Most readers who reach the climax of The Two Dianas and watch King Henri II die from a jousting wound inflicted by the novel's own title-adjacent hero assume Dumas invented the scene for dramatic effect. He didn't need to. The real Henri II actually died this way, in July 1559, in an accident so specifically freakish that it reads more like invented fiction than documented sixteenth-century history, and the man who struck the fatal blow did share a name with the family this novel builds around.
A Tournament to Celebrate Peace
The tournament that killed Henri II was staged as part of the festivities marking two significant royal marriages meant to seal the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, which had just ended decades of intermittent war between France and Spain. Henri, by all contemporary accounts a skilled and enthusiastic jouster, insisted on participating personally despite his advancing age and his wife Catherine de' Medici's reported unease about the match. He had already jousted successfully earlier in the day. The fatal bout was, by several accounts, one he requested himself, against the wishes of advisors who felt enough had already been demonstrated.
The Man Holding the Lance
Gabriel de Montgommery, Comte de Montgommery, was a captain of the king's Scottish Guard and a really skilled jouster in his own right. Historical accounts suggest he was reluctant to face the king at all, and only did so at Henri's own insistence. During the match, Montgommery's lance shattered on impact (a common, usually harmless occurrence in period jousting) but a large splinter from the broken shaft pierced through the visor of the king's helmet, driving into his eye and, according to most period medical accounts, lodging near his brain.
Ten Days of Documented Agony
Henri did not die instantly. He lingered for ten agonizing days while royal physicians, including the famous surgeon Ambroise Paré, attempted various treatments, reportedly including experiments on the severed heads of condemned criminals in a desperate effort to understand the wound's likely progression. None of it saved him. He died on July 10, 1559, plunging France into the reign of his sickly eldest son, François II, and setting off the succession anxieties and religious tensions that would eventually erupt into the Wars of Religion covered elsewhere on this site.
What Happened to Montgommery Afterward
Despite the accident being widely regarded, even at the time, as a true misfortune rather than any kind of assassination, Montgommery's life was permanently altered by his association with the king's death. He reportedly withdrew from court entirely, eventually converting to Protestantism and becoming a committed Huguenot military commander during the subsequent Wars of Religion, a conflict this site's own piece on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre covers in more detail. His later political and religious activities made him a target of the crown for entirely separate reasons, and he was eventually captured, tried, and executed in 1574, ostensibly for his Huguenot military activities, though many contemporaries and later historians have wondered whether Catherine de' Medici's long, unforgiving memory of her husband's death played some quiet role in sealing his fate a decade and a half later.
Why Dumas Built a Novel Around This Family Name
Dumas's choice to make his novel's fictional hero, also named Gabriel de Montgommery, a descendant or relation of the man whose real lance killed a king gives The Two Dianas a real, documented tragic undertone that runs beneath its more conventional romantic plot. The novel's fictional Gabriel spends much of the story unaware of the full weight his family name will eventually carry, and Dumas structures the narrative so that the historical assassination (an accident everyone in the story would consider unthinkable in advance) lands with real historical inevitability for readers who already know how French history in this period unfolded.
Read the full novel at The Two Dianas, or see the Historical Figures page for more on Diane de Poitiers and the real Valois court.