François de Vendôme, vidame de Chartres
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
François de Vendôme, Vidame de Chartres (1522 – 22 December 1560),[1] was a successful soldier and glamorous courtier who figures in accounts of the brilliant but decadent French court of the 1550s.
In the 1540s and early 1550s he fought in the Italian Wars, including the Battle of Ceresole in 1544 and Siege of Metz in 1552-53, and became regarded as a good commander.
The account in the colourful memoirs of Brantôme (1540–1614) places him in the centre of intrigues with Queen Catherine de' Medici (1519–1589), Diane de Poitiers (1499–1566), and the Guise brothers, Francis, Duke of Guise (1519–1563), Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine (1524–1574) and Claude, Duke of Aumale (1526–1573), with all of whom he was at odds by the end of his life. Although apparently not a Huguenot himself, he became attached to the Huguenot convert Louis, Prince of Condé (1530–1569) as the strongest anti-Guise figure. The Vidame was imprisoned in the Bastille after the Amboise conspiracy of 1560, in which he seems not to have been involved, and died days after the death of Francis II of France, which would probably have led to his release.[2]
Fictionalized versions of him appear in several works in various media, the first and most important of which is as a major character in La Princesse de Clèves, an anonymous French novel published in 1678, over a century after his death.