Episode 291: Anne de Beaujeau
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Hi friend, and welcome back to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network and the original Tudor History Podcast telling stories of 16th century England since 2009. I am Heather, and as always, I am so delighted that you are here with me today. We are going to talk today about Anne de Berger, who should have ruled France.

One of these women who had a massive impact. France, it's interesting because France had...

the Salic law that kept women from inheriting the throne, which England didn't have. And yet there were so many women in France in the late 15th and 16th centuries who had such profound influences on the way France developed and on ruling in France from behind the scenes. And we've talked about some of them here recently, like Marguerite of Navarre, for example. And you can check out some of my other episodes on that. And today we are going to talk about Anne Bouchard.

So let's get right into it. Also, I have to say in advance, just a blanket apology for the way I will butcher French. I do not speak French. I apologize in advance. That's all I can say. It's just kind of like a blanket apology I'm throwing out there. All right. So it's the summer of 1483.

And France is holding its breath. King Louis XI, the Spider King, feared and cunning, was dying at Placis-le-Tour. He had ruled with webs of spies and iron-fisted centralization. But now the question that plagued the court was this. Who would rule after him?

Not his 13-year-old son Charles. The boy was frail in both body and will. His mother, Queen Charlotte, was ill and uninvolved. The princes of the blood were circling, but standing calmly in the storm was his daughter Anne. Not queen, not heir.

But Anne had spent the last decade shadowing her father, learning every grimy trick of politics that he had to teach her. And when Louis finally died that August, he left no official regent. He didn't need to. Anne and her husband, Pierre de Beauger, had already taken charge of the boy king. And while Charles wore the crown, it was Anne who ruled, quietly, forcefully, and brilliantly.

So let's talk today about Anne de Beaujolais and her shadow rule in France. Just a quick admin note that we are coming up on the anniversary of the death of

of another Anne, Anne Boleyn, the execution of Anne Boleyn on May 19th. And you can still pop into the free scavenger hunt kind of escape room puzzle situation that I've got going on over at englandcast.com slash anneboleynscavenger. It's totally free. It allows you to do a deep dive into Anne's life and get to know more about her as more than just the queen who lost her head. But

but as the woman that she was who changed England forever. So englandcast.com slash Anne Boleyn Scavenger, totally free. Go hop in there right now.

But actually not right now. Maybe when you're done with this, because let's continue to talk about Anne de Bourgh. So Anne's life began on the margins of power, exiled, technically illegitimate and politically inconvenient. She was born in April of 1461 at Genap in Brabant in the Burgundian Netherlands, where her father Louis had fled after rebelling against his own father, Charles VII.

Louis brought his young wife, Charlotte of Savoy, with him into exile, and it was there, in a foreign court, that Anne first opened her eyes. Within months, her grandfather died and Louis returned to France to be crowned king. Anne, her mother, and her younger siblings were placed not at the glittering center of court life, but at Amois, a relatively quiet royal château.

Her father had little interest in his family beyond their political utility. He visited rarely and ruled from anywhere else. But this distance gave Anne something more valuable than affection, freedom to learn.

Queen Charlotte may have been sidelined politically, but she built a formidable household and library. From that collection, one of the richest in Europe, Anne devoured devotional works, chronicles, romances, and political treatises.

Cicero, Boethius, and Christine de Pizan shaped her worldview. She read about empires, statecraft, and virtue. She also observed her father from afar, a master manipulator, always scheming, always watching. By age 12, she already understood the mechanisms of power far better than many men twice her age. And her father, ever cynical about women, took notice. He called her the least foolish woman in France.

It wasn't exactly a compliment, but from Louis XI, it was high praise. For him, wisdom and foolishness weren't moral categories, they were political ones. And Anne, alone among his children, seemed to understand his logic, his ruthlessness, and his vision. He couldn't make her king—the French law forbade that—but he made her something nearly as rare—his political heir—

Anne's first political assignment came at the age of 12. Her father, always calculating, arranged her marriage not to a prince of the blood, but to one of his most trusted allies, Pierre de Beaujeu, a Bourbon noble nearly three times her age. It was not a love match, but it was a match meant to secure loyalty. Pierre was reliable, steady, and obedient to Louis XI.

And with the marriage, the king effectively installed Anne as his agent inside the powerful Bourbon family. Anne and Pierre were married in 1474 at the Château de Montrichard. While the union began as a matter of statecraft, it soon actually became an unexpectedly successful partnership.

Pierre was intelligent and politically experienced, and he actually didn't have any desire to outshine his wife. And unique among men at this period, he actually deferred to her judgment, he admired and supported her ambition, and he gave her room to lead. Together, they joined the king's itinerant court.

For the next decade, Anne traveled France alongside her father and her husband, absorbing everything. She listened in on council meetings, she observed court rituals, and she watched how alliances were made and broken. Her father didn't shield her from the darker corners of governance. Instead, he ushered her in.

He couldn't trust many people, but he did trust Anne, and she did not disappoint him. When Louis died in August of 1483, the French crown passed to his 13-year-old son, Charles VIII. But no one, not even the boy himself, believed he was capable of ruling. France teetered on the edge of chaos.

The great nobles, led by Louis, Duke of Orléans, sniffed opportunity. The queen mother was ailing, the court was divided, and in that dangerous vacuum, Anne stepped in. There was no formal proclamation, Louis hadn't named her regent, but he had left her something more powerful, custody of the king. She and Pierre had physical control over Charles and the loyalty of the civil service, and that was enough.

From their base at Amboise, Anne began to rebuild the government her own way. She brought order with the same quiet authority that her father had wielded with fear. When nobles came to pay homage to the young king, Anne received them. Anne rewarded them, and Anne diffused their ambitions with offices, titles, and carefully managed flattery. She didn't bluff, but she rarely had to raise her voice.

When Louis of Orléans called for a meeting of the Estates General in 1484 to challenge her authority, Anne outmaneuvered him. She addressed grievances, executed the most reviled tax officials, and offered strategic concessions. And by the time the assembly ended, her position was actually endorsed, which, of course, was the opposite of what Louis had wanted.

Anne then arranged Charles' coronation for May of 1484, presenting a united front to the kingdom. But even as the crown sat on her brother's head, everyone at court understood where the real power was. Foreign diplomats wrote not to the boy King Charles, but to Madame Lagrande. Anne ruled without ceremony. She didn't have a throne. She didn't have a title. But she had skill. She didn't ask for authority. She just took it.

and France, in dire need of leadership, quietly gave it to her. The greatest challenge of Anne's regency came not from within France but from its fringes. Brittany, the last semi-independent duchy, remained stubbornly outside the grasp of the French crown. Its ruler, Duke Francis II, refused to submit and foreign powers, especially the Habsburgs, were eager to keep it that way.

Anne understood that Brittany wasn't a matter of geography. It was prestige and sovereignty and a dangerous potential wedge between France and its enemies. And so while others reached for swords, she reached for ledgers, bribes to discontented Breton nobles, subsidies to buy loyalty, quiet diplomacy to fracture other alliances. She chipped away at Brittany from the inside.

In 1488, when war became unavoidable, Anne made sure her brother's forces were ready. The French won a battle at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, and the Breton duke died soon after, leaving his 11-year-old daughter Anne of Brittany as the heir. The duchy was vulnerable, and so was the girl.

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Anne de Beaujeu saw this opportunity clearly. Forget about invasion. Marriage would be the conquest. Her brother, the young King Charles, was still fixated on dreams of crusades, but Anne kept him focused long enough to arrange a match. To secure it, Charles repudiated his Habsburg bride, Marguerite of Austria.

Anne of Brittany, in turn, broke her own proxy marriage to Maximilian of Austria. And in December 1491, Charles and Anne of Brittany were married. We've done episodes about Margaret of Austria and also Anne of Brittany. So you can go back and check those out. I'll put them in the show notes. So Brittany, by this point, was absorbed into the French kingdom, not by fire or by blood or by war, but by maneuvering and patience and strategy.

By 1488, Anne turned to governing her own base of power. That year, her husband, Pierre, inherited the title Duke of Bourbon after his two older brothers, while one relinquished the claim under pressure and the other one conveniently died. So he got the inheritance. And with that, Anne and Pierre became the wealthiest nobles in France. Their domains stretched across central France. They

They had Bourbonnais, Auvergne, La Marche, and beyond. And they didn't treat those lands as ceremonial titles. They ruled them in person. Anne took the same organizational genius that she'd applied at the French court and directed it inward. She and Pierre codified local laws, standardized administration across territories that had previously been fragmented and inconsistent, and oversaw infrastructure projects, especially roads, to unify their holdings.

Three different regional dialects gave way to French as the language of law and governance. Local feudal chaos gave way to central control. They governed visibly and well. The Bourbon court became a beacon of authority and culture and Renaissance ambition. Justice was dispensed, taxes were collected, roads were cleared, and all of it with Anne leading the way.

She wasn't just the power behind the boy king anymore. In 1491, after 17 years of marriage, Anne finally gave birth to a child, Suzanne de Bourbon. She was not the longed-for male heir, but Anne poured into her daughter the same purpose and preparation that Louis had once invested in her.

Sometime between 1497 and 1505, Anne wrote a small practical guide for Suzanne, Lessons for My Daughter. It wasn't literary flourish or philosophical meditation. It was a manual for survival. Anne instructed Suzanne in how to hold power without appearing to seek it, how to be gracious but guarded, how to obey a husband without giving away everything, representation

Reputation was armor, and she told her daughter women in power would always be watched for weakness, whispered about, and envied. Anne emphasized modesty, restraint, and discretion, not because she lacked ambition, but because she knew it was the only path a woman could take and still remain standing. Laced with references from Cicero and other classical texts and saints' lives, the lessons showed Anne is both a deeply pious person and politically aware.

Her aim wasn't just to raise a good noblewoman, she wanted to raise a survivor. It was the book of a mother, yes, but more than that, it was the legacy of a regent who had learned the rules, bent them, and won. By the early 1490s, Charles VIII had grown restless. Brittany was secured, the crown was stable, and now he turned his eyes to glory. His dream was impressive, a crusade to the Holy Land, beginning with a march through Italy to reclaim the kingdom of Naples.

It was foolish, it was expensive, and it was incredibly dangerous. Anne knew all of that, but she also knew how to pick her battles. So when Charles insisted on leaving France in 1494, Anne didn't oppose him outright. She simply stepped in to govern again.

While her brother marched south with gold-plated armor and royal banners, Anne ruled from Moulins with ledgers and councils. It wasn't officially called a regency, but everybody understood that it was. Charles had the title, and Anne had the work. She oversaw the finances, she coordinated logistics, and she managed France's increasingly complicated foreign entanglements.

And when Charles, predictably, ran short of money in Italy, Anne lent him 10,000 livres in gold plate. She then calmly arranged a repayment plan. He owed her in every sense. Anne governed France for 15 months while Charles chased shadows across the Alps. And when he returned in 1495, battered and bankrupt, the kingdom was still standing because Anne had never stopped ruling it.

But in 1498, Charles died suddenly without a surviving heir, and the crown passed to his cousin, Louis d'Orléans, now Louis XII. For Anne, this could have been a political reckoning. Louis had spent the 1480s trying to wrest power from her. He had loathed her sister, Jeanne, whom he was desperate to divorce. But Anne played it cool. She made no protest when Louis petitioned to annul his marriage to Jeanne.

and immediately wed Anne of Brittany to retain control over the duchy. She didn't even object when he ignored her sister's dignity because Anne had a bigger objective, securing her daughter Suzanne's inheritance. The duchy of Bourbon had an interesting relationship to the French crown. It was a temporary grant subject to reversion to the crown if no male heir existed.

Pierre had died, only Suzanne survived, and Anne saw the danger, so she cut a deal. In exchange for her political support and quiet cooperation, Louis agreed to a remarkable concession. The Bourbon inheritance could now pass through the female line. Suzanne would inherit not just Anne's properties but the entire Bourbon patrimony, making her the wealthiest heiress in France.

Anne knew, though, the titles alone weren't enough. In the background, she was already plotting Suzanne's marriage.

The heir to the junior Bourbon line, Charles de Montpensier, had grown up in her household. He was loyal, capable, and most importantly, he was next in line. Marrying him to Suzanne would close any loopholes and tie up the succession neatly. And Anne never left loose ends. As Suzanne settled into her role as the Duchess of Bourbon, Anne turned her attention to her legacy.

No longer needed at the royal court, she made her court in Moulin her center, a palace, a seat of power, and a Renaissance jewel. She commissioned artists and architects, glassmakers. The ducal palace received a magnificent new wing in the emerging Italian style. Gardens were planted with fountains and labyrinths. A menagerie housed exotic animals. At her direction, chapels rose in Gien and Bourges to honor her father and her sister.

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But beneath the surface, trouble loomed. In 1521, Suzanne died unexpectedly and childless. Anne was nearly 60, and for the first time in decades, she was alone.

Her son-in-law, Charles de Bourbon, inherited everything. Anne revised her will to confirm it, but others had begun circling. Most dangerously, Louise of Savoy, Anne's own niece and now the king's mother, laid claim to the Bourbon lands. She sued for the inheritance, citing blood ties and political convenience. King François backed her.

Anne was widowed and childless and aging, and she stood firm. From her chateau, she supported Charles and counseled resistance. She had survived the ambitions of dukes and kings. She wouldn't surrender to this kind of court maneuvering. But the consequences that Anne had feared played out swiftly after her death. Her son-in-law Charles, isolated and besieged, found himself abandoned by the crown that he had once served.

With no path left in France, he actually defected to the Holy Roman Emperor. And five years later, he led imperial troops in the infamous Sack of Rome, the stunning betrayal that shook Europe. He died there in 1527, killed by his own mutinous soldiers amid the chaos.

As for Anne, she died in 1522, on November 14, 1522. She had outlived her father, her brother, her husband, her daughter, and nearly every ally who had helped her to hold France together. She was buried beside both Pierre and Suzanne, an unbroken line of loyalty and ambition laid to rest in stone. Contemporaries couldn't decide what to make of her. Some called her a virago, brilliant and fearless. Others whispered that she was cold, masculine, humorless.

But even her enemies admitted she was formidable. She was never a queen, never regent in name, but she governed France through two reigns, preserved the integrity of the monarchy, and absorbed Brittany without war, and built one of the greatest noble dynasties of her age, only to see it threatened again at the end.

Anne didn't need a crown. She had authority, and she wielded it with more intelligence, foresight, and restraint than many of the crowned heads of her time. She was, in every sense, the least foolish woman in France. So there we go, a little bit about Anne de Beaujolais. She is a fascinating woman. There are a couple of books to read if you would like to dig in deeper to her. I will put them in the notes below.

All right, friend, thank you so much for being here with me and for spending this time together. Of course, remember, you can hop into that Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt, englandcast.com slash anneboleynscavenger. We're coming up on the anniversary of her execution. And so it's nice to take some time and remember her for more than just the queen who was beheaded, the second wife. So anyway, all right, well, I will be back next week. Thank you again for being here. I hope you enjoyed it.

I will talk to you again very, very soon. Bye-bye.

This is Paige, the co-host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. You can get Chinese food at any time of night, but it's not just for food. I order from CVS all the time. I'm always ordering from the grocery store. If a friend stops over, I have to order champagne.

I also have this thing that whenever I travel, if I'm ever in a hotel room, I never feel like I'm missing something because I'll just...

Uber Eats it. The amount of times I've had to Uber Eats hair items like hairspray, deodorant, you name it, I've ordered it on Uber Eats. You can get grocery, alcohol, everyday essentials in addition to restaurants and food you love. So in other words, get almost anything with Uber Eats. Order now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

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