On a hot, sunny day in late June 1559, the king of France rode out in full armour, his horse trimmed with black and white, to participate in a joust. The preceding week had been spent celebrating the wedding of his daughter to the king of Spain and the hard-won treaty that their marriage represented. Fatigued, overheated and suffering from occasional bouts of vertigo, Henry II demanded one more run at the lists. He and his opponent thundered towards each other and struck. A lance splintered, and a large piece of wood became embedded in the king’s skull, just above his eye. He died in agony two weeks later.
The story told by Leah Redmond Chang, however, is not about kings, their wars, their shifts the focus from these well-known histories to the less-well-known stories of three women of this period – queens for whom the demise of Henry II represented a momentous change in their lives and relationships to each other.
