Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (23 page)

Though Elizabeth disliked the idea of supporting rebels, the French ambassador in London was clear why she had little choice: ‘being informed that the marquis of Elbeuf had been created and named in his letters of power the King’s Lieutenant-General in Scotland, England and Ireland was sufficient argument to push her to defend herself’. 8

English ships blockaded Leith and a formal alliance was concluded with the Lords of the Congregation at Berwick on 27 February 1560.

Elizabeth became a protector of Scotland’s ‘freedoms and liberties’ and of the Protestant faith against foreign tyranny. Three weeks later the Guise regime in France was rocked to its very foundations by an attempted coup, whose inspiration owed much to events in Scotland.

* * * *

The most serious accusation against the Guise, and the one that has been an enduring image of their legend, is that they pursued a consistent line towards and instituted a bloody persecution of Protestantism. According to this reading of the events the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and of Wassy had their origins in the policies developed during the reign of Francis II, whose genesis can in turn be traced even further back to the butchery of the Alsatian peasants in 1525. In later decades when the Guise wished to pose as the champions of Catholicism this was not an accusation they were disposed to contradict; on the contrary it was an image they encouraged. But in the age before civil war and the formation of religious parties the Guise attitude to heresy was complex and more tentative than either they or their opponents were later prepared to admit.

It hardly needs repeating that Henry II’s agreement with Philip II to make the fight against heresy a priority of the new European order was not in accordance with Guise interests. Henry was highly conservative on matters of faith. And the return of the constable to power and his new friendship with Diane de Poitiers made for a court in the final months of the reign that was opposed even to the most moderate evangelical innovations in worship. The Cardinal of Lorraine, in contrast, was criticized both inside and outside France for being too soft on heresy. One unfortunate priest who had the temerity to accuse the cardinal of being ‘affiliated’ to heresy was himself executed on the orders of Antoinette de Bourbon. 9 Paul IV also accused him of ‘favouring’ heresy. Although this opinion was hardly the product of a balanced mind, it does indicate the sort of pressure that the de facto head of the French Church was under from the ultras. The failure to establish the Inquisition was one case in point. The reasons for this were partly to do with the cardinal’s own Erasmian inclinations, in which heresy was better fought on the spiritual front unless some crime had been committed. Unlike Cardinal Pole, the contemporary he most resembled, he was sceptical about the efficacy of mass burnings. In April 1559 he told the Venetian ambassador that two-thirds of the kingdom were ‘Lutheran’, an early indication of his belief that only reform from within the Church would bring them back.

Rather like his uncle Jean before him, Charles did not permit private sentiments to impinge on political realities. All the evidence suggests that the war on heresy was very much Henry II’s initiative.

And it was one area in which the Guise could insinuate their way back into royal favour. In a grovelling letter to the royal mistress Cardinal Charles wrote that ‘God be praised for the means I have to do the services which you deserve, to give the appearance in the light of my actions of my profound gratitude, and to be able to have greater effect in helping the entire re-establishment of his holy religion.’10 The cardinal was not present on 2 June 1559 when a new tougher law against heresy was signed at Montmorency’s château at Ecouen.

Ironically, just three days before, Montmorency had been conducted to Notre-Dame in Paris by Coligny, who had slipped away without hearing Mass. Montmorency must have been aware that at the very least his nephews were sympathetic to Protestantism. But to argue that those leading the war on heresy were hypocrites is to misunderstand its purpose and remit. No one seriously expected it to target members of the social elite. So long as they outwardly conformed, what aristocrats did or did not do in their private chapels was of no public concern; this had been the lesson of Andelot’s rehabilitation. This distinction between public conformity and private faith lay behind the good relationships that the Guise enjoyed with the Calvinist princes. On 23 January 1559 the Duke of Guise betrothed his daughter Catherine, then only 6 years old, to Léonor d’Orléans, Duke of Longueville, twelve years her senior; the dowry being offset by their assistance with the duke’s hefty Spanish ransom.

If Longueville’s correspondence with Calvin was a secret, that of his mother, Jacqueline de Rohan, was certainly not. Jacqueline was a zealous Protestant and her desire to contract a union with the Guise would surprise us if we did not know that they were happy to entertain Protestants in their home and were not yet exclusively identified as enemies of the Reform. Many people seriously believed and hoped in these years that Europe’s religious differences were soon to be solved by a meeting of the General Council of the Church, whose reforms would restore the unity of Christendom.

The target of the war on heresy were the ‘seditious’. In the sixteenth century, heresy and sedition were synonymous and, like all other members of the social elite, the Guise believed that the seditious were by nature riff-raff from the lower orders. As a result, they found it very difficult to conceive of their fellow princes as heretics.

The war on heresy was essentially about the re-establishment of social and political order. In France, the king was the embodiment of the mystical union of the kingdom under One King, One Faith, One Law.

His authority derived from the sacred powers he claimed on being anointed by God, a power most clearly evident in his ability to heal the sick. While the dominant voices of French Protestantism were replete with discourses about the need for passive obedience to the powers that be, the actions of their followers was often in stark contrast. In the civil wars of the 1560s the tombs, effigies, and monuments of the kings of France were the object of systematic iconoclastic destruction—at Cléry, the most important shrine devoted to the Valois, the effigy of Louis XII, kneeling in prayer, was treated to the charade of a mock execution before being smashed.11 The threat to the normal conventions of kinship and hierarchy was evident in the shocking practice by which the elect saw themselves as equals in the eyes of God and referred to each other as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. If kings were not sacred it followed that they were mere mortals subject to God’s retribution like us. John Foxe’s Latin martyrology, which was translated into French in 1561, reinforced this point in its preface by explaining that God uses the most insignificant individuals to exemplify his glory. Kings may come and go; political empires will decay. The only enduring empire is that of the ‘captain-general of God’s elect’. These ideas quickly reached down into society: summoned to surrender in the name of the king in February 1562 Jehan du Verdier, king’s advocate in the seneschal court of Armagnac, replied ‘What king? We are the kings, he that you speak of is a little turdy kinglet; we’ll whip his breech and set him to a trade, to teach him to get his living as others do.’

Not all Catholics believed that heresy and sedition were one and the same thing. Many magistrates, whose humanist education rendered them sceptical of the infallibility of much of Catholic dogma, were unwilling or unable to enforce the existing legislation, which accounts for the very low number of heresy trials in France at the end of the 1550s. The edict of Ecouen therefore proposed to dispatch special commissioners into each province who would take cognizance of heresy cases from local courts. The laxity of the Parlement of Paris, the senior law court in the kingdom, was of particular concern. The cardinal had already intervened significantly in its affairs once before, though not to recommend more burnings. Quite the opposite: he procured the dismissal of the most notorious persecutor, President Pierre Lizet, head of the ‘Burning Chamber’, which until January 1550 had specialized in mass
autos da fé
, the like of which were not seen in France again. Because this was the work of the cardinal, the Protestant historian Regnier de la Planche, writing in the 1570s, could not resist the temptation to condemn the manner in which poor Lizet was ‘disgraced and forced out’! 12 Most of the court’s judges were moderate Catholics whose consciences were troubled by the difficulty of establishing the boundary between the orthodox and the unorthodox. The vast majority were opposed to projects for an Inquisition, fearing that it would cede too much sovereignty to the Church. In the opinion of one of them, ‘the record of the medieval Inquisition did not inspire confidence...[it was] marked by savage brutality and gross errors of judgement’. 13

Judges were adept at using Fabian tactics to scupper legislation they disapproved of and by 1559 the prosecution of heretics had all but ceased. However, the court’s unity was by now seriously compromised by the existence of a small Protestant cell within it and the polarization of opinion it caused between moderate and ultra-Catholics. In violation of the confidentiality of its deliberations, informers among the judges passed a list of names to the king identifying the suspects. The session of the court on 10 June 1559 was surely one of the most dramatic in its history. Henry II, accompanied by an armed escort, the cardinals of Lorraine, Sens, and Guise, the constable, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Montpensier, and the Prince de la Roche-sûr-Yon, interrupted the deliberations, announced his dissatisfaction with the pursuit of heresy and his determination to stamp it out. He then ordered them to continue with their deliberations.

It was then that two of the councillors made bold attacks on the king.

Many of the magistrates criticized the abuses of the Church and called for a free general council—but this was hardly controversial. The tension was raised when Louis du Faur was bold enough to challenge the king directly, recalling the words of the prophet Elijah to King Ahab: ‘It is you who trouble Israel.’ (1 Kings 18:17–8). Judge Anne du Bourg was bolder, commenting on the contrast between the flourishing and prosperous condition of blasphemers and adulterers, and the persecution of those who led pure lives, whose only crime was to demand the reform of a corrupt Church. A furious Henry took the attack on adulterers as an attack on himself, a remark that constituted lèse-majesté. Along with six others, du Bourg was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille. On 19 June Henry appointed a special commission to try them. Exactly one month after he had sworn ‘to see [du Bourg] burn with his own eyes’, Henry was dead. The fact that his mortal wound was caused by a thrust through his eye did not escape the attention of Protestant pamphleteers who were quick see the hand of God smite the persecutor of the righteous. Du Bourg’s arrest and trial were to have enormous repercussions for the new regime.

Events in Scotland were a clear indication of what would happen if the war on heresy was not stepped up. Stability depended on its success. In the autumn of 1559 four new laws were added to the judges’ armoury, ordering the demolition of meeting houses and the prosecution of any landlord harbouring Protestants. An order to arrest those who threatened and intimidated witnesses, judges, and officers of the law also revealed the obstacles to enforcement. The cardinal recommended these measures to the aldermen of Metz ‘for the love and repose of your patrie, which, if this contagion of evil is not rapidly purged, I see it will soon be threatened by ruin and perdition, letting you judge if a town where there is a diversity of religion can long remain united’. 14 The cardinal’s fresh zeal can be explained by the fact that the Protestants represented a political threat to the regime. In house raids in Paris at the end of September, pamphlets were discovered mocking both the Guise and the Queen Mother.

Libels and placards were posted in the streets. One memoir accused the Guise of planning to usurp the House of Valois, in proof of which it cited their claim to descend from Charlemagne, their supposed designs on the duchy of Anjou and county of Provence, and the war for the kingdom of Naples conducted against the best interests of France. As an antidote to their ‘tyranny’, it made a novel appeal to the sovereignty of the people (a theme that Protestant thinkers would develop more fully after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre) and called for the convocation of the Estates-General, a body that had not met since 1484. The Guise took these attacks seriously. On 15 November the English ambassador reported how the king had abandoned the hunt for fear of some conspiracy and that his Scots Guard had been issued with mail coats and pistols. 15

To Protestant eyes these months were characterized by a persecution in which ‘Satan’s rage went beyond all excess’. 16 The archives suggest that this is hyperbole. In the outlying provinces the heresy laws remained a dead letter, either ignored or unenforced. Only in Paris did the cycle of death sentences against heretics outlast Henry’s death and accelerate under his son. The Parlement confirmed three death sentences in July, four more in August (two of whom escaped), one in September, five in December, and four more in January 1560.

Henry II’s extraordinary visit in June cowed the judges into curbing their lenient inclinations. Even so, this handful of executions was not systematic enough to stop a movement that was developing into by far the largest unofficial Protestant Church in Europe. There was another option available. In Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries the Inquisition had stepped up its bloody business. The Habsburgs had already shown what might be achieved in northern Europe. In the Low Countries, with its much smaller population, there were 1,300 executions for heresy between 1523 and 1565. A further thousand would follow during the bloody repression of 1567–9. In early December 1559 the Spanish ambassador complained about the low number of French executions and their quality—there was little value in burning people of ‘simple and base’ condition. He made it known to the Guise in the strongest terms that he ‘was not happy with the manner in which they were proceeding’. 17