Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (34 page)

The cardinal’s letters show that if any such conspiracy existed it was an aspiration rather than fully operational. The Protestants were well aware of his rapprochement with Philip II because they were intercepting his correspondence. His language was now not dissimilar to Calvinist rhetoric, calling on Philip in January 1568 to come north and take ‘vengeance for all the heresies and blasphemies against [God’s] name against the precious sacraments’. 23 When one of his valets was murdered soon after, he was more careful about committing things to paper. In private he tended to be more ambivalent about the war: while he told Philip that he would give his life in the fight against heresy, he was himself prone to melancholia and tired of the fighting—‘better a good peace than a bad war like this’. 24 There were many other factors in the failure of the Peace of Longjumeau. In many localities of France there was no peace at all but an armed truce and the internationalization of the Protestant-Catholic schism had left both sides looking nervously at events abroad.

Protestant fears of impending persecution were heightened by the dismal failure of their invasion of the Low Countries. Alva had protested strongly to Charles IX about their incursions into Habsburg territory.

There can be no doubt the decision of the Protestant leaders to take up arms again on 23 September was precipitated by their irrevocable loss of influence at court: they were now completely eclipsed at court by the Duke of Anjou, whose rivalry with Condé was particularly poisonous.

The chancellor’s influence at court was in rapid decline. The conciliatory line he had taken after the Meaux coup doubled the hostility of the ultra-Catholics, who accused him of conniving with the Huguenots.

He had lost the confidence of Catherine and, though she refused to accept his resignation, he ceased to appear on the council in late June 1568. This paved the way for the cardinal to return. One of the first matters that he attended to was the suppression of Huguenot corsairs operating out of La Rochelle against Spanish shipping.

Catherine recalled the cardinal partly to appease Spain, but also because the Crown was desperately short of cash. The cardinal had shown in the 1550s that his financial acumen was unsurpassed and in the winter of 1567–8 he advanced money to keep the royal army on the eastern frontier in the field. His solution was to place the enormous revenues of the Church at the Crown’s disposal. On 1 August Pius V issued a bull allowing the King of France to alienate Church properties up to an annual revenue of 150,000 crowns. But there was a catch: the Pope dictated that this money be used only to suppress ‘the uprisings of heretical and rebellious Huguenots’. 25 The council was sharply divided over the offer and l’Hôpital made a dramatic return to court to oppose its acceptance and save the toleration policy. On 19 September 1568, in the presence of Catherine, he argued that the bull was an infringement of the Gallican Church and that in time of need the king had the right to close churches and use the income without permission from the Pope. 
According to the English ambassador:

Despite l’Hôpital’s efforts, the king issued letters patent confirming the content of the papal bull. Realizing that he no longer exerted any influence on royal policy, he asked to be relieved of his office. His place on the Council went to one of Catherine’s hawkish Italian protégeś, Birague. L’Hôpital’s final intervention had already come too late: the return of the Cardinal of Lorraine to power had been the last straw for the Protestants and they had already taken up arms again.

The cardinal was now responsible for financing the royal war effort. He used the sale of Church property to raise loans, thereby making the Crown financially dependent on the Catholic Church. For the first time in nearly a decade, his time was absorbed with war and diplomacy, except that instead of opposing the Habsburgs he was now their ally. For dynastic reasons he wished to internationalize the war on heresy further. In his letters to Alva and Philip II, he talked of Elizabeth as their mutual enemy and pressed for military intervention to free Mary Stuart.

During the third civil war the cruelty that characterizes sectarian violence reached a new peak. The royal army, commanded by the dashing 17-year-old Duke of Anjou, initially carried all before it on the battlefield. Nothing better encapsulates the collapse of traditional chivalric values in this period than what followed when, at the battle of Jarnac in 1569, Condé was again taken prisoner. This time there was no prospect of honourable captivity or ransom. He had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the captain of Anjou’s guard who promptly shot him through the head. Anjou then permitted the corpse of his cousin to be paraded around the camp on a mule as a sign of mockery. The Cardinal of Lorraine’s change in mood also catches the new uncompromising zeitgeist. His transformation into a Counter-Reformation warrior revealed the darker side of his personality; his vindictiveness grew at the expense of his wit and charm. The proposition of his 1569 Lenten sermon in front of the king was that ‘heretics were more wicked than the devil’. The spite that had marred his political struggle with the chancellor was on display again when Ramus wrote to him in October 1570, reminding him of their thirty-five-year friendship and requesting his support in regaining his professorial chairs in Paris, from which non-Catholics had been removed. The cardinal’s reply accused Ramus of ingratitude, impiety, and rebellion.

The royal army was unable to follow up its battlefield victories. 
Despite the cardinal’s financial expertise, it lacked the logistical wherewithal to reduce the Huguenot heartlands in the south. Huguenot cavalry forces excelled in guerrilla tactics, which not only slowed the royalists’ progress but, in ravaging the countryside and terrorizing the population, sapped the will of the Catholics to fight. Catherine, realizing that civil war was seriously undermining the power and prestige of the monarchy, made tentative peace moves. Charles IX 
was emerging from his mother’s shadow and jealous that any glory to be won had gone to his younger brother. Courtiers began to whisper that the only people who profited from the war were the Guise. In the spring of 1570 Coligny, who was now the undisputed leader of the Protestants, began a spectacular march across France. He marched from Nîmes across the Vivarais and into Burgundy. On 18 June his men sacked the great abbey of Cluny. He avoided the royalist field army near Autun and, after picking up reinforcements at Sancerre and La Charité-sûr-Loire, he moved on Paris in the hope of securing a speedy and advantageous peace. Lorraine’s opposition to concessions were backed by Spain and the Pope, but by now nearly all the king’s council wanted a settlement. On 8 August 1570 Catherine made peace with the Huguenots at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Its terms were so favourable to them that it has been called a ‘Calvinist charter’. This is an exaggeration: Protestantism was still banned at court and in Paris. Nevertheless, freedom of conscience was allowed throughout the kingdom and freedom of worship where it had taken place before the war, and the edict marked a distinct departure in providing the Protestants with four security towns—La Rochelle, Montauban, La Charité and Cognac—for two years. The edict baffled many Catholics, who did not think the Huguenots were in a sufficiently strong position to exact such favourable terms. Monluc complained that they had gained ‘by writings’ what they had lost by fighting.

The Cardinal of Lorraine was utterly defeated; he wrote to his client, the Bishop of Verdun, that as ‘for the peace, the articles in it are bad and pernicious, but what is still more annoying is the despair’. 
He called for patience. 27 During the peace negotiations he had fallen seriously ill. In part, this was induced by the pressure of the work and the fear of assassination, no doubt made worse by the bouts of melancholy to which he was subject during his later years. But it was also aggravated by the anxiety of having to run his nephew’s affairs. Henri, Duke of Guise, was proving an exasperating and taxing ward.

Born at Joinville on New Year’s Eve, 1549, the life of Henri, third Duke of Guise, was forever scarred by one harrowing event. At the age of twelve he had been forced to watch his father die in agony. The letters he wrote as a 7-year-old to the father, who was away on campaign, reveal a precocious intelligence. Henri idolized his father.

When his uncle suggested that he would make a good priest he wrote to his father: ‘I would rather be next to you breaking a lance or a sword on some brave Spaniard or Burgundian to show that I like much better to fence and joust than to be always shut up in an abbey dressed in a gown.’ His formal education was, however, brief. At the age of 7 he was sent to Navarre College with the two other Henris, who would one day be his rivals: Henri, the son of Antoine, King of Navarre, and Henri, Duke of Anjou. But it was barely a year before the Prince of Joinville, as he was styled, was summoned by his father to learn the profession of arms. He was soon joined by his younger brother, Charles, (born in 1554), while his youngest brother, Louis, born in 1555, was destined to inherit his uncles’ ecclesiastical empire.

Henri was not interested in letters and, in spite of the close attention of his uncle and his grandmother, his knowledge of matters theological was superficial: ‘I heard the beautiful sermons that my uncle gave at Reims but I promise you,’ he wrote to his father, ‘that I will not be about to recite them because they were so long I can only remember half of them.’ Like his father and grandfather, he was more interested in traditional aristocratic pursuits and his letters resound with the themes of horses, hunting, and war.

In an age when looks and demeanour were thought to herald majesty, the beauty of the House of Guise was renowned. It contrasted with the ugliness that afflicted most of their Habsburg, Valois, and Bourbon contemporaries. And the portraits of the new duke support the contention of observers that Henri—as ‘beautiful as an angel’, according to the Venetian ambassador—surpassed even his cousin, Mary Stuart, in looks. He had the trademark pale visage and curly, strawberry blond hair. He was tall too and had a good physique shaped by the usual martial sports and tennis and, more unusually, swimming—he could, it was said, swim across a river in armour. He inherited both his father’s charm and common touch: his immense attractiveness to women and affability with commoners would later be major political assets. If Henri had an Achilles heel it was hubris. In his father, the inbred pride of the aristocrat had been tempered by reserve and modesty, which charmed even his enemies.

Henri, in contrast, inherited some of his uncle’s arrogance. A story told by Marguerite de Valois about the young duke is instructive.

Asked by her father, Henry II, which prince she preferred, Guise or the Marquis of Beaupreáu, son of the Prince of la Roche-sûr-Yon, she agreed that Guise was without doubt the better looking but she preferred the other because ‘every day the duke does something bad to someone and always wants to be master’. 1 The story is probably apocryphal but it stood the test of time because it captured something essential. It is borne out by an event which took place over a decade later. During a solemn religious procession in Paris led by the king, there was a scuffle between one of the duke’s pages and a royal archer.

Alerted to this, the duke walked over to the archer and in the middle of the street ordered the man to kneel while his page administered two small slaps. For good measure Guise then struck the poor man with his own gloves, ‘which several people, including the king, found very strange'. 2 This exaggerated sense of his own reputation extended to the hatred which consumed him. Brantôme, a confidant of the young duke, was convinced that others carried more guilt than Coligny, but Guise would have no truck with the small fry: ‘he only had ill-will for a great captain like him, because the others were not worthy of his hatred, anger and revenge’. 3

Living in his father’s shadow was a great burden. His juvenile
entrée
into politics was disastrous. In the autumn of 1561 he became involved in a plot to encourage his friend, Anjou, the king’s brother and heir, to run away from court and spearhead the Catholic opposition to Catherine. His father and uncle were furious at him for undermining their rapprochement with the Lutherans. The 11-year-old Henri had been led into this folly by Jacques de Savoie, Duke of Nemours. The most hawkish of his father’s friends, the debonair 30-year-old Nemours was something of a role model for the young man, and in 1566 Nemours became his stepfather when he married Guise’s widowed mother. Guise’s prowess in tournaments was already a matter of record ‘not yet fifteen, but yet very adroit, and already then very sharp in combat, as much as those much older than him’. 4

But the triumph of his enemies made the daily humiliations of court life unbearable. Coligny and Marshal Montmorency ignored the challenges to personal combat that he issued; he in turn refused to appear at Moulins with his uncle or sign any document of reconciliation. In order to restore his honour he sought to emulate his father, even to the point of being wounded, for, as he himself remarked, ‘there is more honour to be had in receiving a wound than in giving one’.

In May 1566 he and his brother Charles, accompanied by a retinue of 350 men, left France to fight the Turks in Hungary under the command of their uncle, Alfonso d’Este. However, it was during the third civil war, when he was made colonel-general of dragoons, that he began to show that he was a cut above the other ultra-Catholic gallants who had gathered around the Duke of Anjou.

In the wake of the royalist victory at Jarnac he would finally confront Coligny on the field of battle. The royal army was so mutinous for want of pay and so ravaged by sickness that it had been unable to follow up its victory. On 19 July 1569 Henri de Guise, who was in the Limousin, received news that Coligny and the main Protestant army was heading north. Spurred on by his vow of revenge he and his brother Charles quickly mustered a force of 1,200 horse and made rapidly for Poitiers, where they arrived on the 22nd to reinforce the weak garrison. Coligny invested the city three days later with 30,000 men and, knowing that he had his principal enemy in his grasp, began a fierce cannonade. On one day alone 800 shots were fired into the city. Like his father at Metz, Guise did not shirk from the mundane tasks of siege life, such as supervising trench diggers. On the 24 August a breach was effected and the situation became so critical that the wives of the gentlemen were armed should the Protestants break into the city. For the next week the duke figured prominently in the defence of the breach against enemy assaults and was lightly wounded in the foot. Having repulsed the final assault on 3 September, he assisted at a procession of the Holy Sacrament around Poitiers as one of the bearers of the monstrance. Coligny raised the siege on 7 September. In seven weeks the garrison had lost a third of its effectives; the Huguenots about 2,000 men. Five days later Coligny was declared a rebel and the price of 50,000 crowns put on his head.

The duke’s victory celebrations were short-lived. Peace feelers were already being extended. Worse still, a dynastic marriage between the duke’s childhood playmates, Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre, who had been raised a Protestant by his mother Jeanne d’Albret, was being mooted as a means of reconciling the religious factions. During the negotiations Cardinal Charles’s melancholia returned: ‘I am in extreme need of rest and cannot recuperate.’5

When peace was signed on 8 August 1570 he had come down with a fever and was seriously ill. But it was not only his failure to influence the talks and the ease with which the Protestants were intercepting his letters that laid him low. Like any other teenager, Henri de Guise was difficult to handle. First, there was his profligacy. Though his father had left huge debts, the son had appearances to keep up. His uncle did his best to stave off the creditors. Henri’s majority in September 1568 improved matters for a time, and the cardinal hoped that the war would mean a suspension of lawsuits. But in March 1569 the duchy of Chevreuse, which the cardinal had given to his nephew, was seized by creditors. The demands of Henri’s younger brother, Charles, the 15-year-old Marquis of Mayenne, were no less irksome. The cardinal wrote to his sister-in-law in May 1570 moaning that these days ‘everyone wants to be an inhabitant of Paris’. 6 Mayenne had found a house in the city he wanted to buy. More worryingly, he had taken to wearing green, a dangerous choice because it was the colour of the House of Anjou, a title that was currently occupied by the heir to the throne.

But a much more serious challenge to the Crown, one that put Henri de Guise’s life in danger, came as a result of the other major cause of angst for the parents of teenage children: sex. Henri was beginning to discover just how attractive he was to women. He later confided to Brantôme that when it came to the opposite sex his aristocratic nonchalance deserted him; he became something of a ‘tyrant’, and when one caught his eye he would have to have her by ‘love or by force’. 7 As the finishing touches were being put to the Peace of Saint-Germain en Laye, the young duke threatened one of its key elements—he had fallen in love with the king’s sister, Marguerite. It was a matter of the utmost significance; the future of France and the European balance of power depended on it. Within a week of signing the peace accords, Catherine de Medici wrote that she had hurried to Paris ‘to see the Cardinal of Lorraine in his house where he has been ill for the last 2 or 3 weeks’; they discussed ‘the rumour circulating for some while among several persons of the proposed marriage of my daughter and the Duke of Guise’. 8 The cardinal had long been aware that his nephew was up to something, and at first he may have even encouraged him, as a means of stalling Marguerite’s betrothal. From Marguerite’s point of view there was no comparison between Guise and the 17-year-old Navarre, who was not only a heretic but short, ugly, and coarse. But in April the cardinal wrote with alarm to his sister-in-law: ‘The ladies at court are real stirrers and mixers. The poor little [Marguerite] and your son are riding luck in such a way that it is very bad.’ The most worrying aspect of the affair was the attitude of Marguerite’s brothers.

At first, Anjou, who displayed a morbid fascination for his sister, encouraged the duke; it seemed a bit of harmless fun. But he was too much under the influence of his mother to resist her will for long.

Court gossip became so pernicious that by May the royal family was refusing to talk to the Guise. When proof of the illicit affair came to light in the form of an intercepted letter between the lovers, Anjou was furious and refused to leave his rooms. When he reappeared he had taken violently against his former friend, and urged his brother to punish Guise’s impudence. Charles IX, the same age as Guise, though physically fragile and less able, was beginning to emerge from his younger brother’s shadow; he felt strongly that
his
peace treaty was being undermined. Matters came to a head on 26 June at Gaillon in Normandy, where Marguerite was berated for fifteen minutes by her mother and brothers, and the king hit her and tore her clothes. Guise’s murder was discussed and their bastard brother, the Duke of Angoulême, approached—bastards being traditionally employed in aristocratic families to protect female honour. The cardinal had ‘never seen such a long and cruel anger’. In the end, the king limited himself to banishment; when the duke dared to approach him during a ball he was brusquely dismissed: ‘I no longer have need of your service.’9

Relations were so bad that the cardinal dared not commit the events to paper, fearing that letters to his sister-in-law would fall into the wrong hands. There were strong words too between nephew and uncle, following which the latter was able to report to Anne that if her son ‘wishes to follow [good] council and be wise, there will be nothing else except good news’. So when the Queen Mother visited the cardinal in Paris he was able to announce that the matter was now closed and his nephew was betrothed to someone else.

* * * *

By September the cardinal’s melancholy had lifted and he was once more enjoying his daily stroll in one or other of his residences around Paris. On 3 October, Henri de Guise married Catherine de Clèves, Countess of Eu. Henri’s hurried engagement was not initially to his liking. He is purported to have turned up his nose at Catherine de Clèves as a ‘negress’, either because he wished to marry royalty or in reference to her Protestantism. But there were compelling reasons for the match beyond the need to placate the royal family. The Clèves, like the Guise, hailed from the marches of the Franco-Imperial border, and the families had long been allies. Indeed, Catherine had been raised at Joinville. The sovereign principality of Château-Regnault, which she brought to the marriage, strengthened Guise’s position on the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The most significant and valuable part of the inheritance was however the county of Eu in Upper Normandy; comprising 270 fiefs and manors this consolidated bloc of territory sealed Guise dominance in the region. Facing England on the Channel coast, it would prove to be an acquisition of the utmost strategic importance. The dowry of 100,000 livres, paid by the king, eased the duke’s financial problems and the marriage was celebrated with three days of tourneys in Paris. For the marriage feast, the banquet table in the Hôtel de Guise was covered with vases of gold, crystal, and silver gilt valued at 100,000 crowns and the ambassadors of Scotland, Spain, Venice, and Ferrara invited. The English ambassador, Walsingham, was diplomatically excluded on the pretext that he would otherwise have had to acquiesce to the precedence of the Scottish ambassador, the Archbishop of Glasgow.

Although one crisis had been averted, the coming of peace had left the Guise once more in the political wilderness. The duke’s friendship with Anjou would never heal properly and the heir to the throne, with the sort of melodramatic flourish that he was fond of, declared that ‘If the duke of Guise after his marriage lays eyes on [Margot] again, he who would not drive a dagger through his heart, in such a way as to make him bite the earth, would be declared a renegade and miscreant.’10 The 1560s had seen a dramatic alteration in the fortunes of the Guise family; they turned their back on compromise with the Protestants and emerged as the leading champions of the Counter-Reformation. The lessons of the battle of Dreux were clear. Conflict with the Habsburgs had made the Guise fortune, whereas the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis had favoured their enemies. The return of war once again ensured their ascendancy. To be associated with civil war was, however, fraught with dangers for it left the family open to accusations that they were perpetuating confessional conflict for their own ends. A self-fulfilling pattern was established: since their political fortunes depended on the continuation of the war on heresy, they became identified exclusively as the ‘war party’; consequently the main guarantor of peace was their disgrace. By the end of the decade it had become abundantly clear to Catherine, her ministers, and to her sons that the Protestants could not be defeated militarily, and that civil war served only to reduce the power of the monarchy. This left the Guise with a paradox. They owed their rise to pre-eminence to the Valois and without royal favour would remain impotent; their already serious financial difficulties worsened. Therefore they had looked elsewhere. In the event, the princes and the people had proved either fickle or indifferent. Charles IX heralded the arrival of peace in 1570 with an impressive cycle of festivities that had not been seen in France since the reign of his father. The theme of his reign would henceforth be
Concordia
. Guise influence had reached a new low. 
Events in the Low Countries would soon change all that.