Renée was born on
October 25, 1510 in the
Chateau de Blois, Blois, France and was the second daughter of
Louis XII, King of France and
Anne, Duchess of Brittany. Her mother, who had always fought fiercely to keep
Brittany independent of the French crown, tried to will the duchy to Renée, but her father King Louis ignored this and instead granted Brittany to his successor,
Francis I, King of France.
Having been early orphaned, she was brought up by the devout Madame de Soubise. In return for renouncing her claims to the duchy of
Brittany, Renée was granted the duchy of
Chartres by
Francis I, King of France. As a child, one of her companions was the young
Anne Boleyn, who Renée always remembered with kindness and affection.
She was married in April
1528 to
Ercole II, Duke of Ferrara, eldest son of
Alfonso I d'Este and
Lucrezia Borgia. Renée received from Francis I an ample dowry and annuity. Thus the court that she assembled about her in
Ferrara corresponded to the tradition which the cultivation of science and art implicitly required, including scholars like
Bernardo Tasso and
Fulvio Pellegrini. Her first child, Anna, born in
1531, was followed by
Alfonso, in
1533; Lucrezia,
1535; after these, Eleonora and Luigi; whose education she carefully directed.
On
October 31, 1534, her father-in-law died and Ercole succeeded to the throne. Hardly had he rendered his oath of allegiance to
Pope Paul III when he turned against the French at his own court. Both their number and influence displeased him; and, besides, he found them too expensive; so he by direct or indirect means secured their dismissal, including the poet
Clément Marot. And while the
Curia was urging the duke to put away the French that were suspected of heresy, there came to Ferrara no less a heretic than
John Calvin, whose journey to Italy must have fallen in March and April
1536. Calvin passed several weeks at the court of Renée, though the persecution had already begun, and about the same time a chorister by the name of Jehannet, also one Cornillan, of the attendants of the duchess, together with a cleric of
Tournay, Bouchefort, were taken prisoners and tried. In a "man of small stature," whom the
Inquisition likewise seized as under suspicion, although he made his escape, is to be recognized not Calvin, but Clément Marot.
Renée was not only in correspondence with a very large number of Protestants abroad, with intellectual sympathizers like
Vergerio, Camillo Renato, Giulio di Milano, and
Francis Dryander, but also that on two or three occasions, about
1550 or later, she partook of the
Eucharist in the Evangelical manner together with her daughters and fellow believers. Meanwhile, notwithstanding its external splendor, her life had grown sad. The last of her French guests, the daughter and son-in-law of Madame de Soubise of Pons, had been obliged, in
1543, by the constraint imposed by the duke, to leave the court. The drift of the
Counter-Reformation, which had been operative in
Rome since
1542, led to the introduction of a special court of the
Inquisition at Ferrara, in
1545, through which, in 1550 and 1551, death sentences were decreed against Evangelical sympathizers (
Fannio of Faenza and
Giorgio of Sicily), and executed by the secular arm.
Finally Duke Ercole lodged accusation against Renée before King
Henry II of France, and through the Inquisitor Oriz, whom the king charged with this errand, Renée was arrested as a heretic, and declared forfeit of all possessions unless she recanted. She thereupon yielded, made confession on
September 23, 1554, and once again received communion at mass. "How seldom is there an example of steadfastness among aristocrats," wrote Calvin to Farel under date of
February 2, 1555.
Renée's longing to return home was not satisfied until a year following the death of her husband on
October 3, 1559. In France she found her eldest daughter's husband,
Francis, Duke of Guise, at the head of the
Roman Catholic party. His power, indeed, was broken by the death of
Francis II, in December,
1560, so that Renée became enabled not only to provide Evangelical worship at her estate, Morntargis, engaging a capable preacher by application to Calvin, but also generally to minister as benefactress of the surrounding Evangelicals. In fact, she made her castle a refuge for them, when her son-in-law once again lighted the torch of war.
This time her conduct won Calvin's praise (
May 10, 1563), and she is one of the frequently recurring figures in his correspondence of that period; he repeatedly shows recognition of her intervention in behalf of the Evangelical cause; and one of his last writings in the French tongue, despatched from his deathbed (
April 4, 1564), is addressed to her. While Renée continued unmolested in the second religious war (1567), in the third (1568–70) her castle was no longer respected as an asylum for her fellow believers. On the other hand, she succeeded in rescuing a number of them from the massacre of
St. Bartholomew's night, when she happened to be in
Paris. They left her personally undisturbed at that time; though
Catherine de' Medici still sought to move her to retract.
But she died in the Evangelical faith. In consonance with Renée's last fifteen years, her will bears witness of her Evangelical goodness.
