The Serpent Queen: the series that explores the truth behind the myths about the controversial figure of Catherine de Medici

The Serpent Queenthe new historical miniseries from StarzPlay -a tradition that has already become the brand of the platform-, explores the life and reign of one of the most controversial monarchs of the French Renaissance: Catherine de’ Medici.

Nicknamed “The Serpent Queen”, she was one of the most powerful women of the Valois dynasty, in addition to becoming regent of the reigns of three of her sons, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. She also consolidated pacts with several European monarchies through the marriage of her daughters Isabel -turned queen of Spain- and Margarita -known as ‘Queen Margot’ of Navarra and later of France-, and she is recognized for having built power in a hostile environment. But Catherine was also considered the villain of successive epics, the archenemy of Diana de Poiters -that beautiful court lady who was the lover of Henry II, Catherine’s husband-, hostile to her young daughter-in-law Mary Stuart, and even the architect of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, heart of the bloody religious wars in France?

The Serpent Queen tries to explore the truth behind the myths that surrounded Catalina, but it does so from the character’s own voice, played in her adult life by Samantha Morton. Based on Leonie Frieda’s biography, published in 2003 and an immediate bestseller, the series begins in 1860, when Catherine is already the queen regent of France on behalf of her eldest son, Francis II, who is only 15 years old. . Married to the second son of the French King Francis I, Catalina was destined for a life without great achievements, purging the sins of her ignoble origin, of the betrayals that had marked her childhood. But her rise to court power leads her to her best game. and already from the first images we discover Morton in his chambers, serene and expectant before the arrival of a young maiden. The chosen one is Rahima (Sennia Nanua), a black teenager mistreated by the other servants of the palace, victim of the cruelest jokes. In her fortuitous encounter with the queen, she will become her privileged interlocutor, a witness to a story that goes back to the monarch’s past, to the days before her arrival in France.

With that cunning structure of successive flashbacks, The Serpent Queen unfolds the story of the future Queen Mother of France from her plebeian times, still as the unwanted orphan of the Medici in Florence. In her teenage version, Catalina is played by Liv Hill, who finds her best ally in her camera for complicity with the viewer via breaking the fourth wall. This is how she tells us that her father, the womanizer Lorenzo II de’ Medici, died of syphilis and her mother, Magdalena de la Tour de Auvergne, died days after her birth; that she was left in the care of her paternal grandmother for a time, then passed through the harsh discipline of the nuns until she was kidnapped by the Florentine enemies of the Medici and sold for a few gold coins to her uncle, Pope Clement VII. PBeing the daughter of the Duke of Urbino and having been born into one of the richest families of the Renaissance, Catherine carried the curse of the Medici and the contempt of the nobles of Europe for what would be that lineage of wealthy careerists..

Saved from the streets and sheltered in the halls of the Vatican under the auspices of the Pope, Catherine became a valuable piece for monarchical alliances. A staunch enemy of Emperor Charles V, Francis I of France sought an alliance with the papacy to improve his position on the geopolitical chessboard. Clement VII then found the convenient agreement for both families: to marry the young Catherine, then only 14 years old, with Henry, the Duke of Orleans, second in line to the throne after the dauphin Francis of Brittany. Although the series does not delve into the political aspects behind the alliances that marked Catalina’s destiny, it does examine the conditions of the arrival of the Duchessine Florentine to the court of the Valois.

Catalina was not graceful for the beauty canons of the time, short in stature and without delicate features, she had to be trained in record time in the protocols of the aristocracy, dressed and combed in fashion, and nurtured by an important Italian retinue that officiated as support in the face of the hostile French reception. Not only was King Francis I suspicious of the limited dowry offered by the papacy, but also the risk that the territories promised for the celebration of the marriage would be the target of new disputes.

But the most difficult thing for Catherine was to secure her position in that court that despised her through the rapid birth of an heir (she would eventually have ten children, seven of whom reached adulthood). Her wedding night became one of the few occasions on which she shared a bedroom with Henry, who was more than in love with her favourite, Diana de Poitiers. Portrayed by Ludivine Sagnier, the Diana of The Serpent Queen reveals the more insidious side of that figure always celebrated as the epitome of the French courtesan: cultured, beautiful, seductive. She was portrayed in Hollywood by Lana Turner, she was a figure worshiped in Renaissance poetry, an innovator in the architecture of her domain, a goddess in earthly form. In front of her, Catalina was always condemned to be the ugly duckling who tries to stay at a party to which she has not been invited.

Although the nickname of Madame Serpent or the Black Queen (due to the mourning that she maintained all her life) was coined after those early days in France, when Catherine was still trying to get pregnant to avoid her expulsion from court and resorted to all the ” home remedies” imaginable, the germs of that disrepute were already there. The death of Clement VII and the refusal of the new Pope Paul III to settle the outstanding dowry turned the princess into the “woman who has come to us naked” for the Valois court, and accelerated her need to cling to her title through a royal descendant.

The Serpent Queen, like other historical StarzPlay series, seeks to remove the real character from his ostracism and offer a new look from his own point of view. That’s how he did it first The White Queen with Elizabeth of Woodville (played by Rebecca Ferguson), the queen consort of Edward IV of England at the heart of the Wars of the Roses; then with Elizabeth of York in The White Princess, with Jodie Comer playing the consort who united the houses of York and Tudor, ending the bloody battle for the English throne; and finally with Catherine of Aragon in The Spanish Princess, the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs exiled in her own court due to the marriageable whims of her husband Henry VIII. But also The Serpent Queen collects the vocation to redeem female figures thrashed in official histories from a pop version and something irreverent. In this field, Tony McNamara was a pioneer in the script of The favourite (2018) with her rereading of the figure of Queen Anne, forgotten monarch of the House of Stuart, and then in the series The Great with Catherine the Great, a German princess who assumed total power as the empress of Russia. They were all characters executed for rumors and gossip of the time, turned into the target of misogyny and palace intrigues, now dedicated to having their own voice in the story, the leading role in their own fiction.

In that sense, The Serpent Queen he chooses to weave Catalina’s story with the tense ambiguity that Morton brings to his character, who is presented in the credits sitting on a throne adorned with snakes. Her tricks are on display, and creator Justin Haythe’s game consists of revealing her manipulation capacity based on the confessions he shares with the maiden Rahina, the perfect setting for the fictional line. Gullible and pious, Rahina moves through the servitude bearing her contempt by sacrificing herself by turning the other cheek. What Catalina reveals to him is that “when life conspires against you, you must find a way to turn it in your favor. Whatever it takes”. In those mundane teachings to overcome the gossip that Rahina endures in the kitchen, Catalina wields her political wisdom, the one that allowed her to survive in a hostile court at a clear disadvantage. She not only managed to break her opponents with cunning and advantageous stratagems for the power of France, but she also built a network of allies throughout Europe.

The present of the series starts from her first year of regency in 1560, after the death of her husband and the assumption of the throne of her son as Francisco II, and covers that time in which she directed the destinies of France in the midst of the Renaissance. In addition to her clashes with Diana de Poitiers for the favor of Henry -and the power of the State-, who appears as another of her opponents is the young Mary of Scotland (played by Antonia Clarke), raised by Catherine in the bosom of the court French to be engaged to her firstborn from an early age. María Estuardo represented in France the power of the Guises, a Catholic family that would try to control the government after Catherine’s early widowhood. In this dispute, the series also assumes the clash of two strong personalities, who settle one of the keys to the convulsive situation of the time in that brief time they shared a castle. Successive regent of the Valois monarchs, architect of several strategic marriages for her heirs, Queen Mother of Renaissance France, Catherine de Médici achieved the sum of a power that she would never have dreamed of in her plebeian origins.