsessed with cleoonis and Ri was not. He had a reputation for his odor yeah, and she had the opposite reputation. She is uh alleged to have been one of those rare people who bathed every single day during this time, which was not necessarily common uh. And during the marriage ceremony, Margot is said to have stood silent rather than utter the words of consent to the union when the cardinal asked it of her, and this became an uncomfortable silence, and eventually Charles, who had just grown furious at her behavior, stepped behind her and pushed her head forward and down in a knot of scent. So the massacre and the pre dawn hours of August colony was thrown from his bedroom window. He had already been severely beaten and stabbed, and he was beheaded in the street. This, along with the murders of additional key figures of Hugano leadership, many of whom were slain in the Royal Palace where they were wedding guests, set off a chain reaction of events now known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. As news of the Hugueno leadership's demise spread, Catholic mobs began attacking and killing Huguenos throughout the city. The slaughter was just brutal, and it went on and on. On August, Charles was attempting to put an end to it by means of a royal order, but no one paid any attention. As the weeks went on, the carnage spread out from Paris into the country. It went on for almost two months. A rough estimate of the death toll is about seventy thousand Hugueno Protestants. Several of the as were in Paris alone. And I wanted just to take a side note here. This is actually the first use of the word massacre in English. Uh And a lot of the people who were killed were just like working at their shops, are going about their normal daily lives. When people burst in and and cut them down. Um. The reason I know that is because back when we did our episode about the Boston massacre, which had an extremely small number of people who were killed, a lot of people that got angry that we didn't approach that with the proper gravita or like massacres weren't that big at the time. No, this is the first time that the word massacre appeared in English and it was horrible. Yeah. And I will say there are debates over the the accuracy of those counts. Uh. Some people will say the seventy thousand estimate is way too high, and that the several thousand that were in Paris h may or may not be accurate as well. But we know that it was tens of thousands, So even if it was half that, you're still talking about a great deal of people. Uh. Henri of Navarre, however, despite being a Huguenot leader, actually survived the massacre because he converted to Catholicism. He was kind of swept away uh by royal guards and kind of given this option. It sounds like, uh, he would eventually rule France with Marguerite's queen, but that wouldn't be for a bit. Then this move was also intended to quell the Hugueno uprising, but what it really did was to kick off the fourth of the eight French religious wars ya. As I mentioned earlier, those those wars kind of ebbed and flowed and went on and would erupt in in individuals, sort of what they call wars, but they went on through this long period of time, and they're all linked, all eight of them, as the French religious wars. We mentioned earlier that Charles had developed this serious passion for hunting, which is kind of a very gentle way to put it, and it seems that his obsession with it intensified as he grew and came angrier and angrier, and he kind of developed this blood lust for the hunt. His preference was to kill with a knife, because he wanted to be close to the blood UH, and this seemed to help him sometimes vent off his violent impulses, but it did not work long term. He also developed a taste for torturing animals UH, and he liked to lash servants rather violently. The stress of his position, this ongoing physical problems, and the UH, the tumult of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre all really took a toll on Charles. His temper became increasingly hair triggered, and he would just fly into violent rages without any warning. And as winter came on at the end of fifteen seventies three, he was at this point really quite incredibly frail, uh in constant pain, as tuberculosis really took a toll on his body. And his spring of fifteen seventy four came on. He said to have been sweating blood almost continuously, and he finally died on seventy four, just a month shy of his twenty four birthday. It's believed that Charles remained very melancholy about his involvement in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre for the rest of his short life, although I was not really mentioned when he gave his confession on his deathbed, and he was after he passed, succeeded by his brother Henry the third. So that is our mad Royal du jour. And as I said at the beginning, I was a little you know um in the mad royal zone. He seems so much to be an angry royal, and I would be reluctant to diagnose him as insane, but he certainly seems like someone that is that blood lusty must be dealing with some severe mental illness. Uh, but that is the scoop. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. She was the fifteen child of the Empress Maria Teresa and was only gifted with the prize role of Dauphin of France thanks to random happenstance, an unlikely circumstance be following her older sisters. Her education up until that last minute betrothedale had been minimal, but even if she wasn't studious. She was beautiful and charming and agreeable. She would be happy in France, marrying the awkward young prince only a few months her senior. But even if she wasn't, her happiness wasn't the point. She was a pawn to secure an alliance between Austria and France. Twenty two years after she became a French princess, after two decades of decadence in the most cultured and luxurious palace in the world, Marie Antoinette was alone in a cell in the heart of Paris, with mobs outside calling for her head to join that of her husband and her friends in the guillotine. Marie Antoinette's prison cell at the Conciergerie was not a place of warmth and kindness, but the jail keeper, Madame Rochard, tried to make the woman who had once lived in a palace comfortable. Madame Richard, who ran the Conciergerie with her husband, had watched the queen hang a small golden watch on the wall of herself, the only bit of adornment in the dark room, where the walls dripped and owning could be heard from all hours of the night. It was a gift from long ago from her mother, the Empress Maria Therese. Madame Richard had also watched the guards confiscate the watch five days later. The Queen was mostly quiet after that, Her hands stayed in her laps. She thanked the guards and they brought her food, and thanked Madame Richard when the jailer brought fresh flowers to the cell. Before those two were banned. One afternoon, to try to cheer up the queen, Madame Rochard brought her own son to the prison. Marie Antoinette had always famously loved children. She once stopped her carriage to help a poor boy on the street, paying for his boarding and education. She had clutched her own children to her so tightly and for so long that Versailles had wagged their tongues at her over indulgence. When Madame Richard's son, Fan Fan arrived at the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette burst into tears for the first time in weeks. Her voice rose above a whisper. She wailed while hugging the boy, pulling her arms tighter and tighter around him. It was a cry of misery. Van Van was seven at the time, the same age as Marie Antoinette's son, Louis Charles, imprisoned somewhere far away being re educated by revolutionaries. When Madame Richard took her son's hand and led him back into the hall, she confessed to a maid that she had made a mistake and she would never again bring fan Fan to visit Marie Antoinette. Six months prior, Marie Antoinette's family had all been together for what would be the last time. It was the night before the former King Louis the sixteenth execution, and the man now called Louis Capette was permitted one last meal. Marie Antoinette and louise younger sister Elizabeth cried the entire evening, while the children, a boy and a girl, looked up at their stoic father with wide watery eyes. Promise me, the once king said to his children that you will not seek revenge for those who do this to me. Little Louis Charles nodded his head. Marie Antoinette would not stop her weeping. She and her husband had been married for twenty three years. Louis the sixteenth had never taken a mistress. Perhaps if he had, things would have been easier for his queen some one else to deflect the gossip and attention. But it was far too late to try to imagine how things might have been different. Louis the sixteenth had been sent into to death, and his head would be on the guillotine the next morning. To stop his wife, and his sister and his children from crying, Louis promised that he would see them tomorrow morning, that he would say one final goodbye. This was just good night. We'll say goodbye to morrow morning, he lied. The next morning, Marie Antoinette, now called the Widow Capette, was taken to a new prison cell. Noble Blood is a co production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.