Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (12 page)

Claude had substantial outgoings too. At this time his annual expenditure was nearly 75,000 livres but his income only just short of 65,000 livres, a shortfall of nearly 10,000 livres, which had to be met by borrowing. 33 He had a salaried household of 113 on his accounts, which included three secretaries, two physicians, a surgeon, four valets, an apothecary, nine stable-hands, three musicians, a pastry cook, a sauce-maker and a sauce-maker’s assistant. One of his best-paid servants was the man who cared for his tents, a vital necessity on campaign and while out hunting. 34 Preferring life at Joinville to court, Claude indulged his passion for horses, building up one of the greatest studs in France, where there were never less than 100 or 120 horses. His position as head of the royal hunt required him to do this, but he also opened his establishment to the local squires and offered year-long riding apprenticeships at his own expense—a shrewd way of dispensing patronage and spotting the best local talent. The greatest expense was building. Little is known about the upper château, which dominated the town, since it was destroyed during the French Revolution. It was ‘a magnificent structure, in front of which was a long terrace clinging to the sides of a rocky outcrop wider than seven metres supported by buttresses’.35 Above the terrace was a ground-floor gallery with tall windows, which were decorated with cornices and columns. The upper floors were the principal living quarters, from where there were magnificent views across the hills and down into the Marne valley below. The rest of the palace was a clutter of buildings whose dimensions were determined by the rocky spur on which it was built, the entire complex being protected by a wall and tall towers. Between 1533 and 1546 Claude built himself a second palace on the banks of the Marne inspired by what he had seen at Fontainebleau and designed principally for his family’s pleasure.

Beautifully embellished in the latest Renaissance style, it had a grace which the older fortified palace lacked. The iconography was largely martial. Here and there on the fac¸ade, sculpted between Antoinette’s and Claude’s initials, was the emblem taken from his father’s banner which represented an arm extending from a cloud holding a sword, but now joined by the biblical device Fecit potentiam in bracchio suo (He hath showed strength with his arm), signifying that political authority rests on military might. Inside there was a ballroom for receptions and festivities. The pleasure garden was watered by a canal and three fountains; it had its own little wood attached for promenades, as well as an orchard—in which grew oranges, lemons, and pomegranates—and a croquet lawn. By permission, Joinville’s bourgeoisie could pass the time here and admire the latest in civilized recreation.

Amid these worldly delights Antoinette’s children were not permitted to forget their devotions. The upper château had its own church, where there were a number of relics, including the belt of Saint Joseph brought back from the crusades, and the pious benefactions of successive lords allowed for an establishment of nine canons, two vicars, four choristers, and a choir master. Servants were expected to behave in a manner befitting their station, to know their catechism, and hear Mass and sermons regularly. Antoinette was much concerned with the poor, spending her leisure time stitching clothes for them while listening to pious readings. Alms were distributed regularly: 400 poor girls provided with dowries, and 100 bursaries provided to poor students. Legend has it that once, after her sons returned from a hunt, she was angered to discover that they had trampled the fields of local peasants, and so the following day she served them no bread at table: ‘My children we have to save on flour, since you have destroyed next year’s crop.’36 Antoinette’s daily expense account, a fragment of which survives in the British Library, gives credence to this tale. Lent was strictly enforced at home and there were doles of peas and salt for the poor. She was doubly pious: not only did she renounce the eating of meat on Fridays, but followed the same regime throughout her life on Saturdays as well. Better-quality wine and more lavish food were served when her husband or sons were in town.

Frugality did not mean that Joinville was cold and unwelcoming.

On 8 September 1539 Antoinette wrote to her daughter in Scotland that her father and seven siblings had arrived ‘to dance at our feast tomorrow’. 37 ‘Our’ feast refers to the holiday of San Gennaro (9 September according to the Julian calendar), patron saint of Naples, an indication of how family tradition kept alive the dream of the Angevin empire. Children were present at Joinville throughout her life, and the great disparity in ages between them meant that the eldest had married and on occasion moved in with their wives and children while their younger siblings were still being cared for by their mother. Particularly significant in the beginning were the children of Antoinette’s eldest daughter, Marie, who were joined later by the wives and sons of François, Claude II, and René. In 1534, Marie had married Louis, Duke of Longueville, who claimed royal descent through his great-grandfather, the bastard of Orléans, heroic companion of Joan of Arc. Louis did not live to see their son’s second birthday in 1537 and when Marie remarried James V and went to Scotland she left the boy, François, affectionately known as the ‘little duke’, with his grandmother and grandfather at Joinville. She would not see him for another twelve years. The estates which fell to the Guise as a result of this wardship, one of the greatest patrimonies in France, were a considerable boost to their income. Once again, it was Antoinette who looked after the management of the estates, keeping her daughter informed on the minutiae of administration: how much timber had been cut on one manor, which posts needed filling in another. The little duke’s household was dominated by Guise servants—Jacques de la Brosse was appointed his governor. In 1547, he was briefly joined by his half-sister Mary Stuart, who had become a precious commodity on the death of her father and whose safety in Scotland could no longer be guaranteed. To protect her from English hands she was sent to her grandmother, before, as befitted royal princesses, joining the royal court. Barely 6 years old, she enchanted Antoinette: ‘Our little queen is in as good spirits as possible’, she wrote to her eldest son, ‘and I assure you that she is the prettiest and best [girl] of her age that you’ve ever seen.’38

The letters of the little duke to his mother are touching and give us a glimpse of private life at Joinville. Claude indulged his grandson: ‘he was so crazy about him that he never saw him by half’. 39 Aged 7, François wrote in a childish scrawl to his mother about how he played with his grandfather and uncles and then picnicked with them in the garden of the new château, of how every night his aunt put him to bed and how he said his ‘Ave’ for his mother and his aunt and for the dead and departed, of how he went pig-sticking and hawking with his grandfather. But he was a sickly child carried everywhere in a litter.

He died in 1551 aged only fifteen, the only consolation for his mother being that she had briefly returned to France and was able to nurse him during his final illness.

Antoinette may have been pious and the atmosphere of Joinville austere and religiously conservative, but her attitude to heretics was more complicated than it might first appear. Marguerite of Navarre, champion of the evangelical party, visited Joinville and was on good terms with her cousin. She was, as her children would be, perfectly capable of maintaining friendly, even warm, relationships with individual Protestants. One of her closest friends, Françoise d’Amboise, Countess of Seninghem, converted to Protestantism around 1558 and corresponded with Calvin.40 She and her sons, who also became Protestants, lived in the neighbouring château of Reynel and were frequent visitors to Joinville at this time, although out of respect for their host they did not eat meat during Lent. 41 While they may have had their differences on matters of theology, the two women were united by the depth of their piety. There are many other examples of ties of friendship and kinship cutting across the religious divide; towards their fellow princes in particular, the Guise were inclined to be indulgent. It seems that Antoinette and her children made a clear distinction between privately held beliefs and public worship, with its associations of seditious assembly. Even here they had to be pragmatic, as Marie’s policy towards Protestants in Scotland shows. Likewise, during the Longueville wardship, Claude de Guise permitted the principality of Neuchâtel, which lay on the Swiss border, to maintain its religious freedoms. Ironically, Neuchâtel was to become a base for the evangelization of Champagne.

With ten children to provide for, the resources of the Catholic Church were however crucial to the maintenance of the family patrimony. The Church played as great a role as marriage in furthering the dynasty; benefices passed from generation to generation in a similar way to offices and estates, becoming virtual possessions to be handed down the generations. Not only did two of Claude and Antoinette’s sons, Charles and Louis, become cardinals, but lesser benefices provided for the rest of their children. Dowries could cripple family finances and two daughters were kept out of the marriage market altogether: Renée was abbess of Saint-Pierre de Reims from 1542 until her death in 1602 and briefly of Origny and of Poulengy; Antoinette was abbess of Saint-Paul-les-Beauvais and then of Faremoutier from 1555 until her early death in 1561. Even Claude’s bastard son by his mistress was provided with an abbey (Saint-Nicaise in Reims), and later the rich picking of Cluny to keep him in his old age.

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The first generation of the Guise family came to an end in 1550. On the 2 April 1550, Antoinette wrote to ‘my son, my love’ to hurry to Joinville because of the ‘grievious illness’ of his father who was ‘suffering a lot’. Five doctors, one summoned from Troyes and two from Beaune, could not save him. Claude died on 12 April 1550, surrounded by his wife, his eldest son, François, now aged 31, his youngest son, René, still a teenager, and François’s 3-month-old baby, Henri. Antoinette had no thoughts of following her mother into a convent. As dowager Duchess of Guise, she was guaranteed a significant income and her husband’s will stipulated that she would have ownership of Joinville until her death. She would rarely leave home in future; habitually dressed in mourning clothes she dedicated herself to looking after her grandchildren and the family finances. Not only was she able to pay off her husband’s debts and distribute the 10,000 livres in alms he had left in his will, but she had money left over to acquire more land and repair and expand the two palaces at Joinville.

As the son of a king, Claude required a royal funeral, and so it was delayed while preparations were made and his other sons hurried back from distant parts of Europe—his fourth son, Claude II, making the long and dangerous journey from Scotland. In the meantime, Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine, also died and his body was carried to Saint-Laurent church in the old castle at Joinville to lie beside his brother. Every morning two high Masses were sung for them, after which the dowager duchess sprinkled them with holy water—an act she performed forty times before Jean was moved for burial with the Franciscans at Nancy. Royal burials were different from those accorded to ordinary mortals, because an effigy of the king played a prominent role. Its presence served as a reminder that the king never dies—that the state is an entity that endures despite the death of its head. So, while Claude’s body lay in Saint-Laurent, a shrine was erected in the nearby convent in the suburb of Saint-Jacques, which he had founded, and his effigy, dressed in a grey doublet and grey satin breeches and draped in a huge golden cloak, was placed on a large bed, richly covered with purple velvet stitched with the eaglets and crosses of Lorraine. The effigy, whose silk-gloved hands were joined in prayer, was draped in expensive jewellery, including a golden ducal crown, studded with precious stones, estimated to be worth 80,000 crowns.

The convent was brilliantly illuminated by scores of candles, hung with rich tapestries, one of which represented the story of Esau and Jacob, and the floor covered with a Persian carpet. At the foot of the bed there was a table for the dead prince and an ornate chair and superb dais. On an empty chair was laid the duke’s hat and cloak with its insignia denoting his membership of the royal Order of Saint Michel. Arranged on the altar were the precious contents of the duke’s chapel: reliquaries, crucifixes of gold and silver, paintings, and other devotional objects. In the pulpit one could see the duke’s book of hours open at an appropriate page, and there was a stool nearby for the almoner, who, during the funeral Mass ‘presented the Bible and Pax board to the effigy, without however permitting it to kiss them’. 42 On Tuesday 25 June the strangest ritual of the ceremony took place in front of a large congregation. For the next week, at lunch and dinner, a ‘royal’ feast was prepared for the effigy, and once grace had been said the meat was distributed among the poor.

The following Monday the funeral began at Saint-Laurent at 8 am.

It lasted for seven hours. At the church entrance hung a picture of the Passion, to its left a picture of a fierce lion confronting Claude on his knees and behind him his patron saint, Saint Claude, on which a Latin device recalled the Epistle of Saint Peter: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ On top of the funeral car there was mounted a small figure of a rhinoceros, the beast which dominates all others, carrying a large cross of Lorraine. Outside a temporary stand had been constructed so that the crowds could see the cortege, which was headed by twelve criers with bells, one hundred paupers dressed in black and a further one hundred dressed in white, followed by local dignitaries, clergy, the family itself, ducal subjects and household officers, grandees, and plenipotentiaries from France, Lorraine, Scotland, Flanders and Italy. Esquires led his finest horses, including his barded warhorse; his spurs, lance, gauntlets and harness were carried by seven gentlemen; his shield and the ensign was followed by eight banners representing his maternal and paternal ancestors. Next came the effigy on its bed of honour carried by twenty gentlemen. The rear was brought up with the kin of the Guise, many of whom will reappear in the course of our story: the Duke of Ferrara; the 20-year-old Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé; the Count of Brienne, representing the House of Luxembourg, who as a mark of particular respect came with twenty-five paupers dressed at his own expense; and several members of the House of Croÿ.