Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (10 page)

Until his death in 1547, the principal objective of Francis’s foreign policy was the recovery of Milan. To understand this in modern terms as a geo-political contest between France and Spain is anachronistic.

The outlook of Charles and Francis was aristocratic, their rivalry highly personal and so bitterly contested because honour, the quality that constituted the very essence of a gentleman’s being, was at stake.

Francis’s challenge to his foe of single combat was deadly serious; as the English ambassador put it, ‘He would give his daughter to be strumpet to a bordel to be sure of the encounter.’9 His desire to re-establish his honour and reputation was most evident in the field of arts and letters, where he projected himself as the supreme patron and connoisseur in Europe. Guise was not in the front-rank of policy-makers. From 1528 to 1541 the government was virtually run by Anne de Montmorency, another of the king’s childhood companions who had briefly shared his captivity after Pavia. Montmorency collected an unprecedented array of offices. On his return to France he was made Grand Master of the king’s household, which gave him effective control of court appointments, expenditure, and security and in 1538 he was named constable after successfully resisting Charles V’s invasion of Provence. Guise was kept well away from Italy and relegated to the more humdrum defence of the eastern frontier. He did however make a name for himself in Paris. In 1536, while the main royal army was in the south, he, his wife, and children arrived in the city and promised to defend it when the imperialists invaded Picardy and besieged Péronne, only sixty miles away. In a daring escapade with a small force, he lifted the siege and became the toast of Parisian society.

This period was the high point of his influence. In 1538 his daughter, Marie, the widow of the Duke of Longueville, married James V of Scotland. Marie was a renowned beauty and endowed with wit and abundant charm—qualities which enabled her to shine at court after leaving the convent where she had lived with her grandmother. In order to scupper the strengthening of the Auld Alliance, Henry VIII offered his own suit when negotiations were already well advanced. It has been suggested that he was rebuffed because of his faith or because Marie was too intelligent to consider becoming his next female victim. All the evidence is to the contrary. The Guise were flattered to entertain the thought of one of their number becoming Queen of England but, in an early indication of Francis I’s alarm at the prospect of over-mighty subjects, he insisted that the Scottish alliance go ahead. Guise hopes were still alive in September when an English agent and painter arrived at Joinville to cast an eye over Marie’s younger sister, Louise, before setting off for Nancy to have a look at the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine. 10

In 1542, Claude finally got his own command when he was appointed lieutenant-general and head of the military council advising the king’s younger and favourite son, Charles, Duke of Orléans, who had been given 38,000 troops to command in Picardy, Flanders, and Artois. Warfare on this front consisted of many protracted sieges; a war of attrition was the result, in which victory depended on logistics. Duke Charles was only nineteen years old and surrounded by a group of young noblemen intent on winning their spurs with individual feats of arms. The arrangement which teamed the reliable old soldier and inexperienced hothead was not a happy one: there was little respect for the cautious approach and much grumbling at the sterility of the campaign. Guise had great difficulty in controlling his young charges—the generation-gap generated tensions which almost spilled over into violence when the duke indignantly challenged one of them to a duel, an increasingly fashionable way of resolving disputes. 11 Worse followed in 1544 when Charles V invaded Champagne. The rapid capitulation of the frontier town of Saint-Dizier led to recriminations between Claude and the town’s captain. Showing signs that his reputation was increasingly on the line, he gave the captain the lie and ‘was willing to leave aside his ranks, dignity and noble quality as a prince, in order to fight’. 12 The duke soon had other problems on his mind. The imperialists moved on to Joinville next and, in an act of spite, they burned the town, destroyed the château’s landscaped garden and flowerbeds, and pillaged the church of Our Lady, carrying off a number of precious objects.

In the winter of his reign Francis, often ill and in great pain from abscesses caused by gonorrhoea, became increasingly irascible and susceptible to the whims of his mistresses, first Diane de Poitiers and then the Duchess of Etampes. Factional intrigue increased as the prospect of a succession led to much jockeying for position. In particular, the rivalry between the dauphin, Henri, and his younger brother, Charles Duke of Orléans, for whom the king displayed a clear preference, polarized political society. Claude de Guise did not suffer the disgrace that was meted out on long-serving favourites like Montmorency, but he was tainted because of the open support of his sons for the dauphin, their close friend since childhood. The king’s displeasure meant that Claude was further than ever from the inner sanctums of power. In 1543, he was moved from the governorship of Champagne to that of Burgundy. Ostensibly, this was not a demotion, but he was replaced by the man with whom he had already clashed, the Duke of Orléans, and for many years there had been suspicions that Guise, whose brother had built a formidable ecclesiastical presence in the province, was using royal resources there for his own purposes. 13 In 1532, the Parlement of Paris, the senior sovereign legal and administrative court in France, had censured him for acts which were in direct contravention of royal ordinances. And there were complaints on the occasions when royal troops and resources had been employed to support the policies of his kinsmen, the dukes of Lorraine and Guelders. So when the duke went to install himself in Burgundy, the king took the opportunity to slight him, siding with a simple local gentleman in a precedence dispute, which caused much mirth among courtiers who felt the Guise were getting above themselves; and when he asked permission to keep both governorships Francis sarcastically replied, ‘Conquer me new territory, and I’ll give you its government along with that which you have already.’14 The duke’s political and military career had reached a ceiling and matters did not change with the palace revolution that followed the death of Francis I and the accession of the dauphin as Henry II in 1547.

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Four years younger than Francis I, Guise was, however, an altogether different personality from his master. He enjoyed hunting and music, but otherwise lacked the appetite for love and hatred on a gargantuan scale that made the king such a larger-than-life figure. Francis had had a humanist education and his interest in the arts was largely lacking in the duke, whose appetites were shaped more by the ideals of piety, duty, and discipline required of the Christian knight. As a young man he liked to perform acts of gallantry. One day in 1523, he alerted the ladies of the court of Lorraine gathered at Neufchâteau that the next morning he would give battle to the imperialists on the plain outside the town, so that ‘from the windows and sheltered from all danger...they could reward with their applause and cries of joy the courage of the troops which was animated by their presence’.15 Even in his later years he was, as we have seen, willing to challenge men of lesser status in order to uphold his honour. The duke’s sexual appetites were less extrovert. He genuinely seems to have loved and respected his wife. A tale, first recorded in the middle of the seventeenth century, captures something of their relationship. On one of his visits to Joinville, a beautiful maid caught the duke’s eye but, since the château overlooked the small town, Antoinette was able to spy her husband’s visits to his mistress. Having identified the roof under which his infidelities were taking place, she sent the girl her best furniture, and saw that the bare walls were covered with tapestries; that upholstered armchairs replaced the stools; silver platters the earthenware bowls; and napkins of finest Flemish cloth the coarse tablecloth. When he arrived for his next assignation the duke’s conscience was duly pricked, and he rushed back to his wife to ask her forgiveness. Apocryphal or not, by the standards of the time he was relatively chaste: he had one long-term mistress by whom he had at least one bastard son, but she was the daughter of a provincial judge and hardly a courtesan.

The influence of his wife and mother ensured that Claude was more devout than was usual. Philippa of Guelders was widely admired by contemporaries for her piety and by the 1620s a campaign by the Jesuits to promote her cult was underway with reports of apparitions and miracles. Her convent of Sainte-Claire at Pont-à-Mousson became an important family shrine. In 1528, her grandson, Louis, Claude de Guise’s younger brother, had died from the plague while on campaign in Naples and his heart was placed in the convent ‘in a casket beneath a very tall sepulchre, built in the Italian fashion, and covered in black velvet with the arms and cross of Lorraine’. 16 She too was buried there in 1547, and when her Protestant kinsman, Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, was passing twenty years later he protected the convent from his troops and came to pay his respects to the memory of his ‘good cousin’.

Philippa was especially troubled by the spread of heresy. The events of 1525 merely confirmed what all good Catholics knew: if the crushing defeat of Pavia was not warning enough, the elevation of a woman to the regency, in a society where misogyny was a respectable pseudo-science, confirmed the impression that the world had been turned upside down. In the absence of the king, religious conservatives in Paris were soon hunting down evangelical cells which had flourished under the patronage of his sister, Marguerite of Navarre.

More serious for the Guise—and closer to home—were events in Germany, where the Peasants’ War, one of the greatest popular uprisings in European history, spread panic among the ruling classes, Catholic and Lutheran alike. Fuelled by violent anticlericalism and led by millenarian preachers, peasants formed armed leagues that massacred nobles and targeted the property of the Church. In the spring of 1525 the revolt spread to Alsace and Lorraine. Under banners which proclaimed support for the holy Gospel, the word of God, and divine justice, the peasant bands seized Saverne, residence of the Bishop of Strasbourg, and set up their headquarters in the nearby abbey of Maursmünster.

It is significant that the convent of Sainte-Claire was a Franciscan establishment, for the friars would later be the order most associated, more so than the Jesuits, with the fight back against Calvinism in France, becoming celebrated and loathed in equal measure for their street rhetoric and rabble-rousing. Philippa had a particular devotion to an early Franciscan, Saint Anthony of Padua, ‘hammer of the heretics’, whose apparition visited the convent at her death. It was in this fiercely orthodox environment that Claude and his brother Antoine, on their way to confront the peasant hordes, visited their mother to receive her benediction: ‘Do not recoil now that the occasion presents itself to die gloriously for Him, who with the infamy and opprobrium of the world upon him, died on the cross for you...

Hurry yourselves...and against all who oppose you with arms strike, chop and cut...Do not fear to be cruel...heresy is of the nature of gangrene, it will spread over the whole country, if one does not confront it with fire and steel.’17

These chilling words were prescient. The violence and swiftness of the campaign was terrifying. Saverne was invested by the Catholics on 15 May 1525; the following day peasant relief force was defeated at Lupstein and a second band marching over from the Palatinate met the same fate at Neuwiller. The besieged peasants surrendered on 16 May and marched out unarmed under a white flag of surrender, but in consequence of a dispute between nearby mercenaries and the peasants a fight broke out, leading to a mass slaughter of the peasants. In this action alone 18,000 were slain. On his triumphal return to Nancy, the duke defeated another peasant band at Scherwiller on 20 May. During the battle, Catholic hearts were emboldened by a number of miraculous visions. Guise was himself bathed in rays of sunlight, a halo, which, with his shining sword, made him appear, so it was said, as an ‘angel exterminator’. 18

Following the campaign the brothers published an account which presented their deeds as a crusade undertaken by Christian knights. Since the first crusades God had chosen the House of Lorraine to defend the Catholic Church. Antoine and his brothers were fulfilling their historic mission; the peasants, having revolted against divinely instituted order, were compared to the Philistines. 19 Propaganda was required to justify the scale of the blood-letting, for tales of the slaughter of women and children were soon current in Germany and the duke compared to Herod by the Protestants. And there was suspicion that the ‘crusade’ had more to do with extension of political control over the fractured lordships of Alsace. Among those who agreed that the House of Lorraine was divinely inspired, however, were the Alsatian Jews, who feared lynching at the hands of the peasants.

Much later during the Wars of Religion the events of 1525 were seen as the link between the great crusading past of the House of Lorraine and the new crusade against heresy that began with the massacre of Wassy. This view is one that modern historians have reinforced. There are reasons for being cautious about this interpretation. There is no doubt that Claude, Duke of Guise—like his elder brother and his mother—was fiercely, one might even say violently, Catholic. In a letter of 1538, he informed the constable, Montmorency, that whenever he heard rumours about ‘this evil sect of heretics’ in his governorship he was quick to act. Claude considered life to be like a pilgrimage, in which one was at any moment in danger of ambush. He was proud of his role at Saverne. It is the only one of his battles named on the epitaph of his magnificent tomb executed by Primataccio, the leading Italian artist in France. The figure of Justice on the tomb displays no sign of clemency and displays Claude’s firmness in ordering a summary execution after the battle. But the context of Wassy was very different from that at Saverne. We should not presume that the son was impersonating the father. As we have seen, François de Guise did not evince the same moral certitude as his father, or justify himself in the same manner, although many ultra-Catholics wished him to do so, and he would later go out of his way to explain the massacre away and even apologize for it.