François-Hercule de Valois, Duke of Alençon (* 18 March 1555; † 10 June 1584) was the youngest son of Henri II and Caterina de' Medici. He had assumed that in the event of his brother Charles IX’s death, he would succeed him, since Anjou had accepted the Polish crown. Anjou’s return and his coronation as Henri III of France further increased tensions between the brothers. Alençon once tried his hand at leading the Catholics, then again the Huguenots. He gathered around him the disaffected as well as discarded favourites of Henri III, interfered disastrously in the struggle of the Dutch against the Spanish, and courted the hand of Elizabeth I. This enterprise seemed to be the most successful of all. Although over twenty years younger, Alençon was the only suitor who personally courted the English queen, who did not seem averse to marriage. It took almost two years and all the powers of persuasion of Elizabeth I’s advisers before Alençon left England in 1581 without having achieved anything. When he died childless in 1584, Henri de Navarre became the next legitimate claimant to the French crown.
The Massacre at Paris
Alençon does not appear as an independent character in the play, but is mentioned several times. In [Scene 14] the Queen Mother reassures Louis de Lorraine-Guise by promising to replace Henri III with Alençon if the King does not support her and Guise in the fight against the Huguenots. Even if Caterina de' Medici had wanted to do this, she would not have been in a position to do so legally or in terms of power politics. In [Scene 21] Henri III mentions that Guise had something to do with the death of Alençon. In fact, Alençon died of natural causes, which was not in doubt.
