St Clotilda

Clotilda is often remembered first as the Christian queen who helped lead Clovis toward baptism, but her life is much more than a royal conversion story. From the beginning she worked patiently on a pagan husband whose temper and ambitions made the court a hard place for a Christian woman. She saw one baptized son die in infancy, saw another survive, and at last heard Clovis call on her God in the crisis of battle before his baptism at Rheims. That part of the story is famous, but it is only the beginning. The later years are darker and more revealing. After Clovis died, Clotilda had to endure the brutal feuds of a Merovingian family at war with itself.

Sons turned against one another, her daughter suffered bitterly, and the peace she longed to see in her children and grandchildren was repeatedly shattered. The old accounts dwell especially on the murder of her young grandsons and on the grief that finally drove her from Paris to Tours, where she spent her later years in prayer and almsgiving near the shrine of St Martin. One of the most moving scenes is her all-night prayer that God would stop her surviving sons from destroying one another. Some of the more savage stories later repeated about her vengeance are not historically secure, but the main picture is strong enough without them. Clotilda stands as queen, widow, and mother whose holiness was tested not in comfort, but in long sorrow borne faithfully.