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Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]

The physician looked at the King's three sons and thought to himself, "Two will die and one will rule." But he told the King, Henry II of France, that all three would occupy a throne. The Queen, Catherine de Medici, was delighted.

She pictured two more European countries coming under the sway of the family.

The physician was not making a medical diagnosis but a prophecy. He was Nostradamus, the most famous seer of the sixteenth century and probably of all time. Henry had invited Nostradamus to his court in 1556 because of an earlier prophecy made in the psychic's strange quatrains.  The prophecy had read:

The young lion shall overcome the old
In war-like field in a single fight
In a golden cage he will pierce the eye
Two wounds one, then die a cruel death.

The King wondered whether he himself was the "old lion." Some years earlier his court prophet, Luc Gauric, had warned him to avoid any one-to-one combat, such as jousting, after the age of forty. He would be in danger of receiving a wound in the head that might bring "blindness or death." Now Nostradamus had predicted that he would be blinded in a duel and would die shortly thereafter. A double precognition and therefore to be heeded.

Three years later, in 1559, a three-day tournament was held in Paris. Four days before the start of the tournament, a Captain de Montluc had a strange dream. He saw King Henry sitting in a chair, his face covered with blood. Doctors were examining the King's eye, while many persons stood watching. Some were saying, "The King is dead"; others, "No, he is not dead yet."

Henry may have wanted to tempt fate, but whatever his motive, he challenged the captain of his Scottish Guard, Comte Gabriel de Montgomery, to a joust. De Montgomery was reluctant but when the King insisted, they donned armour, each putting over his head a gilded visor that looked like a "golden cage." Twice they jousted without a decision. The third time Henry was wounded in the throat, then de Montgomery pierced the King's visor with his lance, and the point went into Henry's eye, blinding him.

Thus three premonitions came true-a triple precognition. The "young lion" overcame the old on a "war-like field." There were "two wounds," the King ruled briefly for ten more days, then died in agony-"a cruel death." The physician-seer's prophecy for Henry's sons was also fulfilled.

The oldest son, Francis II, died soon after taking his father's place on the throne. The second son, Charles IX, also "occupied a throne" but died at the age of twenty-four. The third son was King Henry III, who ruled until 1589.