Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (19 page)

To loud cheers the wedding party returned to the bishop’s palace for the private banquet. At 5 pm there was a new procession to the Palais, official residence of the Parlement of Paris, a few hundred yards from the cathedral at the opposite end of the Ile de la Cité. In order to maximize the drama, Guise chose a route which wound its way indirectly, crossing the Pont Notre-Dame into the heart of business and residential districts of the Right Bank before returning across the Pont au Change, which was lined with shops and houses. The state banquet organized by the duke and his cousin the Prince of Condé was accompanied by entertainments on a vast scale to impress foreign ambassadors and the city’s dignitaries. The theme was the triple monarchy of the Franco-British empire. Six giant mechanical ships were constructed, as if to emphasize this was a seaborne empire.

Ronsard, the star of the Pleáide, the most fashionable collective of poets in France, began the festivities with an epic poem in honour of the Guise. He was followed by a panegyric from Michel de l’Hôpital, president of the Court of Accounts, that boasted of how Mary’s marriage would subjugate England ‘without murder and war’. The underlying message was that the marriage would make Scotland and England provinces of the French empire, a dream that was made tangible by the secret clauses of the marriage treaty. Under the influence of her uncles, Mary passed her rights to Scotland and her claim to the throne of England to her husband should she die without posterity. The Cardinal of Lorraine even proposed that the crown of Scotland be removed to Saint-Denis for safekeeping. Later that year Henry issued a law granting letters of French citizenship to all Scots and thereby extending his sovereignty over them. It was the first step towards incorporating Scotland into an ‘imperial’ monarchy modelled on the example of the Roman Empire.

Anyone who has organized a wedding will know that the seating arrangements for dinner are the most likely to cause friction among the guests. Happily, the awkward conundrum of where to seat the king’s mistress does not arise today. Mary Stuart’s wedding planners were fortunate in that they had the largest and most magnificent table in Europe at their disposal. The Table of Marble was mainly used in the Palais for legal and administrative business, but it could also double up as a stage for theatrical performances. Members of the lesser aristocracy and the Parisian civic elite sat further away according to their rank. The top table was a microcosm of the ideal social hierarchy as conceived by the Guise. There was no member of the Montmorency family among the thirty-five people on the top table, except Odet de Châtillon, who took his place alongside three other cardinals. The other members of the wider Guise family were all princes: the Houses of Bourbon, the la Marck, the Clèves-Nevers and the Orléans-Longueville were all represented. And the king’s mistress was here too, seated between her daughters. The composition of the table also pointed to future family tensions. Leaving aside the king and queen, the bride and groom, and the papal legate, twelve of the remaining thirty guests were either practising Protestants already or soon to convert.

Their fellow princes’ private beliefs were a relatively unimportant matter for the Guise. They had reached the height of their influence and power, and had every interest in maintaining the status quo and turning a blind eye to things which did not perturb it. During this period the distinction between royal power and Guise power became blurred. Contemporary estimates which put the Guise fortune in this period at around 600,000 livres per annum are almost certainly too low. We can put this figure in context by comparing it to the annual income of Elizabeth I in the first decade of her reign, which was in the region of 200,000 pounds sterling. Since the English pound was usually reckoned to be just over ten times the value of the French pound, the Guise were worth more than 25 per cent of the Crown of England. But this seriously underestimates the reach of their power, because the King of France enjoyed powers of patronage that were unequalled by all but the Habsburgs. And in Montmorency’s absence the Guise came close to its total control, the duke being responsible for military posts and the cardinal for civil offices. He already controlled ecclesiastical appointments. In 1554 he wrote to his ‘sister’, Marguerite of Bourbon, Duchess of Nevers, that he would ensure that the abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Nevers would not be given to anyone she did not approve of, and in his own hand he added: 
‘watch that you do not go and have yourself a daughter, but give us a little priest and I’ll help you turn him into an honest man’. 6 Every day the brothers had to deal with requests for favours from all over France. Pierre Rémon, a magistrate of the Parlement of Rouen, wrote to the Duke of Guise in favour of a nephew’s promotion to the royal falconers, which would ‘increase and augment his wages...so that he has better means of doing good service to the king and also to you’. When Rémon himself died in 1553 the Cardinal of Lorraine was pitted against his brother and mother in supporting rival candidates to the post. The seigneur of Escavolles, whom the king had awarded a meagre pension, wrote from Toul to request an office in Burgundy, which he could resell for 1,400 or 1,500 crowns. 

On a different level, the war disrupted trade and created all sorts of shortages, so that certain luxuries could only be obtained through influence. In 1558 the Princess of la Roche-sûr-Yon wrote to the duke, her cousin, to complain about the difficulty of obtaining good claret. Her request for a permit to ship 100 tons was sweetened by the prospect that she ‘would be better able to treat M. the marquis [of Elbeuf] your brother with my niece his wife, whom we are expecting in these parts this spring’.

Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, accounted for half the family’s income. In the era before Trent, bishops were regarded primarily as administrators of their temporal lands. Spiritual leadership was left to others. Charles had brushed aside opposition from the constable to inherit part of his uncle’s portfolio. During his career Charles held twenty-four or so abbeys at one time or another, only four of which had been inherited from his uncle; it was his political ascendancy in the 1550s that allowed him to collect what benefices he pleased. 7 The major prize in his collection was Saint-Denis, the spiritual home of the kings of France and the richest monastery in France. As abbot
in commendam
, he took the income from his abbeys and made appointments, but left the praying to others. The treasurers of each abbey sent annual accounts, which were checked by his secretaries and then signed by the cardinal himself. This fiscal regime could stretch the monastic ideal of poverty to its limits: the monks of Bec in Normandy complained that the stewards responsible for the abbey’s administration left them so little they barely had enough to eat. Abbots and bishops were significant lords in their own right. As abbot of Fécamp, for example, the cardinal had the right to appoint the town captain of this port on the English Channel. Influence reached far into the rural hinterland as the petty gentry competed for minor benefices and to place their younger sons and daughters into monasteries. Charles d’Aubourg from Normandy had nine sisters. He offset this misfortune by becoming an esquire in the Duke of Guise’s household, enabling him to get seven of them into convents!

The power that control of the Church gave to the Guise can be seen in the career of the fourth Guise brother, Louis, who became cardinal in 1555. In one sense Louis was a nonentity. Pamphlets denouncing him as the ‘cardinal of the bottles’ were more than Protestant propaganda. Charles complained to François in 1556 that their brother was ‘always lazing about. He acts like a king and there is no order to guard him’. Louis did not need to exert himself. At the age of 18 in 1545 he was Bishop of Troyes. He inherited Albi from his uncle in 1550 but resigned it to become Archbishop of Sens in 1560; two years later he turned Sens over to a family servant. He then retained only Metz, which had been given by his brother in 1551 and which afforded an income of 80,000 livres per annum. Louis may have been overshadowed by his elder brother, but he was an extremely resourceful benefice hunter too. He inherited none of his uncle’s monasteries, but traded in thirteen abbeys during his lifetime; the greatest, which included St Victor in Paris—home to one of Europe’s largest libraries—he kept for most of his life.

Households displayed the grandeur and generosity of the prince. Duke François supported a household of 156 persons in 1556 rising to 164 in 1561. At this time his wife’s household contained fifty-five people at a cost of 4,435 livres per annum. The Cardinal of Lorraine supported 129 persons, including no less than seven secretaries, at a cost of 16,510 livres. These people did not simply perform duties and receive wages; they had the right to be clothed and fed and sheltered. It was estimated in 1576 that each of the duke’s twenty-one pages, seven lackeys and three chantry priests cost 180 livres to clothe. 8 
Those who had no official position had dining rights. The cardinal described his diplomatic agents as being men ‘of my table’. Service with the Guise led to some starry careers. The cardinal’s chief counsellor, Nicolas de Pellevé, began life as a lawyer, but through his ‘servile devotion’ became Bishop of Amiens in 1559, counsellor to the regent of Scotland in 1559, Archbishop of Sens in 1563 on the resignation of the Cardinal of Guise, and cardinal in 1570. Jacques de la Brosse, one of the principal authors of the massacre of Wassy, began his career with the Guise in the 1540s as the governor of the ‘little’ Duke of Longueville, for which he was paid 600 livres and had the services of four valets. On the death of the ‘little duke’ in 1551 he performed the same role for the 9-year-old Duke of Lorraine. When the Duke of Guise became lieutenant-general in 1557, he appointed la Brosse père as one of his
maîtres de camp
and had him made a knight of the Order of Saint Michel. He was chosen to be co-governor of the dauphin in 1559, which gave him control of a staff of 300 people and budget of 68,000 livres, before being sent with Pellevé to Scotland. 
Service was a family affair and passed through the generations, and so in 1555 his son Gaston was appointed as the duke’s standard-bearer.

Mary Stuart’s household was more problematic. Proposals had first been mooted in February 1553 when, in a letter to his sister, Charles expressed the opinion that, since the king was establishing a household for the dauphin, it was time for Mary to have hers. Even at this stage it was clear that a royal household was going to be expensive.

Charles calculated that, if it was to be done properly, it would cost 24,000 livres, a sum equivalent to half the regular income of the Crown of Scotland. Added to this was the news that the Guise could expect no assistance from the king, who had other priorities.

The haggling lasted for months and the new household was not inaugurated until 1 January 1554. Mary of Guise shouldered most of the burden, sacrificing her French pension and her dower from the Longueville estates; the remainder came from the Crown revenues of Scotland. Even so, money was short, wages often in arrears and the organization chaotic in the first two years. The money was not wasted, however. It provided a good living for the Guise and their servants: half of the best-paid ladies’ positions were reserved for the family. Lords were expected to provide protection for their men and to further their marriage prospects and those of their children. The Cardinal of Lorraine was not just the family diplomat and financial wizard, he dedicated a significant amount of time to managing the affairs of his brothers’ and sisters’ servants. Like the godfather of some mafia family he was constantly expected by ‘his people’ to patch up quarrels, help out with dowries, sort out wardships and find them jobs. The cardinal even arranged the marriage of his illegitimate daughter to a German servant, Johann von Janowitz, a man who will reappear in our story during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. What distinguished the Guise from other patrons was that the clan mentality that the family had developed was replicated among their servants. The households of the Guise brothers were not separate entities: they complemented each other with different members of the same families appearing in the household roles or in the musters of their gendarmes, a corporate identity that was reinforced by intermarriage among serving families. The replication of this clan mentality can be seen in operation in 1555 when the last of the Guise brothers, René, made a marriage far beyond the expectations of anything most younger sons could hope for. Rumours about Louise de Rieux’s Protestant inclinations did not put the Guise off because she was co-heiress to one of the great inheritances of the sixteenth century. Better to support his new status, Henry II raised the barony of Elbeuf to a marquisate. The dowry comprised the county of Harcourt in Normandy. The 19-year-old marquis had become a great Norman magnate, part of a deliberate strategy by the Guise to control a province crucial to the functioning of the Franco-British empire.

Success was shared among the brothers: René received a pension from his brother Charles of 2,000 livres per annum and in the wake of the fall of Calais the king granted him a gift of 12,000 livres. René’s part of the bargain was to show obedience to his brothers and his mother in matters of policy and to let them choose his household and recruit his gendarmerie company—one of the precious sixty in existence.

Antoinette filled the posts with long-standing clients, many of whom can be traced as family servants over several generations. Continuity of service and loyalty to the family thus fostered a sense of group solidarity.

The 1550s did not just see dramatic changes in the political and religious landscape of Europe; it marked a fundamental shift in Guise policy in France. Hitherto, the family had been content with its landed interest in the northern and eastern peripheries of the kingdom, its provincial governorships, and commissions in the army.

Henry II’s generosity and the profits from the ecclesiastical empire-building were ploughed into the purchase of land. From the beginning of the decade they embarked on the voracious acquisition of real estate in the vicinity of Paris. In 1552 the cardinal purchased for 50,000 crowns the duchy of Chevreuse to the south of the city, to which he added the nearby château of Dampierre for a further 40,000 livres, and which was soon renovated in an Italianate style and hung with pictures celebrating his diplomatic career. Not content with one palace in the region, the cardinal soon added another, the château of Meudon, on the southern outskirts of the city; it was renovated by Primataccio, the family’s favourite artist, who had worked on Fontainebleau, and its gardens were landscaped according to the latest fashion. A third palace at Marchais, to the east of the city, was purchased at the same time and augmented with new parks and gardens. The duke competed with his brother, purchasing the counties of Joigny and Nesle in Champagne in 1553, and more significantly two years later the county of Nanteuil, a day’s ride from Paris, for 260,000 livres. In Paris itself, the family bought not one, but two residences, the adjoining hôtels de Clisson and Laval, which were amalgamated into a vast palace covering two hectares of the Marais. 
Above the main door were two monograms: a pun on the duke’s device
chacun A son Tour
(which can be read as every A has its circle). Primataccio’s renovation was inspired by his visits to the north Italian
palazzi
. Particularly remarkable was the chapel, whose frescoes depicting the procession of the Magi and the
Adoration
had political overtones. Not only would the attentive visitor have recognized various members of the Guise family impersonating actors in the story of Jesus’ birth, they would have identified the Magi en route for Bethlehem with the Guise’s own claims to the throne of Jerusalem.