Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (43 page)

Henry III too was receiving foreign assistance. There is a strong possibility that snippets of English intelligence were passed on to the French. The enterprise was becoming compromised by leaks. In November 1582, Henry dismissed Claude Matthieu as the royal confessor for being ‘too Spanish’. Guise’s English agents were being followed: Walsingham learned in December of the arrival of one of the Throckmorton family in Paris, carrying letters from England.

Who was the mole inside the Guise household? One suspect we can discount is Thomas Morgan, who had been in touch with Mary Stuart since his arrival in Paris in 1580, and who, from May 1581, was pensioned by her. As Beaton’s cipher clerk, he had a position of considerable influence in the plot, administering all of Mary’s secret correspondence. Trustworthy he may have been, but Morgan was also an ambitious chancer. He was heavily involved with Francis Throckmorton and it was probably through Morgan that Guise was put in contact with his fellow Welshmen, William Parry. Parry had been spying for the English since 1577, though the English ambassador at the time, Cobham, did not trust him. Having been received into the Roman Catholic Church in Paris in the summer of 1582, he became embroiled in exile politics and boasted to Lord Burghley of having ‘shaken the foundacon of the English seminary in Rheyms and utterly overthrowen the credite of the English pensioners on Rome’. 6

It was through the offices of Morgan that he gained an interview with the Guise at the end of 1583, in which he made an extraordinary proposition. Parry offered to assassinate Elizabeth. Guise was not interested; he had heard it all before. In April he had been approached by George Gifford, a disgruntled gentleman pensioner of the queen, to kill her for 100,000 livres. He was initially enthusiastic and, encouraged by Robert Persons, promised to put up half the sum himself. Acquaviva, the General of the Jesuits in Rome, shocked that a member of the Society should countenance such a proposal, delivered a stiff rebuke to Persons. More directly, Guise’s interest in assassination plots was tempered by the death of Lennox within a month of the offer, since it effectively ended hope of assistance from Scotland. He seems to have turned Parry’s proposal down out of hand, and he was right to do so. Many of the exiles who thronged the Hôtel de Guise did not trust Parry, whose penury caused him to play the roles of both
agent provocateur
and traitor; it was as the latter that he would be executed in Westminster Palace Yard on 2 March 1585.

Guise was preoccupied by other affairs. His grandmother had finally died and in February 1583 he returned to Joinville for her funeral. The cash from her estate, estimated at 500,000 livres, was useful. This, added to his Spanish pension, made the duke solvent for the first time in his life and he was minded to put up with the indignities of court life. As the Spanish ambassador put it, ‘the flood has nearly reached its full and threatens to burst the dam’. 7 The king was using the familiar
tu
with the hated Epernon. At the end of April he presented his favourite with a prayer book inscribed: ‘I beg you, my friend remember me when you pray here, as he who loves no other in this mortal world as much as you.’8 Guise announced that he intended to take his leave from the king ‘to go to Eu to take the air of the sea’, knowing that the king knew this to be no holiday.

His relationship with the king deteriorating once more, the duke plunged himself into plotting. Claude Matthieu became his confessor and took on the role of chief intermediary with the nuncio, in order, perhaps rather fancifully, not to arouse suspicion. In early June, the chief conspirators—Guise, Matthieu, Beaton, the nuncio, and Cardinal Allen—met in Paris to hear a report from François de Roncherolles, ‘a very clever man, in whom Guise has entire confidence’. Roncherolles argued that there was no further prospect of invading Scotland and that a new strategy was required. Allen pressed for an invasion of England. Beaton objected, but was overruled. By the end of the month a new plan was drawn up and sent to the Spanish Ambassador. It called for a two-pronged attack on England. 
The main force would be international. Commanded by the brother of the Duke of Bavaria, it would consist of 12,000 men, equally of Spaniards, Germans, and Italians. This force, largely paid for by Spain, would sail from the Iberian peninsula and a port in Flanders and rendezvous at Dalton-in-Furness, using Lancashire as a base for a northern rising. Meanwhile, Guise would land a smaller army of his own men and English exiles in Sussex, where they could shelter in strongholds provided by the Percys and the Earl of Arundel and divert Elizabeth’s attention while the northern uprising got under way. 
Tassis was cautious, telling Philip ‘that it is always easier to spend other people’s money’. So Guise sent Charles Paget, an Englishman in his household, to open a direct channel with Mendoza, Philip’s more gung-ho ambassador in London. Paget visited Sussex under the codename ‘Mope’ and made contact with, among others, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Persons was sent to Rome.

Guise returned to Normandy to begin preparations. In July he stayed two weeks at Eu and was ‘visited by sundry English gentlemen who are come over ‘‘pretending’’ to be papists’. 9 Why men who would take such a long journey were claiming to be Catholics we do not know. The spy reported by mid-August that fifteen ships were being readied at Honfleur, Le Havre, and Fécamp. Guise, accompanied by his brother, Mayenne, the Cardinal of Bourbon, and Thomas Morgan toured the province, and finally alighted at the residence of Vice-admiral Moy, upstream on the Seine from Rouen, ‘where they stayed for five or six days holding council everyday’. Elizabeth complained in the strongest terms to Henry III. It was precisely this sort of activity that the king was trying to stop when he had made the Duke of Joyeuse admiral and Governor of Normandy earlier that year. Joyeuse energetically set about placing trusted men in command of the Channel ports. When news arrived from Le Havre of logistical problems, Guise had to suspend his preparations and withdraw the money he had advanced.

The major blow came not from Paris, but London, where Francis Throckmorton was arrested in November. The conspirators were not, however, deterred by the exposure of their plans and the expulsion of Mendoza. These setbacks were more than offset by the news smuggled from Scotland that James VI welcomed the plan, called for Guise assistance and would ‘submit’ to his cousin’s counsel. The only problem to surmount was Philip’s reticence—he refused to release more than 30,000 crowns. However, the arrival of Mendoza, who had sworn to be an ‘instrument of vengeance’ on Elizabeth, in Paris, gave Guise a more belligerent ally. Mendoza put his backing behind a smaller operation to rescue James VI. Guise declared that he would go himself, whether or not Philip came up with the 300,000 crowns that were necessary. There is no doubting his intent. During the winter of 1583 he issued 120 commissions and continued to hold secret meetings in Paris with Leslie, Beaton, Morgan, and the nuncio.

In January 1584 the English spy reported that ‘he never saw the duke of Guise more gallant or merry. And that talking with his mother, they fell in speech of Scotland...and that he hoped that there would be ere long,
beau jeu
in England.’10 Discussions with the Pope about financing the operation were still going on in April when news of the Duke of Anjou’s illness halted any plans to leave France.

* * * *

Guise persisted with his plans because they made sense in the domestic political scene. During the winter of 1583 Henry III made no secret of his preference for the Navarre succession. And in the spring, Elizabeth announced her decision to send the Order of the Garter, an honour reserved only for close friends and supporters of the English monarch, to Henry. In his role as chief patron of the exile cause, Guise mobilized his supporters in Paris against the Anglo-French entente, while a propaganda campaign advertised to the wider public the terror that was inevitable with a Protestant succession. For pious French Catholics there was a special fascination with England, which had produced the first martyrs of the Counter-Reformation Church. The diarist Guillaume Coton, librarian of the abbey of Saint-Victor, sought out the company of exiles to hear their tales of heroism, and assiduously recorded news of the mission and listed the names of English martyrs in his journal. Only later would reports of the missions from India, China, and Japan surpass the tales of English derring-do and adventure that filled the taverns and dining rooms of Paris in the 1580s.

The engraver, Richard Verstegan, who fled London to escape arrest in February 1582, quickly emerged as the most skilled broadcaster of the English Catholic struggle. As soon as he arrived in Paris he began work on a broadsheet with six woodcuts, depicting ‘An Image of the Present State of the English Church’ addressed to Catholics everywhere. The arrest, trial, torture, and dismemberment of the martyrs, most notably Edmund Campion, were depicted with gruesome precision. It was a companion piece to Persons’s
An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in Englande
, of which Guise commissioned a French translation. The text described the persecution, torture, and violent deaths perpetrated by Protestants. The following year Verstegan produced an engraving of Mary Stuart and by the end had completed an ambitious cycle of engravings the
Briefve Description des diverses cruautez que les Catholiques endurent en Angleterre pour la foi
(Plate 26). Its English story was made familiar to its French audience by the structure of the background buildings: the roofs, the shape of the windows, and the position of church spires were Parisian, suggesting that the action was taking place in Paris. 11 The Guise brothers took a close interest in his work. The following year they saw and approved of copies he had made of paintings in the English college of Rome portraying the sufferings of martyrs.

But Verstegan and his associates went too far. In November they posted a scurrilous image of Elizabeth in prominent places around the city, including the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville:

Parisians were being invited to laugh at the failed Anjou match. 
Stafford was not amused and in January Verstegan was imprisoned at his behest. His arrest became a
cause célèbre
among radical Catholics and he was eventually released at the intercession of the nuncio. 
In the duke’s absence, the Hôtel de Guise was raided and a set of copper plates seized by the royal authorities.

The hôtel was the place where exile activity and domestic opposition came together and where future policy was coordinated. It was both a fortress and a palace. Separated from the rue de la Chaume by a wall and courtyard, it was three-stories high. From the ground floor one ascended by means of a monumental staircase to the first floor, from where one had access to the terrace and the steps that led down to the garden with its flowerbeds, fountains, orangerie, outbuildings, and stables. Banquets at the palace were famous social occasions at which court society mixed with well-to-do Parisians. Pierre de l’Estoile was scandalized by the wedding festivities that the duke put on for one of his servants, who came from a leading legal family, to the daughter of the city’s former mayor. So rowdy did the revelry become that the more refined ladies among the wedding guests had to retire early. These social events now took on more overtly political overtones. In March 1584 the duke hosted a dinner for the most prominent exiles; it was chance for them to meet like-minded Parisians and discuss the international Catholic cause. These were public events, something not unlike a modern movie premiere, but in this case the crowd of onlookers were allowed inside ‘like bats clinging to the rails to see the prince dine with the room still completely full of people’. 12 

At these social events the duke asked his guests to provide more than moral support. The English complained in June 1583 that he was daily ‘practicising’ the city’s aldermen and magistrates. With Philip II dragging his feet, Guise needed alternative sources of money and he invited a number of sympathetic bankers and financial experts to join his salon. One of these men, Etienne de Neuilly, President of the Paris Excise Court and city mayor between 1582 and 1584, joined the duke’s council and emerged as a leader of the Paris’s radical Catholics. 
Their friendship was abetted by the fact that they worshipped at the same church, Saint-Jean en Grève, just behind the Hôtel de Ville.

Perhaps Neuilly was among the mourners when the duke buried his 4-year-old daughter Marie there in 1582. When the duke was not in town the salon was run by his wife Catherine, whose abilities in business matters caused her to become known as ‘the pretty advocate’. While he was away in Normandy, the duke wrote to his wife, reminding her to send his new friend a gift: ‘send the rosaries to President Neuilly if my sister has not done so...and give him the best cheer that you possibly can, make a close friend of him for he is very important to me’. 13 In this manner, the dining club that the duke had started was maintained in his absence. Henri insisted that it was not just for men:

The exiles clustered on the Left Bank, the obvious choice since many of them were students and priests. The cardinals of Guise and Bourbon had several palaces here. Dining rights in these establishments or the lease of rooms in one of many tenements that they owned in the vicinity were significant factors in creating a support network. Priests from all over the British Isles stayed in the dormitories of the abbey of Saint-Victor. It is no surprise that Giordano Bruno, who has been identified by John Bossy as Henry Fagot, Walsingham’s spy in the French embassy in London, also passed through here.

Where the Guise led, their supporters followed. The exiles required accommodation, so Parisians welcomed them into their houses. The Left Bank was home to Paris’s students, lawyers, and other legal officials. These educated bourgeois identified with the exiles’ suffering, their support a badge indicating membership of the outlawed Catholic League. Many radicals in Paris, such as Pierre Acarie, a rich official in the Royal Chamber of Accounts (whose mystic wife, Barbe, was soon to be made famous for conversations with Christ) first got involved in oppositional politics by providing charity to English émigreś. The exiles themselves soon gained an institutional foothold in Left Bank life. They worshipped at Saint-Cosme et Damien church in the rue de la Harpe, and it was no surprise when the radical Scots preacher John Hamilton, became the parish priest in 1585. English and Scots students came to dominate the German Nation of the university, which was centred in Mignon College. The nobleman, Charles Paget, cut a very different figure: he swaggered around the streets accompanied by a retinue of sixteen to twenty men and, sponsored by Pierre Acarie applied for letters of French naturalization. The community and many of its supporters gathered together once a year at Saint-Victor abbey on 29 December to celebrate the feast of the greatest English martyr of all, Thomas Becket.

Opposition to Henry III centred on three other Left Bank churches—Saint-Séverin, Saint-Benoît, and Saint-André des Arts. 
The curés here were sympathetic to or owed their careers to the Guise. From their pulpits they reinforced the message that it was a Catholic duty to give charity to and support the exiles. In these parishes lay radicals developed a strategy to control parochial office, infiltrating the city militia and dominating the election of churchwardens. Mary Stuart’s council, which oversaw her legal and financial affairs in France, played a particularly important role in this process. 
The wealthy Nau clan, which dominated the council, lived near the Hôtel de Cluny and took responsibility for organization in the parish of Saint-Benoît. Henri de Guise knew Claude Nau, her secretary, as ‘a man of worth and devoted servant of our family, among whom he had the honour of being raised’. More significant was her treasurer, Charles Hotman, an acquaintance of both Morgan and Paget, who in early 1585 was elected as the first leader of the Paris Sixteen, the name given to the Catholic League in Paris in honour of the city’s sixteen neighbourhoods.

* * * *

Even before news that the Duke of Anjou had fallen seriously ill reached Paris at the end of March 1584, the strain between the king and Guise had become intolerable. As Stafford put it, ‘he hateth extremely the dukes of Guise and Mayenne’. The succession was not simply a matter of religious principle: for both sides it was about the survival of their respective dynasties. Although Henry III 
was the last Valois, he saw Navarre as his rightful heir and had informed Navarre’s envoy in a secret meeting in February 1584 that ‘he loved him as a son’. In mid-April, as his brother’s health deteriorated, he announced to his dinner guests, who included Mayenne: 
‘Today, I recognize the King of Navarre for my sole and unique heir.’14 For the Guise, the stakes were equally high. Philip II reminded the duke ‘of the treatment he may fear’ if Navarre ever became king.

And the ambassador of the Duke of Savoy spelled out such a future more clearly should Navarre be victorious: ‘could [the Guise] have no other doubt than that their House would be ruined and, that as ancient enemies and Catholics, they would all be killed’. 15 In private the duke was candid about this. Several years previously he had admitted to Michel de Montaigne that the formation of an insurgent Catholic party was borne of necessity, for while Navarre lived ‘neither he nor his House would ever be safe’. He personally favoured a religious compromise along Lutheran lines. Like Navarre, his posturing on matters religious was nothing more than a 'parade'.16 On 10 June 1584 the Duke of Anjou died. The war of succession was about to begin. The ‘parade’ would lead to a thirteen-year war; the most destructive of the civil wars so far, it would claim the lives of two of the principal players and almost destroy France as a unitary state.