Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (15 page)

Warfare was in the process of radical change. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century fortifications had developed to deal with the advent of artillery. Sieges became longer and more complex and required more infantry and more specialists. In this respect, the duke was a very different type of general from his father: he was just as likely to be found in the trenches as cavorting with his mounted gendarmes, encouraging the ordinary foot soldiers, enquiring about their welfare and asking their opinion on tactics. The science of war now demanded much greater knowledge of logistics and attention to detail. Guise was both meticulous and, as his extensive letters to his agents and lieutenants in his governorship of Dauphiné show, a hard worker. He was interested in the minutiae of equipment and designed his own and ‘gave great forethought about munitions, victuals, military discipline and all other things necessary for long sieges’. 15 As a young man little else mattered to him beyond things martial.

The duke was happiest among his soldiers, his ‘compagnons’ as he called them, and on getting married to Anne d’Este in 1548 he told his wife: ‘Madame, there are those who marry in order to stay at home, but I am not one of those.’16 It was a brilliant marriage. Anne d’Este received a dowry of 150,000 livres. Since she was the granddaughter of Louis XII of France through the female line, it was significantly more than a non-royal French princess could command. The wedding festivities were on a royal scale. The bride and bridegroom met each other just outside Paris in early December. In order to break the ice, Anne and her prospective father-in-law arranged for one of her ladies to disguise herself as the bride. She was presented to François and kissed him, before being unmasked to much laughter. 17 The wedding party was conducted to the Hôtel de Reims, the Cardinal of Lorraine’s palace near the Place Saint-Michel, by an escort of 3,000. The wedding was followed by two weeks of festivities paid for by Henry II 
at a cost of 100,000 crowns. 

The marriage brought the Guise into the network of French alliances in Italy. The court of the bride’s father, Ercole II d’Este, at Ferrara was its hub, and, as one of the most magnificent courts in Europe, was having a profound influence on French taste. Immensely rich, Ercole was a major creditor of the French Crown. In fact, Henry II agreed to pay Anne’s dowry in lieu of money he owed Ercole. Anne’s upbringing had been unconventional for an Italian princess. Her mother, Renée of France, was an active supporter of the Protestant cause, which eventually forced her to return to France. Born in 1531, Anne was well educated. She was a competent Latinist and had a smattering of Greek. Following the de facto separation of her mother and father when she was six, she was raised in a largely French environment and, like her younger brothers and sisters, raised as a Protestant. This did not seem to have bothered the Guise unduly. Indeed, considering Guise political interests in Scotland, England and the Empire, it may have been viewed as a positive attribute. Anne’s faith was undogmatic and she adapted quickly to the demands of her new environment. Unusually for a woman, her library contained more history books than works of devotion and she seems to have been more comfortable with Herodotus, Guicciardini, Macchiavelli, and Froissart than books of hours.

The mask sometimes slipped. Lent was a chore to be endured. In a letter written just after Easter 1553, Cardinal Charles gently chided his sister-in-law that her rosaries were gathering dust and that he was sending them to his sister, the abbess of Saint-Pierre de Reims, in order to give them an airing. 18 Princesses were conventionally described as beautiful, but Anne was certainly regarded as more beautiful than that other famed beauty, Mary Stuart, who was eleven years her junior. More cultivated than Mary, Anne was soon indulging her passion for the arts, patronizing Italian artists, sculptors and actors. The court allowed her a measure of freedom from her severe mother-in-law and she was on intimate terms with Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and the many other Italians who surrounded the queen. One native humanist close to the Guise, Michel de l’Hôpital, named her Saint Venus. 19 Her husband showed less interest in the arts, though he shared her love of music, a passion he inherited from his father, and hunting. The marriage was conventionally happy: 
from 31 December 1549, when she gave birth to her first son, Henri, she was regularly pregnant, giving birth to five children in the next nine years. Like his father, François too seems to have been more than usually monogamous for an aristocrat, reflecting his mother’s disapproval and Spartan tastes. That said, there was one bastard daughter, probably born before their marriage. She was initially cared for at court by Anne, who found her ‘pretty and clever’, before being dispatched to join the crèche at Joinville. François’s love of crimson clothing was due to the attentions of a lady admirer, but the source of this gossip, Pierre de Brantôme, is unusually coy about her name, and since he was close to the Guise, his discretion is probably reflective of family sensibilities.

Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine was in this respect more like his brother than his uncle Jean, whose penchant for debauchery was legendary. In most other respects however Charles was different from his brother—a much more complex character, he sharply div ided contemporaries. All were agreed that Charles was charming and good-looking. He had the tallness of his house, his face was long, his complexion on the dark side, and his penetrating blue eyes, set beneath a lofty forehead, indicated a quick apprehension and an acute perception. He was a highly educated and cultivated man. His memory and eloquence were proverbial. Until the age of 10 he remained with his mother and then under the tutelage of uncle Jean, he began his studies at the aristocratic college of Navarre in Paris alongside his cousin Charles, the future Cardinal of Bourbon. When he entered the college he was already Archbishop of Reims, though he could not be consecrated until 1545. Created a cardinal on 27 July 1547, he took over the ecclesiastical empire that his uncle had built when he died in 1550. It comprised some of the richest and most prestigious monasteries in Europe: Cluny, Marmoutier, Fécamp, Montier-en-Der, Saint-Urbain, Saint-Martin de Laon, Saint-Paul de Verdun and Cormoy. Charles was well versed in Greek, a language that the Sorbonne suspected of being associated with heresy; Latin; Spanish; and Italian—he even understood the fiendish Venetian dia lect. His knowledge of foreign affairs was based on a network of informants: ‘one of his greatest expenses was in getting news from all parts of Christendom, and besides he had paid men and pensioners who sent him news from all parts’. 20

Plate 9 shows the portrait attributed to El Greco and which is claimed by art historians to have been painted in 1548 on his first visit to Venice. If this is so, then the cardinal looked a lot older than his 23 years. As late as 1547 he had not been able to grow a beard, so it seems more likely that it was painted on his other visits in 1556 or 1563. The parrot in the window is a reference to his eloquence, which even Protestants recognized. Calvin’s chief lieutenant, Theódore Beza, is reputed to have remarked that ‘if he had as much elegance as the Cardinal of Lorraine, he would hope to convert half the population of France’. 21 Unlike most of his fellow prelates he was comfortable preaching and did so regularly at Lent and Easter, although one commentator found his Easter sermons at Reims cathedral, which could last up to an hour and a half, ‘were not so profound in theology as full of eloquence’. 22 This was an unfair charge, for the cardinal knew his scripture; but it points to what made the cardinal so controversial: he was too clever by half. His undoubted diplomatic skills could easily be misinterpreted as dissimulation, an attribute more commonly associated with the suave Italian than the bluff and honest Frenchman. He was portrayed as a schemer and stirrer, which fed on deep fears of Machiavellian intriguers, who were by nature cowardly and unmanly. Charles remained an enigma to contemporaries.

Whereas his brother, the soldier, was expected to be affable and open, the skills required by the diplomat, courtier, and financier are very different. The former qualities were recognized in the duke even by his enemies; the latter were hardly seen as qualities at all and served to reinforce the stereotype of the worldly and unscrupulous cleric.

Today, we are more likely to find the cardinal’s complexity beguiling and fascinating, but for contemporaries his inconsistency and ambi guity were evidence of his hypocrisy. There are certainly grounds for these charges. In some ways the cardinal was austere. Like his mother he fasted on Saturdays as well as on Fridays and he wore a hair shirt at appropriate times. Like his fellow Christian humanists, he disdained the hunt and kept neither dogs nor horses nor birds. He did not gamble and was sober and abstemious at table. He took frequent exercise in his gardens and arcades, not merely on medical advice, to preserve his health, which was never strong, but because he liked it. But there was also something of the Epicurean about him, a man who enjoyed the benefits of his position and whose benefices and expertise in financial matters would one day make him the richest man in the kingdom.

Charges of cupidity and avarice against him cannot be discounted, given his unprecedented accumulation of benefices. An inventory of 1551 shows that in two years he ordered no less than 120 exquisitely made objects for his household, such as chandeliers, a dining service, lamps, and various pieces of tableware, each one fashioned from the most sumptuous material, either silver, crystal, or gold, sometimes finished with elaborate engraving or precious jewels. 23 These commissions were ordered to augment the twenty-five chests of antiquities, which included bronze and marble statues, he had brought back from Rome the year before.

With power came arrogance. Like all princes of the Church he was highly sensitive about his dignity; but Charles’s status consciousness was so extreme that it alienated his peers. Cardinal Odet de Châtillon found it ‘strange’ that, as the leader of the French delegation to the papal conclave of 1550, he had so little regard for his compatriots, joking at their expense that ‘they were only there to make up the numbers’. 24 And this vanity was manifested in a certain vindictiveness towards those who dared challenge him or whom he felt had betrayed him. In contrast to his elder brother, he had a tendency to lose control of his temper in public—in one tantrum he tore off his red hat and stamped it on the ground.

His private life too was full of contradictions. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘he led a life that was open, honest, and suitable to his station, in contrast to other prelates of his court who were licentious by nature’. 25 Brantôme, who admitted that he was ‘saintly’ and ‘devout’, also suggested that as a young man he was something of a libertine. The man who professes to be more pious than his neighbour is always open to charges of hypocrisy.

Charles’s arrogance and vanity sharpened the barbs of court gossip, and few of the rumours were true. There was at least one product of his youthful indiscretion, a girl, Isabelle d’Arné, who in 1560 was sent to Spain as companion to Elizabeth of France, wife of Philip II.

Charles did not only share the financial affairs of the family with his mother. He looked after his sister Marie’s interests in France. In early 1553, for example, he wrote that he was looking to invest her income in property and that he had moved her furniture and jewellery to his château of Meudon near Paris for safe keeping. 26 He was also intimately involved with the education of his younger brothers, nieces, and nephews. In particular, since Mary Stuart was at court, he had responsibility for her and he was closely involved in the establishment of her independent household in January 1554, keeping his sister informed of her progress. According to her governess, although all the brothers were fond of their niece, ‘the cardinal showed her such great affection, as if she were his own’.27 He would remain her mentor for the rest of his life. An equally important resident at court during Mary’s childhood was her cousin, Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, who was two months her junior. The cardinal was appointed his tutor and kept a close eye on him, reporting to his sister in Scotland in 1553 how well he was and how much he was in the king’s good graces. 28

Differing characters though they were, the two brothers shared a strong belief in their duty of service to the king and in their joint mission to further the fortunes of their family. Charles wrote a letter to François in July 1551, consoling him on the birth of a ‘mere’ daughter the previous week with the knowledge that Madame de Montpensier, Madame de la Marck, and the Duke of Nevers had already offered their sons: ‘if we know how to play our roles, we will have the pick of them’. 29 In the 1550s, duty to family and patrie were not incompatible but complementary, since royal and family policy was united against a common enemy: the House of Habsburg. Much has been made by historians of François de Lorraine’s regal preten sions and the fashion in which he signed himself simply ‘Francoys’, like a monarch. In fact, he only did this in his capacity as royal governor and viceroy, a right that was his due as he was representing the figure of the monarch in person. The device of the cardinal (see Plate 10) reflected the binding of the dynasty to the Valois: it showed a pyramid surmounted with ivy and the motto, Te stante virebo, ‘With you standing I shall flourish’. This was a common device throughout Europe; its symbolism was explained to Elizabeth I thus:

A mightie spyre, whose toppe dothe pierce the skie, 
An ivie greene imbraceth rounde about, 
And while it standes, the same doth bloome on highe, 
But when it shrinkes, the ivie standes in dowt:
The Piller great, our gratious Princes is:
The braunche, the Churche: whoe speakes unto hir this.
I, that of late with stormes was almost spent, 
And brused sore with Tirants bluddie bloes, 
Whome fire, and sworde, with persecution rent, 
Am nowe sett free, and overlooke my foes, 
And whiles thow raignst, oh most renowmed Queene 
By thie supporte my blossome shall bee greene.