Charlotte d'Albret

Charlotte d’Albret remains a shadowy figure, and her relationship with her husband mysterious. At the news of his death she plunged herself into a rigid mourning to which she clung for the rest of her life. At the Château of La Motte Feuilly where she lived, the hangings and furniture in the yellow and crimson colours of the Duke of Valentinois were replaced with sombre black cloth, her bright gowns carefully put away in a chest. From then on she wore widow’s weeds and slept in a bed draped in black; even the trappings on her daughter’s Luisa’s pony were changed to the colour of mourning. When Cesare died she was only twenty-five, beautiful and an heiress, but she never remarried, nor did she return to court, but lived out her days in seclusion at La Motte Feuilly, occupying herself with the administration of her estates, charitable works, and occasional visits to her friend, the divorced Jeanne de France, in the Convent of the Annonciades at nearby Bourges. Charlotte was gentle, kindly and pious, her goodness was remarked on by more than one observer, and she was a careful administrator who took great interest in her estates and had an acquisitive eye for property (she later bought the lordship of Chalus for 17,000 crowns). But she seems to have been a narrow-minded woman; the few books she owned were all devotional works, and in her enshrinement of her husband’s memory it is possible to see more than a touch of obsessive neurosis.

She had never made any attempt to go to her husband, even when in the later years of their marriage she was free to do so. The Mantuan envoy to the French court, Jacopo d’Atri, reported that in July and early August 1503 repeated efforts were made to induce her to go to Italy and join her husband, but in vain. Cesare sent a messenger, Artese, to persuade her, and his efforts were strongly seconded by Louis, who at that moment was very much afraid that Cesare was inclining to Spain, and extremely anxious to accommodate him. Louis even threatened to deprive her of her honoured position as governess to his daughter by Anne, Madame Claude, and promised to send Cesare his daughter Luisa, but the envoy said that Charlotte ‘did not want to go to her husband’. She had been deeply shocked by the events at Sinigallia, wrote Francesco Gonzaga, and doubtless by many other reports of Cesare’s activities, including his abduction of Dorotea Caracciolo. And although at a distance she was prepared to do her dutiful best for her husband – in January 1504 the Venetian diarist Sanuto stated that she had come to court specifically to plead for Cesare’s release – she did not join him even when he was at her brother’s court at Pamplona. It would seem that she preferred the mythical memory of the handsome, dashing young husband she had known for those few summer months of 1499 to the harsh reality of the ruthless impious man whom all reports indicated him to be. Cesare’s disgrace after his father’s death no doubt made her position at the French court an embarrassing one, for some time in the autumn of 1503 she negotiated the purchase of the Château de la Motte Feuilly in Touraine, and moved there in 1504. Absorbed in her widowhood, she lived there in retirement until her death on 11 March 1514, aged thirty-two. The inscription on the stone above the place where her heart was buried in the chapel of La Motte Feuilly was perhaps the best expression of Charlotte’s short, unhappy life: ‘Here lies the heart of the most high and powerful lady Charlotte d’Albret, in her life the widow of the most high powerful prince Dom Cesar, Duke of Valentinois, Count of Diois, seigneur of Issoudun and of La Motte Feuilly …’