Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (21 page)

although it appeased the Catholic masses at home, it did not play well with France’s allies abroad. The disaster at Saint-Quentin had left huge gaps in the French army and the Guise brothers dedicated a huge amount of time to wooing the German Protestant princes, sending agents to raise fresh levies in the Empire. The Duke of Guise wrote to his old friend and comrade the Lutheran Duke of Württemburg to reassure him that those executed were not ‘Lutherans’, whom he was very careful to distinguish from ‘sacramentarians’ who denied the miracle of the Mass. 12

The contrast of the approach of the Cardinal of Lorraine to Cardinal Pole, another Erasmian faced with schism and foreign war, is highly revealing. Pole shares responsibility for the execution of over 300 people in England—a state with a fraction of the population of France—between 1555 and 1558.

Guise moderation was politically motivated. When there was political capital to be made they did not shrink from making accusations.

At the beginning of 1558, the Reform movement in France planned a carefully prepared series of demonstrations to show its strength.

During Lent, the King of Navarre began to show an interest in Reformed ideas, listening to Protestant sermons among other things.

This raised some eyebrows at court, where Antoine was better known for his love of dancing. His new interest in morality happened to coincide with the launch of his suit against the Duke of Nemours for the seduction of his niece. He was also increasingly preoccupied by the recovery of his kingdom from the Spanish. Most people were tiring of war and Antoine reckoned that any deal would leave his claim unrecognized. Like the Protestants, who had much to fear from a Habsburg-Valois rapprochement, he too feared a general peace.

Navarre joined the 5,000 to 6,000 people who met throughout May, hearing sermons and singing Psalms on the Preáux Clercs, waste ground just beyond the city walls. These were carefully organized to coincide with the high point of the festal calendar in Paris. The period of festivities between Rogationtide and Ascension was particularly important to Parisians. It was the time of year for planting maypoles, the most important of which was that set up by the
bazoche
, the confraternity of the clerks, ushers, and other petty officials who serviced the law courts and which played a significant role in Parisian popular life. There was much feasting and merrymaking and not a little of the disorder commonly associated with gangs of drunken young men. It was precisely the sort of ungodly profanity that the Calvinists gathered to protest against.

Henry II was furious at the Protestant assemblies, but the Guise were too busy to be directly involved in the investigation. Henry disliked his total reliance on them and began to tire of their haughtiness. He flatly refused the duke’s request for the office of Grand Master on a permanent basis. He was missing his alter ego, Montmorency, and inclined to make sacrifices in order to secure his return.

During May the cardinal was dispatched to negotiate. Although he did not openly sabotage the talks, like the Protestants, he had nothing to gain from peace and much to lose. Cardinal Granvelle, Philip II’s plenipotentiary, was angered by his counterpart’s attitude. But the Spanish had a cunning plan up their sleeves to increase divisions in the French camp. Granvelle told Lorraine that intercepted correspondence between Admiral Coligny, currently languishing in a Spanish prison, and his brother Andelot, proved that they were Protestants.

Without asking for proof Lorraine hurried back to Paris to hammer another nail into the political fortunes of the Montmorency.

The king’s suspicion had already fallen on Andelot: on his travels to Brittany and the Loire valley at Easter Andelot had promoted open-air preaching. And on his return to Paris he was one of the organizers of the rallies in the Preáux Clercs. On 22 May Henry summoned Andelot to answer to the cardinal’s charges; the principal one being that he refused to attend Mass. Andelot replied that his goods and life were at the king’s service, but he could not retreat from his refusal to attend Mass. Henry became so angry that he could barely refrain from striking him; but instead hurling a plate which only succeeded in hitting the dauphin. Andelot was clapped in prison, stripped of his post of colonel-general of the infantry and Protestant meetings in Paris were prohibited on pain of death. Andelot’s fall was planned by the Guise because they knew it would be popular among a group with whom they were always keen to curry favour: the princes. Andelot was viewed as an arrogant upstart; he had a reputation as a hot-head who was keen to dispute his status at the point of a sword. He had already killed one man when, in 1548, he fought a duel with Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier, Prince of la Roche-sûr-Yon, in which both were wounded. Charles was, like most of the princes, a religious moderate, but like most of the princes, too, he developed a deep aversion for the constable, who would give him no satisfaction and fully supported his nephew. The feud that resulted was so serious that one contemporary thought it ‘the preamble and first strike in our civil wars’.13

Victory over the Montmorency was shortlived. The cardinal was forced to admit that he had been duped and Andelot was released in July after he made a garbled promise to attend Mass. The Saints expected to suffer for a just cause and Andelot emerged from captivity wrapped in a cloak of of righteousness. Ironically, the Guise remained the best hope of the Protestants. Peace would allow both the Valois and the Habsburgs to turn their full attention to the war on heresy.

But even before news arrived of defeat at Gravelines, Henry’s patience with the Guise was at an end. Crucially they had lost the support of Diane de Poitiers, who resented their move from her shadow into the spotlight. She made a rapprochement with the constable which was sealed in October by the betrothal of her granddaughter to his second son. At court only Catherine de Medici, champion of French intervention in Italy, could now be counted on for support.

The constable did his best to undermine the Guise from his prison cell, and in October Philip II took the gamble to parole him for several days in order to break the king’s resolve: ‘if he returns to France the Guise will not have so much power as now...whereas if the Constable be there the war matters will be in his care...which will be good for our affairs’. 14 ‘Nothing in the world can turn me from the love I have for you’, wrote the king in his own hand after their meeting. Word of their mutual recriminations against the Guise soon got back to François who, almost exactly a year to the day that the king had welcomed him as a saviour, quit the court. Although the Cardinal of Lorraine was included in the French negotiating team that met Philip’s representatives on the Flemish border, the constable was clearly in charge. On 29 October Henry dramatically announced that he was resolved to make peace and in order to do so was willing to renounce the territories in Italy. Guise was enraged: only the day before Henry had sworn that he would never surrender Piedmont. He told the king that those behind these plans had lost their heads. The duke’s mood blackened further when the king announced he would pay the 200,000 crowns demanded as ransom for the constable. Montmorency arrived at the court at Saint-Germain on 21 December; that evening the Cardinal of Lorraine returned the signet ring, which he had been given in 1557, without any order from the king. When the king asked him why he and his brother no longer attended the council, the cardinal replied that he did not wish ‘to pass for Montmorency’s valet’. 15 Within a few days fortune’s wheel spun quickly once again. Pensions and offices awarded by the Guise were revoked, Montmorency’s nephews were reinstated in their commands, and the king promised him that the office of Grand Master would pass to his eldest son. In the narrow corridors of the royal apartments the air bristled with hatred between the two clans.

On Christmas Eve the Duke of Guise challenged Montmorency’s eldest son to a duel. The constable was easily able to laugh off his rival’s indiscretion; he now had tighter control of affairs than ever before.

The death of Mary Tudor in November had already removed one of the main stumbling blocks to peace, namely Calais. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed on 2 April between France and England and on the following day between France and Spain, was one of the most controversial in European history. It established the legal and political framework of Western European affairs and marked the beginnings of nearly a century of Spanish preponderance on the continent. Italy was abandoned by the French, who kept Calais and the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. The veterans of Italy in particular were furious at what they considered a dishonourable peace. According to them, the king had ceded lands that cost 40 million crowns and 100,000 lives to win. Guise became a spokesman for their discontent. The princes too felt they had been sold out.

Neither the King of Navarre nor the Duke of Bouillon gained compensation for the loss of their lands in the Treaty. The Duke of Longueville got no financial help with his crippling ransom, probably because he was a member of the Guise faction (he was betrothed to the Duke of Guise’s eldest daughter on 23 January). Guise had made it clear that peace was an affront to his honour, for which he got widespread sympathy at court. He became the focus for those dissatisfied with the partisan rule of the man they snobbishly referred to as the ‘little baron from the Ile-de-France’.

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There were, however, good dynastic reasons why Henry could not afford to let the Guise fall too far into disfavour. Their prominence at the marriage festivities of their cousin, the Duke of Lorraine, to Henry’s daughter, Claude de France, during eight days in February 1559 was a sign that they could not be ignored. During the marriage the English ambassador was infuriated to find that the dauphin and the dauphiness—who as early as 16 January had styled themselves ‘Mary and François, King and Queen Dauphins of Scotland, England and France’—appeared with a new set of arms which quartered their British titles with the arms of France. Having decided to cut his losses in Italy, Henry’s support for the Franco-British empire was crucial to his reputation. Peace with England did not preclude the future possibility of the Pope excommunicating the ‘bastard’ Elizabeth. Henry had already sounded out the Pope about such a possibility. But promoting Mary Stuart’s Catholic credentials over her dynastic rights was to prove disastrous. In May 1559, iconoclastic riots and violence, stirred by Knox’s thunderous sermons, signalled a full-scale rebellion against her mother in Scotland. On 29 June Henry wrote to the Pope that he was resolved to send an army to crush it. Meanwhile the peace with Spain was being celebrated with a magnificent tourney in Paris.

It was a return to the good old days. The king, now in his fortieth year, appeared in the lists wearing the black and white of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. He rode well against the Duke of Guise who was wearing his customary crimson. But on the 1 July the king felt slighted by the Count of Montgomméry, a younger man, who had dislodged him from his stirrups. The count reluctantly agreed to a second run.

His lance shattered on Henry’s visor, sending a large sliver through his eye. Henry’s end was slow and agonizing. He died on 10 July.

Henry II’s death is conventionally seen as the end of an era, in which glory and strong rule was overnight replaced by the divisive and chaotic rule of the Guise. The accession of his son, Francis II, is the starting point of the black legend of his Guise uncles. According to this legend, their rise to the pinnacle of power was the result of a Machiavellian plot to sideline the princes of the blood, in the process of which they acted as bloodthirsty tyrants. In truth, there is little to be said in favour of Francis himself: he was a physically and emotionally stunted fifteen-year-old. In terms of policy, if not personality, however, the two reigns were characterized by continuity. Father and son faced the same problems and at first the Guise, well aware of their precarious hold on power, continued the old king’s policies.

What was new was the level of opposition: those who under Henry could only mutter under their breath were now inclined to speak out openly. Many in the Protestant leadership rejoiced at Henry’s death—their prayers had been answered, divine justice had delivered them.

But we should be wary of interpreting events through Protestant eyes alone. Often written a decade or more after the events they purport to describe, the purpose of their accounts was to scapegoat the Guise and heap the blame for France’s descent into civil war and chaos on their shoulders. The most frequently consulted source claims that the Cardinal of Lorraine procured children’s blood for the sickly king to quaff (a crime more commonly associated at the time with Jews).

Other sources, such as the dispatches of the Spanish ambassador, Chantonnay, shed a different light on affairs.

The slow agony of Henry’s death was shared by all those close to him as their futures waxed and waned with every fading breath. There was feverish wheeler-dealing around the deathbed. The role of Catherine de Medici, hitherto neglected by her husband, was paramount. She prevented Diane de Poitiers from entering the king’s bedchamber; she never saw her lover again. When the king was unconscious she would keep Montmorency, whom she also disliked, at bay. When he was conscious the king would call for his old friend. While others had ignored the indignities that she had been forced to endure, the Guise had always accorded Catherine the respect that she craved. They also shared many of the same views, placing a high priority on conquest in Italy and a low priority on religious persecution. She offered her support to them in return for the humbling and banishment of Diane de Poitiers. But a Guise takeover was not inevitable: even though the new king was beyond the legal age of minority, his faculties were such that a regency was a possibility. Montmorency looked to the King of Navarre as the senior prince of the blood to do something to stop his rivals taking control. Further support came from Chantonnay, the representative of Europe’s only superpower. Spain, ‘the arbiter of Europe’ according to the Venetians, was a new and significant presence in French internal affairs. Philip’s impending marriage to Henry II’s daughter, Elisabeth, would seal the peace and unite the two royal families. Montmorency was the architect of this policy and Spain’s chief ally at court. The day before he died Henry II wrote a letter to Philip II, surely inspired by the constable, urging him to protect the faith and support his brother-in-law. It was too late. As soon as Henry II died the Guise pounced: the new king and his mother were surrounded by Guise loyalists and escorted to the Louvre, leaving the constable in possession of the corpse.