Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (9 page)

The marriage was a vital step in Claude’s political career. He had married into the royal family itself. Members of the House of Bourbon were styled princes of the blood in recognition of their privileged status, as heirs to the throne. Though Antoinette claimed descent from Saint-Louis through eight generations, the counts of Bourbon-Vendôme were in fact cadets of the ducal House of Bourbon, and in many respects her maternal line, the House of Luxembourg, which had provided five Holy Roman Emperors and many queens, was the greater. The Vendôme were very much in the shadow of Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, the king’s most powerful vassal who controlled a large swathe of central France. When the Count of Angoulême ascended the throne as Francis I in 1515, Charles was made constable, the highest office in the kingdom, which gave him control of military affairs. The close alliance between the Houses of Lorraine and Bourbon was sealed the same year when Duke Charles’s sister, Renée, married Antoine, Duke of Lorraine. Henceforth there was to be a close affinity between the various branches of the Houses of Lorraine and Bourbon, and their fluctuating relationship was a dominating feature of French politics for the rest of the century.

Though he was only two years younger than Francis and had known him from boyhood, Claude did not figure among the young king’s confidants. He did however share the king’s passion for deeds of chivalry and tales of derring-do. The day after his marriage to Antoinette, Claude fought in a tourney, upending Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, favourite of Henry VIII. Francis too was physically powerful, a man of action who was happiest when riding to hounds, tilting in the joust, or performing in a masque. A young knight like Claude was fortunate to come of age just as the blossom in the Indian summer of French chivalry burst into bloom. Francis was the ideal of the
roi chevalier
: energetic, vigorous, and eager for glory. Since 1494 the Valois had been intervening militarily in Italy in pursuit of their rights to the duchy of Milan and, through the House of Anjou, their claim to the kingdom of Naples—a claim in which the Guise, too, retained an interest. The most recent French intervention in 1513 had ended disastrously; after a crushing defeat at the hands of the Swiss at Novara, Burgundy was invaded and Dijon besieged. By January 1515 France had lost all her possessions in Italy, the House of Sforza had been reinstalled as dukes of Milan, Genoa was an independent republic, and the whole of Naples was under Aragonese control.

French honour and the reputation of the Valois dynasty were at stake. Within a year of his accession, Francis invaded Italy in pursuit of his claim to the duchy of Milan. He faced a formidable league of anti-French forces which included the Duke of Milan, the Pope, the King of Aragon and the Emperor. Recent wars in Italy had shown that campaigns could no longer be won solely with heavy cavalry, the strongest arm of the French army. Until 1510 the King of France had been able to employ Swiss mercenaries, the best infantry in Europe, but they were now in Sforza pay. Instead, Francis raised 23,000 German landsknechts whose tactics were closely modelled on those of the Swiss, but they were notoriously ill-disciplined. The elite of the infantry was the famous ‘Black Band’ from Guelders, comprising 12,000 pikemen, 2,000 arquebusiers, 2,000 men armed with two-handed swords and 1,000 halberdiers. 5 Claude de Guise was initially seconded to the unit as an officer under his uncle, the Duke of Guelders. But on the eve of battle, the duke was called home and Guise was elected by the landsknechts, in preference to their current lieutenant, as their new captain. His knowledge of German may have been a reason for choosing him ahead of other, more experienced, French princes. At the age of eighteen and still a minor (he was not released from his mother’s charge until October 1518), the count found himself a general on his very first campaign.

At midday on the 13 September 1515 the Swiss swarmed out of Milan and tried to catch the French army whilst it was camped in the vicinity of Marignano, attacking in three compact echelons of pikemen, each containing about 7,000 men. The first square encountered the French at 4 pm and though the German landsknechts were pushed back they did not break. Fighting continued by moonlight until midnight in one of the bloodiest battles of the sixteenth century.

Next morning, the battle raged with renewed fury. The decisive factors were the French artillery, whose 74 guns did great damage to the tightly packed ranks of the Swiss, and the timely arrival of Venetian reinforcements. As the Swiss began to retreat, Guise rashly charged forward and was hit on the right arm and on the thigh by arquebus shots, and a third killed his horse. Unhorsed, lying prone and defenceless, the count’s armour resounded with dozens of pike and halberd blows; he would have been killed had not one of his German squires, Adam Fouvert from Nuremberg, hurled himself forward and taken the blows, giving his own life to save his master’s.

It was only with difficulty that the household officers of the king were able to locate the duke’s body among the 16,000 corpses that littered the battlefield, his wounds so severe that his recovery was regarded as a marvel of contemporary medical practice. A month later, his arm in a sling, he was able to accompany Francis into Milan as captain-general of landsknechts. The House of Lorraine had once again provided valiant service to the kings of France: Claude’s elder brother, Antoine, was signalled out for his command of a gendarmerie company and his younger brother, Ferry, was killed.

Claude’s visceral experience and his miraculous recovery confirmed his trust in divine providence. When he regained consciousness after the battle, he made a vow to go on pilgrimage on his return home. In early 1516 he was greeted by Antoinette and their first child, 3-month-old Marie, future queen consort of Scotland. Two days later, dressed in full armour ‘as if he were in battle’, he walked the twenty-five leagues to the shrine of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of Lorraine, close to Nancy. Claude’s solemn reverence for his ancestors was a feature of traditional Catholic practice; Claude’s father had attributed his victory over Charles the Bold to the saint, in recognition of which work had begun in 1481 on a magnificent basilica dedicated to Saint Nicholas, where he housed the relics accumulated over the centuries by the House of Lorraine.

Marignano dramatically revived French fortunes in Italy: returning Milan to French control; forcing the Swiss, in return for an annual subsidy, to agree to serve no other master than France; and encouraging Pope Leo X to consider supporting the French claim to Naples.

And yet French hegemony in Italy was a mirage. On 23 January 1516 King Ferdinand of Aragon died, an event which seriously upset the new balance of power in Europe. Ferdinand left his kingdom, comprising Castile, Aragon and Naples, to his grandson the Archduke Charles of Habsburg, who already ruled the Burgundian lands, which included the Netherlands and the Franche-Comté. Initially, Charles’s position was weak. In Aragon and Castile there was support for a return to separate rulers, and he had to buy off Francis. On 13 August he signed the Treaty of Noyon, by which he agreed to take Francis’s daughter Louise as his future bride with Naples as her dowry, pending completion of which he undertook to pay an annual tribute of 100,000 crowns for Naples—implicitly recognizing the French king’s claim to the kingdom. He even agreed to discuss the future of the kingdom of Navarre, the Spanish portion of which had been wrested from its king, Jean d’Albret, by Ferdinand of Aragon in 1512.

The first test of the understanding between the Habsburgs and the Valois came in January 1519 when Emperor Maximilian died, throwing open the contest for the succession to the Holy Roman Empire.

Francis knew that Maximilian had wanted to be succeeded by his grandson Charles, but the seven electors were not bound to choose a member of the House of Habsburg, and Francis could not permit his rival to grow any stronger: ‘If he were to succeed, seeing the extent of his kingdoms and lordship, this could do me immeasurable harm: he would always be mistrustful and suspicious, and would doubtless throw me out of Italy.’6

Claude de Guise was chosen as Francis’s plenipotentiary in Germany. Despite his youth and inexperience, he was considered suitable because of his knowledge of matters German, his kinship ties in the Empire and the status of his family as princes of the empire.

His claim on the kingdom of Jerusalem was also seen as a selling point, giving credence to French claims that they were best placed to defend Germany against Turkish invasion. Francis’s extravagant promises and generous gifts were to no avail however. On 23 October 1520 Charles of Habsburg was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen. In order to become full-fledged emperor, Charles needed to receive Charlemagne’s crown from the hands of the Pope in Rome.

Francis’s immediate objective in going to war was to keep Charles out of Italy and thus asserting his claims to Milan and Naples. He did not foresee a long campaign. In the event, the Habsburg-Valois conflict dominated European history for the next forty years.

This was a new type of war, one fought on several fronts: Picardy, Champagne, the Pyrenees, and Milan all required defence. In 1521, Guise, fighting in Navarre, led an assault on Spanish positions against the advice of his commander, the royal favourite, Admiral Bonnivet, crossing the fast-flowing Bidassoa under enemy artillery fire at the head of his landsknechts. Fuenterrabia, the key to Spanish Navarre and until then considered impregnable, fell soon after.

In 1522, he served on the Flanders front under his brother-in-law, François de Bourbon, Count of Saint-Pol, raiding and skirmishing with Charles V’s English allies who threatened the French interior from their possessions at Boulogne and Calais. This brought him face to face with an old adversary, the English commander, Suffolk.

His growing reputation was confirmed when he took Bapaume and relieved Hesdin, harrying the retreating English force and killing 500 of them at the town of Pas in Artois.

The following year was an important one in Guise’s career. The Constable of Bourbon’s wife had died, causing a major crisis over her inheritance, which was claimed by the Queen Mother, Louise of Savoy. The constable refused to compromise and marry the 46-year-old widow, and as a consequence Francis, without due legal process, stripped him of the lands. He had no option but to quit France and join Charles V’s formidable alliance, which included not only England and the German princes, but the Pope and most of Italy, including France’s erstwhile ally, Venice. Francis moved to quell the threat of internal rebellion by showering the cadet lines of the House of Bourbon with favours. With his close ties to the Bourbon-Vendôme, Guise was in line for promotion, and on May 1524 he was named governor of the frontier province of Champagne and when, in the autumn, Francis entered the Milanese, he was promoted to the Privy Council headed by Louise of Savoy. The count, however, would have preferred a command in Italy. He wrote to his brother-in-law on the 8 June, ‘I hear that the voyage to Italy is being prepared...I beg you please to send me news, and you would give me great pleasure if you were to find out whether I am among those who will go. I beg you to take the matter up with the king and with the admiral for me, for I desire that my [gendarmerie] company should come with me.’7

Francis preferred to leave his powerful vassal at home for, once he had secured Milan, he intended to push south and conquer Naples and he did not wish to have his claim to the kingdom complicated by the presence of a direct descendant of the Angevins. Francis was particularly aware of the fragility of his rights at this time—the Constable of Bourbon, with little claim, had assumed the title of Count of Provence.

Guise’s relegation to the home front soon turned to his advantage in the wake of the débâcle that then took place in Italy. Francis had unwisely divided his force and sent 6,000 men to invade Naples.

Next, his army became pinned down by the main imperialist field army as he besieged Pavia. For a month (22 January–23 February 1525) the two armies, separated by only a small tributary of the Ticino river, eyed each other nervously. The French army was denuded by defections among the mercenary infantry and when the inevitable pitched battle finally came on 24 February it was clear that the lessons of Marignano about the superiority of firepower had not been learned. The charges of the French knights with the king at their head obscured the French artillery and, although they dispersed the imperial cavalry, the Spanish arquebusiers, protected by emplacements and pikemen, did terrible damage. As at Crécy and Agincourt, the French men-at-arms with their distinctive harness and plumes made easy pickings once their momentum had been stopped, and the wounded, trapped by the weight of their own armour and horses, were butchered where they lay by Spanish foot soldiers using daggers. A desperate attempt by Guise’s younger brother, François, commander of the German landsknechts, to salvage the day failed; he was killed and his force practically wiped out. Pavia was the greatest slaughter of French nobles since Agincourt. Thousands were killed or captured, including the king and many princes who were led off to captivity in Spain.

Pavia’s graveyard was Guise’s making. Francis’s captivity lasted for just over a year and during the emergency France was governed by his mother. As the king’s closest adult male relative, Charles de Bourbon-Vendôme now had a much greater profile and Guise, as his brother-in-law and governor of a frontier province, likewise played an important part in the regent’s defence of France and in finding the cash for the king’s enormous ransom. On Francis’s return in 1526 Claude was rewarded with the position of
Grand Veneur
, one of the great household offices charged with the supervision of the king’s hunt. The aristocratic social calendar was organized around hunting and the post gave him close access to the king; it also gave him control of a budget and staff, and he would make many new friends among aspirants to lucrative posts, both at court and in the extensive forests reserved for the king’s sport. In 1527, Claude’s position in the front rank of the aristocracy was confirmed by the elevation of the county of Guise to a duchy; he thus became a peer of the realm, which gave him important rights of precedence in public life and royal ceremonial. Seniority among peers was determined by the date of their creation—only the dukes of Vendôme (1514) and Nemours (1524) preceded Guise in the hierarchy. 8