Nostradamus and The Death of Henri 2: A Conspiracy?

One of the most celebrated quatrains of Nostradamus is found in the earliest edition of the Centuries, published at Lyons in 1555. Quatrain 35 of the First Centuries immediately lifted him into celebrity. Nostradamus announced the quatrain as a prediction to King Henri II himself, several years before the “accident” happened in the summer of 1559…

The younger lion will triumph over the older

by single combat, on the field of war

will his eyes be pierced in a golden cage -

two breaks made one and then a cruel death.

Henri had been victorious on the first two days, but he was disappointed that on the third day Gabriel de Lorge, Count Montgomery and captain of his Scottish Guard, remained in the saddle. Against Montgomery’s wishes, the King insisted on a rematch.

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The Count and the King rush towards each other again and collide frightfully. Both lances break; riders and steeds have difficulty recovering their balance. André Castelot and Alain Decaux describe it in their “History of France and the French” as follows: “Henri II takes a new lance, but Montgomery forgets to throw down the stump he holds. Contrary to convention – no one knows why – the trumpets are silent. The mailclad horsemen set off again at full gallop and there is a deafening noise of clanging, clattering steel and hooves pounding the raked sand of the track. The spectators gasp, seeing that the Captain of the Scottish Guard has not flung aside his broken weapon but is still levelling it. The two men clash yet again and Montgomery’s fragment of lance slips off the King’s cuirass, lifting the visor of the helmet and piercing the King’s head. (….) His wound is appalling: the lance has entered the right eye and emerged through the ear.”

The King died in agony ten days later, on July 10. It was the first of two blows that would destroy the dynastic tree of the house of Valois. Henri II, wounded mortally in his golden cage (he wore a gilt helmet), was the first to die a violent death. Henri III, who fell by the hand of a murderer, would be the second. 

The prophetic warning by Nostradamus had evidently been futile. However, the quatrain established him as Europe’s leading prophet. But Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, in their book “The Temple and the Lodge”, along with a number of other recent commentators, have argued that the death of the French King was not an accident, but part of an elaborately contrived plan, a conspiracy. The famous quatrain was, in other words, “a blueprint for action, perhaps some sort of coded instruction or signal”.

Cover of The Temple and the Lodge

According to Baigent & Leigh, Nostradamus was a clandestine agent on behalf of the houses of Guise and Lorraine – and Gabriel de Montgomery was his co-conspirator: “Certainly Henri’s death could not have been more opportune for Guise-Lorraine interests. Despite increasingly brazen efforts to turn it to account, however, they failed to capitalize on it as effectively as they desired. For the next decade, virtual anarchy prevailed in France as the warring factions – Valois and Guise-Lorraine – conspired and jockeyed for the throne.”

Another quatrain (Q30, CIII) of Nostradamus seems to deny that he and Montgomery were co-conspirators:

He who in strife and armour on the field of war

will have carried away a prize from one greater than himself,

shall be stabbed by six men, at night in bed,

unprotected, unarmed and naked.

Some say the dying King gave Montgomery free pardon. Others report that the fled to England to save himself – and indeed, in England he embraced Protestantism. At the head of the revolting Huguenots in Normandy, he returned to France, was besieged in Domfort and obliged to surrender. The terms of the surrender guaranteed his life, but by express command of Catherine de Medici, the vengeful widow of Henri II, in the night of May 27, 1574, he was arrested in his own castle of Domfort by six men of the royal army. Montgomery was carried to the Conciergerie at Paris and there immured. The great tower still bears his name.

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More Nostradamus:

Historical Mysteries – Nostradamus

SuperNatural ParaNormalities – Nostradamus

More Conspiracies:

Murder & Mystery