Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (22 page)

One of the many myths about the new regime was that it introduced all sorts of innovations that made it extremely unpopular. In fact, there was no repeat of the palace revolution that greeted the accession of Henry II; rather the Guise brothers wished to turn the clock back to 1557–8. The cardinal, now aged 34, was the dominant figure in the partnership: ‘He is both Pope and King’, wrote the Tuscan ambassador. 1 He took responsibility for diplomacy, finance, and the administration of civil and religious affairs, while his brother, François, was given control of the army. When he was snubbed by the new king and told that he was too old, the constable realized which way the wind was blowing and retired to his château at Chantilly.

Within weeks, at the request of Catherine, he resigned the office of Grand Master: François had the office he had long craved. But the Guise were careful not to push the constable into opposition, and so his sons and nephews were retained in their offices. François’s magnanimity and courtesy helped the transition: unlike the young king he treated his old enemy with respect and continued to write him affable letters that kept him abreast of events. On the whole, governors were retained in their posts, even those whose religious disposition was the object of suspicion. As friends and kinsmen of the Guise they were trusted; their private beliefs of little significance. The greatest change at the centre was the role of the Queen Mother: all key decisions were now discussed with her in her chambers after lunch.

This does not mean there was no opposition to the new axis: everything depended on the House of Bourbon. The constable urged the head of the House, Antoine, King of Navarre, to stake his claim to a role in the government as a prince of the blood. In late July representatives of the two clans met at Vendôme in the company of two pastors from the Paris Congregation and an agent of the English ambassador, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton: on one side sat Navarre, his younger brothers, and his Montpensier cousins; and on the other sat Montmorency’s beloved nephews, Admiral Coligny and Andelot. As a group they were riven by religious differences and personal animosities: all they could agree on was an end to the feud between the Montpensier and Montmorency which had soured relations for a decade. The Guise handled relations with the princes of the blood with skill and delicacy—on the day after Henry II’s death the cardinal of Lorraine wrote Navarre a warm letter. 2 Dealing with him was made easier by the fact that the Guise had their own spies in his council who reported to the Duke of Guise how:

The king of Navarre...had resolved to be entirely in friendship with him and Monseigneur the cardinal of Lorraine, not only as a cousin, but as a friend...Although Monsieur the Constable has written several letters, nevertheless he always tells me that he would never trust him, knowing that the friendship he feigns him is to attract him to his side, in order to ruin his cousins. 3 

In return the Guise promised to add Poitou to his governorship of Gascony, giving him control of the entire south-west. When Francis II was crowned by Cardinal Charles at Reims on 18 September 1559 Navarre took precedence over all other peers. For the first time in his life, he was centre stage and he had no intention of putting it at risk: 
promises to the Protestants to pose as their protector were conveniently dropped. Condé was more troublesome. But since he was poor and had never held significant office a cash gift of 70,000 livres and the promise of the governorship of Picardy, which his family claimed as a hereditary right, were felt enough to secure his loyalty. By the time of the coronation, the cardinal was able to write that ‘It is impossible to see things more tranquil and quiet than they are, with every demonstration and observation of fidelity, obedience and devotion from everyone towards the new king.’4

This was the quiet before the storm. Although the Guise had proved themselves supremely adept and clever players of the traditional game of faction, politics was about to change forever: Europe was being swept by a religious revolution that would overthrow regimes, and the cities and towns of France would seethe with popular discontent as ordinary people mobilized for and against the Reformation.

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In the last months of his life Henry had mapped out the broad parameters of policy—the implementation of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis and peace with Spain, the extermination of heresy at home, military intervention in Scotland—and the Guise immediately set about putting these policies into practice. All these issues were interdependent and complex and would have presented formidable challenges to a strong and experienced man like Henry II; for his uncharismatic and puerile son they would prove insurmountable.

Peace should have brought France dividends. She lacked the resources of Spain’s world empire and had paid for the war by using the tax receipts derived from an essentially agricultural economy as collateral in order to borrow money on the international money market. The Crown was bankrupt and the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis did not come cheap. On top of the ransoms Henry had agreed to pay for those grandees captured at Saint-Quentin, he also had to provide his daughter with a dowry of 1 million livres. Confidence in the Crown was buoyant while Henry lived. Although he was beginning to experience some trouble in borrowing money and found that rates of interest became exorbitant as the war dragged on, this was nothing compared to the collapse of confidence that occurred after his death. Michel de l’Hôpital, President of the Court of Accounts, the cardinal’s chief financial advisor, proposed radical reforms. The rescheduling of loans, the raising of taxes, and financial cutbacks amounted to a form of Thatcherism
avant la lettre
. The rapidity with which this shock treatment was applied to a weak and fragile body politic did not make them any more palatable. There was resistance to tax increases. In the richest province, Normandy, a forced loan of 800,000 livres demanded by Henry II remained unpaid. Twenty years later people recalled vividly the hardships that this particular tax caused. In the fertile countryside around Rouen peasants fled their villages in order to escape payment. Cardinal Charles did not have to pay the new taxes: his many benefices were exempted by royal decree.

In November he introduced fiscal reforms and rescheduled repayments on loans that had been contracted by the previous regime.

Royal officials, who were among the most significant creditors, now found themselves out of pocket. Bankers lost confidence and refused to lend. The new regime would soon find itself seriously short of specie. Another apparently sensible financial reform was the resumption of Crown lands. Henry II had rewarded his favourites generously with grants of royal demesne—a practice that was both harmful to royal income and technically illegal. The manner in which the resumption was handled was, however, openly partisan. While the constable was stripped of his grants, the Duke of Guise was reconfirmed in possession of the royal lands of Saumur, Provins, and Dourdan. Cutbacks at court, the cancellation of grants, and the suppression of venal office—the insidious practice by which positions were sold and then traded on as a form of private property—alienated those who lost out. Some observers were as delighted as the accountants in the manner which the cardinal’s reforms cut bureaucracy ‘reducing all offices and positions to the [levels] of the time of Good King Louis XII’. 5 The office-holders themselves were less enthusiastic at losing their investment.

The size of the army was slashed. But the cancellation of promises made by the previous regime and the failure to pay arrears left many soldiers seriously out of pocket and they swelled the ranks of the discontented who flocked to court in anger to petition for redress. The treatment of these veterans, who were ordered to leave the environs under pain of death, was odious even to supporters of the Guise. 
Where the sinews of power were lacking, the Crown should have awed its subjects into submission. Monarchy demands magnificence in order to work its magic. But the accountants demanded cutbacks. 
Penny-pinching meant that even Francis II’s royal entries were scaled down to a minimum: France had come a long way since the Rouen festivities of 1550.

Historians today are wary of attributing religious change to social and economic factors. Contemporaries were less reticent. They saw the problems that confronted them—political, social or economic—and their solutions in moral terms. The idea of a godly Reformation that returned the world to its pristine state gave fresh meaning to all manner of discontents. The way in which the ideal of divine justice lent legitimacy to acts of resistance to the new regime can be seen in one small corner of France. Lower Normandy was already a hotbed of Protestant activity centred on the prosperous city of Caen, where a third of the city’s population of 15,000 was Protestant by 1562. For thirty years the revenues of the region and the right to nominate to all royal offices there had been granted to one of the monarchy’s biggest creditors, the Duke of Ferrara. As confidence in the new regime collapsed elsewhere, the Guise turned to their kinsman for help; he advanced them 600,000 livres and they in turn exempted him from the resumption of Crown lands. Tax collectors are never popular, but the administration of the Ferrarese was especially resented. In 1560 a Falaise tax collector and the king’s lieutenant in Orbec were murdered. Italians, without sympathy for local hardships, were a particular target: the murder of Giulio Ravilio Rosso, chief agent of the Ferrarese in the region, by Protestants two years later was a populist act, widely supported. Protestants were not only highly organized and well-armed, but their strong sense of moral righteousness behoved them to act and their deeds struck a chord among those in the wider community fed up with corrupt exploitation by outsiders.

In Scotland, too, religious revolt challenged the political status quo. 
The Lords of the Congregation fumed ‘against the fury and rage of the tyrants of this world; and especially from the insatiable covetousness of the Guisians’ generation’. Their programme of a return to a purer faith was mirrored by calls for a return to ‘the ancient laws of the kingdom’. 6 Since the interests of the great powers of England and Spain were also at stake, events in Scotland threatened the tenuous European peace. Both Elizabeth and Philip were keen to see the Franco-British empire scuppered for good. Henry II had dismissed English complaints when Mary Stuart insisted on quartering her arms with those of England, retorting that she had the right to do so since Elizabeth had not renounced her claims on France. 7 The Cardinal of Lorraine wrote to his sister in Scotland that Henry would punish these ‘wicked Lutherans’ and that their younger brother, the Marquis of Elbeuf, would be sent with a force of 200 gendarmes and 20 ensigns of foot.

Henry II’s death jeopardized these plans and seriously weakened the Guise room for manoeuvre in Scotland. The cardinal was worried about the financial implications of war. He also had to take account of Philip II’s suspicion of Guise ambitions; he left the cardinal with no illusions that the peace was fragile. Marie de Guise survived largely thanks to her formidable diplomatic skills and charisma, managing to stall the Congregation with promises of her good intentions before they overwhelmed her. Charles’s initial instructions to his sister were to settle the rebellion with promises and cash and he sent Jacques la Brosse and Nicolas Pellevé, Bishop of Amiens, with a token reinforcement. The decision to use force had not yet been made. But the Congregation viewed the arrival of French troops at Leith as a breach of Marie’s promises. It made for good propaganda, allowing them to play on Scots’ xenophobia and fear of conquest by foreigners. The Lords of the Congregation transformed themselves from sectarian rebels into a patriotic resistance movement against Guise dynasticism and French domination. Only when she wrote to Charles in desperation on 22 September 1559 that ‘she did not have a bean’ did the full extent of her plight become apparent. Preparations got under way in the Channel ports for reinforcements to prevent her being toppled and replaced by a candidate from among the Congregation. But there were continual delays. Only at the beginning of November did Elbeuf receive his commission replacing his elder sister as ‘viceroy’ of Scotland. Finally, on 6 December, the relief force set sail but the North Sea at this time of year is perilous and it was driven onto the sand banks of Zeeland in a storm. Out of thirty or forty ships, only a few survived. Elbeuf left Calais on the 21st but could make no headway against the northerly winds and had to put in at Dieppe, though eleven transports carrying 900 men did reach their destination.

Further military aid to Marie would depend on the attitude of England. At the beginning of January 1560 a new ambassador, Michel de Seure, a gentleman of the privy chamber, was sent to London to ensure English neutrality. But his mission was compromised by the arrogance of his masters. While the Guise were cautious and penny-pinching in most areas of domestic policy, honour and reputation required that they proudly display their dynastic rights. At the accession of the new reign the heraldic arms of Francis and Mary were emblazoned with those of England wherever the court came to rest. At Amboise in December 1559, Chantonnay noted down the Latin inscription that accompanied them:

Gaul and warlike Britain were in perpetual hostility—At that time they fought amongst themselves with equal hatred—Now the Gauls and the distant Britons are in a single territory—Mary’s dowry gathers them together in one Empire—Because of this you will keep your weapons under a French peace—Your forefathers could not achieve this for a thousand years.

Throckmorton, the English ambassador, was shocked to discover that the design for a new great seal of Scotland showed Francis and Mary seated in ‘imperial’ majesty above the legend ‘Francis and Mary, By the Grace of God, King and Queen of France, Scotland, England and Ireland’. After Francis’s coronation these claims were embossed on the plate and carved on the furniture with which Mary’s household was newly equipped as Queen of France. In a crass diplomatic blunder Throckmorton was invited to dinner and then forced to eat his meal off silver dishes bearing the offending insignia.