Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (11 page)

We should be wary of oversimplifying the religious sentiments of the Guise and of accepting ultra-Catholicism as an overriding imperative of family strategy. Marie de Guise, for example, was educated at Pont-à-Mousson under the tutelage of Philippa of Guelders and immersed in the ascetic life of a Poor Clare: cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Despite her experience there and the formidable influence that her grandmother exercised over her family, throughout her regency in Scotland she would display extraordinary tolerance towards her Protestant subjects. In France, there were many powerful vested interests which opposed not only heresy but also reform from within the Catholic Church, most notably the Sorbonne, still considered then to be the pre-eminent university in Europe. Against them were ranged those associated with the new learning, who wished to base worship and liturgy more closely on the Gospels, which had been translated into French from the Greek in the 1520s. Like many families, the Guise were divided on these issues. It would be wrong to assume that they were united as representatives of a backward-looking aesthetic resistant to change. Philippa had entrusted the education of her sons for eleven years to a theologian, Nicolas le Clerc, a man so conservative that he would be lampooned by Rabelais as one of the ignorant Sorbonagres and imprisoned in 1533 by the king for attacking his sister, the leading supporter of the evangelical movement.

But the career of Philippa’s third son, Jean, shows that an ultra-orthodox upbringing did not necessarily forge ultra-orthodox minds.

Born in Bar in 1498, Jean was the founder of the Guise ecclesiastical empire and, as such, no less important in the founding of the family fortune than his elder brother. He was an utterly different personality from the dour Claude. He was much happier at court, perhaps because he had the natural charm of a diplomat, but also because he had an eye for the ladies. It was said that whenever a new girl or lady arrived at court he would inspect them and offer ‘to break them in’. 20 There was a playful side to this behaviour too. When the Duchess of Savoy haughtily offered her hand for him to kiss, instead of presenting her cheek, he grabbed her and planted one on her lips.

But even a commentator favourable to the Guise could not conceal the fact that ‘there was hardly a girl or lady resident at court or recently arrived who had not been debauched or ensnared by the money and largesse of the cardinal’. Jean’s penchant for dressing up as a woman, though common in the macho world of the Renaissance court, was hardly becoming of a prince of the Church and is indicative of how far life in Francis’s entourage differed from that at Joinville.

He was also handy at tennis, falconry, and lucky at the gaming table, winning £46 12s 6d from Henry VIII at a summit in Boulogne in 1532. 21 This sort of behaviour made him a boon companion of Francis I.

Apart from feeling at home in the bar-room atmosphere of court, Jean was also known for his generosity to the poor. Every morning without fail his valet filled a bag with several hundred crowns, which would be dispersed to the poor that day. Jean could easily afford such ostentatious liberality. He was the richest prelate in France. At the age of only 3, he had been named coadjutor of the bishopric of Metz and by 20 he was a cardinal. Even by the standards of his time, his accumulation of benefices was astonishing, indicating a level of intimacy with the king that his brother never achieved. To Francis he was a ‘companion of the heart’, sharing the king’s interest in the arts and he was admitted to the Privy Council in 1530. 22 He juggled the possession of no less than eleven dioceses throughout his life. Some were held only briefly before resigning them to men whose careers he wished to promote; others were earmarked for his nephews or administered by ‘straw men’ who handed over a cut of their revenue. He held on to the three wealthiest—Metz, Narbonne, and Albi—for the duration of his life.

He was abbot of thirteen monasteries during his career, including some of the richest in the kingdom, such as Fécamp, Marmoutier, and Gorze.

Many of these benefices owned significant property in Paris. Jean established his principal residence in the magnificent palace of his abbey of Cluny, situated on the Left Bank. Built between 1485 and 1498, it is one of the greatest examples of Parisian Renaissance architecture. In Guise possession until 1621, it was where James V lodged when he came to Paris in 1536 and it can still be visited today as the National Museum of Medieval Art. Jean had it sumptuously refurbished in the latest Renaissance style, employing Italians, like Cellini, who had worked at Fontainebleau, and filling it with
objets d’art
purchased by his agents in Rome and Venice. Its purpose was to house a salon devoted to the latest art and music.

Jean and Claude were both great music lovers. Clément Janequin, the most famous and prolific composer of popular
chansons
in Renaissance France, first composed for Claude in 1528, with his song
La Chasse
, which celebrated the duke’s recent promotion to the head of the royal hunt. For the next thirty years Janequin composed several works for various members of the family, and when he died in 1558 he was chaplain of the ducal household. A family tradition of music patronage had begun which would last for another 150 years. The Guise were not just appreciative listeners: Jean’s nephew, Charles, was a good lute player. When the composer of madrigals and choirmaster of the Sistine chapel, Jacques Arcadelt, quit papal service in 1553 to become choirmaster of the Guise court, it was recognition that the family ranked among the most cultured patrons in Europe. Arcadelt’s popularity—his music was popular in Italy and France for more than a century and his first book of madrigals was reprinted no less than fifty-eight times—was built on his gift for marrying Italian and French styles and for writing catchy tunes which were easy to play and sing. Arcadelt’s move to France has been called ‘the most significant musical event of the decade’. 23

The Guise recognized the propaganda uses of music. The glorious defence of Metz (1553) by Claude’s son, François, was celebrated in a composition for five voices composed by Janequin, a genre of heroic song that was reprised by Janequin’s imitator Guillaume Costeley in his four-voice panegyric to the duke’s capture of Calais in 1558. The Italian-style music that emanated from the Guise court in the years before the Wars of Religion had an immense influence, inspiring poets like Ronsard and du Bellay.

Thus far, Jean fits the pattern of a worldly and cultured Renaissance cardinal. What marked him out from other princes of the Church, and indeed, his own family, was that he belonged to the evangelical wing of the French, or Gallican Church. 24 He did not hide his beliefs, to the extent that for a decade the Protestants thought him a fellow traveller.

In 1526 a correspondent of the Basel reformer, Guillaume Farel, reported that he often talked to the cardinal at court and found him ‘certainly not unfavourable towards the Gospels’. 25 And the following year the reformer, Capito, wrote favourably to Zwingli of Jean’s protection of imprisoned evangelicals and of his support for clerical marriage. In the decades before 1564, when the Council of Trent finally established the boundaries of orthodoxy in the Catholic Church, it was common for educated Catholics to hold beliefs that would later be considered dissident. The limits of Jean’s tolerance were tested by people he considered sectarian riff-raff, or Anabaptists, and he assisted his brother in the campaign of 1525, raising troops and burning two heretics in Metz. But his protection of others reveals the growing polarization between Catholics in this period. In the 1520s, the Sorbonne, and in particular the fanatical Noël Beda, launched a campaign against those who sought to use the new humanist learning to translate and reinterpret the bible. One of Beda’s principal targets was his former pupil at Montaigu College, Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus turned to the Cardinal of Lorraine for help against the conservatives, dedicating his 1527 translation of the commentary on the epistles of the Galatians safe in the knowledge that ‘you have always in your hands the Gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles'. 26

Psalm-singing was the classic form of worship associated with the Calvinists, and Calvin had engaged Clément Marot, a leading poet and evangelical who had composed for the cardinal until his denunciation as a heretic in 1535, to translate them into French. The Protestant hymn book was born. In 1545 the Sorbonne condemned Marot’s translation. However, the Psalms were not only sung by Protestants—there were many evangelical Catholics who defied the ban. And there were other vernacular translations of the Psalms used by both Catholics and Protestants alike. Those of Jean de Poictevan, a humanist who based his translations on Greek and Hebrew texts, were dedicated to the Cardinal of Lorraine. In his preface, Poictevan made specific reference to the 1545 prohibition on unauthorized biblical translations, indicating that his defiance of the Sorbonne was due to the cardinal’s protection. In 1548 and 1549, Louis des Masures, translator of Virgil and a friend to leading Protestant intellectuals such as Ramus and Calvin’s chief lieutenant, Beza, undertook to finish off Marot’s work. At this time he was the cardinal’s principal secretary and councillor and had spent the previous twenty years in a circle of writers who had gathered round Jean in an atmosphere that was humanist, Erasmian, and evangelical. Towards the end of his life Francis I turned against the evangelicals and persecution of those suspected of heterodox beliefs was stepped up. The net did not only sweep up Protestants. Marot fled France in 1543, but the austere environment of Geneva was not conducive to poetry and he moved to Italy where he died in 1544. Marot’s friend and fellow humanist Etienne Dolet was less fortunate; on return from Italian exile in 1546 he was condemned by the Sorbonne as a relapsed atheist and burned at the stake. Rabelais had more powerful protectors: when the
Tiers Livre
was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1546 he fled to Metz, knowing that the Cardinal of Lorraine was bishop there and that he would be unharmed. 27

Jean’s interest in and patronage of humanist learning developed alongside his diplomatic activities; his specialization in Italian affairs complementing his intellectual interests—he was a notable patron of Italian vernacular poetry. At the age of only 17 he had been appointed French ambassador to the Holy See. In the papal conclave in 1534, he led the French delegation and successfully promoted the candidacy of Alexander Farnese, who as Paul III was more reform-minded than other candidates, but who was less compliant to French wishes than he hoped. At home, Jean posed as the protector of Italians and of Italian interests, and they in turned recognized him as the most important go-between with the king. In 1535 the papal nuncio went as far as to call him ‘half of the king’s soul'. 28 Visits to Italy on royal business were also an opportunity for Jean to promote his own interests and to further the careers of his own men. In Rome, he used his considerable influence to obtain the cardinal’s hat for one of his own clients in 1538 over and above the king’s preference.

Guise fortunes in Italy changed suddenly in 1547 when a revolt in Naples against the viceroy, Pedro of Toledo, gave hope to the pro-French faction in Rome, which included the Neapolitan exile community, the
fuorusciti
. The brilliant marriage of Claude’s eldest son François in December 1548 to Anne d’Este, granddaughter of Louis XII, must be seen in this context. In his marriage contract François made mention of his Angevin heritage in a gesture to the
fuorusciti
, among whom was the Prince of Melfi, French commander of Piedmont, who assured François of his pride in being ‘among the oldest servants of the House of Anjou’. 29 Another gesture—the attempt of François’s younger brother Charles to take the title Anjou when he was elected cardinal—was foiled by the French ambassador. And the high point of this Italian policy was reached when, with the support of French cash, the Cardinal of Lorraine came within four votes of being elected as successor to Paul III in 1549. He was on his way back to Italy when he was seized by an apoplexy and died while dining at Nogent-sûr-Loire on 10 May 1550, having laid the foundations of Guise domination of the French Church and influence in the Italian peninsula.

* * * *

Life at Joinville was more prosaic. Between 1515 and 1536 Antoinette de Bourbon gave birth every other year; of her twelve children, ten survived to adulthood: Marie (1515), François (1519), Louise (1520), Renée (1522), Charles (1524), Claude II (1526), Louis (1527), Antoinette (1531), a second François (1534) and René (1536).

Antoinette’s faith in the saints prepared her for the rigours of childbirth and, since in those days nearly half of newborns did not reach the age of 10, her devotion paid dividends. Not only had she an ever-growing household to care for, but unlike her husband and brother-in-law, who were expected to live beyond their means, she was frugal. Her role went beyond the day-to-day expenditure of feeding and clothing the household at Joinville: she looked after her husband’s accounts and, in conjunction with financial officials, advised him on expenditure. In 1520, Claude made her proxy for all his affairs. Two years later, she chided him for spending too much money while on campaign, on wining and dining his Swiss guard, and dressing them too extravagantly.30 The role of financial advisor was one she would fulfil for her sons and her grandsons too.

Guise fortunes depended much on royal largesse. During the Renaissance, kings at war were always strapped for cash and commanders at the front were expected to dig deep into their own pockets and seek recompense later. Francis I was forced to resort to ever more desperate expedients to fund his wars against Charles V. In a society that was cash poor, it was easier to reward followers with offices, lands, and titles. Technically, the royal domain was sacrosanct, and the Parlement of Paris, charged with protecting its integrity, was also concerned at the practice of mortgaging royal income years in advance. In 1520, for example, Guise obtained the revenue from the royal salt depots on his lands at Mayenne, la Ferté Bernard, Guise, and Joinville. 31 The Parlement initially resisted the elevation of Guise to a duchy in 1527 on the grounds that its financial concessions were too generous. As the theatre of operations spread and the costs of war rose, so Francis became more generous: in 1541 Claude was awarded a gift of 30,000 livres, in addition to his annual pension of 16,000 livres as a provincial governor, 2,800 livres as captain of a company of one hundred men-at-arms, and 3,000 livres as
Grand Veneur
. 32